Product– Lost Legends
Producer– Queen Games
Price– ~$50 here http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Games-QUG61063-Legends-Board/dp/B00EFKA14G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416372470&sr=8-1&keywords=lost+legends
Set-up/Play/Clean-up-2 hours (3 to 5 players)
TL; DR– Lot’s of little errors really hurt this game. 70%
Basics- Want to be the hero? In Lost Legends, players take the roles of different heroes as they try to kill the most impressive monsters. The game is roughly divided into two phases: equipping your character and killing monsters. When you equip you character, you take a hand of cards and select one card. You can use that card in one of three ways: equipment, money, or skills. You can discard the card to gain money to buy other equipment. You can turn the card upside down and place it under you player mat with the bottom part showing to gain some skill to equip and attack with new items. And finally, you can pay the card’s cost in money, and place it on one of the four areas next to your player mat. The equipment range from swords and wands to spells or armor. You then pass the remaining cards to the next player as you receive a new hand of cards from a different player. Play continues this way until you have two cards. You select one of the remaining cards and discard the other to the center discard pile. After the equipment phase, players then take turns fighting monsters. Monsters are damage by your equipment. Some cards do damage, then do damage based on the number of skill icons you have, and can do extra damage by exhausting the card. Exhausted cards cannot be used again until the equipment phase. If you kill your monster, you take the card and turn it upside down and place it under your player mat with the bottom icon showing. You gain points based on the monster icons you have killed with extra points ranging from getting four different monsters to three monsters of the same kind. Also players compete to see who’s killed more of a particular type of monster. The first player to get the extra points for a specific goal gets extra points with the last player getting the least. In addition, you also gain experience which allows you to get extra money, health, or mana. If you don’t finish the monster, it damages you, and the next player fights his/her monster. Monsters can kill of players, so planning how you fight the monster is important. If you start your turn and don’t have a monster, you can take the current face up monster next to the monster deck or take a randomly drawn monster from the monster deck. When there are no monsters, the round ends after everyone has one more turn. The game goes through two more cycles of equipment and monster fighting. The player at the end of the game with the most points wins.
Mechanics-The mechanics of this game are pretty simple. You draft for a few cards, and then you fight the monster in front of you. No monster? Draw a new one. When the monsters are all gone, you repeat till three rounds pass. That’s not bad, but the random nature of the monsters really hurt this game. You have the drafting mechanics for the items, but the monsters just end up either killing you or being a cake walk, and that has everything to do with the random draw. It makes the draft work against the second part of the games randomness. 4/5
Theme-This game has some great art, but beyond that, there isn’t really a theme. All the items are cool, and they give the world a feel. However, the rule book has less than a paragraph of story. I had fun, but I didn’t feel like I was really in a different world fighting monsters. 3/5
Instructions-These rules are confusing! The rules have out and out misprints leading to some problems, but beyond that the examples have extra information that major rules don’t, the flow is hard if not impossible to follow, and cards don’t really make sense when you look at them critically. If you have the rules, board game geek’s forums, and some understanding friends, you can get through this game and have fun. But, don’t expect your first play through to be an easy one by any means if you only have these rules to go by! 2.5/5
Execution– I didn’t hate what comes in the box. The parts and markers are reasonably well done, if a little small. What will CONSTANTLY annoy you is having to pick up your player mat to play more skills and monster cards. It’s extremely hard to do without any nails. I would have really liked a chunkier cardboard player mat, so I could pick it up! 4.5/5
Summary– I had fun playing this game, but don’t think it I’ll get this one to the table soon. It’s a drafting game where half the game is random. It’s a game where you might be equally able to play without the rules as with them. It’s a game that I reasonably enjoyed, but couldn’t play some of my cards as I don’t have long finger nails. If you want to play Seven Wonders but want a DnD theme on it, this isn’t a bad game. If you want a drafting game outright, you may be better with Seven Wonders or Among the Stars. 70%
Throat Punch Games 