Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan—published by Mighty Boards, the exceptionally steady producer of games such as Rebirth, Vengeance: Roll & Fight, and Art Society—was a member of my personal top 10 from 2024, the best pure action/RPG board game I tried last year.
That’s because the dice combat is sensational, but more importantly, getting in and out of scenarios takes about an hour apiece. For a busy parent with limited table space, bite-sized combat games are the move, and the Fateforge system was great to squeeze in-between other activities or expand into an entire Saturday night of solo gaming through a full Act of 5-6 missions.
The game’s second print run goes live on crowdfunding soon, a campaign that also includes the new second expansion, Kin of the Wild. To get ready for the new goodies, I wanted to take some time to try the first expansion, Clash of the Immortals. Clash of the Immortals is a 10+ hour adventure featuring seven main missions and a boss fight, with three camp scenes scattered in-between to allow players to explore side quests and shops.
The other main addition with this first expansion is a new playable character called the Enchantress. The Enchantress has an initially complicated upkeep/management system but features powers that frankly felt too good to be true during my playthrough experience (I’ll try my best to avoid a word that rhymes with “smokin’”).
If you are new to the Fateforge system, click here to check out my lengthy review of the base game, Chronicles of Kaan. Otherwise, read on for my thoughts on the expansion.
First, A Trip Down Memory Lane
When we posted my initial review, I had played the entire first Act of the base game. But I never completed that first campaign, so I spent three days (about 5-7 hours each night) doing a new solo run of the full campaign to experience the entire story. For that full playthrough, I used the Forest Guard (a ranged attack specialist) and the Mercenary (a melee attack specialist). These were chosen, in part, because they had the highest amount of available health tokens.
Base Fateforge is tough. On the game’s normal difficulty, it was comedy how often I barely survived missions—particularly in Act 3, when it felt like every combat scene was an absolute knife fight—with only one of my two characters still alive and that character having just one or two health left. When players take too long to finish a scenario and/or get knocked out (“KO’d”), they have to take a Corruption card, each of which makes the game a little harder to survive successive combat scenes.
When I finally beat the last boss, the Forest Guard had four Corruption cards, and the Mercenary had three. But the journey was epic, man…epic! The skill cards make the magic happen, as players must use every die result productively on each turn to take out bad guys that possess increasingly creative powers. Dice mitigation via a character build is such a fun process, as rest scenes allow players to use their treasure haul to buy new items and train skills from sorry-lookin’ starting skills into tail-whoopin’ level one and two skills.
Combined with looted items—and if this is possible, I fell harder for the Fateforge loot system during my second, full campaign than I did on my first partial play—the base game became a fantastic puzzle to try and solve from mission to mission. The Where’s Waldo-style map play was still interesting by the end, and my test rolls were pretty balanced over the course of the campaign, So while I still take issue with tests, my die results made the story twists more interesting. Allies (controllable, stripped-down minions with limited powers) showed up in Act 2, and by the time I was morphing into cat form for some of the game’s side missions, I was having a ball.
With a full campaign under my belt, it was easy to jump into the Clash of the Immortals expansion. At least, the jumping part was easy because, as the expansion rulebook suggests, the expansion is “Souls”-like in its difficulty. (Somewhere, Dark Souls video game players who have tried Clash of the Immortals are nodding in agreement.)
The New Stuff
The best thing about Clash of the Immortals is the addition of a sixth playable character, The Enchantress. This is the best thing because the game scales up both the difficulty of the combat scenes and the flexibility players have in addressing so many different variables, such as minion abilities, map obstacles, and many surprise elements that are only revealed after the map setup is completed using the Fateforge app.
The Enchantress has four combat dice, just like every other hero. For the Enchantress, that means three green dice (the Focus specialty symbol, affectionately known as the “Griddle” symbol in my circles, used to open chests, activate some skills, and interact with the environment) and a yellow die, used mainly for movement. So, my initial read was that the Enchantress wouldn’t do much fighting. But this character can save up to two of the four die faces used in the previous round to carry over into the next round as spendable results for results and effects (but, not for straight actions), with one of those two faces being used to duplicate a token.
What this means in combat is that the Enchantress gets a normal set of die results in her first round…then, usually, at least two and as many as four more results to trigger other skills each additional round. That, on its own, ended up being massive. For my solo campaign of Clash of the Immortals, I used the Enchantress and the Nobleman, and this pairing was often devastating thanks to the Nobleman’s choice of “stance” allowing him to inflict damage when using block tokens to deflect incoming melee attacks in the same zone.
But none of it was possible without the Enchantress. At the heart of the expansion character’s build is a spell token, used with basic skills to inflict minor damage to multiple enemies or freeze enemies from moving, depending on the need. Sometimes, with enough result tokens in later rounds, the Enchantress could trigger multiple spells. Combined with primary and secondary weapons that allow a player to use any non-miss die result to trigger more actions, the Enchantress is so good that I’m not sure I would use her in the base game. It felt a little broken even in the expansion content (which, again: hard!) because the Enchantress’ skills sometimes were enough to get through certain portions of the combat scenes on her own.
And some of the Enchantress skills are DOPE. “Burst Enemy” became my favorite after I bought it halfway through the expansion campaign. Using melee results to turn minions into grenades, this skill was incredibly useful in a zone where my two-character team was surrounded by 3-4 other baddies.
The game mitigates the powers of the Enchantress by giving her a low amount of starting health—five tokens, instead of the 6-7 health tokens of other characters. But if you lead with a tank (like the Mercenary) and have the Enchantress as a secondary character, I think that is the best way to attack the expansion combat scenes.
Some of the new material was tied to conditions. Now, certain minion classes ride in on other minions, making them mounted threats. The “Fast” trait means that some enemies can’t be targeted with multiple melee attacks in the same turn. Getting “Pinned” meant that players had to spend movement results to get up and then move out of a particular zone.
None of these additions were difficult to implement, in part because I tackled Clash of the Immortals the week after I played almost 20 hours of the base game. And these additions add a nice little wrinkle to the planning for each combat. The combat scene puzzle is so good here, and I was happy to find myself satisfied by simple things like wiping a zone (map tile) clear of enemies with maximum efficiency. (Like the base game, it’s essentially worthless to wound an enemy, because all enemies recover to full health/”toughness” at the end of the Enemy Turns step each round. The game is still all about either killing baddies outright or using a turn to take out an enemy’s armor to “soften them up” for future rounds.)
Clash of the Immortals adds a bonus in most combat scenes—kill all the enemies on the map to get a three- or five-gold bonus. When you are going shopping during rest scenes, these bonuses are huge!
Another expansion addition I really liked: henchmen. In some combat scenes, players get access to henchmen, which are much more interesting than allies were in the base game. Henchmen activate after heroes, but before enemy turns, and they give the heroes a minor but incredibly interesting planning alternative to each fight.
The first time I got access to a band of henchmen, I got control of three jaguars who I used to soften up enemy minions on a larger map. I used a couple of these spooky-looking tigers as bullet shields while I was using the heroes to take out more difficult enemies. Henchmen each have their own character card that shows 2-3 different options in their “action band”, just like minions and leaders do.
Henchmen made it fun to have some flexibility in controlling the fate of minor accessories that don’t require much in the way of management. “Go over there, Jaguar 3, and chew on a Troll while I take care of this other blue minion two zones to the south,” I said to no one in particular. (I definitely talk to myself more during solo games when I’m sitting alone in my basement!)
So, henchmen are great and certainly better than the “use these two die results while watching allies bleed out real quick” accomplices from the base game.
What Didn’t Work?
My main feedback with the expansion was tied to all the content in-between the fights. Clash of the Immortals feels significantly more dense, story text-wise, than the base game. At times, I was shocked to find myself trying to quickly get through yet another round of extensive storytelling to get to a rest scene or a fight.
This was more pronounced when I tried Clash of the Immortals with three other human players, where we got through three combat scenes before I pivoted back to playing solo. The Fateforge app, like the base game, drives everything for the expansion…but having four people read SO MUCH TEXT became a drag even before the first combat scene had begun.
“I think I’d just rather play a video game by myself, so that I can hold the B button and skip all this story” lamented one player while the table tried to decipher names like Lazziya and Morgensoo, in locations such as Komirqala and Nubilbabassur. Look, it’s fair: the Fateforge team tried its best to build a credible world around the combat scenes. And kudos to every writer who contributed to this work because some of the words in this puppy are ridiculously hard to pronounce. But, they create the kind of world-building many other players will appreciate.
By hour 25 (between the base game and the expansion), I was tapping the “Continue” button as fast as I could so that I could get back to that sweet, sweet combo-rich combat.
Another thing I didn’t love? The time allotted for rest scene actions.
Although one of my story choices limited my rest scene time tokens to just three for one specific sequence, I still think the rest scenes in Clash of the Immortals are way too short. In a video game, I can take as much time as I want at city locations buying and selling items, visiting clinics, doing side quests, or changing the outfit of my character. In Clash of the Immortals, it felt like there was almost no time for any side quests. And because visiting a shop uses some of the time tokens, I found myself debating between buying new items and upgrading my skills (which is always the best thing to do, both because it is vital to combat and because it is just really cool).
I would have loved to get rid of some of my characters’ Corruption cards, but that used two time tokens…if I only get four time tokens for the entire rest scene, doing that plus buying skills ate up all my time tokens!
For the second expansion, I really hope this gets fixed. I want a couple more side quests, but I really just want the ability to spend all my hard-earned gold to get different, ideally better, weapons for my build against baddies that get progressively harder exceptionally fast.
More Fateforge? Yes, Please!
Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan—Clash of the Immortals is a blast. It has a little too much story for its own good, but the new Enchantress character makes up for my issues with the heavy amount of text.
If you only bought the base game but are curious about the expansion, I highly recommend this extra 10 hours of fun if you like getting punched in the tabletop mouth thanks to Dark Souls-like difficulty. Play Clash of the Immortals on its normal difficulty to really see what designer Gordon Calleja is trying to go for. I do agree with the rulebook that it only makes sense to try the expansion if you have mostly completed, if not totally beaten, the base game’s three bosses. All the tricks you learned with Chronicles of Kaan will be valuable with this new content.
The second expansion has my mouth watering…similar to some of the action RPG video games I’ve tried, such as Diablo IV, Kin of the Wild adds pets and a few other surprises that I’m excited to put through their paces. Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan—Clash of the Immortals extends my love affair with great dice combat games, and Calleja has cemented his status as one of the best designers in the world in the action/RPG tabletop genre.
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