Tales from Candlekeep - Released

HiddenX · October 12, 2017

The D&D RPG Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation is now available:

Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation

On the deadly peninsula of Chult, an adventuring party must fight their way through dangerous jungles, labyrinths and dungeons to find and reverse the cause of the death curse. Choose to play as one or more of the four adventurers to face many perilous challenges and deadly foes throughout the quest.

About This Game

Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation, a turn-based dungeon-crawling game based on the Dungeons & Dragons Adventure System board games.

Setting

On the deadly peninsula of Chult, an adventuring party must fight their way through dangerous jungles, labyrinths and dungeons to find and reverse the cause of the death curse. Choose to play as one or more of the four adventurers (Artus Cimber, Asharra, Birdsong, and Dragonbait) to face many perilous challenges and deadly foes throughout the quest.

Features

Unique Quests: The procedural map generation allows every quest to remain unique even when replaying them multiple times.

Over 40 Quests: The game features a mix of Main Story quests and Side quests.

A board game experience brought to life: The game highlights most of the features from the popular board game, combined with features unique to the digital version.

Craft your way to Victory: Collect rare crafting materials. Craft powerful weapons and armors to strengthen your heroes.

Details

End Acererak’s reign of terror and bring peace to the region of Chult.

Master your heroes' capabilities and hone new strategies.

Explore and fight your way through perilous dungeons and jungles.

Face hordes of monsters and terrible villains.

Craft powerful weapons, armor, and accessories.

Level up and unlock new possibilities.

Find chests filled with treasures and materials.

More information.

Saxon1974 · October 12, 2017

Cool, will give this a try. Like the board games but already own 3 of them and that gets costly and hard to store so I'll try the digital version.

NFLed · October 12, 2017

From what I'm reading on the Steam forum for this game, it does a good job of re-creating the full board game experience, with the exception that there is no multi-player at this time.

Saxon1974 · October 12, 2017

NFLed said:
From what I'm reading on the Steam forum for this game, it does a good job of re-creating the full board game experience, with the exception that there is no multi-player at this time.

Yes which is what I would expect as that's what it's intent was. The few negative reviews were complaints about the mechanics which are the board game not the digital game.

Darkheart · October 12, 2017

I would be interested in some impressions of you guys. How does it play? One critique on Steam was that there are "events" after each chars round that make the flow sluggy. Thoughts?

fadedc · October 12, 2017

Well I love digital board games, especially when they are co-op, so I may have to give this a try. I do usually prefer to play them on my Ipad though.

Saxon1974 · October 12, 2017

Darkheart said:
I would be interested in some impressions of you guys. How does it play? One critique on Steam was that there are "events" after each chars round that make the flow sluggy. Thoughts?

Yea it's based on the board game which hands you an encounter card each turn if you don't explore a new tile. It's the games way to keep you moving. Its usually something negative like a trap. Played a few minutes last night but appears well done. Looks quite good.

Saxon1974 · October 12, 2017

fadedc said:
Well I love digital board games, especially when they are co-op, so I may have to give this a try. I do usually prefer to play them on my Ipad though.

Yea surprised that it's not available on the tablets. Maybe soon?

beldurax · October 12, 2017

D&D 4E - ugh, I'll pass.

fadedc · October 12, 2017

Well the module it's based on is 5e. But it's a board game with it's own rule set, so it's not actually any edition of D&D.

Carnifex · October 12, 2017

Board game? You mean like not pen and paper role playing? Never heard of these, seems to me if someone wanted to play computer D&D they'd pick up the gold box games or Neverwinter ones.

SSIGuy · October 12, 2017

Hmmm... interested too even though I had a copy of Wrath of Ashardalon and it didn't stick in my collection. My gaming group liked it but it felt too fiddly to me... a digital version seems like the ideal scenario to remove those issues.

JDR13 · October 12, 2017

I was initially interested in checking this out, but I've read the game is very simplistic, and the four characters are pre-generated.

I guess we shouldn't expect much for that price though.

beldurax · October 12, 2017

fadedc said:
Well the module it's based on is 5e. But it's a board game with it's own rule set, so it's not actually any edition of D&D.

I stand corrected. Thank you for the info @fadedc;

fadedc · October 12, 2017

Carnifex said:
Board game? You mean like not pen and paper role playing? Never heard of these, seems to me if someone wanted to play computer D&D they'd pick up the gold box games or Neverwinter ones.

Yeah, it's a board game based on the P&P games, so heavy RPG elements, but not really a RPG. If your only looking for a CRPG then this isn't the game for you. But if your a modern board game lover it might be.

Hak'n'Slash · October 12, 2017

I've put 3 hr. in the game, so far, and I find it a lot of fun and quite addicting.
The game seems to be one of those "easy to play, hard to master" games. The rules are pretty simple, but the situations you find yourself in get gradually more complex as you progress. There are 3 difficulty levels. It is a procedural game; each hero has a a turn, followed by either an exploration event or an encounter event, followed by a villain (enemy) event. Then the next hero goes through the same set of events. The game is turn based, so you hit the Space Bar to move from one event to the next. It moves along pretty quickly and I find myself in some pretty tense moments, even this early in the game. The difference between exploration and encounter is that exploration is when a hero unlocks a new area of the game board. If he doesn't do that on his turn, an encounter triggers instead. In an encounter, the game tries to put a random condition on your party. Some people complain about this and this seems to be the source of most of the negative reviews on Steam. I find that the encounters add a lot to the game play; there's always an unexpected event to plan for and deal with. The game does give you ways to deal with the encounters, so you're not just blindsided. This is a port of a board game, so the characters are from the game and are pre-generated. You have some small control over skills, though. You start with one unlocked character slot and move up to four as you level. They unlock pretty quickly, by the time I had 2 hr. in the game I had all four slots unlocked. You choose quests from a map and there are main and side quests. Crafting is simple, but is also about 50% of the game. The rewards for leveling and completing missions are all crafting materials. Drops from monsters are gold and various items. Gold is only used for crafting, to improve your chance of a successful outcome. You can craft from common to legendary items. Maps are all randomly generated, so you can replay quests and have a different experience every time. The game runs smoothly at 2560 X 1440 on a GTX 780. I've only encountered one bug, so far; the game froze when a final boss spawned and I had to replay the quest.
Finally, the developers did a Twitch stream which is on YouTube where they play through the tutorial and the first quest. They did the same with the crafting system and they did a stream on strategies. Both are on YouTube. Besides that, there are several game play videos by other people, also on YouTube. So, you can easily see what the game is like. Here's the tutorial vid; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cqoy2o0X2c

JDR13 · October 12, 2017

Hak'n'Slash said:
Besides that, there are several game play videos by other people, also on YouTube. So, you can easily see what the game is like. Here's the tutorial vid; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cqoy2o0X2c

Didn't make me want to get the game, but that girl sure is cute.

Wisdom · October 12, 2017

Omg Hak.
Wall of text crits you for 50k.

Thanks for the write up, but please... paragraph to make it easier to read.

Hak'n'Slash · October 12, 2017

Wisdom said:
Omg Hak.
Wall of text crits you for 50k.

Thanks for the write up, but please… paragraph to make it easier to read.

Hak casts Wall of Text on Wisdom, Wisdom suffers Confusion for the next 3 turns!

Sorry, I'll pay more attention next time.

Wisdom · October 13, 2017

Hak'n'Slash said:
I've put 3 hr. in the game, so far, and I find it a lot of fun and quite addicting.

The game seems to be one of those "easy to play, hard to master" games. The rules are pretty simple, but the situations you find yourself in get gradually more complex as you progress.

There are 3 difficulty levels. It is a procedural game; each hero has a a turn, followed by either an exploration event or an encounter event, followed by a villain (enemy) event. Then the next hero goes through the same set of events. The game is turn based, so you hit the Space Bar to move from one event to the next. It moves along pretty quickly and I find myself in some pretty tense moments, even this early in the game.

The difference between exploration and encounter is that exploration is when a hero unlocks a new area of the game board. If he doesn't do that on his turn, an encounter triggers instead. In an encounter, the game tries to put a random condition on your party. Some people complain about this and this seems to be the source of most of the negative reviews on Steam. I find that the encounters add a lot to the game play; there's always an unexpected event to plan for and deal with.

The game does give you ways to deal with the encounters, so you're not just blindsided. This is a port of a board game, so the characters are from the game and are pre-generated. You have some small control over skills, though. You start with one unlocked character slot and move up to four as you level. They unlock pretty quickly, by the time I had 2 hr. in the game I had all four slots unlocked.

You choose quests from a map and there are main and side quests.

Crafting is simple, but is also about 50% of the game. The rewards for leveling and completing missions are all crafting materials. Drops from monsters are gold and various items. Gold is only used for crafting, to improve your chance of a successful outcome. You can craft from common to legendary items.

Maps are all randomly generated, so you can replay quests and have a different experience every time. The game runs smoothly at 2560 X 1440 on a GTX 780. I've only encountered one bug, so far; the game froze when a final boss spawned and I had to replay the quest.

Finally, the developers did a Twitch stream which is on YouTube where they play through the tutorial and the first quest. They did the same with the crafting system and they did a stream on strategies. Both are on YouTube. Besides that, there are several game play videos by other people, also on YouTube. So, you can easily see what the game is like. Here's the tutorial vid; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cqoy2o0X2c

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