Ok, after about 10 - 12 hours of play my thoughts, sound and graphics are excellent and have had no crashes or bugs rear their ugly heads. Would appear to me beta testing was taken seriously compared to many other games.

I rated the game though with 3 stars for the following:

1. Rules/instructions not the best.

2. Game is painful to play - pretty negative in tone. By that I mean other than the first 2 - 3 rounds, most of the game is spent trying to get to a position of neutral as opposed to all the negatives you get hit with. Last round I just played before I quit was 1 card played on me by the opponent, I got 2 delays and lost to a silver. I never feel like I am in control of anything or where I might have a strategy to win, mostly reacting to negatives. Other card games I play I usually feel like I can build a strategy to win.

3. Trying to get leads seems at best extremely difficult. Rarely to I do for proofs to build leads as I am trying to respond with the other actions to the negative actions.

4. I have been playing Triss and Geralt in offline mode versus 1 opponent to learn the game. The 3 quest goal games are taking well into an hour and a half as indicated. Hard to believe there is no save option for off line games. It is rare I complete a 3 goal game before life kicks in and I dump it. I cannot imagine how long a 3 or 5 goal game would take with more than 1 opponent, game play is not fast.

I am trying hard to like the game, I need a slower more strategy styled game to play as twitch and faster games are becoming harder to play due to hand issues. It will get a few more hours to see if more exp with the game helps out. But I am thinking this may slide to being played when other games get played out. I definitely would not mind input if my observations seem wonky.

edit: spelling

When I started playing, I felt completely lost and confused and overwhelmed, and like the game just kept throwing negatives at me. The more I played, though, the more I started to understand it. I probably shouldn't have started with a 4-character round--later I tried again just against one AI opponent, and even played a few games by myself to focus on the mechanics.

The thing I've found is that you need to focus on development cards early. No matter which character I played as, development cards were the difference between being crushed in every battle and winning them. Your specific strategy will depend on the character you've picked, but building up a decent number of development cards is a good way to start.

Once you have more development cards and are able to avoid/recover from negative effects, you'll have more time to travel around and gather leads.

I agree that a save feature for offline games would be really nice.

I agree with Tatuaje on point 2: the number of "Foul Fortune" tokens that end up covering everyone's character sheets (and it gets worse with more players) is excessive, and Triss seems to be the only one who can actually do anything about it (with the spell to remove them). Everyone else is stuck with the things, and the fact that many of the foul fortune cards have "add a foul fortune token to your sheet" as an effect makes it difficult to impossible to climb out of that hole. That there are various other "everyone gets bleeped" effects scattered throughout the cards and monster traits makes it much worse.

The impact or preferably the frequency of "every other player gets hit by this negative effect" stuff desperately needs to be scaled back as the number of players increases.

Honestly speaking I've found this game to easy. I think that AI is weak. It can win if you are careless but normally has no chances in 3 task game. In the beginning I felt lost and overwhelmed. But after I've learned pros and cons of all players it is like no challenge against computer. I wish there was some way to choose harder difficulty level.

Unfortunately AI players fast bog down in wounds and bad fate. Especially when there is 3 AI. It is frustrating to watch their agony ;). I myself learned how to combat whatever fate throws at me, but AI seems like blind child. I think I will have to play on-line with humans.

Well, I'd like to like this game, but I just can't. The endless sheetfulls of wound and foul fate tokens caused by the cascading effects of the latter (again, worse with more players, ESPECIALLY the idiotic AI ones) keep bringing me to the point of "I don't care that I can win or even that I'm all but guaranteed to. The slog between here and there isn't worth it, so my action for this turn will have to be Alt-F4 and I'll go do something fun instead."

If this ever gets dealt with then I'll give the game another look.

They can't just change the rules and setup of the game, lol. This is a digital version of a REAL BOARD GAME, and should stay as close to the actual game as possible. They just need to fix the AI so that it actually cares what is going on and responds the same way any of us would when you take damage or get Foul Fate tokens.

Right now, the only thing I want is a save option for offline games. I like the overall tone of the game - it's very "Witcher-y", in the sense that things everywhere go south really fast - but without a save option, I don't see myself playing it much. :(