Board Game Geek Avg Player Rating: 7.382
Players: 1 to 4
Published: 2019
Content Notes: Kickstarter Pre-Painted with Sundrop Edition of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon Collector’s All-In Grail Pledge: The Fall of Avalon Core Board Game. Includes everything in Tainted Grail Kickstarter campaign: Core Box with all unlocked Stretch Goals, Niamh (KS Exclusive), Expansions: Monsters of Avalon, Red Death, Echoes of the past, All models will be pre-painted with Sundrop, Collectors items: premium card sleeves for all cards, album, adventurers notebook, metal coins, neoprene playmat. Please note: unless otherwise stated paid add ons from the Kickstarter Campaign are not included.
Includes:
- Sundrop prepaint for all models
- Niamh (KS Exclusive)
- Tainted Grail Core Box
- All unlocked Stretch Goals
- Monsters of Avalon miniature expansion
- Red Death expansion
- Echoes of the past expansion
- Premium card sleeves for all cards
- Album with artworks
- Adventurers notebook
- Metal Dials / Coins
- Neoprene playmat
Tainted Grail: the Fall of Avalon is an unforgettable, solo or cooperative adventure experience for 1-4 players. Blending Arthurian legends and Celtic mythology with a unique vision, it allows you to impact the game world in deep and meaningful ways. A deep, branching storyline allows you to tackle problems in different ways, ensuring no two games play alike. Difficult decisions or harrowing choices wait behind every corner and seemingly minor tasks may reverberate with major long-term consequences.
In a land slowly sinking into the Wyrdness and torn apart by conflict; surviving each day is a challenge on its own. Starvation, sickness, violent weather, and random incidents all conspire to end your journey. Guardian Menhirs, that ensured safe travel throughout the realm, are slowly going dark turning simple logistics into an involving puzzle. To overcome these challenges, your character develops along several conflicting lines, such as Brutality / Empathy or Practicality / Spirituality. These traits unlock a rich choice of mutually exclusive skills and lead to different deck-building strategies, making character advancement meaningful and deep.
The character you develop is going to be tested during dozens of combat and non-combat encounters. Sometimes you will need to brute force your way, but often diplomacy might be a better option. Regardless whether you fight with your strength or your wits, our unique dice-less encounter system makes resolving each conflict fun and exciting, while keeping you immersed in the game.
In Avalon, there’s a legend waiting behind every stone and every tree. All locations have their own rich stories and secrets to discover. Places and characters are often much more than they seem. As you slowly put all the pieces of the larger puzzle together, the land will always have a surprise waiting for you just around the corner. Many secrets can be discovered only after several games. Created by one of the best polish fantasy authors, Krzysztof Piskorski, the story of Tainted Grail: the Fall of Avalon aims to push the boundaries of non-linear narrative, building upon the rich experience Awaken Realms has infusing ambitious stories with excellent board game mechanics and striking visuals.
Tainted Grail is a new major board game from Awaken Realms, offering an immersive co-op/solo experience for 1-4 players. Illustrated with over 1,000 pieces of unique, stylish art, it will take you on a fantastic adventure set in a dark reimagination of the Arthurian legends.
Designed by Krzysztof Piskorski (one of the most well-known Polish fantasy writers) and Marcin Świerkot (owner of Awaken Realms, developer of Lords of Hellas, Nemesis, The Edge: Dawnfall), Tainted Grail will bring you adventure, survival and exploration mechanics perfectly paired with character development and exciting combat and diplomatic systems.
The immersive, story-driven exploration will bring the world of Avalon to life, confronting you and your team with difficult choices that have far-reaching consequences. Over 100,000 words of branching story scripts provide many different paths to your goal as well as several different endings to your adventures!
Niamh Kickstarter Exclusive
Niamh is different from all our other Characters. Born on the streets, raised by thugs and grave robbers, this is a woman with a thousand faces and a real jack of all trades.
She has no basic deck. Instead, she can use any of the basic decks, picking any of four general archetypes, and enter any campaign. She gives you more flexibility when putting your party together, and can close any gameplay gaps you have.
She also comes with her own board, and 30 unique upgrade cards for combat and diplomacy. Her Streetwise ability is just as useful, letting her slip in and out of Settlements unmolested, as long as she’s alone. Of course, there’s also a drawback. Niamh is quite notorious in many places. As such, she has a significant Reputation penalty that extends to everyone who travels with her.
Red Death campaign
With the “Red Death” add-on campaign, you now have another option. You may play it after finishing any of the other thee large campaigns, and take your favorite heroes on a last, one-way mission to mysterious Homelands. Their ship will slip into the mists separating Avalon from our reality, and spend many weeks traversing the border between the worlds. Finally, it will emerge back in Homelands, many years after the plague, where answers to some ultimate questions lie buried under the rubble of desolated cities.
- What happened here after most humans departed for Avalon?
- Is it safe to return?
- What caused the plague?
- How did Arthur learn about the island of Fore-dwellers?
- What secrets did he leave behind?
“Red Death” is an expert-level expansion campaign for Tainted Grail. It contains 32 dangerous Location cards that allow you to visit a part of a kingdom ravaged by plague, where unspeakable horrors still lurk among the ruins. These horrors won’t be your only problem! The ancient undersea empire of Fomoria already surveys the lands abandoned by humans, while brutish Picts of the north, who somehow built resistance to the disease, raid the ruins looking for treasure, magic – and something more sinister. Then, there are solitary survivors who outlasted the plague. They’re often mad and dangerous, but their knowledge may help heroes survive.
Pick your allies and enemies, solve difficult riddles, navigate ruins of the old world and face some of the hardest Encounters created for Tainted Grail. And if you survive, learn things that will put the main storyline of three campaigns in a new light.
This add-on campaign will contain approximately 15-30 hours of gameplay grouped into an 8-chatper story. Just like our base campaigns it offers multiple endings and branching paths, so you can try to solve it in a different way multiple times!
Extended Character Advancement
Naturally, a large amount of additional gameplay meant we had to extend the Character progression. That’s why the box also includes new and exciting Advanced Abilities that can help you upgrade your Attributes even further!
Not to mention that many artifacts or items found in Homelands are much more powerful than anything found on Avalon.
What comes in the box?
Hear the Echoes of the Past
One of the most important parts of Tainted Grail is that every playable character is in some way broken or afflicted. Each had something big happen to them before the start of the game. Now, with Echoes of the Past, we have a chance to dig more into what makes these heroes unique.
- Where did Beor receive his wound and why won’t it heal?
- What happened between Naazer and the love of his life?
- Why was Ailei spared by Wyrdness that claimed all of her kin?
- Which of the countless atrocities resulted in Arev’s curse?
- Why did Madb devote herself to keeping the legends of the past alive?
Thanks to Echoes, you will learn all of this – and much more. The add-on contains a personal achievement sheet for each character from all three campaigns, including Niamh. This sheet lists 9 special conditions that trigger 9 unique Memories – if you fulfill any condition during the game, you can mark it off and read an appropriate Memory from the “Echoes of the Past” brochure.
For example, the first time Fyul goes hungry, her memory of being a wandering orphan kicks in. The first time Beor defeats a Purple Encounter, a history of a less fortunate show-down from the past is revealed. And so on…
These memories have a small gameplay effect (sometimes positive, sometimes negative). But as you progress through the game, and your Character progresses in their story of self-discovery or reconciliation, you will also gain some interesting rewards.
Every time you complete a block of three achievements, you receive a Legendary Action card that you keep by your Character Board – you can use it once to perform a single action so epic that bards will sing stories about you in the years to come. Then, the Legendary Action card is discarded from the game.
That’s not everything! If you manage to trigger ALL basic memories, you progress to the final, tenth entry in the brochure that contains a personal side-quest where your hero will confront their worst fears, weaknesses, or a personal nemesis. Should they emerge victoriously, they receive a special golden Legendary Action card that gives your character permanently a second gameplay action!
Don’t worry if you won’t get there in a single game. The sheets can be used as a legacy element, allowing your hero to start a new game with a part of their story and some Heroic Feats cards already unlocked.
Effectively, this add-on introduces interesting personal objectives for each of the characters, and a small legacy element, at the same time reinforcing the character backstories and providing a deeper look into the world of Tainted Grail.
Please keep in mind that it is an advanced addition that requires some knowledge of the game and is best suited for your second or even third playthrough of the campaigns!
- 52 Legendary Action cards (4 for each of 13 Characters)
- 52 Achievement Sheets (4 for each of 13 Characters)
- Echoes of the Past booklet (24 pages)
(more content visuals and descriptions to be added)
-- from the publisher
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