Trudvang is a solo or co-operative fantasy adventure with Nordic fantasy world theme. The game system is based on a swedish roleplaying game featuring some excellent and unique artwork style, and it is very much a branching story game where you will undertake a saga or journey using your chosen heroes.
This game starts with a large world map and questing side board, which hold your important locations and areas to visit, but ones that can change during and between adventures as you will sleeve new cards directly into the boards. The side boards make the turn mechanics really easy to follow, and the map looks amazing, and it is especially neat to carefully sleeve new locations into place as you progress which change the world interactions.
Each hero has their own combination of feats or skills they can utilise, plus a set of runes which are drawn from a bag during combat or character tests. These runes are reset for each adventure but they can be added to or changed during a chapter. When you are involved in combat you will draw the runes, three at a time, to place on your feat cards to cover symbols and trigger attacks, skills or blocks. Pushing your luck to trigger more combinations is really tempting, but if you cannot place your runes then negative status effects will come into play. It is a smooth and enjoyable combination.
Adventures are broken down into chapters, and each new one has a mini reset of sorts during its set up stage, however your character’s will upgrade feats or titles that remain during the campaign, and it is nice balance to create a feeling of progression, while enabling each adventure to work independently. You can choose to follow a main saga story path or embark on any side quests that you have unlocked, which are mini stories in themselves. Saving the game is so easy as all your core map cards are sleeved into the game boards, so you only really need to save your character into their own rune bags, making it one of the easier campaigns to manage.
This game has exceeded expectations, especially given its long and drawn out development issues. I can see that it is going to be selectively loved, as it majors on an easy to play system and the narrative adventure rather than deep strategy or clever tactics. It has some of the story book elements of Oathsworn, Tainted Grail or Sleeping Gods, but its mechanics and difficulty are lowered a little to provide such an easy to play adventure, and it has proven itself to be fun and engaging, removing some of the frustrations and dead ends seen in other campaign story games. It’s replay value will undoubtedly be reduced on a second play, but there are choices, so a number of story sections and side quests will still be new.
Overall this game has lovely artwork, a mix of the colourful and sketch drawings, a strong theme, and blending with some nice miniatures to create a neat story gaming experience in a box. I really like this product, the ease with which it plays and the enjoyment of owning it make it much more likely to be set up for a quicker afternoon or evening session. I have had some disappointments with Cmon games, but this one has been a surprising success, plus there are more stories and expansions to come. If you want a low complexity story game, then this is a good option.
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Expansions
There are expansions coming soon you can add to enhance your story (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Story Boxes
There are three larger box expansions which add new specific campaigns, enemy miniatures and heroes. Westmark adds a new map board extension and six heroes and is the largest and likely most important expansion box. Darkwoods has a dark forest theme with spiders, goblins and three new heroes, and has my favourite theme. Muspelheim goes deep underground into caverns and has 5 more heroes but this one is an kickstarter exclusive.
Lost Stories & Wildland
These are kickstarter only stretch goal expansions that come with new one off stories to play, new miniatures and many new heroes.
Thorn Beast
A huge dragon which features in the storyline but one you can capture and potentially ride, which is very neat but is again a kickstarter exclusive.
Books & Runes
There are optional extras coming such as plastic runes which will improve the feel of the game when drawing from your bags, plus two hardback books, an artbook and a chronicles RPG book.