Chronicles of Drunagor is live (Revisit Drunagor and face the Horsemen of the Apocalypse)

Update: Chronicles of Drunagor: Age of Darkness Apocalypse is live on Gamefound, along with a reprint of the base game, and the campaign will run for 16 days. You may pledge just for the expansion, just for the base game, or for both.

Our preview post below was published on July 18.

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Chronicles of Drunagor: Age of Darkness Apocalypse is an expansion for Chronicles of Drunagor: Age of Darkness. It will launch on Gamefound on July 20, alongside a reprint of the core game and all existing add-ons from the previous Kickstarter campaign. The prelaunch page is already up, and all pledge levels are listed there.

Image source: CGS website

Chronicles of Drunagor: Age of Darkness is a 1-5 players dungeon crawler, with choose-your-own-adventure-style interaction with monsters on elevated 3D terrain. It is a campaign game that alternates between dungeon delves and “camp” phases during which the characters fully rest and gain rewards from their adventures.

The heroes are heavily customizable, from their starting class and the gear they may acquire, to the many skills they can learn, the class abilities they unlock, and the specific “dungeon role” they may choose to fill. They also come with starting equipment when you begin the campaign.

At the beginning of an adventure, you set up a few rooms, following the instructions of the Adventure book. When you go through a door, you must retrieve the corresponding door card, which is a folding card with hidden instructions for setting up the dungeon further, including the spawning of enemies. Doors also come with a QR code that gives access to alternative set-ups that are regularly added to the database.

The game is played in rounds, alternating heroes' and monsters' turns. The order of play is determined by an initiative track. The position of each monster on the initiative track is indicated by a rune symbol on the monster card, and that of the heroes is given by their chosen dungeon role. On a monster’s turn, the monster will try to attack as many heroes as possible, prioritizing the strongest hero within range. The damage they inflict is deterministic, equal to the number shown on the monster’s card. If they reduce a hero’s health to 0, this hero gains a “Trauma” cube that cancels one of their skills for the remainder of the adventure, but will come back with full health on their turn. If, however, they gain a second Trauma cube, then the hero is defeated for good and the adventure is a failure!

On a hero’s turn, they can move once for free, and then spend action cubes to activate their skills and gear items or perform additional moves. They can also perform a variety of free actions such as opening a chest or a door, interacting with a detail in the room, or use a consumable item. At the end of their turn, they can decide to perform a “recall action” to retrieve all their action cubes back to their pool (and this becomes mandatory if they no longer have any cubes available). However, this “recall” comes at a cost: they also earn a “Curse” cube in the process. Like the Trauma cube, the Curse cube covers and cancels one of the hero’s skills. If the hero collects a sixth Curse cube, the adventure also ends in failure. Whenever you fail an adventure, you can reset the current chapter instead of starting the campaign all over from the beginning.

When the round ends (the initiative marker reaches the end of the initiative track), you must randomly draw a rune that will spawn a Darkness polyomino tile on the map which will try to grow towards the heroes. In Darkness-covered areas, the hero loses health and their attacks become weaker, whereas the enemies will deal bonus damages.

Image source: Chronicles of Drunagor Facebook

The Apocalypse expansion adds a new chapter to the campaign, featuring 16 adventures and four massive bosses (the miniature of the biggest boss is 25cm high!). Note, however, that the miniatures are optional and come in a separate pack. The Gamefound campaign also offers a hero pack to play with both the original game and Apocalypse, introducing four new classes represented by eight heroes (one hero of each gender for each class, that otherwise seem identical to each other), besides the five heroes/classes of the core box.

The expansion also introduces a few additional gameplay elements: allies characters controlled by the player, more interaction with the furniture (e.g. you can telekinetically push the treasure chests to hit the enemies, destroying their contents in the process, and dealing even more damage if the chest was trapped). Doors can be closed until you fulfill the conditions to unlock them. Skills can now be upgraded to make them even more powerful (although it does not have the benefit of adding new action cubes to your pool, by contrast to learning new skills). You also have time tokens that track the time on certain tiles: when you reach the end of the initiative track a number of times equal to the value specified by the token, the tile with the time token disappears, and all adjacent tiles along with it. Finally, a new loss condition has been introduced: the amount of rune tokens is now limited, and if it ever gets depleted, the adventure ends in failure, thus making it a race against time.

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