Everybody's Dungeon Crawling for the Weekend
All games and no AC makes Sam something something
Our home HVAC went out about a week ago so sitting next to the small heater that is my desktop computer was not ideal so I spent most of the weekend downstairs, at the gaming table, playing through some solo games, which all happened to be fantasy themed (okay, I know that’s not a rare thing, but I didn’t notice the trend until I was adding them all into my BGStats).
Delve: Kinfire Chronicles: Vainglory's Grotto - Kinfire Chronicles is one of those gorgeous, sweeping, campaign dungeon crawler games ala Gloomhaven that I know I will NEVER have the right group to play with. When the Delve series was announced, designed for 1-2 players and cooperative, my ears perked up because that was more my speed. And then the reviews started to roll in and they were pretty positive. I saw it on the shelf at my FLGS and was shocked that it was only $20!
ANYWAY, I cracked open the box this weekend and played through the game with each character on Saturday afternoon. I played true solo, with one character delving into the well (of cards) and fighting on their own. For the first game, I did follow the first rules setup and I managed to win the fight with Asha, who is the rogue of the party. Then I played a game with Khor, who is druid/healer and managed to win (it was close).
Silly me, thinking I was good at this game…I played again on Sunday and lost 3 times in a row before finally FINALLY scraping a win in the last moment.
In the game you are delving into the well (a big ol’ pile of cards) and trying to reach the bottom, where the Master, Vainglory, is hiding with their minions. The board is setup with the Vainglory card face down (1 of 3 so you don’t know what awaits you on the other side), and it provides a buff to the 4 challenge cards surrounding it. Each turn, you pick one card to go against by playing an action card from your hand and then using up to 2 cards to boost. Then you roll some dice in the hopes of adding more progress. 3 of the dice have the colors of the challenge cards, the other is just light or darkness.
Most of the challenges reward you by letting you delve deeper into the well, which means in any given game, you will not see a lot of cards as you discard cards each time you drop down. Mixed in with those cards are a handful of events that you can trigger, each with their own risk vs reward factors.
After you have played all of the cards in your hand, your character is exhausted. You must draw an exhaustion card from a special deck, which can either handicap your game or create an “if this happens, you lose!” scenario. Then you can draw back up to your full hand of cards and return to the battles.
It’s my kind of mix of push your luck and strategy. You can usually mitigate dice results by boosting, but do you want to discard more cards than necessary? I really enjoyed trying to find the balance of cards to dice to danger. The randomness of each encounter meant that every game I played was new, as cards I had not seen in previous games appeared or combo’d up with other cards in a way they did not before, changing my priorities each turn.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game. I will probably get the other two sets to complete the adventure party since you can mix and match all of them. It is easy to learn and to teach as most of the important text is on the cards and it’s just understanding matching the colors to the action cards and dice.
Have you played Delve? Or Chronicles? What did you think! Let me know in the comments.