A co-operative adventure campaign game which has the feel of a video game. This has strong roots as a role playing experience, from creating your character, entering a story, and levelling up skills and equipment to discover quests and defeat monsters. It is designed in a legacy format, where monsters and items will be revealed as the game progresses.
The game is really well designed, coming with nice pre painted miniatures, and great layered character boards into which you slot your weapons, equipment and skills. There is a really nice visual appeal to the artwork and characters have a selection of six role paths to choose from and progress into. Each path comes with their own boards, skills to choose from and treasure chest to gain special equiment. Three large boxes of cards will drive the game mechanics, providing the storyline events, encounters and non player interractions.
Adventuring is free form, but with a scripted branching path storyline explored at varying levels via an over-arching terrain map, before zooming into locations and then dwellings or caves. Here you will encounter the monsters, quests and interract with storyline characters using events and point of interest cards. Travel and exploration is made quick and easy to complete, with events triggering a response depending what type of terrain your are in.
When you enter a combat it is well implemented, with positioning and the weapons used being important to how damage is applied. The enemy intelligence is great too with a threat meter dictating how agressive the monster is and threat cards deciding each round what is activated. Foes have intelligence cards too that show what areas of the body you need to attack to defeat it and also what they will do when activiated. It flows easily, and weapons or spells have their own attack patterns which mean that each one may be more useful at different times, and the character to ally or monster positioning is important in relation to all attack patterns.
This is a class act for role playing style adventure games. It is relatively easy to save your position between sessions, and is very engaging with its storyline, interraction with non player characters, with combat really well implemented. It is all about the joy of discovery as everything is revealed slowly, from the monsters to the skill progression and the quest adventure itself.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Expansions
There are expansions you can add to enhance or change the gameplay (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Hero Expansion
There is a new hero box that called Epic Hunt that has a lizard type mage hero character to add as an extra choice, with new skills and cards to add him as a foe. It is not really essential given the amount of content already in the main box.
Small Bodies
Smaller scale bodies for you to use as your character when you want to run as a dwarf or halfling. Again this is not really that important.