Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall is a fantasy cooperative dungeon crawler for 1-4 players from Incredible Dream Studios, and it's obviously a labour of love from the design team of Kevin Wilson, Darrell Hardy, Adela Kapuscinska and Brandon Perdue. The magnetically affixed box cover unfolds to become the playing board and inside there are individual boxes for the six different 'Seeker' characters and for the 21 scenarios and quests that together make up this epic campaign game. It's reminiscent of the boxes in boxes used in Gloomhaven (Cephalofair) but this feels more lavish and is certainly much quicker and easier to set up and pack away between scenarios.
And this game isn't just thoughtfully packaged, it's beautifully produced, with attractive standees and art from Katarzyna Redesiuk, Katarzyna Bekus, Sandra Chlewinska and Weronika Kozyra.
As you might expect in a campaign game, Kinfire Chronicles is story driven. It means the fantasy realm scenarios feel immersive and not all just more of the same. And it's a game where the aim is for players to learn as they play: the rules are divided into three accessible booklets so that, for example, players are stepped through the detail of how combat works before being left to their own devices. We like the fact that there's no heavy rules overload as a precondition of play tho' if your experience mirrors ours at Board's Eye View the corollary is that you may find that the slimline rules give rise to occasional queries.
The game uses a deck building mechanic where you'll be drawing cards into your hand. You'll play a card to take an action but many of your cards will be playable on other players' turns, or during an enemy's turn, to boost an ally's abilities, give them some protection or to hamper a foe. It makes for card play that is fairly intuitive and it has the effect of involving players on each other's turns: success or failure in combat in Kinfire Chronicles is likely to come down to effective use of boosts and combos on each other's attack actions to ensure they have the maximum effect. This is a cooperative game that feels much more actively cooperative than most others in the genre.
Hand management is important in Kinfire Chronicles: you don't automatically draw new cards but when you have no action cards left you can redraw your entire hand, tho' that means you have to discard any other cards you have still left in hand as well as any positive or negative status cards affecting you. Some boost cards let you give another player a card draw so, again, well-timed cooperative play can make a big difference.
There's no pesky 'initiative' to worry about in combat in Kinfire Chronicles. Rather than conventional turn order, turns are triggered by drawing a chit from a bag. If the chit shows a character, then it's that character that takes an action; if the chit is a number, then your enemy takes that numbered action. It's simple but it works. For sure, it means there's a distinct luck factor but the randomising delivers palpable tension, and players need to develop tactics that can keep their quest alive even when the chit draws don't go well. And there's scope too for using Fate tokens to manipulate the bag; tho' it may be wise to use these sparingly...
There's a distinct progression over the campaign, and with deck-building level ups and loot to discover and unlock along the way. This is game where you can be pretty sure that, win or lose, players will want to come back for the next quest.