I was incredibly anxious to get this expansion. Mage Knight is one of my favorite games, and everything I read or heard about this expansion sounded great. Then, it was released and everything changed. I just keep hearing that the poor quality of the components make this expansion unplayable. Well, my pre-ordered Shades of Tezla copy arrived, I have tested the expansion and here is my review (issue of the components will be addressed at the end).
CONTENT:
The expansion comes with:
- A new hero: "<PERSON>", a druid. Alogn with the figure comes everything else you need to introduce a new hero in Mage Knight: action cards, skill tokens, level tokens, shield tokens, round order, hero card and 2 description cards (one with the cooperative skill and the other with the iterative skill).
- 2 Faction leaders. The name of the factions are: Elementalist Faction and the Dark Crusaders. Each faction has 8 green monster tokens, 4 red draconic tokens and 4 brown monster tokens. There are also 12 faction tokens, which are rewards you get every time you defeat a monster of a particular faction (except the leader).
- 5 Graveyard Markes, 1 Necropolis Marker and 1 Hidden Valley Marker. This marker modify the terrain.
Well, it does not seem like it, but there is a lot of content in terms of adding re-playability in this expansion. Having said that It would have been great to have some new map tiles and miniatures for the leaders.
NEW SCENARIOS:
The rule book come with the following scenarios (all of them can be played cooperative, competitive or solo):
- Life and Death (long game, 3 days and 3 nights)
- The realm of the Dead (medium game, 2 days and 2 nights)
- The hidden valley (medium game, 2 days and 2 nights)
- The lost Relic (short game, 1 day and 1 night)
<PERSON> a picture of the Hidden Valley solo play, at the last round
In the Life and Death scenario you will fight both factions (and their respective leader), each factions controls one half of the map. In the medium games, only one of the factions is used, and in the Lost Relic (which I probably never play) the factions are not really used, is a very quick game to attack dragons that destroyed the cites.
I haven't tested all scenario. I only played the Life and Death and the Hidden Valley. Well, ....., THIS SCENARIOS ARE AWESOME!!!. They are extremely hard, specially the Life and Death. The leaders are very hard to beat even in cooperative mode. Now, hard does not equal great (wait I said AWESOME!!). 728
What makes this scenario so good is that everything makes completely thematic scene. Having the tokens being specifically designed for each faction (not all tokens, because <PERSON> and <PERSON> tokens did not came with the expansion), really helps a lot to improve on the immersive experience that this game already was
NEW TOKENS:
- Leaders: As already mentioned this guys are tough. Each leader has several followers (as General <PERSON> did), each leader starts at certain level, which give him certain abilities. Each wound it receives drops the leader one level (to drop multiple levels at a time, you need to wound him multiple times at the current level, in other words, the level only drops at the end of the battle). Well, why are this guys tough?. First, in a cooperative mode, all heroes that are attacking suffer the attack of the leader, not just one, all of them. Second, the attack of the leader is not easy to block at all, specially at high levels. Nevertheless, if you are able to reduce the leaders a couple of levels they became significantly easier. The trick is to do it in time. Which is the third point. The levels only drop at the end of the battle, so normally, you need to have time to engage them in several battles before the game ends. The only issue I have, is actually a content issue. I would love if there were miniatures to represent the leaders instead of just the tokens.
- New Monsters Abilities, some of the abilities of the monster were already in the Lost Legion expansion. The new abilities are:
* Defend: The enemies have the ability to increase their armor value (either melee or ranged) or increase the defend value of another enemy token in the same battle. This is determined by order, the first enemy that you attack gets his armor increase. Well, I do not like this ability much. Is not bad, it works. I just not like the sound of it
* Vampiric: This is easy, for every wound you receive (including units) the enemy gets 1 more armor. 728