Revisiting Iron Helm: This or that and press your luck

[Music] foreign [Music] hey everybody welcome back to the dungeon dive Daniel here I hope you're doing well and if you're not I hope you are soon okay today on the dungeon dive we are taking another look at iron Helm uh game designed and illustrated by Jason Glover with additional illustrations by Daniel e Walthall so ironhelm is a game that I've taken a look at a couple times before we've taken a look at the base game we've taken a look at the iron chest expansion and it is a game that I've been wanting to get back to the table for some time and I am super happy that I did what you are seeing set up now is the uh the end the demise of grimly I had a I had a really bad game this game without grimly here grimly was my character so grimly here has a health of 14 energy 10 and an encumbrance value of nine he can hold up to nine value of weight of things he started with two rations and four gold uh for those of you unfamiliar with iron Helm iron Helm is a card based Dungeon Crawl game where you are taking a character and you are going into the dungeon and trying to find the boss at the end energy health and and rations are three resources that this game has a lot that you want to manage as you are traversing through the dungeon and it's a really important to manage those resources wisely to make it to the end health is you're basically your hit points energy can be spent to do attacks and rations you have to eat rations at certain points during the game or else you will starve and die your characters start off with a number of trappings those are beginning those are items that you get at the beginning of the game and those are also items that you can buy at certain points if you are playing the very light campaign version going through multiple adventures and then each character will have a starting skill and each character will have a a an ability type that they specialize in so you have agility Brawn and mind and those correspond to different skills and uh grimly here his starting skill was Dash and basically I could choose to avoid a card in the dungeon at the cost of maybe some of my energy and throughout the game as you kill more monsters you can trade those monsters in as trophies to gain more skills and the skills that I gained on this adventure were six cents which would help me with my choices in the dungeon and martial arts which would help me with combat I kind of try to focus on combat in this particular adventure and it did not end up going well I fought way too much and just got beat down and finally this fire troll killed me so I faced off in this short Adventure I faced off against a fish man an orc Warrior a wolf a goblin a flying snake a wraith and a fire troll so I'm going to talk about three things that I really love about iron Helm and then one thing that is on an iron Helm wish list of mine I know Jason is working on a new little expansion so he is returning to the game the game was supposed to be done but he has been inspired to make a new little blister pack expansion and he's going to be adding more dungeon cards to the expansion and the dungeon card deck is kind of the this this is the main driving force the main driving mechanism of this game and we'll talk about this in a little later but iron Helm I think is a game that is made so much better by every expansion you add to it some games have a pretty good base game and I think the iron Helm base game is pretty good however when I compare it to something like Rogue dungeon I prefer the Rogue dungeon base game I think it is a better game without needing the expansion that is available for rogue dungeon however iron Helm a similar game a similar kind of card based Dungeon Crawl but whereas ire or whereas a rogue dungeon is a little more luck based iron Helm is a little more decision based we'll talk a little bit about that when I get to uh topic number two but ironhelm the base game is okay but the expansions add so much to it and I love the game once you start adding in the expansions and you can get a boxed expansion called the iron chest which comes with some booster packs that you can add kind of in a modular fashion you can add them to your game uh some of them will make the game a little harder some of them will add some things that will make the game a little easier a lot of them will add new characters so once you start adding in all the expansions you have a ton of different characters to play as like Zola and feyon aslar and I just I love Jason Glover's character art it's so good eldra braswits aura or Cora uh sortab Kiln Orma um Miss like the beggar I've I want to play the beggar at some point uh scroll or o'slo this grizzled Warrior there and then of course with all the new characters you will get a whole bunch of new skills and I have the skills uh separated into their categories so we have agility skills such as Shadow archery concealed Dodge and then we have the Mind skill so you have the Hawking the life drain tactics Alchemy Divinity herbalism and Treasure Hunter and appraise and then you have the bronze skills such as the uh the ax Master the Dual wielder the Berserker Shield block Harry and fortitude and if you choose to level up and take a skill that matches your character's Focus then it only costs three points of monster trophies but you can also go out of your character's focus and spend Five Points of trophies to get one of those other skills you will also end up with a lot more plots to add to your base game and plots are little story elements that will add some flavor to your game you will always deal with one plot in between each floor as you are working down in the dungeon going from levels one down to level five looking for the boss you will draw a plot card and when at each plot card has a little story usually with a little choice or some kind of pressure luck element and then each plot card will also have some eyeballs and I think whenever you find your 10th eyeball that's when you have found your boss and so it's good to have as many plots as you can so you can encounter that boss before you get too beat down by the other things in the dungeon however one of the expansions and I'm not sure if I enjoy this expansion or not or this element of this expansion and that is uh the beasts and a burden's expansion it adds some very difficult mini bosses to the plot deck so I think I might actually take these out the next time I play the game because facing off against these guys can really be detrimental to your character's ability to uh to survive but you'll end up with more plots to encounter you'll end up with more enemy variety all of the in all the various enemies that you can encounter a lot of them come from the base game but each of the expansions does add one or two enemies to the deck you'll end up with a whole heck of a lot more Loot and uh the loot in this game is really fun it's it's very mechanical it will usually give you a choice of something to do if you want to use that loot some of the loot you can use over and over again some of the loot is uh is one and done and there are also enemies there are also mimics in the loot deck which is always fun you will end up with more trappings and the trappings are the initial items that your characters start with but these are also items that you can buy in between Adventures if you are playing the light campaign mode so these are all options that you can spend your gold on and things to help augment your character make your character stronger and give them more of a chance to survive you will also end up in one of the expansions you will end up with some afflictions and afflictions I think if your character takes a certain amount of poison damage you will end up having to deal with one of these afflictions this is another part of this beast and burden expansion uh this expansion here that makes the game quite a bit more difficult so again I'm not sure how I feel about this expansion because this game can be pretty difficult already but if you want more of a challenge and want to deal with some of the things like gold less or in feeblement or necrophobia insomnia plagued or gluttony you might want to add this little module to your games you have three main bosses that come with the base game and each of the adventure expansions also adds an additional boss that you can face so the three main bosses in the base game are the lurker the Lich and the Naga and then finally if you start adding in all the expansions you will have the ability to hire henchmen henchmen you can buy for a certain amount of gold and they come on your adventure with you and they have a certain amount of morale and if their morale ever drops to zero they're gone they take off but the hingement will help you do certain things while you are in the dungeons one of the expansions adds in this environments deck and this is a really cool deck that just adds a twist it adds a little bit of flavor to each of the dungeons that you go in so you might go into the shadow dungeon or the parched dungeon the abandoned mind the death Grotto the ray uh the watch the sanctum the plateau the bogland or the frost Glen and each one of these adds a little twist to the game this is a great little module if you just want more variety in just a simple small deck of cards and then finally here we'll take a look at the artifacts the artifacts you can spend a blessing token so blessing tokens are things that you can gain throughout the game and at certain points when you draw loot if you have a blessing token you can choose to spin that blessing token to uh draw from the artifacts deck and this is a more powerful items deck however there is also some Dragon dung in here so again there is a little bit of fresh your luck element to that artifact deck then the other expansions will add more adventures and the adventures are what you want to add if you want to turn this into a light campaign game so you can think of the box set as being level one and then you could have there are three additional Adventures for level two and three additional Adventures for level three so at level two we have the Warren of Despair and the warrant of Despair comes with a little information card it will come with its own boss its own set of enemies and plots and you will use those when you choose to go to this level two the warn of Despair we also have the gal knocks Labyrinth then each one of these Adventure Packs also comes with some stuff that you can just mix into your other decks and then uh the final level two Adventure is the Throne of Embers and then we have our three level three adventures and those are the blackened burrow here the uh level three the crystal Caverns and then also we have a militia's refuge and finally with the iron chest expansion we got our final level four dungeon what that is the spider of zogar and you will be facing off against zogar as a boss then you have a whole bunch of cool new plots to face off against zogar and new powerful enemies so the campaign system is very cool it's very light it's quick you start with your base level dungeon level one dungeon in the bass box and then you progress you choose to go into whichever level two dungeon you want to go into and then you'll go into a level three dungeon and finally you will go into a level four dungeon I've only made it to level three one time one other quick thing that uh the iron chest expansion adds is this random encounter chart so as you are going in between a dungeon floors you will have an encounter with something on the random encounter chart and it just adds a little bit of spice to the game so if uh Jason Glover made a game that was Stripped Away of its theming completely I think you could call that game this or that and Press Your Luck because almost all of his games deal with that kind of choice you have a choice between two things and in between those choices there is a pressure luck element sometimes you have a choice between this or that or you can press your luck and those are all things that I greatly enjoy about this game and the base of that choice comes in and the the pressure look comes in this dungeon deck so this dungeon deck has 16 cards and there are going to be eight turns in a in a dungeon level and on each one of your turns you will draw two cards you will choose to flip one over then you can either do the top thing of that card or you can choose to do the bottom thing of the card that you don't know so do you choose the devil you know or the devil you don't know if you don't want to get involved in this Skirmish here then you would flip this card over and oh my God it is a skirmish but now you're having to do the level two skirmness which is much worse again so after you would deal with that you would go on to your next turn and you could choose okay let's look at this one first okay in Ambush so drawing the doing the number one Ambush is much greater much better for you than having to deal with the number two Ambush but let's say you were getting low on health or energy and you didn't want to face off against that Ambush you could press your luck and turn this over and oh a clearing okay so you pressed your luck and it turned out pretty well possibly but you might then have to draw a plot card and even some of the plot cards will have choices in dire need do you defend the pilgrim or keep moving on and so you have more choices here sometimes these plot cards will also have a choice where you can do this or that or you can roll the dice and leave it up to fate so again you have that this that or Press Your Luck and that element is just kind of what drives iron hell and I think it's what drives uh Jason as a as a game designer a lot of the items that you get will give you a choice of what to do or when to use it and it's very important to choose which thing you want to do when I had one um uh one item that allowed me to draw two loot cards every time I had a loot card I could look at them and then I could choose which one I wanted to uh to encounter which one I wanted to take so if you are looking for a Dungeon Crawl a light Dungeon Crawl that has good choices that I think ironhelm is a game for you if you kind of lament some of the bigger more crunchy dungeon crawls that are just kind of all about chucking Dice and you want something where you can make some informed decisions on how to approach things uh look into ironhelm and that leads me to topic number three and uh topic number three is kind of is is playing off of that that element of choice and in my original video for iron Helm I called it on no dungeons for Old Men or or women and uh the theming in this game not only do I love the theming but the theming is more informed by that uh that that focus on choice and the game's theme for those of you who don't know is you are playing as an old Adventurer so this is a game about old wisened old grizzled adventurers who are going on One Last Quest to get some gold so they can afford to retire and I think that theming fits really well with that element of choice and being wise about what your characters are doing uh knowing when to say no knowing when to press their no their luck knowing when to say yes because these are seasoned wisened these are Wise Old adventurers they are not going to rush into a dungeon willy-nilly you know these are not the Leroy Jenkins of the adventuring World these people they are thoughtful and so when you are faced with a choice it's very important to think about those choices and how the outcome of whichever dungeon room you choose to explore how that might have the possibility of impacting your old Adventurer and I love that marriage of theming and mechanisms I'm not sure if Jason was thinking of that while he was designing it I'm not sure if he thinking about how a wise old Adventurer may approach a dungeon in a different way and so he decided to use that kind of choice or pressure luck element but even if he wasn't it was probably in the back of his mind because I think he's a pretty intelligent game designer and this kind of marriage of theme of light theming and mechanisms is something that he does very very well and so I would I just really appreciated that marriage of theme and mechanism on this last play just kind of dawned on me like yeah these you know you want to avoid combat most of the time in this game however combat is also the way that you can upgrade your skills so again that is another choice but as an older Adventurer you probably don't want to face off against the fire troll but as an element of another of another Choice a lot of the powerful enemies will give you an option that you can spend one of your valuable resources to avoid that combat so again it's that element of choice now you didn't know that you might be facing off against the fire troll when you decided when you made that choice to face off against a skirmish so again that is adds a little bit of a pressure luck element even when you choose to do something there is always an element of the unknown in the game and that makes the game really exciting and fun now I do have one wish list and that has to do with the uh campaign rules there is a really handy little sheet that somebody put together on BGG that compiles all of the various rules and questions that you need to go from level one to level four to face off against zogar but one thing that I think would be super cool is if there was an Overland component here and I just drew this map really basic map of having the lonely troll in and so that's kind of you know where you uh go in between each adventure and uh it tells you what you can do in between each Adventure when you were at the lonely troll Inn and then you have your level one so you could go off to your level one and that's the base box Quest you come back to the level uh the the lonely troll in and then you can choose which level two uh adventure to go to you can go to the throne uh sorry my I scribbled this out really quickly so I can't really read my own handwriting I have terrible handwriting but you have your three level two Adventures that you could travel to you have your three uh level three Adventures that you could travel to and then finally you could travel to zogar's uh level four the final dungeon there and maybe if each one of these paths that you could travel had a small deck of eight or so Random encounter cards so you had a little bit of an Overland travel component to this game you could make this a a tri-fold board that fit within here kind of like the boards that were used in the uh the uh Fantasy Flight Silver Line games like Conde I think that board folded up would fit into this box and just have a really cool map that Jason could do the art for and have a neat little simple uh a simple Overland component to the game and again you would have that element of choice and each of the choices that you would make depending on which level two dungeon you wanted to go to or which level three dungeon you wanted to go to could give you a different outcome on which encounters you have and I think that would Elevate this game even more I think this would be an expansion that I would love to see so I don't know Jason make it or somebody make it uh hit me up maybe I can help I would I would dedicate some time to riding some Adventures or something for something like this but uh yeah I love Iron Helm now I liked the base game but with each expansion I added I loved the game more and I think it's a pretty fantastic game it gives a great sense of adventure it gives a great feeling of peril and of scraping by by the skin of your teeth as your old Adventurer is just trying to get some gold so they can retire and live out the rest of their lives in a quiet Solitude so all right you guys well I hope you enjoyed taking you another look at iron Helm today and we will talk to you later bye-bye

Channel: The Dungeon Dive

Views: 7,730

Keywords: dungeon crawl, dungeon dive, fantasy, gaming, science fiction, rolo rpg, solo gaming, board games, adventure games, table top RPGs, table top gaming, hobby gaming

Id: z-n_vz4gFRw

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023