2195: Quest Complete

We played through the whole Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game campaign today with the full complement of four players, and despite failing the first four quests, we were ultimately victorious, saving our local town-in-peril from a full-on orc invasion.

It’s an interesting game. The first four quests felt very difficult indeed, with our party quickly getting overwhelmed before we were able to complete our objective. On one occasion we got frustratingly close to victory — like, one extra action would have let us win, probably — while on others it very quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to make it out of this particular dungeon in one piece.

What’s interesting is that if you know this is going to happen, you’re not necessarily resigned to playing out the last few turns of your inevitable bloody demises; instead, you can do what you can to minimise the damage you’ll suffer in the subsequent quest. Each quest has both “reward” and “penalty” affects according to whether you succeeded or failed, you see, and these range from adding a “Nemesis” monster into the monster deck for the subsequent quest (a penalty, obviously) to adding one of the four “Legendary Fortune” cards into the Gear deck, allowing the lucky drawer to take and equip one of their three Legendary items.

Where the interesting stuff comes is once a couple of these rewards or penalties have resolved themselves. Since we failed the first few quests, the Nemesis from the previous mission would end up in the next quest’s monster deck, in addition to any Nemeses the quest threw at us. This was obviously a bad position to be in, but there’s a ray of hope for a party in this situation: if you kill a Nemesis added to the monster deck in this way, they are perma-killed and won’t come back again. As such, when it became clear that we weren’t going to successfully complete a quest, we’d simply turn our attention to the Nemeses who were harassing us and take them down so we wouldn’t have to deal with them again in the campaign, and this ultimately worked out pretty well. Facing three or four extra Nemeses in the final quest rather than the one we did successfully deal with would have made a big difference to the eventual outcome of the campaign.

At the moment, we’re not quite sure whether our failures in the first quests were due to our own incompetence (largely due to lack of knowledge of the game) or due to bad luck — or a combination of both. I suspect a bit of both, though it’s not at all unusual for a cooperative game such as this to be tuned to a very high level of difficulty to encourage replayability. I’d be interested to try the campaign again and see if we perform any better — or if the few random, non-fixed elements and dice rolls we had to deal with throughout really were the deciding factor in our success or failure.

Interestingly, Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game also comes with a non-campaign “Delve” quest that is much longer than an individual campaign quest, and provides a condensed form of the campaign’s progression automatically at set intervals through your progress. It sounds like this will be a stiff challenge as well as significantly more randomised than the campaign quests, so it will be fun to give that a go sometime.

All in all, it seems like a great game, and I’d be happy to play it again sometime. A day well-spent, I feel!