Take your heroes into battle against foes and see if you can take down the enemy in Champions Rise, a cooperative card game by Nefarious Duck.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/championsrisegame/champions-rise?ref=profile_saved_projects_live

Pros

• Playthroughs
• Combing Deck Concept

Cons

• Artwork
• Details
• Price of Game
• First Game & Zero Backed

The Page

In all fairness, this isn’t a game that I even looked at when it popped up on Kickstarter. I literally didn’t click into it and that’s because of the page/video. When you see the thumbnail and it says Champions Rise, and that’s it, it looks super generic. I look at that, I have no idea what the game is, there is nothing that gets me excited for the game or to even click into the game to find out more. The only reason I found out more was because of the Dice Tower playthrough.

Looking at the page, I’m not sure I’d have given the game a second thought without that playthrough as well. The page does not lay out the game well, you don’t get to see components, there is little to no rules, and all of that’s a shame. I again go back to watching it on the Dice Tower. This game has rules, this game is polished to at least some extent. There are interesting and cool characters and concepts in the game, but the page sells you on none of that.

Now, I have in my cons that this is Nefarious Ducks first game with zero backed on Kickstarter. But they seem to talk about Kickstarter like they are familiar with it in the page. So my concerns about them not getting the game out are actually fairly low. But I do still have concerns, they seem to know the basics of Kickstarter but fail to really create something that wows me. The page just misses when it comes to the layout and the details. For example, I don’t know how to play the game, and while you can get to information, it’s a long ways down. They seem to have a rule book, and while I knock companies for only using rule books, share the rule book if you have it.

The Game

Like I just finished talking about above, if I hadn’t watched the Dice Tower playthrough, I wouldn’t know how this game works. Once I knew how it worked, it was interesting. In particular there are two aspects that stood out to me.

Firstly, the villain was extremely unique that the Dice Tower played against. The whole idea of tattoos that the villain has which can take damage and be gotten rid of, but provide some power to the villain as well. That is extremely cool. I love when companies create interesting mechanics around the bad guys and what seems like diversity in their bad guys. That will give the game way more replayability over time.

The other thing that drew me in was how you combine characters with a trait. And you can pick whatever combination you want. You could have a trickster harlequin or a trickster kelpie. Again, this falls into something that makes the game way more replayable. It reminds me of Marvel Champions and building out decks based off of aspects and how each hero can play any of the four different aspects giving you a massive amount of variety in play and play styles for each character. This is a simplified version of what is done in Marvel Champions.

A negative knock to it though was the randomness of some events. While I don’t mind flipping over a card and having a monster attack, there were some cards that came up that didn’t impress me. I’ll get to my negative one in a second, it is cool that these monsters and things can also hit the villain though. Normally the villain controls the battleground but in this game the battleground is it’s own entity. But to the negative, there was a card that caused a player to just lose their turn. I forget if there was a way to negate it, but they just lost their turn. That is not fun. A good game doesn’t need a random mechanic like that which can just stop you from doing anything because of a bard card draw. It seemed like that card was there to make the game harder, in the playthrough didn’t seem too hard, but it isn’t an interesting way to do so.

Back or Brick

Is this a back or a brick for me? Right now, this game is a Brick. While I know how to play it and the concept interests me a lot, the game just needs to be polished again. The artwork needs to be polished up, the game play needs to be polished, everything feels a little rough around the edges. Now, I will say, if you want to back this game, I think the concept is there. I don’t think anyone will be disappointed with the final product from what I could see from the Dice Tower playthrough game wise. I just feel like this concept needs another pass over. Also the price for what you get in the base box $55 (after shipping) for mainly cards, feels like it doesn’t match. Or maybe it’s the the funding goal for something that’s mainly cards doesn’t match what I normally see on Kickstarter.

Is this game a Back or a Brick for you? Did the video, that first image, get you interested in the game?

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