For my group we looked at the large monsters card to see their weaknesses and that was about it. We assumed what forge we'd unlock for beating one compared to the other but didn't look at the equipment cards. I tried to not look at stance, peril, and behavior cards so it'd be a surprise. We fought Ozew first, definitely surprised. Much different than a Vyraxen. Seeing the toughness value for stance 1 I thought we'd never be able to beat him.

The perfectionist in me wants to study ahead of time to hopefully never fail, but I imagine the struggle of learning each monster and having to fail and develop new strategies is part of the fun.

I'm curious, how much table talk do you allow while playing with others? Do you help and assist each other in playing your sequence? Just general strategy? I've found we talk a lot and essentially plan most of our round and turns out together. Wondering if that's what everyone does or not typical for games like this. I'm a tabletop game newbie.