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Vindication is a Euro-style game designed by Marc Neidlinger and published by Orange Nebula games.
The main objective of Vindication is that of honour. You are on a quest to gain as much honour as possible before the end of the Epoch.
You will explore the island looking for opportunities to expand your influence, recruit companions, obtain traits and artefacts and defeat monsters all to gain the most honour.
Setting Up
First, place the board in the middle of the table shuffle the Monsters, Traits, Relics, Strength, Knowledge and Inspiration decks. Place them on their relevant spots on the board with one card face up. The rest will need to form a deck as seen below.
Each player then draws, or are dealt, a journey card. This will dictate the players starting position on the board and the colour of the starting companion. Their companion will be drawn from the top of the relevant deck.
Play with Conviction
Each player has a player board that tracks their potential, influence and conviction:
Influence is the primary “currency” in the game, you will spend it to activate yourself or your companions and on the mainboard to track the common attributes of Inspiration, Knowledge and Strength as well as the Heroic attributes of Wisdom, Vision, Courage.
Common attributes are primarily used to be converted into heroic attributes, pairs of common attributes convert as follows:
Inspiration and Strength = Courage
Inspiration and Knowledge = Wisdom
Strength and Knowledge = Vision
Activating
On a player’s turn they can complete all of the following actions in any order:
- Activate – Using the ability of your character or that of your companions (you can only activate one character a turn)
In the above example, if you activate this companion, you would take two of your inspiration from your board. These would then be placed in the Knowledge spot on the mainboard.
The text at the bottom of the card is normally only used when you activate that particular card. The above example operates slightly differently. Iis only relevant at the end of the game when determining mastery, the most of a particular colour of tile.
- Move – Move a number of spaces up to your normal speed
You must move at least one space. Remembering that you can only move in the triangles between hexes.
All About Hexes
For each unoccupied hex passed by your move, draw a tile from the bag. This then must be added to the board.
- Visit a Region or Rest – After moving, you can then use the effect of any of the adjacent tiles.
In addition to the above you can also complete any/all of the following bonus actions in any order:
- Convert Heroic Attributes as described above.
- Gain Proficiency – if you have three of any attribute, you can convert them into an associated proficiency tile.
- Control a region – pay conviction on a visiting region to gain control of the region. If other players use that region in the future, you will gain two honour.
- Recovering influence – at any time you can recover a block to your sphere of influence.
- Vindicate yourself – once you have met the criteria, you may flip the character tile over from the wretched to vindicated side.
The game ends when one of the game end triggers are met. At the start of the game, 2 end game triggers are flipped face-up. When a player passes the 30,45,60 or 75 honour marks, more game end triggers are drawn and revealed. Once a player meets the requirement of one of them, the next round becomes the final round for all of the players.
Final Thoughts
Here are the basics of how to play the base game of Vindication.
The base box contains a number of expansions. Some of the expansions are smaller and easier to add to the base game. You'll just need to replace some of the basic tiles with the expansion tiles. Others expansions such as the Myths and Wonders Expansion, add more depth with a monster to battle!
The Kickstarter edition of Vindication plays the same as the retail edition. The Kickstarter edition has an added objective to wake and provoke the monster. This will continue until you are rescued using an additional game board. Other players will need to use influence to fill spots on the board. Once all are filled, you are rescued and Tuuk-Tuuk kills the dragon!
