Tiny Epic Quest
Sick day with the kid meant she turned in early to sleep off a fever, so I shanghaied my wife into learning this with me. She’s so good about helping me work through games.
Like every other Tiny Epic game, it’s a surprisingly dense game that’s pretty satisfying. Like, it won’t replace a big blockbuster board game, but given the form factor it sure beats packing a deck of cards or a box of dominoes on a trip.
Despite playing one major rule vitally wrong, I got a good sense of how it’s supposed to work. Each player has three of those adorable little itemeeples, with holes for installing treasure. The game is played in five rounds. Each round starts with some moving around the board (which is kind of bigger than you’d expect once you lay the cards out; consider that when thinking about hotel rooms and airports), generating small bonuses or landing on temples (to finds treasure and complete some quests), obelisks (to increase your magic level), and portals (from which goblin hordes are emerging).
The night phase, which I spectacularly fouled up, is a series of die rolling rounds, generating damage, power, magic, and other resources and costs. You press your luck until you either choose to rest or are knocked out and forced to rest.
The game takes five rounds, and maybe 30ish minutes per player. Your meeples level up with treasure! And collectively they improve their maximum health by killing goblins and maximum power by learning “spells” (which they really aren’t; it’s just a leveling mechanism).
Honestly, I think TEQ is more fun than Runebound in that space, but I gave up after that game’s first edition. Maybe it’s better.
No idea what more experience will bring, but boy is it replayable: new map every time, new quests, tons of items, and an expansion that backers got that looks pretty cute.
Still waiting for mine :(.
Are there different strategies or win conditions to pursue or is everyone working towards the same goal?
Any comment/comparison with other Tiny Epic games?
Chris Groff I think there are, yeah. You score on three tracks (quests completed, spell level achieved, goblins killed) and it’s hard to do well on all of them. There’s also some small worker-placement type concerns: no more than two heroes in a temple, no more than one hero fighting a particular goblin.
There’s also some opportunism in that there are only three quest cards on display at a time, and everyone’s character card had a different progression of achievements to earn your three “legendary items,” each of which are vital to the three scoring tracks.
Given the five round constraint and the fact you can only give each meeple two treasures, it does seem like you need to specialize.
I think the game gets a lot harder with four players, too.
Nate Parker it’s easier than TE Western and reminds me a little of TE Kingdoms because of the three scoring tracks. Faster than TE Galaxies.