Top 5 Horror Board Games

Again, no particular order, but let’s see the ones that made the list.

5. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Almost didn’t put this one on here. I own other games that are maybe more horror and less fantasy. But Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon created a world of both. It’s very grim dark in terms of fantasy with monsters, wyrdness, and more popping up around every corner. It definitely dabbles into the horror elements with the creatures that the wyrdness has twisted.

4. Spire’s End

Spire’s End, or Spire’s End Hildegard make the list as well. Both really are similar in what the world does. Greg Favro creates a world of unknown and horrific monsters. While also giving you a nice, simple game to challenge yourself with. Things don’t come easily for your characters, but the rules generally let you get into the game quickly and start playing and seeing what is happening.

Probably the truest horror in terms of how the story is written. It’s impressive how it develops the horror throughout the game as you don’t know what is going on. And I still have a lot of game and story to explore in both of them. Plus the artwork is amazing.

3. Betrayal at House on the Hill

A classic horror themed game at this point. Yes, it does have it’s problems where either the person who is haunting or the other players will have a massive advantage in the haunt. But when it works well, which it does, it’s an amazingly fun time.

In Betrayal the game is split into two parts. First part everyone is exploring the house, together, but not together. You want to find good items, increase your stats and well, search until you trigger the haunt. But, you don’t know when that is going to happen. And when it does, one of you at the table is going to be the betrayer. So now what’s the new condition for the betrayer to win the haunt or the other poor characters to defeat the betrayer?

2. The Night Cage

This one sounds like an abstract game, and The Night Cage really is. But it’s an abstract game with horror at the heart. Players wake up in a labyrinth that they can’t stand up in. With only a candle they need to explore, find keys, and all get to an exit portal together. But no two players can share a spot, and monsters are lurking.

Plus, the game is counting down. As you explore and your candle no longer shows off where you’ve been, now those locations go away and the labyrinth will be different. So the pile of tiles is dwindling as you search. And you never know when that monster will pop up and steal your wax and light, leaving you fumbling in the dark.

1. Arkham Horror LCG

This one is on that horrors edge as well. Is it a detective fantasy story? Kind of. Are there elements of Lovecraftian horror through everything that you do, absolutely. And that’s where it makes it onto the list. The game offers you adventure as you explore Arkham or other locations. And you need to be setup to defeat monsters and cultists, and progress the story with finding clues. All of this to stop something, a ritual in the base box, from happening.

Mainly this game is just a really well balanced experience. There are some characters you can get to make you better or that have better cards. But that doesn’t ever make the game feel too easy. And Arkham Horror gives you ways to make it harder and really level it not to the story you want, but how hard a challenge you want.

Final Thoughts

I want more good horror games. I own a few more that I’d put into that range and a few that I need to try. Deep Madness would be the big one. Or Solomon Kane and Darkest Dungeon might also fall into that category as well.

But as I said a couple of days ago. Horror is a genre that I want to find more games. And when one comes out I’m interested in. And I will check it out, and a lot of the time I’ll be disappointed. Why, because a lot of them go with the gross and gore side of horror. Because elements like jump scares, or good psychological twists are hard to build into a board game.

What’s your favorite horror themed board game?

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Deck Building vs Deck Construction

So let’s talk about this really quickly because one game that isn’t on this list is Gloomhaven. Though, you do add cards to your deck throughout the whole of the Gloomhaven campaign. And there is another one on the list, no spoilers, where you do the same thing. But it’s done in a different way.

Deck Building allows you to add cards to your deck when you can purchase them. And while you might be able to do things to manipulate how many cards you have in your deck, those rules aren’t as in place. In some of them you might need a lot of cards in your deck.

Deck Construction, on the other hand, allows you to focus your deck. You decide what you want to put into your deck and keep in your deck. Often times there are rules as to how you can even construct your deck. Gloomhaven only allows you to have a set number of cards. Or Magic: The Gathering, in standard, you can have a 60 card deck, no more, no less.

The Rankings

14. Dominion

I know that Dominion would top a lot of people’s lists. But for me, Dominion is not that interesting a game. The mechanics are perfectly fine, but it’s just deck building for the sake of deck building. It is just the mechanic for the sake of the mechanic. And it doesn’t look good on the table. Plus, Dominion misses on one big thing for me. A person who can look at all the cards and figure out the best strategy before the game starts will win. I like a bit more randomness in my deck building so it’s more on the fly decisions versus from the very start.

13. DC Comics Deck-Building Game

This one I haven’t played in so long. I remember it being perfectly fine but nothing really stood out to me. Add in the fact that DC Comics don’t interest me that much, mainly because there are too many comics overall to keep up on, and it is low for me. I would play this one again, but it is mainly a forgettable experience.

12. God or War: The Card Game

Another one that falls into this category, God of War was just a dud when I played it at GenCon. The game play seemed too easy and the decision making space was so limited. I get that it was a demo scenario, and maybe the game is more challenging, but I like a cooperative game challenging. This I felt like I’d win 75% or more of the time, and that doesn’t interest me. Plus, how you got the cards was just okay. You divided them amongst the group, and did it cooperative, but the choices were limited. It barely, if at all, qualifies as a deck building game.

11. Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game

Now to a theme that I love, but one that is really low on the list. Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game should work for me, but it misses on three things. Firstly, the game set-up is way too long. Some of that is too much stuff for the game. The other part is just it’s too complex with it’s set-up. Then the game takes too long. You take forever to start being able to hit the boss. Finally, the theme is missing for me. I want it to feel like a super hero team-up. But when you have cards of five heroes, and I have cards of those five heroes as well, it doesn’t feel like that.

10. Legendary Encounters: A Firefly Deck Building Game

Another Legendary game from Upper Deck, and this one I like a bit better. Mainly because the balance feels better. The scenarios, different episodes, are fun to play through. And while it does have the same thing as Marvel version where we are all playing all the characters, it just works smoother. I think having less stuff makes it play faster and be faster to get to the table.

9. Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

This is one that I’m bummed I never got to play through the whole game. I could have kept Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle in my collection. And it might come back to my collection later. But it wasn’t getting played, and in terms of campaign games, I felt like it wasn’t going to be one that I came back to any time soon. The game is fun in that you unlock things as you go along. So not a legacy game, but a resettable campaign which is cool. And it took you through the books.

8. Cry Havoc

Another one that left my collection, and this one it is because I have Root. Cry Havoc and Root do different things, but I’d prefer to teach and play Root if I’m going to play an asymmetric game. Combat is really cool where you put your troops on a track to determine how it goes and then manipulate it with cards. And the deck building is interesting as you use them in combat, for powers, or to do basic actions. So card uses were really cool in the game.

7. Clank!: A Deck-Building Game

Now we start to get into the heavy hitters and games still in my collection. Clank! A Deck-Building Game is a wonderful time. It is a nice light deck builder, but one that isn’t only deck building. You build up your deck as you adventure down into a dungeon. All the time you are trying to do it as quietly as you can so the dragon doesn’t find you. But some of the better cards make you go clank. It’s a great push your luck game with a nice theme.

6. Ascension: Deckbuilding Game

Ascension goes back to being a pure deck building game. But I like this one so much better than Dominion. Firstly, there isn’t a fixed market. That means that I need to think about and adjust my strategy on the fly. And there is fighting monsters. Yes, everything can give you points. But in Dominion, everyone works towards the same points, here, someone can focus on getting cards for points or for combat, or do both.

5. Aeon’s End: Legacy

This is almost cheating, because it maybe should be combined with an entry coming up. But I do think that Aeon’s End Legacy and Aeon’s End are two different games. At least until the legacy experience is done. I really enjoyed my time with Aeon’s End: Legacy, and I do think it’s a great game. If you want to learn Aeon’s End, I would recommend you play this before you dive into the base game. But once you are done and you play against other nemesis, the game will seem easy.

4. Clank! In! Space!: A Deck-Building Game

Another Clank! game on the list. I prefer Clank! In! Space!, because it is even goofier than regular Clank!. And I do think that I like the space theme better. Plus, the game play is better for me. It adds in two changes. Firstly, how the game ends, there is no longer a timer, it is just until the players all get out, or Lord Eradikus takes them down. In Clank! it is a set number of rounds. And I like that you need to unlock the treasure room. It means there is more than just rush in grab treasure and rush out.

3. Aeon’s End

Later this year when I do my Top 100 Games (of All Time) 2022 Edition, I might combine this with Legacy. But I do think that the base game, or any of the expansions are better. Aeon’s End is a great cooperative deck building game. I like that you don’t shuffle, if you are good, it adds to the challenge. I also like how different the breach mages are and how different the nemesis are. It gives the game a lot of good challenges. Plus there is so much content to dig into.

2. Xenoshyft: Onslaught

I’m trying to remember, I’m not sure I’ve ever beat Xenoshyft: Onslaught. I think maybe one time. But I have come close a lot of times. This is another cooperative game, and you defend a base from waves after waves of bugs. Yes, this might sound like Starship Troopers the board game. I would say it is, but maybe slightly more serious. I love the challenge, and I like how each different area you can play has different powers and abilities.

What pushes this game ahead of Aeon’s End for me is how you can help others. I might draw a hand where I hold three weapons. But I only need two. I can give you that card to equip to one of your guys. Your line of defense getting weak, I can drop a paratrooper in. I’m getting some tough monsters, you can throw a grenade. It is highly cooperative and I love it for that.

1. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

Finally, this is the one I was talking about when I was talking about deck building versus deck construction. And in all fairness, I don’t play this for deck building. I play Tainted Grail for the story. But you do deck building, spending XP to get random card draw and then picking between them to add to your deck. And while you can remove cards from your deck whenever, there aren’t a lot of limits on how many you can have, just how few you can have. It’s a small part of the game, but making a great combat deck can be a challenge.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of deck building games that I still want to play. In particular, I want to play Clank! Legacy because I love the theme for that one. And I know there are more deck building games out there to try. It is a mechanic that I really love, like roll and writes, so I don’t think I will ever complain about finding new favorites to work into the rotation. I’ll probably do deck construction games here soon, because I do like them as well, though I own and have played fewer.

What are your favorite deck building games? If you’ve played Tainted Grail, would you consider it one? Let me know in the comments below.

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Pros

• Solo Play
• Aesthetic
• Dungeon Crawl
• Campaign/Standalone

Cons

• Campaign/Standalone
• Price Point
• Early Bird

The Page

I like Gamefound pages because it makes it so much easier to navigate. And you can see everything all at once in terms of navigation. But that really isn’t the point of talking about the page. But I will say that the rules section is good and because I can navigate directly to there I don’t mind that it’s later on the page. Also if you want to see the miniatures you can see them as well and they are fairly grotesque.

The Game

The game play looks interesting with elements of choose your own adventure and dungeon crawl and boss fights in it. I watched the BoardGameCo video on it which tells a whole lot more about how the game plays:

It is tricky to talk about because, like he said, the information on how the campaign plays is limited in his video. And it’s fairly limited on the the page as well. This isn’t all that odd for games because you don’t want to spoil the story. But it also feels like I’m just getting general details on how the campaign will work and not details. Even for the game play it feels a little bit light as to how the game actually works.

That said, I do like the fact that there are morning and night time phases of the game. And as expected, vampires don’t like the sun. Also as expected, they are dangerous at the night. Alex from BoardGameCo talks about how he lured a group of six vampires into a room, busted open the window and dusted all of them.

But that does lead to another question/concern for me. Some cooperative games with a solo mode have what is called true solo. That means you can play it controlling a single character to play the game. This doesn’t appear to be the case. This looks like you either have specific numbers of characters that need to go into a scenario or you need to play four. Now, in the video that didn’t seem to be a problem for Alex, but will it be for me. I think it’s something worth noting that might trip some people up.

Back or Brick

So is this game a back or a brick? I really want to back it, but for me it’s a Brick. With that said, it’s more the time of the year and finances that are keeping it from being a back. The game play sounds very interesting and vampire hunting as a concept for a game I really like. But even if finances were readily available for this Gamefound Crowdfunding Campaign, I’m not sure I’d back it.

Why, because I have a lot of campaign board games. I have beat three of them, Gloomhaven, Tainted Grail The Fall of Avalon, and Sword & Sorcery. I have games like Etherfields, ISS Vanguard, Isofarian Guard, Oathsworn, and let’s not forget about Frosthaven coming in. And I have games like Solomon Kane, HexploreIt, Midarra, and more on my shelf too play. What about this game stands out over the others I want to play? For me it’s mainly the theme, which might not be enough.

Plus, the price, which I didn’t talk about but I put as a con, is a little bit higher. I think that the Slayer Pledge is a solid value, but the Hunter Pledge seems a little bit steep. This is a campaign that I’d want to see what all gets unlocked before I back it. Because just with what there is now, or what there was at the start, it seems a bit light compared to an Awaken Realms, Mythic Games, or CMON project.

How about for you, is this a back or a brick?

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Let’s talk about the games:

Orchard: A 9 card solitaire game – 38 Plays

This is the game that pushed me over, when I was under the weather I knocked out a lot of it. It gave me something to do while I was bored at home. Orchard is also now at 100 plays for the year, which is impressive because I started playing it in August. But Orchard is a great little solo game and it allows me to do something while watching a sporting event or something like that. If you are looking for a little solo game, I love Orchard.

Tainted Grail: The Last Knight – 4 Plays

From a small game to a big game, Tainted Grail, the second campaign has been started. This is just two evenings and it’s been a lot of fun. I will say, The Last Knight legitimately feels different than first campaign, The Fall of Avalon. And there are a few different things, such as exposure that make the game trickier. I still like it for story mode so that there is less maintenance for the characters, and it’s still tough. The story and aesthetic of the game are so very good.

Ohanami – 4 Plays

And back to another small game, this one I like because it’s pretty simple but has some good decision making in it. You are just putting cards down in numerical order as you draft them, but scoring matters in what you draft. You score blue in the first round, for only three points. But then it scores the next two rounds. Green scores four points but only scores the last two rounds, and seven for grey but only the last round. So you can strategize some. And I played this two and four player and it’s fun but different at both player counts.

Patchwork Doodle – 4 Plays

A roll and write game, I won’t say too much about it, because I did a TableTopTakes review on it recently. You can read that here. It’s a good roll and write game, it is a bit like Second Chance. So that makes it easy to get to the table but it also adds in a bit more than Second Chance does and gives good game play.

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition – 1 Play

I keep on coming back to this game and really enjoying it. I have only played it with one friend, but we know how to play it and can play it very fast. And we’re tied at two wins a piece. Our scores, my friend is average 47 points per game, I am averaging 46.75, so it’s always been amazingly close. And I have gone with different strategies in different games, depending on the corporation that I have, and it’s a lot of fun every time.

Dice Throne – 1 Play

Finally we have Dice Throne. It was Pyromancer versus Shadow Thief. I played the Pyromancer and won handily. I’ve had some rough games recently with the Pyromancer because I wasn’t able to get the fire mastery going, but I did this time and the Shadow Thief didn’t keep their CP high enough early on to deal that much damage. Dice Throne is a game I love, and you can see where it ended up on my Top 100 Board Games (of all time) 2021 Edition if you want here.

365 Days of Gaming Stats

The challenge got completed on November 25th. Looking at the numbers, it is 71 different games. Orchard: A 9 card solitaire game was the most played with 95 plays followed by Tainted Grail (34), Dice Throne (16), Deadly Doodles (12) and Ohanami (12). So that rounds out the Top 5 games that I’ve played in the challenge. And I finished with 36 days to spare.

Yearly Gaming Stats

So for the year, 378 plays recorded. Stats for games are pretty similar. Orchard is at 100 total plays and Tainted Grail is up to 36. 8 games have more than 10 plays and 17 with more than five. Plus a total of 72 different games over all. I am up to 23% of the games that I own that have a play this year. That number keeps on being pretty steady because I buy more games. I’d love to get that up to 25% by the end of the year, and I have a month left to get there.

I suspect that I won’t get to 25% played but we’ll see. I think that next years challenge might be based more off of playing new games, and by new games, I mean games in my collection that I haven’t recorded any plays of. My shelves are full, or nearly full, so I need to play more to make decisions on what games are kept.

What game would you want to play from my list last month?

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Let’s get to the games:

Marvel United – 5 Plays

Marvel United only got played one evening. But we played it a lot because the game is so fast to play. It’s great to pull out whatever hero you want, whatever villain you want and just get going on the game. And it was fun to play around with other villains and heroes. The different villains in particular really change up the game.

But one really nice thing that I’ve found about this game is that I can get it to the table in a minute. Finding a villain figure and their cards, and then heroes and their cards is so fast, and there’s so little set-up for the game. It is extremely accessible and I’m excited to get it back to the table, though, thus far in November, I haven’t.

Werewords – 4 Plays

Werewords is a word based social deduction game. It’s basically playing twenty questions, but you can ask more, with someone being a traitor, or werewolf. I wrote up my thoughts on the game here. For me it was an okay game. I actually want to sell it, either to a friend or my FLGS (friendly local game store) because I don’t see pulling it off the shelf more.

Yes, it has more interesting going on than a game like Secret Hitler, The Resistance, and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. But it is still kind of a guessing game based off of no real information, in the end. And for me, that doesn’t work all that well. I want something with more meat to it, like Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, if I’m going to play a social deduction game.

Hanamikoji – 3 Plays

There is a new version of Hanamikoji on Kickstarter right now that I’m backing. It seems to add in some level of area control, more so than the base game has. And there are mini expansion for base Hanamikoji, which I’m tempted to get as well.

This is an abstract game about winning the favor of Geisha. The game plays so fast and only at two players that it’s one I need to break out more often. It’s a good filler to either end an evening or start and evening. And I have even brought it into work because it’s a nice lunch break game.

Tainted Grail – 2 Plays

Less plays of Tainted Grail than normal. We finished up Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon campaign, so we took a week off to just play other gamers. That is where five plays of Marvel United came from and some plays of other games as well. But we’re back to playing Tainted Grail, this time playing the Last Knight campaign.

This one we’re doing in story mode again, and honestly, I think this one needs to be played in story mode. I’ll write about it as a whole later after we get a few more plays of the game with what the new stuff is. And, the new stuff in the game is interesting. It is extremely challenging but again the writing is good and the story is good.

The Night Cage – 2 Plays

Of course had to play The Night Cage around Halloween. This is a cooperative game where you are going through a labyrinth but you can’t see much. Only the spots around you and as you lose site of spots they drop off the map and it twists and changes.

This game is fairly abstract, but it does create a good sense of tension. You carry candles which illuminate the board around you. That can go out and then you are moving around blind. But also all the tiles sit in a candle holder so as you remove tiles it looks as though the candle is burning down. The tension of it burning down works really well.

Dice Throne – 2 Plays

Dice Throne got a couple plays in. One king of the hill and one two player. The more I play King of the Hill style the more I enjoy it that way. I know I talk about Dice Throne quite often but mainly in the two player context. In King of the Hill, you get a benefit, an extra card, for attacking the player with the most health. It’s a nice twist and a good way to keep players from ganging up on a single player and knocking them out.

Hats – 2 Plays

Another game that hadn’t hit the table in a long time. Hats is an abstract game that I prefer at two players. It can play more, but with more players it becomes way more chaotic. With two players you can plan and push for things to go your way. The game play is a lot of fun for it, and it’s one that is tricky to wrap your head around. Especially the idea of the cards you play down influence what scores but aren’t the cards that you score.

Cross Clues – 2 Plays

This party game only had been played on Zoom before. Playing Cross Clues in person is a lot of fun. You are trying to come up with a one word clue to get people to guess the intersection of two words. It could be something like cat and taco, what word would link those two.

When playing with a big group, you only get one coordinate card. That means that sometimes you are stuck without giving a clue for a while. But the game moves quickly enough that you never feel like you are holding up the game. And sometimes you need something else, another clue to be given, before you can give one as well. It’s a newer party game, but one I highly recommend.

Clank! In! Space! – 1 Play

I busted out Clank! In! Space! again, this time with an expansion. And I have to say, the expansion we played with is fun. The black cubes that you pull now matter in the expansion. Basically it is a mission that can happen which makes your life harder as the game goes on. So, a game where you can already die and have zero points at the end of it becomes even tougher. But it is still a good game with that expansion and it’s a nice twist.

Tiny Towns – 1 Play

First game, not of Tiny Towns, but of Tiny Towns with more than two players. Two player Tiny Towns sometimes ends up with one player controlling everything. With three players, it makes the game more random but in a good way. Players diversify what they do more in a three player game which is good. It means that there are more things you can get stuck on, but also more interesting decisions to make. I still need to play with expansions.

Letter Jam – 1 Play

Another game that sat on the shelf for a long time. I love Letter Jam. It’s a cooperative word game that uses some of the mechanics of Hanabi. You can’t see your cards. But everyone else can. And you give clues that are words putting a marker in front of each letter that makes up the word. So if you did FROM, and my letter was the M, I’d see the word FRO* and need to figure out my letter.

The number of clues is limited. So you need to be smart about how you give them. And everyone needs to figure out their letters and words, so one person can’t give all the clues. The game works really well and doesn’t require a massive vocabulary or knowledge of how to game the game like a lot of word games do.

Calico – 1 Play

I played Calico with my wife and parents, and we played it in the simple version. That means that instead of having quilt blocks that determine any scoring, you only score buttons and cats. To me, it made the game too simple. But it is a solid way to learn the game. The basic concept of matching colors and patterns isn’t that hard to get. But adding in the scoring from quilt tiles adds a lot to think about.

Zombie Dice – 1 Play

Zombie Dice makes a great filler for a Halloween game night. Well, it was the October game night, but I did horror themed. That is why it came off the shelf. Zombie Dice is a basic push your luck dice game. And if things go poorly. people push too far, it can take way too long. But it is fun to pull of the shelf. And it is an easy game to teach and play. It is even easy to have people join part way through the game. I don’t own expansions for it, and I’m not sure I’d want to.

Yearly Gaming Stats

So, in October I added in 27 more plays. Slightly less than a play a day, but I was over that threshold already, so I am still on target. Currently, I am 98% of the way to completing the challenge, so a chance that even this month I finish it and then everything else is a bonus.

Now, because we are mid month, I do have plays on the list from November. But Orchard is still my most played game, up to 90 plays. And for all 356 plays that I have, there are 71 different games that I’ve played. Hitting 100 different games played would be great, but I doubt it will happen.

I have enjoyed this challenge a lot. I think that next year I will try it again, but also might put a focus on playing games in my collection that I haven’t played before. There are lots of games that need to get played on my shelf. Some are getting played, but I have 31 Kickstarters coming in and I’m sure more games than that, so a lot to get to the table.

Which of these games would you like to get played from my October plays?

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Orchard: A 9 Card Solitaire Game

This is going to be a little solo game. It says it’s a 9 card game, so you’d expect a small package. In this game you are overlapping cards to grow fruit. The more fruit you get the more points that you have. But you need to overlap the same types of trees, so it makes it an interesting puzzle.

This is a very fast game to play. And while it says 9 cards, it comes with 18, so you split the cards and you can play it twice very quickly. Which I think works well for the game. This is a game that I sit down and play 4-10 times in a sitting because a game takes five minutes or maybe 10 if you are trying really hard to optimize everything.

Marvel Champions: The Card Game

A bigger game, this one can be played multiplayer, but solo you take a hero against a villain to try and beat them up and stop their schemes. I really like this one as a thematic Marvel game. Each hero plays very differently, and you can change up how they play through deck building. The villains play differently as well.

And this is a game where the base box comes with some heroes, but you can get additional heroes. Now, there are a lot of heroes and a lot of content out for the game. And while I own it all of it, you don’t need to. If someone you know likes Thor, get them the base box and the Thor expansion. Or maybe they like Spider-Man and his villains, give them the base set and the Green Goblin pack. You can customize who the person can get really easily.

A Gentle Rain

Back to another small game with A Gentle Rain. This is for the casual gamer who might like that solo activity. A Gentle Rain is meant to be a relaxing game and it really is. You are flipping over tiles trying to match sides. If you can get it so that you match all the corners, you put a disc down. The goal is to get all of the discs out or as many of them as you can.

This one is a simpler game than Orchard and takes up a bit more space, but both of them fall into a category of fast and little games to play. This game also has a really nice aesthetic. This is even a solid one that you could give someone to take into work as something to fidget with when they get stuck on a work problem or something like that.

Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade

A lot of roll and write games can be played solo. I could have picked Metro X, Ganz Schon Clever (or any of that trilogy) and a whole lot more. But Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade is a fun one because it’s a thematic roll and write. In it, you are playing a pinball game basically seeing how high a score you can get.

The cool thing about this roll and write is that they have four different boards, plus four more coming in an expansion. Some of the boards are easier, or pinball machines, so you can learn the basic concept of the game on that, and then move onto harder boards. And even the harder boards don’t make the game much longer or more difficult. If you want a good thematic game in a small package, this might be it.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

On the flip side, this is a very thematic game, but in a very big package. It’s also going to be harder to find than some. I know places like Game Steward, I believe, still have copies of the Kickstarter available though, so not impossible to find. This is a big survival game that can be multiplayer, but also works well as a solo game where you control one character.

This is a dark retelling of the Avalon and Arthurian legends. And it has an amazing story. I recommend playing it in story mode because it’s a great story to experience and the survival in the regular mode can be very challenging. I’ve played through the main quest and started on the expansions and talked about it a lot because it’s an amazing game. It’s going to be more expensive but such a good experience.

Honorable Mention Solo Games

Of course, I can add in a few honorable mentions. Onirim is a fun little solo game where you are trying to deal with nightmares and create patterns in cars you play down to get doors. There is a lot of shuffling and A Gentle Rain and Orchard have replaced it for me. I could have put Gloomhaven or Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion on the list as well. Those can be played solo, but unlike Tainted Grail where you can play with one character, in Gloomhaven you need to control two.

What are some solo games that you’d want for Christmas or that you’d recommend to others?

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The Setting of Tainted Grail: The Last Knight

Let’s start with the setting. It is still the lands of Avalon, but time has passed by and the lands are now covered in a snow. The Wyrdness isn’t as bad, but food is scarcer and you’re worried about exposure. All of the “heroes” have gotten lost in a snowstorm, found each other, but also all have scene a four armed foredweller. In the cold, will they survive and find their way back to a village. But even if they do that, it doesn’t solve the issue that their village is having.

I really like this new setting, and the new mechanic is brutal. I’ll talk about that later though. By throwing all of Avalon under a blanket of ice and snow, the world feels different. And while I kind of remember the map from before, it took a little bit to place everything. And that’s nice that it did. If it was too familiar or the story felt like the same thing, I’d have been less interested. Right now we’re just trying to survive, but we don’t even know what we feel like our end goal is going to me.

Exposure

This is one of the new things in the game, and I will say that it is brutal. To help balance this, they made it so that if you’re outside of the range a Menhir, you don’t lose two health and gain two terror, you just game a terror at the start of each day. But exposure is basically the cold seeping into your bones. If you keep moving and don’t run into any issues, you won’t get it. But when you get exposure, it doesn’t leave your body until you’re told to remove it. It basically caps your max health.

Now, that’s not great because that can limit your energy and cause you to panic faster. Though, in story mode, which we are playing, that isn’t the case. In story mode, it doesn’t limit either of those things, but obviously, less health is bad. And you’re still gaining terror as you go, pushing you to go insane. But it isn’t as brutal, just might get you dying faster, well, much faster.

The Menhir

Another new thing to start the game at least is that we don’t know how the light the Menhir, okay, that isn’t new, but there aren’t Menhir on the map at all. There are Menhir on the map, but they are leaking magic, not something that we can light at this point. Our town has no Menhir on it at all. There are seals and those things help keep exposure at bay that are called Menhir seals, but we can’t light them yet.

And in the original, you got the Menhir rites immeidately. That is the point of the first chapter to get the rights. Here, that’s not the case. Nothing points us to getting those rites thus far. We might have some hints at it, but nothing that directs. So gaining terror every day, that could be a thing for a while.

New Combat Traits

There are also new things in combat. None of them are good. In fact, a lot of them are really bad. Frostbite is a keyword that just gives you exposure every single time. Multi-attack hits everyone. They definitely haven’t made it any easier to fight the monsters in Avalon. I expected things to get changed up this way, adding in new keywords isn’t that hard to do, and I’m glad that they did.

They actually cleaned up some other keywords, such as some secrets now have the word Global on them. There were some that it was implied on some of the previous secrets but now it is explicit. That makes the game easier to play, th ough wasn’t hard before. It mainly makes it cleaner to play.

Importing From Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon

So, this was something I wanted to know how they’d make it work. Basically, decisions in the previous campaign that made a difference to ours. Honestly, I was disappointed in this. Now, let me be fair, I wasn’t disappointed in the game. We didn’t get a lot of things done. That is on us, not on the game. Or we could have done a whole lot more. We swapped out one location based off of what we’d previously done. And I checked a single box in the legacy section.

I think there are around fifteen of those different legacy boxes. Probably another four or five locations we could have swapped out as well. We didn’t though, because of how we played the game. And, if you remember me talking about going back and playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, now I am ready to play it again. And I could, almost, play it solo right now if I wanted to. But for a few things.

Adding Base Content

And this is the thing blocking me. You add in base content for the expansions. This includes monsters that you add into the decks. You use the random events from the base game. Secrets from the base game, the items, and the help cards. So there are a lot of things that get used between the games. And I like that, in some ways. There isn’t a need to reinvent the wheel every time you play a campaign. Using things across games is really nice. However, now I need to figure out how to store it all.

I wish things would easily slot into the base box. But I’ll always need to pull out the second box to at least get the miniatures for our characters, unless I leave them out or loose somehow. I wish I had an easy way to just swap stuff out of the base box to only get that one out. Make it more generic for only the active campaign. Granted, with how it was shipped, I don’t think that’d be possible. And this protects the miniatures more.

Initial Impressions on Tainted Grail: The Last Knight

The first thing I think is that I wish we’d continued in The Fall of Avalon one session longer. I think we might have gotten more check marks. After that, I like it thus far. I can see how not in story mode this would be extremely brutal. Exposure can stack up really fast and that’d make a slow journey back to town or somewhere to heal yourself.

And I also want to add, we already have something we wish that we’d done. Now, not something that is that important, it is just a branching path that we didn’t go down because of choices we made. That would be very different and unique to what we’d done. The fact it’s an option in the first chapter is great. I am excited to play more of this game and then the final campaign as well.

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If it’s not obvious, I clearly love campaign games. I have a lot more on my shelf from Pandemic Legacy Season 0 to Midarra: Unintentional Mallum Act 1, to Destinies, all that need to get played. Plus there are more on the way including a massive game, Frosthaven, the follow-up to Gloomhaven. Yet, compared to a lot of gamers, I’ve played a lot of campaign games. So how do I get a consistent group together?

Talk About Campaign Games

Talk with people about playing a campaign game. It sounds obvious, but I think a lot of gamers forget to do this. I forget to do this with people who might be interested in a campaign game. I own many other games that aren’t campaign games, so I sit down and play those with a lot of people. People who might want to play a legacy game or a campaign game, but I don’t mention it.

Now, it does come with a balance. I have one friend who I could play a campaign game with, but I don’t. Why, because while we had fun playing Sword & Sorcery, I realized I wasn’t playing my other games as much. So now I game with him every other week, and it’s just pulling games that maybe don’t get play that much off the shelf. Heavier games that are a one off, or teaching him new games that I’ve gotten. So it is a balance, but if you don’t mention campaign games, people won’t know it’s an option.

Define a Schedule

This one is tricky, especially as you get older. When I was in college I probably could have gotten stuff together easier. Or played campaign games more often. If I’d played Dungeons and Dragons then, I probably would have played for an eight hour session every week, or maybe every two. Now my schedule doesn’t permit that. The same is true for the people I game with. We have work, other activities, and kids in some cases. All of those things eat into gaming time.

On the flip side, we now need to get it scheduled more than before which means that we play more consistently. When younger, it is easy to go months if you aren’t thinking about it. You play for hours, but when you stop, you might not play for a long time again. Because I need it on the calendar to know I can play, that means we have a consistent schedule.

For both campaign board games and Dungeons and Dragons, I play every other week. The Gloomhaven/Tainted Grail group meets every other Tuesday. Dungeons and Dragons is every other Thursday. I keep, or try to, them on opposite weeks. That means that the one player who overlaps doesn’t have two evenings in one week are taken up and the same for me.

It is important to define it also so people know the commitment level. A full Saturday once a month might be what you need, or even weekly. Figure out what works for you and your players.

Be Flexible

This goes against what I said, or might seem like it, but I don’t think it does. Flexibility is scheduling is important. There are different reasons that people cancel and flexibility is important for that. I’ve had my Dungeons and Dragons game shift by a week multiple times, and that is fine. We know the schedule, every other Thursday, and try and make that work, but adjust when need be.

Now, there are more valid reasons for being flexible sometimes. If someone keeps on missing because they just don’t feel like it that day and that causes you to cancel, that isn’t being flexible. That’s them not being interested and they can be dropped from the group. Likely, campaign games weren’t for them. But lie things, working overtime, a kid who is under the weather, car troubles, those sorts of things need to allow flexibility.

Know Your Campaign Players

Finally, know who your campaign players are. I talked about before how I have one person I game with regularly not with campaign games. He’s played them with me before, but doesn’t always love a long campaign. He dropped out of Dungeons and Dragons recently because it’s too long for his focus and style, which is fair. Dungeons and Dragons is a massive commitment. I’d play a shorter campaign board game with him, and have with Sword & Sorcery, but I know he isn’t my big campaign game player.

On the flip side, I’ve played Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon and Gloomhaven with the same two people. And that’s taken us years to get through, I think coming up in February will be four years of us playing games. Gloomhaven took up most of that time, but Tainted Grail will as we wait for Frosthaven. I know I can campaign game with them.

I also had a group I played Pandemic Legacy games with, but I don’t think I’d campaign game with them anymore. They were always hard to pin down in terms of scheduling. And lately, they’ve been even harder. One of them was part of the Charterstone group and even with just one, they were still hard to nail down for that. So I moved away from playing campaign games with them. Knowing who will be consistent enough is important.

Are They Worth the Effort?

Clearly for me they are worth the effort. Campaign games give great experiences at the gaming table. They are completely different than playing a one off game because the story emerges around you most of the time. There are twists and turns that simple cannot exist in a regular game.

That isn’t to dismiss other games. Normal single session games still give very good and I still play them a lot. There is just something about a campaign game and a shared experience that is different. This can be a legacy style campaign game or just a campaign game, either are very good. And you get to know that feel of the group you are playing with. You know all your styles and really develop how you play a campaign game.

Have you gotten through a campaign game or are they on your radar? Have you found a good group to play with?

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But, enough about that, let’s get to the games.

Orchard – 34 Plays

So this game alone is going to push me over the finish line for the year, maybe even with a month to spare. I really like Orchard, and I really like Orchard because it is such a simple solo game. And it doesn’t take up much space. You are overlapping cards to get matching tree colors which allows them to grow and produce more fruit. It is one that I can play while having a baseball game or a football game on in the background. Really, this game just works.

Ohanami – 5 Plays

This is such a good little game. It’s one that works well at the lowest player count, two, and the highest, four. I will say, this game changes drastically between player counts, though. With more players it is more relaxing and casual. You draft 2 cards from a hand of ten, so you can’t plan. When your hand comes back it’ll have two cards that you need to take. At two players, I can look at what someone has an optimize my drafting strategy. I can leave cards I might want because I know you won’t take them.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon – 4 Plays

We’ve finished playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. And we’re going to jump into the two expansions coming up here pretty soon. This is one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had. Is the game play the best, probably not, but the story it tells is so amazing. And with how we played it, we could certainly go back and play it again and find even more. Which is really cool because we got a lot of play out of the game.

My Farm Shop – 3 Plays

This was a Pop-Up GenCon game that I picked up because it is very easy to get to the table. I do wonder how long it’ll stick in my collection. While I like it, the more I’ve played it, the more I can see how light it is. I did a TableTopTakes on that very recently that you can see here. But I do want to play it more. I want to play it with three or four players because while two is fu n, it can limit the game a little bit. I think it might be stronger with more.

Downforce – 3 Plays

Now this is a great game that I was really glad to play at the the start of this month. It’s a racing game, but it’s a racing game where bidding matters as much, if not more, than how well your car does in a race. I really want to set-up a “season”. It’d be pretty easy to do and I think would be a lot of fun. I have all the tracks for it, and going through all of them once would be very interesting to do and see how strategies might change.

HexRoller – 2 Plays

A new game to the collection, I got it played twice over a work lunch. This is a very fast roll and write and I’ll be writing up a review on it soon. The basic idea is that you are trying to connect numbers, fill in groups of hexes, and generally just score the most points that you can. But how you score points is interesting and how the dice come out is as well. You are rolling seven or eight dice and playing groups of numbers which feels different.

Unfathomable – 1 Play

Another Pop-Up GenCon play, as is the next game. Unfathomable is the new version of Battlestar Galactica (BSG). It’s a big social deduction game or hidden traitor game. I really enjoy it because it feels a bit more streamlined than BSG. I’m not sure it is that much but with BSG you had two expansions that could be mixed in. And it’s never a bad thing when you can spend a chunk of a game just blasting away at deep ones.

Descent: Legends of the Dark – 1 Play

The final Pop-Up GenCon game, I wanted to play this one not because I wanted to know if I’d like it, but because I already knew I would and I wanted to learn how to play it. Game play, it turns out, is very easy to do. And the game play is interesting. It’s an app driven game that causes the map to emerge as you go. And I really like that about the game. It gives you that fog of war as your characters race to complete their goals and not die.

Aeon’s End Legacy – 1 Play

This will likely be the final play of Aeon’s End Legacy for a while. I did see my FLGS has a recharge/reset pack for this legacy game. I could see, if I got a group, buying that and playing it again. But another very good gaming experience. I knew I’d like it because I like Aeon’s End and legacy games. Now I need to figure out what to stream after my Top 100 list is done. It might be some smaller solo games until 2022 and then dive into another new campaign.

PitchCar – 1 Play

Finally, I played PitchCar again. This time I didn’t put in the loop or a change of elevation, but it was still fun. I really like the loop but that can slow down the game. You get stuck at the loop and now it takes a few rounds for people to really progress. On a flatter course it feels more like a racing game as you speed around. Definitely shortens the game time. Doesn’t make the game better or worse, just, mainly faster.

Yearly Gaming Stats

So let’s start out with how close I am to the goal. As of today, which is a few days after the end of the month, I have 66 plays left in 88 days. Two other ways to put it are that I’ve gotten 299 plays under my belt and am 82% of the way done with the challenge. For the year, I have two games that I’ve played over 25 times (Tainted Grail and Orchard) , six more th an 10 times and 7 more than five times. I think that Orchard might break the century mark. I’ve also played 66 different games. 15 of those different games are roll and writes.

So right now it’s looking good. But I know that I’ll likely need get a number of plays this month and before Thanksgiving because the holidays might put a damper on a late gaming push.

Which game would you want to play out of Octobers list?

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The Stats

So in 31 days in January, I got in 30 plays, so just one off. I had time yesterday, so I should have played one more, I guess. The BG Stats estimates around 20 hours of playing games, and this doesn’t count RPG’s, and that I played games on 13 out of the 31 days. I also had two games that I played over five times and three games I only played once. I’ll talk about those coming up here. I also played with 12 different players. Though, a number of my plays were solo, looking at the numbers 50% of my plays were solo. I also played through 4% of my collection, so not a wide variety of games.

The Games

Let’s talk about the games that I played, I’m going to mention all of the games here and talk about a few of them, especially ones that might be newer or new to me.

• Deadly Doodles – 7 plays
• Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion – 6 plays
• That’s Pretty Clever! – 4 plays
• Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon: 3 plays
• Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade: 3 plays
• Metro X – 2 plays
• Cross Clues: 2 plays
• Scattergories: 1 play
• Marvel Battleworld: 1 play
• Criss Cross: 1 play

So Deadly Doodles and Jaws of the Lion were the most played on the list. It helped that Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is scenario based with the first four missions really teaching you how to play the game and keeping things simpler and easier so that you can learn. All of those plays were knocked out in a single evening. Deadly Doodles is one that I played solo five times and with Kristen twice.

Three of the games on the list were played during our monthly board game night. Both plays of Cross Clues, Scattergories, and Criss Cross. We can’t play in person, otherwise my plays overall would likely be higher, but all of those have and do continue to work well via Zoom.

Gaming Highlights

I do want to throw out some highlights with stuff as well, because this is going to be a bit of an odd year for gaming again, and I know that I’ll forget some of the highlights as I go along.

Tainted Grail

I think that my number one highlight is getting into Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon and adding in the Echoes of the Past Expansion. I had played through the first chapter myself before, but this is a three player game, via Zoom, and it’s actually working pretty well. It was a lot of fun being able to dive into the content, see more characters, two that I hadn’t played with Beor and Ailei and then bringing Niahm into it as well. The story has been so good and I like the voice acting in all of it quite well. There is a bit of a grind to it, but it’s been a game I’ve wanted to get to the table more so for months, and to finally do it now has been great.

Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

On a similar note, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion has been a blast as well. Normally I’ll have a single campaign going and then maybe get in gaming on board game nights and one or two more times a month, but that hasn’t been the case, so this is giving me another game that I can consistently get to the table. We’ve been playing in person as well, which is nice, and since it’s just two of us and both work from home during the pandemic, we’re being very safe about it. And obviously I was going to love the game as I love Gloomhaven, so it’s fun to get back into that world, but not have it feel like I’m playing the giant box of stuff.

Roll and Writes

Finally, Metro X, Deadly Doodles, Super-Skill Pinball: 4-cade, Criss Cross, and That’s Pretty Clever, I’ve gotten a ton of roll and writes to the table to be played. If you look at my 30 plays, 18 of them have been roll and writes, And of those roll and write plays, most of those have been solo. While I don’t mind playing bigger games solo, I need to get back to streaming Pandemic Legacy Season 2, there are some evenings where all I have time for is to sit down and knock out a couple games of something really fast, and roll and writes are great for that.

So I’m slightly behind my goal, but I’m likely going to, to relax, knock out a few roll and writes this evening, and I have a few others games, Star Wars Unlock in particular that I need to sit down with Kristen and play some evening(s). What have some of your highlights for board gaming been thus far in 2021, even though we’ve just had a month to game?

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