The price of impatience

Of course I should have waited until 2026 to buy PBA. But given my fun with dead cells and sts I was dead-set on getting the roguelite games and PBA didn't leave my mind. So I got it from the designer's webshop. I recommend you do not follow that path though.

- core box came with old 1st print crappy rulebook. My epson can emphasize text (and more) which makes a huge difference, plus the 2024 rulebook is much better.

- sadly the rb was only available behind bgg so only with an account you can download it. I uploaded the rb here for everybody. The 2024 rb is still pretty bad, though.

- PBA is mainly a roguelike game driven by a net difficulty which you set by selecting (game changing) Plot Twist cards. This naturally opens up a spectrum of net difficulties from say -13 to say +33 where higher positive is more difficult. Which is awesome, think Ascension levels for Slay the Spire.

- So I set about to writing out the PT card modifiers to get an idea of which pair of cards would for example sum to zero - same as base difficulty. Intuitively I thought upside down PT (the cards are 2 PT per side, 4 for both sides, 5 such cards, so 20 unique twists) would mutex each other. That is not the case. You can have both sides active if you wish. You are not limited to 2 PT even though the 2024 rulebook only uses 2 in the examples, you can use all 5 PT and have all 10 of one side active. You could also have one PT from the front and on the same card on the reverse. It would be painful to keep track of though.

- so i wrote out the various combinations per difficulty level, recommend you finish a campaign on difficulty -7 (using 2 PT, and no reverse crap) up to +10. For difficulties 11-20 you need 3 or more PT cards. For difficulties 21-33 you also need the reverse PT. Best to write them out on a sheet of paper for those attempts...

- And finally there is the pdf for the Limited Resources fix, download it here.