20 Strong: Tainted Grail
Transcript
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Board Games on Light. Today I'm doing a discussion over 20 Strong Tainted Grail. This is the second one that I have currently played in the Awaken Realms series within 20 Strong. And out of all of them, uh so Etherfields, Tainted Grail, and Nemesis, uh this was the one that I was most curious how they were going to implement within the 20 Strong system because Tainted Grail is this massive not really open world, but open world narration uh game. And knowing that 20 Strong is about a dice system, I was very curious, like I said, on how they were going to implement it.
So, much to my surprise, this is an excellent uh you know, 20 Strong game. Now, Tainted Grail, um if you take out the narration and the exploration and the menhirs, which most people would actually probably are happy to hear, um and a lot of the game, and you only took the combat, that's what they put in here. Um so, for all intents and purposes, no, this is not Tainted Grail. It is, like the Nemesis one, it is Tainted Grail themed, and the art the art from uh the board game is is put into here, uh and the bosses that you would fight. But, the reason why I actually am not mad about this, like I was with the Nemesis one, is because this one, the way that it is actually structured is uh it is the closest to Solar Sentinels and therefore, in my opinion, the best way to play 20 Strong. So, I am extremely high on this one, uh even though, again, has nothing to do with Tainted Grail. It is an I It is a theming and that is it.
Um well, it does take the combat and and apply from Tainted Grail and apply it to here, which for me, I've always loved the way combat was done in Tainted Grail. Uh which which if you're not familiar with it, basically, it is kind of a card combo game where you are playing cards down uh when you're facing enemies and on the sides of those cards are these nodes and you are trying to link up nodes to be able to gain benefits from those nodes. And I always thought that that was a really cool way to thematically represent what you were doing to to fight this creature or this person, whatever it might be that you're fighting. Because you were able to see the steps that you took. And for me, personally, when it comes to combat, I have to really get into the theater of the mind to enjoy combat in any type of D&D or board game.
Um and the way that Tainted Grail did that helped kind of me think of, "Oh man, first I come across this creature and then I do pull raise up my shield and I do a charge attack and whenever I bash him with my shield, I see him stagger stagger back and then I can play my find weakness, which I see that he's opened himself up for me to do an attack." You know, things like that. Um obviously, you're not really able to do that in this game because there's nothing else to really do except just roll a bunch of dice. But, uh Uh, like I said, the format and structure of this version of 20 Strong is the closest to Solar Sentinels, which is uh, my favorite out of all the all the box sets.
And the reason why I say that is because the game is literally set up to where you have one boss you're aiming to fight, you know exactly what that boss does and what you need to do to get to him. Uh, and then the game has you shuffle four different types of decks that are all versatile, but they all have a theme in what they give you. Uh, which is blue, green, gray, and purple. And all of those are face up. So, it's actually a little bit better than Solar Sentinels in the sense that you can see all the enemies that are at your disposal. And in each given round, you're only given eight rounds to uh, to level up as quickly as possible uh, to be able to fight the boss. So, at the beginning of a round, you look at all four of your options and you choose one of them to go ahead and fight.
So, if you are perfectly fine with not having to fight a bunch of enemies, then typically you don't have to pick the ones that summon more enemies. But, the blue ones for example, uh, unless I haven't come across them, I don't think so. So, the blue ones are interesting because they don't actually have any nodes for you to play. So, you're just limited to uh, a certain set of dice. I'll talk about the way they use dice in this one, too. But, uh, so you can't play cards against them. So, you're at at the whim, but they're not overpowered and they don't really do that much damage back to you. So, which is I think is a good trade-off. You can't play cards to deal extra damage, so you have to rely pretty much on luck unless you have an item or something that lets you modify things.
But, then the uh the green ones, they do a lot of stuff with being able to cycle cards. The gray ones alter your stats. And then, the purple ones, this is one of the coolest aspects, and this is an aspect that actually is in Tainted Grail, is by defeating the purple cards, they upgrade your deck. So, your deck is always going to start out the same besides for one card that is going to be tied to the uh the character that you're playing. That'll be shuffled in, but you will always have the same uh deck. However, over the course of the game, there are these upgrade cards. And by defeating purple enemies, it will tell you, "Hey, okay, if you defeat this living ice, you can go ahead and gain the Nature's Help card."
Which the Nature's Help uh card says, "Set the dial to the color of your choice." And these are extremely powerful, but what's awesome about them is this kind of has a little bit of deck management. I don't want to say deck building cuz the game is not long enough to really matter on the deck building. But, whenever you are adding cards from this uh the purple deck to you can add it to your hand, you can add it to your deck, or you can add it to your discard pile, but you have to banish a card from the the area that you are um that you're choosing. So, if you add it to your hand, you have to banish a card from your hand. If you're adding it to your discard pile, you have to banish a card from your discard pile. If you add it to your deck, you have to banish the top card of your deck. So, your deck will always stay the same amount of cards.
[snorts]
And I really like that. That uh gives an extra element of decision-making and strategy to this game of 20 Strong that wasn't ever really there in a lot of the the box sets. So, I love the fact that you were able to see what those enemies are, weigh your options on which ones you think you can actually defeat based off the cards that are in your hand, and whenever you get to combat, it does something extremely fascinating that none of the other ones have really done, and that is utilize this color wheel and actually control the dice that you are able to commit.
So, whenever you are facing an enemy, whatever color that is on this wheel, those are the only dice that you can naturally commit. So, if I'm facing off against the you know this mad warrior, uh ignoring whatever ability he might say, and it's on yellow, I can only use yellow dice unless a card says otherwise. Like if you're able to play this hex, the hex now says I may apply blue dice to this enemy. So, what's awesome about the way that combat is structured is you have to take into consideration where the color uh what color is available to you, and then what nodes are available for [snorts] the cards you can play. Like this mad warrior, I actually can't naturally play this hex because the nodes don't line up.
But, I could potentially play I don't know. I'm looking at at an option. So, I could play this charge. Well, this charge lines up and says draw one card and, you know, strike again. And when they say strike in this, that basically means that you are able to either draw a card or play another card. So, in this instance, okay, cool. Well, let's say that the dial is on blue. It just happens to be on blue. All my blue dice are are exhausted and I have I only have yellow and green available. Um or not blue dice. Let's say it's on purple. Who cares? And all my purple dice are exhausted. So, whenever uh so, it's like, "Okay, cool. I can draw a card and strike again. Great. I'm going to play my war magic." My war magic links up and now I can apply yellow dice. So, then you go to the natural roll step, yada yada. I rolled like [ __ ] which is par for the course with this game. But, this is where your strategy comes in, the strategy die. So, I can apply the one hit I got to him and then it's, "Okay, well, I have, you know, a three in strategy, so now I'll do it again. I will now be able to link my hex to that.
So, now I can keep the yellow dice and now I can do all the blue dice and roll them and then now I roll amazing." And that's enough to kill him and you still exhaust all the dice and stuff like that, but this is part of the strategy of trying to figure out I increase your um stat die, which uh or your strategy die, which indicates how many cards you can hold in your hand, how many times you get a chance to strike, which is draw or play a card. And that in combination with the actual color wheel, I really, really like because a lot of enemies' effects can modify the color wheel. There's an enemy in here that just says set it to red and it only has two health, but if you have no cards in your hand to be able to play, then you're at the whim of if the red die is available to you, then you have to roll a crit to be able to actually kill him because that's the only die available. However, if you do have cards you can play where now all of a sudden like whenever I fought this enemy last and it was set to set set it to red, I was able to play a card called surprise attack that let me adjust the dial back or to either side. So great, now my purples are available and I had purples to be able to attack and defeat him.
This manipulation of utilizing your cards with items and with the dial actually make for a really really solid card game and dice are also in cuz the problem that I have slowly come to realize that I don't enjoy with 20 strong is when the dice are kind of at your disposal and then it just feels that when you're choosing dice to use the answer's almost always obvious. Um I mean yeah, there's it depends on the health of the enemy you're fighting and you might choose yellow and hedge your bets or maybe a yellow and a green. Uh but anytime you had to recover dice it was always going to be your highest highest strength die.
But this version actually makes you want to recover dice differently. I was leaving heavier uh you know more powerful dice, the purples and the blues and getting yellows and greens back because the cards in my hand um allowed me to use yellows or greens and the color die was was going to move to purple. Well, no real point in recovering the purple since I can't use them. I really think that this was a smart decision on their part because I think if they had just taken the card combo system from Too Many Bones Trail, it still would have been good, but if they had just left it with oh, yeah, you could still pick what however many dice you want and roll them and just keep rerolling.
I don't think I would have liked it as much. I think they they had found a really cool way to utilize their dice system and implement that into the Tainted Grail combat. Again, that's the only thing that they took from Tainted Grail. There's nothing else. This could literally have been just any other IP, something made up for their own, you know, from their own game. Cuz still, besides the Tangled Wood set, which I just I hate all of them. Um, the Solar Sentinels is the only one that they have made that is their own made up IP. And this could again have been literally anything else. It could have still used the note system and we probably would have thought, "Oh, yeah, this is kind of like Tainted Grail." But it's a different setting.
Uh, but I mean, since that is Tainted Grail's combat, they implemented extremely well here. I think that the enemies or the the characters that you play have really strong and powerful abilities. I think the bosses, whenever you're fighting them, is also really cool because there's a good variety of bosses um that you [snorts] get to pick at the beginning. And what's also really cool is whenever you're going to fight the boss, at the end of a round, to keep track of essentially the rounds, is, you know, okay, I defeated the Mad Warrior. All the cards that I've played go into a discard pile. And now, you look at the top four cards and you will actually pick one of these to go into the Menhyr deck. This is where they implement the Menhirs, which is probably better than anything in at least base Tainted Grail. I think Kings of Ruin, um, they fixed the menhir problem. Which, although for me, I never had an issue with it.
But anyway, you take any one of these cards and you add them to the top of a menhir pile. And once that pile reaches eight, then you have to go and go ahead and fight your the boss and the boss will tell you how many enemies to add. And then you shuffle the menhir decks. And the you know, maybe you were trying to avoid having to fight an enemy, even though you never have to fight one. Uh, or you kind of thought that hey, I'm going to throw in these weaker enemies into the menhir pile. And if I have to fight it later, okay, it's instant effect is actually a benefit. So then you add one and that's an enemy you have to fight and kill along with the boss. Um, so and it it it all just feels manageable.
That's the great thing. This is the first 20 strong box that I have played where it actually kind of makes sense to do a higher rank. I I don't know how many of you are out there that actually do higher ranks on this game. Maybe people who play this game a [ __ ] ton. But board game difficulty has always just felt like a joke to me. With any with any co-op game, it always feels as if it's the most obscene difficulty spike. And 20 strong is no different. But this is one that actually kind of allows you to experiment with that. Which I I just think that they they kind of nailed it. Uh, in terms of just the way that this is this is uh, funk that this functions.
So yeah, I am pleasantly surprised with the tainted Grail version of 20 Strong. I again, I can't stress this enough. It's not Tainted Grail in any sense of the board game except for its combat. And I think unfortunately, this might be a maker break. I I have a feeling most people will either love this or hate this because I know there are people out there who hated the way that the Tainted Grail board game managed its combat. Now maybe because this is a significantly shorter experience, 20-30 minutes at tops, which is another positive to this one is because you're always adding a card to the menhir deck, the game will last eight rounds unless an effect or something makes you add another card and it's shorter. So the fact that you know that this game even so it manages the luck factor. It it tempers it because the game doesn't play for an hour and then oh, now it's time for me to fight the boss. Cool. Let's do all this luck [ __ ] that now I played for an hour and the dice don't go my way and I wasted an hour.
This game has a very steady pace and it's extremely easy to set up. It's not convoluted in any way. They This is how all of their other boxes should have been. Um So yeah, I I really really like this one a lot. Um which is kind of fascinating. So it'll be it'll be interesting cuz I think I'm I I did not like the Nemesis one, but I haven't played the Etherfields one yet. So it'll be kind of it is funny that this is the one that I had the least expectations for and so far it's become probably it's up there in the the 20 strong ranking.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm going to give the Tainted Grail one a nine. I I think this is in the in the scope of 20 strong, I think this is probably up there with Solar Sentinels, if not higher. This might be my favorite one that they've done. Cuz I like I said, I really like the structure. I like the card the the deck manipulation. I like the color wheel. Um I've always liked that card combo thing and I like how it's a short experience so that the randomness of the dice doesn't feel bad whenever it doesn't go your way. So, yeah, I mean, if I was going to add this to my 20 strong ranking that I did cuz I'm not going to redo that video for each one.
It Do I I might like it more than I think because of theme, even though again the Tainted Grail theme is that there's no narration or anything like that. I think just this dark Arthurian Dark Souls-like fantasy, I do like that more than bug sci-fi. So, it it might be number one. Uh that's where I probably probably put it. But, that's that's it everyone. That's my thoughts on Tainted Grail 20 strong. Let me know what you think of it in the comments below. Other than that, like, comment, share, and subscribe and have a wonderful whatever time of day this is for you.