Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin Prototype Review

Video published September 27th, 2022

Text Review

Our Scores

Video Review

Explore the West side of the island of Avalon.

The same Tainted Grail core gameplay that includes progressing your character, equipping items, and card driven combat.

The Exploration Journal will suck you into a Wyrd world, we promise!

This is a sponsored post. Prototype featured.

Overview & How to Play

Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin is for 1-4 players (this prototype is for 1-2 players), where everyone picks a character who’ll each have their own strengths and weaknesses. This specific campaign has 10 chapters, each about 2-4 hours long.

Here’s how gameplay works: Set up your characters, and put them on the overworld, where you put your character minis to move around on, and chapter event cards which give you flavor text and the objectives for the chapter.

Your characters are gonna have a whole bunch of resources that you gotta earn and spend in your adventure like food, money, magic, energy, etc. Energy is what you’ll spend to do pretty much every action in the game like moving around and exploring your location which makes you use a ‘choose your own adventure’ exploration journal. Once energy’s low, you gotta replenish it by ending the day, at which point you do a bunch of end of day upkeep such as eating food to heal, then go the next day where you do start of day upkeep like drawing an event card, and then you’re back to spending energy, doing stuff again.

Throughout your adventure you’ll get into conflicts that you’ll either fight or talk your way out of using your character’s combat deck or diplomacy deck.

But really, the meat of the game is: Chapter Card says figure a thing out, you wander around exploring trying to figure it out, while occasionally getting into combat and/or diplomacy encounters, all under a loop of spending energy and refreshing it the next day, which causes the world to progress via a new event everyday.

To set the stage of what’s going on at the beginning, there’s a main road that connects everything on the island called the King’s Pass, but its last Waystone broke, meaning no one could travel between different regions because of the Wyrdness blocking the path. However, at the start of the campaign, the Wyrdness begins to clear up, and you’re not gonna let this opportunity pass to finally go home, cause your characters have been stuck here for A WHOLE DECADE.

Pros

Minis look super duper detailed as always, especially if you have the Sundrop version where everything comes shaded and dry brushed. Combine that with the art on the location cards, and wow Kings of Ruin is fun to look at during the exploring.

The art is really more phenomenal than before, with its quality and quantity. Small cards, big cards, exploration journal… wherever you’re looking at, there’s some super mind boggling imagination fuel just begging to be gazed upon. Your encounters will tell a little story from the cards, the overworld looks super cool when you look at all the cards together, the random events look beautiful, and the exploration journal now has MASSIVE full size art.

There are so many improvements over Fall of Avalon’s components that we don’t have time for that here, but just trust us, there are a LOT of much appreciated changes. One to really key in on is the absence of giant Menhirs minis, in favor of Waystones, which in being smaller don’t block the location cards anymore, and since they stay up forever, don’t require finicky time dials, sheesh Fall of Avalon’s components were not fun to work with.

Speaking of improvements, we’re sure Tainted Grail veterans are anxious to hear about what’s improved with gameplay, namely because Fall of Avalon’s campaign was inanely tedious with its grind gameplay loop. It was supposed to make your journey feel like a brutal survival game, but the issue was it wasn’t actually difficult/brutal, it was just needless filler.

“Oh no, we’re low on food, let’s take a day farming this spot that generates food, wait, now the nearby Menhir is running low on its time duration, we have to get some wealth and magic to refuel it, let’s farm these spots that has us do a bunch of encounters for wealth and magic… etc. etc.”

Grindy survival makes for a great scenario, but not for the entirety of a 40+ hour campaign. For more details on grind, check our video review below.

Kings of Ruin went ahead and eviscerated the grind! First off, you don’t even need to regularly eat food anymore, you only use it if you want healing or more energy. And speaking of, you have more energy everyday. If you don’t fully exhaust you’ll refresh 5 energy, 6 if you ate food, and 7 if you ate while playing solo. Fall of Avalon had you refreshing 4 energy per day—oh my god that was painful. Furthermore, exploring doesn’t even cost energy anymore! Now only certain choices made while exploring cost energy, which feels SO much nicer since you can at least do free quick peeks at all the locations you run by if you need to get somewhere further in a hurry. This does a lot to remove the need for backtracking, cause now whenever you’re clued in on the next objective, you have a much better idea of where to go because you were able to explore more places beforehand at a much faster pace.

But the thing is, chapters now have you confined to certain sections of the map instead of having the ENTIRE ISLAND to trek through. This fixes sooo many problems, like balancing/progression issues where you explore somewhere that has nothing available until you come back later, or finding explorations that have huge attribute checks too early. There’s also way more of a directed focus with meaningful story bits since it can all be timed properly. For example, the game can now track how long you’re taking, and since you’re guaranteed to be in a certain area, it can more precisely make big story changing events happen.

The focused story and sectioned area also makes it way less tedious if you make a mistake while exploring, since it’s easier to figure out what to do next AND move there faster. The smaller map sections also makes guardians (wandering encounters) way more threatening, instead of the silly guardians in Fall of Avalon that were incredibly non threatening.

Trust us, the smaller map is way better than open world! Open world only shines if there’s an ungodly amount of diligence and meticulous design at every corner and possible interaction point, which is an obscene amount of work to create on top of designing it to function well.

Pros Con’t.

The next important thing is the Waystones, which we already praised back in the components but yeah, they last forever unless something like a wandering monster destroys them, which is super cool by the way, AND their cost is fixed and cheap compared to Fall of Avalon’s variable menhir costs and timers.

To wrap up grind notes, the encounter quantity has been toned down, the mostly useless reputation mechanic has been removed, and we haven’t seen any exploration options that had us roll dice, which led to wasted time during exploring. The ‘Death Spiral” that was in Fall of Avalon, where the game hurts you more while you’re down, is drastically reduced, where there are more locations that you can spend a resource and energy to heal up, in addition to how your health is a good bit above energy, and health does not affect terror.

Also, the game now readily tracks your time spent in each Chapter, giving you a good frame of reference to limit your side questing and is a more satisfying way of punishing slow play. Oh, and then red herrings aren’t as useless as before, where dead ends at least tell a small story with a reward, or can meaningfully allude to something else, main quest or not.

Playing solo also got a MASSIVE buff so you aren’t super pressured into playing 2 characters for efficiency’s sake cause you start with a Self Reliant card that gets you an extra energy AND makes you much stronger during encounters with an extra card.

Enough talking about the grind improvements, let’s talk about other random gameplay pros. Our favorite one by far is the implementation of double sided location cards, because the game utilizes them in really cool ways. Even if the Wyrd side did nothing but hurt you for walking through them, that’s still a MASSIVE improvement over Fall of Avalon, which straight up barricaded you from leaving the 1 card range of Menhirs. Now you can freely walk around wherever, and going into Wyrd sided location cards can cause cool and dangerous things on their own, plus give incredibly thematic clues.

Furthermore, there’s even a character, Elgan, that is built for doing Wyrdness shenanigans, cause he can make candles to fend off the Wyrdness!

Plus, with 2 different decks of secret cards, Kings of Ruin can have its secret cards get added to all sorts of different decks based on your decisions.

Boss fights are actually cool now too, where, SLIGHT SPOILER WARNING, Claudyne the Unknighted will play his own unique encounter cards on you. And thank goodness diplomacy encounter cards have been reworked, where they’re no longer incredibly easy and are more engaging.

Last combat related pros are how running away from fights is less punishing, as it doesn’t force the opportunity attack penalty anymore (but still the attack, which you can control), and how guardians are now massive scumbags on the map that can destroy Waystones, so they actually do something now.

There’s some nice cleaned up rulings on letting the players trigger simultaneous things any way they want, and the game actually has a natural teaching process for the new mechanics, where as you explore your starting location, it sets up the scene for the story and explains Waystones well.

Progression is WAY more balanced in Kings of Ruin, where there’s different tiers of items, so no more randomly finding a super powerful weapon from the 1 deck and permanently making your campaign easier. Characters also got a rework for their progression in that they all have their own unique skills now instead of using a shared pool. On top of that, your character’s combat and diplomacy decks have been reduced from 15 to 10 cards each, meaning you can now make your hands way more consistent, on top of seeing new deck upgrades making a bigger impact at a faster rate. Very satisfying to see your new cards come up way more often.

The story is awesome, where the game has a better starting premise/hook compared to Fall of Avalon, with deeper backstory letters. As you play the game, (another slight spoiler alert) you get the Kingseeker’s Brand, which is magical voodoo that drives your character nuts if they don’t get out to find Arthur, the One True King. So then your character is torn between wanting to go home to their families, or finding Arthur. Awesome internal conflict there.

As for the rest of the story, that’s always been what Tainted Grail has excelled at, with the bread crumbs and puzzle pieces you gotta put together from explorations, but now it’s even better. Going back to that point about how this is no longer open world, the string of events that happens has never felt more cohesive. And it’s not even a railroaded experience, you still have plenty of agency in what order you wanna check things out during a chapter, because remember that what you prioritize matters once time passes and options start closing off. This sense of urgency is so much better depicted versus Fall of Avalon, where you’d frequently run into situations where you’re wasting time dawdling about exploring something totally unrelated to the chapter.

Last couple of story pros: the First King of Ruin, Claudyne the Unknighted has an incredible build up, where you periodically hear about him, then find secrets and explorations that are related to him, and you even fight enemies that fight under his name. Another thing that can be done so well because of the lack of open world.

Then, since going to a new Chapter means that you set up a new area, starting Chapters feels way more substantial than Fall of Avalon’s: ‘you just keep playing the game.’ Now, as a hypothetical example, you would get to the end of a mountain road, see a volcano there, then get the next chapter card and clean up mountain map to setup the starting location cards of the volcano for next chapter

Lastly, the NPCs are doing more compared to Fall of Avalon, where you have to interact them quite a bit to progress the game. You can get yourself involved with royalty extremely quickly if you want, Chapter 2 has lots of NPC dialogue tree interactivity, which may or may not be affected by stuff you did in Chapter 1.

Cons

Before we start this, again, we are reviewing a prototype, so component quality is shoddy, where some mini stuff was broken off because there’s no insert, and heck, we got sent the game with rubber bands and some sticky pieces. So we can’t talk about how this game’s setup and teardown is.

There are some hiccups on the player aids, where they don’t mention taking damage if you end your turn in Wyrdness, or how in combat they are missing the victory check to end the encounter after the enemy attack, in case you have some sort of defensive thing that does damage when attacked. In fact, after returning to Tainted Grail, we’re really noticing how wordy they are, which had our eyes glazing over and should have had key sections highlighted in some way.

And the rulebook has some confusion in ‘enemy attack under combat’ and we are still not sure if we are allowed to show our hands to one another during a group encounter. Or how even the turn structure for the exploring part of the game is a little confusing.

Next there’s a thing that says if your group can’t decide who’s the active character in an encounter use the lowest character number, which is nowhere to be found. Nowhere.

Again, moving through briskly here, more information on component cons are in the video review, but for gameplay cons, it was very weird how character’s bonus energy was not maxed out, as it currently feels bad if you play as Gerdwyn and get too much bonus energy that can’t be used. There is also a skill called “Fast Learner” for Gerdwyn, which while retrained from Fall of Avalon, is still one of the worst skills in the game, where it lets you see 4 cards instead of 3 when buying an upgrade card for an encounter deck, which basically doesn’t do anything when compared to other skills that are potential game changers.

Next we’re gonna complain about Elgan’s skill, cause it’s actually really expensive to make a Wyrdcandle that only lasts 1 day, especially when solo because you literally only have to throw in 1 more Magic to light a Waystone; which lasts forever. However, Waystones can only be placed in locations with a black circle slot in the corner, so the value in Elgan’s ability is basically entirely up to how the chapter’s area is designed. Even then, from what we’ve seen there’s always way to clear up the Wyrdness through the chapter contextual exploration anyways, and if anything, it’s a really common situation where you SHOULD be walking through Wyrdness, which makes Elgan’s downside come up super often in comparison to Gerdwyn’s, which we kid you not has never mattered yet.

Now we’re gonna bring up various cons involving encounters, starting with how in diplomacy, the duration timer doesn’t actually decrease naturally every turn, rather it only ever changes from external effects like your cards or the enemy response, which was kind of confusing at first.

Next, and this is still an issue with multiplayer encounters that’s been innate to Tainted Grail, which is the downtime during encounters if some players aren’t involved. Granted, there’s now a tooltip that says the other people should do their own actions or plan how to use their exp, but sometimes a fight can go on for so long, the other people just don’t do anything for a couple of minutes.

Also on that note, grouping up for fights doesn’t even feel that much stronger to justify the increase in encounter difficulty tiers, unless the fight is a long one cause now you all have more steam. Group fights are great for dealing more total damage to the enemy, but at least early on in the campaign, it’s not very good at controlling the fight, meaning doing proper amounts of damage to avoid huge retaliations or setting up good key connections.

Last encounter related con is boss fights, and yes, there will again be slight mechanical spoilers, cause while they do feel long and epic, it is really funny and thematically off putting how little damage they have to do in order to be fair, like ‘this giant dude with a sword the size of a house does less damage than a bear’ really betrays the sense of scale and danger mechanically. But a more legitimate con for this is how when playing solo, you’re for sure gonna run out of cards with a 10 card deck.

Last few bits of gameplay cons: insanity never really felt like a thing anymore. Of course, back in Fall of Avalon there were definitely circumstances that felt bonkers that shot your terror up super hard, so I’d imagine they’d also be in Kings of Ruin come late game, but who knows if they’ll be fair or not.

Also, can we just say how unthematic being Insane is? Panicking during encounters where you play the top card from your deck instead of drawing is pretty funny, we dig that effect, but the only other effects don’t have anything to do with going crazy. Going insane just makes it so you can’t heal when resting and that traveling/exploring sometimes costs more energy. Being insane isn’t even that consequential, especially now that there’s actually places to heal. It’d be way funnier if insanity did something similar to how most Lovecraft board games handle this, with a deck of negative conditions that you draw from, making you hallucinate, go mute, etc.

Final con is that while the prevalence of once per day random encounters on a location is an excellent change, there’s an instance where it’s still not enough cause the location is in a chokepoint for the chapter that you have to frequently pass through. It was SO common that we’d go to a place, explore, figure the thing out, next day we’d need to go back, explore, and then to top it off the day after that we had to deliver a thing at the encounter location. For the love of god, whoever’s doing the map design, please make these chokepoint random encounters once every 2 days if you have to pass through them a lot holy moly.

Final Thoughts

We’re giving a Tentative Score for Kings of Ruin, because we were only sent 2 chapters for a prototype! One chapter was done 2 player, and one was true solo. Frankly, there’s not enough content we were given to determine if the balance pans out, if certain mechanics hold up throughout the campaign, etc.

But what is here we can still pretty confidently say, yeah, there’s definitely been a ton of improvements in all sorts of random aspects across the game, enough that this isn’t like some hopeful, cautious optimism when we say 8/10, we’re full on excitedly optimistic about this game. If you always fancied the idea of Fall of Avalon and wanted to try it but were turned off by the negative reviews, now is definitely a way better time to jump in and back Kings of Ruin. It’s still the good ol’ Tainted Grail exploration formula with the immaculate vibes and excellent presentation, just with way less dysfunction—game really went on a diet, shaved off a whole lotta jankiness, took better care of itself.

And for those of you who already liked Tainted Grail? This is more Tainted Grail, what’s not to love? Unless you were a huge fan of the grindy gameplay, but hey, there’s tons of challenge mode rules you can try out for your liking, though now it looks like we got stuff that actually makes the game harder instead of just being more grindy.

As for more specifics about giving Kings of Ruin an 8/10, it’s because we think that, despite listing out a gajillion cons, most of them are actually pretty minor, so that plus the ones that do matter like balancing issues for certain skills, abilities, boss battle mechanics when solo, etc. are what really sets it back, alongside some cons that just seem to be innate to a design like this such as multiplayer downtime.

The Tainted Grail experience is definitely at its best either solo or 2 player, especially cause the exploration journal uses the pronoun ”you” which feels much more tailored to a solo playthrough. And at higher player counts we 100% recommend having people download Tainted Grail’s companion app, which will essentially provide extra copies of the exploration journal for people to read along, or you can just straight up have the app narrate verses for you. Can’t speak to the quality of the app for Kings of Ruin, it’s not released yet, but we can definitely stand by the Fall of Avalon one they made, and the app was free so hell yeah. Also groups should probably sit closer together to be able to read the tiny text on location cards or chapter events and whatnot.

But other than all that, Tainted Grail’s world and exploration journal has and always will be such a strong selling point, so if the cons don’t bother you and you’re looking for an epic dark fantasy campaign game with a whole book of choose your own adventure options, definitely check this one out, cause if you think all the minis and art look cool plus you enjoy the story, you WILL be hooked from start to finish.