Very Gloom, But Not a Haven. Review of Gloom of Kilforth: A Fantasy Quest Game

 Gloom of Kilforth is an adventure fantasy game in which you try to successfully complete your hero's adventure (write a saga about him) and defeat the Ancient or Ancients. Almost every card in the game has keywords. In each chapter of the saga, you must collect a certain set of keywords, traveling through Kilforth and meeting various creatures and objects.

 At the beginning, you create your character: you choose race and class cards. Together, a unique combination of skills will result. Over the course of the game, you'll overcome the obstacles that come your way—encounter cards—using these skills: Combat, Exploration, Stealth, and Influence.

 You travel on a map consisting of 25 (laid out in a 5x5 square) location cards. 24 belong to one of four types of terrain: mountains, wastelands, plains, and forests - and 25, Sprawl City, is your starting location, located in the middle of the kingdom.

 Rounds are divided into dawn, day and night phases. At dawn, you regain action points (equal to your current health). All defeated heroes are respawned in Sprawl City. During the day, you take actions: movement, searching locations, buying cards from the market, resting, drawing cards from your hand as assets to strengthen the hero. At night, you draw a card from the deck of the night; one of the locations is enveloped in "darkness" (it turns over), and at the same time, one of the abilities on the card of the Ancient's plan can be activated.

 As in many other adventure games, here you will have to pass a lot of checks to find out whether you have passed the encounter card or not. Let's say if you want to fight an enemy and you have a combat rating of 4, you will try to roll enough successes (fives and sixes) to defeat the enemy on 4 dice. Also, every day you can add +1 success to the result of any check by discarding a hearing card or using a fate token.

 When you enter a location, you draw the appropriate encounter card for the location, then deal with what/whom you encounter. Encounters are divided into 5 types: Enemies, Strangers, Locations, Quests, and Events. For each successful encounter, you are rewarded with gold, adding that card to your hand as a spell, or drawing a certain type of card as a trophy.

 Your hero's saga is divided into four parts and a finale. You need to find certain keywords in each. They are present on every encounter card besides the events (like villain, forest, stranger, etc.), so you have a rough idea of where to go to find what you want.

 Cards in your hand are considered "rumors", and if you play them next to a hero, they become "assets". Assets give the hero bonuses to parameters and/or special abilities. Both rumors and assets can be used to complete a chapter, but rumors are reset when applied.

 After completing your saga, your old enemy will appear in Kilforth. Battles with them are the same as with other creatures, but as soon as you enter the battle, you will have to fight to someone's death. Ancients have abilities that activate each round of combat. In addition, they get additional abilities from the plans cards that you did not remove from the field during your adventures.

 In solo or co-op, you win by completing your saga(s) and defeating the Ancient(s). You lose if all heroes are dead or if you fail to win before the 25th day is over. In competitive mode, you win by defeating the Ancient or (in the event that no one has defeated the Ancient by the end of the 25th day) by having the highest combined gold and assets.

PROS OF THE GAME

• The collectible aspect, collecting keywords, is what sets Gloom of Kilforth apart from other fantasy adventure games. Quests give you clear objectives by listing the types of map progression required. This is both thematic and adds interest to the gameplay.
• The mechanics of progressing through the heads of the saga and level-ups give the feeling of an adventure, in the course of which you become an increasingly powerful hero. The end of chapter four is especially great because that's usually when you get your most powerful skill or the ability to use your most advanced stat as a combat stat (against the Ancients).
• Love the rumor and asset mechanics. Both of them are suitable for completing quests, but you will lose rumor cards in this case, which can become a big problem. This adds some interesting crossroads to the game: you have to decide which cards to save for the next chapters of the saga, and which to discard in order to successfully complete this part of the adventure.
• The atmosphere of an adventure game is definitely present. There is a feeling that while you are traveling from location to location, fighting with enemies and looking for things you need for the quest, time is passing: the darkness is gradually spreading over the lands of Kilforth.
• High replayability. The map is different every time, the terrain cards are shuffled randomly, there are different heroes and sagas. And, of course, the influence of the cube. Together - the feeling of different adventures every game.
• One of the most beautiful illustrations I've seen. The artist did an amazing job: she breathed life into this fantasy world with only cards.
• I like how the number of action points depends on your health. It makes you think about the consequences of the decisions made. Yes, sometimes you will have to take risks, but you will quickly understand: taking damage in battle has very unpleasant consequences.
• While in competitive and co-op modes other players' turns can drag on a bit, especially battles, overall there is little downtime and there is time to plan your turn while waiting for your turn.
• Ability to choose from several reward options for completing encounter cards. Sometimes gold will be needed, and sometimes it's better to take a risk and pull a token from the loot bag. It's nice to have some control over the situation.
• It's surprisingly easy to master. Yes, someone will have to read the rule book cover to cover, but Gloom of Kilforth is still easy to both master and teach others to play. I once put a person who was unfamiliar with the boards for her, and after a couple of rounds she already navigated the game perfectly.

CONS OF THE GAME

• Sometimes Gloom of Kilforth requires co-op, but for most of the game you'll be on your own, which I found very disappointing in the early games. In games with 3-4 participants of cooperation, there will be more, since there is a higher probability of being in the neighborhood of one of the heroes. But still, most often you can successfully complete the saga without interacting with others.
• If you don't play with the dice, the game can leave a negative impression. This is especially problematic at the start, when you have little health and few cubes. Fate Tokens can help with this problem, but only if you're only one success short.
• The four Ancients are pretty similar to me, even with the concept cards used in battle. The idea is that they are incredibly powerful entities, so I was hoping to see some cool and themed abilities... It's a bit of a let down though, as the main focus of the game is the adventure towards the boss, not the boss fight.
• You can get stuck in locations for a long time in search of certain types of cards. In solo this is not a problem, but in other game modes it is not very pleasant to stick around while everyone else is doing quests.
• Preparation takes some time: you have to shuffle 11 decks of cards.

CONCLUSION

 In my opinion, Gloom of Kilforth is an awesome game... solo. I would classify it specifically as a solo game with additional co-op and competitive modes. It's not that the cooperative mode is bad - it's just that you shouldn't expect active player interaction and cool joint combinations from it. If this is not a problem for you, then the cooperative may suit you.

 I think Gloom of Kilforth will especially appeal to roleplayers, although set collectors will also find it a fan. Our group began to think of the game as a collection of sets after the first few games, not particularly concerned with the artwork, and we still enjoyed it.

 So Gloom of Kilforth is a great game. I'm not a big fan of soloing, but I enjoyed the solo test so much that I played solo a couple more times and had a really good time. That said, I'm not likely to play Gloom of Kilforth as a co-op very often, as I have quite a few other fantasy card games: Dragonfire, Direwild - that have a lot more interaction.

USEFUL LINKS

Gloom of Kilforth on BGG

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98527/gloom-kilforth-fantasy-quest-game

VIDEO REVIEWS