Disclosure: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.

I identify as a euro-gamer. Given the opportunity, my game nights generally include more food chain management (Food Chain Magnate), and wrestling with the economic intricacies of rats trying to build a rocket to get to the cheese moon (First Rat), and less of swords and dungeons and danger. Now and then a game breaks that tradition, such as One Deck Dungeon or Massive Darkness. Kinfire Delve becomes the latest game to press a blade into my hand and punt me down a well to deal with the overflowing threats that loom down below.

Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is a 1 – 2 player cooperative tactical card game where you take on the role of either Naz of the Windstrikes, the female orc tactician, or Feyn Longstride the Bard of Destiny. The goal of the game is to delve through a well of challenges to meet and contour the boss at the bottom, Scorn.

Naz, the Tactician

Each delve begins by randomly selecting one of three Scorn cards to place in the centre of the table, face down. Each Scorn card had a different challenge on the other side, so you won’t really know what you’re facing until you reach his lair. Surrounding the Scorn card are four cards from the well. These cards can either be an event or a challenge. On your turn, you select one of the cards to interact with. If you choose an event, do as the text reads. If you choose a challenge card (as most of the cards in the deck are challenges), you’ll play a card from your hand that matches the colour of the challenge as an action in an attempt to meet or surpass the difficulty. Each action can be boosted up to two times. If playing alone, you boost yourself, but if playing with others, then the boost needs to come from your comrades. Again, these boosts need to match the colour of the challenge. You’ll also need to roll the four dice, which may add extra progress to your action. If your final sum meets or exceeds the challenge rating of the challenge, you complete the challenge and gain the reward. If you fail, you place progress tokens on the card based on your action value, and suffer the penalty.

At the start of any turn, you may choose to exhaust yourself, which has you discard any cards in your hand, and redraw back up to the hand limit, as well as reveal an exhaustion card. The exhaustion cards have a few extra lose conditions, such as having 3 specific exhaustion cards up at the same time, or when a specific character plays a specific card.

The game continues to be played until either the players run out of health and lose, or exhaust the well deck and overcome Scorn in the final confrontation.

Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is a challenging game. I’ve only come close to beating Scorn a single time, with all my other plays see me fail about halfway down the well. I’ve tried solo with both characters, and a two player game, but I just haven’t been able to overcome this challenge.

I like how tactical the Kinfire Delve gameplay is. Each round, you’re presented with 4 challenges, and you need to pick one to tackle. Some of these challenges will have bold text that are in effect as long as that card is face up, such as “all other challenges are +2 difficulty”, or, “Everyone you roll a dark, lose one heart”. These become the obvious targets, but it’s also quite interesting when those effects start to overlap.

Another point of tactics are the cards in your hands. You must use a card of the matching colour to attempt a challenge, as well as a boost of the matching colour to boost. There have been times when I’ve been desperate to clear a blue challenge, but I have naught but red and green in my hand. Similarly, situations where I need to boost, as the penalty for failing a challenge feels drastic, but the only card I can boost with is a card that I really want to use for it’s effect on my next turn. Do I forfeit the effect until the next time I draw that card, or do I put my faith in the dice?

Heaven forbid I roll a blue

Capping every action in Kinfire Delve is a die roll. 4 dice that can add up to 4 extra progress to your challenge, should you roll well enough. But the randomness is also weighted in a way that rolling absolutely nothing helpful isn’t a terribly rare situation. It’s tempting to lean on the dice to conserve your cards so you take less exhaustion as you delve, but a terrible roll will spell disaster for you. I’ve failed more than one challenge because I needed a single progress point from the dice, only to be utterly denied.

The production on Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is fantastic. The cards are great quality and the art direction by Katarzyna Redesiuk is phenomenal. The art on the back of the player cards shines with gold that memorized me for longer than I want to admit. And while I’m not a fan of body horror imagery, the challenges depicted on the well cards did instill a level of grotesque fear that had me feeling like a terrible evil needed to be vanquished.

I received all 3 of the Kinfire Delve games at the same time, and I arbitrarily chose Scorn’s Stockade to be my first romp. On one hand, I’m interested and intrigued! I want to keep battling against this stockade until I make Scorn pay for his atrocities. I want to defeat all 3 variants of the boss before I move on. But at the same time, I’m excited to discover what the other characters feel like. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s in the next box and how well characters from other boxes would fare against this challenge. I do not know how I’m going to store all the content from all the boxes at the end, though, as I generally prefer to keep a game system contained to a single box.

All in all, Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade is an excellent solo or cooperative game. At 30 to 45 minutes, it’s short enough that when I lost, I didn’t feel horribly demoralized, but it also gives a sense of accomplishment when I finally managed to confront the boss. I loved exploring the characters and am excited to explore the other boxes. I’ll be posting a review for each box individually, and then a final post looking at what a game feels like when all three sets get mixed and matched. Look forward to it!