Disclaimer: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.
Back at it again with the third entry in the Kinfire Delve series, this time with Roland and Valora diving into Callos’ Lab.
Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab plays exactly like the previous two boxes, Vainglory’s Grotto and Scorn’s Stockade. It’s the same setup, the same core rules, but with two new heroes and a whole new well deck, it offers some fun and interesting twists on the system that I’ve come to know and love.
Firstly, Callous starts with 10 progress points on his card, and if these progress drop to 0 before you reach the bottom of the well, it’s an instant game over. Several of the challenge cards in the well will add and remove progress from Callous, as well as some of the exhaustion cards will siphon progress away.
I switched to using dice instead of the progress tokens
The two new characters, Roland and Valora are both wonderfully unique. Roland, can feed card draws into his partner by boosting her actions with specific symbols, as well as having a few key cards that scale up dramatically, depending on the contents of his discard. Valora on the other hand, excels at dropping extra progress on challenges you aren’t currently attempting, setting up for an easy success on her next turn.
Roland and Valora complimented each other beautifully. Their synergy made it fun to play as the two of them, feeling like both characters were helping each other, instead of the usual tank/DPS combo, where one player constantly has to set up the other, and the DPS player gets to have all the fun.
As before, the art direction by Katarzyna Redesiuk is still absolutely stellar. The back of every card has a full, gorgeous art piece on it, and the Callous’ Lab’s theme of scientific horror feels cohesive throughout the well deck, leading right into Callous himself, who is a tall, dark brute with gems and crystals growing out half of his head.
I love the flavour text on so many of the cards, and the life it breathes into the world. Snippets of context of Roland and Valora bantering, or warning each other. Callous egging his foes on, it’s masterfully done and makes me care about the theme.
As I said before, the gameplay of Kinfire Delve is just stellar. Every action is tactical, every decision needs to be weighed and the risks, calculated. You aren’t able to complete a challenge every single turn, so timing your blows to moments when you can suffer them are important, as is choosing when to let loose your cannon to smash through a particularly nasty scenario, even if it costs you your best cards.
Part of the joy in Kinfire Delve is the discovery, and each of the different boxes have plenty of content to discover. Because the goal of the game is to get to the bottom of the deck, and so many of the challenge rewards are just discard 1-5 cards, you only really see 25% of the deck in each play. Every time you go through, you’ll have a new combination of challenges that may or may not work together to ruin your run.
Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab succeeds in being an excellent standalone expansion for the rest of the series. The characters feel unique, the challenge of this well feels completely different from what you’ve had to face before, the exhaustion cards are distinct from previous sets, and I loved my experience with this box as well. Now the only thing left for me to do is to start mixing and matching characters to see which parings absolutely sing and which characters travel amongst sets the best.
When I think of Bonsai, the very first thing that comes to mind is Mr. Miyagi from the movie ‘The Karate Kid’. A Japanese Karate master, quietly pruning his little tree, and eventually the bonsai becomes a lesson for Daniel about inner peace.
Daniel: “But how do I know if my picture’s the right one?” Miyagi: “If come from inside you, always right one.” Also: “Close your eyes, concentrate. Think only tree…”
Bonsai, the Japanese art of tray planting, has a long and storied history. It’s culturally significant with thousands of years of development, but put simply, it’s the art of growing a plant in a pot, and carefully sculpting the tree as it grows to achieve a specific aesthetic. Now, I’m no arborist. Most of the plants that come into my possession end up worse for wear, which is why I turn to board games to satisfy my plant growing desires.
Designed by Rosaria Battiato, Massimo Borzì, and Martino Chiacchiera, Bonsai is a tile placement game for 1 to 4 players. Bonsai starts each player with a pot with a single wood hex buried in the dirt. A small deck of cards sits on the left side of a small board, then 3 cards are turned face up. Each turn consists of a player either taking a card from the board, potentially also taking plant tiles, depending on what slot that card was in, or to take the tiles from their supply and place them on their tree. Game play continues until the deck runs out, scores are calculated, and the player with the most points is the winner!
One of the nasty hooks of Bonsai is that at the start of each game, 3 public objectives are laid out, with 3 levels of accomplishment. These objectives are things like “have 6, 9, 12 wood tiles on your bonsai”, and the restriction is that the moment a player achieves an objective, they have to choose to either claim the achievement, or renounce it. If claimed, it’s worth end game points, but they are now ineligible for any of the higher achievements. And of course, once an objective is claimed by a player, no other player may claim the same objective.
This aspect gives Bonsai some teeth, players need to make the tough decision to renounce an objective and risk someone jumping ahead and claiming the top objective right out from under you.
Other than that, Bonsai is a tranquil game. Tiles come in and out from your supply, the cards you pull increase the number of tiles you can put out at a time, the number of tiles you can hold, and offer more endgame victory points. No one can affect your tree, nor can they steal the tiles you’ve already collected. The most interaction in the game comes from someone sniping the card you were hoping to take the next turn, or claiming an objective a turn before you were going to.
Bonsai is a short and sweet game. Barely any hard feelings between competitors, which makes it a great game for date night, or with players who are conflict averse. Bonsai isn’t complex, nor does it ask a lot of your brain. It’s a simple game, perfect to play after a long day of work, and at the end of the short game each player is treated to a beautiful and unique tree, adorned with a multitude of flowers and blossoms.
Disclaimer: A copy of Mean 13 was provided by Sticky 13 Games for review purposes.
Mean 13 is quite the departure from the games that I usually cover on this blog, as I tend to focus on mid to heavyweight euro hobby board games. Mean 13 is not that, in fact, Mean 13 doesn’t even have a BGG page! Instead, it’s a twist on bingo, designed not to test your tactical or strategic mind, but to spark laughter amongst family and friends.
In Mean 13, each player gets dealt a tableau of 13 face-up cards, numbered 1 to 13 in four different colours. Players are also dealt 8 secret ‘mean cards.’ Each round, the dealer flips over the top card of the call deck, and if any of your tableau cards match the number and colour, you flip them over. The first person to flip all their cards wins.
The mean cards can be played at any time, and have different effects, from flipping your own cards face down, swapping cards with an opponent (ideally one of your face up cards for one of their face down cards), reshuffling the call deck, or cancelling the last mean card played. And that’s the whole game. There are some variants, like removing cards numbered 9-13 to shorten the game, or playing with fewer or no mean cards if you want a more friendly version.
So yeah, it’s Bingo with a twist. It’s simple, straightforward, and anyone can play— and I don’t mean that in a bad way. What I’m really getting at is that this game is perfect for playing with people who don’t want to deal with a bunch of (or really any) complicated rules.
There are plenty of occasions where Mean 13 would shine. I played a friendly game with my (almost) 4-year-old daughter, and she had a blast matching colours and numbers. I could see this being a hit at bars and pubs, which seems to be what the developers had in mind, as the cards are plastic and waterproof. It’d also be perfect for big family gatherings, like Christmas or Thanksgiving.
If you enjoy games like Uno or Munchkin, you’ll probably have fun with Mean 13. While it might not make it to the table with my regular gaming group, I can see it finding a place in many people’s lives, on tables surrounded by friends and drinks.
Disclaimer: A copy of Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto was provided by Incredible Dream for review purposes.
Last time I talked about Kinfire Delve, I focused on the Scorn’s Stockade box, as I arbitrarily chose that box to be my introduction to the series. This time, I’m going back to the box that was released first, Vainglory’s Grotto, and taking this dive with the self-sacrificing Khor, and the Opportunist Asha.
Nothing about the core system has changed from box to box. This is still an endurance run down a deck of cards, tackling challenges one at a time until the well deck is exhausted, then completing the final gauntlet to overcome the boss, Vainglory. The gameplay still has players choosing cards from their hand matching the colour of the challenge, getting boosts from the other players, again, matching the colour of the challenge, and rolling dice in an effort to meet or exceed the difficulty of each challenge, and taking the rewards and punishments as you succeed and fail.
What is different is the theme of the game. Scorn’s Stockade was a body horror filled dungeon, with grotesque monstrosities in chains and bars. Obelisks, towers, and other prison themes permeated the art and flavour text of the cards, while Vainglory’s Grotto is more of a macabe symphony. The nightmare of someone who’s spent too much time at the opera. The art features unsettling beauty all around, like a slender lady in a red dress with a large blue rose obscuring most of her face, with only the top of a skull peeking out, and long daggers for fingers, or the marionette, which are a pair of ballerina legs disappearing into a cloud of ethereal roses. Beauty and horror mixed to create the feeling of high culture corrupted.
Vainglory’s Grotto two characters complimented each other quite well. Khor’s ability sucked up wounds, allowing him to take potshots at challenges and purposefully fail them, knowing he could absorb the punishment, then Asha’s ability added free progress to any challenge that already had progress on it. They worked well together, and the fact they synergized so well is likely part of the reason Vainglory’s Grotto feels much easier than Scorn’s Stockade. It helps that the Vainglory herself being nearly trivial if you manage to get to the bottom of the well with no cards attached to her. And even with cards attached, they’re more of a minor inconvenience, less of a show-stopping problem.
All that said, I can tell that Vainglory’s Grotto is the ‘first’ of the series. The card effects are a bit more muted and tame when compared directly to Scorn’s Stockade. Vainglory’s Grotto feels like a rock-solid, but safe first game, where Scorn’s Stockade saw designer Kevin Wilson having more fun with the system, seeing which ways the system could stretch and flex. It is less interesting, but only when directly comparing to its follow-up. That said, the entire time I was playing Vainglory’s Grotto, I couldn’t help but see the synergies that Asha and Khor would have with Naz and Feyn. I’m so excited to mix the character pairings to see how they play off each other and create a wholly different feeling game.
If you’re coming into Kinfire Delve as a new player, this is the box to start with. As an experienced player, It’s worth coming back to. The well cards themselves are less interesting than the successor, but the characters included here are unique and fun. I’m really looking forward to mixing them with the other heroes and seeing how they fare against the other challenges. Or use Vainglory as a testing ground while playing a new hero combination for the first time, so I have a safe space to see what makes them tick!
Last week I wrote about one of my favourite cooperative games, Burgle Bros by Tim Fowers. This week, I want to talk about the follow-up, Burgle Bros. 2: Casino Capers.
Burgle Bros. 2: Casino Capers retains a lot of what made Burgle Bros great, but also directly addresses some of the criticisms. In Burgle Bros. 2: Casino Capers, there’s only 2 floors instead of the default 3. The guards now always move 3 spaces during each of their activations, and when their deck runs out, they enter ‘hunt mode’, where they target characters specifically. The is now only one safe in the game, and in order to get dice on the safe, players need to seek out the moles, then move the dice from the Owner’s Office on the first floor up to the safe on the second floor, making it valuable and necessary to have characters on both floors.
Speaking of moles, there’s 16 poker chips littering both floors that provide a variety of effects. Some of those chips will be the aforementioned moles, but some will contain crowds, giving you a space to lie low from oncoming guards. Some chips like the drunk and saleswomen only take effect when you move onto the tile without peeking first, and with either send you flying into the next tile, or hold you hostage until someone rescues you. Similarly, the prima donna and undercover tokens only trigger when you peek into the tile, and will either pull you or the guard onto the tile you just peeked at.
The characters have changed too, now, each character has 3 gear cards that require an action to be prepped, but offer different effects. Some can be used multiple times, while others have a more powerful one time use. This makes each of the characters more varied flexible, which is an amazing change to the game. I’m much more likely to use a character multiple times in a row to see what kind of situations they can get out of, instead of just picking the hacker for every game like I used to.
The real big change is how players win the game. Once the safe is revealed on the second floor, all the tiles in the X and Y axis are revealed, the moles have sent their dice to the owners’ office on the first floor, AND someone has shifted the dice from the owners’ office to the safe, then a player can spend an action to roll all the dice to try and crack the safe. Every roll does send one die back to the owners’ office, giving a reason for some players to hang out on the first floor. Once the safe is cracked, the finale begins. Burgle Bros. 2 includes 8 finales, each one giving out specific instructions on how to win the game. In one, you need to find two Prima donnas and escape without a bouncer catching sight of them. In another, the safe contained a car that you can use to blow through walls, pick up your co-conspirators, then blast out the second story window. Players don’t know how to win the game until the safe is cracked, which adds a real exciting twist to the late stages of the game.
I’m of two minds for Burgle Bros. 2. On one hand, I dig the new tiles, the new heat system, the flexibility of each character’s gear card, it’s all great improvements on the base system, which was already rock solid. What I don’t like are the poker chips littered about the board. Half of them trigger when moved onto, while the other half trigger when peeked at, and cause just a bit more mayhem than I prefer. For a game as tight as Burgle Bros, the added randomness and risk just makes my buttocks clench.
Another complaint is the bigger box. Burgle Bros. 2 has this amazingly fancy insert and comes with plastic legs that you can jam into the corners of the box to create a 3D space. That second floor is now actually above the first one! While this creates an amazing visual, it’s not terribly functional. During our plays, we found it hard to see all the tiles on the first floor, and had to be ducking often to make sure we were reading the small text correctly, which was made more difficult from the shadow of the box looming over the tiles. Eventually, we chose to go back to the way that Burgle Bros managed multiple floors, just having them side by side. I applaud the efforts of the box design, even if that aspect ultimately was a miss.
I think the conclusion is thus: If you liked Burgle Bros, you’ll probably like Burgle Bros. 2. Maybe more so, if you enjoy the flexibility of the gear cards, and enjoy the tension that the randomness of the poker chips introduces. But if that randomness gets under your skin, Burgle Bros. 2 won’t be an improvement for you. Personally, the theme is better implements in this sequel, and the variety of the finales has hooked me and keeps me reaching for Burgle Bros. 2 over its beloved predecessor. I would never turn down a game of either, but given the choice, at the moment I prefer to play Burgle Bros. 2. We’ll have to wait and see if it can manage to stand the test of time.
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 Delvegameplay 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!
