Thunderstone Quest First Impressions

Thunderstone Quest is a legitimate Worker Placement and Deck Building Game.

Finally!

Recruit your heroes, arm your party, and then visit the dungeon with new perils, challenges and rewards as you explore deeper and deeper in the dungeon. Each quest brings new dungeons as well as new side adventures!

Thunderstone Quest Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

I’m just going to give a top-level overview of how the game plays. Also, as the game is set up from one of many different quests, I’m not sure how different specific things in other quests will be so I’ll keep it generic.

Players get a deck of genetic cards including 0-level Adventurers and some other bits.

On a player’s turn they either take a village action or a Dungeon turn.

Village Turn

Players place their mini in one area of the village, then they reveal all the cards in their hand.

Then players can play abilities on their cards and in the area of the village they placed their mini. The village actions let you spend money on gear and treasure, recruit heroes and heal wounds.

After, players can buy one card from the market with any money they have left on revealed cards, and then heal one wound.

Then they can pay XP to upgrade a hero in their hand. The 0-level Adventurers can be upgraded to any level one hero of those available. In the future, those Heroes can upgrade to level 2 and then 3 of the class they chose.

Dungeon Turn

Players reveal their hand and equip any weapons to any adventurers they have in their hand. Players move their dungeon mini from the Wilderness at the top through the dungeon rooms, as long as they have enough light on cards and gear to do so. Some rooms will have traps or other negative effects if they are moved through, as will some Monsters in those rooms.

Players resolve the before-combat ability on the baddie they’re fighting, then determine the winner, and then resolve the after-combat ability on it too.

Collect the rewards which can include cards, gear and XP, remove the monster card and replace it with a new one from the top of its deck.

How do you win?

So, I don’t know if that is just this quest or how most quests work but here’s how my game played out.

In the 3 dungeon decks are different coloured keys on cards. As the keys are revealed they are put aside, when the 4th is revealed, so is the boss of the level.

Players draw 6 cards, then discard 4 cards. They each attack the villain once, gaining one XP per 2 damage dealt.

Players score XP from cards added to their deck, plus unspent XP leftover, one XP per key they found (and other bits I might have forgotten) and the most XP wins.

Main Mechanisms

Deck-building is the main one as it determines your turn. If you don’t draw Heroes you’re not going to the Dungeon this turn.

There is also Worker Placement when selecting those actions in the Village.

Theme

The theme of fantasy and dungeon diving is very clear. Each quest also has a backstory in the book so there is a reason why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Setup

So this game and its expansions have a lot of stuff in two huge multi-layered boxes. So while setting up the game is a case of putting cards out on the table and shuffling some of them, finding them probably takes just as long if not longer.

Components & Artwork

The cards are OK and the gear tokens are fine.

The art is really nice, especially on the Hero cards.

Ease of Teaching

If people have played a deck-building game before this will be easy to teach.

The player board, as you can see from above, has a breakdown of both the Village and Dungeon turn at the bottom. Also, each of the Village areas on the main board breaks down all of the actions available.

The Dungeon area also has most things in writing too meaning you don’t have to remember every little detail during the teach.

Similar Games

I mean, Thunderstone Advance is this game’s predecessor and is nowhere near as good as this game

People will say Dune: Imperium and Lost Ruins or Arnak but they are just deck-building games, not hybrid worker placement games as they claim.

Thunderstone Quest Review

Positives

A very good deck-building game with a good theme.

The iconography and helper text keeps gameplay smooth as you don’t need to ask too many questions.

There are very few wasted turns. Each turn you either go to the village and buy cards to improve your deck, or go to the dungeon and kill monsters to improve your deck. I only had one wasted turn in the whole game, but I still bought gear that I could use later in that turn too.

In this game, we had a monster in the Wilderness that upgraded the 0-level adventurers for free meaning you can get off to a quick start.

There are a lot of quests available, each bringing new cards, heroes, monsters and mechanisms keeping the game fresh.

Negatives

There are fewer level 2 heroes than level 1 so you might have some stuck on level 1 in your deck.

The buy-in for everything is quite pricey and with so much stuff, setup takes much longer than it should.

Summary

Well, it took three tries, but Thunderstone Quest finally got the Thunderstone game right!

Jesta ThaRogue