Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade

• 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

In Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade, a tactical and cooperative card game for 1-2 players, you will fight your way through the well deck of challenge cards to reach Scorn, the Master of the Well, and face them in an epic final battle.

Scorn’s Well is made up of four challenge cards, with Scorn himself in the middle. As a challenge is defeated, another takes its place, with 57 challenge cards in total. As you face the challenges of the Well, you may play a skill card from your hand only when it matches the color of the challenge card, e.g., if you’re facing a red challenge card, then you may play only a red skill card. Some cards have two colors, and some are white, that is, wild. If the card you play does not defeat the challenge, you’ll be able to add some progress to it and attempt it again, though you may suffer a penalty for doing so.

Other seekers can provide help by playing one of their own cards as a boost, but beware. Running out of cards nets you an exhaustion card before you can draw a new hand. Exhaustion cards are never good, but some are worse than others.

Defeating a challenge provides you a reward, such as regaining health or delving deeper into the Well, which is represented by discarding unseen challenge cards. Once you’ve made your way to the bottom of the Well, you’ll face Scorn himself. All Seekers share a health pool, and if the pool reaches zero, you’re defeated. This is a game that requires teamwork and persistence as the wells of Atios are unpredictable and quite dangerous.

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

Delve is a really tight 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.  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.  I’d definitely recommend reading all three before you start though, just so you are aware of what you might have to face.  It will definitely help you make more informed decisions as you play through the Well deck.

As you face the different challenges, you’ll have to plot your best course.  Sometimes it’s better to fail on a challenge and take the penalty and then finish it on the next turn.  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!

Speaking of the Exhaustion cards – there are some interesting decisions to be made here.  It stinks having a small hand size – you won’t have much choice at Skill cards (nor ability to boost).  However, if you Exhaust yourself, you have to draw an entirely new hand as well as face the possible negative effects of the Exhaustion card.  When you play with more players, the Exhaustion effects can become deadly indeed as you are much more likely to have Exhausted players (due to smaller hand size).  Of course, to balance it out, you’ll also have a better chance of boosting as well as two more Lantern actions available to you…

I believe that the Well Deck in Scorn’s Stockade is a bit more difficult than Vainglory’s Grotto.  There are a few cards (such as the Green Watchtower that increases the difficulty of all other challenges by +2) which really ramp up the difficulty.  For my group(s), we have had a really hard time even getting to the bottom of the Well in Scorn’s Stockade – whereas we normally were able to at least initiate the final fight in Vainglory’s Grotto.

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.  

A third module is to be released this summer, and I am definitely looking forward to exploring the Kinfire Universe some more when that comes out.    The more that I play this Delve series, the more I like it for its challenge and flexibility in both difficulty and player count.  If you stick to the original max of 2 players, you can then also mix and match amongst the different seekers – also giving you new challenges to face.  It’s hard to think of a situation where I couldn’t get this game to fit the group, and that raises it very high in my estimation.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…