Red is the color of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind, in heart, in womb.
Quest for the Holy Grail with your Avalon: The Riven Veil rules & reference!
The first game by Shadowbourne Games, Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood, has become one of my favourite story-based adventure and combat games, so I was surprised to see their next game was a more traditional Euro-style area control and card management game, albeit with heavy theme, miniatures, and lots of colour. So much colour! Avalon: The Riven Veil is a little too colourful for my taste, so much so that sometimes the illustrations feel like they’re shouting while the text and icons struggle to be heard.
It’s an impressive game nonetheless which I’m sure will be very popular with those who love to get very deep into strategies and card play, but sadly it left me a bit cold. While I appreciated the systems – the variety of actions controlled by cards, paying for cards with other cards, placing settlements to anchor regions, the reset of the board each season of play, bidding for monster control, even the slightly arbitrary push-your-luck combat mini-game – I was left feeling that any theme could have been pasted on this one. When it boils down it’s dudes-on-a-map area control, which is not a favourite style of mine. And there are quite a lot of fiddly rules in the pretty rough rulebook. But I insist, in this case don’t let my personal opinion out you off: I can see a lot of people getting into this game and enjoying the many possibilities offered by the asymmetric factions.
It’s interesting to see Shadowbourne go in such a different direction for this second release, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with next. In the meantime, here’s my rules summary and reference for Avalon: The Riven Veil.
Oh, and by the way, this is my 500th rules & reference. FIVE HUNDRED! It’s staggering to think I’ve made so many in the last 20 or so years, and nice to reach this significant milestone.