Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 30-60 minutes
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)
The Components
Testimony comes in a small card box with 110 cards and a dozen dice.
Cards: The cards are divided up into 3 decks: characters (6); locations (14); and terror (90). All the cards are printed on cardstock that’s just slightly flimsy with rounded corners.
The fronts of the cards are attractive and visually easy to follow. All three card types follow the same general layout: a name at the top, then a picture, then a card type and possibly subtype, then below that a box of explanation with some numbers at the side. What exactly is in those areas varies from card to card, but the use of a standardized layout makes the game that much easier to understand. Colored borders also make it easy to distinguish one card type from another.
The character cards should really have noted the combat skill of the characters, even though it's standard (2), but that's a minor issue.
The artwork varies considerably, from the truly sublime (a number of pieces by Levon Jihanian stand out, as does a picture of a scarecrow by Dave Gustin) to the cartoonish (including many pieces by Todd Shulek and Chris Seaman). Personally I find the cartoonish art distracting and the more artistic pieces appealing, but recognize that's mainly a matter of taste. However, I think the game would have benefitted from more consistency among the artwork, no matter what style was choosen, which should be possible in a game of this size.
The backs of the cards appear to printed in two colors, though I expect they actually went through the same four-color press as the fronts. Each one is colored sepia and one other color--red, green, and orange for the three different decks. Sadly, the name of each deck (character, location, or terror) is not printed on the back, which leaves you guessing as to which deck you should be drawing from (in looking more carefully at the decks, I can see that the producers tried to choose pictures that would clearly demonstrate what the deck contained, but none of our players made this connection in the playtest games I played).
Dice: There are six six-sided dice in pink and six in yellow. These are used, respectively, to denote the life and mind (sanity) of a character. The colors are very distinctive due to their unusual shades.
Rules: The rules are printed on a six-folded sheet of paper, in black and white. They're pretty plain, though two of the folds contain explanatory pictures of all the cards, which is helpful.
Box: The box is a thin cardstock container with a flap at the top. It's subideal for usage. First, because there's no divider and because the cards are quite slick, the two stacks of cards that you stick into the box will intermix, which means your Locations and Characters will get mixed into the Terror Deck. Second, the box is just barely big enough for the cards and rules, and thus it can be a bit of a pain to slide them all in together.
Missing Components: I felt like two components were missing from this game: something to mark which location you were currently at, and something to mark your current number of Investigation Points. The location marker is important because locations go away once everyone has left them, but you can hop over to a location card that was played by someone else, so it's not always just the card in front of you that your character is currently related to. A marker for investigation points would be helpful so there was a visual reference for how everyone was doing in the game; the rules just suggested keeping a list on a piece of paper, which I always find subpar because it tends to mean that only the scorekeeper knows who's winning. In our playtests we killed two birds with one stone by using a ten-sided die that marked investigation points (from 0-9) also as a location marker. Because most of the people depicted on the character cards are wearing unique colors of clothing, it was even possible to correlate them to the characters.
Overall, the Testimony components feel about average for a card game of this price, with the only real standout being the clean layout of the card fronts (and, actually, the colorful dice). Still, it's good looking and relatively easy to use, thus I give it a "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The goal in Testimony is to be the first player to achieve 10 investigation points, which come through the exploration of locales and the defeat of monsters.
Setup: At start each player is given one character (who either has 5 life and 4 mind or vice-versa) and five terror cards (which can be encounters, clues, items, or actions). Play then begins, with each player taking the following turns in sequence:
- Draw up to three cards, to a maximum hand of five.
- Move to a new location, taking the appropriate results.
- Play terror cards.
- Discard up to three cards.
More information on Locations and Actions is included below, as well as a few related systems.
Locations: Locations are the heart of the game. Each turn you may either: stay at your current location; flip a new location card from the location deck, immediately moving to it; or move to a location currently inhabited by another player. The whole idea of locations is somewhat abstract, so if you leave a location behind with no other players in it, the location is discarded.
The locations are the various places within Castle Bay--a town that's been overrun by evil. You'll find places like the "All Night Diner", the "Asylum", the "Library", and the "Sewers", many featuring grotesque, doomed artwork.
Each location tends to have some attributes relevant to the use of various cards (e.g., indoor, town), some special rules for the location, a color quote, an encounter, and investigative numbers. You must first face the encounter (more on that in a second), then you can investigate the location.
Flipping: Encounters, investigations, and many other cards in the game use a randomizer technique called "flipping". Quite simply, you flip the next card in the action card deck, then read the number which appears at the bottom right, which is between 0 and 5.
Encounters: Every location has an encounter. So do most clue and encounter cards (two of the types of cards found in the terror deck). Each encounter gives the following information: encounter name, class, combat value, damage value, reward value, and evade numbers.
The name provides color, while the class puts the encounter into one of three niches: spirit, fiend, or abomination. Different cards have different effects on these various categories; some weapons are particularly powerful against certain monsters, for example, while certain locations make certain classes of monster more powerful.
The combat value lists how many flips the monster get, which is compared to 2, the starting combat value for each character. The damage value lists how much damage the monster does (e.g., 1 life) and the reward lists how many investigation points you get if you defeat the monster (usually 0 or 1).
Put all together, these three values should tell if you want to try and avoid the monster or not. If it has no reward, you almost always want to try to get away; if it has some you may or may not, depending on its damage and combat values.
If you choose to try and evade you look at the evade value, which is a listing of numbers, e.g. "1, 2, 3". You then flip to try and get those numbers. If you succeed, you avoid the monster entirely; if you fail, you must fight.
Fighting is done by flips as well. The character and the encounter (played by another player) each get as many flips as their combat value. Cards are flipped one at a time, to increase suspense, with either the combatee with a higher combat value, else the monster starting. If the monster's total flip value is greater than or equal to the player's, the player takes the damage, else the player gets the reward.
If the player was fighting due to an Encounter or Clue Card, it's done with at this point; if he's at a location he may now move on to investigation, whether he won or lost.
Investigations: Each location has an investigation target (e.g., 5) and an investigation point value (e.g., 2). After evading or surving the encounter at a location, a player may now try and investigate. He flips and adds his Mind to the value of the flip. If he exceeds the value of the target, he gets the points and the location is rotated 90 degrees to show that its secrets have been uncovered. (Each location may only be investigated successfully once.) A failed investigation means the player gets nothing usually results in other players hopping over to the location card on their turns and/or the player trying again on his next turn, if the secrets have still not been found.
Terror Cards: After having moved to, fought through, and investigated a location, a player may now play as many of his "terror" cards as he wants. There are four broad types: items, encounters, clues, and actions.
Items are played on your character. Most, though not all, modify combat. You can only have two items at a time, including one weapon and one armor max.
Encounters and Clues can either be played on yourself or on other players. They're almost all monster/encounters, though clues tend to give Investigation Points even if you evade the monster, while Encounters do not. You play them to hurt opponents or gain yourself IPs.
Actions have a variety of effects. Many are "React" cards which may be played out of turn and most typically affect flips and/or combat (e.g., gain a bonus flip or a bonus value to your combat total).
Winning the Game: The game continues on for a while with players investigating locations and facing encounters to game Investigation Points. Eventually some players start approaching 10, and then other players become more likely to hit them with Encounters and nasty Actions from their hands. Finally, someone manages to reach 10 and wins the games.
Relationships to Other Games
The Testimony of Jacob Hollow is one of the newest entries in a long line of card and strategy games which emulate roleplaying games. It bears a passing similarity to one of the oldest horror/RPG/strategy games, Arkham Horror and even more similarity to the CCG of Lovecraftian investigation, Mythos (though I personally think that Mythos did a better job of bringing this whole concept off).
Testimony also bears a close resemblance to another recent RPG/strategy game, Dungeoneer: Tomb of the Liche Lord. Both games have characters running around encounter locales, all represented by cards, and also throwing various encounters at each other. I generally found Testimony to be more abstract and Dungeoneer to be more concrete, but other than that, they could be kin.
The Game Design
Overall, Testimony plays simply and consistently, but without a lot of surprises. Here's some of the better game design:
Good Atmosphere: The general atmosphere of the game was indeed horrific, thanks to some combination of card names, pictures, and monster names.
Exciting Battles: The method of drawing cards one at a time to determine the outcome of a combat proved to be one of the more exciting combat methods I've seen in a game. There was also sufficient variance to allow for the occasional upset.
Flip Method Improves Replayability: The flip method means that the majority of the cards go by without actually being played, which improved replayability because some cards will never come up in some games.
Here's some of the bad:
Storytelling Promise Fails: The game offers up the promise that it's about storytelling. The idea that you're trying to gather clues to solve a mystery just builds up this promise. However, the game is actually entirely abstract, simply a point-gathering exercise rather than a true investigation.
Low Strategic Potential: The strategic possibilities of this game are very low. You flip a Location card, then do your best to muddle through the challenges offered by that investigation card, then play some good cards on yourself and some bad cards on the game leader. It felt mechanical, without much ability for a superior player to get ahead.
Random Factor High: Related, your success in the game was largely dependent upon whether you were lucky enough to flip location cards that were within your ability or not. Despite the fact that you could visit other player's locations, this rarely came into play, because either the player had already retrieved the investigation points there, or they were beyond most players' abilities to retrieve. The luck of drawing protective React: cards also determined a lot of players' success in the game.
Player Dropout Problematic: Players can be eliminated well before the end of the game, which is never that much fun. There was some attempt to get around this issue by allowing him to play his remaining cards against other players, but the utility of that was somewhat limited. One of our players fell asleep after his character's death with his remaining cards still in hand; they were never used.
Long Turns: With the ability to go to locations, then play a large number of terror cards, turns could be decently long. This was made worse by the fact that cards are drawn at the start of the turn, rather than the end, resulting in some need for reading of those new, occasionally complex, cards.
Win is by Attrition: Finally, Testimony suffers from a victory condition problem that's fairly common in light card games. The first couple of "winners" get beat down by their opponents, and thus it's the third or fourth best player who actually rises to victory, after the other players have used up their stop-the-winner resources.
Overall, I didn't find the design of Testimony particularly flawed. It had some issues, but overall played smoothly and was some amount of fun. However, I didn't find it particularly exciting either. Thus I give it a below average Substance rating: "2" out of "5". (I'd originally marked it a "3", but then saw that didn't really match up with my description of the game's design and my recommendations regarding it.)
Conclusion
Although an interesting and colorful card game, I can't particularly recommend The Testimony of Jacob Hollow except for the most die-hard horror fans. If you've already played Mythos and others, and are bored with them, this is probably worth picking up, else I'd consider other possibilities.
