Siege of Valeria Review - An Engine Destroying Game

hey there everybody I'm Mike delicio I'm Chris Yee today we're going to be taking a look at a solo only game that is set in the Valeria Universe solos of Valeria close Chris close very close Siege of Valeria and this is a kind of a tower defense Style game yeah I'd say so yeah but instead of giving you vague generalities let me give you slightly less vague generalities in this overview [Music] everyone [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] okay here we see Siege of Valeria set up this is a solo only game and if you want to get an idea on how to play the game all the way through you can check out a playthrough I did for this game in my delicio Factor show so that would show you a whole game but right now let me just give you a quick overview in the game what you are trying to do is defeat All Of The Siege engines the soul winning condition is to defeat All The Siege engines there are going to be 18 of them in the game they start with five on the battlefield and then there will be 13 more in that deck over there that's your only winning condition there are multiple loss conditions that I I can talk about as they come up you're going to be playing through seven rounds and all of those rounds have a step-by-step process that you can use your little player Aid card here to do but the first thing you're going to do is you're going to roll your dice so you start off with five of these strength die and two of these magic dice in your supply there are more that you can gain throughout the game through various card effects but you would just go ahead and roll these Dice and this is the pool that you're going to be starting with for this round these dice can get manipulated and changed in values through various effects throughout the game but that's going to be your starting roll the next thing you're going to do looking at your player Aid card here is you'll resolve the siege engines and this is going to go from left to right so if you look really quickly at one of these Siege engine cards they show the five rows in the battlefield and if they're in a black for that particular row it means that it's in inactive it's out of range and it's not going to take effect so for this particular ballista only if it's in the second row or the v stands for the Vanguard which is the front row closest to your Fortress board here they're not going to be firing off the other thing is that they're not typically going to be accessible to attack if they're not an active Siege engine so under most situations you can only attack this ballista if it was in the second row or the Vanguard row there are some exceptions I can talk about in a minute so you go from left to right the first one that would uh trigger off would be this flaming rain because you can see in the fifth row it is an active ballista or an active Siege engine so it says here discard One champion card and then flip another champion card well at the beginning of the game you don't have any Champion cards this is the deck there are spots for five of them one for each column in your player area so that doesn't affect anything and it's the same thing over here so in this case none of those Siege engines actually do anything to me in the first round that would obviously change as things go on the next thing you do is resolve an event here you've got a deck of event cards these are going to be different random things that that you have to deal with mostly negative some not so negative this tells you Fools Rush In that you add two strength tokens to the weakest of the red cards in the Vanguard so you take a look here the weakest of these cards this is gargoyle Talon normally it takes four string that's the weakest of these you would take two of these tokens and you'd place it on the card now it's a six strength card as I said not all of these are negative so for example this Shore up the walls remove all damage from one turret one of the Lost conditions is if any of these turrets have four damage tokens on them you can see they've got little spots for them that would be one of the Lost conditions so that other uh event would kind of help you out most of them are negative though then you're going to perform your actions this is the meat of the game what you're going to be doing is you're going to be spending these dice to defeat these troop cards in the array and when you defeat them they come to you so all of these cards have abilities you start with two in your hand so for example if I started with this auric Archer I could discard it to use its ability gain and roll one more strength die so sure that's a great thing I would take one and now for the rest of the game I've got an extra red die that I can use when you are defeating the cards the only cards that you are available to attack are what are considered front cards the ones that are closest to you that have nothing in front of them so the only front cards right now are these Vanguard row cards if I wanted to defeat this gargoyle Talon now at six I could spend this red die and I can place it right there the other thing I could do is I could use my magic dice to help supplement my strength dice you can never use a magic die to completely defeat a card so I couldn't use this six blue to defeat that five red I'd have to have this card out of the way to defeat it anyway but you have to use these in conjunction with the red dye so let's say I spent the six I got rid of these and I now have this ability in my hand the other thing is that when I defeat a card with these tokens I can immediately buff up one of my other dice that amount so I can take these two let's say I make this four into a six now all right now the other thing that happens is that this now becomes the front card of this column because there's no card in front of it so now this is a valid card for me to attack the main thing again that you're trying to do is defeat these Siege engines so right now the only two Siege engines that I'm able to attack would be these two flaming rain Siege engines because they are again active so I could 12 13 14 defeat this flaming rain and when you defeat a Siege engine not only does it help you get closer to winning the game but you get one of these Champion cards and they all are going to have abilities that you can use once per round or have a discard ability like this which tells you that you can only use it once and then you get rid of it and you can place it on any one of these turrets all right as you are gaining them and uh you know using them and flipping them over one thing you have to keep in mind is that if you ever have three damage tokens on one of these turrets you have to discard the uh Champion you don't have spot for it because it blocks it the other thing you could do is if you had damage on a turret that had a champion on it you could always discard a champion to remove one of the damage tokens in its column you can also always spend any dice you want doesn't matter the color or the value to get rid of a token anywhere on your Fortress board so once you've performed all your actions then you're going to activate the Vanguard any cards that are remaining in this front row are going to do a damage to the associated column so if I left all those that would have been very foolish I would have got a damage here here here and here then the next thing you're going to do is you're going to advance the battlefield any cards that uh have spots in front of them you're going to slide them down and then you're going to reinforce the battlefield you're going to add a new Siege engine to any row that doesn't excuse me any column that doesn't have one in the fifth spot you'll add four new cards from The Troop deck and then you will push down to fill up any spots you're going to do that seven times if you are able to defeat all 18 of The Siege engines you have won the game there are multiple loss conditions in the game the one way you would lose is if there is a Siege engine in the Vanguard and you have to activate the Vanguard you also lose as I mentioned previously if you have four damage tokens on any one of the turrets and you lose if you've gone through the seven rounds and you've not defeated all of the siege engines that is Siege of Valeria let's head back and let you know what we think all right well that is an overview of Siege of Valeria a a solo game do you want to just start off talking about the components first that seems like always a good place to start sure yeah I mean the the Valeria Universe I haven't played too many games okay in this world but I also feel like that doesn't really affect much because they're not very similar one to another no generally not they're not yeah but one of the things that I do like about them they have the nice wooden components that comes into play in this game uh fantastic artwork uh there's not a ton of stuff I don't have a lot of complaints because the cards are are great I like The Siege engines they're differentiable uh the information is is easily presentable yep I have one issue okay the uh the fold out board yeah on which you put the damage tokens yeah there is uh on on both creases there's a spot where you're supposed to put a damage done and it sits wonky is that game breaking no is it gonna lower my score no it's a mild annoyance it is and and it's it's something to bring up I you know again I think they went with a three-fold board to fit in this size box and I don't think and I'm not saying you would either I don't think I would trade a different folding board for a larger box but they could have done maybe like the puzzle piece type boards I've seen those are more in Vogue lately that probably would have alleviated some of that issue uh but yeah it's something to point out um I agree with you I think that the the component tree is good the card quality is good um and since there's a kind of as you saw in the overview a a relatively large splay of cards on the table it is important to be able to read what's on the cards clearly even if they're up in that fourth or fifth row and I never had a problem with that even with my uh I sight that is not as sharp as it used to be I have not found that to be a problem you know it's interesting you know you noted that you haven't played a lot of the Valeria games and you absolutely don't you know this could certainly be your first game in the series you're not really missing anything but if you have played other Valeria games one thing that is nice is that they've kept a consistent iconography throughout and so if you have played other games in the series you'll have a little bit of shorthand coming into this one the idea of strength and magic and Magic being used to kind of boost strength that's been toyed with in other designs in this line so I like that there are some continuities but you absolutely don't need to be aware of them yeah and I think that this is a game that it's nice it stands on its own I like the box size a lot actually because it's perfect right you have a you have a bunch of cards in there you have some dice a nice pool of dice that you start off with a certain amount and then you can kind of grow them over the course of the game right so you can feel stronger even as your Castle is taking more damage I mean I yeah I think that everything fits in here really nicely so I I like component wise I like art art wise yeah my goodness uh the mikko's is a fantastic artist and this Siege this idea of of monsters putting pressure on you really comes through in the art yeah the the whole thing presents itself very well yeah I agree yeah that the consistency that's the other consistency along this line is the the r from the micho and it it's always in my opinion fantastic let's talk a little bit about the the difficulty level of the game because that's something that I think is important to note in Solo only games you know what I mean uh getting that uh getting that balance right of it being difficult enough to be feel like you have a legitimate challenge every game but not so difficult that it feels soul-crushing and hopeless um how do you feel like it walks that line and again I want to actually not again this will be the first time I'm bringing this up there is a campaign addition you can get for this right like like an expansion we're not discussing that at all we're really only talking about the base game experience here so what are your thoughts on not only the level of difficulty but how it handles win loss conditions I think the first time you play this game you're gonna say yikes right right right right right uh because you just have to figure out what the synergies are and everything so it presents itself as fairly difficult out the gate which I think you should know going into it but I don't I don't fault it for that because you wouldn't want this to be a cakewalk no I appreciate that they have a slightly easier variant that they recommend for your first game don't use the event just leave the event cards out simple so simple yeah yeah nice easy way to scale it down just a bit and I think that's good you'll probably lose your first game still unless you're a you know big brain super smart person or you roll very well that helps too yeah a rolling well helps yeah but there's also lots of ways to mitigate things so it's I think it's more on you and there will be some luck obviously sure yeah it's not easy no it's definitely not easy I would agree with you and there's plenty of of dice manipulation in the game which I think is essential so you feel a sense of agency um but it's not also one of those designs where High Rolls are necessarily always better because of the mitigation because of the different powers that you get in the game which is also a very nice kind of uh design touch is that the the cards that you are quote unquote defeating then become powers that you can use and that's where the combo element of the game is going to come into is being able to get some cards that synergize well with each other letting you pull off some big epic feeling turns which is uh pretty satisfying um so the the way that you're able to use those dice I think give you a nice sense of agency now there is luck in the game anytime you're rolling dice anytime that you are drawing cards and placing them into an array you have to be aware of that and I will state that that if you end up with because you have a starting hand of two cards and if one of those two cards allows you to get one of the extra dice turn one it's gonna make your life easier it just is right and so you have to be aware of that that if you have a particularly strong game where everything is working for you or you have a particularly terrible game where you feel crushed you feel things we're crushing you know give it another chance you'll there are there's plenty of variability within the game you know one session doesn't necessarily always feel like the one before which is a positive yeah that's the type of thing don't you can't just judge us off the first play because of those different starting factors which uh which of the siege engines come out are they forcing you to re-roll every sixth thing you know yeah one six this round re-roll it yep yep yep those uh those Siege engines put a lot of pressure on you which is good as that's the point in the name of the game right right a couple of things I will mention uh you get the the champion cards I want to talk a little bit about the champion cards um they you get them every time that you defeat a Siege engine they give you a an ability it might be a one-time ability to discard it and then you get that ability or it might be a persistent ability you can use it once per round not yeah somewhat persistent you have to flip it over there are also other cards and Siege engines that can make you either lose those or flip them over so that you can't get their power um I felt they were quite situational um you know I they're not always as powerful as maybe I was I was hoping but that might be a design balance thing I don't know I'm sure it absolutely is yeah you said there's I have a champion yes right it's like a add one to a red dye yeah well if I beat up that monster I get a a you know I get a card ability that's way cooler than that right right my favorite Champions are actually the one-time use discarded and you get something huge you get you know extra magic for this round you get you know I like those ones a lot and I like that choice because this game is all about choice you defeat a monster you add it to your hand uh when do you spend it right when do you need to absolutely Crush in a turn yeah knowing that everything is more or less going to reset at the next turn do you you know do you um do you count all your no no do you spend all your money on one fancy phonograph now or do you kind of you know save them over different rounds right right um one thing I don't think we've talked about yet is the is the win loss condition yeah I kind of that's right I I kind of brought that up and then we never really went there so you know there's this kind of um running question within solo gaming which is how how do you want your win loss condition to be handled do you want to be a strict win-loss situation where you're playing maybe against an opponent and you have a point thing that you're trying to match up or do you have a beat your high score type of a thing this does a little bit of both it's kind of almost a hybrid type of a system and I've seen more and more solo games do that where there are very clear win and loss conditions right right you know the siege engines or that's your one way to win yeah to knock out all the siege engines um and there are multiple loss conditions you know you can have too many damage on a particular turret you can run out of time you can have one of the siege engines in the Vanguard line when it's time to activate your Vanguard line so multiple ways to lose one way to win however they go beyond that um and they give you a how well did you win or how poorly did you lose type of a thing and I kind of like that actually because it it allows you if you win you don't necessarily feel like okay well I've beaten this game I'm done right there there are levels of how well did you do and there are other things you can do to kind of to play with that and also you know the the first game that I played I lost but it was a I was close you know what I mean and I liked having that thing that told me a little even a little bit of a story text very little you know you're it's you're not reading a novel here but you know it gives you a little bit of a feeling of oh next time next time I'll get them I was able to escape you know that type of a thing right what are your thoughts on that no I love that right in fact uh in a lot of solo modes that have just like kind of this this chunk of different scores you can hit and you know good job kid nicely oh excellent yeah yeah what I would do in my own mind at least I used to just say like okay where's where's the above average cutoff point in my mind I drew an imaginary win loss line and I would kind of do that yeah yeah I'd say hey here's a great Victory awesome Victory right and I like that this game does that right out the gate it gives you clear win loss but also kind of Gray AIDS within that win or that loss and I think that's fun that makes it like you said more exciting to to table again right right well uh do you have any other big points you want to come at or do you want to go right with your final thoughts uh I'll go into my final thoughts here I I like this game a lot I can I can see myself definitely you know pulling this out and playing it I have plenty of solo games but something about the um ease of setup and just kind of the fun nature of Tower Defense I'm giving this one a 7.5 because I have a lot of fun with it a few gripes here and there right and some of them are you know my own personal taste I wish the Champions were a little beefier or something that's fine and kind of the swing of luck from one game to another I'm fine with all of that uh I think one of my issues is that I don't think I love the Valerius series Rule books I think that sometimes they uh leave some questions I definitely played my first game of this wrong yeah yeah you know absolutely and there's no question about that I feel like they could have been a little bit more clear um the rule book is very Stark yeah you know big white page lots of small black text in a funny font that's not enough to you know really really damage the score anything I I still recommend this I think that if if you're a solo player and you like uh Tower Defense things this is this is a lot of fun we're very close Chris I because honestly I think a lot of our positives and negatives mirror each other I'm coming in an eight so just write right on online there I will uh co-sign your your issues with the rule book um it's not necessarily that there's anything missing out of the rule book I think maybe some of the organization and their points of emphasis could have been more uh focused because there there are some small little details that are easy to miss and they can relatively strongly impact uh your game I so that's another reason why if you have a you know a first play that seems a little bit off maybe go back through the rule book again and make sure you might be like oh that's something I missed you know because there are some little things you can miss the basic flow of the game is relatively straightforward and and makes sense but there are some nuances in there so I'll co-sign that but it does a lot of things very well it you you mentioned the the setup and tear down that even though you've got a lot of cards out there it's a it's a very quick the the ratio of that to the gameplay is very good there's a nice level of agency in the game although there's gonna be luck you have to be aware of that but I when I lose the game I most often feel it's because I tried for something or I I was was maybe keeping my wasn't keeping my eyes on the prize you know remembering you only win the game when you knock out the siege engines that's the only way to win and if you know there's 13 of them and seven turns your brain's telling you I've got to get at least two around and sometimes you get lost in the weeds you really want that car and you're like oh that's gonna give me a great power but you know that type of thing I think most often when I lose it's because I probably didn't make the best decision so um plays in a good amount of time looks good satisfying solo experience so for me that's an eight all right well that is Siege of Valeria until next next time I'm Mike delisio I'm Chris Yee have fun um storming the castle I get you know I always come back to storm in the yeah let's just stay with storm in the castle [Music] [Applause]

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 16,610

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Id: v1U1J03wGc0

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 05 2022