While visiting one of the local gaming stores, they told me about a new "living card game" that was being put out by Fantasy Flight Games. Not being familiar with what an "LCG" is, the owner told me that they're basically a type of constructed card game environment with the exception that it's not collectable and a new expansion comes out every month or so. They were very excited about this one and were knocking off 30% for all preorders for it, so I decided to give it a chance.
Opening up the box revealed two small bags of cards, another bag with two thick cardboard page punch outs, a moderate sized card sorter, and of course the rules of play.
The bags that everything came in were resealable, which was a very pleasant surprise. While the token bag was far larger than would be needed, the deck bags work great. After punching everything out, we thought we were missing a few pieces that held two dials in place on a "threat tracker", but after lifting up the card sorter, we found another bag at the bottom of the box with the missing parts.
Game play is very different from your traditional constructed card game in that this is actually a cooperative game. The core set is designed for two players (although you could stretch it to 4 with minimal effort) and more can be added with additional core sets, or future expansions. Players work together to take on a three part quest, exploring new areas, and battling monsters. To do so, you pick three heroes from the series to lead the way. They will act as resources to play additional cards from your hand, consisting of allies, attachments, and events.
After bolstering your forces, you then try to take on the quest. You commit whatever characters you wish to adding progress tokens to the current quest. There's two hitches to this, one, you are basing your decision on who to commit before knowing if anything will be coming out to stop you, and two, anybody who is questing won't be able to assist with combats this round.
After committing your forces, you then reveal an encounter card for each player in the game. Encounters can be locations to explore, monsters to fight, or treacheries that work against you. Locations and monsters work against your own characters in making it more difficult to complete your quest. If you have more quest points than they can overcome, you put all the additional points on the quest as progress points that will eventually lead to overcoming the quest. If the monsters have more points on their side, each player's threat meter goes up per point. When the meter hits 50, that player is out.
Now that there's monsters and locations out there that are making it harder for you to fulfill your quest, it's time to go out and deal with them. Locations can be traveled to, which removes their threat, but now will take progress counters before your quest does. Not all locations are bad, some give bonuses for going to them or finishing them.
Once done traveling, you engage any monsters that are out there. Engaging follows a sort of threat index, players with the most threat take on the monsters with the highest threat levels. The monsters fight first, Nd then whatever characters are left over are able to strike back. Once everybody gets their strikes in, the whole sequence starts over.
Okay, now that we've gone over how everything works, how does it all come together? It's a bit rough, to be honest. The rules are 36 pages long, and go over each detail, but seem to like to throw important details as a sort of seasoning. I also found at least one error in it, albeit a minor one, involving the card numbering system for the first game.
Once we did figure things out, it went pretty smoothly. We actually did need to work together in order to finish our quest. The rules specifically state that you cannot read from the cards or name them, so there is some level of trust that you'll need to build in order to win.
I've only gotten to play the two player version of the game and am definitely looking forward to trying out a larger game. I've also only tried playing with the preconstructed decks that were included in the core set, so I wonder how a constructed tournament style deck works still.
All in all, it was a fun experience, but a rocky one. There's not a whole lot in the way of cooperative games, let alone expandable ones, so if your group likes fantasy environments and looking for a new game, you might want to give this one a shot.
