Players: 1-2
Playing Time: 15-30 minutes
The current games are: The Lair of the Lich, an undead-heavy dungeon; The Infernal Forge, a demonic place; and The Den of Dementia, a battle against "bubbleyes", which are these floaty ball things with lots of eyes.
The Components
Each game comes with 60 cards, two dice, and twenty-eight tokens.
The cards are all medium weight, but without any gloss or texturing I have some concern about how they'll hold up to repeated use. Each deck of cards features a lot of original artwork that generally runs the gamut from good to very good. The cards also make good use of icons and standard layouts to make it obvious what each does (though there's a fair amount of text too).
The tokens are small plastic tiddlywinks which come in red, black, yellow, and blue to mark courage, fear, tenacity, and mana.
The dice are standard plastic dice. One is a six-sider and the other is a different polyhedron. The Infernal Forge has a d8, The Den of Dementia has a d10, and The Lair of the Lich has a d12.
Overall the components are fair to good quality, and as is typically the case with games from Asmodee, the artwork and layout are top rate and really add to the game. I've given Hero: Immortal King a "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Game Play
Hero: Immortal King is a head-to-head game where the adventurer player is trying to defeat the boss monster and the dungeon master is trying to prevent him from doing so.
Setup: The adventurer player decides how he's going to arrange his party. He gets to enter the dungeon with five cards, which can include 1-4 adventurers and 1-4 equipment.
The dungeon master meanwhile sets up the dungeon. He shuffles the 48 dungeon cards and arranges them into three piles of 16, which represent the three corridors in the dungeon. When the adventurer is ready to go, he flips one card from each pile face up, showing the starting monsters.
The adventurer player starts off with 5 courage and 1 mana for each adventurer. The dungeon master starts with 1 fear per adventurer.
Adventurers. Each adventurer is defined by a name, a type (e.g., warrior or rogue), and a sex. The latter two will sometimes trigger other cards. In addition, each adventurer has three special characteristics.
His skill is something that's always in effect. It might let him use a better combat die, reroll the combat die, have a bonus to combat, or something more esoteric (like starting with more courage).
His temporary power is a more powerful effect that he can use by spending his mana.
His ultimate power is a super powerful effect that he can use by spending trophy cards (as noted below).
Equipment. There are three types of equipment. Potions are one-use effects that are typically free to use. Objects (including weapons and armor) have constant effects, but you must pay a trophy-card cost before you can play them into play. Quests are multi-use effects, but you must pay a trophy-card cost each time you need to use them.
Dungeon Cards. Dungeon cards come in one of four colors: green, yellow, blue, or red, which approximately mark their increasing difficulty. These cards are all monsters and traps that must be defeated. Each one has a Strength which must be overcome in order to delve deeper into the dungeon (and gain the card as a trophy). Some also have special powers, typically making themselves or another monster better.
After they've been defeated, dungeon cards become trophy cards. These may be turned in for various effects. Object cards require a one-time trophy payment of a specific type (e.g., three blue) as do Quest effects (e.g., a yellow and a red).
You can also turn trophies in to use an adventurer's ultimate power at a cost of one complete set of trophy cards per adventurer in your party (e.g., if you have two adventurers you must turn in a set of two green, two yellow, two blue, and two red in order to use either of their ultimate powers).
Order of Play: Each round of play contains three phases:
- Construction Phase
- Equipment Phase
- Combat Phase
Construction Phase: This is the phase when the dungeon master can try and make life slightly harder for the adventurer player. He can look at the top face-down cards of all three "corridor" decks, then swap two of them. This just swaps the undrawn cards, not the current encounter for that corridor.
Since the current card doesn't move, this can be used to put a taller deck or a tougher card behind an easier card (or just the path the adventurer player is likely to take).
Equipment Phase: The adventurer player may reveal equipment and play his ultimate power.
Combat Phase: The adventurer player may try and defeat one of the dungeon cards. He rolls a die (usually a d6) and tries to equal or exceed the Strength of the monster. Afterward he can use temporary powers, expending mana as he does, to improve the die roll in various ways.
If he defeats the monster, he gets the card as a trophy and a new one is revealed. If he fails, he loses a courage point and the dungeon master earns a fear point.
Regaining Mana. Half of the monsters allow you to regain one mana point for one adventurer after you've defeated the monster.
Fear Points: The dungeon master can earn fear in a variety of way: he starts off with one; he gets one every time the adventurer player loses a courage token; and he gets one every time the adventurer rolls a "1" on a die. He can spend them for a variety of effects:
- Ambush (cost = 1). Played as a new dungeon card is drawn; it's placed face down rather than face up.
- Tenacity (cost = 2). Places a tenacity marker on a monster which is now +1 strength (or +2 strength if it has the Fierce attribute).
- Horrible Luck (cost = 3). Forces a reroll of a die.
Ending the Game: The game ends in one of two ways. Either the players clear a corridor, move on to the final monster, and defeat it (and win); or else they run out of courage (and lose).
Alternate Games: Hero: Immortal King offers two notable gameplay variants: the constructed game and the solo game.
The Constructed Game. This variant requires two or more sets of Hero: Immortal King games. The dungeon master gets to choose a set of 48 cards (within constraints concerning card color and the mana-restoration cards) while the adventurer player gets to decide the set of 4 adventurers and 7 equipment from which he'll choose a final set.
There's lots of potential synergy between cards, so there's the potential for interesting deck design here.
The Solo Game. The game can also be played solitaire, without a lot of difference. Because there's no malevolent dungeon master to play fear effects, instead an array of increasingly bad things happen as the "dungeon master" gains fear tokens.
The Three Games: As noted, there are three different games: The Lair of the Lich, The Infernal Forge, and The Den of Dementia. They play the same in all the broad strokes, but because of different selections of monsters and different adventurer powers, each one has a different feel to it. There's also some slight variance in card powers from one game to the next.
Relationships to Other Games
Hero: Immortal King is a dungeon exploration game, a popular genre in recent years, with games running the gamut from the big-box Descent to the much smaller Dungeoneer card game.
Hero: Immortal King is different from most of the rest of the pack, in that it's a more European design. That means simple and elegant mechanics and a short game time. One of the few other games in that sub-genre is Asmodee's own Dungeon Twister, but Hero: Immoral King is a vastly simpler game.
The Game Design
Overall, Hero: Immortal King is a clever resource-management game. After some careful thought about what cards to start with, you have to balance your mana, your courage, and your trophies in an attempt to best push forward toward the final boss. The resource management aspect of Hero: Immortal King plays well. It's not particularly deep, but you always have important decisions to make.
Some more needs to be said about the variant games.
When you're playing two-player, I'll contend that the dungeon master is the less interesting role. You overall have fewer decisions to make and the decisions aren't quite as critical to the course of the game. However, you do have one resource to manage (fear), and there's some interesting interaction as you try and figure out what your opponent is doing. You can also sometimes bluff via the Construction and Ambush actions. The dungeon master role is probably all right if you switch it off occasionally.
The limited role of the dungeon master is probably why the 1-player game works so well. It feels like a puzzle that you're trying to push your way through--much like classic Solitaire card games do. If you're just playing the basic game, a 1-player game might be the way to go.
However, I think the 2-player game shines more when you add in deck construction. A dungeon master getting to put together a whole 48 card deck helps to balance his more limited ability to play strategically during the actual game.
(And I'll generally say that the deck building is interesting. Even when you're just an adventurer player selecting from 11 cards, you have to really think about what to select. Overall, there is enough interaction among the cards that good deck construction can mean the difference between victory and defeat.)
On the whole, Hero: Immortal King is a solid game that works best in its 1-player or deck building incarnations. I've given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Hero: Immortal King is an interesting and elegant game design that lets you investigate a dungeon in 15-30 minutes, either head to head with another player or using a well-designed solitaire system. If you want a quick dungeon game for 1 or 2, this is a nice choice.
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