Review of Prophecy

Prophecy is a fantasy adventure game published by Z-Man Games.

Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 3-4 hours

The Components

Prophecy comes in a square box jammed with components.

The Board: A square board which depicts the map--a circle of 20 different terrains, plus 5 astral realms--and also contains places to store 9 different decks of cards. It’s linen-textured and graphically depicts the various locales of the world in light, somewhat cartoonish artwork.

The Cards: These are all half-sized cards of medium-to-heavy weight which are linen-textured. There are a total of 200+ cards. About a third of them feature just text, but the other two-thirds feature artwork. Other than a few clips taken from the board, every piece of art seems to be original, which is a fairly extraordinary amount of original artwork.

There’s also a collection of icons on many of the cards, meant to explain what they do. They’re a little bit small, but otherwise they do a good job of quickly describing what each card does.

Characters: There are a total of ten characters in the game. Each comes with a heavy cardboard character sheet, which provides places to put your experience, gold, health, and magic. There’s also a standup cardboard figure for each character which goes on the board; both the sheet and the figure feature the same original art for the character.

Other Tokens: Other tokens for the game include cardboard pieces for money and experience (both in denominations of 1s and 5s) and wooden cubes for health (red) and magic (blue).

Overall, the components for Prophecy are all superb quality. The cards feature a multitude of good art as well as a good attempt to make the game as usable as possible.

I was shocked to see this game is retailing for only $40. I would have guessed $50 or maybe $60. As such, it’s a great deal, and that on top of its innate quality clearly earns it a “5” out of “5” for Style.

The Gameplay

The object of Prophecy is to gather 4 of the 5 artifacts hidden away on the Astral Plane.

Setup: The board is laid out with a huge pile of stuff. There are five decks of cards laid out in the center of the board, each associated with one of the player guilds (forest camp, fortress, magic tower, monastery, and thieves’ guild). The top card of each of these decks is flipped up, each offering an ability for purchase.

Around the edges of the board, four more decks are placed: common items, rare items, chance cards, and adventure cards. A card is flipped from the chance deck that results in adventures being placed on one of the outside terrain types (plains, mountains, or forest), then an adventure is placed in each of these spaces. It will be a creature to fight or an opportunity to take advantage of.

Small decks of artifacts, lesser guardians, or greater guardians are shuffled, and then one of each card type is placed in each of the five Astral Plane spaces.

Finally each player selects a character, and then places it in their home guild space.

Characters. For adventure games, characters are pretty simple in Prophecy. Each one lists two guilds that the character can use without extra cost and also lists their starting health and magic levels. That’s it.

Health and magic are the basic resources available to a character. Health is used in physical conflicts and magic is used in mental conflicts. Each character gets a pool of cubes which mark their total health/magic; they place these to the right of their character to mark that they’re available. Usually these cubes are just moved back and forth across a character to mark when they’re used or when they’re regenerated, but in special cases a character can increase the size of his pool, marking a permanent gain. Overall it’s a clever but simple mechanism.

Current levels of health and magic are very important because they’re the levels used when a character is involved in a Battle, which we’ll return to later.

There’s no particular penalty for running out of magic, but if you lose a health that your character doesn’t have, he dies.

Order of Play: The standard order of play for a turn is:

1. Draw a Chance Card
2. Move
3. Battle
4. Use Possibilities
5. End Round

Draw A Chance Card: Chance Cards stock the board, placing adventures to face in the wilderness, items to buy in the city and village, and abilities to learn in the guilds. They also can heal, give money, and do other generally good things.

Move: A player can move his character one space clockwise or counterclockwise on the board for free. There are also other ways to move, such as spending a gold to take a horse two spaces or to take a boat to a port, or spending two gold to use the magic gates.

Some abilities and items give special movement powers, while some spaces have possibilities that can be used instead of movement which let you do things like trading health or magic for gold.

Battle: If a player lands in a space with a monster he must fight it, and then if there’s another character there he may fight.

Battle is done either physically or magically. The default is a physical fight, but if either combatant chooses a magic fight, that takes precedence. However for a player to do so he must spend 2 magic, thus decreasing his strength in the battle.

Players will have various items and abilities which help increase their values in combat. After everyone decides what they’re using, two dice are rolled, one for each combatant. A player’s die is added to his health or magic total. Whoever has the higher total wins.

When fighting a monster, the player wins what’s specified on the monster card if he’s victorious, plus some experience. If he’s falls to ignoble defeat he usually loses a health, though some monsters list greater penalties. Losing a fight with a monster also ends a player’s turn, which means he can’t use any possibilities in the space.

When fighting another player, the loser loses one health unless he decides to give the winner the choice of his items.

Use Possibilities: There are various good possibilities which may be used on spaces once the monsters are defeated. Some of these are special cards turned up as part of the adventure deck. In Guild spaces players may spend experience (plus gold if it’s not your home guild) to get spells or other abilities to use. In the city and village players may spend gold for items. Finally, other spaces have other abilities, usually involving regenerating one of the resources (gold, health, magic) or trading it.

End Round: At the end of the round the player must discard down to 7 abilities, 7 items, 15 experience, and 15 gold.

Going to the Astral Plane: As characters advance they’ll gradually become good enough to head off into the Astral Plane. These are five spaces around the edge of the board, each of which is adjacent to two spaces on the normal movement track. A player may choose to ‘attack the Astral Plane’ from one of those adjacent spaces rather than taking his normal movement.

Here there is a Lesser Guardian to defeat who offers some nice reward. Then there’s a Greater Guardian who is protecting a powerful Artifact. Whoever defeats the Greater Guardian gets the Artifact.

Winning the Game: A player wins by collecting 4 of the 5 artifacts. If the artifacts end up split up, then once all 5 have been collected, a final battle occurs between the characters with the artifacts. Everyone is healed up, and then they take turns attacking each other, each taking an Artifact when they win. The player who ends up with 4 artifacts first is the winner of the game.

Relationships to Other Games

Earlier this year I reviewed the fourth edition of Talisman and I said, “When I first heard that Talisman was being reissued, I'd hoped that Black Industries would do with it what Fantasy Flight Games did with Arkham Horror--which is largely revise the game to take advantage of both the graphical and mechanical advances of the last twenty years of game design. That they didn't is disappointing: if they had this could have been another classic for the next decade.” What I didn’t know at the time was that a game already existed which fulfilled my hopes; it’s Prophecy.

I have little doubt that Prophecy was developed as the designer’s answer to Talisman. It similarly has a looping board where you move from space to space, flipping up cards that represent encounters, some of which are good, some of which are bad. Additionally, your ultimate goal is to collect a powerful magical artifact, and you’ll probably have to fight the other players at the end.

The difference is that Prophecy does take advantage of those twenty years of game design. Not only is this obvious in the much more usable game components, but also in the game design itself, which is less random than Talisman and which remolds much of the old game’s ideas into a clever resource-management game.

So, fundamentally, Prophecy is what the new edition of Talisman should have been.

The Game Design

As you can probably already assess, I’m pleased with the game design of Prophecy. Without losing any of the color or theming of an adventure game, Prophecy creates a much more strategic gaming experience.

There’s fun adventuring, as you’d expect, as you often don’t know what all is in a space. You also get to really interact with the world, as you circle around the board, heading for certain locales. However, beyond all that you’re constantly managing all manner of resources. Do you need to regenerate your health? Your magic? Should you trade experience in for abilities? Can you spend you gold? Do you need to get to a space before someone else does?

However, none of this ever feels complex. Instead you’re just making a long series of strategic and/or tactical decisions based on what’s important at the time. There’s a bit of brinkmanship too, as you might decide that you should go after a monster before you’re ready, in order to get ahead of other players, but it’s so well integrated into the game, that you don’t even consider it as a different decision to make.

I have a few slight qualms. I wish the game were shorter, but that’s pretty much a defining aspect of the genre. I also would like there to be more cards, as you’ll go through the event deck multiple times and the adventure deck at least once over the course of the game. I don’t think this will practically limit its replayability, but it will make future games a bit less colorful.

Generally, you can classify adventure games into two sorts, the gamemaster-led games of which Descent is my favorite, and the everyone-for-themselves games, of which Prophecy is the best that I’ve reviewed*. As such, I’ve given it a full “5” out of “5” for Substance, as it’s the best of its class to date.

(* I like Return of the Heroes quite a lot too, but its availability is limited outside of Germany.)

Conclusion

Prophecy is an excellent every-player-for-themselves adventure game. If you like games like Talisman or Runebound, try this instead, as it’s a more thoughtful, better balanced game.