Tainted Grail Review - An "Epic" Disappointment

here we go again tainted Grail is one of those board games that made 350 million pounds on Kickstarter enough to fund the NHS for a whole year or at least dance what a bus told me once in my nightmares each packet received fine plastic things free bigger plastic things enough cards to build a life-size hospital and when it all gets a bit too much you can calm your anxiety down with an included book fine now you know how this goes publisher make some nice pretty miniatures put some adverts on Facebook Kickstarter previews rave about the epic scope and the multi-million dollar grassroots story perpetuates itself a great example of this is our recently reviewed Batman Gotham City chronicles a game with a good idea trapped somewhere under a bonnet of rules clutter excessive production and a drive to fulfill the visuals at the sacrifice of everything else I get the appeal of pretty miniatures I really do but as someone who had to back way too many of these Schmucks bothers to review on the channel I get the opposite feeling when I open one of these boxes as opposed to a normal board game instead of excitement elation and anticipation I just get anxiety because I'm afraid that it's going to be filled with like live bees yet here we are again so maybe finally one of these plasters or X's actually nails the landing maybe will pledge $200 and get a justified investment maybe just maybe this game it's great it's not but let's see if it even gets close Tainted Grail in the words of publisher awaken realms is a fantastic adventure set in a reimagining sorry set in a dark reimagining of a theory and legend and what they mean when they say that is that you'll put all around the giant map composed of carat size cards looking for adventure in places like Camelot except it's spelled with a k not a seed because it's cool like that that's cool spelled with AK a bad joke works better on paper each card that composes the map is the location your characters are a group of misfits and outcasts a ragtag group of human rags that is the last hope of Avalon a dying world that people were never meant to inhabit there were real heroes that set out to fix it except they failed and now it's down to you the sinew of this landscape Arminius gigantic statues that hold reality together boiled too long in neglect and a supernatural substance called weirdness each statue has a dial that at the start of each day takes down once the dial reaches zero the Munir goes dark any cards that are not in reach of one that still lit up immediately fade away into the weirdness but from the perspective of us players these places stop existing until we're alike the statue again what's happening to these places for people settlements animals traveling merchants and mystical beings will ask the veneers are dark that is part of table crowns children why are the mini is going dark how does the weirdness work what happened to the expedition of heroes that left before you who are the four dwellers and if there's a miniature one of them in the box does that mean I'll have to fight them why is Aerith a dead ringer for wheels from Daleks breaker none of these are questions with readily available answers they are tantalizing a mystery and the only way to find out more is to cannonball into Avalon headfirst apart from the wheels but that's just a coincidence or is each card you visit can be explored meaning you can either flip it or save yourself the bother go directly to this giant ohm find the appropriate section read a bit of narrative and make a choice of what to do in this totally made-up location of F Kabul you could for example visit the handsome village mayor oh you could attempt to recover the Almanac of eternity or you could pay Poochie the village dog I think we're gonna go for Poochie and of course Poochie is the law team in the Praxis in disguise and dead okay okay these locations are the chewy bits that make up this mystery Avalon is a whole continent but what each card brings is shrouded in the unknown you're even handed a map at the start of the game of the entire continent but with a fair warning that it's old and probably so you can sort of gain a direction or an idea of what to do when you're given a quest but you were never really certain not to mention that as a Kickstarter tainted Grail was a refreshing change from your typical blockbuster campaigns instead of scores and scores of miniatures you only get eight because that's all the game needs you can alternatively pledge for an extra box of monsters if you want miniatures but they are entirely unnecessary for the game to function and the majority of the stretch goals won't be shipping at the same time with the core box but many months later the emphasis is shifting from here look at this big box of stupid things to we're gonna really slow down and make sure that we're gonna deliver a well-thought-out thing when it's ready and I have all of the time in the world for this ethos and that's the magic but anyone who's ever played an open-world videogame for more than five or ten hours will tell you that magic wears off open-world board games with a 40-hour campaign or a pretty new territory so we came up with our own classification of what we think makes this a solid Santa I don't know why I said Santa it just sort of made sense in my head [Music] what works in our one isn't necessarily true for our ten or twenty a lot of these games focus on survival and the thing about survival is they can become a bit tedious let's see if it involves its mechanisms to accommodate this Tainted grail is broken up into 15 chapters each providing you with a quest so you have a reasonable direction destroyed towards rather than aimlessly bending around the continent investigating curious things like what's under that log since each Munir only allows you to access cars that directly surround its location you'll need to find resources such as food wealth and magic to get its jollies back in order once real it you'll be able to press on further the problem is that if you want to do anything you need to spend energy and just like in the real world you only allotted a certain amount a day you can push yourself further but then you have less the next day so it all kind of evens itself out in the end there's only so many logs you can look under before you go that's enough logs for me mom I'm going to bed the meat and gristle is exploring each location spending some energy and then diving into a big book of story to see what narrative string you can pull out yet to get to the next narrative string you'll have to find resources to light more minis along the way sometimes these things overlap and the string and the gristle become the same the narrative bit gives you the food you've been looking for which by the by you have to spend at least once a day lest you want to have less energy the next day so you can do less exploration and find less food to have less energy the next day maybe there's a village right for plundering and you have no morals sometimes you'll have to fend off a wild beast engaging with a game's combat system and I don't know if you heard but beasts are full of meat and gristle and sometimes you'll have to actively pursue these resources burning energy faster than a kerosene the answer is 10 10 hours is the threshold at which point survival starts feeling utterly tedious and becomes bothersome busy work that's just in the way of progressing through the narrative because the variables like health well food and magic are solely to do with survival all the game can do to impose a sense of threat is to take those resources away of course when survival becomes boring you can't help but feel that the game is constantly slowing you down 10 hours later you're still looking for a bore to kill just so you can load up on food before you set off and do other things until you run out of boar and once again go looking for a boar to kill so if a level doesn't bring any meaningful choices to survive is not a decision it's a necessity I think awaken realms knows this because a lot of the character progression is to do with mitigating this constant need for food energy or anything else as you accrue experience you'll get access to skill cards which permanently enhance your character with rules exceptions for example you could get a card that gives you more energy each day or a card that makes mineus cheaper to activate or a card that makes hunting more profitable but strangely as much as it allows you to drift away from that busy work system may be still politely staying friends on Facebook but never really texting or getting together for a coffee like a bad X or an overbearing parent it crashes back into your life demanding attention seed it into the game on events that will sort of check up on you if you're struggling they won't shower you with resources kind of like mechanical nepotism or if you're doing too well just just gently take all of this way and put it into a savings account because you're far too irresponsible the Cheka thing I just described doesn't just feel arbitrary which is bad enough but it's antithetical to the experience the game is trying to create it's so obvious what the game designers intentions are and in a narrative adventure that's bad because you don't want to see the frame work you don't want to be taken out of the adventure so often the game feels like you're not so much allowed to run free but you're having a guided tour of Avalon go see this don't do that now go to verse 7 now go to verse 21 now go to verse 11 now go to verse tainted grilled conceptually riffs on 7th continent a game we reviewed years ago it was the first game with a giant map composed out of cards full of narrative branches a mixture of choose-your-own-adventure and open world exploration and was groundbreaking an idea to us it was disappointing in execution 7th continent was filled to the brim with frustrating gotcha moments that would have made me quitted long before we actually did if it wasn't for us being board game reviewers nothing is more infuriating than an arbitrary decision between an effective left or right way if you choose left hey without any warning it'll kill you and destroy the progress that you've made over the last 20 hours of course you could say well just fudge it but that renders the entire affair meaningless once again when it comes to box ticking tainted grilled nails it and not just because the game system for remembering things literally involves ticking boxes but also because decisions will never lead you to outright death and then when it does this is a saving grace moment if you do die take a special box and just restart the chapter questions whether there's any reason in theming peril as damage to hit points aside there is a significant improvement over seven continent and a big step forward and now of course I tell you that after that comes a big step back imagine a passage filled with options I'm trying to keep it vague here to avoid spoilers but many options I don't six and you're like cool option a doesn't look very interesting cuz it's just your bog-standard have a rest here before you do anything else and that's fine option B vaguely looks like a plot point but not a particularly engaging one an option C looks cool but to do it all I have to have that killed a magical unicorn parts four and five complete ask the princess to eat a diseased Pelican part seven incomplete and also be Chapter eight cool I'm on chapter one and options de and F they equally locked off by things I know nothing about you initially this feels curious I mean I want to find out about this magical Reindeer killing plot knowing I'm excited for it to appear in the future I make a note in my notepad that if I return to F Cavill I'll get to engage further in the reindeer storyline you don't have no idea what it is yet the world feels full of possibilities location after location after the location I keep being told that if only I had some ticks on the magical Reindeer storyline I could do something here and while it starts getting a little bit old and I haven't even started that plot point and when I do yeah the reindeer thing magically sure and oh my god spoilers this system is actually telling me things about the game that I shouldn't know don't want to know but do know because I can't play without finding out about them I really don't want to know that there's something I can do at this location at the very end of the game I might not know what happens when I engage with it but that's still more than I'd like to know I think the game wants me to treat these as seeds for future plots to remember that there's something useful here and potentially make a note about it in the notebook so I explored my first location and made a note about three things in that one location and then another five things in the second location and then two more things in the third and after five hours of playing my notebook looked like this where you can clearly see that I've become Charlie Day so I'm just going to feels better already [Music] you're probably sensing a pattern by now I'll tell you how the game tackles the padding problem but then develops are the problems that it doesn't know how to tackle well you would be wrong because it just doesn't tackle it honestly most of its a 40-hour run time is due to the fact that the game is fully rife with meaningless twaddle that you're forced to constantly engage with to get anything done I wish one of these days there would be one of these forty our Kickstarter games that was twenty hours or maybe even ten it's fine just make every hour count first travel the map is of course designed in a way that makes certain spaces deliberately directly inaccessible you'll have to move in gigantic circles to reach areas that you guessed it are key locations for quests that on its own is forgivable and from a thematic standpoint makes sense travel is never easy or direct there's canyons rivers lakes and mountains and other nonsense and that's just when I leave my house in Nottingham imagine what it's like in a dark reimagining of England which these days is just England but spending a day's worth of energy and don't forget a day isn't just today it's a turn of a mini F da which means it's one step closer to needing to reactivate which means you need to bring it buckets of neat magic and money spending a day's worth of energy is not enough because most locations don't let you just calmly pass through them you have to fight let's touch on how combat works it's sort of all right each time you fight you're playing a matching puzzle if you're fighting something on your own you'll match cards on your own and if you're fighting with a friend you'll match some cards the enemy will attack back then your friend will match some cards the enemy will attack back again and so on sometimes you'll face diplomatic encounters which use a different deck but aside from shallow surface mechanical differences they are nearly identical to the fight e1 so we'll just gloss over them you'll start with three cards in your hand and you'll try to match symbols according to stance you actually possess to the enemy card and lay two other counts that you have played however subsequent cards require you to match at least one bonus card play symbol after you played all the cards you have or want the enemy will hit you back this is the really tricky part each enemy's attack depends entirely on how much damage you've dealt to it for example if you dealt it free damage it could really not you or if you dealt it quite damaged it could heal itself negating all of the progress or if you dealt it for damage it could run away robbing you of delicious delicious rewards sometimes it isn't about how much damage you can dish out but what dish do you serve first if you ever wanted a game that simulates the disastrous anxiety of being a contestant on Come Dine With Me this is it except every meal is made out of knives the problem isn't so much the combat system itself but how it integrates with the rest of the game if you're fighting by yourself your friends can go make themselves a cup of tea and if you are one of those friends and you run out of milk you're in luck because you'll easily have enough time to poke to the shops get yourself some more whilst your friend painfully tries to figure out turn after turn every possible combination of matching symbols over and over again an activity that matters very little to you aside from its actual outcome and thus location after location that triggering countess's you move along them stretch the narrative strands you've been hunting as thin as tokens in the original printing of castles of Burgundy and just in case you've not been fighting enough see that events will spawn Guardians enemies that are hard and like bad come down with me contestants won't leave until you defeat them sometimes you'll end up with multiple Guardians on the same location sometimes that location will be the one you need to visit for your current quest sometimes you'll just buckle up fight take damage each damage you take allure was the threshold of energy you were allowed per day meaning you can do less meaning days go by faster meaning minions need reactivation quicker meaning you need more resources and then more and more you gage with this the more the inescapable realization hits you this is just a slog [Music] here is where publisher awaken realms goes all out and hires an actual award-winning fantasy writer and it shows the world has sense and cohesion things like the winners are an underlying mystery that pushes you to turn page after page the subject of Ithorian legends is well researched invoking major minor and throwaway characters interwoven into this dark reimagining dark dark reimagining dark dark dark reimagining this is easily the most disappointing part because after setting up something that I thought was going to be unique and inventive all I got was a cheap Dark Souls knockoff where everything is dark or disturbing all dark and disturbing if I had a penny for every time I read a full boding adjective I would have liked an extra 100 quid in my pocket which would at least partly cover the cost of tainted Grail and if I had another penny for every overwrought analogy we would be quid pro quo get it cuz cuz of the hundred quid it's funny and I wouldn't mind it so much if I wasn't just constantly told that things are dark and disturbing but actually shown it instead time after time I seem to bounce into the exact same situation where I enter a new place and learned that things are dark and disturbing there's probably two sides at each other's throats I have to pick a side but they're all bad because times are hard and everyone's struggling now I will pick a side even though I don't know why and then I'll probably get some resources or maybe experience anything go to the next location after reading hours of this I felt like I was having a conversation with a drunken adolescent who is very passionately explaining nature and at 36 I just don't feel like I have the energy for that the gamification of narrative will often lead you to dead ends asking you to repeat the exploration action spending more energy over and over to once again inflate the length of the game I'd argue that a game that presents you with a choice should make it an actual choice rather than an arbitrary deterrent something that's become common practice in role-playing game design of course that side of the industry had decades to perfect their craft and this instead of putting the wind in my sails it just gave me wind from anxiety this game after all hangs on how good the story is and whilst it's incredibly competent at building a world in fleshing out the setting the plot is fredbear the payoffs are barely tangible and there's nary a memorable character in sight looking back at other games with storybooks even something like above and below where the story was just set dressing for a light euro game left a much stronger impression and if I told you that ultimately I found the story in ghent 7 more engaging so an utter failure on all accounts or so we would have you believe if you ask BoardGameGeek this game posts an astounding rating of 9.0 other critics have also lavished with praise commenting on the excellent comment system and grandiose scale storytelling so what's up has the entire world gone mad or are we just wrong no don't be ludicrous we are never wrong consider that tainted Grail is an entry in a genre of to where it simultaneously improves on the original and then presents its own problems imagine that Star Wars started with the prequels and ended after the second one this would basically be it it would be rubbish but it would be the only Star Wars we have ever had and that's something I understand why people want to like tainted Grail its vast beautiful convoluted and if you want to lose yourself in it well there's lots of it and honestly if you're one of those people you probably already have this and nothing we say can or should stop you from enjoying it but what it's worth the first ten hours of tainted Grill have been tantalizing engrossing and kept us wanting to poke prod and eventually swim through the game's mysteries the problem is that once we know then we discovered that we're in shallow water and as much as we want to swim through the waves all we're doing is making sand angel and after the pointless affair as we're getting nowhere and all our progress is just washed away would we knowingly recommend this to people I think I'd rather watch a montage of Jar Jar Binks on repeat if you want a dark fantasy adventure might we recommend the curse of strata adventure module for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition if you don't want to pro play but what the choose your own adventure why not get a copy of legacy of dragon hold and if you want a gigantic game with good dungeon crawling mechanisms maybe get yourself a copy of goo maven you deserve it tainted Grail will only serve you if you want this specific strange mesh of open-world exploration and choose your own adventure and even then we'd hesitate to recommend it because it's the end of the video and there's still a huge list of problems that we didn't have time to address so here's that list over some Bureau of me eating a very hot steak bake the rule book is not only convoluted but omits a lot of rules the structure makes it impossible to look things up and then this rules hidden in the story book it's one of the worst rule books since Batman Gotham City Chronicles and that's saying something both female playable characters are hyper sexualized say what you want but in a world where everything is miserable and nothing is sexy this feels like cheap pandering to plastic voyeurism and detracts from the theme there's a potential situation in the game that will make you replay the same chapter for no reason whatsoever you'll towards the end of the chapter you we're off a bid decide to explore you've done nothing wrong you haven't lost in any sense of the concept but then you just have to start over why because the game tells you to your frequently forced into situations that haven't been play tested they post questions that even the FAQ doesn't have answers for you have to make up your own rules to move on progress is often curbstone by a totally arbitrary role of a d vi I want to find out more about what happens in a narrative bit well you can't curse dice the time does perhaps the most cumbersome and annoying way of tracking States in any board game ever that's it I haven't finished my steak baked yet so you'll have to just watch me eat until I'm done there's nothing else happening in this video silence from now on I guess you can subscribe or something whilst you wait you really don't have to finish watching this you can see one of our other videos you can go donate this was hard work if you appreciated it donate that's really it now

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 117,607

Rating: 4.4581809 out of 5

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2019, tainted grail, awaken realms, the fall of avalon, open world, game, kickstarter, overview, preview

Id: CvP-Oui_duQ

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/verysmallbeta]

I don't know if their review has saved me from the upcoming pledge manager opening up or not, but I was really hyped to get this game and now i've simmered down a bit. I think i can easily get through the 10 hour mark, but if it becomes a slog of frustration and thumbing through rule books, I don't know if I'm interested.

[u/realxkillerbees]

I am surprised how often I disagree with their reviews. Shows though that even if a game is ranked high or low you could still try it out for yourself.

[u/Knot_I]

Full disclosure, I backed the kickstarter and have played 7 chapters solo (so somewhere around 10 hours). I personally really liked Tainted Grail, enough that it is the only game I've played multiple solo sessions. I really like the combat and diplomacy and the initial exploration.

I'm around the threshold NPI mention (10 hour mark) of when they criticize the survival mechanics. I actually disagree that it's the "survival" aspects that gets tedious, but instead I found the tedium coming from the "maze" type backtracking that occurs due to the menhirs. Since you have to light up menhirs to be able to open up certain paths, there were a few moments where I was traveling to a location just to light a menhir, in order to get to a menhir to light, in order to actually go to the place I wanted to go. I'm really glad I took notes and made little minimap for myself. Not sure if that's "against the spirit of the game", but I personally found it not just helpful, but part of the experience of discovering new locations and people.

Overall my experience (and maybe that will change once I get to the end) has been positive. I enjoyed the combat enough that I liked doing it over and over (especially since I rather like the upgrades). I found the narrative more engrossing compared to Gloomhaven (whether or not this is true, for now it does feel like the narrative divergences in Tainted Grail are greater than in Gloomhaven, so it makes me feel more inclined to start a new campaign just to experience "alternate paths").

To a certain extent, I agree with NPI's comment that this is basically the 2nd of two games in its "genre" (the other being 7th Continent), and thus it's not too hard to "stand out". I'm not sure I agree that this is the only thing going for it though, and something said in the review makes me wonder if it has more to do with how one views open-world games. Playing through games like Dark Souls, Code Vein, or grinding in Diablo, Torchlight, Monster Hunter, etc... repetition was only "padding" to me if the progression wasn't interesting. In the case of Tainted Grail, so far it seems that the "grind" works for me because I like the combat and leveling up the character continues to enhance the combat (although I wish there were character specific unique upgrade cards to help make character upgrading more unique in future playthroughs once more characters are released in expansions). However, if you "just want to get to point B", I totally understand feeling annoyed with constantly having "stuff in the way".

[u/TopBanana69]

I have to agree with them. Backed it all in and couldn’t wait. Got 10 hours in and sold it. Really enjoyed the combat but the exploration I found boring/frustrating. I’ve also never been into survival video games either so it was likely my own fault for thinking I’d like this one. I’m glad it’s doing so well and I’m hoping it’s tweaked and refined for the upcoming Etherfields.

[u/ggfunk]

It's weird, I agree with all of their points except one...I love this game. Granted we're only on chapter three but we are having a blast.

[u/Direktorin_Haas]

They highlighted quite well what would have put me off this: It just all seems a bit much for what you get out.

I'll stick to my 7th Continent (which I know they didn't like either, but which at least is a mechanically simple game where you get to focus on just a few things).

[u/ExiledNorin]

the dog was the real star of this video

[u/keithmasaru]

I have this game coming in the “single wave” shipment later this year. In a lot of ways I sort of wish I hadn’t backed it. I’m not sold on the mechanics and the grimdark setting is not my favorite.

But: I already knew where this review was heading when Efka spent so much time on the miniatures at the beginning. I like NPI quite a bit but I definitely take their reviews with a grain of salt. Like SUSD, they have a very idiosyncratic set of tastes that don’t translate 100% to reviews.

This truly isn’t a knock of them, just an acknowledgement of different strokes.

[u/Babetna]

While I usually love negative reviews of something I like (or may like) because they are often much more informative than gushing reviews which gloss over potential issues, I feel that NPI often have a habit of misrepresenting a game they didn't like to the point of spreading actual misinformation.

I first noticed this with AH LCG. I didn't agree with their review, but I put it aside because of the fact that they, after all, reviewed a single core experience, which is pretty much a barebones demo of what the actual game is and as such understandably a bit flawed. Then they reviewed 7th continent and convinced me NOT to buy that game... only for me to get it as a gift a year later and realize it was a great game and half of what NPI stated in their review is extremely misleading and sometimes objectively wrong (even in this video what Efka says at 11:07 is absolute nonsense). Now they crap all over Tainted Grail and I really don't know whether to take it at face value or just write it off as yet another game that got an unfair treatment merely for being what it is and not what NPI would want it to be.

I still like them and will continue watching, but I definitely think their opinions should be taken with a grain of salt (or a bag of salt for that matter), especially if your tastes differ from theirs.