It’s finally time to meet your competition!

Enemies come in a lot of different shapes, sizes, and abilities. Some of them will hit you hard, others will inflict status effect while others are just there to harass you.

What they all have in common is the way they interact with your party of heroes.

Let’s have a look at one of the enemies, the Serpent guard, and see what you need to do to beat them and advance for the final battle with the king.

Spawning enemies

After players select the desired base difficulty for their next room (1 to 3), it’s time to select the corresponding room tile and place all enemies.

On the above tile we will spawn 3 enemies for a 3-player game, 4 enemies for a 4-player game, and 5 enemies for a 5-player game.
The general rule is to spawn monster on all shapes whose number of sides is equal to or lower than the number of players.

Once you know which spaces to populate it’s time to reach into the bag and spawn some enemies.

Every enemy comes in 4 difficulties - easy, medium, hard, and boss. Their differences lie in the total amount of health points (HP) they start with, how many skills they have at their disposal and if they have any additional modifiers like bonus damage points (DP), increased basic range (BR), etc.

Let’s have a look at the enemy dice and then check out the enemy sheet of the Serpent guard.

Enemy dice

Enemy dice come in two flavors - regular and bosses dice. They have the same icons on them but are different in color. The (black) boss dice also has a movement icon on every sides as opposed to the (yellow) regular enemy dice, which has movement icons only on three sides.

Players will roll 3 regular dice for all enemies and 1 additional boss die if a boss is spawned.

Enemy placement

Once you randomly select your enemies from the bag you will get the corresponding enemy sheets and place them close for easy access. Enemy placement starts from the farthest spaces to the entry space and then moves closer. If there is a tie, players decide where put put the next enemy.

Enemy sheets

An enemy sheet has several sections so lets check them out one by one.

Keep in mind that this is still work in progress.

On the top you can see the name of the enemy, in this case the Serpent Guard. Right next to it you will find modifiers that will apply to this enemy for all strength levels. This can range from additional movement in every turn to dealt status effects every turn even if the enemy doesn’t attack. It will also list enemy immunity to certain status effects (the Serpent Guard, for example, will be immune to poison).

Now you have to determine the strength of your enemy. The current version will work with tokens in different colors. So once you pulled an enemy from the bag you place a small tracking cube on the lowest spot of the health tracker for the color of the pulled token.

For each DP dealt to the enemy, players move the cube one space up and once it leaves the top most space on the tracker, the enemy is considered dead.

Hard and boss enemies will deal additional damage (noted under the health tracker) to the ones displayed on the left side so keep that in mind while applying damage.

Each enemy wants to attack you. Each enemy sheet has attacks separated in 4 spaces labeled 0 to 4 in the bottom left corner. By adding the selected base level (L) and the enemy strength modifier (L+X) noted above the health tracker will give you all the available spaces for all enemies.

For example, in an easy (level 1) room with a medium (L+1) Serpent Guard, it would have all attacks from the 0, 1, and 2 sections available (1 + 1). This gives the Serpent Guard 5 different ways to attack you. On the other hand, a medium (level 2) room with a hard (L+2) Serpent Guard would give them all of the available attacks (2 + 2). Whenever the sum is greater then 3, all attack are available to that enemy.

To keep track of all available attack for each enemy players simply add another tracking cube of the same color as the enemy to the highest available level and everything above it is available as well.

Enemy attacks

For an enemy to attack, players roll 3 enemy dice. They then check for each enemy on the board if the rolled combination matches one of the available attacks.

If yes, they read from top to bottom of that space and apply damage and status effects. The top most damage count is applied for all rolls of that space while the status effects and additional damage points are applied to a specific roll under which the status effect is located.

Let’s check out some examples with the following setup.

We are playing a 3-hero level 1 room which means that we spawned 3 monster and all of them happened to be a Serpent Guard. 2 of them are of medium strength while the last one is hard.

Let’s place all cubes on the appropriate locations and start rolling those dice.

Since this is a level 1 game and we have two medium strength enemies we place the yellow cube on the space marked with the number 2 in the bottom left corner (again, base level 1 + medium strength modifier 1 = 2). We see that they have a total of 5 combinations available (2, 1, 0 space attacks). Now we go through the same process again and place a red cube on the space marked with the number 3 in the bottom left corner (1 + 2). This configuration enables the strongest Serpent Guard to have a total of 8 available combinations available. But don’t worry. There are still 2 combinations you can roll for the Serpent Guard to still miss.

Now it’s time to roll some dice!

We rolled two fighting symbols and a target symbol. After a quick check we see that this combination is in the space with the number 0 (weakest attacks). We apply damage starting from the strongest enemy to the weakest.

The red Serpent Guard hits for 1 DP plus one additional DP (marked under their health tracker as DP+1). This will inflict 2 damage points to one target while also poisoning it.

Now we have to check out the yellow Serpent Guards. Both of them hit for 1 DP each while also poisoning their targets.

Let’s roll again!

This time we rolled one fighting symbol, one target symbol, and one explosion symbol.

By checking the enemy sheet we see that this is a combination from the space with the number 3 and we start reading from top to bottom. We deal 4 DP plus one additional DP for this being the red Serpent Guard for a total of 5 DP. Additionally, the poison status effect is under the rolled combination so we apply this status effect as well. Have we rolled, for example, 3 explosion symbols, the enemy would have dealt 5 DP (4 + 1) and applied the stun status effect to it’s target which would prevent it from doing any actions for 2 rounds. The yellow Serpent Guards in this case both miss since they don’t have this ability available to them.

Having a boss opponent

In the case that a boss is spawned we would roll an additional black die and execute the two strongest attacks. We simply move from the bottom (number 3) space up and find the first two combinations that match 3 of the 4 rolled dice. In the case of a tie (two combinations matching in the same space), we would apply the right most attack.

Bosses by nature are an L+3 opponent which means that they always have all attack available regardless of which level you have selected.

Let’s roll once more, but this time for a boss.

We rolled the regular enemy dice like in our first roll so the remaining enemies behave the same (yellow 1 DP each and poison, red 2 DP and poison) but the boss would execute two completely different attacks.

They would execute the fighting-fighting-explosion combination for 6 DP (4 + 2 additional as a boss) and deal confusion. The other attack would be a fighting-target-explosion combination for another 6 DP and poison.

Bosses always attack 2 different targets in order to prevent one shot kills. Lucky for this boss, they have a BR+2 modifier on them as well which means they have an increased base range and can hit opponents farther away to help them find his second target.

A few more notes on enemy attacks

Players can roll a combination which enemies can execute but aren’t close enough to hit them. In this case the attack is a miss and play carries on normally.

The combinations for enemy attacks aren’t the same on all sheets so if one enemy misses there is a good chance that others won’t.

Enemy movement

When deciding whom to attack, enemies follow this checklist:

last hero to taunt them
last hero (or their beast/minion) to attack them
closest hero

Enemies will do the least amount of movement in order to execute their attacks. A enemy with a melee attack attack will get to a space adjacent to its target while an enemy with a ranged attack can stand anywhere from adjacent up to their base range plus any additional range modifiers.

Enemies always try to move in a straight line and will go over traps if this is the shortest path to attack so keep that in mind. Also, enemies can move through other enemies but have to end their movement on an empty space. If enemies can move but not enough to execute the attack, they will still move the full amount of movement symbols rolled.

If there ever is a tie between two targets, enemies will target the one with the lower HP value. If there is a tie after that as well, then the player going first after the round’s party leader (more on that in another update) will be targeted.

If there is still something ambiguous after going through the mentioned process, players decide on enemy movement.

One final note

In order to prevent players from seeing into the future. Enemy dice are rolled after all heroes have executed their abilities. Once all players are done, enemy (and the boss die if applicable) are rolled and resolved. This prevents players from moving into specific spaces or executing specific abilities since they know that the enemy might not catch them.

And that’s a wrap.

Next time we will start compiling general rules which will then evolve over time as we come up with edge cases and interesting twists during play testing.

Until then,
Never stop playing

Oct 24 Update #8 - Enemies