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The road to restoring your lost honor goes deeper with Chronicles, the second expansion to Vindication. Chronicles adds more narrative, immersion, and story to the existing Vindication experience, both for the island itself and for your own personal journey.
Narrative-choice chronicle cards add a layer of decision and intrigue that bring your story to life. Each time you gain a card in the game (companion, relic, trait, monster, pet, etc) another player will draw and read a chronicle card, which presents you with a narrative prompt and a decision, ultimately telling the story of how you obtained that card. As you grow your tableau, so too do you chronicle your own journey.
These decisions are further recorded on new, large, full color paper player sheets. Make enough decisions embodying a certain attribute and you become legendary for that attribute, gaining you a powerful new ability and a big gorgeous tarot card to place next to your wretch tile to help you feel extra good about your progress.
All the while, you must confront various global events that rage across the land. At times no one may visit an inn until all the bandits have been run off. Strange mists may make traveling the edge of the map extra perilous. Dozens of unique events change the game state in some dynamic way — until someone deals with it and claims a huge reward.
—description from the publisher
- Adds story elements
- Adds events that provide renown
- Humorous events
- Adds more options
- Not a campaign game
- Good for people who want storytelling without a long commitment
- Waters down the base game
- Changes the focus away from board control
- Can feel bloated
- Firewind Festival is an afterthought
- Does not add new content beyond story
- Production complaint: largest tiles for the tiniest bag
- Not a must-have expansion
- Adds story elements to Vindication
- Adds events and flavor text to provide story
- Unsettled
- Sleeping Gods
- Elder Chore
- Above and Below
- Caldo Adventure
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Events — New decks of cards that add story elements and trigger events.
- Firewind Festival — A new mechanism that uses Renown, but one reviewer found it to be an afterthought and not very useful.
- Legendary Abilities — Abilities unlocked by filling out attributes multiple times, granting significant points.
- loot — Included as part of the expansion, adding more to the game.
- Pets — Included as part of the expansion, adding more to the game.
- Renown — New tokens that are used to gain honor points and access legendary abilities.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Vindication needed story
- it almost waters the game down in a weird way
- it's not a campaign
- The Chronicles expansion is not a must
- The Chronicles expansion is exactly what I thought it was going to be