Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab is a standalone expansion with two other versions previously published as part of Incredible Dream Studios’ Kinfire Chronicles. This is a cooperative card game for 1-2 players, where you fight your way through a deck of cards to reach Callous, the Master of the Well, and face him in an epic final battle. The game integrates with Kinfire Delve: Scorn’s Stockade and Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto. The game is a dungeon-diving card game using your character’s cards to fight in a fantasy horror themed world in the Kinfire Chronicles universe.
What’s in the Box?
- 3 Master Cards
- 57 Well Cards
- 4 Gauntlet Cards
- 6 Exhausted Cards
- 2 Seeker Character Cards
- 2 Kinfire Lantern Cards
- 36 Seeker Skill Cards
- 1 Health Tracker
- 3 Skill Dice
- 1 Light and Darkness Die
- 28 ‘1 Progress’ Tokens
- 10 ‘3 Progress’ Tokens
How’s it Play?
This is a game for 1-2 players, or you can add in other Kinfire games to play with additional players. Players take on the role of Seekers, who are dispatched to one of the mysterious and magical wells of Atios. Players work together to delve to the bottom of the Well and defeat its Master to prevent them from being unleashed upon the world.
So in this game the group has a pool of shared health, so all players need to help manage it while playing. On your turn you will be able to select 1 of the 4 well cards that surround the master and interact with that card. There are event cards and challenge cards, and the actions you can take depend on what type of card you choose to interact with.
If it’s an event card you are interacting with, you read the instructions on the card and perform them in order. When choosing a challenge you try to complete it by placing enough progress tokens on it to meet or exceed its difficulty listed on that card. You add progress tokens by playing cards from your deck and by rolling dice, both of which need to match colors with the color of the well card. If you don’t have enough progress to complete the challenge, you receive the penalty shown on the card. If or when you complete a challenge, you gain the reward. Many times, this is discarding cards from the well deck so you can thin it out to face off with the Master.
So again, you choose to use one of your skill cards, and it needs to match the color of your chosen challenge. Each player has a lantern card, which is a powerful card that needs to be charged before using, and they are unique to each player. After using a skill card, other players can use one of their skill cards for the boost ability to add more progress tokens to hopefully meet or exceed the difficulty for that challenge. Remembering that you also roll the 4 dice and the dice that match the color of your challenge or for the light and darkness die; if it is a light result, that adds 1 more progress token to the challenge. You then either complete or fail the challenge and discard all used cards afterwards.
Unlike other games, you do not draw back new cards at the start or end of your turn. You can choose to exhaust yourself at the beginning of your turn, and if you have no cards you have to do this, and you then draw a new hand of cards. You also take an exhausted card and place it face up near the play area, putting it into effect. These are usually cards that make things worse and hinder you, sometimes even causing you to lose the game.
With time, you will be battling through challenges and events to discard more and more cards from the well until you reach the bottom, and at that point you confront the Well Master to either win or lose. All other well cards are discarded surrounding the master card, and it gets flipped up. The 4 gauntlet cards are placed on the 4 sides of the Master. To defeat the Well Master, you must complete the challenge on its card. The Master card is a black challenge card, meaning that it is invulnerable to all 3 colors including white. You need to defeat the gauntlet cards before being able to perform the Master’s challenge.
When a gauntlet card is completed, instead discarding it, it is be flipped over. Sometimes this reveals a vulnerability for the Master. Once the Master is vulnerable to a particular color, defeating him may be attempted using that color. Once you complete the challenge, you win the game. You lose if the health is ever reduced to zero, with some game effects that also might cause the seekers to lose the game.
The Verdict
This is ultimately a great card battler game where each player takes a unique deck of cards specific to that character, and works together to defeat the Well Master. So you battle cards and defeat the small bad guys to then get to the big bad guy and find out what cards you need to defeat it, and then go punch its life out.
The 2 characters in this game complement each other pretty well: Valora Helmsman, guardian from afar, and Roland Wordforger, a true friend. (Supposedly you can also use the characters from the other Kinfire Delve games and use whoever you’d like to face off against any other Well Master.) Roland provides card draws for the other player and boosts their actions with some cards that can make the difference, and Valora can lay out tons of progress tokens, which makes it easy to finish up a challenge if it’s not completed with her turn.
The idea for this game is just great, and the execution on the design is wonderful. You go through the well deck, but each time you play you are discarding random cards, so you never know which cards will come out each time you play. Cards are also different colors and you can only use your own color cards to complete the same color well card. So if the same colors come out you and your partner need to figure out the best way to complete what’s out. You also need to calculate risks to make the best decision.
It’s a tactical game of deciding which of the 4 cards to choose. Because the other player might not be able to do much for certain cards and you might be able to do only so much, you need to work as a team to find out how to minimize your damage taken so you can survive to the end. But also, you want to choose a card you can be successful with and add progress tokens on them to at least do some damage against them. As you run out of cards you gain an exhaustion card making things more tough.
Rules are fairly straight forward, with most of the “learning” coming from reading a cards. If you are successful or if you fail, you need to know what will happen when choosing a card to encounter so it pays to read everything. The box is full of discovery.
Lastly, this game is produced far above average. It has a very thick box and thick progress tokens. The cards are nice, they have a great feel to them without being too thin. The character cards are extra cool, with spot foiling on the back that really stands out. I love the art, and they did a great job with the graphics as well as organizing where all the information is on the cards. It’s nice to look at, with the dice being the only component that makes me say “meh”.
You can grab Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab from the Incredible Dream site here at an MSRP of $19.99.
Images via Incredible Dream
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