So far I had been all in for everything Tanares series related and about a month ago I had received all of my Tanares Adventure items, and now finally got a chance to start playing the game. Here is my first impression after solo gaming for several hours beyond tutorial.
What’s Tanares Adventures?
Tanares adventure is a 1-4 coop player massive campaign board game taking place in an original high-fantasy setting. Technically, this is a campaign expansion for its original game, Arena the Contest. However, this expansion is far more extensive than original game from the campaign game perspective, if you are new to this, it’s practically a standalone massive campaign miniature board game that are made up by two components, Arena the Content and Tanares Adventure packages.
This interpretation looks to be confirmed by upcoming Ultimate Tanares campaign, which combines two into a single box and calling Tanares Ultimate Edition box.
The original game, Arena the contest was the first project by Brazilian indie company Dragori Games. Despite being its first campaign, the game was successfully funded by raising over $730k and supported by over 4000 backers in 2018.
The Arena was primarily developed as player vs player miniature tactical combat game. As an extra, the game included approximately 10 hours of campaign mode. As a good surprise, the campaign mode was widely acclaimed by many players.
As the second Kickstarter campaign project in 2020, Dragori Games has introduced Tanares adventure. This is advertised as a massive campaign expansion to the Arena the Contest. The campaign raised nearly $1.7 million and almost 8000 backers.
The game is currently being delivered and many has received the items. As for myself, I’ve received everything but a missing one expansion box, which is on its way.
Currently, the game has a respectable 8.9 rating on board game geeks with 259 ratings.
Tanares adventures promises over 100 hours of campaign.
Now let’s take a look at my personal first impression pros and cons.
❶Tactical Combat System
Tanares Adventures is a dungeon crawler game, so the combat system is the heart of the game, and it is indeed one of the major sale point of the game for me.
The original, Arena the Contest inspired by D&D combat system, has been markedly evolved and adapted for massive campaign board game.
In this system, players control 4 heroes and combat against villain. The combat takes place using miniatures and grid map. Each quest have their own unique grid map setup using various types of terrain element.
The grid based system has its own strategical and tactical depth including mechanics like mob, focus, reaction, and of course various terrain effects.
When taking a hero’s turn, the player choose movement and prime action. Prime action can be second movement, but majority of time we choose one of 6 attack card.
The damage is calculated based on a hit dice roll and attack cards effect. So if a target has defense value of 5, we need to roll 5 or above on our D20 roll for the attack to be a hit. Once the attack hits, all the effect listed on the attack card resolves.
When a hit point of the villain or hero is reduced to 0, it is destroyed.
Monster AI
In contrast to the Arena where heroes were able to take turns consecutively before villains start acting, Tanares has a “retaliation” rule. This means if a villain who has not taken its own turn during this round and was a target of hero’s attack, it takes the next turn.
In Tanares, Villains do not have AI deck but instead their favorite target is determined by a color. For instance, green villain’s target is a hero with the highest number of mana cubes. Other options include the highest and the lowest health points, and the furthest.
So villain’s action are predictable and that adds a tactical and strategical element in the game. If you like to ponder and find an optimal sequence of actions, go for it. This game rewards you doing so. If you’d rather want to be surprised? Spend as little time as possible, and go with your instinct. Simple AI rule with various passive and on-hit effect will easily go beyond your prediction.
Skill Pad
For anyone who had played Arena, one of the main new addition to the combat system in Tanares Adventure is a skill pad.
This system allows each heroes to act during other heroes or villain’s turn. If you are TCG player, this feels analogous to “instant” ability.
Before the each quest begins, each hero choose which of the four skills that the hero can be used during the quest.
During the combat, each hero may use one skill during a turn outside of own. Each skill has a specific timing when they can be used, which can be as simple as any time during other heroes turn, or villain’s turn to more specific “start of villain’s turn”.
In order to use skills, one need to pay its cost, which is represented by mana cubes. These are accrued by different means such as pre-combat adventure, accompanying NPC’s ability, when one of villain is destroyed.
This system has two main benefits. One is during multiplayer game, each player has a way to interact outside of their own turn. So it won’t be you are just playing 1/4 of game. The second, perhaps more important benefit is this system add another dimension to hero’s synergy and combo play.
For example, I can tactically setup such that attacking a specific villain will trigger its retaliation, but during that villain’s turn, before it deals damage to my hero, I can finish it off using one of hero’s skill.
The Tanare’s adventure’s combat system’s fundamental rule is fairly intuitive. Yet, the system is highly tactical.
❷Variance
Variance in game refers to degree of variation in game play when one plays the same game over and over. In campaign board game, we want variance so the game do not feel repetitive.
Tanares adventures have multiple means of providing the play variance.
Hero variance
First, the game has 8 combat roles, analogous to class system in other games. This means there are 8 different skill pads. Also there are handful heroes to choose from in each combat role with each having unique passive ability, own attack cards. This combination provide a feel analogous to TCG of playing different deck.
As the game progresses, we will be replacing attack cards and opening up more skill to choose from. When going out for quest, each hero is allowed to take one NPC. These NPC card have certain effect to boost hero. There are also weapons and gears. All these elements level up/evolve over the time. So each heroes are customizable and kept fresh throughout the campaign. Furthermore, the game allows replacing hero as the campaign progresses so if one wants more drastic change, that is also an option.
Villain variance
Even though there is no monster AI deck, and only four types of favorite target, the game has many different villains with varying on-hit effect to keep different villain feel different even if they had same favorite target.
Quest variance
The real variance in play in this game; however, comes from the quest’s special rules. Developer claims every quest have a unique feel. This is achieved by having special rules to each quests.
For example, tutorial’s very first quest has special rules where heroes are restricted for what they can do such as they cannot use attack action cards. This is certainly built for the purpose of tutorial so player can learn one rule at a time, but it illustrate how fundamental rule of the game can be altered amongst quest.
Although I am still in very early stage of the game, this degree of quest variation seem to continue throughout the campaign. What I like here is they all seem to be in keeping with the specific situation heroes are in within the campaign story.
Luck based variance
The fourth piece of variance comes from the dice roll as in other adventure board games. The game uses D20 dice roll. Some may view this is “too swingy”.
To mitigate the luck element, the game uses residual damage rule, which means missed attack still deals certain amount of damage. The game also provides tactical ways to improve the luck on your favor such as proper positioning of the heroes. Also, missed attack will give the hero mana cube, which again is the resource you need to use skill.
❸Balanced Difficulty
One of the main reason why I enjoyed Arena the Contest, and now enjoying Tanares Adventures is the game’s difficulty level. I like to play a game where I feel like I achieved the “win”. This means I do not want to have a lopsided win nor “bad luck” loss. The game feels “epic” when there are moments I feel like I’d lose and at the end, I end up winning.
Dragori Games seem to do this really well. Almost every game I’ve played since the first game in Arena the Contest including PvP and even tutorial to certain extent, I have been feeling a close game with exception of Arena the Contest boss battle, which felt a bit too easy.
I have definitely had multiple occasions of consecutive “bad luck” rolls that felt like they could cost me the game. However, those games ended up balancing itself at the end, and created “epic” moment where my heroes barely standing at the end of the quest.
The game even has a built in, thematic, challenge mode for those who want to push themselves to hard mode. By achieving extra objectives, using harder rules, players can gain extra loots. The game’s ability to adjust difficulty level to player’s liking while in campaign is something I hope every other game to follow.
❹Beyond combat
Besides the combat mode, the game has two other relatively distinct game play mode during the campaign, which are adventure mode and city management mode.
Adventure mode
Adventure mode is essentially “choose your own adventure” book style game play. Rather than you just simply read a narrative and go straight into the quest, the game have you go though branching multiple choice narrative before each quest. Tanares also uses tabletop RPG-esque ability test system.
Here we use hero’s ability value to modify D20 roll result, and each event has its own threshold value for success. For instance, the imaginary situation using this system is something like you want to get into a thieve’s hideout but there is a lookout. Rather than making this encounter full quest, the system allows to create such as test your Force with threshold of 10. Normally with D20, its 50:50 chance. However, if your hero has high force stat like 6, then suddenly you just need to roll 4 or over to success. In the same scenario, one can give alternative option like, rather than fighting with the lookout, one can perhaps persuade them. In which case, Diplomacy test maybe performed. This system makes non-combat potion interactively immersive experience.
Also, it is important to note that Tanares Adventures ties one mode to the others well. For instance, I was impressed with such simple thing as that I actually got to use attack card from combat mode in adventure mode.
City Phase
City phase is a resource management mode of the game. Part of this is represented by mini-deck building game.
Thematically, we recruit NPC, add heroes in roster, build/level up structure, and have your ally go exploit to get more resources so you can do the things mentioned.
Here, we have a character deck, which is consist of NPC cards and hero cards that you own. Then each player draws 4 cards from the deck.
You then use the drawn character cards i.e. characters to pay required resource for the city phase tasks.
This basically represents you assign each character members a specific task. Some maybe good at one thing over the other.
Once all players finish the character task assignment, we gather rewards. If we performed exploration task, we get loots. If we use characters to recruits another character, they are now added to our character deck. Each of the city structure has their own effect such as getting rid of unwanted character from the character deck. We can also level of city structures which allows us to obtain higher level weapons and armors as well as attack cards.
❺Lore/Story
To me, playing massive campaign games are like reading books with playable element. So it does not matter how great combat system is, how much variance the game has or how well the game is balanced, if I do not find the game’s theme or world setting not fitting my taste, I can’t play. Tanares is a high fantasy genre. There are magic, dwarves, elves, dragons and so on. I don’t have problem playing this game with my elementary school child.
Originally, when I played Arena the Contest for the first time, I was a bit skeptical for their world setting.
Malrokian Curse, an ungodly affliction that prevents open warfare and large-scale armed conflict, forces all factions and kingdoms to avoid war to prevent a massive cataclysm from ravaging the continent.
For example, the Malrokian Curse part of the lore saying no war is allowed in Tanares world felt retrofit created story to support Arena the Contest’s 4 vs 4 play.
Whether this is true or not, the game’s story has expanded tremendously. In fact, Tanares now has 5E rule based RPG in development. This should be more than sufficient to be seen as a proof how extensive the Tanares world setting is.
Tanares Adventure narrative are easy to read and intriguing story, but from what I’ve seen, read and watched, they are not as immersive as games like Aeon Trespass or Oathsworn, which are often referred as one of the best board game narratives.
It is a bit hard to say if the narrative in Tanares feeling behind those two games are due to actual content vs. the writing style, or perhaps the mixture. Being anime fan, if I were to use anime analogy, Tanares is like Dragonball while Aeon Trespass are like Demon Slayer. Here I do not mean the difference in the genre, but I mean it’s more of the difference in depth of the story telling. Dragonball is fun to watch with exciting actions but when you think, there isn’t much detail in the story. Demon Slayer is also a battle animation with creeping power villain, but each villain and characters have more depth in their story.
Upside of Tanares is that it’s much easier to read, especially with fast track mode. So even non-native speakers with less English fluency have easier entry point to this game than the game like Aeon Trespass.
❻Flexibility
Another element of the game I think Tanares Adventure stands out is the game’s flexibility to fit many player’s need or play style.
Although story is a core part of this campaign game, there are certainly those who prefer not reading text after text. For such people, Tanares adventures have “fast game play” mode during adventure part of game. This allows those players to essentially skip “choose your own adventure” style part of narrative play while keeping the overall game story coherent, and allowing one to still play quests at full capacity.
If you are the one who don’t even want to read any story at all, and rather just play individual quests. The game allows single quest play mode.
Then there are people like myself who wants to play campaign board game solo. Tanares Adventures require 4 heroes to present on each quest, but controlling four full heroes, though possible, by yourself could be seen as a bit too much to some. So Tanares adventure provides simplified heroes for such situation.
I’ve played 4 full heroes during tutorial and now switched to 1 hero with 3 comrades. At one point, I may switch another hero to full hero.
Then for some, they may want to know story but do not want to read own, and may feel more immersed when story is read by others. With upcoming campaign, Fort eller app may be purchased. This is used in Gloomhaven series and other campaign board games. I personally feel much more immersed in the game when I can listen to pro reading the narrative for me.
❼Replay value
In these massive campaign games, what we call “replay value” is not necessary a pros. After spending over 100 hours, do you really want to play the game again? Does that determine the value of the game? Especially, if the game says you won’t know everything until you play second and third times.
From this regard, Tanares adventures have 100+ quests while during any single campaign run you will see only see 22 of those. Also, the story certainly branches. For instance, in the very early game you’d have a dichotomy of take the quest A or B. If you chose quest A, you’d lose quest B option forever during the campaign. So I won’t know the other quests leading from quest B.
Having said that, if one wants to just enjoy various quests, there is again the option to just play each quest as one shot. So that is an option once you finish a campaign.
In the case of Tanares Adventure though, I think “the true replay value” in the game exist in the form of other game modes. This includes PvP, which has its own rule set that is simpler than the Tanares Adventures. I have played this mode couple times with my child couple years ago and we certainly had a blast. The game also has boss vs. boss mode, which I’ve never played myself but is yet its own form of PvP that is different from Hero vs. Hero PvP. There are other modes of play as well.
Furthermore, I can confidently say that this is Tanares series is a platform rather than just a game, and the Dragori Games have shown its devotion with its track records. Since the Arena the Contest, they have released own expansion boxes such as legendary hero box to add more heroes to the game. They’ve added Dragon Collection box to add more dragons and boss battles. Then Tanares Adventure rather than making completely a standalone game is released as an expansion. Most recently, during the Tanares RPG campaign, although it is its own entity, the team has added several new miniature boxes for RPG and that came with board game play content.
So even though one has to pay for new expansion, the original Arena the Contest has been seeing continued expansion and support. This seems analogous to Living Collectable Card games releasing new expansions every so often to keep the game fresh while keeping original investment still relevant.
With such an expansile world the team has created for Tanares, I have no doubt we will continue seeing more support in this series while keeping our investment repayable in the future so long as the game continues to receive player support.
Whether I’d be continue playing the game or series forever as aside, I really like the fact I can think this is something I can in theory keep playing long time and there is a high likelihood, the game will continue seeing its support with future expansions.
❽Components
Quality
Production quality of the game feels great. All cards feel to have great print qualities. I like the fact most of the game component has actual physical representation. In tabletop RPG, we typically just write down the items and gears we own on the character sheet. Here we do have dedicated card representations including even simple loot cards, which I’ve seen on some other board games used campaign log writing style approach.
A few of mana cube came with corner cracks, which I am ok with but could potentially bother some. Though I would not be surprised if you contact Dragori Games, they may send the replacement.
I’ve purchased many optional, add-ons for the game.
Card sleeves are one of them. They fit tightly to each cards. These are not penny sleeve quality and certainly provide protection to cards. They are relatively thick.
One add-on I have purchased that I do not recommend to others is plastic tokens. They feel and look cheap. With this quality, included card board tokens look more premium. Here I had wished Dragori games offered metal token as optional add-ons.
Space occupancy
One of the challenge with a massive campaign type of board game is the physical space occupancy. This applies to both during and between game sessions.
The first fact is Tanares se ries have many expansion/add-on boxes beyond Arena the Contest and Tanares Adventure boxes. If you purchase all add-ons, there are lots of contents; hence, boxes.
The developer tries to offer the way to combine a few boxes together, but we are still left with many boxes. This is about to change with upcoming Ultimate Tanares adventure campaign. It looks like the development team is offering two box storage option for all the contents.
For those who wished standee version over miniature to save the space or cost, Tanares, for the first time will have this option as well.
As far as in game space occupy goes, the game uses city and world phase map that is equivalent tot the size of battle grid map. However, these phases are separate from the combat and tracking of data here is represented by character deck, loot cards, and writing in campaign sheet. Also, the combat board setup changes between quests so we will be clearing the board after each quest. So it is definitely possible to play two modes on the same space one at a time.
The third element of storage is organization for the data saving, and ease of setting up next quest. At the moment, these require a bit more work. This is something I’d list as cons of the game, but upcoming ultimate box specifically addressing this issue.
Miniatures
This is a miniature based board game. So the quality of mini are important to many of us. My disclaimer is I do not qualify for making miniature quality assessment. I simply have not own enough miniature board games.
As a my first adventure board game, I purchased Gloomhaven. Despite I’ve never owned miniature driven adventure board game before, I was seriously disappointed with the quality of Gloomhaven miniatures. Every time I looked at them, it felt like took my excitement away. The Jaws of Lion looked slightly better but I still did not feel good owning the miniatures.
To the other extreme, I have purchased Warhammer Age of Sigmar set. These miniatures are something I have built my own from plastic sprue. However, I was impressed with every mini I built for how much they had.
Tanares Adventure mini are PVC minis without requiring assembly.
I know there are many people who loves to paint these minis and to the point, some can only play games after they’ve finish painting. If you are the latter person, one warning here is that there are lots of minis as this is a dungeon crawler game with each quest having multiple villains.
I cannot paint myself. So fortunately, Tanares provides option for prepainted minis on larger miniatures.
I think these are amazing quality and 100% satisfied.
Other smaller minis are also great in quality. They are not at the level of Warhammer detail but I like looking at them when I play game and each time I pull out new villain, I am impressed by the amount of detail these mini has.
However, this maybe just the personal preference but some of colored mini appear to be less detailed compare to others.
Here I had hoped developers went with uncolored mini, or perhaps even better option was to provide other game’s option like essentially primer type painting to accentuate details.
Overall, I am very satisfied with minis though.
❾Complexity
Rule Complexity
With a massive campaign game, I think this is almost inevitable. If the rule is kept too simple, it may result in lack of game’s design space and as a result, game may quickly repetitive after several plays. However, how the balance between the rule complexity and design space expandability is a challenge each developer has to decide.
In Tanares adventure, the fundamental game rule is intuitive, but it is certainly a level of massive campaign game. There are many combat effect that one needs to keep looking up, especially in early stage of game play. There are many minute aspect of the game that one would raise a question only after start playing.
Even though core rule is relatively easier to learn, Tanares uses quest specific rule to keep each quest unique. Since they are one shot rules, they can maybe forgotten and that can have significant impact in the quest difficulty.
However, as soon as you start playing the game, you will notice the developer has put lots of effort into alleviating rule complexity. First, the rule book is well referenced and have many detailed examples are provided within. The team also created tutorial quests to allow players to learn as they play. They have also provided a quick starter play guide and official cheat sheets.
However, there is some organization issue.
The original Tanares Adventure required unnecessary amount of book swapping that interfered with with game flow and actually made the game feel unnecessary confusing. Luckily, developer has been working on this and recently already updated tutorial is uploaded on Tabletop simulator. So I believe this issue will be officially fixed.
Once that’s sorted out, I think this game is not necessary any more complicated than other massive campaign games. Yet, it is undoubtedly far more complicated than Arena the Contest. So if you are not ready for steep learning curve with constant rule look up, massive campaign game may not be for you.
Upkeep
Being a campaign game with 100 hours of play, there are some upkeep to deal with. Fortunately, many element of the game represented by a physical card like skill pad, attack cards, NPC character cards, quest cards, I think the upkeep in this game is reasonable for the scale of the game.
Having said that, it can be improved if there were digital app as in other campaign games do. One of the best example here maybe Oathsworn into the Deepwood. The games audio narrative and adventure mode choices are in a single app, and your choices are recorded automatically. So you can play multiple campaigns. Tanares Adventures do not have digital app at the time of this writing.
➓Value
All high quality, massive campaign miniature adventure board games are expensive. From what I have seen, they usually range between a few hundreds dollars to even over $1000 after adding all expansions.
Tanares Adventure falls under this exact price points.
Currently, the upcoming Tanares Adventure core pledge is listed as $189. If you go all-in, it is listed as $649. If you add painted miniature options, it goes all way up to $839. If you are budget or perhaps space conscious, Tanares Standee version for $129 seem compatible in price with a game like Gloomhaven.
Overall, amount of minis, quality of components and numbers of hours you get to play, along with the game’s replay value, I think Tanares Adventure is a great value.
Especially, I believe this series will likely to see continued expansion in the future; hence, the value of this game should continue to get better.
First impression
I am all-in for everything Tanares related so far, and I am happy witvh it. The game’s rule are relatively simple for its scale, and intuitive. Three modes of game play during the campaign including combat, adventure and city building are well balanced, and each creating own fun experience.
At its core, Tanares Adventure is dungeon crawler, and its combat system is the main sales point. While there is luck element in the game to allow creation unpredictable, epic moment, if one is willing to and have time to ponder, the system rewards your skill over luck. However, it does not mean you must solve puzzles every moment or quest. You can still play with your intuition and the game still creates tense moments.
Main shortcoming of the game is disorganized campaign book flow, but it is being fixed as we speak. Expansile, high fantasy world setting with lots of background lores are exciting and for sure to be unveiled in the future with more expansion the game series.
If you are intrigued by the game, I highly recommend you to try out in tabletop simulator and see this is something you’d enjoy.