Griphold Tower - Rules Overview

hey everyone this is going to be um a quick rules video for my game griffin tower in case you uh prefer learning through video um gruffle tower is an 18 card game um it's played completely in your hand there's no table needed if you don't want one um the theme of the game is you are going to assume the role of a lone adventurer you've either been separated from your adventuring party or or presumably something horrible has happened to them and you find yourself at the top of a of a legendary tower and there's waves of enemies coming at you through the room's only door and you got to fight your way through five waves of enemies and then a final boss so i'll go through the setup here you just choose which boss you want to take on we'll go with death spain for this one and you can set the other one aside and then you choose one of the eight characters they're double sided here i think i'm gonna go with the valkyrie and set two of the characters aside keep one for what i call the dummy card and it's just going to help it's going to help the cards work better when they're in your hand these are the monster cards there's 12 of them but they're double sided so there's 24 monsters so give these a shuffle make sure you rotate some of them just to get the variety okay put these in your left hand for setup take the boss card flip it over and orient it so we're indicating that this is round one actually what we need to do first is you need to get your strength cards ready all that means is take the cards from the back i'm going to give me three strength cards you you rotate them 90 degrees and you set them there like that i said i'll give me three strength cards that's actually hard mode if you want an easier game you give yourself four four is is normal mode hard can be pretty difficult but just to just to give a good illustration of of some of the harder decisions i'm going to play on hard mode take your boss card slide it behind the last monster and in front of your top strength card then comes your dummy card slide it behind your boss card and leave it sticking out of here that's just going to help your character not slide around when you're moving your strength cards around and then put your character right in front of that dummy card and behind the boss card so here we go that's set up let's go through just some terminology here so these are your monster cards we ignore the one on the bottom for now um that one's that one's not in front of us but this guy is um monsters have a type so he's a creature type a lot of most of them have an ability here he doesn't so we don't have to worry about it and here is your monster's health with the heart and here is your monster's damage okay but when they're rotated 90 degrees in there the terminology is slotted when they're slotted on the right here they are a strength card and um so they have different names these values so this is your strength value of the strength card so 9 12 4 and then here is your um armor and armor is not going to come into play until the end of the wave but as you're playing you'll find you kind of want to try to preserve as much armor as you can but a lot of times you don't really have the luxury to worry about it because you're more worried about your strength okay your character has six health and six abilities so your abilities are your health each of these kind of sections is an ability there's five combat abilities with the shields and then there's one rest ability that you only worry about in between waves that's indicated by the tent icon and then here is the icon indicating whether or not your character is ranged or melee obviously this one is is range because it's got the bow and arrow let's show you uh you can see the swords for a melee character melee characters can only fight they can only attack with strength attacks the front monster in line ranged characters can attack the front or the second monster in line so um obviously that that means the range characters are going to play a lot they're going to give you a lot more options they're going to be easier to play so i suggest starting out with a range character if you're just beginning the game so the central kind of mechanic of the game is is pretty easy you're just going to use your strength cards to meet or exceed the health of the of the monster and how that works is um let me just do one here so let's say i want to i actually want to attack the lich first um partly because of his ability exhaust one ability for every monster defeated before lich so if i take him on first i would have to exhaust an ability and i'll show you what that means but i want to defeat him with a strength and actually it's going to be super efficient because i have a 9 strength card so what i'm going to do is well the right order is probably i'm going to discard spend this strength card by putting it all the way in the back and then i get to slot the defeated monster as a strength card so let's just do another one here oh actually i don't want her the phantom to get in the front strength cards are half value rounded up against phantom yeah so i don't want her to get in into the front because then her front ability is going to trigger so some abilities have this bolded text and it either says front instant or second front means because she's in second position right now if i would defeat this lion she would then move into first i'd take her into my right hand and then her ability would apply uh so i'm gonna try i'm gonna hit her off at the pass here and i'm gonna try not to let her get into front position but there's also one character or one monster excuse me has a a second position power and and that just behaves the same as a front power except it applies to when he's in the second position and then an instant ability an instant monster ability means it happens once and it happens right the first time you see them the first time they become visible so you'll see actually valkyrie is a good example sometimes um monster abilities or character abilities will require you or give you the option to quote unquote peak at third and that just means take a look at who's hanging out in third position and now they are considered visible as well so i'm gonna the way i play it is i don't you could leave it like this if you want i'm just so you can still see that third monster after peaking but i tend to just put this back and remember who's there but you have to remember that monster is considered visible and so if there's an ability that that affects all visible monsters just remember that after you've peaked at the third monster that monster is visible um so let's just do a couple more strength attacks just so you get a feel for it so i'm going to attack this 10 with this 12. so i'll slot the 10 because i defeated it with a strength card and i'll discard the 12. so we're actually doing pretty good so far let's see i'm still sitting on a 6 in front but he's going to hang out a little bit longer because i really want to defeat that 9 with that 9 to preserve as much strength as i can and notice he has a front ability so that's only going to come into play when he gets into the front okay so you get the gist on the strength attacks um the other if you get stuck or if you just see an opportunity pay attention to your other option for attacking which is the character abilities there's two ways to activate an ability um you can apply a strength card to it which means you just discard a strength card so let's say i wanted to do take flight there in the in the bottom right peak at third and ignore visible instant and front abilities okay well it wouldn't be very useful to do it right now but i'll do it just for an illustration so let's say i want to activate that i will discard a strength card apply it to that and now i get to activate that ability and so it says peak at third and ignore visible instant and frontability so if you get third aha that was actually pretty fruitful because the bone thief can be a real bugger with his with his front ability discard a strength card of your choice that's pretty penalizing so i'm glad that happened actually so i peeked at third and every all three of these are visible and so i get to ignore visible instant and frontability so his no longer applies and his no longer applies okay great but let's say um i've played a little bit more let's say i've i don't know let's i'll just play a couple here so i'll defeat him with strength and remember his front ability has been ignored so we'll ignore that defeat him with strength okay let's just say we're here and i want to um let's say i want to do take flight again let's say there i i'm just scared of what's coming next or let's pretend that you know there's a really damaging front ability here and i really want to use it again but you only get to use you only get to activate an ability with a strength card by discarding a strength card once per ability per wave so i could discard a strength card and activate any one of my other combat abilities but um i can't do it with this one because i already did that this round however you do have the option to exhaust the ability to activate it again so exhausting just means covering it up it's gone for the round i can't use it again um you can exhaust an ability to activate it even if you haven't already done so with a strength card so let's say i want to use the sweet combo i could exhaust it and i could use it like that but then i can't go back and apply a strength card to it to activate it it's gone for the round be be a little bit discerning when you do this because not only you know is it not usable for the rest of the round this is your health and so if the monsters if you're taking damage at the end of the wave um and the monsters are causing you to exhaust abilities you might regret having exhausted a bunch of abilities on your own okay so let's just one more thing to say about that i guess you can like say i want to use dive bomb but i haven't exhausted take flight yet i totally could do that if i wanted to i could do this to exhaust dive bomb but that's maybe not the best play unless i'm really desperate because i had to cover up take flight to do that you can totally do that it's it's a legal move um and you might find yourself in situations where that's beneficial but um one caveat to that is when you're exhausting abilities you can't exhaust all three on one side so this is a legal move that's a legal move i could do that you know if i needed to exhaust that one can't do this and then one more thing about there's each character has a stock ability which just means it's free many of the stock abilities say just stock they don't say stock once and that means it's probably a just sort of an ongoing ability an ongoing effect on something and so you just have to pay attention to that the valkyries stock ability is a once ability so it says rotate a monster and highest strength card so once for free without spending a strength card or without exhausting it i get to i get to do that um the thing about one thing to remember i guess with stock once abilities is you can you can use it once for free and then you can if you want to you can exhaust it to use it one more time okay so let's pretend we fought through a number of monsters um actually let's let's just skip ahead and i want to illustrate one thing to you so um ignore his ability for now and let's pretend um this is the game state here and let's pretend i i read through my abilities and i can't think of anything that's going to defeat this guy for me and i'm just stuck he's an eight i've only got a four left my abilities aren't relevant so my only option is to let him pass and what that means is i turn him upside down i put him in the back and he's sticking out the bottom here and i have to take his damage right away right when i let him pass so um i have to take one damage which means i have to exhaust an ability of my choice and um let's okay i'm gonna be really weird here and say let's pretend that we somehow this was a different monster and and we were able to to satisfy the 11 there and defeat it with strength somehow um so let's pretend that this is the end of wave game state um this monster that i let pass the sort of the illustration is uh i let him pass into the room with me he kind of was dazed and hung out there but now i to turn and take him on at the end of the wave so i have to take damage again so i took the damage right away and that's called the initial damage and now i have to take final damage so if i had no strength left if i had no strength cards left for whatever reason i would have to take another damage to put him with the defeated monsters and and have him gone for good so i'd have to do that and that would be the end of the wave however this is where your armor comes into play i have three armor sitting on me at the end of the wave this armor can mitigate the final damage so you take your total armor if i had more cards i would sum it all up take your total armor that can mitigate this damage so i get to send him to the back and now my total armor is two and actually one of the other benefits of armor is it also heals you so let's pretend you know i had a really i had a really tough wave and this was the the end of wave state and so i had that one final damage so i i put that to the back with the defeated monsters and now i'm down to two armor but i get to heal with whatever's left over so i have two armor left i'm going to heal this one and this one i could heal like i could heal these two if i wanted or these two so let's just say i wanted to heal this one and this one i get to do that and that would be the end of this strength card and this would be where we sit after that wave except after each wave you get one free heel just for resting so i get to heal whichever one of these i want and so i would be going into wave number two with this one still exhausted i'd have to start like that so rest abilities would apply now it says cost 1 to swap front monster with second highest strength at start doesn't really apply to me because this cost 1 means let's say i let's say i i didn't need to use this to heal or i just decided not to and i would rather use it for my rest ability um it means i need to spend one armor to activate my ability most are my rest ability most rest abilities don't have a cost but if it says cost one it just means you need to use a leftover armor or alligate allocate one of your armor points to activate your rest ability so yeah so uh next wave i would just turn this over and i would set it up again and we would play through four waves and then at the end so let's say we play the second wave third and fourth uh for the fifth wave you flip it over and you you have the boss face up so let's just illustrate a boss fight you know what i don't even probably need i probably don't need the cards but i'll set it up anyway let's just say most of these are behind and we're facing the boss and let's say i i end up having i don't know these two left and here's my character let's say i've taken like one damage okay so boss cards um just like a normal monster you have to meet or exceed that to defeat them more than likely you're not going to do that with raw strength although it's happened before because i've only got 13 strength left not near enough to get to 25 but you can take a chance and go for the critical hits each boss has three critical hits this uh so for limb this 8 the skull icon is how much damage you can do with the critical hit the heart is how much strength you must devote to it to activate the critical hit and then you also must take damage so you're taking a risk you're kind of exposing um yourself to take damage to get in there and get this sort of big shot on the guy so you also have to take some damage and exhaust one ability so let's pretend i want to activate well heck i could i could activate body blow because i've got a 10 so that could satisfy that and i have enough health left that i could take to do damage so let's pretend i do that i have to discard the 10 that act that satisfies that criteria and now i need to take two damage so i'll do that and then i get to do 14 damage so now i'm up to 17. uh that's not going to get me there so let's pretend uh instead let's get to the last part about bosses they have one special boss rule so his is take one damage to slot the lesser value half of the last defeated monster take two damage for the greater value half so let's say i want to do that i grab the last defeated monster so what that's saying is i can take a damage to get the lesser value half the seven as a strength or i can take two damage to get the 12 out of the strength and man that seems like a good deal so i'm going to do that i'm going to opt for the greater value half and i'm going to abide by the rules and take my two damage gladly and oh gosh now i got to do math in real time oh i think i did it i think just doing the the boss rule did it because 12 and 3 is 15 plus 10 is 25 and i defeated the boss um so yeah the bosses can present a kind of a unique puzzle in themselves you got to have a good fifth wave especially if you're going to take on the i consider azazel the the tougher boss you really need to have try to hang on to at least two strength cards by the end and not just be left with one but you'll figure out your own strategy to defeat them and um yeah that's the game i hope you guys enjoy it and uh thanks for watching

Channel: Joe Klipfel

Views: 1,854

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Id: CJAtwIGuijI

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020