Another Relic Bites the Dust

Second game that I played was a three player Relic.

Characters were Techpriest Enginseer, Space Marine and Ordo Malleus Inquisitor.

Ending card was to defeat the chaos lord Corruptis, who is a Strength 14, Willpower 14 and Cunning 14 enemy. It also gets the characters to four Corruption cards very fast, which looked like a problem for Techpriest. Space Marine and Inquisitor have some abilities to mitigate the effects of corruption.

Space Marina started rocking on quite early when he got three completed missions rather fast and probably one of the most powerful Relics there is. Of course I don't know the average power level of Relics, but it's difficult to imagine that there are many more game-changing Relics such as that. It allowed to flip a Power card and add it to battle results.

Inquisitor didn't have a bad start either, but somehow he was unable to progress anyway. Mutations from corruption cards dropped his statistics as he was able to raise them, and some unlucky battles that he should have won proved to be too difficult for him to handle (curse that exploding dice system! When it explodes on me, though. If I get explosive dice, it's a nice addition to game mechanics.)

Techpriest, however, was the unluckiest of the whole bunch to the extent of leaving play with six corruption cards and not picking a new character.

Eventually Space Marine stomped all the way to victory, and Corruptis fell down without landing even one successful hit on Space Marine.

My Very First Relic

So, I got to try out Relic, which takes place in Warhammer 40k universe and is based on mechanics from Talisman.

First things first, the game mechanics did seem less random than in Talisman, which is in a way a good thing. One thing I'll sorely miss in future games of Talisman are the charge counters - how much easier and simpler many adventure cards would be with a charge mechanic! Strength points, Craft points, gold, fate and a ton of other little effects wouldn't litter the board that much.

Also three different threat decks was a nice touch. Even on the unexpanded main board there's different, themed encounters. Of course Talisman has additional decks in corner boards, but in Relic the main board seems to be much more interesting. It doesn't exactly crave for variation unlike Talisman counterpart.

Enough of comparisons, though. We had a three player game, and characters were Callidus Assassin, Ogryn and Tech-Priest Enginseer.

Ogryn got himself killed first, and here is a big difference from Talisman - you don't lose your characters from loss of lives. Relic doesn't have any inbuilt reroll mechanics, but that's okay since losing last life isn't nearly as fatal in Relic than it is in Talisman. You can lose you character, though. You lose them from getting mutated too many times. Tech-Priest nearly suffered that fate when early in the game he was sitting with five mutations (sixth kills).

Good luck removed mutations down to much more manageable 3, and somehow Tech-Priest started snowballing his stats. I guess it makes surviving a bit easier when you got results of 2,3,4,5,6,6 in your dice - a relic he got turned any 1's into 6.

Callidus Assassin was the first one to acquire a relic, though, and it was a piece that let her remove one mutation per turn from herself.

Ogryn was mentally challenged when he continuously drew Willpower enemies against him. If I remember right ultimately he died to too many mutations, but the player didn't draw a new character as there was quite a bit hurry, as my opponent for a game of Warmachine had already arrived.

Anyway, Tech-Priest was the first character to get to the Crown of Com... uh. What's the victory condition space in the middle of the board? I don't think I caught it. The ending was Chaos Factorum or something like that. You spent influence and trophies to add charge counters to the end space and if your roll + number of charge counters was 13+, you won. Anything below that had various results, like spamming mutations to Callidus Assassin, who just removed them with her relic. Other results were giving two lives to Callidus Assassin, and the like.

Tech-Priest had four Influence and no trophies, but due to a lucky roll from Chaos Factorum he got 5 charge counters to the Factorum before Callidus Assassin arrived there, too.

I liked the Chaos Factorum mechanics, as even with a good head start one character can only have so many influence and trophies if he rushes to end the game. But Callidus Assassin didn't just instantly win when she arrived there, but finally the Factorum started to get additional charge counters with fresh blood from the Assassin.

I think Callidus Assassin was the first to roll 13+ there, but my memory is a bit hazy there as I was deploying my army to Warmachine board at the same time...

Time constraints put aside, the game gave a good first impression.