Altar Quest is a miniatures dungeon questing game designed by the Sadler brothers, who created the great Warhammer Quest Adventure Card Game. It’s overall design pays homage to HeroQuest, particularly with its use of a set board to play on, rather than using and laying out individual tiles, and has room object features for players to interact with. Your heroes will undertake quests to find an underground altar, but their reasons for doing so will change depending on the quest you selected.
A modular design means that for each adventure you select different card decks for your heroes, villains, threat and your quest objective to create a new adventure, allowing you to build the dungeon flavour you want to experience from a pool of available options. It’s rulebook is a difficult beast to negociate, whilst explaining the various mechanics it does not do a good job of drawing you into how to play, especially regarding the area of actions, reactions and free abilities.
The general production quality of this game is good, with nice plastic models and interesting room objects, all covered by some lovely card artwork. The board is particularly eye catching with rooms of differing colours, sizes and also style, including a glassy floor and another with roots growing through. The enemies however are somewhat unusual comprising a number of animal type creatures, with Frox (frogs), Raglanders (pigs) and Vampires in the core box, and adding in Crows and Rats in the kickstarter expanded edition. Upon reflection they make a nice change from the usual goblins and orcs, but i have mixed feelings. It is worth adding that the way villains attack really seems to fit their personality, with Bolx the Frox king for instance burping acid and lashing you with his long tongue.
The mechanics of playing this game are thematically fun, as each hero has their own card deck which is unique enough to create an individual character flavour. Cards are used to fight, interact with objects or undertake feats and it gels together as a good experience, providing different tactical options and choices. Your hero feels alive and generates a story by what they are doing. The use of dice is also inspired, as you have magical altar rhunes energy that will constantly change, bringing your hero and enemies extra abilities that flow in and out of play during the game. The action test dice you roll feel full of positives, as even rolling badly sets up focus tokens to improve your next roll, and the critical rolls that allow for a cumulative re-roll are just great fun when they happen, and always give you the chance to pull off something unexpected. The game also scales well, as different player counts spawn extra threats, and villains have more health.
Why i chose not to keep it ….
The game is enjoyable but does suffer in a couple of areas against other dungeon crawlers, as some the animal enemy decks are slightly on the quirky side, and many of the better ones are found within the stretch goal box rather than the core box. It requires a more lengthy game session to complete a mission that feels necessary as the altar takes a long time to discover, and repeating rooms can begin to feel repetitive. It was good for a while but less engaging over time.
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Expansions
Here are the additions you can make outside of the core box (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Stretch Goals
Given this was a kickstarter, a lot of the extra content was packaged up within the stretch goals box which is only really going to be available now on the second hand market. In the case of this game all the extra heroes with their card decks, and additional monster groups and miniatures are so good that if you love the game then it is likely worth the outlay to expand your game choices as a first priority.
Ruins of Arkenspire
This is a box expansion that adds in a new hero, threat and villains with an undead theme and an new quest story to play through. It also plays mini encounters using side boards, which are shorter versions of the main game. This is a decent addition you can make outside of the stretch goal box if you want more playable campaign content, but it is not a priority and i sold my copy in the end as i already have enough content.
First Four Hero Pack
A set of four extras heroes with their models and card decks. This is a great addition if you want more choice of heros and the stretch box is too expensive.
Lurker Pack
An add on purchase to a range of miniatures by Blacklist games (who produced Altar Quest), providing a set of 12 new roaming monsters with their lurker cards. The miniatures are good and having played the core set a number of times this fixes any problem of encountering similar random monsters. This expansion is probably going to become really hard to find, but i feel it is a most useful expansion if you only have and want to play the core set.
Component Additions
These are non essential extras such as extra dice, base rings and a neoprene mat which may appeal to some players, although the double sided board in the core set is pretty great anyway.