The Secret Lair

If the gameplay of Dominion was expanded to involve stabbing things in the face, along with a dose of MATH,¹ you would have an excellent game – and that game would be Thunderstone.

Wait! Drek… that was putting the conclusion first. Let’s start this a bit more properly:

Last week, I started a tour through the realm of deck-building card games with Dominion, the first and arguably the most popular of this new genre. Subsequent deck-building games have tried to do very different things with the basic gameplay formula that game pioneered, with varying degrees of success. Today I’ll consider Thunderstone, which by keeping the core game mechanic the same while expanding on a specific theme, manages to mostly retain the balance and simplicity of Dominion while making something that is far more interesting to play.²

Vital statistics: Thunderstone is a non-collectible deck-building strategy card game designed by Mike Elliott and published by Alderac Entertainment Group in 2009. It handles 2-5 players, and claims to have a playing time of 45 minutes, although most sessions I’ve run have lasted longer than that. It is rated as suitable for ages 12 and up, which seems appropriate given both the mechanics and mental MATH³ involved.

Theme and production: Thunderstone has a dark medieval fantasy theme that involves abstracted combat, which may not be to the taste of some people,⁴ but still allows for family play with children who are old enough. Each player takes the role of an adventurer who has arrived at the village of Barrowsdale, seeking a powerful artifact called the Thunderstone. The Thunderstone is hidden deep in the nearby Grimhold Dungeon, and much to the complete shock of anyone who has played a game with a dark fantasy setting before, it is guarded by a horde of monsters. The goal of the game is to equip a party of heroes from the village, venture into the dungeon to defeat monsters, and eventually to uncover the Thunderstone, at which point the game ends.

Most of the cards represent people and items you can acquire from the village to aid in your fight for the Thunderstone. Unlike the kingdom cards in Dominion, which all functioned in the same way despite what was thematically depicted on them (i.e., a person or a location), in Thunderstone the thematic distinctions among the different village cards affect gameplay: Hero cards allow you to attack a monster, while you can only use a weapon card in combat if you also have a hero card in your hand that meets the requirements to wield it, for example. Although this does sacrifice a degree of simplicity, it makes the game feel like it was designed with the theme in mind as opposed to giving the sense that a coat of medieval paint was added on after the design was complete.

The cards are of good quality and thin enough to allow easy shuffling, which means that they are susceptible to wear with repeated plays. Artist Jason Engle did excellent work with the art, and the fact that a single artist worked on every card adds further consistency to the fantasy world the game takes place in. Card layout features artwork over two-thirds of each card, serving to pull you in to the experience even more. The only downside to the card design is that there isn’t enough font and color differentiation among the different numbers depicted on each card – representing purchase cost, strength score to wield items, XP cost to level up, et cetera – which can easily confuse newer players as to what each number represents until they’ve play through the game a few times. The box is large and comes with a slotted plastic tray to organize the cards, although the slotting system is a bit crude and is really only good at separating general large decks from each other as opposed to each specific card type.

Gameplay: The bulk of the central play area represents the village of Barrowsdale, and which is comprised of 16 stacks of cards. 4 of these are Basic cards that are present in every game⁵ that represent plentiful, cheap resources. The remaining stacks include 8 types of Village cards,⁶ and 4 types of Hero cards⁷ which are more expensive and powerful. The remainder of the play area portrays the dungeon, where 3 Monster classes⁸⁹ are shuffled together to form a monster deck. The Thunderstone is shuffled into the bottom 10 cards of the monster deck. The top 3 monsters are drawn and laid out in a line, representing their infestation of the dungeon.

Each player starts with a deck of 12 cards of identical composition¹⁰ shuffled as theire player deck, and draws 6 cards into their hand. Each player can do one of three things on their turn: 1. visit the village to level up hero cards in their hand to a more powerful version, and to use their cards in hand to purchase a new card from the villiage, 2. venture into the dungeon to fight a monster, or 3. rest, which allows the player to remove a card from their deck entirely and take no other action. At the end of the turn all cards a player used or still remaining in their hand are placed into their personal discard pile, as are any new cards purchased, and they draw a fresh hand of 6 cards from their personal deck. When the deck runs out, they shuffle their discard pile to form their new deck. This way, players add to their deck to allow them better and more powerful options when fighting monsters in combat.

The combat system revolves around the idea that there is a line of 3 monsters present at all times, and the card at the head of the line is in the “highest” part of the dungeon, while the one at the back of the line is in the “lowest”. All of the monsters have a darkness penalty based on where they are in the line that makes them harder to hit. A player can attack any of the 3 monsters currently revealed in the play area, but attacking one “lower” in the dungeon incurs a greater darkness penalty than attacking one “higher” in the dungeon. When monsters are killed and removed from the line, any monsters present move to a higher position in the dungeon and a new monster card is drawn in the lowest position. This makes it more difficult for players to preferentially target the easier to kill monsters, as freshly revealed monsters will be harder to hit. While not complex, juggling the negative modifiers for darkness and a monster’s special abilities with the positive modifiers from the cards in a player’s hand does require a bit of on the fly MATH¹¹ that can slow the game down a bit on occasion.

Any monsters a player kills are added to their personal deck, and provide victory points, gold for purchasing power at the village, and sometimes special abilities in combat. Additionally, killing a monster grants the player XP, which they can use to level up their hero cards in the village. The game ends when the Dungeon Deck is depleted to the point where the Thunderstone is revealed, and once it makes it to the “highest” point in the dungeon, the game is over. The player with the most victory points in their deck at that time WINS.

What works well: Gameplay takes the straightforward simplicity of Dominion and adds just enough mechanical robustness to make it into a different, more interesting strategy game. The mechanics fully embrace the game’s theme, which makes it very engaging to play. There is a huge amount of Hero and Village card types, ensuring lots of replayability. You stab things in the face.

Not so much: Doing on the fly MATH¹² during combat when multiple penalties and bonuses are involved can be cumbersome at times. Some of the Monster Card types¹³ don’t feel diverse enough when played through the course of a game.

Endgame: You already know my verdict – if the gameplay of Dominion was expanded to involve stabbing things in the face, along with a dose of MATH,¹⁴ you would have an excellent game – and that game would be Thunderstone. I find it to have a different and more interesting flavor than Dominion because of more detailed mechanics with different card types, the combat system, and it being more thematically fleshed out – the story behind the game feels very relevant to the gameplay, which is a good thing. But are there other deck-building games that can top it? We’ll audition a new contender next time.

[This review is based on personal play with a copy of the game I bought with my own cashy money. John Cmar has no financial or personal interests in Alderac Entertainment Group or anyone involved with the design or production of Thunderstone.]

1. *gasp* [↩]
2. At least for me, as I greatly enjoy stabbing things in the face. In games, that is. [↩]
3. *gasp* [↩]
4. Admittedly, my first reaction when I learned about the game was “Oh, yippie, another dungeon crawling RPG-lite card game…”, but any exasperation with the general unoriginality of the concept was squashed once I actually started playing. [↩]
5. This ensures that players will always have access to cards that will allow them to do useful things, especially in the beginning of the game – the militia is counts a hero card that can attack monsters, the torch provides a small amount of light which can aid in combat, the dagger gives a small bonus to attack, and iron rations give a bonus to a hero’s strength – and all cost a minimal amount of gold [↩]
6. randomized from 19 different types included in the game [↩]
7. randomized from 9 types [↩]
8. randomized from 8 classes [↩]
9. I use the term “class” here instead of “type” as monster cards are slightly different; a stack of Village cards of the same type contains 8 identical cards, whereas a stack of Monster cards contains 8 cards comprised of doubles of 4 different monsters that are related in terms of look or abilities, like “Undead – Spirit” or “Enchanted”. In some classes, the individual monsters are diverse, but in several of the classes they are a bit same-y which makes them less fun to fight over and over. [↩]
10. 6 militia for fighting, and 2 torches, 2 daggers, and 2 iron rations for support. [↩]
11. *gasp* [↩]
12. *gasp* [↩]
13. I’m looking at you, Doomknights. [↩]
14. *gasp* [↩]

Tags: Deck Building Game Review-A-Thon, deck building games, Jason Engle, John Cmar, Mike Elliott, Thunderstone

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 8:21 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.