Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a board game set in post-Arthurian times. The land is being seized back by old magic, it’s a dark age. The heroes of the village are out on a quest that no one knows the prospect of, and the substitutes are lined up to secure the settlement. Yup, that’s right, the substitutes. These are the characters controlled by the players in this game.
The box is big and full of cards, alongside rulebooks and one rather sizeable “book of discoveries”. There are also numerous tokens and several figurines.
Thankfully, Tainted Grail comes with a solo-player tutorial scenario. It’s largely scripted and allows for only very little variation, but that’s the point: at the same time, it’s highly instructive and introduces most of the relevant aspects of the complex (albeit not complicated) web of mechanisms.
The tutorial first walks a newcomer through the entire setup, building up to a layout like the one in the following picture.
The terrain is represented by cards. New cards can be discovered by travelling - but only within the boundaries of a so-called menhir’s reach. The menhir is the large figurine at the center of the cross-shaped terrain in the picture above. Menhirs are sources of good magic that prevent people from going mad, and in later stages of the game, it becomes an important routine to “recharge” them.
Heroes - the tableau of the tutorial character is shown at the bottom - have the usual features: energy, health, and fear (which, as it adds up, develops into madness), and some character traits that control the heroes' abilities and reactions during fight and diplomacy.
That’s right: diplomacy. In addition to the usual smack-em-on-the-head type of encounters known from many role-play games, encounters in this game can also involve convincing suspicious folk of one’s integrity. The mechanics for fighting and diplomacy are the same, but the skills used are different, and different characteristics are at stake.
These mechanics are rather well done; the fight and diplomacy decks each have cards that can be applied and combined according to certain rules. Sometimes, magic unlocks another card; sometimes, it’s sheer aggression, or cunning.
The tutorial took me about an hour to play, and certainly interests me in continuing. The atmosphere of the game is thoroughly sombre, there is rarely anything joyful, things are mostly grim. While that may not be to everyone’s liking, I enjoyed the well designed mechanics and great artwork.
Tags: games