Crimson Keep Review

The set up is fairly straightforward for both players, who get identical starting cards and tokens, as well as your own Rune Board where you will collect the Rune tokens to enable you to summon a Dragon of 1 of 3 different power levels for the epic final battle.

The rules / rulebook is well laid out, with plenty of full colour pictures and diagrams, to aid in both the set up and play of the game.

Set up is no longer than 5 – 10 minutes at worst and once you’ve played a few games this will easily be done in virtually no time at all, as there is also a handy storage box for the player specific components and cards so that these are quickly sorted out at the start of each new game session.

Theme and Mechanics:

As stated earlier, the game is based in a fantasy setting, and the theme / aim of the game is to place cards into spaces on either your own board or the main playing area board, be they Keep / Building cards, Monsters / Characters or Cavern cards, which go into your own player specific area and give you special abilities / actions during the game.

Gameplay:

Players take it in turns to play 2 actions each on their go from a possible 7 different action options, or they can choose to take the same action twice.

Once these 2 actions have been done and completed, the play passes to the other player.

Both players have the same action options available to them and they are;-

PLACE – you can either is to select 1 card from your hand or a Summoning card from your own Clan board, and place it on its INACTIVE side out onto the main board area. INACTIVE cards cannot use their special ability until they become ACTIVE.

Alternatively, you can place a Combat card from your Barracks area onto the Battlefield area on the main board. It must be placed on a Level 1 space, and on the empty space closest to your Keep, i.e. the leftmost space on Level 1. Cards in the Barracks or moved from the Barracks to the Battlefield are placed INACTIVE, and remain so until flipped.

REPLACE – you can replace 1 card on the board with 1 card from your hand or Clan board. The set icons on both cards must be a match, and the new card must be placed as INACTIVE.

The displaced card is put into your discard pile.

FLIP – you flip one card on the board to it’s current opposite side. This is how cards go from INACTIVE to ACTIVE, and sometimes vice versa.

DRAW – place any remaining cards left in your hand into the discard area, and draw 5 new cards from the top of your draw deck. You choose 3 to keep and

discard the other 2 cards. If your draw deck runs out simply shuffle the discard pile to make a new live draws deck.

If you end a turn with no cards left in your hand, you will do this action for FREE, prior to your next turn, and then take 2 actions as normal. This way avoids using one of your 2 actions to take the draw action on your turn.

SPECIAL ABILITY – this action allows you to use the special ability shown on an ACTIVE card. Once the special ability has been used, the card is flipped to it’s INACTIVE side, and that special ability cannot be used again until the card has been flipped over using the FLIP action as mentioned above.

BATTLE – you can use an ACTIVE card to battle and adjacent enemy card on the main board.

MOVE – This optional FREE action MUST be played at the beginning of your turn, and is used to move an ACTIVE combat card forward 1 space on the Battlefield.

Players continue to take actions as outlined above until one of the players has discovered an amount of Runic symbols they feel is enough for them to summon their Dragon and engage their opponent in the epic final showdown, where the Dragon they have summoned will attack the other players Keep in order to successfully destroy it and ultimately win control of the lands and thereby win the game. The defender will be able to defend against this last set of attacks, and if the Dragon ultimately destroy the defenders 3 Keep columns then the attacker wins. If the Dragon is injured 4 times during the final battle, then the attacker rolls a D6, on a 1-5 the Dragon flies uncontrollably into it’s own Keep destroying it and the defender wins. If the attacker rolls a 6 then you have managed to control the dying beast in it’s last death throes for one last attack and it destroys 1 complete column in the defenders Keep. If this is the last column in the Keep then the attacker wins, if not the defender wins.

Artwork and Components: