The Kinfire Delve series by Incredible Dream is a set of cooperative fantasy card game that I was not expecting to get as hooked on as I have.
Kinfire Delve sits comfortably with the other high energy huge sprawling fantasy epics that have recently come to my games table. Only with those, they came in massive boxes, sometimes with enough miniatures to cost the same GDP as all of Yorkshire and rulebooks that I have to dust off my Latin textbooks to understand. Then you take the Kinfire Delve games out of your bag and you have all that epic gameplay in a box that is about the same as an old VHS tape.
The Kinfire Delve series consists of three sets: Kinfire Delve: Scorns Stockade, Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto and Kinfire Delve: Callous Lab. You can buy one set, and have one to two players. Or you can add another set in and have a three to four player game. Whilst the instructions do not have a version that gives you a five to six player game if you have all three modules, I would be shocked (and appalled) if someone hadn’t masterfully made an epic set that uses all the modules in one.
The basic structure of Kinfire Delve is wonderfully simple. You are Seekers and you must descend deep into a Well (which I thought of as dungeon floors). You go deeper into the Well by overcoming challenge cards. In each set there are three possible final enemies. You select one at random and you keep it face down until you reach the bottom of the Well deck. Surrounding the hidden final enemy will be the four challenges.
On your turn, you select one of the challenge cards. In its top left corner is that card’s health. You can choose to play one of your cards against that challenge if the colour matches, and your cards will often get a bonus strength if certain criteria are met, e.g. You play a card that does four damage, but then an extra two if the target is a trap card. If you are playing with someone else, they can contribute to your challenge with a single card of their own if possible. Then you come to the dice roll. You have four dice, three of the dice have colours on, and if you roll the colour of the challenge card, you get a bonus point. Then the final dice has either a plus one, or a minus one to the total on it. It is nearly impossible to get a card combo that will beat the challenge card on their own, you have to hope that luck is on your side with the dice. But any damage you have done to a card stays there, so you might have made it easier for the next player to finish it off.
Some players out there might hate the dice mechanic — the reliance on luck that is very hard to mitigate might be too much. If that’s so, that’s ok, not all games are for all people. I like a bit of dice mechanics in my games. Yes, I can often be as frustrated as anyone else, but I like the lucky feeling when a roll goes well.
If you succeed with your challenge then you will get a bonus, usually in the form of removing dice from the Well deck. At first, when we first set the game up, I thought that the Well deck was huge, and that we either must have set it up wrong, or it was impossible. But when a challenge removed eight cards, and then the next challenge removed five, we quickly saw how that deck wasn’t as intimidating. If you don’t succeed in the challenge, however, you take a penalty. That might be health… which you start with only ten points of, shared by the group (and you will rarely see any chance to get any lost health back) or you might have to sacrifice cards from your hand.
Now, there are three Kinfire Delve sets, each one offers a different vibe. I will do my best to break them down for you:
Vainglory’s Grotto
Vainglory’s Grotto is the set that most people seem to consider the one to start with (I wish I had known that at the time). You get Khor and Asha as seekers, I felt that they build up steadily over time during play. The final boss powers themselves up over time. Asha is more of a tank character in my opinion, whilst Asha was good for slapping more damage on challenges that we had already started to chip away at.
Scorn’s Stockade
This is where we started, and it worked well for us as an entry point. I played as Feyn and he mainly helps with rerolls which is always a good way to mitigate the luck factor I mentioned earlier. Naz allows you to move progress tokens around, and that is necessary when certain challenges come out. I do think that the boss’s ability to bring out exhaustion cards relatively easy and you have less, means it can be a sharp difficulty increase. Feyn is a big plus there because Scorns dice ability means you might want to use those rerolls to stop an instant defeat. I do think that Feyn and Naz don’t compliment each other as well as Khor and Asha, but maybe this is just more reason for me to mix the sets up.
Callous’ Lab
I don’t know if this is tougher than Scorns Stockade, but it is at least as difficult. Your new seekers here are Roland and Valora. Roland is great at feeding cards to your partner (great with brown sauce) and the more that’s in his discard pile, the more powerful he can get. Valora is strong at banking progress, as an archer, I felt the idea was that she is sniping and gets key hits in often. I don’t know if I clicked with Valora as much as I did Roland. Callous is the coolest thing about this set, basically Callous is dying of a disease and will slowly start to be cured through challenge cards and exhaustion cards. Once cured, that’s it, he comes out swinging and its game over my people.
The replayability of Kinfire Delve was a worry that I had. I thought that each box would feel tired and exhausted after a game or two. BUT, because you only encounter parts of the Well during each run, combined with the three boss chances, there are a lot of possibilities. In our first game, we won a challenge and gained a card that stated that if we managed to achieve getting two other specific cards from the Well, we would win. Me and my much better half tried really hard to make sure we got the second card when it came up. But it was not to be, for we never saw the third card. It went into the Well discard pile early on. But that variety was brilliant.
The card quality is just perfect. The artwork on the front, and even the back of each card has stunning detail. You can also use some of the cards in the Kinfire Chronicles: Nights Foil game, but I am yet to be lucky enough to try that. I was reminded of Critical Roll with the artwork as its clean and detailed and has a certain comic charm to the character design. It also made me think of the Netflix show Arcane. If the Kinfire games ever have an artbook, I might have to add that to my shelf, between The Investigators of Arkham Horror, and Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Games are quick, and you can reduce the time more by removing some of the Well cards to suit how long you have. Our first game lasted an hour, which is what it says on the box, and that was a surprise in this day and age where I feel a game can say its 60-90 minutes, and then I go “yeah right, per turn you mean”.
If you want a mechanically and stylistically delightful one to two person game, with a price tag that is much better than I would have expected, and the ability to scale up easily to more players, or to just give yourself more variety, Kinfire Delve series are very much for you.
Kinfire Delve is available now, you can find out more about it on the Kinfire Delve official website
