Tainted Grail Review

Tainted Grail — The Fall of Avalon Review

*An epic dark fantasy campaign with a unique spin on Arthurian legend and Celtic mythology.*
As the Menhirs grow dark, the island of Avalon slowly sinks into the winds of Wyrdness, a fog that defies spacetime and warps everything within it into unfathomable aberrations. Time is warped, the land endlessly twists, and monstrosities roam about. You’ll have to endure this waking nightmare to uncover the secrets behind Avalon’s miserable state, just as you’ll have to endure horrendously balanced gameplay and jank rules to get to the incredible story.

Video published June 29th, 2021

Text Review

Our Scores

Video Review

Explore Avalon with one of four characters.

Manage experience, food, magic, and more.

Ensure the Menhirs stay lit while exploring the island's mysteries.

This is a sponsored review.

Overview

Tainted Grail’s campaign for 1-4 players has everyone pick a character who’ll each have their own strengths and weaknesses. However, you’re all playing the B-team, as your hometown already sent out their greatest champions towards Kamelot to seek help when Avalon’s Menhirs darkened and the land plunged into wrydness. You’ll have to traverse the land in your quest to seek help, all the while surviving the horrors of Avalon and lighting Menhirs to delay the winds of Wyrdness.

This premise is the bedrock of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s gameplay loop. Menhirs, which come as giant mini’s that you place on the map made of cards, are these creepy statues of what appear to be giant humanoids with a multitude of protrusions and extra limbs. In the story, humans settle around them as safe havens for their towns and cities, as they possess the miraculous ability to fend off the ever-present clouds of Wyrdness that encompass Avalon. However, they do require rituals and sacrifice to maintain, and people even found that different Menhirs have different individual preferences to keep them alight. Despite the constant offerings and bonfires lit for the Menhirs’ upkeep, their power wanes, and clouds of Wyrdness have been slowly drifting back into the land.

Tainted Grail has multiple campaigns available as expansions. The base game’s campaign: The “Fall of Avalon”, has up to 15 chapters to complete. Every chapter has an objective to complete that will bring you farther into the story and closer to understanding the nature of Wyrdness and Avalon. Some chapters will have sub-chapters and branching paths, which may enable skipping certain chapters, locking you into certain story paths, and providing different possible endings.

How to Play & Pros

The first chapter explains Menhir mechanics, as a Menhir that’s on your map made of cards will enable movement on a 3x3 formation of cards, with the Menhir on the middle card. Your hometown, Cuanacht, has its own Menhir that slowly grows dark, represented by an octagon dial placed in its base. At the beginning of every round, that dial ticks down by 1, which means that eventually, that Menhir can extinguish and remove itself off the map. This means Wyrdness encroaches! Wandering around in a Menhir-less state will have you taking massive mental and physical damage is your character’s body begins to distort in awful ways.

So naturally, the first thing you’re gonna have to learn how to do is light Menhirs, which is the objective of Chapter 1. The 3x3 of cards available from the starting Menhir will be your starting area to explore, and once you learn the secret ritual rites, you can now light Menhirs whenever you find them—assuming you have the resources to pay for it. But once you’re able to light your first Menhir and start chapter 2, the world will open up to you, as you’ll be able to uncover more of the map by lighting additional Menhirs. With this newfound freedom, you’ll be able to chase after whichever chapter objectives you like, albeit on a timer as Menhirs constantly tick down, on top of a chill in your spine that the Wyrdness itself schemes, seemingly contorting to stop you.

Moving on to the turn by turn gameplay instead of big picture Menhir lighting, everyone is going to pick a character of their choice from the 4 available (5 if you’ve got the kickstarter exclusive one). Each character starts with a different distribution of attribute points, as well as different starting decks of cards used for combat and diplomacy encounters. These can all be upgraded by spending experience points, so by the end of the game the differences between the characters’ gameplay will narrow as their weaknesses disappear and their proficiencies widen.

On your turn, your character is able to perform actions by spending energy. Spending too much and falling into your character’s red exhaustion threshold will incur negative effects like gaining back less energy for the next round, so while most characters can do 6+ actions a turn in a pinch, you’re usually gonna do 4.

The vast majority of your energy is going to be spent either moving or exploring your current location card. Exploring causes you to open up Fall of Avalon’s exploration journal and turn to the page that has your location’s number, at which point you’ll follow along its narrative prompts that basically works like a choose-your-own-adventure book that’s self contained to the section of the exploration journal that pertains to the explored location you’re on. Picking different options makes you go to different verses within the location’s section, and sometimes you’ll have to do skill checks where you roll a d6 and add one of your attribute values to the result to see if you succeed.

Explorations are the heart of Tainted Grail’s experience, as it’s THE way the plot is told to you, and the story that your characters tell is tracked by marking statuses on the save sheet of your campaign. Frequently while exploring, certain choices will be unlocked or blocked off if you have certain statuses.

And depending on the location, you may end up taking multiple rounds exploring it to achieve your goals, or even peace out right after your first explore action depending on context, in which statuses play a huge part. Then on top of all that, locations all have their own specific location abilities, which can range from spending energy to hunting for food or scavenge resources, all the way to instantly triggering a combat encounter upon entering the location.

Speaking of encounters, whenever you enter one, you draw 3 cards from either your character’s combat or diplomacy deck depending on if you’re fighting or talking. Your cards have a bunch of attribute keys on their left side that need to connect with previously played cards’ attribute keys in order to activate their effects. You’ll want to spend your exp tailoring the perfect decks as to not be screwed by randomness, because fighting can happen A LOT, plus it’s the best and most consistent source of resources.

Cons

Though unfortunately, the fighting is happening too much, to the point where it’s making the story’s experience worse. The most common complaint you’ll find about Tainted Grail online is that the gameplay is a grindy slog to get through. The survival experience is fun for the first few hours when the experience is a novelty, but when you’re 20 hours in, having to go out and get resources to light Menhirs multiple times just so you can traverse Avalon to get to the next story point becomes super tedious.

Granted, this trudge can be slightly alleviated through good planning of your routes, leveling up certain skills to acquire more resources, and avoiding combat when possible. However, the grind is still unavoidable unless you’re willing to house rule a significant amount. There are rules variants in the back of the rulebook though, one is a challenge mode to make the game even harder mainly by increasing exp costs for everything, and the other is a story mode to make the game easier mainly by lowering the difficulty of encounters.

The big problem with story mode is that it isn’t really a “story” mode at all, it’s just a difficulty slider. Fall of Avalon will remain just as, if not more grindy if played on either variant. This is because on easier difficulties, sure you’re winning all your fights easier, but that’s because enemies are scaled down, which also means rewards for defeating them is less, which in turn means you have to fight more if you want to get more exp to get access to more skills that speed up the resource gameplay loop. A “story” mode in most other games usually will make the difficulty of gameplay completely negligible so that the experience is focused solely on allowing the game to deliver its plot. Instead, no matter which difficulty option you pick, you’re probably going to end up spending 30 hours of the 40 hour campaign doing tedious and repetitive gameplay instead of exploring and progressing the story, which is by far Tainted Grail’s strongest aspect in the first place.

Now, if the gameplay was actually good, this wouldn’t be an issue. After all, no one’s complaining about RPG’s where the majority of the experience is combat over story if the combat is excellent. In Tainted Grail, once you randomly find a good weapon, upgrade your decks a few times, and pick up a combat related skill, you trivialize the combat. This is catastrophically boring, especially in a combat system that’s not very crunchy in the first place. Having a starting hand of 3 means that on your turn there’s usually only 1 reasonable choice to make. On top of that, enemies attack based on how much damage they’ve taken, so it’s really easy to control what they’re going to do unless you’re really unlucky with your hand. That is, if you don’t one-shot them in the first place by comboing a whole bunch of cards together that draw another card and do some damage. Both the innate combat system itself plus the fact you can one-shot everything really doesn’t allow any of the fights to have a story to them, they’re just random and tedious. The most memorable and high impact fights were the ones prompted from explorations: the ones with context and purpose behind the enemy showing up.

The gameplay balance isn’t the only thing that’s broken though, Tainted Grail has very dysfunctional component usage and unclear rulings. There’s a massive list of these to go through, and it’s ridiculous just how asinine the problems get. As an example, the massive Menhir minis constantly block cards so you can’t read information on them like names, icons, and abilities, as well as any character minis that may be behind the Menhir. Also, the octagon dials used for Menhirs as well as quest trackers are extremely loose and the slightest jolt can mis-position them to make you forget what number you’re on, which isn’t even mentioning that the numbers on the dials are extremely hard to see, unless you paint them yourself so that they actually have contrast. Also also, the backs of location cards have full art and the first verse of their explorations, but you’ll never use this because 1: you have to move aside any minis on top of the location card to turn it over in the first place, and 2: you have to use the exploration journal anyways, which lacks the gorgeous full art on the backs of cards.

Final Thoughts

But ultimately, there’s way too many nuances in bad rulings and dysfunctional components that rely on a more comprehensive understanding of rules and gameplay elements not explained here for the sake of brevity. If you want more details, check out our comprehensive video review, as well as our follow up video after finishing the campaign to see why the recommender score was lowered!