ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS | A New, Cooperative Adventure Game (with Tactics!)
Transcript
Hey everybody, Kimberly here, and I've got a real treat for you today. Now, I'm going to liken All's Well That Ends with a couple other games I've been playing in the last year or so that really do fit that kind of vein of storytelling in a rich, well-developed universe where you've essentially got a tactical game built in with kind of an exploration part of it while it is very, very strongly character driven. So, the very first game I want to liken this to is Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall. Now, there are some really fun mechanics and features in that game that make the tactical aspect of it, the fighting part of it, really, really interesting. If you want to go and see, I've got tons of stuff on my channel about Kinfire and that whole world. Um, but that's something I would liken this to, number one, mostly because you've got characters that have asymmetrical focus, skills, techniques, and cards. So, everybody has someone that they are really playing with that has very, very different approach to fighting and to succeeding. There going to be four characters that you can pick from here, and in the opening, um, kind of like chapter, the game teaches you how to do it by running you through all the actions and guiding your very first two rounds in a game and then taking the training wheels
off and saying, "You've pretty much learned the game. Now, go and review back, um, to the rule book when needed." And I have to say that that experience was incredibly helpful and very efficient. I found that that way of learning by just playing and having them guide you through the choices pretty much taught us the game, and I just played with my husband. We played all four characters because the opening scenario asks you to play with all four characters, even if you have fewer players in the game. So, I did enjoy that experience. That's one thing I would like to tout about All's Well That Ends is that guided first game experience that just teaches you how the cards work. You've got tactics cards, you've got impulse cards, you have um essentially a starting um weapon or tool.
And you also have a special ability and they're all unique to each of the characters. So, it reminds me a lot Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall. It also reminds me a lot of Gloomhaven. This is a hex um tactical game. If you look at the map out here, I'm going to show you. This is that opening scenario. Now, I do want to I I want to spoil anything really too far into um the bit that I got because I didn't get all 12 of those chapters. Um I think there are 12 encounters and 10 journeys in the final game. Um but I have gotten a very good taste uh of those chapters and journeys with this tactical exploration. This is a half-size It's a spiral notebook that will open up and you'll essentially have even bigger maps that you're playing on. They have spawn spots for the uh villains or the opponents to start in. They tell you exactly which card they have and how many of each to put out of the rascal and the anointed factotums and the hired roadsmen. And they even have their image and their colored base again where they start. You have the impassable red spaces that if you cross that line, you essentially die. You're falling into the chasm that's right there.
The fire pit you don't want to be pushed into. That's very dangerous. And then you've got some opportunities for some encounters and for grabbing some loot. Up here, you'll see that. Um and then characters have their entire player space right here. So, it it's just really again has that, you know, Kinfire and where you just really feel like a specialized character in this world that operates in a unique way that really does help the team because this is a cooperative game. So, you are all playing together to accomplish your goal. You're going to have a story that begins each of your chapters and that story is going to tell you essentially what you need to do to win. If you succeed, uh they also sometimes have a secondary objective that you can accomplish as well and then you'll get even something better if you can do the thing on top of the main objective. Um they also have fail conditions and I'll get more into the journeys. So, the very first phase of anything is going to be an encounter and the encounter is where you have this tactical hexagonal map where you have baddies and you have your goodies and then you're going to essentially be taking your turn and this is the initiative track. So, this is what's really, really cool about this game. This is the way that it functions.
You either are fast, they have this kind of green flight symbol or you're slow and it's a blue turtle symbol. And you're going to have all of your um characters out here. These are going to be the four characters that start in the game. These are going to be the three of those opponents and you are in the readied space and we have a set number of rounds. That's what this round tracker marker here is and when you go, we will start from left and go to the right and if you play a fast card, you will now go into the spent space on that fast side. If you play a slow card, you're going to come down here. And everyone is going to go putting themselves on the farthest side of the bottom line either on the fast side or the slow side always on the outer edge going in.
Um and then when we're all spent, then we just push everyone back up to the ready, and now you have your new order. So, one of the cool things about this is you always know where you're going to go in the next round, when you're going to go, who is going before you, who is going after you, and you have some way to plan. And you might even choose to pick a faster card so that you know you can go again before a baddie goes so that you can possibly eliminate them or weaken them because this game has a really cool, intuitive, intelligent enemy um uh action. So, if I show you this card right here for the anointed factotums, you've got a three-step process to killing them or eliminating them from the map. You first have to do three damage to get them to this space right here. Then you have to do two damage to essentially bloody them. They're one step closer to death, which is three more damage. But, they also tell you how they are going to act on their turn. So, they might uh heal back up, right? If they're wounded, the anointed factotum's condition improves to rattled.
Otherwise, it's going to defend itself, which means it's one point harder to get through their defense, and then you get to the attacking. Belt Daggers is this action right here. The anointed factotum deals two damage to all characters within range one. That's particularly bad because their range is currently one. So, they essentially get to reach out even further for this surprise attack. Um and their damage they do is always two, but their range is pretty poor. They get to walk at three speed. You know what this card does now. I just walked you through everything. Now, how do they actually activate? That's pretty cool, too. So, players are going to go taking their turn. I want to talk about that in a minute, but I'm talking about these enemies and really how this works. It's so clever. You're going to have this stack of cards right here. This is going to be their deck.
It's got this eyeball on it. You're going to flip over this card and you're going to see that there is a stage of are they particularly bloodied? I think I called that bloodied, but it also was wounded. Um then you're going to check to see are they rattled? Are they engaged with someone? Meaning are they within range and actively fighting that person? Or are they just doing super great and they have to essentially walk usually to get to them to do an attack. So these cards are all different and they will essentially trigger based on what their condition is and it is on a card here that will oh tell you if they're fast or if they are in this case slow. And every single one of these cards is different.
They will do different things. In this case if you draw that and they're wounded, they're going to heal up. But in this case they're going to attack and then brace. They're going to like get some armor on. So they are going to do very different things and you really don't know what they'll do, but you do know what those particular actions will activate because it says so on their card. You know the Rascalins have a really big bite. This is going to be their potency. That's how big their attack is, but again they have to be one away, but they move pretty fast. They've got this constant coagula and they have latching tendrils and they're a little bit harder to start off the fight to make sure that they're rattled. Four is a pretty high threshold, especially when you compare it to the hired roadsman, which is one.
It's a one, then a two, and then a two. And they also can shoot really far away, so they can keep their distance and still do some damage to you. So they all have these tactical strengths, but you know about them. You just don't know exactly how they are going to act and that's what these cards do. So, I think the enemies are incredibly intelligent and somewhat predictable, but also really, really surprising at times with what they do. And they will act just like we do in this particular order going from fast to slow, and then when you look at their card, they might move over to the fast side. They might move back over to the slow side. This is just the setup for that very first scenario or chapter. Now, about the hero. This is what's really cool about the hero.
On the very first step of every phase here in the encounter is to read a story in an entry in the book based on what number we're in. So, we start off and it's number one. We read entry number one, and number one is going to tell us something. And as the game progresses and you move from chapter to chapter, you are going to receive during the journey phase these things which are called plot armor. Hopefully, you're going to receive plot armor, and you're going to place them over the numbers with which they match. And when you get to that story in the book, you'll read a different entry that will hopefully give you some kind of advantage. You got plot armor. And so, the journey part of the phase, which is after this entire encounter is resolved, is a place where it's really low-key.
You're not necessarily fighting, but you are still going through challenges, going to possibly a town, talking to folks, getting information, and getting plot armor. And so, you are going to have a chance to get that and that plays into your next encounter. So, having this story at the beginning of each round might give you a disadvantage, but in future rounds, if you have that plot armor, it might actually give you an advantage. So, I find that to be really cool and it makes you want to go hard in your journeys to get that plot armor so that the next time you play, there's something just a little bit more unique about your story, but also better for your team. So, the second thing you do is you take your top two impulse cards from your impulse deck, and you will essentially choose one of them to play this round, and it will give you maybe sometimes a disadvantage. Right here it says your movement for the entire round is one less.
Or it could be regain a resolve. Resolve is how you draw your tactics cards. Um or regain a health. So, you might get one or the other, but if another anointed, which is your fellow players, choose one of those instant uh cards, then you could do um uh your potency or your health equal sorry, your um um um resolve uh equal to your potency, which every player's going to have a number depending on the amount of players in the game. So, this is your potency up here, and potency is key to the success of your fellow players team. So, again, if you have fewer players in the game, it's going to tell you that your potency is going to be higher. What that means is every time you do a check, or you do a strength building, like you put some armor on, you do um some kind of attack, it's going to say potency. And in a one to two player game, my potency as Marika, for example, I've got one character out here, is four. But if I'm in a four player game, my potency is two. So, my potency is going to be lower because there are more characters to kind of divvy up all the fighting and all the damage to.
Um but you can see how that scales really well for fewer players, one, two, three, and then four. Your potency is going to change. So, I pick one of these cards. Let's say I say I'm I'm just going to take this one, and I'm going to put my held impulse up here. Now, what that means is you're saying, I'm going to hold off on this. I don't want to do this card. I'm going to save it for later because once you're out of this deck, you choose one, put one back, choose one, put one back. That's round three. For the fourth round, you have to shuffle up your held impulses and play those. So, you're either saving a good one or you're putting off a negative for later um and maybe kind of hurting yourself. So, the impulse paired with your tactics is a really clever double deck uh feature and selection in this game specifically that I've seen not elsewhere.
So, I'm going to draw cards based on my resolve. My resolve is three. I take my top three tactics cards and I keep them in my player area and what I'll do on my turn is one of two things. I can choose to play two lines of a card. Let's say I take this one. I will choose to do steady advance. Uh-oh, but at one less foot than I have here, so three would make it two. I could play this one to get that particular action, which is a specific ability to Marika only. I could also do pommel smash, which is a an attack. So, the attack would be potency level um and my range is one. I have 10 health and there's also something called influence, which is your range of influence. They might say, "Within your range of influence, do this." And you'll be looking and it'll be spread out a lot further. Your range is much further in influence than it is with attack and uh fighting.
But, in the corner, it says when I'm done with this card, I have to put it in the slow side. So, I pick two of those three things to do on my turn. The other choice that I have is go on a rampage. And a rampage is when you have three cards, um one of which is the beginning, one of which is the end, and one of which is the um middle. And you can even have more than one middle if you actually have more um if you have more resolve and you have more cards, tactics cards in your hands. So, it would look something like this, where you see at the bottom, you've got a start uh marker, a blood trail, a middle one, and a blood trail, and an end. So, if you get to this, you can play all three cards, only discarding the last one, um making yourself slow cuz you went on a rampage and it took a whole lot out of you, but you can you have to start here, do this, then you have to do this, and then you have to do this. It makes your turn really, really cool, and I just think it's the coolest feature. Like, you can do that and you're like, "Neat, I'm going to do this."
Um, and there's also a surge. So, so there's so many great choices about these tactics cards, and you're trying to figure out which one's going to be the best, which one's going to position me right, do I need to move first, do I need to attack, can I heal somebody, can I do one of my special abilities, where am I going to end, and is anyone going to go and essentially get an attack before me, and am I defended properly? This is a thing called a surge. If you do the uh actions that have the connected line between it, you get the bonus. You get the bonus splatter. That's a surge. So, there's some fantastic features with these tactics cards that I again haven't seen elsewhere, and I find that they're really, really clever, and you have to pair it well with your um impulse, um but it's just dynamite. So, you have a lot of great choice, and you really are just tactically like hex by hex trying to figure out where are they going to go, what are they likely going to do, when are we going to go in turn order, and how are we going to eliminate the enemy. Quite often, it's eliminating the enemy, or it's covering up the spawn point so that they don't spawn more whenever that triggers in the story book.
So, once everyone is gone and the spent um line is filled up, you just start another round, go through the story, pick your impulse, activate everything, and then do cleanup. So, when you are side by side with an enemy and they die, you essentially draw a death rose card, and this is going to tell you how they die and what happens. And these stories are all different. So, they might be really, really good, gain your enemy's coin reward, regain a resolve, kill your enemy, or they might have some repercussions. They might have some things that affect you negatively because it was such a traumatic experience killing that particular enemy. And of course, you've got your loot cards right here. So, it's going to be ah, right? Um sirenite vial, regain health equal to your potency, depending on what your potency is.
Um this one says, "Make a combatant within your influence, which is much bigger than your range, to an unoccupied hex adjacent to you." You do whoop with them in. So, these kinds of cards are really going to um add. You have two spaces uh for loot cards, and you can play them on your turn whenever they best uh help you. So, there're going to be other enemies, there're going to be other uh you know, baddies that activate. Every single uh encounter has a different map that gives you a different opportunity to uh essentially play through the story, and of course, reach the success at the end. And so, I want to talk just a little bit about that journey phase, which is going to be after you clean all this up, and then you move into a group. Um you have essentially a group uh token.
And you will Here's your group token. This is like your team, your adventuring team. And you will move around onto these particular uh story tiles. You flip over and it's going to have a story on the front, it's going to have some kind of uh location on the other side. So, during this phase, you're going to need a lot less on the table, and this will essentially be cleared out because you'll have these tiles that you will place out into the center of your player area. And they're going to essentially have your figure right here. You're going to have your team, and you will choose to go to these stories, and you have another book that will read them. You'll have a a fellow player read them to you. 1.5, 1.6, you don't know exactly what adventure is there, what story is there, but this one you know the challenge you're going to have to defeat. It says, "You have six feet and/or that particular image." And that image is going to be showing up in one of the character's decks. Now, I know that Marika doesn't have that particular ability. Um, so she may not want to go there, but she also moves a lot, and she has cards that when you flip over a card and it adds up total to what is asked for, you succeed. So, in this case, I will show you this. She's got a card that does this.
Three feet, four feet, that's seven feet. You will be flipping over your cards based on your resolve uh from your deck and trying to complete these challenges successfully by passing the test. And in this case, you get to add everything on your card. And there might be requirements of speed in the corner. You're going to see different kinds of challenges with different symbols. Um, you might even see an attack, which is going to be your um potency, right? So, that's going to be your potency. But this would be a success if she went there and she drew this card. Now, it's maybe unlikely. I kind of had to go through my deck to find it, but I knew it was in there um because I've been playing Marika in my campaign. So, once you do that, you read the story, and then you put one of your figure um discs on top of it, and then you will move on. You can move to new places whenever it says go to card number two, and you just move around town until you run out of time, which means that you have uh essentially spent a short journey, which is this side, um or you spent a lot of time and you went on a long journey. And that is going to be flipped over and you're going to see, ah, you've got even more time here um that you can spend. There's a six-round side and there's a 12-round side.
So, there's a lot to to just enjoy in a turn-based trying these little encounters and these little stories um whenever you get to your journey side, and it's just going to create a little map. And that is what reminds me of the third game. So, Far Cry Escape from Rook Islands came out a couple years ago and had this very distinct two-phase um like system where you would do your tactical adventure uh sorry, tactical um like fight and you would have like some kind of encounter, and then the second phase would be going out and trying to get resources and really kind of souped-up your character and preparing for the next round, which is a lot less low-key and uh time-based. So, you can only do so much before your time ran out.
And then you had to go to the next uh challenge. And so, this kind of reminds me of that back and forth where you've got your encounter and then you go into your journey phase, which again is a lot like yeah, a little less stressful, but still has that challenge that uses your tactics deck. So, very very cool and there's tons of those cards in there that you're going to get. Um this this is just really dynamic. I love the turn order track here. I love how that works. I think the enemies make a lot of sense and these cards really throw a wrench in your plan, but in a good way. They all make sense and they're all interesting. The worse your uh villain is, like the the more hurt they get, the more hurt they act, and I think that's pretty smart. And your characters, I think the tactics deck cards are really clever. You pick from however many cards you draw with your resolve and you do the best with that setting yourself up for the next round.
Um so you keep your cards out here and then you discard the one you chose drawing back up to your hand before you go into your next round. But also the impulse deck, these are the things that like your character does. These are the things that make them interesting and unique and special. And so it's like really clever when it comes to character development. So a lot to like here and just a nice campaign in the cooperative vein. I will say there's one feature of the game that doesn't click for me. Um and it is essentially gaining trauma and then gaining calling tokens. So these are going to be the calling tokens. On one side you've got your trauma, on the other side you've got a calling token. Now during encounters and during journeys you can I well maybe it's just in um in your uh encounters. You will be gaining these calling tokens and the player at the end of the round who has the most of those will get to discard a trauma that they previously earned. And then it goes down from there. So every player there's going to be some tie break and all four of the um uh characters are going to either get rid of trauma cuz they have a high amount of these flags or they're going to be gaining them. And trauma doesn't do anything to you until the very end of the game in which you are going to read what kind of trauma you've experienced throughout the course of the game, but it does make it weird that when you order someone which there is a
an action in here called order. Marika has some of those. Um it's this symbol right here. Um it's that symbol. If you order someone to do something they get to do your action that you essentially took at your value. And if they choose not to take the order, which usually you give them an order because it gives you a free action for them, and you're all working together to defeat the enemy, but if they don't do it, um then you just don't get the you don't get the action. And in Marika's case, if an ally follows your order, you gain a calling token. So, there's like this weird uh disincentivization to to like not work with each other because then Marika might get more calling tokens, and then she'll be less traumatized. And I just don't find that to be as compelling as everything else in the story. So, for me, those calling tokens, getting those, and then having trauma, um isn't the most engaging part of it, and doesn't necessarily make sense with the cooperative nature of the game. But that really is one of my big my my biggest critique. Um my second critique is that sometimes the story and the lore gets so involved that when you're reading the stories out loud, it can be a real mouthful. Um there's a lot of names that are unfamiliar cuz it's fantasy language. There's a lot of locations that are unfamiliar. And there's a lot of stuff that happens where sometimes you can read a sentence or two and not really comprehend it because of the language. And I feel like I read a lot. I feel like my husband reads a lot. We're we're readers, you
know? We're we're English teachers. And uh I even found that to be just slightly um inaccessible at times. But, with those things aside, Also, Althea Ends has a lot to offer that cooperative adventure campaign game where you've got that character that you are essentially just navigating in a fun, connected way to each other and to the story world, and you're just kind of uncovering uh everything that is uh in this uh What is it? Western Wildlands. Uh tons and tons of fun. Definitely want to come back and play. The tactical um uh fight is intense, is hard, is rewarding. Yes. All right. That's going to be it for me. I will see you later, folks. Bye.