Diceless Dungeon Crawling + Adventuring Goodness! | Heroes of the Sanctum | Solo Review
Transcript
Hello everyone. Welcome. I'm Robert and this is a solo review of Heroes of the Sanctum, the strategy card game. And I'm going to be reviewing only the base set contents, which I purchased from the last Kickstarter campaign, which was supposed to be the second season of Heroes of the Sanctum. I played four games in total. I played the intro scenario and then three other various scenarios at varying difficulties. So first, let's give you an overview of the game. So in Heroes of the Sanctum, you're going to go on a quest with a party of four characters. And when you pick a quest, it'll have a length, difficulty, and set up instructions. Uh so you'll form a party that hopefully will be uh well-equipped for whatever task lies ahead. And then you'll set up a stack of regions. And some quests will only take place in one region. And other quests, you'll be navigating through different regions. And quest goals will vary in general. But uh what you'll do in your turn to turn will be spending actions from each of your heroes to accomplish different things, like scouting the region or defending or attacking threats in your hero's lane or also interacting with proximity cards.
So when you arrive at a region, uh it instructs you to go to the proximity deck and set up the number proximities that you see there. And some proximities will give you uh bonuses, like maybe they'll enhance your attacks or maybe some proximities will deal damage to you. Uh so they all have interesting effects. Each hero will have its own battle line and they both defend a common banner in the middle. And you lose when enemies deal enough damage to your Sanctum banner. and usually that amounts to uh summing up these two values of your heroes. So, this is a pretty interesting mechanic that this game has. So, the heroes themselves don't take damage. Any damage that they would take go to their banner. And the game through various mechanics will regularly spawn enemies from the enemy deck to all of the battle lines. There's also this quest tracker card, which is used to keep track of a couple things.
One, there's this timer token, which will dictate when certain events happen. So, quest cards will have these numbers where when you go to the quest phase, if the timer is at that number, then something will happen, usually something bad. And then there's this scouting counter. So, when you are done scouting a region, you keep track of that here. So, you'll spend actions increasing this tracking number, and when you reach the region's tracking max, then you're able to move on to the next region. So, you're going to have to spend a lot of actions over time making sure that you explore the region, and that way you can progress through the quest. And heroes perform feats through this strategem deck. So, you'll basically shuffle this at the start of the game, and you'll keep cycling through these strategem cards, which go to the bottom at the end of each turn. And each hero will have its own action token. So, when you start a turn, you'll have a new strategem card, and they'll dictate what type of actions you can take. And there's two types of actions. There's blue and red actions.
Red actions cost two points, blue actions cost one. And each strategem card will indicate a maximum number of action points that you can spend. So, if I wanted to, I could spend a red action per hero up to eight. So, I would be able to have all of my heroes perform four actions right there, right? So, when you when you use one one actions, you have to cover it, and then no other hero can do that same action. Uh so there's a pretty interesting puzzle here of uh you figuring out how uh you can most optimally have your heroes uh perform uh the best action at the moment based on the strategy. And each strategy also has uh interesting effects uh on top of the action that you can take. Some effects are detrimental, other effects will actually uh boost your heroes in some way. And also this means that each hero, because they each have only one action token, uh each hero may not take more than one action per turn. After your heroes take action, then you'll go through all of these phases. There's the threat phase where all of the enemies attack and deal damage to your banner.
Then there's the region phase where you'll flip the region card and perform the updated effect that you see there, if any. And also resolve any proximity cards that have a region effect. And finally you move to the quest phase where you increase the time and also resolve any effects if the number matches the quest card. And that's pretty much it. You'll just keep doing that until you complete the quest objective. All right, so that's the overview of the game and now let's talk about what I liked. All right, so first thing I want to comment on, folks, is just how much game there is in this small box. It really reminds me of Dragons of Etchin Stone as far as proportionally based on the size of its box, how much it offers. This really feels like a big board game in a small box. But it also has small footprint to boot. This pretty much is the size of a standard play mat. You'll need a bit of additional space uh if you want to have your tokens nearby and also the discard piles for uh the loot uh the enemy and loot decks, uh but pretty much what you see here is it. And I took this with me to play outside of my home and I brought a play mat with me and it was a great uh just a great uh travel game, relatively small box, but yeah, it is pretty proportional to uh Dragons of Etchings Stone as far as uh the amount of game that it brings uh compared to its size.
Next, I want to mention that the game is relatively easy to learn. Uh the rulebook is pretty good. It's not perfect. Uh I wouldn't say it's bad or anything. There's a couple details that it glosses uh over. They do have this interesting approach um very similar to Fantasy Flight games, how they have the how to play and then the rules reference. Uh the one issue is that reference is not 100% uh comprehensive. Uh there's a lot of information that's still just in uh stuck in the how to play uh book. So, you're going to be referencing both uh back and forth. Uh and there were a couple of um you know, uh nuances that were missing that I had to go and check on BGG, but overall, a good learning experience. At least the basics of the gameplay loop, you know, flipping a strategem card and doing actions and spawning enemies and interacting with uh the region cards, all of that, you should be able to pick that up relatively quick. Next is the puzzle, and uh this is a bit of a brain burner.
Uh one thing I really like about this is that it offers the experience of controlling a full party of characters, uh RPG style, where each of them have their specialties. You'll have a healer, a defender, a spell caster DPS style character, a rogue assassin type character. And usually, there's a lot of upkeep associated with the idea of controlling multiple characters, uh but this game does a great job at offering the experience of uh controlling a full party of characters with a pretty minimal amount of upkeep, but it is very brain burning. If you are AP prone, analysis paralysis prone, uh you know, just be warned because there's going to be a lot of possibilities, even though there's just four actions in total that you do each turn, uh you're going to sit there and think how you can optimize everything. So, it is a pretty great puzzle. But, yeah, if you're AP-prone, just a little warning. I also enjoyed the team building element. So, for these types of adventuring/dungeon crawler style games, I usually just like picking a random party and just having at it. But, here it'll go a long way if you pick a good team composition for whatever quest you're about to tackle. Oh, and by the way, this game is completely diceless, which I commend. And I know that a lot of people don't like dice. So, if you want to experience a diceless dungeon crawler/adventuring game, this is one of the few out there. Next, I want to mention how much variety there is in the box. There's a pretty decent amount of classes and quests, which is where most
of the variety will come from. Combined with the loot and enemy deck, no two games should feel the same. I also appreciate the fact that the game offers a way for you to adjust difficulty. So, you have tons of quests to choose from, and they come in various difficulties, ranging from easy to normal and hard, and also various lengths, okay? So, if you want a shorter quest, you can check the length at the bottom. If you want to go on a longer quest, you have these that go over an hour. Uh but, also there's a way of adjusting difficulty by flipping your heroes to their advanced side. So, if you check the difficulty adjustment instructions, you can um flip various of your heroes to their advanced side, which basically boost their stats. Uh and I really appreciate the game doing this because I really hated it when some of these um uh dungeon crawler games can get very difficult and they don't offer any official way of adjusting difficulty. So, kudos to the devs for offering ways of adjusting difficulty here. And finally, I want to comment on the gorgeous art and presentation. This game just has some exquisite fantasy art. I adore it. Very good art and also graphic design, just beautiful. All right, and I don't have any mixed points or neutral points. I only have one negative point. I have one thing against the game, and that's the fiddliness element. And that's due to these tiny tokens.
Now, I don't know the behind the scenes of why they decided to make the tokens so small. I don't know that they needed to be this small, but it really is detrimental to the experience, especially with the action tokens. I really wish that these cards were bigger. In fact, if they offered I know that there's a third season around the corner for more content for the game, and if they offered a premium add-on that is the strategy deck as big as the box size with weight chips, bigger weight chips instead of these god damn tiny tokens, I would buy that in a heartbeat, okay? Because this really is the only thing that took away from the experience for me. I don't know that the tokens needed to be this small, but maybe there's a reason why. I think that if they had made them the same size as just standard like Lord of the Ring LCG token size, which is a bit under 2 cm, I think everything would have still fit back in the box. I could be wrong though. But anyway, yeah, that's my only nitpick. All right, folks, so those are my thoughts on Heroes of the Sanctum.
This is a fantastic little dungeon crawler / adventuring game, and it really does feel like it offers a really big experience relative to its small box size. Fantastic puzzle, and also offers a great party dungeon crawling experience that allows you to control four characters solo with minimal upkeep. All right, everyone. So, as a little bonus, I wanted to show how I fit everything back into the box, sleeved and with the tokens organized. Of course, no expansions though. But, we have the rulebooks on top, and here's what I did. I put the quest and yellow tokens in this half pill container and all of the hero tokens here. And of course, a little bit of friction tape at the bottom.
Then we have this Altoids little container and this is where all of the HP damage tokens of course with a little friction tape at the bottom so that I can pick them up without the little tin can sliding around. And then I put all of the small size cards sleeved into little plastic bags like this facing outwards so that they don't spread all around the all around the box. If you have the top facing towards the edge of the box like that. There we go. And then we have the we have the strategy and hero cards sleeved and and these cards by the way are sleeved with mostly sleeve kings although the strategy cards are sleeved with premium sleeves, okay?
And then here we have at the bottom this is a errata pack. I just left it there cuz I don't know where else to put it but there's the errata pack at the bottom and then here is the quest tracker. I did put a bit of friction tape at the bottom because the quest tracker because of the tiny tokens it was very fiddly. So by adding a couple strips of friction tape at the bottom it'll just stay in place when you move the tiny token, right? So that helped a lot with the fiddliness. And then finally in the other bag we have the quest cards and location cards and that's how it fit all back in the box. But yeah, I want to thank you all so much for watching. If you have any comments, questions, feedback, go ahead and put them in the comment section and if you enjoyed this content, make sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.
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