Legends of Andor: Dark Heroes Review

Legends of Andor: Dark Heroes is an expansion for Legends of Andor and contains four new characters and rules for playing with five or six people. In the base game of Legends of Andor, I’ve always liked the monsters for being less generic than the usual fantasy fair. This couldn’t be said about the original characters – Elf, Dwarf, Warrior, Wizard – who were incredibly generic. So, does this expansion offer some characters with a bit of flair?

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The Characters

Forr/Forn is a half-skral who can get around the board quickly but at a price. Every time they move in the direction of an arrow on the board, instead of moving their time marker one space, they may lose one willpower point instead. Also, Forr/Forn totals up equal dice values, the same way as a helm would do. To balance this, creatures that onto Forr/Forn’s space are advanced to the next space as if they were passing another monster.

Forr/Forn is fun to play with. Seeing as though the legends generally have you charging about the board, trying to be in five places at once, the extra movement is very welcome.

Drukil/Drukia is a shape-shifter who turns into a bear if they are on a forest space at sunrise. This is great because the bear form has a load more strength. In most legends, if you spend eight gold upgrading your strength, you would hit your maximum of eight strength, unlike other characters where eight gold would only take you to six strength. But there’s a downside, when you’re a bear you can’t carry any articles, and if you’re low on willpower you can cause your chums to lose strength points and potentially lose the ability to control your own movement.

Drukil, Drukia is, again, another fun character. The decision of when to transform is always interesting. Planning for if your willpower drops is another perplexing challenge.

Darh/Darhen is the weakest of these characters. If they participate in a battle, they can randomly place the killed monster back onto the board along with their bone golem, which adds six strength in a battle and can be moved like Prince Thorald or the Shield Dwarves. This bone golem only lasts for the next four advancements of the narrator.

In most legends, it’s all a bit touch and go with the monsters overrunning the castle, so putting a monster randomly back onto the board seems like a big risk. It could instantly finish your game. Darh/Darhen is great on the last day, where you can bring something back on and not care about it going into the castle, getting the plus six to help you defeat the baddie. Apart from that, they are a very basic character.

Leander/Leane rolls five dice at the beginning of the game and places them in any order on their dice track. Depending on their willpower points, they can get rid of zero, one or two of these dice. When they fight, they use the top dice on their track and then remove it when finished. Any ones can be used to turn over any one token on the board.

Leander/Leane is great for helping you make your mind up for what order to fight monsters in. It’s another fantastic puzzly element to an already puzzly game. They can occasionally be pathetic if you roll badly.

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What’s Good About This Expansion

Replayability. This expansion gives a breath of fresh air to the base game, and can also be used with Journey to the North and The Last Hope. The characters can be mixed and matched with the base game characters and characters from

the New Heroes expansion. They create new ways to play the game and new puzzles to solve.

Whether you want to play with five or six players will be a matter of taste. Personally, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. But it’s there if you want it.

Any Problems?

Apart from Darh/Darhen being less than stellar my main issue is a minor one, but one that has annoyed me through all of the Andor games.

Let me give you some background first. I primarily play games at two players, so when a game has one side of the main board for three and four players and the other side for two, I’m always quite happy that the designer had thought about how the game scales. But invariably, the two-player side of the board is the “bad” back side of the board, the side where the edges have been wrapped over. It’s only an aesthetic feature and doesn’t affect gameplay, but it still irks me. It always makes me think that the game is meant to be played at more players, and the two-player side was an afterthought. Basically, I’m in the minority, and the game isn’t really for me.

Now, let’s apply this to Andor. The player boards also have a “bad” side. When the boards get cut, the top side always has nice round edges, whereas the bottom side has sharper, less pleasing edges. It’s a small thing, with no effect on gameplay, and not something everyone would notice, but I do, and so do the developers. Every male version of the characters in all of the games and expansions is on the “good” side. The females are all on the “bad”. The developers have obviously done this on purpose; it hasn’t happened randomly. What message does this send? If you want to play as a female, this game isn’t really for you.

It’s a small detail that many people wouldn’t notice, but how hard would it have been to have had half of the female characters on the “bad” sides and half on the “good”?

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Conclusion

If you love Andor, this is a no-brainer. If you don’t like Andor, this won’t change your mind. It’s a cheap, cheap price for something that reinvigorates the first three big box Andor games. Great stuff!