Relic Wars Full Playthrough | Fantasy Tactical Combat | Wargame Boardgame | Flying Pig Games
/pic8761523.png)
Transcript
Hi everybody, I'm Sil Blitz and welcome. Today we're going to show some gameplay from Relic Wars, the upcoming tactical fantasy combat game from Flying Pig Games. Got a three-person game all set up. Let's jump right into the action. So, here is Relic Wars pretty much all set up for a three-player game. Two quick background things before we start. First up, this game is coming to Kickstarter on May 5th, 2025. There'll be a link to that Kickstarter down in the description if you'd like to go check it out. The second thing is this is a prototype of the game. So, there are going to be while this has the spirit of the game and the general artwork will be the same and the design will be the same, there are going to be things that will be different. Like these player mats will be designed differently, the miniatures will be um a higher quality and more durable. Some of the the tokens are going to be higher quality tokens. So, this is very much got a prototype feel to it. So, kind of consider more gameplay and kind of artistic design rather than the quality of the components as you kind of think about um you know if this game might be something you would enjoy. So, let's jump into gameplay. First up, what's the goal of the game and what are we trying to do? So, we've got three players. One over here, one on the other side, and two down the side. And these players are going to be entering this map. Now, each player represents a single character.
This is Saikari Lion Heart. This is the Veil Walker down here, and this is Sanctifra over there. And these characters are unique. They have some unique abilities. They are going to enter this tiled area, which is currently unknown to them. As they enter this, they're going to explore through this. They're going to uncover various terrain that's in here. could be monasteries, towns, woods, all kinds of things. And then as they go through this, each one of these tiles is also going to have an item. And we'll talk about what that what's that is. So, they're going to be finding weapons and magic spells and chalicees and portals and using those things they find to wreak havoc on their opponents and win the game. There's two ways you can win. You can win by being the last character standing in the combat area. Or you can win by getting three chalicees, and we'll show how that works shortly, and holding on to those for one turn. This is a turn-based game. And I've done a couple of things before the video started. First up, in a three-player or two-player game that the combat area is 5x5 tiles. If we did have a fourth player, this would be 6x6. The second thing I did was I rolled this directional die to determine the starting sides of the board with north being up the top for each of our characters. Now, if two characters roll the same direction, they both come in on the same side of the map. But I rolled Sakari Lionheart got west, the Veil Walker got south, and then Sanctifra got east. So, it actually worked out pretty well for the video, too, because we've got one character coming in on each
side, and nobody rolled north. And with that, we have two things left to do before we are ready to start the game. One of the two things we have left to do is to prime this bag here. This is a felt bag that's going to hold these tokens. And what's happens in terms of gameplay is as a character moves into an unknown tile. They're going to flip that tile over and they're going to add one of these tokens onto the the map. And just to show you what's going to be in the bag, we've got three swords, three bows, three each of the spells. So, water, fire, and earth, five chalicees. And these, again, if a character has three chalicees in their possession, they will uh win the game if they can hold those for one turn. We're going to have four shields and then four portals in play. Now, in a four-player game, there are extra ones. So, the three-player game has a reduced set of tokens. So, I'm going to take everything except one of these chalicees, and I'm going to put all of these items into this bag. All right, so our bag is primed with items. Now, this last chalice, the last chalice, there's a special action here. We're going to flip over the very central tile here in the board, which is a hill. And you may roll an attack. That's a special feature of that hill. And the chalice goes right on the center of the hill. So, this is an incentive for characters to come to the center here. Kind of like the cornucopia in Hunger Games. Get to the center, get the chalice, and you've got one of the three chalicees that you need. And with that, we are now completely set to begin the game. And now the battle may begin.
Uh the rules mentioned, the youngest person goes first. For our sake, we're just going to pick Sakari Lion Hart to go first, and then we'll go in clockwise order around from there. So, in each turn, you can perform basically usually two actions. Uh you can move, you can attack, you could pick up an item, you could drop an item, and you're going to be picking from any kind kind of combination of those. And you can move twice and attack twice as well, too. So you can uh repeat the same action. And in the first turn, your first action has to be a move because you have you're starting off map. You have to move onto the map. And whenever you move uh onto an unrevealed tile, the movement cost is two points to reveal the tile and move into it. That's so that's going to be the first action for each of the three characters they have to get on the board here. So, we're going to start with Saikari Lion Hart. Let's take a look at his card in some of his unique features.
Let's figure out a strategy for him and let's get him in the board. So, here is Saikari Lion Hart's player mat if you would. We've got a picture of him here and we can see he's kind of a paladin and he's, you know, basically a knight type of character here. His hit points are seven and this in the final version, these are going to be inset with little things you drop inside them. This is just a random hit marker that we're using to hold it. I've got it pointed to the right, meaning that's got seven hit points left. Very slow. His movement is only four, as one would expect for kind of a big lumbering knight. Uh his basic attack is a strike of a range of one. And attacks are not diagonal. They're only orthogonal in this game. And then for for the most part, there is an exception. We'll talk about that. Special ability is retaliation. when he gets attacked at range one, his special ability allows him to retaliate and attack back. So, he's not a character you want to stand toe-to-toe with. If you're someone his opponent and try to go at it because he's going to attack you once in his turn. If you try to attack back in your turn, you're going to get attacked back. It's a losing proposition. You're going to get beat up. So, you uh it's a strong defensive kind of ability there for Sakari Lionhard. In that turn, he gets to retaliate on anybody that attacks him.
Down here are his slots for weapons and slots for shields. We'll talk about how those work. Now, Sakari Lionheart doesn't have good speed, but there is this chalice in the middle of the board here. So, I think it makes sense to bring him in on the left side. We're going to reveal this character, this uh this pile tile here, and then have him, at least for the moment, go straight to the middle because we can probably beat people toe-to-toe if we need to. So, let's see if we can get this middle chalice with him. So, he's going to spend two of his four movement points. And you get four movement points for an action, but you can you can interweave other actions within this. So, we're going to spend two movement points to flip over this first tile. Oh, bummer. It's a lake. So, uh that's that's not good for Sake Lion Hart cuz that cuts his direct line to the the chalice here. He can't move. You can't move on to a lake. There is one character, Lacurimosa, who I'm not using for this game, who flies. She would not have any problem going over the lake. Everybody else has a problem going over the lake.
There are ways we can freeze this, but that's not the case at the moment here. So, we do, however, need to pick a token to see what's going to be on here. This is a portal, which allows you for one movement point to move to any other portal on the map. Doesn't help anybody at the moment. So, Sakari Linhardt spent two movement points so far. That's it. The question is, what do we want to do now with him? He's got a character down here to the south, right? The veil walker is going to come down to the south, and that veil walker can steal items. So, I think it makes sense to stay away from the veil walker. So, we're going to go one tile up to the north. So, we're going to flip this tile over here onto the north. This is a hill and he's going to move into it now. And and he gets to drop an item on here. And this again is still his first action. Oh, this is perfect. It is a sword. So, he has a second action what he could do.
Really, the only thing he could do now, we could move again to kind of think of it, but let's not do that. We're going to pick up the sword and we're going to drop it on his inventory. Sakari Lion Hart gets a sword. We're going to drop it on the weapon slot and we'll talk about how combat works when we get there, but this is going to allow him to roll an extra die in combat and it give do extra damage. So, it's a pretty good offensive start for Sakari Lionhe Heart. There is one thing left to do. At the end of the turn, you pick a divine intervention card. This is a card that kind of shakes up the landscape and can do all kinds of crazy things. Let's see what we get. So, this is the Divine Intervention deck. We're going to flip over the first card and follow what it says. Plague. Uh-oh, that doesn't sound good at all. So, plague is all characters currently in a city take one hit point of damage. The only character on the map right now is Sikari Lion Hard, and he's on a hill. So, this has no effect for anybody. Let's go now to Sanctif's turn and take a look at her Matt special ability and get her in the game. Here is Sanctifra, a very unique character. movement is six, so two extra movement points per turn as opposed to Sakari Lion Hart. And hit points are actually a very robust eight. It's kind of a really cool looking character here, too. Basic attack is uh kind of roll two attack dice and choose the higher result. So, we're going to be rolling two of these instead of one. And you pick the one that does the most damage.
So, a potent attack. And the special ability is Sanctifra can attack adjacent diagonal tiles, which means that she can attack in places where other characters can't. So this is good. So for example, she could attack diagonally on Saikari Lion Lion Hart and he can't attack back because orthagonally it would be a range of two. Talk about that when we get there. Disadvantage. Sanctifra cannot hold weapons or shields which is a big disadvantage. So any of those things that she finds as she's making her way through combat are not going to be any help to her at all. So advantages and disadvantage for Sanctifra, but that diagonal attack and the ability to roll two attack dice per attack is a little bit of a potent kind of potent advantage. Let's think about what we want to do with her. So we've got Sikari Lion Heart way over there in the west.
She's coming in from the east. I think the same strategy because if things work out well, we could get Sanctifrast all the way to the center here and grab that middle chalice before anybody else can do anything about it. Let's see what the terrain involves here. She's going to spend two of her six movement points on her first movement action to flip this over. This is a clear terrain hex here. Let's drop an item on it. What do we get? We get a portal. Aha. So, she could well she could can't go to the lake cuz she can't go into the lake. So, that's uh two points of movement actions. Let's spend two more movement points and we will go here to the woods. Aha, woods provide a defensive die bonus. We can see down here you get to roll an extra defensive die. We also have an item to drop down in here. Let's see what we get here. We get a water spell. Okay, so she could use her second action and pick up this water spell, but let's not let's not screw around here with Sanctif.
Let's go for the quick victory. She's going to go right to the center of the map and use her second action to pick up one of the three chalicees she needs. And that goes on her inventory here. So, Sanctifra 1/ird of the way towards victory. Aha. The last thing we need to do for Sanctifra's turn now is to turn over a divine intervention card. Aha. The very omnipotent revivify card. This card allows you to stave off death. Basically, when you get knocked down to zero hit points, you can play this card. There's a few ways you can play it, but it's probably I think it's most potent way to play it is to play it as brings you back with one hit point. So, in we're going to take this and we're going to play it uh put it off to the side of Sanctra's card up here. And for the moment, she's going to hold that. Now, we might use it for one of the other uses, but for right now, it's kind of an insurance card. Keeps you in the game if you get knocked out. You can only hold one of those cards. You can't stockpile them. So if she finds a next one, she has to use it one of the alternate uses there. That's a sanctifice turn off to a good start. A revivify card got a third one of the three chalicees has made it to the center of the board. Let's go now to our veil walker. Veil Walker as we can see here is very much kind of the cut purse if you would. Got the thieving kind of look to this artwork here. Hit points are six, movement is five. Basic attack is the range of one. It's a it's a regular attack here. Uh special ability, however, is a pickpocket. So, this is a special action that the veil walker can take whereby she can take and
steal any one item from the adjacent person's inventory. So, I think if all goes well for Veil Walker, I have a plan for what we can do to start off her actions in the board. This is the plot for Veil Walker. She's going to come in here for two movement points, come in here for four movement points, use an action to pickpocket and steal the chalice from Sanctifra. In your face, Sanctifra, let's get busy. So, first two movement points to come here. It is a woods. We have to drop an item in here as well. Oh, a chalice. So, this is an interesting decision. Do we pick this one up or do we go steal the other one? Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, let's pick it up. We're going to uh So, she's going to use her second action is to pick up the chalice. I've dropped it on her player mat. Chalicees are in action quickly here. So, we've only revealed, I think, five tiles, and we've got two of the well, two ch two of the five chalicees that are in the bag are already there. Let's expose this next terrain tile up here. Ah, it's a lake.
Okay, so that's good because she can't move up into this lake. It does cost two movement points to reveal it, even if you can't go there. So, that's four movement points. She's only got one movement point left. That isn't enough to reveal any of these terrain features. So, that means Veil Walker's turn is done. However, like Sanctifra, Veil Walker has one of the three chalicees. We do, however, have to flip over a divine intervention card. So, our third divine intervention card, St. Michael's sword. St. Michael's sword is a special card that allows you to attack instantly any other character on the map on the world. And it's an attack that ignores range, it ignores defense, shields, uh any other special features, and it's just a one die basic strike attack. So, we're going to roll this die. The result can be anywhere from a zero if you get no none of these little hit marks on it up to three hits like that if you get the three on it. So, let's roll this.
And first of all, uh the Veil Walker has to decide who she's going to attack here. Let's, you know, I think Sikari Lion Hart can be getting shields and could be a problem. So, I think knocking his hit points down early might be a good idea. So, we're going to go after Sikari Lionhe Heart with this attack. Let's roll and see what we get. Oh, little bit tricky to see, but that's a threestar attack. So, let's put three hits of damage on Saikari Lion Hart right away. Problems for Mr. Lion Hart. 1 2 3. He's down to four health points already. This game moves quickly. Skirmish mode. It moves fast. Now, there are ways that he can heal. And actually, that's the end of the Veil Walker's turn. So, we are going to go to Sakari Lion Heart now. And it is his turn. As we go to turn two, Mr. Lionhe Heart here is in trouble. Down to four hit points and he doesn't really have any good defense. He's only got a sword. It's early. That was a very unlucky die roll for him. And if I'm Sanctifra, I'm thinking who can attack diagonally. I'm thinking I can close in for the kill now and perhaps take him out of the game very very early. So, I think a good strategy for him is going to be to move north and try to create some distance and maybe find even a monastery, which is a location that helps you you can allows you to heal before you draw your divine intervention card. It's a long shot, but I think he needs to play a little bit defensively and kind of gain strength before he can really come back into here, the battle here, and try to take on these other two opponents. So, we've seen how movement works. Now, I'm going to move him north, and we'll see
what it looks like after I've done those actions. He moved north, uncovered a portal, and then moved east and found a fire spell. Um, he's going to pick this up. Then, the fire spell has a number of characteristics. One of the characteristics of this fire spell is that it allows you to ignore damage from one attack. So, this could be a handy thing to have in his back pocket. We'll now draw the divine intervention card for Scikari, and that will end his turn. A heal card would be nice for him. Mountain sacrifice. Mountain Sacrifice says all players currently located on hills drop an item of their choice on their tile. If they do not have anything, nothing happens. Interestingly enough, Sanctifra is on a hill. So, we're going to have her drop an item. The only thing that she has is the chalice. So, we'll put this back onto the hill. This is just a momentarily momentary delay for her because she can pick it up at the beginning of her turn, which is next. Having said that, uh, the benefit of dropping the item is that if she had the item in her hand, she could move and attack. But now, because she's dropped the chalice, she has to reach down and pick it up, which is that one of the two actions, which means that she will not be able to attack this turn, but she will be able to move. And the question is, do we want to try to go close in on the kill on Sikari Lionhe Heart or go someplace else? Um, I think we do want to stay away from the Veil Walker, too, who can pickpocket this chalice. So, yeah, let's go up and around. She's got six movement points and maybe can find something interesting. As with before, I'm going to move her and then show the results of
her action. Sakari moved up and then east two spots. I'm covering some spells along the way, none of which she could pick up because um she had already used that a second action to pick up the chalice that she dropped. So, we'll go now to her divine intervention card. Divine intervention card for Sikari for Sanctifra is Flames of Hell. Roll one for an attack on the current player's tile and all orthogonally adjacent tiles. Oh, so Sanctifra is going to take an attack here. Let's see what happens. So, this will just be a straight up 1d6 attack. And it's another three. There's a one in six chance it's a three. So, the flames of hell pour down on Sanctifra and she takes three hit points of damage. 7, six, five. Uh, one of the things I've noticed about playing this game is it can go in a lot of different directions. This is a very unusual game in that players are kind of randomly getting hit by things that have nothing to do with their interactions with each other, but it is what it is. Real deal.
Let's go now down to the Veil Walker's turn. The Veil Walker with both other characters injured. It would be nice if the Veil Walker in particular could find something that could strike at range like a bow or some other kind of weapon, maybe some shields and build up some defense and then come in for the kill and perhaps take out the other two weakened opponents. So, we're going to have um her explore to the southwest here. I'll do that and then I'll show what it looks like. An interesting first move here. She uncovered a fort. And uncovering a fort is pick two and choose one. So, the Veil Walker actually has found a chalice and a water spell. This is an easy choice. We're going to put the water spell back into the bag. And as her second action, she's going to pick up the chalice, which actually puts her only one chalice away from victory. She's got two of the three she needs. And she still has one action left.
Sorry, I mean one move left. And with this one, she comes to this last corner and uncovers an earth spell. Let's draw her divine intervention card. And the veil walker draws a revivify card. Very nice to have indeed. We'll hold on to this one when she might need it. and under cases of dire circumstances. That ends round two. We go back to Saikari Lion Hart for round three. Lion Hart's in a little bit of trouble here, but I think we can come down here. I want to stay away from Sanctifra, who I think is going to be more dangerous. Uh maybe come down here and see if we can find something to help heal or maybe get some kind of a another a shield or something. So, he's going to move straight down and uncover and explore this way. This works perfect. In the first spot, he finds a shield. So, he's going to pick that up and add that to his inventory. The shield goes into the shield slot. This will allow him to roll a defensive die when he gets attacked, which is he needs all the help he can get for defense. So, that's a good pickup for him. Lastly, we're going to move him down into this other spot here and see what's in this.
This is a forest and another shield. This is excellent. This is exactly what he was hoping for. Now, he doesn't have an extra action to pick this up, but he could start the next turn and pick this up. So, um, getting some defensive power here. This is going to help a lot. And com combined with that fire spell that will allow him to negate damage on one attack. He's getting some durability as we continue into this game. Time for the divine intervention card. Lucky. All players draw a relic ward token from the container and add it to their inventory if possible. If not possible, the token is returned to the container. Okay, so we'll do this uh each player in turn. Lionheart draws another sword. Oh, this is excellent for him. So, he'll add that to his strength there. This is a potent attack. It's a 1d8 now, which is a much more powerful attack die in addition to the basic strike. And he's got a shield.
It could be time to go on the war path. Sanctifra picks up a portal. Can't pick it up. So, that will go back into the bag. Nothing for her. The veil walker already has two relics. If she were fortunate enough to draw the last relic in the bag, she would be in a position to win the game. and it is a bow which is not a relic but still it gives her some range and gives her a powerful attack. Now with this bow she can attack at range two instead of just range one which is good. So I think Lion Hart's got a double powered kind of an upgraded sword. He was going to get an upgraded shield. This could be problematic for everybody else. I think it's time to try to take him out before he can get going. So I think if Sanctifra can do a couple couple things here to kind of get off an attack. First up, she's going to pick up the fire spell for her first action. And that will allow us to actually get an attack in momentarily. But she's going to go up here, uncover this tile for whatever this is, two, and then three, four, five, six, and then attack diagonally with the fire spell. We'll talk about that happen. So, I'm going to make this move, and then we'll check back in with her when she gets here.
Interesting. As she went up here, she actually it's a fort, so she can choose two. Pick one. One is a bow and one is the chalice. The question is, I think she can be the fastest one here to the chalice back in. So, she's just going to leave the chalice there and then still continue out the rest of the turn and come back for that perhaps on the next turn, then move down here for three, four, five, six. She's moved all of her her things. And then she has, let's take a look at her card. She's already done her two actions and fully committed her move, but the fire spell is an action you can perform at any time. So, she's going to use that to use it as an attack, which is one of the things that you can do with the fire spell. And because she can attack diagonally, she can attack right onto Lionhe Heart. So, she expends that fire spell and she can attack diagonally. Now, when she attacks, she's going to roll two attack dice and pick the highest one. And then, we do have here a couple of things going on for Lion Hart. He is in the forest, so he's going to roll the defensive terrain die. And if it comes up forest, which is right here, that's how many hits it blocks. Also, he has a shield.
He has one level of shield. So, he's going to roll the shield die. And depending on what this comes up, that's going to negate some damage, too. So, let's perform this attack. So, two attack dice for Sikari to see what it does for initial damage. Oh, three and a two. This these attack dice are rumbling here. So, she's going to take the three hits here and put that on Lion Hart. Lion Hart now will roll all of these defensive dice and gets a zero for the shield die and then a city a fort thing for the the other defensive die. So that blocks no damage whatsoever. However, Lionheart can do one thing right away which is he has a fire spell as well that can be played at any time and you can play it to negate damage even if you know what that damage is. So rather than take three hit points of damage which would put him down to one hit point, he's going to play that fire spell to negate that attack. It does burn it up, but it keeps him at four hit points instead of one hit point. And with that, we end Sanctifra's turn. And she's going to pick a divine intervention card. Divine intervention is pious. Pious is the active player must select one item in their inventory to drop in their tile as a sacrifice to the gods. Interestingly enough, the only item that Sanctifra has is the chalice. So, she's uncovered two chalicees and she drops this one on the hill here. Chalice is all over the place. This is perhaps an opportunity for Veil Walker. We'll see as it goes to Veil Walker's turn. Now, I think Veil Walker is going to continue the theme of let's give everything we can to dump on
Lion Hart here and see if we can knock him out of the game cuz he's building up a lot of power. So, um and she has a bow which means she can attack at range two now instead of range one. So, let's go up here. We're going to uncover this terrain and then attack. Interestingly, she's found a second bow on top of this hill. By the way, the hill allows you to roll one attack roll. We could have rerolled Saikari's attack roll, but she did roll the maximum of a three, so it didn't make sense to roll anything there. However, we have a trick we can do. So, as Veil Walker's second action, she's going to pick up the bow, which makes it stronger and increases its range, which will be pretty helpful for staying away from her opponents here. And now, actually, that's it. I thought she had an earth spell, but she left it behind there. So, she does not have an earth spell. Yeah, she's going to buy a little time. She's going to move back down here and set herself up for a power action on the next turn because she'll have the range, I think, to hit Lion Heart if there's no blocking terrain in the way here. So, she can pick up this earth spell which allows you to have an extra action which could result in a pretty good double attack on Lion Hart if he's still in the neighborhood here.
So, that's the end of Veil Veil Walker's turn. Let's draw a divine intervention card. Divine intervention for Veil Walker is traveling archaeologist. All holy grails on the map are removed and put back in the relic wars container. Sanctifra now lamenting the the dropping of this one and the not picking up of this one as her opportunity to grab both of those goes away. We drop those back into the bag. This creates a very strong opportunity for Veil Walker who's already got two of the chalicees and there are a number of unexplored terrain squares over here. It almost makes me think her strategy is instead of attacking San attacking Lion Hard to come over here and see if she can find the chalice real quick and then just win the game. So, uh yeah, cuz in four spots she's probably bound to get one chalice out of that bag. So interesting change perhaps in strategy here. But um we go now to Lion Hart for turn four. Lion Hart's got a couple of options here. He could attack Sanctifra, potentially take her out of the the battle here, but the problem for winning right now literally is the Veil Walker.
She's got two of the three chalicees she needs. She has no damage. She has a revivify card. So she's in the best place to win. And all she has to do is run to the east and grab another chalice, survive for one more turn, and she's going to win. So, I think it makes sense for Lion Hart and Sanctifrax to kind of say, "Let's make an alliance, try to team up and take Veil Veil Walker out, at least prevent her from winning for a second." With that in mind, Lion Hart's going to pick up this shield, which will give him two shields. Come down here and explore this and then probably go back up so that he can't get pickpocketed by the Veil Walker. God, that did not work out very well. So, um, as Lionheart moves down here, here is a chalice. This is a third chalice that that the Veil Walker would need in order to win the game. So, uh, and he can't pick it up because he's already picked up something. So, he's got to stay there to sit on it and prevent Veil Walker from grabbing it.
But, this gets very, very interesting. He doesn't have He could move somewhere, but I don't want to move somewhere cuz then Veil Walker is going to come right in here, pick it up, and that'll do that. I mean, Sanctifrax could come down and grab it, too. So, the strategy gets really interesting and doesn't Yeah, I think I think Sink I think Lionhe Heart's just going to sit on this and end the turn. Divine intervention card says heal all players in fields heal one hit point. And good news for Lion Hart, who's in a field, so his hit points go from four back up to five. He's actually in pretty good shape. He's got two swords, two shields. He's got well, not two swords, but a double strength sword, a double strength shield, and it's now back up to only down by two hit points. Um, so yeah, things looking pretty good for for Lion Hart. Now, I think Sanctifra up here needs to start to close the gap on Veil Walker because the Veil Walker is going to be kind of create all kinds of problems here if she gets the third chalice and one of the potentially third chalice is up here. So, now we go to Sanctifra's turn. She has a very a kind of a cool thing we can do. So, uh, she's going to pick up the water spell. And the water spell has a number, so each spell has a number of actions that you can perform with it. Um, it can be played at any point during your turn.
One of the actions is is to force a player to return an item of your choosing from their inventory to the container. So, that's an easy choice. Sanctifra will blast the water spell over on Veil Walker. Hit the chalice, take that and it goes back into the container, pushing the Veil Walker back down to just one chalice and keeping her at least a considerable distance away now from victory. Actually, now that there's not an imminent threat of Veil Walker winning, let's go explore this terrain to the north and see if we can find something good. So, I'll do that and show what it looks like. So, interestingly, uh, Sanctifra moves two up here, uncovered an earth spell and a shield, and left the the earth spell here, moved three to here, uncovered a portal. Um, with her fourth movement point, she can activate the portal and come over here and then come down here and activate this tile for five and six.
It is a lake and the lake has a chalice on it, interestingly enough. So, this lake would have to be frozen for someone to get it. The water spell allows you to freeze a lake. So she could conceivably on the next turn come here, grab the water spell, cast it, freeze the lake, come back, and then pick up the chalice in the turn after that. So, interestingly, we have two chalicees on the battlefield now, and the only one holding one is Veil Walker, who has one, and we know there's probably going to be other chalicees down here in this bottom right quadrant. Um, so anyway, uh, that's it for Sanctif. She will pick a divine intervention card. Drawing her card, it is a second revivify card for her. She can only hold one. So she can do this other action here, which is to reveal any unrevealed tile adjacent to her. There is none. So I believe that means there is no action to be done with this revivify card. And that's where it stays. So I think it is time for Veil Walker to go on the offensive here with her bow. Uh what she can do is we're going to move her two over here. Leave the earth spell where it is. Move four into the forest here. Now, diagonally, she has a line of sight here, and she has a range of, I think, three hex's with her bow. So, plenty of range, and she can fire here at Lionhe Heart. Lion Hart has the special ability, which is retaliation, but it is range one. And because re range is orthagonal, this is range two. So, he can't retaliate. So, she's going to fire the bow at uh Lionheart here, who doesn't have any options of uh you protecting himself
other than his shield really. He's got in terrain, but he can't he kind of he can't attack back on this attack. So, the attack for Veil Walker is a basic attack plus the D8 for the double powered bow that she has. So, we'll roll this first to see what kind of damage she does. It is a sword and then two hits. So, two hits go onto Lionhe Heart. However, he can mitigate the damage with his shield. There's no terrain benefit to being in this clear terrain, but he does get the double shield now. So he gets his d8 die for the shield. It is a shield plus a dropped weapon which is this actually becomes very interesting because the shield stops one hit. So first uh Lion Hart takes one hit and then we'll resolve the dropped item element. So Veil Walker does two hits, one of which gets through reducing Lion Hart's uh uh healing his strength to four. The dropped weapon, however, means that Veil Walker could either drop the weapon, which would be both bows, or drop the chalice here, which you could then pick up on the next turn.
Everybody's dropping chalicees. I don't want to lose the bows. I feel like that's that would be bad. So, she's actually going to drop the chalice and and leave that there. So, the chalice is going down on the back into the forest here, which leaves chalicees all over the place. There's a victories worth of chalicees on the ground right now. She does succeed, however, in taking Lion Hart down to four hit points. So, with that, let's draw out the divine intervention card for Veil Walker. Divine intervention card is revivify. She already had one, which means she can reveal a terrain tile next to her and put an item on it. Let's do that cuz she does have one. So, she can reveal this adjacent space here, which is clear terrain. And we'll add an item to it here. Could be a chalice. That could actually be very interesting for her. It is not. It's a water spell. Okay, so we go now to turn five. I think it's time for Lionheart to go kick some butt. So, he's going to move down here into the fort. Not even worry about the chalice.
We're just going to go for the kill on Veil Walker here and attack. His attack is a basic black attack die. And he's got two swords. He's got a double strength sword. So, he'll use this D8 on the swords. Attacking with both those for a defensive die roll. Bale Walker's in the forest, so she'll roll the defensive terrain die, but she has no shields or any items like that. So, here we go to the attack. Let's see what happens for Lionhe Heart. Gets one hit and then two more hits. Three hits on Veil Walker. That's strong. Let's see if the defense of being in the forest helps at all. It does. It's a double forest roll. So, that's going to reduce two of the three hits that come through. So, Veil Walker takes her first hit. She is has drawn blood. six to five hit points.
Let's draw a divine intervention card for Lion Heart. Torrential downpour means that until it comes back to Lion Hart's turn, characters can only do one action. So that's that's an interesting situation for both Veil Walker and Sanctifra. Uh so we'll leave that into state. This stays beside the board until it expires and come back comes back to Lionhe Heart's turn. So it goes to Sanctifra's turn now. Sanctifra is going to move here, move here and expose this tile, then come back here. Um, can get position to pick up the water to freeze the lake to come get the chalice, I think, in the next turn. So, uh, we'll take care of that and we'll show what it looks like. She came down here. It is a shield, which would be very helpful for, uh, Veil Walker or Lion Heart, but, uh, comes back up here and gets a position to pick up the water spell, freeze the lake, come down and get the chalice. So that's uh let's draw a uh divine intervention card for sanctifra portal vortex. For the remainder of the game, monasteries and watchtowers may be used as portal. Leave this card next to the map. Okay, so there is one such element on the map already. So this watchtowwer now is a portal as well. So characters can portal to there if they would like to. So I think a good move for Veil Walker actually is going to be use her pickpocket ability. And I think we're getting this right because we'll take a look at Lion Hart here. She can pickpocket any item that Lion Hart has.
My understanding is that because this represents an upgraded shield, when she pickpockets this item, she gets both of these things because it's not two shields. It's kind of an upgraded stronger shield. So she gets that and can drop that down on her card, giving her a kind of a much better situation for taking out Lionhe Heart in the future. And now we go to her divine intervention card. Heal all players in forests heal two hit points. Sanctifra in a forest heals two hit points. Goes from five to seven. Veil Walker in a forest goes to five to max health of six. And that ends the torrential downpour where Sanctifra and Veil Walker can only do one action. We remove the torrential downpour from the game and we go back to Lion Hart's turn where he'll have two actions. Boy, the loss of shields here really hurts Lionhe Heart, but I think he's going to go all attack.
He's got that double powered sword. Let's uh see how it works. And he's got two actions. So, we're going to have him attack twice on Veil Walker and see what kind of damage we can do. So, uh, first up, what kind of attack is this? This is a D8 attack because he's got that plus a basic attack die roll. However, uh, Veil Walker has the Veil Walker has the double strength shield and a terrain die for being in the forest here. Okay, let's roll up this attack. Lion Hart takes a swing with his powerful sword and gets two hits. He's got a sword icon and one hit. So, that's two hits on Veil Walker. Bailwalker's defensive role. Oh, two shields and it forces a drop of a weapon. That's a powerful one. So, she blocks all of the damage and Lion Hart has to drop his sword, which means that the sword goes down on the ground here and that changes everything perhaps for the second attack here. Um, because he doesn't have a he doesn't have a weapon.
So, um, and I think when you pick it up, you can only pick up one of these at a time, even though it's considered kind of a double. You can only pick up one token at a time. Uh, he's going to actually do that. He's going to pick up this token. He better get his weapon back instead of conducting a second attack. And that finishes, uh, Lion Hart's turn here. Complete fail of an attack. And we need to draw a divine intervention card. Divine intervention card for Lionhe Heart is Earthquake. Oh, this is interesting. So, this is all unoccupied orthagonally reward revealed adjacent tiles to the current player are shuffled with the extra map tiles and placed back on the map in their unrevealed side.
Interestingly enough, that means the items on them go back into the bag. So, there goes the chalice again. It's going to be hard to get the chalice out. This might mean it might be a battle to the death here. So, we're going to take these two tiles. I'm going to mix them up with the unrevealed tiles with the tiles that are still uh left over and weren't used in this game. And then we're going to put down two new unrevealed tiles on the map here. Two new tiles back down on the map. Another chalice vanishes. Boy, from going close to victory. Both sides now are slipping away from victory here. Uh let's go to uh Sanctifra's turn. All right, Sanctifra is going to be real simple here. She's going to uh pick up the water spell for one action, then move over here for her second action. Cast the water spell to free cuz you can cast it anytime during your turn. Cast it to freeze the lake and then move down here to the frozen lake where she can grab this chalice and hopefully for her anyway, get uh onethird of the way towards victory, although she's the only one holding a chalice now. Everybody else has dropped theirs. And let's pick up a divine intervention card for Sanctifra. Heal all players in this tile. Heal one hit point. Sanctifra goes from seven back up to eight hit points.
She's back to full strength. All right, let's go to Veil Walker. Veil Walker's kind of stuck between a rock and hard place. She's got Sanctifra kind of bearing down on her from the from the the northeast here. And she can't get around Lion Hart. She can't go north because of the lake here. She doesn't have any spells. She does have a shield and her bow, though, which makes me think it might be time just to attack. If she moved here and tried to attack from range, though, it would be blocked by the force. So, she'd have to attack and face Lion Hart's retaliation. Um, but she could attack twice. And she does have a double strength bow and has a double shield. And Lion Hart has just his whimsy wimpy wimpy sword now. So, let's do it. Um, let's let's see if we can knock Lion Hart out because he doesn't have a revivified card. We're going to have Veil Walker fire at Lionhe Heart. It's a basic attack plus the D8 die for the double bow. Lion Hart gets the red defensive die for the terrain and has no shield. So, no other defense here. Let's roll for this attack. Oh, that's two for the bow and two for the attack points. four hit points worth of damage. That Ryan Lion Hart only has four hit points. This is a big roll for Lion Hart. He gets two in a city, which is where he is. Oh, that li that roll saved his life. So, four hits done, two hits get through. Lion Hart goes from four down to two, bleeding profusely on the
verge of getting knocked out. Lion Hart, however, has his retaliation ability. He can use that for his attack. He gets the D6 for the attack roll, the basic attack. Uh, Veil uh, Veil Walker gets the forest die, the defensive die cuz she's in the forest, and she stole the shield die from Lion Heart, so she gets the D8 shield. Let's roll for the attack. Ooh, sword and two hits. Actually, three hits on Veil Walker. That's a powerful hit. But let's see what kind of defense we get.
defense. We get the town, which does nothing because she's in the forest, and she gets a shield and some symbol. I do not know. The prototype rule book had a different symbol, but I figured it out. This means the defender can ask the attacker to roll one of their dice. So, let's have them reroll the two hit here. Hopefully get something maybe less. Two hits, same thing. So, it doesn't matter. So that means that one hit is blocked, three hits, two hits get through. Veil Walker loses two hit points. Six down to four. Second action though, uh because Lion Hart's down to two hit points, I think it makes sense for Veil Walker to try to just finish him off and take him out of the battle. So she's going to attack again. The one die plus the D8 attack die. And Lionheart only has the terrain die. So let's get one more attack for Veil Walker. She needs two hits potentially to finish this off. Oh, she Oh, it's a sword. Okay, so two swords don't matter cuz she's got a bow.
She does get two hits and sh the defensive die must turn up for Lion Hart or he falls to the ground. He gets a forest. He's in the city. The forest die doesn't do any good. Two hits get through Lion Hart and he goes to zero hit points. However, there is a rule. You when this happens, you draw a card and if you draw the Revivify card, you stay in the game with one hit point. So, Lion Hart's only hope is to draw the Revivify card. He picks Guardian Angel. It doesn't work. So, that is the end of Lion Hart, who falls to the ground, knocked out of the battle. Lion Hart is removed from the game. His items fall to the ground and he is gone, leaving a Sanctifrax and a wounded Veil Walker to fight for the final elements of the three chalicees here. Now, there's only these two chalice markers out on the board. Might be a battle to the death. The problem here is that um Bill Walker has a a rather long range bow, but it is not her turn. It is Sanctifra's turn right now.
Before we do that, we do have to pick the divine intervention card for Veil Walker. Oh, St. Michael's sword. So, she can attack. It ignores all kinds of defense. She will attack Sanctifra with this. It's a good card for her. Let's pull this up and see what happens. Ah, she gets a zero no damage whatsoever. So, that doesn't help at all. Let's go to Sanctifra's turn. Now, Sanctifrax has a big edge in HP. She's got eight and Veil Walker's only got four. Um I I think going for the chalicees aren't isn't going to work very well for Sanctifrax because Veil Walker could just come up to her and steal them. So, and there aren't many spaces left to uh kind of basically kind of pick up chalicees. So, I think it's going to be a fight to a death. So, we're going to have Sanctifra ignore the chalice there, move up onto the hill, which allows her to roll one of her attack dice. She can attack at an angle here on Veil Walker. And she rolls two dice and picks the higher one as her basic attack, but she also can roll one of these if she doesn't like them. So, let's get that. And nothing that uh Veil Walker can do, but Veil Walker does get the defensive die for the shield and for the terrain here. The attack each does one. She'll roll one of these and see what it does.
Still gets a one, so she gets only one hit. My guess is that the defense here for Veil Walker is going to handle that without a problem. She gets one shield here. Yeah, one shield and the town, the shield stops it, so nothing gets through. Very interesting spot here now for for them. Let's go to Veil Walker's turn. She's just going to Let's just She's going to go for it. She's going to just fight it out. Um, she can basically attack twice with her bow. Oh, we could draw the divine intervention card for Sanctifrax first. Metal blight. Oh, wow. This is such a bad card for Veil Walker. All currently equipped weapons and shields are removed from the game and placed back in the Relic Wars token container for all players. New ones may be acquired when revealed, so only equipped ones are dropped. But that was the bow for her and the shields. Wow, what a horrific card here. So all the bows, her double grade bow and her double grade shield go back into the container and she's she can't even attack now unless she gets next to Sanctifra. Oh, that's like a total fail for Veil Walker. Let's rethink her turn then. Yeah, let's have uh Veil Walker pick up the chalice here and get on the move. So, she's going to try to get three chalicees maybe and come over here with two and then sit in this city for a moment while she waits to figure out what's going to happen. I think she can pick Yeah, actually, let's go. Let's go one more. Let's expose this one here and see if she This one here in the corner
and go into that one. Let's see what she finds here. I suppose we could have picked up the weapon. That might have been smarter. But she could get lucky here and get the chal. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in this bag now, though. Oh, she gets her bow back if she can pick that up. Okay, that's a good one. so she can at least get the single strength bow back on the next turn. Okay, Sanctifra is up first over the Divine Intervention card for Veil Walker. Wheel of Life. Wheel of Life means that all of the Revivified cards that are in the deck get shuffled back into the remainder of the Divine Intervention deck. So, there's going to be a lot of them in here. So, that is taken care of. Let's go to Sanctifra's turn. Given that Sanctifra has eight hit points left and Veil Walker has four and no weapons or shields, I think it's time for Sanctifra to go on the offensive. So she's going to go one, two, three, four, five, be in the town here, and then use her attack right on Veil Walker here. Sanctifra's attack is the two dice which she can roll. And Veil Walker gets just the terrain die cuz she no longer has a shield. So let's roll up this attack here. She gets to pick which one of the higher. She'll take the two, of course.
And then the defensive die for Veil Walker is two cities. She's in a forest. No good. So, two hits get through. Veil Walker drops down to two HP, which is problematic here. And we draw a divine intervention card. Heal. All players in fields heal one hit point. Neither player is in a field. So, now we go to Veil Walker's turn. Veil Walker's turn is looking pretty grim. She's down to two hit points. She does have a revivify card. Doesn't have much of an attack. And Sanctifra is in a town, so she'd get some defense here, but she could die on the next turn. It's looking a little bit grim here. And she's kind of trapped in the corner. Well, let's pick up the bow to get a weapon here. That'll help with a little bit with the attack strength here.
And gosh, he's got to run maybe. Yeah, let's go two up here. And then we're going to come into this one. Oh, perfect. This is the monastery. This is exactly what we're looking for. That wasn't in the game yet. Plus two. You heal plus two before your divine intervention pull. So, we'll put an item on this one as well, which is a chalice, a second chalice, interestingly. And that ends her turn. But before we pull the divine intervention card, she heals back up to four strength. So, but but we're going to pull a divine intervention card, too. Sanctifra is going to get two attacks. It's still kind of powerful here. Divine intervention card says heal. Player in this tile is healed two hit HP. It goes on. Veil Walker goes from 4 HP all the way up to max HP, 6 HP. So, a very fortuitous turn for Veil Walker, who runs into the monastery, gets healed there, and then gets a double heal by picking up another one of the monastery, the uh the the divine intervention cards. Let's go now to Sanctifra's turn.
Ideally, Sanctifra really needs to push Veil Walker off of this tile. A water spell does have that one of its features that you can cast it to push a character in one direction. So I cuz I think if Veil Walker just sits here, she's going to be unbeatable, right? There's going to be not anything we can do really to get her off that tile and it could be problematic. Sanctifra can't pick up the sword, so it doesn't do any good. So let's have Sanctifra run here, two, three, pick up the water spell and then hold it cuz what she wants to do is cast it, push Veil Walker off, and then move on to the monastery. And that will probably win her the game. There's no other water spells out on the tile here. But that begets the question of what does Veil Walker want to do? Oh, we have to divide divine intervention card for Sanctifra first. Oh, St. Michael's sword an undefensible attack. Let's see what happens here. Three hit points. Oh, that's huge. Kind of, but not really that big of a deal. So, she goes down three, six down to three.
But, as we go to Veil Walker's turn, she can literally just sit here on this monastery. She'll pick up the chalice which gets her a second chalice here. And that gives her two chalice, one more attack. The line of sight from the center to the center, I believe, is blocked by the edge of this forest here. So, I don't think she can shoot with her bow. The range actually is only two on the bow easily. So, that doesn't help her either. That's a range of three orthogonally. So, the question is, what does she want to do? Does she want to move? Ah, she's going to sit there and then heal back up. She goes up to five. Divine intervention card time. Revivify. It could reveal a tile, but there isn't one there. So, nothing happens with that because she's already got one. Sanctifra's turn. Sanctifra is going to go two three four.
Cast cast the water spell to push her any one direction. Let's push her. We can't push her where we are. We can't push her in the lake because that's water. Push her in the forest gives her good defense. May roll an attack roll, but still whatever. Let's push her this way actually because we don't want her to run over to get the other chalice. And then with the last movement points, the last one movement point, she's going to move into here, which puts her on the monastery and gives her the healing power of the monastery. And that is a move. Actually, the water spell isn't isn't extra movement. Isn't an extra action cuz those are free actions. So, she's moved. She can attack then. So, she's going to attack Veil Walker with her two dice here and picks to pick the highest one. Gets two twos. So, she'll put two hits on Veil Walker. Veil Walker's Predicament suddenly not looking so good. Veil Walker drops down to three HP. It goes to her. Oh, it draw divine intervention card for Sanctifra.
Divine intervention card is portal instability. Any players on a portal are transported to another portal if available. But there is no no one is on a portal right now. So that does not impact anything. So Veil Walker's holding two chalicees. The third chalice is over here. She potentially could get there, but the only way to get there is to go around to the south, which is going to give Sanctifrax one more attack. If she survives it, she could run over and get the chalice and still win cuz that lake is frozen. So that's our play. We're going to go two 3 4. We have to stop there cuz she has a movement of five. She doesn't have enough to get Oh, but second movement. She's not going to attack. She can do her second movement here. Two three four five to expose this one right here, which is a shield. And she's in. Next turn, she can grab the chalice and perhaps win. We have to draw a divine intervention card first. St. Michael's sword. That's pretty good. So, she gets to roll an attack on Sanctifra. Does no damage. So, that's a wimpy St. Michael's sword. Now, we go to Sanctifra's turn. What happens if a character gets the chalice? So, on the next turn, Bill Walker's going to get the chalice and she can pick it up and just run. This just has to survive one turn to get the win that way. Sanctifra has got to move. Um, so she's got to try to do something to stop this from happening, which means coming down basically and attacking. Now, I think we
want to come around this way so we can force Veil Walker into the slower terrain here. Maybe she can jump through portals and stuff, too. Yeah, I think we want to keep her away from the portals. So, let's go. Oh, actually, we can do this, which is we're going to make a double move, too. So we can go two 3 4 5 six. Second move. 1 2 and just sit right here on frozen lake denying Veil Walker the chalice. Ha. Okay. Divine intervention card. Reilify. There are no unexposed tiles. So this doesn't do anything. And each character already has one. So, Veil Walker has an interesting situation because she's down to 3 HP, but she could potentially run back over to the monastery, sit in the monastery, and heal back up. Meanwhile, picking up the shields and the weapons here. Um, and there's not much Sanctifra could do to stop that once she gets into the monastery. But, Sanctifra can't win by picking up chalicees, and she stays there. So, you could create kind of a little bit of a stalemate here with this one. But I think for the sake of seeing what happens here, we can she can actually get off two attacks on Sanctifax, which would be pretty powerful. Let's have them go toe-to-toe see who wins here. We're going to have Veil Walker unleash an attack, which is one basic attack die plus her bow there, which is going to get some kind of damage. And then Sanctifra is on a no defensible terrain here. So here comes the attack. It is a sword and one hit.
So it does one hit. So, Sanctifrax eight down to seven. Second attack. Yeah, let's do the second attack and see what happens here. We should be able to get some pretty good damage here. Two hits and a sword. The sword doesn't do anything, but the two hits do. Down to five. Sanctifra, however, now has the advantage here. But we have to draw a divine intervention card here first. So, let's draw a divine intervention card for Veil Walker. Holy smite. Player in this tile is struck with lightning. Roll an attack roll die against yourself using one attack die. Oh, that's that's bad. So, oh no, it's the three hits. So, holy smite hits the Veil Walker for three, reducing her to zero. However, she has the revivify card, which she can play to come back to life with one hit point. But that's the end of her turn.
It's Sanctifra's turn. She's going to go on the attack here. There's no defensive die for this. She just gets to roll two dice and to pick the highest attack. This should finish off Veil Walker. First attack does one damage and Veil Walker falls unless she draws a revivify card with the divine intervention. Petty gods. It is not. Veil Walker falls and the victory goes to Sanctifra, our winner. That brings us to the end of this replay. This was so this is my fourth game. Now, this one went on for the longest. In many ways, this game reminds me a little bit of kind of like a a baseball game, right?
Where some games are really fast and they're low scoring and and someone gets the chalicees and wins with three chalicees. Other ones are just slugfests that swing back and forth and you see comebacks and revivals and all kinds of things to keep a player back in the game, have them come back to strength. Uh, this one was like that. This was by far the longest one I played. Now, at the end there, it, you know, thinking through this, it probably made the most sense for Veil Walker to grab the shield, run over here, try to grab these two swords, heal up, and then come back and probably try to take out Sanctifrax that way. That was probably the the better move. And the the holy smite was was unfortunate for mailwalker there. That divine intervention uh kind of kind of really twisted the the tail there. I think Sanctif would have been able to chase her down perhaps and get her before she got back to the monastery.
Maybe finishing her off that way. It it's a little bit tricky to say. It created an interesting situation where there was no more tiles. You couldn't get the third chalice. I mean, the win here is if Bailwalker gets the chalice, but the kind of instant back to life here is if you get back over to the monastery and you can kind of be almost immortal here because you can hold up, you get two hit points. I suppose you could grind a character down, but that's a, you know, a big advantage if you're sitting on that monastery um pulling that that plus two healing there. So, it created kind of an interesting almost a little bit of a a stalemate as it came to the end here. And that's the first time that something like that has happened. Um, you know, that first game I played was fast, second game was more medium, third game went on probably a medium range. This one was the longest one. I wasn't expecting things to go quite this way, but it does have, I think, a good um, what's the right way to put it there. At times you feel like you're almost dead, but the game has a lot of ways to kind of bring you back into power. You know, you can see a character even like Lion Hart got hammered down in the beginning, but then came back pretty strong and then lost weapons. Veil Walker had some unfortunate actions there. the the the metal blight there that wiped out her weapons. I mean, she was on the verge of victory there, that would have done it.
Um, and still, I think even there at the end, had we perhaps made that move over here to try to get back to the monastery, that could have brought her back in a little bit stronger position. It probably wasn't the wisest strategy to try to go toe-to-toe with Sanctifra um at that situation down in hit points there or at least pick up the shield and then go for it. That might have been the right way to go, but the holy smite really kind of finished things off there. In any case, curious to hear your thoughts and actions. This should give you an idea of gameplay. If you're interested in picking this one up, it's available on Kickstarter starting on May 6th. Victory to Sanctifra.