This review is going to talk about how well the game works via Zoom. I plan on doing more in this series, though we might get a few party games lumped together into a single review of the premise of the is similar. For Tainted Grail, though, it is the only big game that I’m playing via Zoom, except for Dungeons and Dragons and people have been playing that digitally for years. So let’s jump into looking at Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

How Do You Make It Work?

So there are a few things that drew me to Tainted Grail as a game that we could play that was big and grandiose over Zoom. I also didn’t want it to be a game that we played digitally. We had played Dice Throne on Table Top Simulator and more games as well there. But the bigger the game, the clunkier it is on TTS.

The first thing to make playing Tainted Grail work was my camera set-up, and even that only kind of worked. The other players can’t always read all the cards or information on the locations, so that is part of what I do, explain what they say. But I have a top down camera that I can show all of the map. I can also Zoom it in for diplomacy and combat on the encounter.

The next thing is getting the players their characters. Since we wrapped up Gloomhaven in person, in a well ventilated area and masked, I just handed off the characters for people to play. That got them their character board, combat and diplomacy cards for the character color and their character. Since then I’ve also handed off the marker for tracking health, and some other sheets and cards that are useful for helping keep track of everything. If I were to do it now I’d hand off the character board, combat and diplomacy cards, a save sheet, some cubes, the health marker, the map, and if you have the Echoes of the Past expansion, the sheet for that. That is what the ideal would be, it sounds like a lot, but it works well.

Then the app is key for the game. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is an adventure game at it’s heart. And there is a massive adventure book. However, there is an app that has most of the adventure book read out in it. So I play the audio and everyone can listen to the narration as it goes along. However, everyone pulls up the app, that way the player who is exploring can see the choices that they have. It makes everything run smoother using that and I don’t have to read as much. I still do need to read the Echoes of the Past story bits thought.

What Works Poorly?

In the game you can team up with other players and do things. You have the option to explore as a group, fight as a group, and more. We don’t do much of that. While, in theory, it sounds great, it is hard to make it work via Zoom. I lay out my combat line, so someone else could work with me, but the other players don’t have a great setup for that. So we need to explain what the open keys are when fighting together. For that reason, we tend to do our own thing, cover more ground, and come together when we need to light an Menhir.

Speaking of Menhir and lighting them, we’ve played through the first two chapters twice now. The reason for that is that remotely, playing not in story mode proved to be too difficult. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is at it’s hard an adventure survival game, and there is emphasis on survival. However, when playing remotely, it is harder to plan as well as we should. Story mode allows us to use fewer resources when lighting the Menhir, it keeps them lit longer, and generally reduces the cost when we do things together. I think in person we might not have played on story mode, but digitally with the extra moving pieces, it’s tricky.

What Works Well?

Honestly, most everything else works well. But let’s talk about the highlights of what really shines. The app is amazing. Tainted Grail wouldn’t have been a game I picked if it wasn’t for the app. There is a lot of reading. And if I were the only one reading, it would be fine, but make it more difficult for the person who has the game. I feel that even if we come back in person before we finish, which I think is very possible, we will still use the app. It makes it that much easier.

The story element works very well as well. Now, I talked about the app already, literally just finished. What I am talking about here is the fact that this is a story heavy game. I feel like for playing via Zoom, you need either a game with lots interaction, quick turns, things like that, or you need something that has a ton of story. With a ton of story, every player stays engaged in the game. And the writing in Tainted Grail, it is not even close, it is the best writing I’ve seen in a board game. Yes, it is fairly dark, but it is extremely well put together and is extremely immersive. Honestly, probably the best part of the game, though, I spent my whole last session generally fighting and healing. But when other players explored, that was great to get the story.

Would I Recommend It For Zoom?

This is tough. With vaccines rolling out and it being fine, per the CDC for vaccinated people to get together in small groups, share meals, and spend time, this one is tough to recommend. I personally would prefer to play it in person, it’d be less book keeping for one person. Now, if you are playing with someone across the country, say both of you have the game, that’d be simpler. If not, there is a lot that you would need to send even with just the player board and cards.

So yes, I think this one works. Most likely it’ll be a bit before some groups of people can play together in person. Or maybe you will play across the country with someone who has the game. This game works well digitally. Having played it solo, it works even smoother when everyone is at the table, I think, but it’ll work well digitally also. The main takeaways when considering it, there are a bunch of pieces to hand off, and the set-up. I won’t way the app, because I’ll use that in person as well.

What is the largest game you have played digitally? Would you try something as big as Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon via Zoom?

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.
Support us on Patreon here.

In Tainted Grail you take on the roles of 1 to 4 characters, these characters aren’t your typical heroes, they are the B-Team. You’re deeply flawed characters with an iffy backstory and something that is a negative for you. When the A-Team, those people from the farmhold of Caunacht who were more skilled and more important than you went missing, you were tasked to find them. It wouldn’t have been that big an issue, but the Wyrdness is starting to take back the land and the Menhir, statues that Arthur and his knights erected to drive back the Wyrdness, are going out. Can you find a way to save the lands of Avalon and keep the Wyrdness at bay, or will it fall? That’s the story of the game, the mechanics for most of the game aren’t that difficult. In it, you spend energy to explore locations move around the lands of Avalon and light the Menhir, but all of this is while you are trying to balance finding the resources you need to keep the Menhir going and fighting off monsters and convince hostile villages and farmholds that you means no harm. And when you fight or do a diplomatic encounter, the game changes. You are now in a tactical card playing phase where you are looking to change together cards to do damage, use abilities on those cards, and most importantly, leave yourself in position where you aren’t taking to much damage. It’s a giant puzzle to figure out as you chain moves together to take out monsters or string words and stories together to convince those doubting people.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is split up into 15 chapters and each chapter can go between half an hour and probably up to two or so hours, maybe even longer as I’m in Chapter 2 and I’ve been playing for an hour and fifteen minutes, but I’m also streaming it (Here on Youtube). I think, if I had hit a couple more ideal battles, I’d be in a much better position, but you can check that out. So there is some luck in how long it takes, do you explore in the right direction, do you not find too difficult encounters, things like that. And I think that there is a little bit of early scaling that might not be quite correctly paced, I’ll talk about that in a second when I talk about some issues. But it really is this massive branching story which is even more impressive. I believe even as early as Chapter 3, depending on what you picked in Chapter 2, the game can branch into different parts of narrative and how you choose to solve everything. So this 30+ hours of game play is replayable as you can pick different paths to take, which ism extremely impressive to me. If I were playing with more than a single character, that would make a difference as well for me. I am really digging that piece of the game.

So, let’s talk about my first negative for the game quickly, and I hinted at it before, I feel like the monsters level slightly too fast. I get that this is a grim dark setting and it’s supposed to be hard. In Chapter 1, you have the first tier of monsters, I’m not going to say level 1 monsters, because some of them are a lot harder than others, in level 2, I added in tier 2 monsters, and maybe because of how I went about the game, I wasn’t able to level up my character as much, but right now I’m running away from 90% of the encounters that I face just to get as little damage as possible. I think either having more tiers of monsters or adding in a partial grouping of tier 2 monsters and encounters, and then finishing adding them in chapter 3 and slowing down that progression a little bit would still keep the game hard, but I’d only be running from 67% of them instead of most of them. And some of that is my fault as well, I am the type of poker player where I want to see the flop at least with almost any hand, and I know that’s not a good strategy, so I often hang in combat for a round and then drop out when I should just know to drop out right away, but I want to see if I can draw that one card that will help me crack the puzzle and win the encounter. This is a minor negative.

My other negative and this one is slightly larger, is that when you die you have to restart the game. If you’re smart, I’m not, you have a nice save sheet that you can use between chapters to save the game and come back, but I’m not smart, and people who are playing multiple chapters at a time are going to have the same issue. I wish that it was an official rule that you have to save between every chapter so that when you die you can restart the chapter. This game is really tough, and if I’m in chapter 8, I don’t want to start again at Chapter 1, even though I’ll know how to rush through it. Or, better yet, I wish that the beginning of each chapter told you how to reset the world, so yes, you might have to reset your character or take a hit to your character, but to be able to have a starting option for each chapter so that you don’t have to replay would be nice, because it would mean that if you are playing through, you’d be able to quickly get into the game again if you die. It could also work if you don’t want to do Chapter 1 again and get to where it branches faster, you’d be able to do that, because Chapter 1 is a bit of a prologue. Now, I just came up with a solution for some of my issues, and I’ll have to go back and implement that for myself, save at the end of every chapter, but it would be nice to have something more official.

Next, I want to talk about some things that others have brought up as negatives. It’s the time that the Menhir are lit and the amount of food that you need. People have claimed, and I can see why, that the game forces you to farm for certain things, you need to farm food so that you can eat every night, not become exhausted, and heal and have your terror go down (eating is good). But you also want to be exploring and doing other things not just farming food. The same with the Menhir. You need some resources, probably magic, so that you are going to need to farm that. One of the characters can produce their own magic, so that’s good for them, but the one that I’m playing actually needs an extra magic because of his flaw, so I need to farm even more magic. But all of that said, neither of those things are negatives for me. First, my character can produce food if I really need it in a pinch, so while it does take up energy to do that so I can’t do as much in terms of exploring and traveling I always have that option. It also is fine, because we knew the game was going to be like that going into it, or if people paid attention to the kickstarter and rules and so many things, it was obvious that this game was going to be tough to survive. The grind is going to be part of it, and I feel like most of the grind isn’t even that grindy, because it is going to drop you into a combat which is such a fun puzzle to try and figure out that it doesn’t just feel like wasted time. Though, as you can see, I think that the encounter level does go a bit fast. Mainly, this piece of the game is very thematic, and the Menhir running down it adds to the stress of the game, and you can do things to play in more of a story mode, and I think there are interesting ways that you could “cheat” if you wanted it to be purely story mode, but that would lose some of the challenge and tension of the game.

But there are so many good things about the game, let’s start with the Exploration Journal. This thing is massive, and it has so much story in it. You feel like you’re always jumping into it, and there are so many options and statuses that come from it, that I don’t think it would ever be possible to get them all or read through all of it in a single game, and I love that. Plus, that then makes it really replayable. It also makes the world really immersive. All of the locations that you can go have a lot of history and depth built into them, and I’ve started running into side quests and things to explore that might create a more interesting story and more history that can be unlocked so that I can fully understand the world. And there are going to be two more expansions to the game, one before and one after the time frame of the base game, so I’m going to unlock the world history. I also can see, because of the amount of exploration how it would be fun to just be the keeper of the book, almost a game master, and lead other people through the journey so they aren’t getting spoiled to.

The encounter system, both combat and diplomatic, I really like as well. I’ve called it a puzzle and it really is. Cards connect on various keys and open up other various keys (I’m going to mainly give combat as the example), and you are trying to chain those together in the best way possible. The first card you play down is always free and doesn’t have to connect to anything, but ideally it does so that it’s not a wasted card, but it might be that you need to put it into play in order to combo something onto it later. Because some cards have a symbol that allows you to chain it together as a bonus move, and you can chain multiple of those together and hopefully in the first round take it out. It’s also a puzzle though because various levels of damage changes how the monsters responds to you. So if you’ve done 0-2 damage to them, they might hit you for one damage, but if you’ve done 6 and they need 7 damage they might run away. So, you won’t want to hit 7 damage, but it might be 6 damage on the monster means you get 3 wounds, so that isn’t ideal, so you’re trying to set-up a combo so that you can rush to the finish from 2 damage. I really enjoy the puzzle nature of it, and diplomacy works similar as well, but now you’re trying to move it up using different skills.

Finally the characters, that’s the last thing I want to talk about. I love how different they are. There are six skills and each character has a different set-up of those skills. That means, that Beor, for example, is great a combat at the start, but horrible at dealing with diplomatic encounters. Arev is a more balanced character. Beyond that, each character has their own unique upgrade cards for combat and diplomacy, now if you’ll see them, who knows, but that allows them to feel more thematically developed in terms of characters. I also like that each type of character, there are four archetypes that will be showing up throughout the base game and expansions, has their own combat and diplomacy for that archetype. Finally, each character has something unique that they can do, an action that is unique only to them. In Arev, that’s that he can always find some food, one food for two actions. But to balance that out they have a weakness as well. Arev’s is that he needs one more magic than required to light a Menhir. If a Menhir doesn’t have a requirement for magic, there’s not a requirement for a single magic because of Arev, that offers your own unique challenges for playing each character and adjusts how you can deal with certain encounters for combat and diplomacy or what options you might choose in exploration.

Overall, you can probably tell that I really like the game. Is it a perfect game, no, there is no such thing as a perfect game, my favorite game of all time, Gloomhaven, isn’t a perfect game. But Tainted Grail is an amazing game. I think that it might not work for someone people because it might be too dark in the story, but I think a lot of people are going to love it, and with it shooting up the lists on BGG, it is clearly being enjoyed by those who have it. The story part works so well, and the mechanics are actually quite simple for how large a game it is. Even if someone doesn’t like the story element of it, they can tune that out if other players love it and just hunt down combat and other encounters for their character. This is a really well done game that looks beautiful on the table.

Overall Grade: A+
Gamer Grade: A+
Casual Grade: B+

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

Arev travels further into the world of Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. I continue my journey into the grim dark fantasy setting that is the land of Avalon and the Wyrdness that is pushing humans off of the land. Can Arev figure out where to go next now that he’s found the secrets of driving back the Wyrdness, with Menhir, if only for a short time?

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is a giant story driven game by Awaken Realms where you are struggling as an almost hero against the lands, the monsters, and the wary people who make up the land of Avalon. To do this you must hunt for food, but more importantly explore many a location in search for answers to the problems that are facing you. In exploring you delve into an Exploration Journal and make choices that will affect your story going forward.

I, also, always have a beer on hand. So last nights beer was Size 7, and IPA from Steel Toe Brewing in St. Louis Park, MN. I like it a lot because it’s a bigger IPA checking in at 7% ABV and 77 IBU. With it having a slightly higher ABV than some IPA’s, it isn’t too malty though, but unless you’re in MN, probably not an easy beer to get your hands on.

Finally, if you are enjoying the content that I’m putting out with my solo game plays, please consider giving me a follow and a subscribe. The first is for Twitch and the second on YouTube. For YouTube views, comments, and subscribers can all help more people find my videos and hopefully help more people learn about new games.

Bottoms up!

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

I was back last night with a live stream of Tainted Grail on Twitch. And now the video is also up on the Youtube channel. Thank you to those who checked out the stream. I don’t tend to announce too far ahead, but my plan is going to be every Thursday for the next few weeks as I’m really liking Tainted Grail from Awaken Realms, and after this last game, I need to play through some more. For more specifics on time, you can follow me on Twitter at @TheScando and I tweet out when I’m going to be going live, or follow me on Twitch to get notifications when I’m live.

Tainted Grail is a massive story game where you take on the roll of a back-up plan for a group of heroes and you’re going through a grim dark Arthurian fantasy world where everything is out to kill out and the wyrdness is barely being held back by some Menhir that are going out. Will you be able to save the land of Avalon and find out the mysteries of the land?

And my beer last night was from Elysian. Dragons Tooth Stout, a great stout in my opinion, it has that big stout dark taste that I really enjoy during the winter. But there is a good hop profile that really drives home bitter counter point to what could be a too sweet beer, giving it a coffee and dark chocolate flavor.

Bottoms up!

It was a long holiday break, mainly because it’s also generally a Kickstarter deadtime so I didn’t do a Kickstarter show, but I’m back to streaming a game. This time it’s Tainted Grail by Awaken Realms. This is a massive and immersive story set in a dark Arthurian legend.

I’m playing as Arev, a resident of Cuanacht Farmhold. I used to be a mercenary, but no more. Now I’m just a simple farmer. When the Menhir in the town started to fade, the best from the town went out to find a way to save us, but they haven’t returned. Now, even though I’m not one of the best, I’m going out to explore in hopes of savings my town and all of Avalon.

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is a story driven game where you explore various locations, meet people, and try and survive the wyrdness that is creeping across the lands by keeping Menhir lit. In the first chapter my goal, thus far, is to find out how to light Menhir. I’ve made it two days in, and thus far, I still don’t know.

You can join me again probably next week as I’m going to continue the story again. I plan on streaming every other Thursday around 7:30, but, because I’m really enjoying the game thus far, it might be more often than that.

And, of course, it’s Malts and Meeples, and while there were no Meeples showing up in the episode, I of course had a malt. That is, I had Dragon’s Milk White Stout from New Holland Brewing. This is a very enjoyable beer. It has a good flavor to it, but I do think that compared to regular Dragon’s Milk which is a very big beer, 12% or so, barrel aged beast of a beer, the White Stout, while barrel aged doesn’t quite hold up.

Bottoms up!