Kreel Manor: The Dungeon Crawl Card Game (review)

0:13 hey everybody welcome back to the dungeon dive Daniel here I hope you're doing well and if you're not I hope you are soon okay I have been wanting to make a video on Veil wraith for some time now this is a game from Tristan Hall and Tristan Hall is of course the designer of games like Gloom of kilforth and shadows of Kil forth amongst many others and vrai is a solo player only a solo only card game and I know that Ricky Royal really likes this game a lot box of delights and it makes a lot of sense the game is mechanically I think pretty interesting however I struggled with this game thematically and the reason why I never made a video on it is simply that I didn't have enough to say about it I didn't find the game interesting enough outside of the mechanisms and I struggled with connecting the dots between what I was doing as while I was playing the card game and what I was supposed to be doing as the character in the game I've even read the the opening little story multiple times you're some kind of spirit of veil Wraith in a world that is post-apocalyptic or something and you're trying to get through a gate and you need to play through something like 20

1:44 games in a row in order to win the campaign there's a little bit of deck building um it all just felt like the thinnest little veil the thinnest little layer of theme on top of what really is just a mechanically driven card game you know I don't know if you told me that this game was designed by somebody like re uh rer kitzia I might believe you it feels like that it feels like a kitzia game mechanically interesting thematically kind of weak and that brings me to cre Manor cre Manor is a new game from Tristan Hall and this was recently delivered from Kickstarter I was a backer of veil wraith I was also a backer of cre Manor and cre Manor is a Dungeon Crawl card game made specifically for one player but you can also play up to three players but I would probably only focus with this as a single player game and cre Manor takes all of the good stuff all of that mechanical goodness all of the the nice tight card play from Veil wraith and adds some really good theme on top of it and I think cre Manor is everything good about Veil wraith with none of the bad things about Veil wraith and so this has completely replaced Veil wraith for me I will be selling this and keeping this because I think cre Manor is a pretty

3:16 cool game okay so let's take a look at Krill Manor and see what we get in the Box we'll take a look at all the components all of the various cards and then we'll do a little setup and we'll kind of talk about how the game is played so KR Manor is a Dungeon Crawl card game you are taking one of three characters we have three different classes three different characters we have our night Raven our wolf of the North and the war Mage and each one of these has male and female Sides Now each one of these characters has their own deck of skills and some of those skills can be upgraded each of these characters has their own deck of assets and those are weapons and armor and followers that they can can uh earn during the game and also each one of these characters has its own deck of story cards and the story cards will also correspond to the book of fables and the Book of fables includes all of the little narrative Snippets of text little uh flavor text and stories that you will be reading throughout a campaign a campaign of creel Manor consists of five different games starting with Adventure 1 through Adventure 5 now Adventure one is always the same you always start at the entrance to creel Manor Adventure five is always the same you always end up in the same place but Adventures 2 3 and four those will have different Adventures depending on the choices that you make with your story cards or

4:48 through the book of fables so there is some variety here and I think the variety is pretty good for such a medium sized box and a just a kind of a large deck of cards quite a few cards you do get a lot of replay value so let's take a look at our cards here first I do have some of the cards separated out for the first Adventure because each Adventure you will be creating subdecks of all of your various various cards you have threats these are your kind of typical your your your low uh danger encounters you have foes which are kind of like like your bosses your encounters that have a higher level of difficulty we have all of our hero skills and these are separated out by your generic skills that all the heroes have access to and then there are also those custom skills that each class has access to I also have my class stories mixed in here uh we have silver assets which are different things that the characters can earn Brawn assets actions class assets statuses and wounds and so with the regular threats there will be groups of threats and the group will be listed on the bottom so each group of threats will consist of one plot card and a number of different encounter cards I believe it's five 1 2 3 four five so yes so this verman swarm

6:20 group consists of the sealed barrels plot card and then it also consists of two rat things and three Refuge beasts and so when you are playing through an adventure you will have to defeat a number of the different plots as well as taking care of any of the foes the normal threats those can be ignored or mitigated or defeated as you see fit but you do need to encounter and defeat each one of the plots for example you might come across this sealed Barrel plot if you are playing with the verman Swarms in your group of cards and to defeat it you have to have an attack value of five or a sneak value of six we'll talk about how you earn those totals in a bit and if you do then you get a choice you can open them you can smash them or you can ignite them and depending on what you choose you will turn to that paragraph in the book of fables so this card right here has three different outcomes so I think that is pretty cool so in the first Adventure that we're playing these are all of the threat cards so we are using the Vermin swarm we are using the manor servants we are using the wild claws we are using the Deep dwarves and we are using the manor guard so there are five different plots that we have to overcome that we have to to chall to face off against in order to beat that first Adventure if we turn to our adventure cards here which is maybe

7:51 where I should have started where a smart person would have started but uh you know me I'm always doing things backwards here but we have our adventure card so the adventure cards are locations and those have a purple banner and that purple Banner tells you which groups of threats you are going to use if you are playing with uh more than three heroes or three or more Heroes then you will also add an additional threat group so the first Adventure always starts in the Great Hall of creel we are as a character we are approaching cre Manor to investigate to go through the dungeon of cre manner to defeat the evil that lies within this adventure always starts in the same location and that is the Regal Gateway and so we have to overcome this location before we can move on to the next location then as you can see as you progress through the campaign you will have choices of which Adventures to do next so Adventure Two we have a b and c Adventure 3 A B and C Adventure 4 a b and c and then finally Adventure 5 all Adventures end up all campaigns end up in the Lord's layer where you're trying to defeat the ultimate Evil there is also an endless variant where you can just set up a whole bunch of different random cards and play a game without having to worry about the campaign or the story the other Quest cards here are the different

9:21 locations and so we have our green locations and our red locations these are a little easier these are a little more difficult but the locations will be things like ambry's blood infirmary or the S The Sentinel guard room The Fragrant fragrant Bath House Oasis the sge guest quarters uh perhaps the cave of spectral Whispers uh we also have uh places like the celestial Dueling Grounds the chromatic kalpa Gallery the Imperial Master's suite and the Boreal towers of menar and each of your adventures will tell you how many locations there are so remember the adventure card is also a location so this is the location that we have to defeat to win this adventure we start here in the Regal cre at at the Gateway and then we have to have two standard locations and so you'll mix up your standard your green locations and then you will choose two of those at random and those will be added into this stack here so we will be progressing from the Regal Gateway to these two locations and then finally ending up at the Great Hall of creel the other two locations let's see what we have here we have the torture Asylum and the crafts Spire Workshop really interesting I mixed those up and those were the exact two that I have drawn for my last two games something about this game is forcing me to play those so that's how you set up your adventure and then again

10:52 you will look at your final location and you will create your threat deck using those and you will create different subsets of those decks and then stack them together in a certain way that first Adventure also has the goblin Chief and the main foe so you will take that card out and then it also tells you to take out your worm kin goblins and these might get added to your threat area as you are playing and then finally we have a Lord's Vengeance card and this kind of acts as a timer if you ever run out of a certain deck of cards if you ever run out of threat cards and you have to reshuffle then you Shuffle this guy back in and it kind of Lights a fire under your feet and you want to win the game before this guy is drawn again and that's one of the ways that you can lose so we have a whole bunch of different other threats that come with the game and again those are all divided into plot one plot for each and five encounters for each so for our blood Tusk Orcs here we have the Monstrous orc is the plot and then we have the half orc uh the blood Tusk and the ravager uh here we have for the dark hand and this is a faction we have the darkhand Priestess is the plot and then we have the darkhand Assassin and the darkhand Rogue and so you get a pretty huge stack of different threats here so I'll put those off to the side because we don't need those for for this adventure and then our foes so these are all these stronger enemies the little uh sub bosses and the big bads that we have to

12:24 defeat in each one of the quests again the quest the big bad Foe for this first Adventure is the goblin Chief but you might come across things like zombie Warriors or Lord creel himself the spectral dancer a nature Sprite Spirit a lizard man Champion an aberant wretch the armored Jailer the Doom Guardian The darkhand Scribe or maybe the doom armorer and like Gloom of kilforth like shadow of kilforth the art in this game is very pretty uh this goes for a very kind of pretty look and it is kind of the art is pretty fantastic if you're into that kind of style so here we have all of our hero cards and again I have these separated a little differently than the game actually tells you to so these are all of the cards here for our Thief style character these are the cards here for our Warrior character these are the cards for our mage character and then these are the card cards that all the characters have access to and so you will start a game with 20 different skills and you can build your hand of different skill cards as you are going there's a little bit of deck construction at the beginning of the game you will be told to take your 10 basic skill cards so we'll play as the night Raven here and so these are 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 different basic skill

13:57 cards things like r tenacity the silent approach Shadow slip hidden Advance Sly cunning and so on and then we also have an ultimate and your ultimate is an ultimate ability that you get to use when all of your other skills have been used you will then have access to this final card in your skill deck and then of course each of the characters also has their own story deck and so the story in adventure one you will start here you will read this Adventure then you will have a choice depending on what you choose between the next two cards you will add that card into the threat deck of your next game and when you encounter that card you will again make another choice and these cards will help you to uh navigate through the book of fables as well as unlocking assets and character upgrades for your deck of cards because each of the characters also has an upgrade deck and the upgrade deck you will be able to substitute out the old card for the new card for the more powerful version and then finally in the instruction book in the manual here the rule book there is a suggested number of 10 basic skills that you want to use and so you can have things like Hasty strik Soulful Serenity hurling projectile Gallows humor and things like that so this is the

15:27 suggested starting deck for all the characters and then you will take both of those decks and you will Shuffle those together and so that will be your characters starting deck of skills two of there are two decks of 10 cards each so we can put that aside here are the other generic skills that you can mix in to create your deck at the beginning of the game or between games if you want to modify your deck a little bit so here here's our Thief story cards we'll put those aside and then again here's all of our cards for our warrior with all of their skills and stories and all of their upgrades and then we also have all of our story and skill and skill upgrade cards for our magic user so again a lot of variety here this game packs a lot of punch into a pretty small little box and the Box could actually be a lot smaller uh that was another issue I had with Veil RAF is the box was just way too big for the number of components and that's kind of the same here so we have our silver assets and these are more powerful items that we can unlock throughout the game such as uh armor and different types of followers different types of weapons one inh hand oneand and two-handed weapons different things that we can keep in our backpack so all kinds of different equipment that we can unlock those are the Silver unlocks and then we also have the bronze assets so these are a little less powerful but

16:58 there's more of them we have axes and helmets and lanterns and fruit so just your kind of typical fantasy items that you might get while you're on an adventure we also have our class assets so these are the special items that each of the classes has access to each class has access to their own unique deck of assets so we have our uh starting Longbow for Thief character so they start with that and then the thief character can also get poisonous darts thieving tools silent razors and black leather our Warrior character has access to the wolven blade Destiny's Edge The agis Shield the wolven male and the uh the war s of Amber man that's a pretty cool that gives you a plus one to all of your stats and then your wizard has the Tome of magi the silver dagger the Ivan spell book The Mystic robes and the aonic headpiece so really cool I love that each of the classes has their own unique custom deck of assets we also have our statuses so there are three different statuses and these statuses can either be applied to your heroes or to threats and foes and things that you might have to uh fight against so we have Shield hero or Shield threat we have dazed action and dazed threat and we have bold hero and bold threat so these are just conditions that

18:30 can be applied to any of the cards that you might come across in the game we also have our wounds so one of the ways that you lose this game is if you ever are suffering Five Wounds you have lost the campaign and you have to start over if you lose an adventure you draw a wound at random and then you replay that adventure and this wound makes things harder so there's kind of a negative snowballing effect as your character becomes more and more afflicted by wounds it will be harder and harder to progress but these wounds will be things like shattered ribs chest trauma fractured shoulder a dis lesion an ugly scar a gouged eye and splintered shins so all kinds of really nasty things that you can become Afflicted with and then finally we have our core actions and this is really where the game has a lot of similarities between Veith between this and Veith because of the way that these actions work and the choices that you have while you are playing the game and this game has a lot of choices so if you like making choices in your games I think you will like this game quite a bit so we'll take our night Raven car character out here their lofty Ambitions notwithstanding one thing is for certain they're not afraid of getting their hands dirty sending their finest assassin to the haunts of cre Manor was something of a an in inevitability particularly when the

20:02 princely award for the safe return of the kidnapped Contessa was announced so the night Raven her or his their mission in cre Manor is to rescue the the kidnapped Contessa so here we have places around our character card to keep our helmets our body armor things that we are wearing on our feet our boots different things that we have stored in our backpack and our different weapons and we will put that card right here we will take our two-handed bow our starless long bow and we will place that off to the side here we have our deck of skill cards we can choose one of our starting hero class uh cards to take into our hand at the beginning of the game so uh let's take our silent approach here and then I will give these another Shuffle the characters will also start with a certain number of spirits this is their life points and you can never go above that but you do have quite a few opportunities to heal so we start with H 20 so we'll take our dial here and set that to 20 so that's our starting life and then we have our three actions we have red blue and green actions and those will correspond to your different characters so each of the characters different actions are slightly different but we have red for fighting and that goes in slot one we have our influence

21:34 blue for influence goes into slot two and finally our sneak goes into slot three the number associated with the slot also corresponds to how powerful that action is when we use it so if we were to use a fight action in slot one that would be used for one power one fight power if I have a bow equipped or anything else equipped that adds to that value then I get to use that as well so right now because of my bow at a plus one fight my fight attack action is at 02 when you use an ability so let's say that I was using my influence ability at two so that's for two power I could apply two damage two influence damage to a threat as soon as you use that ability it drops to one and the other cards move up so now my influence ability is at Power one my fight is at Power two if I were to use my sneak ability at a power three I could do apply three damage to something that would go down to one and then my fight would move up so you're kind of constantly cycling these in and out of their various slots for different Power values you can also power up these abilities once per turn you can simply tilt an ability and you can add a D6 to that starting with one and then that adds a bonus then you can tilt it again

23:05 to power up again on your next turn pushing that up to a two and then you can use those Pips as extra power as you see fit and so part of this game is learning when to use your powers how to manipulate your powers in The Columns and the strength uh slots that that they are in at the most opportune time to do the most damage and then also how those will be repositioned for future turns down the road because as you are facing off against your various threats so these sealed barrels you either need to have a six you have to do six snake damage or five fight damage and you can apply your tokens here so for instance if this was out in the threat area my sealed barrels and I I had this configuration right here I could use my threat and I could tap that for one two three applying three threat damage to this particular threat here so I could take a damage marker of a two and a one and now I am halfway there to defeating those bottle to those barrels to defeating that plot and being able to push further into cre Manor it's a really interesting mechanism there are a lot of choices to be made because not only do you have access to these three different

24:37 actions each turn and you can do one action per turn and you can strengthen one of your actions per turn but you also have your deck of cards and you will be slowly building up a hand of up to six of these various actions and these actions can be used to make each one of those actions stronger or they can do a additional things will allow you to have um additional choices to be made from one turn to the next it's all very interesting and you will feel very clever as you are playing this game as you are putting together good combinations you will start to learn various combinations and you will start to become better at this game this game rewards careful play it rewards um attention and you will learn to be a better player at this game there isn't a lot of luck in this game you're never rolling dice to attack you always kind of know what you are going to do and you need to be smart from one turn to the next so we can take a look at our uh cards here so here is again we're starting at the Regal Gateway to progress to the next location we have to apply two sneak damage so we have to sneak through this card and so as we build up our our our sneak um Power we can add sneak damage here and then we can as soon as we have two at a certain time during our turn then we will move on to the next location the locations

26:09 also have these active abilities here and if I ever have an influence of three or more I can take this special location action that doesn't cost me any power I don't have to use my influence ability it's just a check to see if you have that that much of one of those abilities then you can do the special thing in that location this is a really cool one the craft Spire Workshop if I have a fight value of three or more then I can construct I can craft a bronze asset and I can do that once per game uh with here with the torture Asylum if I have a fight of three or more I can unlock the iron maiden and and and uh rescue a follower and then I can find a follower in one of the asset decks and I can add them to my character and they can help me on the rest of the game so each one of those locations has different things that you can do depending on your active abilities and the strength of each one of your abilities again another Choice another thing that you might want to be working towards as you are leveling up as you are powering up those abilities now the next thing you'll do is you will take all of your various threat cards and you will organize those into a number of different subdecks and then stack those in a certain order so there is quite a bit of setup as you can see the two pages of setup and you do need

27:39 to do this for each Adventure so it's not a simple game of just getting the cards out of the box there is quite a bit of setup and I think that's where some of the complication issues come into play and so just remember that the threats have two different names we have the threat group and the specific threat and so if you can't find the verman Swarm card you're looking through the Vermin swarm because you're looking here at the name of the card no that is the name of the faction that's the name of the group that they are part of so if you can't find a card just look at one of the other names on the card and you will you will you will be able to find it I had that issue I was looking for a threat when I should have been looking for a name or vice versa but yeah just just know that going in that each card does have two different names and so you will gather the green board the the plot cards for each and then you will Shuffle those so I'm going to do the uh setup off camera so we don't have to go through that okay so there is our threat deck we have to work through this deck while we are also working through our various locations trying to work our way into cre Manor we will take our threat cards and we will place those uh let's Place those right here here and then we also have what is called the shadow area and the shadow area is where enemies and threats are staged before they come out into the threat area and we have to

29:11 engage with them so you'll use some of these tokens to keep track of your threat area we have threat or your Shadow area we have three two and one and these tokens will correspond to how easy it is for us to view the things in the shadows so if something is in Shadow slot three we can spend three points of sneak power to reveal that card and one of the abilities that the night Raven has is the ability to actually attack things that are in the shadows not all characters not all abilities will allow you to attack things in the shadows you can attack things before they engage with you so that's a really powerful ability for the night Raven so the first thing we do is we take one card and we add that to uh shadow Area 3 just off the camera up there but we'll keep this area here ready for our our uh threat management area and so and then uh basically the game uh begins you will have your story card number one at the beginning of the game will be placed in your threat card and that will show you on your character card it'll tell you which story card to add to the first game and then we can take this and read it so we have the sneaky entrance in theil shroud of night you linger at the threshold of the OM ominous Fortress draped in Shadows that conceal every subtle movement the mission fraught with Peril command you to infiltrate the Manor's profound recesses rescuing the

30:41 captive Contessa and snared against her will a crucial decision about your fate plagues you noiselessly you weave into the dark and DEA fingers poised to navigate locked portals and concealed pitfalls the corridor before you stretches Into Obscurity harboring Untold Legends two paths unfurl we can proceed with restrained prowess advancing deeper into the manner's core if you choose that we will take story card number three or we can attune our senses to the night listening for hints of unseen Sentinels EAS dropping on the clandestine conversations of guards as you continue your exploration of the manner uh let's proceed with restrain powers and take story card number three so we will take that from our story deck and we will put that off to the side and then this is mixed into our threat deck during the next adventure so during the next adventure the choices that we make in the previous Adventure will have some bearing that is really cool I love that idea now we can go through the various steps of a turn we have our delve step which is our story we just did that any delve abilities if you had anything with the keyword delve that would trigger now if you have explored a location if you have put two points of damage of sneak damage on this card this location is explored and then we would move on to the next location at that point you could check for victory then you could

32:12 do uh any local effects that take place during the Del phase would happen and now we have our threat phase the threat phase is where the threats come out this is where the bad stuff comes out so anything in slots three or two move down if if something was in slot one that would become an active threat and now we add a card to Shadow slot number three so as you can see at the beginning of a game you have a few turns to kind of build up your hand and to build up some of your power okay so now it is our turn we draw one skill so I'll draw the top skill for my card so now uh for my deck so now we have silent approach and Sly cunning these are two cards that we have in our hand again and you can have up to six of these in your hand and now we can play our skills so we can play any of these skills a lot of these skills can be played at any time and then we can also activate our abilities so we can tilt to make an ability stronger or we can fully tap rotate to use that ability's power and each one of the characters has a special ability that has something special that they can do so the night Raven of course being a thief her special power is her sneak ability and that will give her the opportunity to add additional sneak damage to something if we take a look at the warrior here the Warrior's special ability is of course fighting and the

33:43 warrior can add additional fight damage to a threat so again there is a lot of variety between the characters and a lot of variety in the game this game if you want something that has a lot of variety a lot of different choices and different things to do on your turn this is definitely a game that you will want to check out so we need to explore the Regal Gateway for two uh damage two sneak damage right now my sneak is at three so that's a little Overkill you do want to start thinking about that kind of stuff because using a three power sneak on a two that additional third uh point of sneak damage doesn't roll over to something else it's just wasted and so learning when learning how learning to balance this economy between the damage you are doing and the Damage that something needs to be defeated is a very very important thing that you will learn throughout this game but let's uh let's fast forward a little bit and let's say we've played a few turns let's say maybe we've upgraded a couple of our of our ability like that and we have our threats our shadow track is full and our first threat has come into the threat track and so now we have to do what this says so we have come across in the Regal

35:14 Gateway here we're approaching the Gateway and we are confronted by a barbarian Chieftain she is from the war claw threat group she's a threat human to defeat the Barbarian Chieftain we need to either do seven fight damage four influence damage or six sneak damage so we can sneak by them we can maybe bribe them or we can sedo them seduce them possibly or we can just defeat them in combat this symbol here is a negative on our on our spirit when it is their turn to attack you will add up any of these values here and you will apply that much damage to your character you also have an opportunity sometimes to block some of that damage depending on the assets that you might have or some of the skills that you might have so if it was our turn now uh it looks like maybe influence might be the easiest one to do we only need a four right now my influence is at two uh let's say I might have uh some more cards here a fast block so I can block one damage uh one hero gains a spirit and one each of that power okay so that's pretty interesting there so I could play this which would give me a plus one to all of my abilities so that would be a one uh that would go up to a two that would go up to a three and then I could tap this to do what was it that was at a one to do one two three uh

36:47 three influence damage to the chieftain so put a three on the chieftain there and then this drops to one I use this power so that goes off my fight goes up to two now and then on the next turn I would take one point of damage but I could play my shield to block that point of damage this gets regenerated at the beginning of the next turn and then I could tap that again to do one point of influence damage thus defeating the threat there but you will have times where you will have multiple threats out here and you will have to balance all of these right now we have two plots that came out we have the plot for for the uh the Dwarven Treasure Chest so if you either do Five Points of damage so you bust that open or you pick the lock then you get to have a choice of what to do and then you will get to read in your book of fables so if we open this and we loot it let's go into 8 here and see what happens we open up the treasure chest and in the heart of the dwarves stolen trobe your inquisitive fingers unearth a concealed item glimmering with venerable resilience the cool touch of the enchanted material against your skin reveals a coveted prize amongst the carefully guarded possessions you emerge a newfound Guardian carrying a story Treasure of the mountain realm okay that is a very verbose way to say draw one bronze asset or gain one Spirit or heal one

38:17 damage but uh yeah this game is really cool I like it I love all the the different variety in the missions in the locations and what the locations can do I like that the story has branching paths so each time you play through one of the five adventures in a campaign it's going to be different especially when you start mixing in the various story choices and the various ways that each of the different three classes can upgrade their skills the way that each of the three classes has access to different assets to different armor to different weapons to different followers and you have a lot of variety and this game is really cool it takes all of the clever card play all of those really hard decisions that were in Veil wraith but it adds a very cool approachable theme to the game that gives the player a connection between what they are doing mechanically with what their character is doing within the fiction of the world and for me since since theme is King that aspect is very important and when I am unable to make that connection between what I'm doing thematically and what I'm doing mechanically I tend to bounce off of a game and that's why I bounced off of Veith and why I didn't have a lot to say

39:49 about V wraith conversely that's why I didn't bounce off of of cre Manner and why I have a lot of positive things to say about this game this game has completely replaced Veil wraith I will be selling Veil wraith and I will be keeping cre Manor I think this is a very interesting game and a lot of fun especially for a solo game it's great so all right you guys well I hope you enjoyed this detailed look at cre Manor we will talk to you later byebye