Warhammer Quest: Lost Relics!
This was my first time getting Lost Relics on the table. I found it to be… OK? I played the first five adventures solo over the course of a few days.
It didn’t feel nearly as “light” as some of the reviews said. I found myself constantly in the rulebook trying to grapple with surprisingly tricky and interconnected rules.
I think a sizable portion of the community saying this game is too easy misses a subtle distinction in the rulebook: You can kill any minion with two attacks. Not any hostile, but any minion. Leaders are not minions and will take numerous attacks to kill.
Some critical rules are presented as a textual logic tree with odd line, paragraph, and page breaks.
I wish some rules were stated explicitly, rather than through inference:
- Hostiles don’t react if the acting hero isn’t visible
- Moves can be made diagonally
- A “Reaction” is made up of “Actions”. They are two distinct things.
- Leaders are not Minions
- Minions are not Leaders
- Both Leaders and Minions are Hostiles
- Minions can be killed with one (sufficiently powerful) action, unless they are Tough
- All Minions can be killed with two actions, regardless of Resilience Value, even if they are Tough
- Leaders can only be killed by taking wounds meeting or exceeding their Resilience Value
- Dice chains almost never happen
- Don’t move the game tracker on the very first turn, since you’re no longer at the start of the Adventure Phase
- If you’re wounded but have no additional damage, taking an Inspired Rest action is super powerful. You’re now back to full strength and health!
Some things are explicitly said, but easily overlooked or buried:
- Only one hostile, visible to the acting hero, reacts to a player action
- All Leaders on the board make their Leader action during the Leader Phase
- Hostiles only move one area
- Heroes move two areas unless sprinting
- Board areas are visible diagonally
- All heroes activate in the Action Phase. I saw one playthrough on YouTube that they ran through all the Play-Round Phases for each hero. “That ain’t right”.
I also have some questions:
- Can a player “Barge” a room that isn’t full?
- Why does Taros have a wound slot but only one health point? Taros is immediately “wounded” if any damage is taken. The wound token can never be placed.
- Why is the Leader symbol so incredibly small? I can’t pinch and zoom the maps in the physical rulebook. Luckily a PDF copy was available online… for a time anyway. The site is fairly broken these days.
- Why isn’t there a rules summary on the back cover? (I know why; they’re too convoluted to fit on one page. Just take a look at the wall-o-text provided by the normally svelte Esoteric Order of Gamers summary)
At the end of a game, I felt like I worked, rather than played. It just wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped. The game designers deserve credit though, they sure shoehorned a lot of game into this box, maybe too much. I’ll give it a couple more tries, but I think I prefer a more traditional style game.
I did save this game for years before playing. I brought it on a vacation, and I’m glad I did. Future me is definitely going to be transported back in time when I take this game off the shelf over the years.
This would be a tough start for someone new to the hobby. It’d be frustrating to assemble and understand, both as a gift giver and gift receiver.
The minis are nice, and mostly come on scenic bases, but they’re thin and delicate. Model clippers are necessary to remove them from the sprues. No one has that type of tool unless you’re already in the hobby. Also, they’d shed small parts like crazy without glue.
Although! This box contains everything necessary to run a compact standard dungeon crawl. It just needs some new rules… (scratches chin and squints, pensively looking off into the distance)
