I’m not the biggest fan of most campaign games. They have a few things going on that don’t gel well with me, personally. Firstly, I find it hard to have the same group of people meeting regularly. I find the overhead of character customisation and tracking annoying. I don’t like the repetition of doing the same combat steps again, and again, and again. Mostly I don’t like how they are prohibitive to drop-in, drop-out play. I still enjoy campaign games, but those things are like grit in my shoe. Nothing that’s going to hurt, just an annoyance.

Midhalla makes some welcome changes to those things which go a long way towards alleviating my annoyances.

Keep your trap shut

My favourite thing that Midhalla adds is the element of tower defence. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a game style where enemies keep rolling in towards you, and you build defences to keep them at bay. One of my favourite games ever – Cloudspire (review here) – uses it. In one of the three phases of the game in Midhalla (more on those phases shortly) you get some preparation time between waves of bad guys. During this time you can buy and upgrade traps, positioning them in the dungeon to try to slow their encroachment towards your gate, which you’ve got to protect above all else.

Traps aren’t just single-use either, they’ll continue to work against the enemies until they destroy them, which is great, and really leans into the tower defence theme. As a group, you can decide during these preparation phases how you want to set up for the next assault, and it acts as a little breather. Breather is an apt term here too because Midhalla moves fast. Combat rounds are often over in 10 minutes and are really easy to run. I will give a quick overview of how the enemy turns play out because cumbersome enemy control drives me crazy in games.

First, you activate all of the enemies in the dungeon. There’s a specific order that is really easy to follow, but it’s a case of “Can the enemy attack the thing it targets (typically heroes or traps)? Yes? Okay, attack it. No? Okay, how about the gate, can it attack that? If it can, great, if not, just move onwards”. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to have the basic enemy turns work like this. No complex way-finding. No charts of priorities. No list of exceptions. Just look at their card and do the thing.

Power up

My favourite thing in campaign games, whether they’re tabletop or digital, is when you unlock new powers and become more skilled in the art of ass-kickery. Midhalla doesn’t just tickle that little dopamine hit for me, it pulls the ripcord on a 2-stroke receptor stimulator. Each time you start a new part of the campaign, your characters are pretty basic. It’s not like Aeon’s End Legacy (review here) or Gloomhaven where you whip out your heavily modified character to take on the next chapter of the story. Your character sheets only have some pretty basic actions on them, which might sound rubbish, but they don’t stay that way for long.

The basic gameplay loop has three main phases: Exploration, Preparation, and Combat. During exploration, you’ll draw new tiles to add to the dungeon, each time reading the appropriate section of the campaign book to explain what you found. It’s a pretty cool system that gives you ideas about how you might want to explore and fortify. You might read a section that talks about noises from the west, so maybe you choose to keep exploring in that direction to find out what kind of a something makes those noises.

I touched on the preparation and combat phases earlier and won’t go into it more for now, because the fun stuff happens after those three phases when you come to the rewards step. The reward phase is when you get to prepare one of the ultimate abilities you might have used, do the same with items, remove status effects, and most importantly – for the control freaks like me – level your character up. Levelling up is as simple as drawing a couple of cards from the next skill tier up, choosing one, and putting it in a space on your character board. Instant power!

I love this way of doing things. It means you get more powerful as each chapter progresses, not like Gloomhaven where you’re thinning your deck out constantly, barely surviving an encounter with a sole ability left. Midhalla makes me feel powerful, and that’s a great feeling to get from a game like this. You’re going to need that power, too, because once you’ve levelled up you do it all again, and then again a third time. Exploring, placing traps and monsters, fortifying, fighting. The dungeon starts to sprawl, waves and waves of monsters begin to bear down on you, and the event cards you draw add a little bit of spice to the proceedings.

Interestingly, and brilliantly, the events are just about the only random things that happen during the game.

Determination

If you read and watch a lot of Midhalla previews I’m willing to bet five whole Pounds that you’ll hear a two-word phrase used a lot: ‘deterministic combat’. Sounds like a smartypants, big-brain thing to say, right? “I really like Midhalla because of the deterministic combat” – dinner party conversation gold right there.

What does it actually mean though?

When a game is deterministic it means that there are no random factors to the play. No dice rolling. No blind drawing of cards. No spinning a wheel of fortune and hoping for the best. In Midhalla this means that you know everything that’s going to happen in each cycle of play before it even happens. You know which enemies are in which locations. You know what they’ll attack, from how far, if they’ll move or not, and how much damage they’ll do. You know which traps will survive, where you can move, what you can do, and how much damage you can do.

Now, when it’s written like that, it doesn’t sound like much fun. It sounds like a giant spreadsheet that you can sit down and puzzle out with a pen and a piece of paper. And in fairness, you actually could. If you’re just that much fun that your idea of a good time is to run through every permutation possible to see what works, then you go for it. For the rest of us though, the reality is that you’re only really planning a few turns ahead at most. You know some baddies are miles away, so you don’t think about them until they’re getting close enough to cause you a headache.

It’s a really fresh take for a dungeon crawler. I realise there might be other examples out there, but to me, it’s something new and interesting. It makes me wonder why more of them aren’t done this way.

Final thoughts

Midhalla wasn’t a game I knew anything about when I first spoke to Eike, one of the designers. Coming into a game fresh like that is the way I always choose to do things when I can because I go into it having no expectations. If I had had any expectations, however, it’s fair to say that Midhalla would have blown them out of the water. Even playing with a prototype with thin card standees was an atmospheric, exciting experience.

I love that it has answers for so many of the things I don’t enjoy about campaigns. The rinse-and-repeat combat is broken up with preparation phases and setting up traps, and acquiring new skills mid-game. The feeling of getting more and more powerful in a short period of time is great, and the speed it plays out is so snappy, it keeps me invested more easily. Exploration is quick and adds flavour and atmosphere through the campaign book. Preparation is a proper team event, deciding on how best to defend your gate. Combat rattles through quickly and painlessly, and it’s all tied together with a player aid which honestly tells you everything you need to play the game, including all the status effects. Chip Theory Games would do well to see how to handle status effects without making it all but incomprehensible at times.

The combination of enthusiastic, colourful world-building and a story that looks like it’s going to deliver on the narrative front, and a smart, clean, efficient game design is an absolute winner. Maybe the Viking theme does nothing for you, but that’s personal taste. As far as whether you should take a punt on Midhalla – yes. The game is fun, it’s easy to learn. Your friends can drop in and out and take a character from a weakling to a hulking man-bear made of fists and axes without tainting someone else’s precious hero. The tower defence aspect is nicely done, and I love, love, love playing one of these games where luck doesn’t play a factor. Fyrnwest games have created something special, and for the money they’re asking for it, it seems like a bargain.

The Kickstarter campaign for Midhalla is running now and runs until September 13th 2023. Click here to jump across and take a look at it.

Prototype copy kindly provided by Fyrnwest Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Midhalla (2023)

Design: Eike J. Meyer, Michael Meyer
Publisher: Fyrnwest Games
Art: Phan Tuan Dat, Nicholas Koo, Nikoloz Baloo Kuparadze
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-180 mins

The post Midhalla Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

When you read the words ‘dungeon crawler’ in the previous sentence, did you conjure an image in your head? Did you see brooding warriors in armour alongside scantily-clad women only wearing enough armour to protect their most intimate areas, flanked by wizards in robes? Did you envisage skeleton warriors, orcs, goblins, and magic? Was it dark, gloomy, and grimy? If you did, this might not strike you as a problem, because it’s probably what you’re looking for in a dungeon crawler.

What if you’re looking for something else? What if dull greys, greens, and browns aren’t your thing? What then? Up until now, your options have been very limited. As soon as you step outside of the generic, gritty fantasy theme you’re either looking at generic, gritty sci-fi or ‘family/kids’ games. Artisans of Splendent Vale redresses the balance by giving us a watercolour world full of diverse, non-stereotyped, pastel protagonists, breathing fresh life into tired tropes.

By the book?

Artisans of Splendent Vale takes a leaf out of the books (pun very much intended) of games like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion which use a book of maps to play on. I’ll touch on overworld exploration later, but once you visit a place where some kind of skirmish takes place, you’ll be instructed to turn to a particular page in the Action Scene Book and told where to put the different characters before getting down to some fisticuffs.

Skirmishes – Action Scenes in the game’s parlance – in Artisans are great fun. There’s an initiative track to keep track of who gets to act in what order, which is more intuitive for newcomers than something like Gloomhaven’s per-turn initiative setting. I had an initial worry that the action scenes might feel a little hollow, with so much attention being lavished on the narrative and world-building. I needn’t have worried, the action scenes are solid. What I really like is the way they’re not always just a straight-up fight. I’m not going to spoil things for you here, but let’s just say that at times you’ll be testing how fast you can get out of trouble, instead of getting elbow-deep in it.

The design choices for the skirmishes have been carefully thought out too. Gone are plastic minis, and in their place instead we’ve got screen-printed meeples with round edges. The screen-printing is friendly too, just giving the impression of clothes and characteristics. Why am I telling you this? Because the sort of person who might want to try a game like Artisans of Splendent Vale might also be the same sort of person who’s looking for a friendlier experience. The sort of person who wants to feel like they’re being led by the hand into something welcoming and fun, without having something sharp and pointy stuck between their ribs and left for dead.

Representation matters

During its Kickstarter campaign, a lot was made of the diversity represented in Artisans of Splendent Vale. It’s true, there’s a ton of diversity in the game, and it’s a good thing. It doesn’t take very long before you realise how embedded it is in the game. To begin the game each player chooses one of the four characters in the game and takes the corresponding (200+ page!) book, and what you’ll notice right away is that each book lists the character’s pronouns. If you choose Farah, you’re going to be referred to as ze/zir for the rest of the game. What’s the last game you played where that happened? This doesn’t just happen for pronouns. All four characters are QTPOC, which is another first for me in a board game.

Does all of this matter? Yes, absolutely, it matters. It’s not just about ticking boxes. It’s not just a case of saying “Look at us, we’re being so diverse, right?!”. I play games as a part of that huge demographic group of heterosexual, cis, white males. I don’t have to worry about what I see in games. I know I’m going to find something familiar in whatever I play. What about the huge number of people who don’t fall into that intersection of those Venn diagrams? What about people from marginalised communities? What’s going to make them feel comfortable and at home when they take their first steps into this hobby? Artisans of Splendent Vale might not cover everything, but it does a damn fine job of doing better than most.

The sad truth is that there are people out there who will actively avoid the game because of the diversity and representation. I’ve seen it in online groups. I’ve seen people who believe it’s some kind of agenda, and it’s ridiculous. If you’re really worried that a game with a good representation of diverse characters is in any way negative, I’d ask you to stop reading now and close your browser. We should celebrate the fact that games like this exist. In Artisans’ case, this celebration should be amplified, because it’s not just a token gesture of a game, it’s an excellent game in its own right.

Career path

Artisans of Splendent Vale is a campaign game. Your choices dictate where you go in the world, what you do when you get there, and how your character changes after the action scenes. I love that each of the characters has a different mechanism for tracking their advances. Harinya’s method for brewing potions is completely different from Javi’s artificing, where he fills in nodes around tracks. It reinforces how different each character is from one another.

These differences are apparent in each character’s book too. Most of the books’ contents are the same, but there are subtle differences in some parts. Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but there might be occasions when your group is exploring a room, and each of you is looking at a picture of it in your books. One character with a certain ability might be able to see something in their picture that the others cannot. If you see a number in something like that, you’re free to look up that location in the book and see what you find there. This is one of those bittersweet features of a game like this because it means that your experience could be very difficult from somebody else. Your chosen characters (if you’re playing with less than four characters) might not see things that other people did. That’s just something you have to live with in any campaign or legacy game – you won’t see and do everything in one playthrough.

Something about the game makes your character feel uniquely yours. I’m not sure whether it’s using pencils to add things to your to-do lists, or using the overworld map to decide between you what happens next, but I can tell you that the moment you apply your first scar sticker to your character, you’re going to feel a real investment in their fate.

Final thoughts

In an ideal world, I’d be able to write a review of Artisans of Splendent Vale and tell you why it’s so good. It’s a great campaign game with tons of dungeon-crawling skirmish action, character development, and fantastic writing throughout. Seriously, the story of Artisans is great, and it’s abundantly clear how much time and effort has been put into the world-building. The graphic design and illustrations throughout are beautiful. Truly beautiful. This isn’t an ideal world, however, so I have to pay attention to what this game does for inclusivity and diversity and applaud it for that. To have these things not just paid lip service to, but woven into the very fabric of such a story-rich game is special.

In the interest of transparency and full disclosure, I’ve got to tell you that I haven’t finished the game yet. I’m playing a two-player campaign and getting the time together with my player two to get through it all is tricky. What I can tell you, however, is that I desperately want to know what happens in the end. The story is so good, which is a good thing because there’s an awful lot of reading between fights. If you’re not a fan of the written word and look for your games to be action, action, action, this probably isn’t the one for you. If and when you do complete it, if you want to explore all of the ‘what might have been’ options you can buy a reset pack to play it all through again.

Artisans comes in a big box so make sure you have space on your shelves for it. Along with the rulebook and action scene book, you’ve got four full paperbacks along with the various meeples, pencils, and the gorgeous card box. The card box works like an old card index, and even the design and artwork on it evoke the sort of feeling the game is going for. If you’re looking for a big-box campaign but are tired of the same old themes being re-hashed, and if you have the money for it (it’s north of £100 at the time of writing), Artisans of Splendent Vale is going to give you and your friends an adventure you won’t soon forget.

Review copy kindly provided by Renegade Games Studios. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Artisans of Splendent Vale (2022)

Design: Nikki Valens
Publisher: Renegade Games Studios
Art: MK Castaneda, Lil Chan, Cleonique Hilsaca, Lisa Pearce, Christina Pittre
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45-90 mins per session

The post Artisans Of Splendent Vale Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Every so often a game comes along, and I think “That sounds like the name of a Black Metal concept album”, and this is one of them. Book of Skulls – Slayers of Eragoth wasn’t named this way accidentally, either. Andy, the brains behind this new, team vs team fantasy dungeon crawl, is clearly a metalhead, much like me. It probably won’t come as a surprise then, to learn that the final game comes with a full metal soundtrack too. Get ready to throw some horns.

Let me get the music thing out of the way first. You’re here to read about a board game, after all, not my reminiscing of the days when I went headbanging at metal concerts, back when I had hair to swing. So far we’ve only got the battle theme to listen to, but I think it strikes the tone perfectly. It sounds like what you’d get if you mashed-up Iron Maiden, Dragonforce, Rhapsody, and a few other favourites. Harmonic distorted guitars, machine gun double-bass drumming, just awesome. Have a listen for yourselves.

Raining Blood

Book of Skulls is an unapologetic, balls-to-the-wall dungeon crawler. My first impression when the prototype turned up at my house was “Ooh, is this like Talisman??”. I think it was the mixture of high fantasy and roll-and-move in the rules that did it, and for a first-time designer, I’d actually call it high praise. I directly asked Andy if he’d been inspired by Talisman, and he told me he’d never played it, so the genesis of something like this, now, is as surprising as it is refreshing.

There might be some of you now taking a sharp intake of breath and thinking “Yikes, roll-and-move…”, and I admit that it was my first worry too. However, having played through the game a few times now, I can honestly say it doesn’t influence the speed or perceived fairness of the game in any notable way. There is so much else going on in Book of Skulls, that the overworld map and movement (or navigation as the game calls it) around it is a smaller part of the game.

Where Book Of Skulls shines, and shines brightly, is in the encounters. And by encounters, I mean fights. Boys, girls, and everything in-between beating the snot out of each other, with big weapons and more magic than Paul Daniels’ underpants.

Angel of Death

The clever twist Book Of Skulls applies to the genre, is to make each team act as each others’ opponents. For every turn the Slayers take (the folks you’re controlling to try to win), the opposing team acts as the various Demons they’ll encounter. Each Slayer has a cool range of abilities, giving tons of variety and tactical depth. When they face-off against the nasties, the opposing team chooses how they want to spend their Demon Coins, in order to summon in a team of diabolical creatures for them to fight.

Battle is by-the-book for the most part, and there’s a really cool feature whereby each Slayer card has a Guardian card beneath it, with the top edge protruding. A special die is rolled before each combat, and if one of your Slayers’ Guardians still has its symbol on the top edge, you can cover it. Cover all six on a Guardian, and Bingo! Literally, bingo, it’s like playing bingo. You then get to control the Guardian, who’s a bit like a Slayer on steroids. You haven’t even seen my final form, and all that gubbins.

The overworld map is what ties the fights together into an adventure, and there are all manner of dungeons and other places of interest along the way. I like the way the map and your choice of direction matters, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Deciding how best to use your Slayers to emerge victorious from each encounter is great fun, and I take a perverse amount of pleasure from controlling the Demons. It’s immensely satisfying to shove a stick in the proverbial spokes of the other team’s bicycle.

Not that you get many bicycles in dungeons, you understand. It’s just a poorly chosen analogy by yours truly, but it made me smile, so it’s staying in.

Final thoughts

For a first attempt at a tabletop game of any kind, I’m very impressed with Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth. I’ve been in touch with Andy for weeks now, and it’s been fascinating watching the rate of development in the game. I’ve played before and after big mechanical changes were made, and with each iteration it’s feeling more and more like a finished game.

There are a few rough edges, sure, but that’s to be expected. I’m still not 100% sold on roll-and-move, but it doesn’t cramp the game’s style for a moment. The combat – which, let’s be honest, is the most important part of these games – feels great. It works even in this prototype, where I’m sliding paperclips to track rage levels. I’m so engaged in the process that it doesn’t break the immersion.

By the time you throw in an app to track your characters, a full soundtrack, and goodness-knows-what-else, this has all the hallmarks of being a sleeper hit. The modular board is great, and means you can shorter games if you don’t have the time for a full-length game, and I really like the fact that the boards are small. Dungeon crawlers especially are guilty of throwing more and more in the box, and the boxes get bigger and bigger (looking at you, Descent 2nd Edition). Book Of Skulls is in a smaller box, and fits on the sort of table a normal person might have.

This might be the first time you’ve heard of Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth, and the first time you’ve heard of CloudRunner Games, but it’s almost certainly not going to be the last. Keep an eye on this one folks. The Kickstarter campaign goes live on 31st May 2022, and you can sign up for updates here.

Prototype copy kindly provided by CloudRunner Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth (2022)

Designer: Andy Feehan
Publisher: CloudRunner Games
Art: Various (TBC)
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Book Of Skulls – Slayers Of Eragoth Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

Charisma check

If you hadn’t noticed, dungeons are cool again. Over the course of the last fourteen lockdowns, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has seen a huge revival thanks to celebrities playing, among other reasons. Dungeon-crawling games are huge in boardgaming too, with the recent release of a third edition of Descent, and Gloomhaven having been the BGG number one game since 1964. While these games usually play a bit differently, there’s a couple of things many of them share: the necessity for a table the size of a family car, and costing as much as a mortgage payment.

Bag of Dungeon retains much of the core ideals of these games, but dispenses with crates of plastic miniatures and furniture, opting instead to give you a set of cardboard tiles, some dice, and some meeples. Mmmm, lovely meeples. The heart of the game is drawing and placing tiles, to expand your dungeon in a spiderweb of tunnels and passageways. Combat is handled with dice-rolling, as you might expect, combined with weapons and items you pick up along the way.

Light in the dark

Bag of Dungeon is a much lighter game than most crawlers. It’s so easy to explain how it works, I could probably teach my pug to play. Because of the ease of play, it’s a great one to play with kids. There’s very little downtime, and because the main game is co-operative, players are pretty invested in what each other player does on their turn. Certain player characters are stronger against certain monster types for example, so you can talk among yourselves and decide who gets pushed into the monster and has the door slammed behind them.

It’s not the kind of game that’s going to take centre stage in seasoned gamers’ games night, but it’s a great start or end game for the evening. It’ll make a nice game to introduce players to modern board games, too, much like Horrified.

The biggest problem I found is when you’re down to the last monster or two. I’ve played games of this where one player is much better equipped to beat certain ne’er-do-wells, so the other players just wander around the same few spaces waiting for that player to get over and commence the baddie thumping. In the standard rules, monsters never move from their tile. I picture an elf sitting down and doing a sudoku, waiting for the dwarf to come lumbering down the corridor to fight the monster a few feet away. It can make for an anti-climactic finish to the game. Because the monsters don’t actively chase you, there’s never a reason to not enter a fight with full Action Points, so you can always escape if you need to.

PvP

By far the most fun I had with Bag of Dungeon was when we played with the competitive rules from the back of the rulebook. The aim of the game is the same – find the ring, give the dragon a kick in the family jewels, then scarper. The big difference comes when the ring is discovered, because then players can turn on one another. The player who manages to escape and has the most kills is the winner, and the ring and dragon are worth four and two kills respectively. It makes for a much more interesting game, and has the excitement build to a crescendo at the end.

As the parent of a young child who hates losing, the standard rules are great. Co-op is great for avoiding arguments. But the competitive game really is the way it should be played, if you ask me. There’s another advanced rule which causes monsters to run towards you if you use ranged attacks, which not only adds more excitement to the game, it also makes more sense. If I was hiring monsters to work in my dungeon, I’d want them to do something if someone is firing a bow them from a few feet away, not just stand there, admiring the fletching on the arrows.

Final thoughts

Bag of Dungeon is a lot of fun, you just have to make sure it meets your expectations of what a dungeon-crawler should be. It’s not a super-deep, campaign-driven affair that’s going to take you a year to play through. It’s a “grab-a-beer-and-snacks-with-your-mates” smash-and-grab, or a family’s first steps into the genre. That’s not to say it’s overly simplistic, there’s still a lot in there which will feel immediately familiar. Players have a choice of characters, each with unique stats, and you’ve got slots to equip your loot in to customise your hero.

With the standard rules, it’s pretty good. There’s a fun time to be had by exploring and battling, guiding your intrepid party to the end of the adventure. If you’ve got the kind of group that don’t mind a bit of take-that, and fighting one-another in games, then the advanced competitive rules are definitely the way to play. A good game should leave a lasting impression when it’s over, and the semi-coop crawl followed by a potential battle royale for victory is a far more exciting way to end the game.

In short – a great game if you want to arm yourself to the teeth before a mad scrap against your friends in the competitive mode, and a really nice game for families to take their first tentative steps into a dungeon. Just manage your expectations and don’t expect the kind of epic crawl you’d expect from one of its big-box brethren.

Review copy kindly provided by Gunpowder Studios. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Bag of Dungeon (2018)

Designers: Tim Sharville, Russ Law
Publisher: Gunpowder Studios
Art: Tim Sharville
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-60 mins

The post Bag Of Dungeon Review appeared first on Punchboard.