Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall
About
A darkness (literally this time) has descended upon the land and it's up to you and your adventures to save the day. Played over the course of about 20 Quests each taking about 2 hours you will fight monsters and level up all with the final goal of killing the big bad.
A co-op, campaign, adventure game in a medieval fantasy setting. User actions are determined from a choice of cards in the users hand drawn from a customizable deck. Turn order is random and based off of picking chits from a bag with players having some ability to influence the pick.
Thoughts
Tim:
3.5/5 Good
So nothing to terribly unique in the story but still good. I really like the cards for actions mechanics similar to Gloomhaven, but I was not as fond of the random turn order. Determining turn order by pulling chits from a bag leads to some wild swings in play that I really didn't care for. After 2 or 3 total failures due to utterly bad luck because of this we tried to house rule way arounds this but were never really successful. Writing this review was one of the hardest yet as our feelings about the game swung back and forth massively during playing with some really great moments and some "why the heck did they do that?" moments.
Laura:
3.5/5
Kinfire was great! Kinfire had its very annoying parts. Also, Kinfire burned us out on playing games for weeks. The cards instead of dice for attack/support worked well. The maps were small (in regards to number of spaces) so you never had to burned an entire turn just walking up to the enemy in preparation to hit him. (Looking at you, Gloomhaven!) It also meant that the enemy could probably reach you on its turn, so there's no place to hide. The overall story was good, but the character backstory/leveling up was rather weak. Also, the actual leveling up process was too fiddly with Kinfire tokens and the new character cards weren't often large changes from the previous cards. One of my favorite parts of these types of games is seeing what skills and attacks the designers came up with! I have fond memories of the game, but I also know we had a couple quests not go well. Eventually we settled on a few house rules that allowed for the game to be played effectively if not as randomly.
Journal
I purchased this off of Kickstarter and loved everything about it so I went for the "All in" package. Expensive at $175 but I know we would get 30-40 hours of play time out of it so I felt it was a good purchase. We did end up with about 30 hours to finish so not a bad deal.
The first thing you notice when opening the box is the incredible presentation. I have to say this is the best presentation of a game I have ever seen. Having the individual quest box spines make an image is so satisfying. The cards are great, the map booklets excellent, the map great, the acrylic standees wonderful. Really if I have to find something to gripe about it I guess I could say the hit point counter wheels are a bit lose. Many other games have this same issue with spinning counters and no one has yet found a solution.
(This journal was an afterthought so it's going to be a bit thin)
Quest 1 of 15, The Road to Vinna
This is a usual "This is how you play the game" introduction. The rule book is split into 4 parts and you only get part one for this encounter. While a nice idea and it does help learning the game, we found it to be more of a pain than useful after the first few quests. Having to flip through 4 separate rule books with no index or table of contents got old. As for the first battle, it was easy. Unfortunately it was too easy. We had got very lucky draws from the chit bag and didn't realize how bad that could go with bad luck. It also meant that we were unprepared for the "glass cannon" nature of our characters.
Quests 2-5 (Early Game)
And here is where things went wrong. The game mechanic requires "pulling chits from a bag" to determine who goes next. You might get lucky and pull 4 of your tokens in a row letting you wipe the floor of enemies before they have a chance. You might also happen to pull 4 enemy tokens in a row. It doesn't help that your characters just don't have a lot of health and die easily. We lost a couple of early quests without even being able to do anything. Yes, there are "Fate" tokens that are supposed to keep this from happening, but you they can still fail and you only get 3 per quest. It's also difficult to gauge how much you should save them and how much you should use them if you have not played before.
Quests 6-13 (Mid Game)
Here is where it bogged down for us. Your characters get stronger very slowly as well as the monsters, but you never gain more hit points so you become more and more glass cannons. I was also looking for some good synergy with the cards but never found anything which I thought was a miss. It would be great to have some cards or abilities that would work together but there are none that are either obvious or significant. We also started to run into the issue of clutter. With the either story being moved along by text on cards, it because difficult to organize everything. I loved the town and the town map, but keeping track of where you have been, and what is available in each shop is rather cumbersome. To be fair, Gloomhaven suffers this same problem, so I'll be interested to see when a designer finally thinks up a solution.
Quests 14-15 (End Game)
I was not a fan of the ending. Ques 14 has you battling a giant construct which is neat, but it takes a huge amount of table space to setup. They also start playing with the fate mechanics which really seem like a cheap shot when they pull the rug out from under you. I did like how they bring in many of the NPC's you have met along the way which was a nice touch.
More Images
A few more images
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6-1-2024