The Stormlight Archive
Since we have played the awesome game Call to Adventure. We of course had to try the follow up: Call to Adventure: The Stormlight Archive. That’s why we were so happy and thankful we could receive a review copy from Brotherwise Games. The board game is created after the Stormlight Archive book series by Brandon Sanderson, which sets this game in an amazing fantasy world torn by war and shaped by storms. Although it is not necessary to read the book first, it does help to get familiar with the world. But for those who don’t have time to read, the publisher provided a quick overview of the books to get you started quickly, which I think is a great detail.
How to Play.
Each player has three acts that tells your story. An origin, motivation and a destiny. You begin at act one and each time you have three cards added to your act, you go to the next chapter of your story. On your turn, you can either get a trait, gain an ally, or attempt a challenge. Traits are free to take, if you have the same rune token on one of your cards that is needed for the trait. Traits give you extra rune tokens or/and an extra benefit to the game. Allies are special cards that gives you extra benefits. To get a revealed ally, you tuck them under a challenge you want to attempt, when you succeed you will gain that ally. When you try to gain an Ally, they often make the challenge you need to attempt for them more difficult. But when you succeed, you will receive their help.
Attempting a challenge is more difficult, but also more rewarding. You either win or lose a challenge depending on your successes. To get successes you toss your rune tokens. You can always toss the three core rune tokens, but if you collected ability runes with your character, you can add those tokens as well. This will increase your chance of winning.
The card that you want to play for has all the information you need. It tells you the difficulty, the tokens you need, and the reward you will receive. Some challenges have an even more difficult path which will add for example one more difficulty to the challenge, but this reward is usually even greater. If you think you wont get enough successes with the runes you can toss, you can pay experience tokens to throw the dark rune tokens as well. With those runes, the chance on getting success is higher, but if you throw a moon token, your corruption tracker will go down. This can have consequences for your hero/antihero deck and your point score at the end of the game.
If you fail a challenge, you gain one experience token.
The game ends when you collected 3 cards under each act. You win the game if you have collected the most points. You can simply count each point with the included score sheet.
Solo and Co-op.
Call to adventure: The Stormlight Archive comes with the opportunity to also play this game in a solo or cooperative mode. Your hero needs to face Odium. every player need to defeat him by collecting ability’s that get you more successes to fight him in the end game. This happens after you collected all nine cards. When you have equal or more successes then needed for the card, Odium is defeated and your heroes will be get all the glory they deserve. You win or lose together.
‘By seeing this art and creating a couple of different stories of my characters, I really want to read every book from The Stormfront Archive series again.’
Tomasz
Playtrough of the game.
The best thing about this game is the art. It’s just a present to reveal a new card on your turn each time and see what this new card brings to the game. We played this game mostly competitive because we liked to play it that way the most. With your destiny not revealed until the end, you need to plan the best strategy to collect the most points and win the game. There is so many ways to collect points and build your story, a nice example of that is your corruption tracker. You might start as a bad character because of your motivation and you want to seek redemption. At the end of your story, you might have found your redemption and be the best character you can be, scoring also eight points extra at the end of the game. It really feels like a journey shaping your character through the game.
A big difference we noticed between this game and the core box of Call to Adventure is the quality of the experience tokens and the player boards. The experience tokens are made from cardboard instead of plastic, and the player boards are now the same thickness as the cards. We didn’t like this change with the player boards so we decided to play with the boards we have from Call to adventure the core box as they look the same.
‘This game takes you on a journey while you advance your characters, I love it’
Sharon
Another great aspect of this game is that you can mix The Stormlight Archive with the core box from Call to adventure. In the rulebook it’s even explained how you can best do this. But because we like to play competitive more, we mixed everything which also works perfect. Note that this will make it hard to play solo or cooperative games.
By mixing all the cards together with the core box, you will have endless stories to discover.
Final Thoughts.
The art and story build in this game, make you want to play this over and over again. It’s easy, pretty fast and a great strategic game. If you like the novel series of The Stormlight Archive or overall story telling fantasy games or books, this is a game for you. It has a lot of replay ability as a standalone game or with the core box of Call of adventure.
We recommend to add this game to your collection.
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