ThreeTale is live (A Tale of Prophecies)
Update: ThreeTale has launched on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for another 13 days. You may pledge for the core box only, or combine it with the expansion.
Our preview post below was published on August 29.
ThreeTale is a fantasy adventure game for 1-3 players. You will be taking control of three heroes who must prepare to fight a threat, the arrival of which has been prophesied. The campaign for the game will launch on Kickstarter on August 31.
You start by drawing three prophecy cards: they all announce an upcoming peril that you will need to face in the end game. At this point, you do not know which of these three prophecies will be fulfilled. By knowing the possible futures that await you, however, you can choose your three heroes accordingly. Each hero has specific starting stats and talents that can be unlocked in the course of the adventure.
A hero has six virtues (their stats will vary throughout the game), a speed stat, spirit points (three in total), and can earn shevitsa (akin to experience) to unlock their unique talents. The speed stat determines how much you can move on the map and is also used as an Initiative number during fights. The virtues are the following: love determines how many dice you roll during combat; hope allows you to mitigate dice results by flipping a die face from positive to negative (dice only show two types of faces in this game); faith enables you to draw bonus cards to help you during fights; endeavor sets the number of actions you can perform each turn; endurance allows you to increase the stat value of other virtues at the end of your turns, and finally mercy works the same, except it targets the virtues of other heroes.
The game is played over three major phases: Past, Present, and Future. Past is the bulk of the game, and during this phase, you will build up your characters. In each round, and for each of the heroes, you start by drawing a tile to expand the map. Then, you can move your active hero and perform actions by spending action points. No encounter is mandatory and all require to spend an action point to be triggered. In your travels, you can receive quests to fulfill, engage in fights, find treasures (whose value depends on a dice roll), artifacts that can be equipped, etc.
During a fight, your hero and your enemy alternate turns, starting with the one with the highest speed stat. Enemies have three stats: speed, strength, and defense. To defeat them, you must inflict as much damage as their defense value. On each of your turns, you roll as many dice as your love stat, and the number of dice showing a positive result gives the amount of damage you inflict. You may also set aside one positive result to activate an artifact. On each of the enemy turns, they roll as many dice as their strength and inflict as much damage to you as the positive results they get. You can choose to either suffer the damage by lowering your stats by the corresponding amount (you spread the loss over your different virtues as you deem best), or you can spend a spirit token and negate all damage. You can also spend a spirit token to flee the fight. If you lose all spirit tokens though, you lose the game!
The Past phase ends when all the map tiles have been placed. Then, the Present phase begins: one of the three prophecies drawn at the beginning of the game is fulfilled, and you will open the Future book to see the details of the threat you have to face. The Future phase is played like the Past phase, except you now have a timer to race against, and a special objective to fulfill before the timer ends.
If you reach your objective before the time elapses, you win the game! No matter how the game ends, you can still calculate your score to assess how well you performed.