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.
