Spire’s End Hildegard Early Impressions

Obviously I’m not too far into the game at this point. I’ve played a single chapter and experienced only a little bit of what the game has to offer. But it’s time to give a few pieces of early impressions and comparison to Spire’s End.

Firstly, Spire’s End Hildegard is going to be a more family friendly game. Spire’s End leans into horror and while there might be bits of the story that are intense that I’ve heard of from Hildegard, I don’t find it to be nearly at the level of Spire’s End, so it makes it a more friendly game to play.

Also the die combat is a little bit different and I enjoy both types. In Spire’s End you were tracking health and spending that to try and do actions. You were hitting a target number on a roll. Spire’s End Hildegard you are trying to complete targets. And I don’t know that I have a strong preference for either. With Spire’s End Hildegard you have a bit more choice with the rolls, but with Spire’s End you were picking for one roll which was a fun challenge. You could spend more health to have better odds but put you closer to death.

I think that I do like in Spire’s End Hildegard you just play one character. The fact that you play as Hildegard means that you get her story versus a more generic story with characters who are just battling various monsters. You don’t get attached to the character like you do with Hildegard. Now you can play as her sister as well, but that’s only in a two player game, as this is game that is really meant to be played solo.

Upcoming Streams

So for sure next Monday is going to be playing some Spire’s End. Join me at 8:30 PM next Monday and see how that game compares and we might even see Hildegard in that one as well, probably will. It’s a different game but both I find are easy to table and I want to do more comparisons between the two of them.

Then on Wednesday, we’re going to be streaming at 8 PM central time more Spire’s End Hildegard. We’re going to progress into Chapter 2 and find out if we can survive long enough to play another week. If you join in you can help me make some fun choices as we see what new adventures Hildegard is going on.

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How to Play Spire’s End

A spire has come up from the ground and many villagers have been taken. For some reason you, and some others were left behind. And now, you need to go into the spire and find out what is going on. What is happening to those taken.

In Spire’s End you are flipping cards off a deck and then using the seven characters you have, two at a time, to fight monsters, unlock doors, and make decisions. The main pieces of the game are flipping over cards and reading the story on them which generally gives you a decision. You then remove cards down to where it tells you to flip, so keeping part of the story hidden from you.

The other piece is combat. Combat is centered around dice rolls, but uses an interesting mechanic. The dice are not that exciting, it’s roll high enough and do damage. But how you determine your attack is interesting. You spend health to determine your attack, or stamina, the bigger the attack the more it spends. Then at the end your activation you recoup health, if you roll well.

Eventually you reach the end, either when all seven of your characters die. Or one of the various ends in the deck of cards. I’ve done that once and died a couple other times.

What Doesn’t Work?

It’s tricky for me to say that much doesn’t work in this game. I think that it’s a solid and different feeling game. For some people the luck of the dice might be a little bit high. There is little to no mitigation that I’ve come across thus far. So, while the story is good, someone might just end up with bad rolls in a few games and not see much story.

I also think that some people might not like the story. Spire’s End has a dark story to it. The game doesn’t look like a light and fluffy game, so it shouldn’t be a surprise. But I see how the story might be darker than expected.

What Works

I like the mechanics of how you go through the deck of cards. Mainly that you skip over cards. When you make a choice it might be between going to card sixty or card sixty-three. If you go to card sixty-three, you will for sure not see cards sixty through sixty-two. It’s a clever branching mechanic that makes the story more replayable. I hit chapter three and found and end this last time I played. And I skipped probably twenty cards out of seventy, if not more.

The combat is interesting for me as well. Yes, the dice are lucky. There were times where I just couldn’t finish off someone fast enough. But the decision space around how much health to spend on an attack, that’s interesting. Plus, later in the game I got better at resting to get back more health during combat. So you can play around with when you push for that big hit and when you might try and get a lot of health back.

I personally like the story as well. I think that the story is dark but not too dark. Plus the whole of the story is a mystery and I enjoy a good mystery. This feels crazy in a good way, it also feels like an awesome D&D setting. I could see using the cards to just play through a one shot scenario sometime. They determine the story the players interact with, and can they survive. But I want to see what else is happening in this world, that’s for sure.

Who is Spire’s End For?

I think that it works at one and two players. In fact, I think I might prefer it at two players. The game is easy enough to play solo but I like the idea of sharing the story. When I stream it, though, and read the text out lout I suspect that will make solo better for me.

But this is going to be for people who want a simpler story driven game. A lot of story driven games are very big, or they might be too goofy when they are lighter, like Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger. Spire’s End doesn’t pull back from the darkness of the world that you’re going through.

I also think with the story, it is for a more mature audience. I don’t believe it’s 18+, but 16+ is where I would put it. A younger person might be fine with it, but it’ll depend on the person.

Final Thoughts

Spire’s End is a game that feels unique in what it does. But at the same time it feels familiar in that it is a story driven game with dice combat. The world building and accompanying artwork are what set it apart. And I really like it for that reason. The story has some depth but not too much. And the story doesn’t feel like it only gives you obvious choices.

And I like how fast this game plays. I think to reach a point in chapter three where my story ended last night, that was about an hour. That is nice, it’s something that I can pull out when I want to spend a good chunk of an evening playing a solo game. But the set-up is minimal and I can dive right into it.

My Grade: A
Gamer Grade: B
Casual Grade: B+

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Dice Throne Season 1 and Adventures

So, the whole story of why I am selling Adventures is in the Point of Order article. Basically, I got painted minis and a second copy of Dice Throne Adventures in a sale, so I am selling that one. I can still play with my own copy. Probably the more interesting is Dice Throne Season 1. That game is one that I love, so why am I selling it. Well, because my version was the original version of the game. For a lot of people, not an issue, for me not much of an issue either. But for a lot of people, they’d upgrade it to the big box version, I went the opposite direction. I have all of Season 2 in the duel boxes, think boxes with two characters in them. Then I got the Ninja vs Treant duel box. I wanted to get the duel boxes for the original six characters. Mainly, they’d fit on my shelf nicer, and it makes them easier to transport around. So it’s less I’m getting rid of the game, more that my version is changing.

Sword & Sorcery

Now, I was stoked for this game. I picked up the base game and then an expansion, plus character packs. Now I am selling it. Am I said that I’m getting rid of it, no, because I had my fun with it. My hope was that it’d be like Gloomhaven. A massive campaign that I’d want to keep around and play again. Sword & Sorcery fell short of that. The story lacked for me. The game play, while fun, repeated too much. You roll dice, see if you hit, the bad guys go, repeat the process. You find weapons, you level up and get new skills, and you repeat. While Dice Throne has you chucking dice like this does, the characters in Dice Throne feel more unique. In Sword & Sorcery, the characters were fun but everything lacked feeling so different. And the actions you could take, outside of combat, were too basic or possibly not common enough. We reached a point where we had a few actions, but couldn’t do anything with all of them, so there was waste every turn.

All of that is pretty negative. But I still like the game. It is or was in my Top 100, I think it’ll drop out. The game play works, it plays pretty fast, and you can get through the story quickly. It’s not like Gloomhaven where the story lasts for weeks and weeks and it took me three years to get through it. Sword & Sorcery, it took 3 months to get through it. That is nice to have a shorter story game. But, because the story is simpler and shorter, and the game play is simpler, I don’t see myself going back to the game. again.

So I am selling all of that. The store credit will help with getting more Marvel Champions characters and expansions as they are released, or it might help get more Deep Madness expansions as well. We’ll see when it all comes through. So really with all of this, I’m going down one game, and it’s a game that I’ve had my fun with it, now it’s time for someone else to have fun with it.

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Risk Legacy keeps most of the same rules as the original Risk game. You still get troops based off of how many areas you control at the start of a turn. You still are rolling dice to try and take over areas, But the story of the game is different, in this, you’re still trying to take over a world that somehow was terraformed to look like Earth, just with rougher corners. Things went wrong when everyone came to the planet, so you all splintered off into groups. Each player at the start of the game gets a group and a base. The goal is to reach a certain number of victory points, and your base with worth a point as is everyone else’s bases. So you aren’t worrying about conquering everything, just getting their bases. Then, if you are knocked off the board, you can come back on the next round, so you still have a chance, though a very slim one. Also, factions have powers, but you might not always be playing the same faction so you have to know how to play different strategies with different factions.

Now, I’m going to try and talk about spoilers as little as possible as the game doesn’t have that many things to unlock, but the game was a ton of fun to play. It took Risk which can be a very long game and allowed you to focus in a few territories where your opponents had their bases. We had some games that would stretch on for a while because you’d end up with a lot of base trading so that even if you captured someone else’s base, someone had probably taken over your base the turn before, but all the games were much much faster than a normal game of Risk. It was a massive improvement, and unfortunately you only have a kind of playable copy of the base game afterwards, because I’d love to see Risk revamped to have that in it.

The special powers are great as well. It allows you to get a preferred faction, but not one that you are always going to play. It also means that you’re going to have something that makes you different. I like it when games can do that, so that even at the start of the game, you feel like you’re unique. And, not a spoiler, the factions become more diverse as the game goes on. This is interesting because it means that some factions can become stronger, so do you make changes to the faction to make them better for you now knowing that you might not get it back another game. This is another way that it is really a step up from Risk, being unique in a game where it can feel very generic is really nice. And like, I think, a good legacy game, you are different and then you can become more different and that keeps the game interesting for several games.

The set-up is also different from regular Risk. In normal Risk, every territory starts out with a troop on it, so the world is already populated for war, but that means that your troops are going to be spread quite thin even at the start. In this, you start with a base in an empty location or one that has a major city you founded earlier in the game. That’s where you start, and you can start as close or far from others as you want. You can expand out as slow or as fast as you want. It makes it a bit more of a strategic game versus just jumping straight into dice chucking. And it makes it seem like your choices matter more. There’s no trying to grab as much of Australia as possible, because you’re starting in one spot and someone could possibly block you in. Being in a remote corner or Asia can actually work because you’ll be able to expand out slowly. And, I think it helps with the speed of the game, because you aren’t always fighting each turn, so even though technically you could get to conflict faster, early turns of the game of Risk Legacy go much faster, and because you’re only dealing with trying to take out the bases, it works much smoother.

Finally, how does it compare to other Legacy games? Firstly, it doesn’t have as much to unlock. In Risk Legacy, you basically have a handful of envelopes and a couple of other spots to open. So, you aren’t opening stuff as often as you do in a game like Pandemic Legacy or even SeaFall. To go with that, since you aren’t opening as much, there isn’t as much of a story. There are a few twists that can come along the way, but it isn’t as story driven as Pandemic Legacy. There’s nothing to read at the start of each game, it’s basically put stuff down and start again. But what you do unlock, there’s a lot of fun stuff, and it has those moments of unlocking things and thinking that it is going to massively change the game, and it does. I won’t spoil what those are, but there are some very fun ones that you can get and unlock.

Overall, it was a really fun experience. I think that it still has some of the flaws of Risk because combat is still about who can roll dice with more luck than the other person. But the game length is shorter, the crazy moments of unlocking things is great, and the winning objective works really well. I don’t know that it really adds much more them to the game, but it does make it a whole lot more interesting. If you like Risk at all, Risk Legacy is going to be a really good option for you, and if you dislike Risk because of the length of the game, this could still be enjoyable. If it’s about the dice rolling combat, I’d skip it.

Overall Grade: B
Gamer Grade: B-
Casual Grade: B

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