Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto

• Designer: Kevin Wilson
• Publisher: Incredible Dream
• Players: 1-2 (up to 4 if you have two modules)
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto is a tactical and cooperative card game for 1-2 players. As Seekers, you will fight your way through the well deck of challenge cards to reach Vainglory, the master of the well, and face her in an epic final battle.

To defeat Vainglory, you’ll battle and puzzle your way through her well deck of 57 challenge cards before facing her final gauntlet. On your turn, attempt a challenge by playing a matching skill card and rolling the dice. Add enough progress tokens to a challenge and you’ll be richly rewarded. But fail and you’ll face the penalty by losing health, discarding cards, or being forced to return cards to the well deck.

Even when it’s not your turn, the cards in your hand can be played to boost your teammate’s action. But be cautious–emptying your hand means gaining exhaustion and suffering effects that can lose you the game.

Survive long enough to reach the bottom of the well and reveal Vainglory’s final form. Break through her gauntlet of protectors in order to face and defeat her once and for all and win the game.

To setup the game, randomly choose one of the 3 Master cards and place it facedown in the center of the table – then surround it with four cards from the Well deck.  The rest of the well deck is set aside, and the top 3 cards from the deck are moved to form a facedown discard pile.  If you want to play a shorter game, discard an additional ten cards at the start but also reduce your team’s starting health by 2 points.  Shuffle the Exhausted card deck and place it on the table.  

 Each player chooses one of the Seeker characters, as well as their Lantern card and their 18 card deck of Skill cards.  There are only 2 Seekers in each Delve module, but if you have multiple modules, you can expand the game to include more players. Based on the player count, each player deals themselves a starting hand of Skill cards from their own deck.  The group shares a single health tracker – a d10 – set at 10 for an easier game and 8 for a harder game.  (Again, subtract two from this if you are playing a shorter game)

A starting player is chosen and then play goes around the table until the Master is defeated or the group is defeated (their health hits zero).  On a turn, you choose one of the 4 Well cards surrounding the Master and then resolve it.  There are two broad types of Well cards: Events and Challenges.

Event cards have simple instructions on them – simply read the card and follow said instructions.

Challenges come in four types – Combat, Puzzles, Obstacles and Traps.  The border of the card (red, blue, green) represents the color.  The icons in the upper left of the card tell you the difficulty, the reward for completion and the punishment for non-completion.  Some cards come with special rules that are in effect during this particular challenge. There are four steps to each challenge.

1] Play a Skill card (or your Lantern) – play a card from your hand that matches the color of the challenge (note that white cards can be played against any color challenge). The strength of the card gives you that much progress against the challenge.  There may be special abilities also granted by the text of the card.  Alternatively, if your Lantern card is active, you can use it (and flip it over) instead of playing a card from your hand.

2] Boost up to two times – at the bottom of some Skill cards is a Boost criteria – it denotes what effect happens if a certain color card is discarded by a teammate.  Any of your teammates can discard a matching card to gain the benefit shown.

3] Roll the dice – Roll all 4 dice.  For each result that matches the color of the challenge, gain a progress.  (The three “regular” dice have 2 sides of each of the three colors).  A white fire symbol is wild (three of the six sides on the fourth die show a white fire).  Given the dice distribution, the median result is 1.5 successes.

4] Finish the Challenge – count up all the progress gained from the skill cards, possible boosts and die results.  If the progress is equal or greater than the number on the card, you have completed the challenge.  The team gains the reward shown on the card – more often than not, it lets you delve deeper into the deck by moving cards from the top of the deck into the discard pile.  The challenge card is flipped face down into the completed challenge pile.  If the progress is less than the number on the card, the card remains in play with the progress still on it, and the stated penalty is taken by the team.  All players now discard any played Skill cards to their respective discard piles.

Note that you do not automatically draw new cards.  The main way to draw more cards is to exhaust yourself at the start of your turn.  When you exhaust yourself, you discard your current hand and then draw a new hand (hand limit still based on player count).  You also then reveal an Exhausted card – many of these have ongoing effects as long as they are visible.  Exhausted cards do not go away until a card or ability tells you to discard it; at which point, it gets shuffled back into the deck.  You do not skip a turn when you exhaust yourself and draw a new hand; but you should remember that you can only make the decision to exhaust yourself at the start of your turn.

At the end of your turn, refill the display so that there are four cards surrounding the facedown Master card.  If you ever get to the bottom of the Well deck (when you need to draw one and there are no more to draw), it is time for the final showdown.  Discard the remaining Well cards from the table and reveal which of the Master cards is your final foe.  Pull the four Gauntlet cards out of the box and arrange them around the final Master.

The Master card is always black and this means that it is not vulnerable to any of the colors in your Skill deck.  However, as you complete the different Gauntlet challenges, you will flip those cards over to reveal the Master’s color vulnerabilities.  Once there is at least one color vulnerability, you can try to accomplish the Master’s challenge.  If there are multiple vulnerabilities, you must choose one and openly state it before starting the challenge.

If you are able to complete the Master’s Challenge- you win the game!  The team can lose if their health is reduced to zero or though a few other game conditions (usually found on the Exhausted cards).  

My thoughts on the game

Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto is a really nice cooperative game – meant for 2 players – but it can also be played solo and expanded to four players if you have 2 sets of the game.  This is a nice range and allows Delve to meet the needs of most groups.  Each player takes one of the Seekers, and each Seeker deck has its own feel and special abilities.  You should look through your deck before playing to get a good feel for the strengths of your character. Also be sure to understand how your Lantern card works – it is super powerful, though it is not easy to recharge, so you don’t want to come out using it on your first challenge…

Though the Well deck never changes – each game really plays out differently because of the unique delving mechanism.  One of the most common rewards for completing a challenge is to Delve through the deck, thus discarding cards from the top of the Well Deck.  I’d suspect that you’ll see maybe 30-40 percent of the deck at most in a full run – so the permutations are vast.  Furthermore, the timing of when you see a certain card can definitely affect how it plays out.  Many of the cards have conditional effects that are reliant upon other cards currently visible – and thus, the card draw really affects what happens.  Finally, until you get to the bottom of the deck, you never know which of the three versions of the Master you’ll have to face, so there’s always a bit of anticipation when you get to finally reveal the Boss Monster of the well.

As a note, I’d definitely recommend players look at all three of the Boss varieties before starting.  I think it’s helpful to know what the different possibilities are at the end as this will definitely color your judgement on in-game decisions. For instance, in Vainglory, an attached card to the boss might be nothing, might represent +3 HP for Vainglory, or might represent +12?!   Knowing what the possible options are will help you weigh your choices during the game.

As you face the different challenges, you’ll have to plot your team’s course.  Sometimes it’s better to fail on a challenge and take the penalty and then finish it on the next turn.  Sometimes you’ll have a card which nicely mitigates any possible penalty.   Other times, the penalties are so severe that you’ll want to take a few boosts to get you over the line on the first try.  Of course, you should be careful when to use boosts as they tend to be an inefficient way to use a card, and each card spent this way gets you closer to yet another Exhaustion card being revealed.  And, of course, with all games that rely on dice rolling, try to roll well – this really helps you win those important challenges!

Managing exhaustion is a big part of the game as they can definitely lead to your team’s doom.  Figuring out how to limit the exhaustion frequency is big – but also the group should figure out what their options are for removing exhaustion and make sure they keep those options at the ready.

The level of difficulty has been good for us.  I can usually get through the Vainglory well deck and start the final Master battle, with us winning maybe half of the time.  Given our usual record against cooperative games, this is an astonishing win rate :)   If you are better at cooperative games than us, feel comfortable that you can alter the difficulty by starting with fewer health points.

The components are really nice.  The cards have a nice feel to them and there is a really sweet foil finish to the Seeker cards as well.   The iconography is fairly easy to grasp, and if you have any questions, the back cover of the small rulebook explains anything that you might have questions about. The entire game comes in a pleasing small box, and that’s another plus for me.

Kinfire Delve gives you a nice streamlined cooperative game that gives you a lot of interesting choices without too much rules overhead.  The game is both flexible in player count (supporting one to four players) as well as length (as you can shorten the game by discarding about a fourth of the deck from the start).  Each play is varied based on setup (which Seekers you choose to include) as well as random discards through the Well deck.  Overall, a very enjoyable game and one that will surely be played more this year.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Steph – Haven’t lost yet (4 plays) but it is always a very close game. Very enjoyable. I think I like Vainglory more than Scorn. I haven’t played the 3rd one yet. 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Steph H, John P
• Neutral.
• Not for me…