Call to Adventure: Epic Origins is live

Call to Adventure: Epic Origins, a stand-alone sequel to Call to Adventure, is live on Kickstarter until December 3. In this game, you draft cards to tell the story of your heroic character in a generic Fantasy setting, casting runes to claim the cards that interest you the most.

Image source: BGG

The game is played as a campaign: in each scenario you shall face a different Adversary while unfolding your personal story. You also randomly pick an Adversary Challenge that will add abilities to the Adversary and may trigger effects over the course of the game. You create your character by taking a Heritage card, an Origin, a character Class, and a Destiny. The Heritage card provides a special ability that triggers a certain rune result, the Origin also gives you a special ability, while the Class card provides you a bonus for your rune casts and can be improved if you spend experience on it. Finally, the Destiny card provides a specific scoring condition. You also start with 3 Experience tokens.

The game is played over three Acts. In each Act, you will play until you draft three cards to add to your character tableau – which tells their story. There are always four cards on display. Each card shows a story prompt, rune symbols that specify which runes for your pool you can cast, and an alternative between two options of different difficulties. Each option rewards you with an additional rune of a certain type that will be added to your pool, destiny symbols for the end game scoring, and sometimes bonus tokens. To claim a card (face a Challenge), you gather all runes from your pool matching the symbols shown on the card and cast them. Each rune is a two-faced bit, each face showing a number of points. The total number of symbols shown on the faces gives you your score: if this beats the difficulty level of the card, you claim it. If you fail, you gain an Experience token and the card is discarded. This will also add strength to the Adversary. Besides this, there is a Corruption track: depending on the choices you made while facing challenges, your character can become either good or evil. This enables them to use Feat cards, which are of two types (Hero and Antihero), with various effects, such as mitigating the rune casting.

Image source: BGG

At the end of Act II, you must face the Champion of the Adversary, the same way you face a challenge card. Defeating them brings you a reward, being defeated a penalty. At the end of Act III, you will at last face the Adversary, which you may defeat or not, each outcome triggering its own effect. What matters, however, is that you must be able to remove all Experience tokens from the Adversary in order to win the game.

Once you win, you can calculate your final score depending on your destiny scoring condition, and the destiny symbols you collected during the game. The more symbols you collect of a given type, the more points it grants you. You can strive to achieve the highest possible score, or face the next Adversary in the campaign! Further progress in the campaign also unlocks stronger Origin and Destiny cards. However, you do not keep your character from one scenario to the next.

This game differs from the core game in the way the Adversary is implemented, by adding Heritage cards, replacing Background cards with upgradable Class cards, and by adding a campaign opportunity with the unlocking of different Adversaries in succession.

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