The Hungry Gamer Reviews Kreel Manor

0:00 Ooh, that looks tasty. Welcome folks. The Hungry Gamer is back with another game review. And today we're talking about Creel Manor, the dungeon crawl card game designed by Tristan Hall from Hall or Nothing Games. And I do apologize if I mispronounced that name. And before I get started, please make sure you turn your clean on subtitles because if I make any mistakes in the rules overview, that's where you'll find the corrections. Additionally, thank you to Hall or Nothing Games for sending me this copy so I can make this video. Now, what this game is is this is a card- driven dungeoncross style card game. And there's a little bit of deck construction that goes into it, and there's a bit of deck building that goes into it. But in general, this is a game somewhat in the same vein as the Pathfinder Adventure card game or Aventuria or even a Sentinels of the Multiverse. though this one is closer to the Aventuria or Pathfinder because you're playing through a campaign of multiple different games to accomplish your quest. And to do that, as I said, you'll be doing a little bit of deck construction, a little bit of deck building, but most of all, you will be playing cards out of your hand in order to defeat the threats that are there, accomplish quests and plots, and using actions based on these three cards up here. Now, if you are not interested in how this game is played and want to jump into my final thoughts, then you would go to the timestamp on the screen right now. For those of us still here, let's

1:30 talk about how this game is played. Now, what you're seeing here is a fast reset from the last game that I played. And I just completed the second quest in my current campaign with the war mage here. So, I don't have it set up as it would be at the beginning of the game, but enough here so I can kind of show what's going on. I'll also point out that I have this lovely playmat that All or Nothing also sent me, which helps kind of show where everything goes. And I'll also point out this playmat underneath is the awesome horror playmat from Game Toppers, which is really, really pretty and very cool. Anyhow, what's going to happen is at the beginning of each campaign, you will have one of these cards right here that will tell you what your setup's going to be. It'll tell you how many different locations you're going to add. In this case, three standards, which are these green ones.

2:21 There's also harder ones, which are red. It'll tell you what the bad guy, the main foe is, in this case, two zombie warriors. And it'll tell me which decks of cards to shuffle together to make my plots and make my threat deck. And that'll make a little more sense in just a bit. And it's also going to tell me what section of the story book I read after I set up. And then if I defeat the scenario. And so I place that over here. And I place all the others on top. And I would flip over the top one. Now, the core thing here, as I move this back over, is each one of these is different. It has some flavor text. It has an action that you can do. And then over here, it has a sneak number. This is the value of sneak damage you need to do to this to move on to the next location.

3:07 And depending on your character, you'll have a certain hand of cards that you'll start with, and so on and so on. You'll also notice I have a whole bunch of little gadgets I've collected around the border here of items that I have in my backpack and equipped and so on and so forth all the way around. Now, what's going to happen is is every round you're going to go in the following order. You'll start with the the story phase, which is if your personal story card has to be activated, and I'm purposely leaving this zoomed out because there's a different because there's a different story deck for every different character. This is when you would go through your story, make a choice, get any rewards you might get. Then after your story, any cards that are up here that say delve, that those abilities will activate. Then we move to the location. Now, I mentioned you have to do this sneak damage. And I again, I'll tell you how to do that in just a bit, but then any location that has enough sneak damage on it, then you will flip to the next card and continue on. Now, this is important because you cannot win the game until you have accomplished the sneak damage you need on all of these cards. After that, you check to see if you have won the game. And you win the game by defeating the foes, which if you remember in the setup was two zombie warriors. And then you also have to accomplish all of the different plots.

4:24 And the foes, if you remember, and the setup happened to be two of these zombie warriors, which the setup will tell you where to kind of shuffle them into the deck. And again, I'll explain what all this means in just a bit. And then all five or six if you're playing with three or four players of the plot cards must all be completed as well. And if you've done both of those things and you have completed all of the locations, then you will win the game. Then you check to see if there's any ongoing effects from your location and then you move into the threat phase. And what happens in the threat phase is is the top card from here gets placed out here. And if it's full like it is right here, everything slides down one space. And then any that get to the threat area will be flipped over. And now we have a bad guy right here. And some bad guys when you flip them over it'll say there's some kind of effect that happens. Might get a shield. They might take something away from you. They might do damage to you, etc., etc. Then you get to draw one skill card. It comes into your hand and then you're moving into your main play of your turn. Now the main thing that you're going to be doing is defeating the cards that wind up in the threat area. You'll notice that there's these here you can spend some of your sneak to kind of flip over and get an idea of what might be coming down the way. But for the most part, you're going to be tilting one card. And these are your three actions. You have physical fight, you have influence, and you have sneak. And so you can tilt one, which allows you to put a die on it. Or

5:55 there's already a die on it, tick one dye up. And what that means is that ability is stronger. Then you are able to, as I mentioned, take an action. And to do that, you will turn a card all the way to the side. And either you can draw a card by doing that or take an action that might have to do with the location or you can do an attack with that ability. And then you're going to look below. So in this case, I turn this one and I see I do three sneak damage. However, I have this item here, which is plus one to sneak damage. So now I do four sneak damage. Then I also have this die right here at which is ranked at one. So I could use that as well. And now I'm doing five sneak damage. So I could do just like that five sneak damage to this card right there. And again, I will tell you a little more about that in just a moment. But in addition to that, I can play as many cards from my hand as I want. So maybe I play this card right here, which allows me to do one more sneak damage. And so now I've done six sneak damage. And let's just say I had another one of those cards. So now I have done seven sneak damage. And again, I will explain why that number is important in just a moment. But perhaps there's other threats that are out there that I have to deal with as well. You know what?

7:14 I'll add two more threats out there. Like so. And all these threats might do different things. For example, this card right here only allows me to play one skill card per turn, which means I would not have been able to do what I did there. However, you have a whole range of different skill cards that you have. So perhaps instead I would choose to play this card as my one card. And this card will allow me to take any card from the threat area. So this dwarf here, and put it on the bottom of the deck. Then I would add another threat to the line, which would kind of push everything forward and give me something else to deal with. But that might be better than what I was dealing with before. And then I would lose one spirit. And spirit represents your health. If you ever run out of spirit, then you have lost the game. And as I said, in general, you can play as many cards as you want. Now, the other thing that I haven't done yet is right here because I turned this card, which means I took an action with this.

8:06 And that means this one gets picked up, this slides over, this slides over, and this goes all the way back down to here. And now that means my influence action is a base of three, my fight is a base of two, and my sneak is now a base of one instead of three. And every time you take an action, you'll continually rotate those front to back. And of course, there's cards that might change things around. Now, I mentioned the amount of sneak damage that I was doing. So, in this case, by doing seven sneak damage, I look here and I'll see I have defeated the barbarian chieftain. However, I could have done the same thing with only four influence or eight fight. And again, depending on your makeup of your character, that'll be easier or harder. For example, I could have played this card right here and immediately done six fight damage. And then because I have these items like the sword and this escaped warrior following me around, that suddenly would put me up to the eight damage. Then I would look over here and see if there's any bonus.

9:05 So for example, this one here, by defeating it, I would heal one. But in this case, there is no bonus, so it just gets discarded. Then once I'm done playing cards, I would see what kind of damage I'm taking. So I look at the nymph here, and I see right here, I take one spirit damage. So I would take that damage, assuming I have no way to block it. I'm down to 19. Then I end the turn. At the end of my turn, I discard any cards that I've already played and discard down to six cards total. And then we would start the round again, checking what's going on over here. Do I need to change location? Did I win the game? Then we move into threat where another one slides over. We flip it over, over, and whoops. And then right here. Now, you'll notice, as I mentioned earlier, these sneak numbers. At any time I could choose to, if I wanted, take an action and reveal one. So, let's just say I had one power on there and I chose to use this. That would come off and I could flip this over and see what's going on. And now I know that the zombie warrior is coming. Now, there's a whole bunch of different things that can happen depending on what you do on the cards, particularly when you are dealing with these plot cards. And generally, you'll see when you do things, you have a choice to read different entries in the book of fables. Now, I'm not going to open this at all because it does give away spoilers, but there's about 110 or so entries in here that connect to the story cards that you have and also connect to these cards here. And in general, they'll give you some kind of bonus or harm depending on the choices

10:36 that you have made. But all in all, that's how this game works. As you go through, you'll be getting more and more treasure that you can use to bulk yourself up. At the end of every quest that you are victorious, you get to add two new cards to your deck and throw away some of the older, weaker cards. And as you go through, you get stronger and stronger. There's also a series of wounds that you can get because every time that you lose a campaign, you have to start the quest over and you now have a wound. For example, shivered hand, you can only equip one hand asset and lose three spirit to flip the card over. And if you ever get too many wounds, you've lost the entire campaign. But all in all, that's how this game works. So, what do I like about this game? The first thing is the core action system. And by that, I mean the three different colored cards at the top of your player board. That's just it's really clever.

11:25 It's clever because you're constantly cycling through which of those three types of actions you're really ready to go with. But when you take into account that you're also always able to kind of power one up every single turn, it's it's just really clever. There's more times than I can count that I was constantly stopping and thinking, okay, should I do this possibly less efficient move now or just kind of draw a card to flip this one from the three to the one? So, the thing that I know I need to do, so the thing that I know needs to be really strong because I've already scouted this thing in the shadows that's coming up or should I just kind of power this thing up and just kind of push my way through later on? It happens a lot as I'm constantly trying to make that decision. And along with that, the character that I've played the most is the war mage, and I was constantly able to kind of move those around. and I had cards let me just kind of swap things around which was just really really cool. Along with that, I like the limitations of one action and one tilt per turn, but then play as many cards as you want because that lets you have awesome bursts of amazing and then you kind of got to recharge and it is fun.

12:42 It feels good, but then you're sitting there thinking, "Oh gosh, I got to figure out how to kind of deal with this now. How am I going to fight this? How am I going to handle this next thing because I blew through all these cards? And then that plays back into the thing with the action cards. How maybe you just take a hit for a turn and you draw extra cards by turning your one of your actions and kind of moving that. It's very very clever. Along with that, each of the decks definitely plays quite differently as you're and that only increases as you get further and further through the campaigns because you're throwing away kind of the core base skills and then putting in your stronger abilities. though I guess technically you don't have to throw away your character abilities, but you pretty much want to keep those in there. I also like the just basic breakdown of the different threats. I like that you're building it out. You're going to get five or six if you're playing with more players. I've not played with three or four players. And each of those has five cards in there.

13:39 So, it's very quick and easy to kind of build up that deck. But I particularly like the difference between the plots and the threats because you know that every five, six cards or so, a plot's going to come out, but you can't see those cards. So, you're constantly kind of pushing and hoping you're going to find those plot cards because the plot cards for the most part are going to give you something good or at the very least aren't going to hurt you. So, there's this lovely kind of balance of trying to get those done because that's how you win the game and you want the bonus. want to go read the story versus taking care of the things are actually going to hurt you. And it's the same thing with the locations that have some cool stuff that they can do, but also maybe you just push through it because you can't win the game if you don't pass the location. So that might mean you're passing up actually using that location.

14:32 And it's just a very clever balance the way it works of having those things in there that you have to complete, but they're also giving you cool bonuses, but by getting those bonuses, you're not fighting the things that are hurting you. It's very, very clever, and I think that is actually what makes this game work quite well. I also like the kind of personal stories that you're playing through. As you go through, you have different choices. So, even if you play the same character four campaigns, you're probably going to have different choices you've made all the way through. It doesn't do a lot. It just gives you a little bit of story kind of why you're in there and gives you bonuses, but it's a fun little thing to have at the beginning of each game. So, I do enjoy that as well. The last thing I'll say is it looks pretty good, especially if you get that playmat. It just And actually, let me just sidebar. It's a really good playmat. It has space for everything that you need. And I actually found it so helpful that it got me playing the game faster. It's a really good playmat.

15:28 not usually a playmat guy because it takes up space, but this one I'm really glad that Tristan sent it to me. It's really been great. And the last thing I'll say is once you learn the game, it plays quick. And especially as a solo player, and I know this type of game is often popular with solo players, you're going to play in 45 minutes, maybe a little bit less, but definitely 45 minutes going through. And it's it's just quick and it's not hard to set up if you've organized yourself. you have those threats alphabetically put into your box, it's easy to find what you need. So, what are my quibbles with the game? Well, the first thing is even though I just praised how easy it is to set up, it's not nearly so easy to put away because you got to sort everything because you are shuffling up all five or six of those threat decks and it just takes significantly more time to put it away than it does to set it up. Next thing I'll say is it can feel a little bit repetitive because even though I said it can be very fun as you're going through and there these bursts of amazing action, when you do that, you're going to have several turns where all you're going to do is an attack action and a tilt, an attack and a tilt or maybe the location action and a tilt.

16:37 hand. Even though your cards are doing different things, at the end of the day, you're just basically going to be fighting things and sometimes waiting for the cards that you want to show up. Which brings me to the next thing. There are times when I found that I had beaten the foes. I had finished the locations and I was literally just grinding away and waiting for that last plot to show up. Didn't happen all the time, but it did happen a few times where I'm like, "Well, okay, I'm just going to keep beating up on these things." and just a little rinse and repeat and it's fun but sometimes it does feel a little bit repetitive. Next thing I'll say is due to the nature of you can kind of go anywhere and all the different threats are getting shuffled together the story can feel a little bit disjointed and it's not necessarily bad but it's not a throughline story that you're really fully experiencing. It reminds me of like Too Many Bones where you have these little quests that you're doing and it all is kind of guiding you towards the end game, but it is a little bit disjointed because you just don't know what you're going to do. Maybe you go the second option for quest two, then the first option for three, and then the third option for four. And so you're kind of bouncing all around as you're kind of making your way through. You don't know which of the other story beats you're going to read. you're how are are you going to kill the zombie overkilled enough to where you get that bonus and does it matter? And so it it's an interesting story and it all makes sense in this big world, but you don't

18:09 have an arc per se. And the last thing I'll say is the loot is simple and easy, but it is very hit or miss. I certainly know in one of my playthroughs I kept drawing hand items just I shuffled it a million times but all I could do is draw hand items which meant I was constantly throwing things away which put me a little bit behind the eightball as compared to the setup that you saw on the screen in the rules overview. So the loot can be very hit or miss. But there you have it folks. That is Creole Manor. I got to say I I really enjoyed this. I think it's one of those games that's doing something clever and if this was a longer game, I might not be as big a fan of it. But it's not. It's a quick game.

18:59 And so the things that I found to be a little bit of detractors of, you know, the the loop being kind of hit or miss even sometimes it felt a little repetitive or maybe it was too easy or it felt like, oh, I just have to keep fighting things so I get this one thing. The game was over in 40 minutes. So, even a bad scenario, a bad pull where the cards just don't work for you and every single plot is at the very bottom of the stack and all you're doing is getting head items. You're done. You set up, you play again. And so, I really have I've really been pleasantly surprised about this. And I have to say, I really would like to play this multiplayer. As I said, this is a type of game that lends itself to being a solo game. And I think it does very well as a solo game. In fact, even in the rule book, it says this is kind of a solo game. And then at the very end, you have the different rules for multiplayer, but I'm really excited to try it at multiplayer, and I quite enjoyed it. I'm absolutely planning on completing the campaign as all of the different characters because it because it's fun. It has a mechanic or two in there I haven't seen before, and everyone wants to just go beat something up and you do get to do a lot of that in this game. So, there you have it, folks.

20:08 That is Creel Manor. As always, if you found this video useful, please like, subscribe, share, maybe become a channel member. As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a wonderful, wonderful day.