Tainted Grail: the Fall of Avalon – Awaken Realms Strikes Back in Style

Awaken Realms seems to be dominating Kickstarter more and more with each of their campaigns. Tainted Grail: the Fall of Avalon seems like it’s destined to end up as yet another huge event on KS. Let’s see what the new project from the authors of The Edge, Lords of Hellas and Nemesis is about.

A Dark History

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is said to have an incredible atmosphere, that will allow 1 to 4 players immerse in it. Alone or hand in hand with other companions, we will enter the world, inspired by arthurian legends, transformed into a much darker place.

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Players will, first and foremost, have to… survive. Apart from that, we will explore the world, go on adventures and fight. Along the way we’ll get some valuable experience points allowing us to develop our heroes, so they can face even tougher challenges.

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The gameplay is supposed to be very atmospheric, with a heavy story focus. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon will come with over 1000 unique illustrations, thanks to which we’ll feel, like we’re really a part of the events taking place on the board. Each Adventure will have a few separate endings and different ways to achieve them, which will allow us to delve deep into each nook and cranny of this world, without feeling that we keep repeating the same things over and over.

The Gameplay

The players will get four basic heroes to choose from. Each will possess his or her own miniature, a 2-level board, 40 combat cards, 40 diplomacy cards and 18 skill cards. All of these elements will make us move through the map, and our decisions will affect the quests and the world around us.

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The adventures won’t be happy though. The atmosphere of the game is dark, and our heroes are prone to suffer from starvation, sicknesses, bad weather and many other unpleasant factors. To deal with such conditions, the players will have plenty of ways to make their characters stronger. A cookie-cutter path of progressing your hero won’t exist, because sometimes, we will need a good chunk of raw brutal power, other time: depend on diplomacy, or even on a completely different set of skills.

It’s also worth mentioning, that the game doesn’t use dice. All tests or adventures are performed without these, which is still a really fresh approach.


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“Well, unless you played a whole campaign of Gloomhaven like I did. Twice. Still, as much as I love dice, games that avoid them in creative way, can be amazing.”

The Campaign

The Kickstarter campaign is supposed to launch on December 5th. At the moment, the draft shows only a single 90 dollar pledge, that will allow us to become owners of the game and all the included stretch goals. The box will contain: 8 minis, 100 small cards, 576 standard cards, 72 bigger cards, over 100 tokens, and over 200 pages of text, that will tell the story from the game.

I’m almost sure, that we’ll get more add-ons to order during the campaign. Also: all day 1 backers will get an additional heroine called Niamh for free.

>>>Campaign draft

What do you think?

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