Review: Heroes of Tenefyr - by @boardgamefanatic
Heroes of Tenefyr - What sounds better than your next gaming evening working alongside your friends to fight monsters? Looting dungeons, gaining enough new skills to defeat the inevitable Boss in the ultimate challenge of your adventure?
Nothing, exactly! So let me introduce you to Heroes of Tenefyr, a super enjoyable co-operative deck building game by Broken Mill Games. No two games will ever be the same. With the range of cards available, continually mixing up your dungeons and who your final battle will be against!
What's the story?
Heroes of Tenefyr is a co-operative deck building game for one to four players. Each player takes on the role of Barbarian, Bard, Cleric or Thief. Each have their own unique ability to contribute to the team and the adventure. Players start with a particularly weak deck of cards, and must choose one of ten dungeons to venture into as a group in the hopes of securing new skill cards and abilities to strengthen their position in the next dungeon and eventually in readiness to fight the final boss!
Each dungeon will contain four monsters for your team to risk combat against. You’ll only get one run through of your deck. You’ll draw three cards and check if you’ve done enough damage to defeat the monster. If not, the next member of your team will put down three cards, and so on until either the monster is defeated, gaining you a new skill, or all players have played three cards unsuccessfully and therefore you have to abort your adventure and escape!
Did I have a good time?
I personally love a deck builder, from the likes of intense battling games such as Star Realms, to Clank! where you are an adventurer pushing your luck to see who can escape with the most loot. This was my first co-operative deck building experience and I think it was very wholesome light fun! There isn’t much depth to it and it was super easy to learn and play.
We played Heroes of Tenefyr at two player count and thought it was a fun game. To balance the game a bit more against the dungeons and the boss, you choose two characters to play as, and add both of their special abilities to your deck. There's also a solo mode with some small changes, such as abilities, normally applied to another player in your team, being applied to yourself.
What I loved/What I didn't
I love the fact there is such a variety of cards included in the game. It really mixes up each play through, and you can just never feel as prepared as you hope to! There are also four bosses included in the game who are super difficult to beat! I’m sure if you replayed a lot, you may get a feel for some advantageous skill cards for each boss. However, as two beginners, we were so in over our heads when it got to the Boss dungeon at the end, and we failed miserably! But it just made us more determined to beat them next time!
The game flows well and the rules are easy enough to understand. The premise is quite basic so it’s an easy light game night teach. I am not such a fan of the art style of this game. I think the aesthetic quality of games has increased so much recently, it can be quite hard for a game like this to stick out and look appealing. However, the gameplay itself works really well.
The Second Curse Exapansion
The replayability of this game was already very considered, with everything included in the base game. But, for those looking to proper maximise replayability, there is an excellent expansion- The Second Curse. This adds so much to the base game- six new heroes, new bosses, and loads more dungeon cards. The Heroes in this expansion are more complex and add in some new abilities with accompanying decks, including a Ranger with a separate Wolf deck, and an Enchanter with their own Enchantment deck! I really felt that everything included in this box added so much more to the game and that it's an absolutely worthwhile addition for those who enjoyed the base game and are considering investing in some extra content, or for those who wish to enhance their experience from the start and aren’t averse to a few extra rules to learn!
Final Thoughts
I personally think Heroes of Tenefyr with the Second Curse expansion included is it’s best version; the content this adds increases the variety and therefore replayability so much more, especially with such a randomised approach to setting up the dungeons and which boss will be in the final battle- I find excitement in all the different combinations and experiences this brings! It’s a game that would be so easy to introduce to friends whether they had played games before or newbies to the hobby, and is just such a really light and enjoyable experience!
