Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin Review

The latest and greatest (literally) version of Thunderstone has broken onto the gaming scene - Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin.

In case you're new to my site - hi! I hope that you keep coming back (and note, that you can follow me with RSS, Twitter, or Facebook). But, you should also know that Thunderstone Advance is definitely not my first Thunderstone review. So far I've reviewed Thunderstone, Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements, and Thunderstone: Dragonspire. So, I'm going to assume that you're familiar with Thunderstone, and I'm only going to cover the new elements introduced in Advance. If you aren't familiar with the game, you should definitely check out the basic Thunderstone Review - and maybe the Dragonspire one, too (though Wrath of the Elements introduced some new concepts, too).

The first new addition that Advance introduces is that Monster groups now have "Levels". This is small, but is by far my favorite new feature! Yet, not when I play the game by the "official" rules. I think that one of the biggest problems with Thunderstone is that the dungeon often fills up with gigantic monsters, and so nobody will ever go fight them - thus the game gets really boring. (One of the expansions, I believe Wrath of the Elements, introduced a variant of "advancing monsters" that also helped address this problem.) So, in Advance, the official rule is that you select a random monster group from each of the three levels. And, that is the extent of their role - you shuffle them together and play the game. However, it is easy to come up with a slight variant that helps keep the game flowing - either stack all the Level 1 monsters on top, followed by Level 2 then Level 3. You could also shuffle the Level 1 monsters with half of the Level 2 monsters, and the Level 3 monsters with the other half of Level 2. Or, any other combination that you like. No matter what, you actually have the freedom to setup the dungeon hall to prevent this stalling!

One of the more awesome Familiars

The next new feature introduced in Thunderstone Advance may seem a bit "familiar" to you (hehe - I love puns). You can now gain a Familiar. The first time that you defeat a monster in the dungeon, you gain a Familiar. This card goes in front of you and gives you extra abilities that you can perform. Some of the abilities require you to own Experience Points (though you don't spend it). The Familiar stays in front of you every turn until you use it - at which point it goes in your discard pile. But, once you play him again, he will again stay in front of you. This is a neat concept, but I dislike that your Familiar is random and that you have no ability to change it. They all seem to be fairly balanced, but I still think that in a game where one of the main objectives is to tune the cards you play with, it doesn't make sense that you get a card at random with no ability to decide which one to get - though you can prevent yourself from having to draw it by never using it (thus never discarding it). But, if you do this, then the other players with Familiars that are helping them have a slight advantage.  Overall, Familiars are a nice addition, but they won't change gameplay very much.

The third major change (do you like how I've now upgraded that first change to "major"?) is that you now have a fourth option on your turn - you can "Prepare". When Preparing, you simply discard what you want from your hand and keep the rest. Then you draw back up to six cards. This is a very small action, and yet it can be incredibly helpful. When you draw all weapons and no heroes, you can keep a few and hope to draw heroes. When you draw three amazing heroes and three cards that only help in the village, you can keep what you need for next turn. When you get a bunch of useless trophies, you can keep the useful cards. This action will really be used much more than you would originally think, and it mitigates some of the inherent luck involved in trying to draw the "perfect" hand.

There are a ton of other changes that Thunderstone Advance makes to the brand, but I won't cover them all. I will say that I think they all improve the game. Here are a few more (without discussion about how useful they are):

One of the new Guardians

• The game end condition is based on a Guardian instead of a Thunderstone (thus, no free points to whoever ends the game unless they kill a huge monster)
• "Militia" have been turned into "Regulars" and have been improved slightly
• "Iron Rations" has been replaced with "Thunderstone Shards" which are worth actually using
• The game comes with a board that helps you in setup by preventing you from overloading a single card type (Weapon, Spell, Villager, Item)
• You can play in a Dungeon (light penalty of 2) or a Forest (light penalty of 1)
• The packaging is better than the original Thunderstone but not as good as in Wrath of the Elements (yet the cards stayed in place when I carried it vertically in a backpack - kudos!)
• Diseases are replaced with Curses, and each one has an Ability that lets you destroy it (by suffering a temporary penalty)
• There are more cards that encourage you to go to the Dungeon even when you don't have a guaranteed victory

Overall, I give Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin an 8.5/10.  If you disliked the previous Thunderstone offerings, there's not enough in Advance to pull you back in.  However, if you liked the previous games, or you were interested in trying out the game, I think that this is a good set to buy.  I think that Advance improves on the game in a large number of small areas, which add together to make a better game.

If you like games like Thunderstone, you might also check out Nightfall, Warhammer: Invasion, and Runebound. Or, if you're looking for more opinions on this set, you can check out a Thunderstone Advance Review from I Slay the Dragon, or another Thunderstone Advance Review from the Board Game Family.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a review copy of Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin.

Thunderstone: Dragonspire Review

Now that I've had the privilege of playing Thunderstone: Dragonspire, it is time to post my review.

So, this is the part of the review where I normally summarize the game. I'm going to assume that you have already played the base game, and if not, you should probably read my review of Thunderstone. Instead, I'll try to focus on the differences that set Dragonspire apart from the other iterations of Thunderstone that I've played. In all honesty, I skipped Thunderstone: Doomgate Legions, so I'm not 100% sure what was introduced there instead of in Dragonspire, but after doing my due diligence on Board Game Geek, I think I have a pretty good handle on what aspects were introduced in each set.

Dragonspire really doesn't introduce very much in the way of new mechanics to Thunderstone. The only two things that I saw that seemed to be new were Settings and a new cooperative way of playing the game. However, it did include everything necessary to play the game (it is a fully playable standalone game), and also expanded upon all of the features that were added in previous expansions (new Thunderstones, Treasures, Traps, Mercenaries, and Guardians). Therefore, whereas the game isn't especially innovative, it does allow a new player to jump into the fully developed Thunderstone game.

Now for the pros, cons and something in between. We'll start with the in between, which is the packaging. If you have read each of my previous Thunderstone reviews, I thought that the packaging for Thunderstone was absolutely atrocious. However, I thought the Wrath of the Elements packaging was amazing. I personally think that Dragonspire is somewhere in between those two. Instead of the sleek, spartan packaging of Wrath of the Elements, AEG went back to the ridged plastic dividers, but with the ridges meant to keep the cards from sliding instead of to separate cards.  They have also continued providing nice, labeled dividers. I'm not completely sold on this being "better" than what was in Wrath of the Elements, but it is definitely better than what was in the original game. Along with the new packaging design, they also included plastic experience tokens and a dungeon board (to help keep track of light, guardians, etc). These are (though unnecessary in my opinion) nice little additions to the game that make you feel more like you get your money's worth. Regardless of which packaging I prefer, I have converted all of my cards to be in the Dragonspire box, because it is big enough to actually hold the board and the instructions (which annoyed my about the Wrath of the Elements box because it wasn't big enough to hold the instructions from the original game).

Now that I've had the obligatory discussion about packaging, time to get more into the actual game. I'll do one quick note about Settings, and then I'll go on to the cooperative play. So far I like the Settings mechanic. What the Settings do is change the actual overall game. They add rules like "every time you defeat a monster you gain a disease" or something similar that makes one game of Thunderstone different from the next. This is a plus, in my eyes - especially since they are optional, and if certain players find them annoying they are easy enough to leave out.

The innovation that I found in Dragonspire was around the cooperative play. My wife refused to play this game competitively with me after our first game (I have lots of deckbuilding experience and she has very little, and so she found the experience quite frustrating). With a new cooperative game, I was excited that I felt like I could convince her to try again (and in fact, I was successful at this). The cooperative game works very similarly to the advancing monsters game variant that was introduced in Wrath of the Elements, where the monsters attack and cost the players points every certain number of turns. There were a few big differences, though. In the cooperative version of the game you have a shared experience pool, you can trade cards (to a limited amount) when resting, and you can turn in monsters when visiting the village to gain experience (and remove them from your deck). This mode of play worked fairly well, and I would be willing to continue playing it. I really appreciate the fact that each release I have played has added a new game play option.

Another quick pro is that in Dragonspire, the heroes have diverged from the standard setup. Whereas in the previous versions all the heroes had levels 1-3 and the same number of cards (from one hero to the next) for level 1, 2, and 3. This is no longer the case. In Dragonspire, some heroes have 4 levels, some have 2, and therefore the heroes are actually becoming more unique. This helps the game not feel like it is the same every time through.

The next thing that I have learned to really appreciate about AEG (through my interaction with their Thunderstone brand) is that they seem to both learn from their mistakes and fix them. As an example that was stated previously, the original Thunderstone storage was horrendous. AEG realized this and setup the Wrath of the Elements box to use labeled dividers between the card sets. The problem was, these were not included in the original set. AEG, fixing their mistakes, provided labels in Wrath of the Elements for both the original game and the Wrath expansion. They have done this again in Dragonspire. They determined that it would be very convenient for the randomizer cards to have different colored backs. Therefore, they provided new randomizers for each of the previous sets. I really wish that all companies tried to fix their mistakes like AEG has done with the Thunderstone brand.

Now that I have talked about the pros, here are a few cons. First off, I noticed more than ever that you need to be careful when picking the heroes and village cards that you play with. If you randomly select them, you will often get cards that do not mix well together and so you will have several cards that are essentially unusable in your setup of available cards. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to fix - look at the cards selected and make sure they work together; ie, do not have a wizard that works well with spells and then no useful spells available (this happened to us).

Something that I have mentioned as a con previously in the Thunderstone set, but that I noticed again (and so I will mention) is that the game seems to be setup where nobody attacks the dungeon for quite a long time. It seems to be all buildup for the first half of the game, and then attacking for the second half, but not intermixed. Because of this, I will continue recommending that you play with the advancing monsters variant that was introduced in Wrath of the Elements.

There are several other pros and cons to the game, but these are the same as what can be found in the previous versions of Thunderstone, so I don't really feel the need to retype them, since you can click on those reviews from my links on this site.

A few final quick notes before wrapping this up... First, I like Treasures and Mercenaries (these were introduced in Doomgate Legions, and I will write more about them if I play and review that expansion). Second, the game seems to work best with about 3-4 players, as with 2 your deck will get too watered down with monsters, and with more than 4, you will not have the opportunity to purchase many village cards.

Overall, I give Thunderstone: Dragonspire an 8.0/10. It is not nearly as innovative as the original game (and so I seriously pondered giving it a 7.5), but it introduces some useful new aspects to the game and so I keep them on par with each other. If you really enjoy the Thunderstone brand, then you should pick it up, because it will add more replayability to your sets. If you are debating whether to try out the Thunderstone system, I would recommend getting this set before the "original" base game, as it includes everything the base game had plus more.

If you want to read about more Thunderstone, I've also reviewed Thunderstone, the Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements expansion, and the Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin franchise reboot.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me a demo copy of Thunderstone: Dragonspire to review.

Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements Review

So, this will be my first review of an expansion to a game that I have not bundled with the base game's review. There hasn't really been a reason that I've always previously bundled them except that at the time that I chose to write about the expansion, I hadn't written about the base game yet, so I killed two birds with one stone. Anyway, if you're interested in my review of the base game of Thunderstone, feel free to check it out here (or you can also navigate to it with the right-hand widget where the reviews are listed alphabetically). With all that said, it's time to review Thunderstone Wrath of the Elements.

Instead of talking about how Wrath of the Elements works (which would be a complete repeat of how Thunderstone works), I'll point out a few highlights and then get right to the pros and cons. The main things that Wrath did was 1) improved the box/storage layout 2) added "traps" and "guardians" 3) added several gameplay variants and 4) added lots of new cards of all kinds.

The first pro of Wrath of the Elements is the improved storage. Now, I realize that you are all incredibly concerned and think the game must not have been good if this is my biggest pro, but that's not at all true! Instead, it's important to realize how much I hated the storage of the original game. In fact, I believe it was my biggest con when I reviewed Thunderstone. Not only has AEG fixed this problem with Wrath of the Elements, they have also fixed my biggest complaint with Dominion. Both at the same time! I won't really discuss the pitifulness of the original Thunderstone storage, because there's really no need, but I will mention my complaint with Dominion - I liked the game and so I bought a ton of expansions. And then I had a ton of big, bulky boxes. Finally I stopped bothering to play it because it was a pain to carry around. Well, in Wrath of the Elements, the box (as seen in the picture) is wide enough to hold two rows of cards and has file cabinet style labeled separator cards to distinguish the different piles of cards. The separators are even color and symbol coded. And both the original game and Wrath fit in the box (except the original instruction book is a bit too big, so you have to fold it over the top or leave it at home), and they even left room for several more expansions so that I can carry it all around in a single (heavy) box. This made me incredibly happy before I even played the game.

Now that I have gotten off my soap box about storage, here are some gameplay pros. I really liked the traps, and my only complaint is that there weren't enough different kinds of them (I'm sure they'll fix this with more expansions). Whereas in the original version of the game monsters would come out and you never really had to worry about them unless they had breach (and then you were still safe unless they reached the first rank), the traps can occur when replenishing the dungeon cards, and can affect one or many players. I liked how this played out in practice.

The next significant pro (this may have been the big one if it weren't for the storage) is the different variants. I believe there were about 5 different variants on how to play the game. Whereas most of the variants were pretty similar, there were a couple that I deemed worthy of mentioning. First, there is a single player variant. Honestly, I haven't played this variant yet as I prefer to play multiplayer, but this variant looked interesting enough to me that I will probably try it out in the "near" future. Secondly, they added a variant in which the monsters don't just sit still in the dungeon waiting on you. We did try this variant out, and I will say I'm hooked. In the original, each player can wait out the other players before going to the dungeon - unless another player goes, there's no real need to go to the dungeon early when you can build up your deck in the village. This is no longer the case; if everyone starts going to the village, the monsters will escape from the dungeon and players will gain negative victory points (and others might breach, and traps might come out....).

Aside from those points, there were also new cards of every type. I am yet to play with all of them, but from what I have seen there are some that I like and some that I am indifferent about - just like in every deck building game. I would like to point out that we did try all the new monsters and I really liked them; they seem nastier than the monsters in the base set. Especially when paired with the variant rules about monsters escaping (a lot of the new monsters have breach).

Really, the only "con" is that the game is still Thunderstone. If you didn't like Thunderstone in the first place, you're obviously not going to like the expansion. Fortunately, I thought the base Thunderstone game was solid, and so this didn't bother me.

Overall, I give Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements an 8.5/10. I very rarely give expansions a higher score than the base game, because they often don't add very much, but I really thought that Wrath added a lot to the basic game and now that I have it, I can't imagine going back to just the basic game. If you are a Thunderstone fan, I can honestly say that I think you should check this expansion out. (And if you're not a Thunderstone fan, and you read this far into the review.... why did you read this far? You knew a long time ago that you weren't going to play this game.)

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a demo copy of Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements to review.

Thunderstone Review

I've been on a deck-building kick recently, so sticking with that genre, it is time to review Thunderstone.

As far as I know, Thunderstone was the second widely produced game in the deck-building genre (after Dominion, but before Ascension Chronicle of the Godslayer, Heroes of Graxia, The Resident Evil Deck Building Game, and Arcana). In Thunderstone, each player must decide on their turn if they will go to the village, where they can level up their heroes and buy new cards for their deck, go to the dungeon, where they will attempt to defeat monsters to gain victory and experience points, or finally if they "rest" - thus being able to trash a single card from their hand, draw a new hand, and end their turn. If they go to the village, they are able to first level up any heroes that are in their hand assuming that 1) they have enough XP (generally earned from defeating monsters) and 2) the next level of that hero is still available in the common card piles (there are 3 levels for each hero, and the number available at each level gets lower). After leveling up heroes, they are able to use the remaining cards in hand to purchase new heroes, equipment, spells, etc. - collectively known as "village cards". If they choose to go to the dungeon, then the player reveals all of their cards, totals their attack and magic attack totals along with their "light" total, and then chooses which monster to attack and determines if they are successful.

Thunderstone, as the second deck building game, added a lot of new concepts to the genre. First, it added the RPG element of heroes and monsters. Instead of buying cards just to help in buying victory points, you are now buying cards in order to be able to defeat monsters (Resident Evil borrows heavily from this).

Even within the standard RPG elements, however, they did this well. One element that shows the game is well thought out is that the XP goes to a different pile instead of in your deck. If it were to go in your deck, then you would wind up with issues related to having to draw the XP and the heroes in the same turn, and it would really cause leveling up to become a non-factor in the game. I appreciate how the XP is treated. Also, they added to the standard "dungeon crawling" RPG element the concept of light. The further into a dungeon you go, the harder it is to see the monsters unless you have brought light with you. Whereas this sounds like a no-brainer, this is the first game where I have seen this actually play out, and it plays out simply but effectively - for each light you are missing, you must add 2 more points of attack, and some monsters can't be killed unless you have enough light.

With all that said, Thunderstone struggles in a few places. For one, killing monsters isn't often intermixed throughout the game. What winds up happening is that people spend the first half of the game building their deck, and the second half of their game killing monsters, while only visiting the village when they have a bad draw. Some of the village cards make this effect even more dramatic (specifically one called the "Trainer" which allows you to get rid of your basic cards to gain XP without killing monsters).

Another more trivial issue is the packaging. Whereas Dominion's box is setup to keep all of the cards separated so that you can easily pick out which cards you are using in any given game, Thunderstone is not. Thunderstone has a few packaging features that are supposed to help this - some larger cards for separating different piles and some raised parts in the plastic holders, overall it does not work very well and you spend a lot more time looking for cards than is needed.

Overall, I give Thunderstone an 8.0/10. I appreciated that it was not a simple derivative form of Dominion, but that it truly added some new innovations to the genre, but overall it is not as engaging of a game as Dominion. If you are a fan of the genre, however, and are looking for something new to try, Thunderstone is a good option.

You can also check out my reviews of Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin, Thunderstone: Dragonspire, and Thunderstone: Wrath of the Elements.