Return to Dark Tower: Covenant - Discussion
/pic6954125.jpg)
Transcript
some viewers may find the following video disturbing viewer discretion is advised hey everyone welcome back to board games unlocked and today I'm doing a discussion over Covenant the newest expansion to return to Dark Tower this is the second expansion that has been uh been released for this game the first one was Alliance which I actually haven't covered on this channel uh but anyway here I am talking about Covenant and what does covenant bring to return to Dark Tower well uh a little bit of everything I think uh it mainly uh it brings in new Treasures it brings in new corruption it brings in new characters uh there are some new quests and stuff in the app that it brings um but the the biggest differences is that this game that this expansion adds are monuments Wasteland and doom uh Doom tokens so uh I'm going to be talking about basically the major differences and of course my overall thoughts on each one of those but my overall thoughts for the Covenant expansion is it's all right like it's uh it's not it's not bad but I'm not I'm I'm not that Keen on wanting to ever play this expansion and and and the reason I say it that way is unfortunately this expansion cannot be combined with the
alliance expansion and I think that that is a huge dis disappointment because I I like my my Cooperative games to add more stuff or to be modular to where I can pick stuff from various expansions and add them in to get a different unique experience like it'd be cool to add The Monuments and the guilds or it'd be cool to add the Doom skulls and the wastelands with the guilds mainly or the unique skulls from the alliance expansion with uh this expansion but you just are not allowed to do that like the app literally has like you either select the alliance expansion or you select the Covenant expansion and then you go with that and I really really find that to be disappointing like and and limiting honestly because if you are like me and you don't like everything in one expansion but you like some things you can't pick and choose which one you want to do it's all or nothing so it's kind of like all right well I don't really like M much of the stuff in the Covenant expansion so I'm not really ever going to pick that over the other one uh and like I said the the stuff that's added from covenant I'm not I'm not that big on so uh we're going to so we'll start with like the the smaller stuff so the way land tokens there's a bunch of these Wasteland tokens that get added the app will just randomly add them in uh to each location and each uh each location
uh or each region that has a monument build which I know I haven't really talked about uh will get a wasteline token and all these do all these do is stop movement like it's a full stop no matter what you step into a space with a wasteland token you have to end your movement I kid you not every single time that I have played with this expansion the Wasteland tokens have never been an issue like at all in fact they've they've been more of a problem of rules than actual like a hindrance in movement like to get where you want to go whenever quests show up or you need to get to a building or you need to do something at a very specific location the way that these locations are designed still makes it extremely easy to be able to get there there are items and treasures that can teleport you places so wastelands are no longer like there's one in the expansion that's just like hey Place yourself into an air a space adjacent to the tower okay well if I'm able to do that then I don't have to Traverse around and get you know B try and bypass the Wasteland tokens the fact that you're able to double move means that you can kind of work your way around Wasteland tokens they're honestly a huge waste of plastic or in or in my case but if you're a Hu a huge waste of cardboard I find them completely useless
they're only there I feel to be kind of a uh for for like an offering for a monument uh other than that I there I I mean yeah keep them in the game I guess you have to you can't omit them so just kind of just toss them out the other thing that they do is they do remove the locations uh terrain type so if it's like in the SS of Madness the Sands of Madness is no longer a desert so you don't get like your champion of the South advantages if you happen to fight in that location but other than that they're there um the other thing that this expansion adds are what's called Doom skulls Doom skulls are these black skulls that are just set off to the side uh they are permanent skulls that's all they are so every once in a while the Apple tell you to drop two into the tower when they fall out you place them on a building and that building now has a permanent skull there so it it theoretically makes it um to where the buildings can get destroyed more again that's that's fine like that's there I I didn't feel like it actually made the game all that difficult like it was it was just another thing to have the app tell you grab two drop them in all right
then now they fell out and it's on a location so those were those were there that was something that was added the new corruption deck that it added uh the rules say like like that your game will be more difficult depending on it's like hey these corruption are way harder than the ones in the base game so your game is going to be more difficult depending on how many of these you add into your original deck and if you want an even harder game just use these I didn't find them all that all that much more difficult honestly granted I don't find the corruption that big of a deal uh I feel like the corruption is just kind of there honestly uh like yeah yeah it can be a hindrance but it's relatively easy to get rid of them and you just yeah I mean honestly like I would just shuffle them all together and just keep them at that because I don't find them any more debilitating than the other ones like and they might be like one of them is like you can't do the quest action you don't get your banner ability yeah for some like the things in this expansion feel like they're so hyp specific like not being able to do your banner ability feels like it would be way more of a problem for some characters than others like there are some characters who drastically need to use their banners for their other virtues to pop off others it's like oh no I don't get to roll the haggle die
and I'll explain what that is in a sec cuz it's one of the new characters but it's like okay it feels like that the corruption this is kind of like I mean cuz it's not any harder to get rid of these it's not like there's a new rule with these corruption that's like hey to get rid of these specific corruption you need to uh spend double the amount of spirit it's not that they work just like regular corruption they're just perhaps more debilitating very hyp specific uh there's more there's new Treasures Treasures uh can kind of deal with your with blessings blessings are something new that are added uh very specific things will give you a blessing it counts as a wild it's a wild advantage uh and you lose it at the end of your heroic action so for that one point in time you can have a a wild advantage or more if you can get multiple blessings but other than that they're there uh some of the new Chargers can be pretty cool like the as call scroll uh spend when you battle to gain plus six wild advantages you may not use other advantages during this battle um spend one to remove one corruption from any hero that hero gains a blessing uh when you fully upgrade a battle card gain three Warriors um honestly like because you can't combine these the two expansions I would honestly say just take the treasures from the Covenant expansion and shuffle them in with your uh base game Treasures because when you do that it actually increases your Market by one so instead
of three cards there there are four uh and that is I think that's just overall a better scenario then it goes to the new characters so we can talk about that add four new characters this is my favorite aspect of this expansion because I like the I love the character designs in this game um love love the art so it adds four new characters that are pretty interesting um I think they're probably the more I wouldn't say they're complex by any means but they're more interesting than any of like the four base game ones so we can talk about like the Relentless Warden and I'll just talk about like the banner abilities and their starting virtues so the Relentless Warden has a quy token it's a it's a hawk kind of makes me think of like Hunter Mark or something uh but the banner is if you if your query token is not on a foe you place it on a foe otherwise move your quy up to two spaces um so like you can actually just have that token go on a foe and then start moving your foe around uh it's starting virtues are plus one wild ADV AG versus your Quarry and guarded prevent up to three Warrior losses per battle card when you battle your Quarry so the Relentless Warden is hyp specific to a foe like one foe she's probably going to dominate them um that could be really good it feels these are kind of like it almost feels like these
characters were like specifically designed for some of the monuments that are added into this game and I know I haven't talked about monuments because they're the biggest thing that's added to it um so just retain everything I say uh but yeah like now you can move a foe around might make it easier at the beginning of your turn so that's the Relentless Warden the reverent astromancer starts with their own deck of spell cards which is kind of neat I can actually grab some of some of them so they have their Banner remove a skull on orj into your space well versed is their virtue if you remove a skull with your banner action gain a blessing okay so get a wild Advantage pretty much uh Pi at the start of each month prepare spells equal to the month number so the spells that they have they can eventually unlock evocations which are just better but they have six spells that they can pick so at the beginning of the game they can only prep one spell then two then three then four but like they have Winds of Change put any number of treasures from the market on the bottom of the treasure deck then refill bestow blessing one hero gains a blessing Ora friendship when you reinforce at a building this turn you can treat it as any building Bounty of the gods look at three random Quest items gain one at the end of your turn return it ritual of warding place a protection token on your space and soothing word one hero on your space replaces a corruption with a new one and I swear and I swear by the moon and the I don't know
if those are the words um like we could not for the life of us figure out what oh wait um okay yeah when you cast the spell yeah so what's super weird is it mentions the uh protection tokens but nowhere in the rules does it actually specifically talk about those except the spell location so uh the next time A Wasteland or fo would spawn on its Bas of protection token prevents it um so it's just it acts like kind of like a quarantine token from from pandemic but yeah so those are those are the six spells that they get to choose to prep they're okay uh so that's the Reverend astromancer then we have the undaunted AIS or agus this one is actually my favorite out of the four because they're the ones that are kind of like a push your luck kind of character so the undaunted Aegis its Banner is for each corruption you have gain three Warriors and you may spend 10 Warriors to remove one of your corruption then their virtues gain one spirit for each battle card you spend no advantages on so that could be two three up to four if you just really want to risk it and then iron W you can have an additional corruption but you start the game with one random corruption again this is one of the characters that I've played recently um I always was like running
with two corruption gaining six Warriors each time and I never felt like the corruption was ever just a problem uh but that one is kind of cool like you can have three um the virtues like that you can unlock for that one is pretty neat but yeah that one I thought was pretty interesting and then last is the devious swindler Banner action you roll the haggle Dy and gain the result virtues when you battle you gain all advantages in the Treasure Market which is really cool and then joyful when you roll the haggle die you ignore the the pissed off guy like no I don't want to Le uh you ignore that hence why with the devious swindler I was saying Shuffle the the Covenant treasures and the Bas game Treasures uh into one deck so you have four cards potentially giving the devious swindler four advantages uh yeah the characters are a nice addition and then we get to The Monuments I don't really care for The Monuments I don't think they're bad like I don't think this expansion is like it's not trash like it's not like oh everything it added sucked I just didn't really I don't really want to play with them so what The Monuments do is the game will randomly put four monuments out there are eight total and it replaces a building in each region and that is to me already kind of a problem because it uh it reduces the
amount of building you have in your region therefore skulls kind of become more of a problem because they cannot go on like what you do is you don't place the The Monuments on the location just yet they are these templates that you place onto onto that spot and each uh each template has kind of a an offering condition that when it triggers a uh in my case a cube gets placed onto that and once there are three cubes you can go out and build it but so each reaches now down one one uh one building so that kind of makes Doom skulls a little bit more of a pain in the ass uh and then but once the monument is built now it can actually get skulls on it and it could be destroyed just like any other um any other building but here's the thing is the uh the monument that have these conditions well they're not difficult again they're very situational and here's what I was talking about with these Wasteland tokens like for example the senap of the first prophet its offering is to feed a foe in a wasteland well they don't spawn on wastelands every time I've played with this I it's like exceedingly rare that you'll see a foe on a wasteland so you need the potion uh that allows you to move a fo two spaces or you need the character that can move its quiry two
spaces so it's like now I can pull you onto a wasteland and try and fight you there's ones that are just spend or lose a treasure there's ones that end your turn on or adjacent to a space with four plus skulls and it's not like you as the player like if I have the Moonstone Temple uh monument in my region it's not me that has to do that once any any player does that a cube gets placed on that template so another problem I have with the monuments is it's not scaled per the number of players so in a four player game The Monuments are going to be huge they're going to be getting done way quicker because it's you still only need three uh three cubes on the spot so for example if if everyone's able to get a treasure that allows them to spend like spended for example because there's a lot of in here that just say spend when you battle to gain Advantage spend spend instead of dropping a skull this turn spend to to remove one corruption let's say you're playing a four player game and three of them like you happen to be able to get a treasure in in a round and then they just spend it okay well now that uh that building or that Monument can be built the fourth player can go there and build it um but in a one or like two player game that's two people having to try and meet these conditions which means the monuments are getting built way later which means their ultimate abilities aren't being done until basically the end of the game game
cuz once a monument is built you flip it over you place the monument on the location and The Monuments look badass like they they really stand I love the fact that they're like this matted muted gold kind of thing uh and they actually fill like the spot of like a village or a uh Citadel they do stand out which is very neat but then they get an ultimate ability uh instead of its like enhanced regular building ability so so the endless necropolis which is this one that I'm holding you can reinforce there and for free you can still gain your six Warriors but uh it's ultimate is you can spend a spirit to remove any number of skulls from this building and return them to the supply because this building can hold any number of skulls you cannot cleanse uh this building so you have to go there so it's actually kind of it's Hollow on the inside because you can just Place skulls in it which I think is actually pretty neat cuz it it looks like this um skull like head thing uh so you can fill that up with a bunch of skulls and as long as your bag doesn't run out you go there spend a spirit then dump them all in there so it effectively completely uh prevents that region that has it uh from ever losing a building from skulls anyway but the monuments are are clearly better than others like that one's just really good but then you get like the senat no sorry it wasn't the
senat it was like the Moonstone Temple is for 10 Spirit you may battle and cleanse any number of times this turn well that initially sounds good but unless you have some high-end ways to move or teleport multiple times it's you you just spent 10 Spirit to maybe cleanse two locations uh again there's ways that that could probably be Ben official like you can really get like an awesome cleanse if everyone spends potions and and you have all these Treasures that let you move but other than that you just spend 10 spirit and you'd much rather have the 10 Spirit to survive a battle card or a quest or a dungeon uh the nightmare cage uh you can still gain your gear but for 20 Warriors you can remove a foam uh I mean again that's 20 Warriors that now you you might have characters that can like you might have the the uh treasure that every time you spend a potion you double it so you get the dragon's tooth potion now you spend that to get 12 Warriors you have the warlord who can just you basically have the entire bag of five five tokens then that's really good but again that's hyper specific so I find that the lack of a building at the beginning of the game to be pretty detrimental um and I also find the war you have to go out and do in a lower player count
game to not be worth like building these because you're very rarely going to actually use The Monument's ability uh the passive ability is now Wasteland tokens don't get placed in a spot that has a Monument built like I said the wastelands are just stupid and they don't but they don't matter anyway so the only other thing that The Monuments bring and this is actually something that we missed the very first time I tried this expansion and that's in the app whenever you do build the monument you have to put in the app that you built it and that's because every now and then The Monuments will have an event just like your allies you know how like oh you have vossa the Divine she can Whoever has her gain uh removes a corruption things like that The Monuments do that as well and this actually did uh increase my like for the monuments cuz the first time I played this with with this we forgot to put it in the app and I was like these things [ __ ] suck uh and then I was like oh yeah you're supposed to put them in here and then then at the end of that game we started getting benefits it's like oh yeah that might be good so like but still those events are much better like some monuments are much better than others for example the nightmare cage is uh for 20 Warriors you can remove a foam well no one wants to do that unless you have an influx of unlimited
Warriors but its event will randomly remove a foe just it'll be like the nightmare cage claims another victim remove remove a uh uh I just play remove a mormo or and like oh okay cool that's just gone so you want to get The Monuments built like quicker so those events pop off more but again if if you're playing in a four player game then yeah you're going to see those a lot but then you're going to in a lower player count game you're not going to see those because the game's almost over anyway so they might happen every once in a while so I just like I don't think the monuments are bad I just don't think they're worth it and because you cannot combine this expansion with the alliance expansion you can't module both of them together because I don't really like anything that this expansion brought I'm not going to play with The Monuments like the alliance expansion I really like so between the two I'd much rather play The Alliance expansion um so I mean and here's the thing after I after I had played return to Dark Tower this game came out in 2022 so a year ago almost two years ago um like I remember was like it was super high like I think it got a 10 out of 10 from me uh like let me just double
check that it was it got a 10 out of 10 for me return to Dark Tower yeah got a 10 well almost two years later with two expansions coming out I was finding myself in kind of a dilemma where I had severely cool on this game in that I don't think it's bad by by any means so whatever when what I'm about to say don't be like oh it's trash cuz that's what people take and they run with it but I found it to kind of be boring and the reason why I say that is because in my Cooperative games this is for me personally I want them to be very difficult like I want to work for a victory I'd rather honestly lose rather than win as long as the loss feels fair and I'd rather win uh if I earn and the very first time I actually played with this expansion previously I had played Spirit Island and I hadn't played Spirit Island in quite some time and I was reminded how fantastic and how much I love that and how it's still my favorite Standalone Cooperative game uh not counting um like Campaign games cuz sleeping Gods is like my favorite game right now that's Cooperative but I don't I don't count that uh in like my Cooperative anyway um but I was reminded at how great that was and we won that one and I've won Spirit Island but I've also lost it quite a uh quite a fair
number of times but I felt challenged the entire time and when I was playing this I have not lost this game in a I like I mean I think the the run through that we did we lost and that was like whenever we hadn't but ever since then I have never lost because you get so over powered so quickly like you get there there's literally a a I I wish I knew what the name of it was I might be able to find it there is literally a treasure card in here that says
um um when you cleanse you can remove skulls from any space that's just oh that's actually a base game sorry uh there was one in here it was you can complete yeah when you nope I can't find it now um when you cleanse you may spend this to remove all skulls in your current Kingdom but that's a spend there's a card in here anyway that says you can complete any Quest from any location and it reminded me of how busted the treasure cards can be cuz it's like oh I don't even have to so again the wasteline tokens are useless I don't even have to travel to that location and I can just complete it so I I was starting to realize you can just steamroll this game and I had done a discussion over this expansion previously and I was like and I and I was talking about okay well I've never tried it on gritty difficulty so I I was like you know what let me try the expansion again uh on gritty difficulty and maybe that'll kind of fix my feelings towards it and not really like the gritty difficulty just kind of quickened things and I didn't feel like anything was just all that different except now things happen faster but I still won and I think a big issue with that is because the whole game is centered around you completing a main quest to get the adversary out of the tower but when you fight the adversary if you can get if you have no corruption
and you can get past three of its five cards unless and please tell me if I am wrong about this I but I have double checked the rules many many times you gain you can if you can get past three of the cards you can just take corruption for the last two and win because if you have no corruption and you cannot complete a battle card you gain a you gain the corruption okay well nothing says you stop or you or you just gain the corruption so you then you move forward then the very last card you're like well I can hold two corruption we only lose if I gain three well there's the fifth card my second corruption and we win if I am completely wrong about that please let me know I and but I cannot find anywhere that says you have to end your turn uh you don't get to continue if you take a corruption so on and so forth so I just kind of found this game to be extremely streamlined like I'll play this game anytime that I'm asked to but I'm definitely not as keen on wanting to set it up because it's like well we're just going to win like the uh the the the treasures are too are too strong you can you can get rid of corruption too easy uh you can get spirit and warriors too easy it's just kind of like everything you just kind of go through the motions and I I was really feeling that especially with the Covenant expansion where it's just kind of like we're kind of rinse and repeat here like just and we just kind of stop adjacent to for to four skulls place
that there boom okay now we got the now we got the Tower built um and another thing that this expansion didn't add the alliance expansion I don't think added it either but I'd really like them to add more adversaries like cuz it didn't add it didn't add more uh allies I mean there's there's a few there's still a decent amount of allies it does it hasn't added more monsters you know more uh you know of the level two three and four and then obviously five I would have just liked to see a couple more adversaries added uh more quests it did add more quests like the one I just did was uh with hakan the artificer you had to build three of The Monuments to then find the location of a dungeon and go through the dungeon then get the adversary out and all right that was that was obviously focused on the expansion but yeah it's just kind of like it it was it was eye openening to be like huh like I'm not I'm not super super keen on I'm not super like hot on return to Dark Tower in this expansion I just don't really care for really anything it added except the characters um oh I guess another thing it added was charge tokens uh those very rarely come up because they're treasure specific there are wands now in the
Treasure deck that give you put charge tokens on them and you can spend those charge tokens to to activate them like the wand of Solarity uh you gain four charge tokens spend any number of charge to place your hero that many spaces away um again that bypasses the wastelands cuz it says place your hero so not move your hero and when you battle a meleeo you can gain a charge I do like that at least whenever you don't lose the treasure whenever the charges go away they have ways for you to get them back some of them are like at the end of the month gain a charge well like one of them was like spend number of charges here to remove a foe so you can run up and remove like a higher level Foe and then end of each month you gain a charge back stuff like that but I would have liked to see more Quest items would have liked to see more potions more more allies more adversaries um yeah I think I think just overall I mean if a new expansion comes that I'm absolutely getting it like I still like this game uh and I know a lot of people are probably just going completely disagree with me on this expansion and that's perfectly fine like if you really like the which monument do should we get first should we really try and focus to get that one um like that slight puzzle uh and if you also like the fact that the game's on the easier side than the brutally hard side like I get that some people just hate [ __ ] this war of mine or Spirit island or Robinson Caruso because
they're they're insanely difficult I totally get that like this is just for my personal taste um overall I think on a scale of 1 to 10 I'm going to give the Covenant expansion I think I'm honestly G to give it a five yeah I think I'm going to give it I'm GNA give it five or a six is kind of where I'm at originally I would would say six but because you can't combine it with the alliance expansion I think I'm actually going to drop it by a point I think I am going to put it at at a five because that's the thing it's because I can't combine it with the alliance I know I've said this multiple times but because I can't combine it with the alliance expansion I'm not going to play with it you know I'm not going to add it to my game uh so that just kind of hurts it if if if I could then I'd probably give it six maybe a seven because it could be fun to combine things together and see how they would work but because you are hard locked from doing so because of the app you can't even house rule anything to be like oh just give it a shot because the app just won't let you do that which to Some People's Credit they might be like well that's the problem with app games in this case I agree with you uh because it's like that sucks I
can't house rul it I can't throw in the colored skulls and the doomed skulls and have a completely wacky Wild game I can't throw in some monuments and and the the guilds to see how they combine cuz the app literally does not let you do that and that that is just such a huge disappointment so overall I mean this probably like after playing with this expansion and it's like I I mean I had returned to Dark Tower at a 10 I'd probably put it now at like an eight which is still good like that's still I mean if seven for me is good this is still great like it's still atmospheric and and the the tower is still fantastic uh but it's just kind of it's just kind of too easy so I kind of get bored anyway that is my overall thoughts on the Covenant expansion to return to Dark Tower 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 is for hey everyone thank you for watching and I really hope that you enjoyed the video if you would like to see more of my content go ahead and click that subscribe button and the bell to be notified whenever I upload any new content if you feel like supporting the channel you can go ahead and click that patreon link to be taken to my patreon and any help is truly appreciated other than that stick around for any any other run throughs or reviews or cool top t or whatever I feel like putting on other than that like comment share and subscribe and have a wonderful whatever
time of day it is for you