On Memorial Day this year my mother-in-law hosted a cookout at her home and invited family and friends. I attended along with my child, my brother-in-law was there (he and my mother-in-law live together), and a couple he is friends with came to the cookout and brought their children. Now this friend of the family – we’ll call him Mark for the sake of his anonymity – often brings to our cookouts and various family get-togethers one or more board games for folks to play. So as the meal wrapped up and the younger kids all started to play and run about, Mark, my brother-in-law, one of Mark’s two kids, and myself all sat down for some board gaming. So it was that I had my first (and second) encounters with a fantasy board game called Stormvault.
The premise of Stormvault is as follows: two to five players play as a group of heroes who are trying to unlock the mystical Stormvault. To do so, they have to gather three gate shards and deliver them to the keep where the Stormvault lies. The problem? The gate shards are scattered across six realms, and the warlords of four great chaos factions are pursuing the heroes. The heroes must use their wits and their unique abilities to overcome the chaos factions, keep them from growing out of control, and survive long enough to seek out the gate shards and bring them to the keep. It’s a cooperative game where the players act together to try and overcome the game itself.
A look at the Stormvault board all set up
The game has a relatively straightforward setup, especially compared to other board games I have played of a similar scale. There’s a single board with the six realms and all of their various locations displayed, as well as the paths that connect them. Along the outer edge of the board, all of the location names are listed – each of these slots has a card placed beneath it face down. Every realm has a specific location where the chaos warlords spawn, and at the beginning of the game each of these slots is filled with a warlord, who then moves a certain number of spaces based on a roll of the dice. Each player chooses one of the six player characters and places them at Azyr, the starting location for players. A deck of chaos cards is shuffled and placed on the board, and a token is placed on a tracker also located on the board to keep up with the party’s lives. The board is large and requires a decent amount of table space, especially because of the cards beneath the edges, but otherwise the setup for this game is pretty tame. It definitely isn’t time consuming, especially when you have multiple players who know what they are doing.
I’ll take a brief moment to discuss the components. Stormvault’s pieces aren’t necessarily anything to write home about. The four chaos factions each have one warlord design and these are primarily distinguished by color; the little tokens representing them are so small and only show the warlord’s face, so there’s not much to pull from in terms of evoking anything compelling about the chaos factions. The player miniatures are much larger but they have their own problems. The character designs have a lot of overlap – they’re all big armored dudes with a pair of weapons. The miniatures are all the same color of deep blue; the design similarities and the lack of color variation makes it difficult to tell them apart. I had to remember, for example, that my guy Bran Surebolt was the guy with both the axe and the crossbow, but I regularly mixed mine up with someone else who also had a crossbow but whose weapon was a sword instead. The board looks a lot better with unique art for each location and with clear visual distinctions between realms. And the card art is solid, if a bit generic. The whole thing is clearly inspired by Norse mythology but not in a way that helps to give it a unique identity. If there’s a broader Stormvault property this game is based on, the components didn’t do anything to convince me I should be interested in it.
In terms of structure, the game is turn-based and broken down into a series of clear steps that take place each turn. The three phases are the storm strike phase, the chaos phase, and the hero action phase. Storm strike only happens when your character is in Azyr, the starting location, which of course happens at the beginning of the game but also when you die or if you have a card that lets you go there willingly. During this phase, you can place your hero on any of the storm strike locations spread across the board. You also roll your quest dice – a standard six-sided die – to determine the number of quest actions you can take during your turn. Next is the chaos phase, where you draw a card that describes how the enemies move during your turn. Typically chaos cards add a warlord to a particular realm on the board and then cause warlords to move, usually either within the realm that got a new warlord or all warlords of a particular faction. If this movement causes anyone to initiate combat, that combat is resolved and then the hero gets to take their turn (assuming they lived, of course).
These are the four heroes we used during our game; they’re not particularly distinct visually
On the hero action phase, the player can move their hero a number of spaces equal to the quest points they rolled on the die. Quest points can also be spent to initiate combat with a warlord sharing the space with the hero, although if the hero moves into a warlord’s space then combat happens automatically. Once the hero stops moving they can explore the location where they land, which allows them to pull the quest card at the edge of the board next to that location’s name. Most quest cards are useful one-off effects that the hero can use on a future turn to do something like move farther or move in a different way than normal, automatically win a combat or gain a combat advantage, or some kind of defensive maneuver such as preventing a death. Some quest cards, though, are gate shards, the MacGuffin that the players need to escort across the board in order to win the game. After the hero action phase is over, play passes to the next clockwise player and the phases begin again.
Depending on the hero you choose you have a special ability that gives you an advantage during play. Four of the heroes specialize in defeating warlords, one for each chaos faction in the game. These heroes can, as a free action, defeat one warlord of their specialized type per turn without actually going through the combat rolls. Combat in this game is dangerous, so this is useful feature. Another hero has the ability to better manage the chaos deck, drawing two cards instead of one and then choosing which one they want to resolve. This allows one player to make sure that the lesser of two evils is playing out when chaos happens. Finally, there’s the hero I chose to use, Bran Surebolt. Bran can pull the quest card from an unoccupied location without ending his turn, allowing him to explore and then continue moving to a different location. This gives him extra mobility and allows him to still collect quest cards without having to roll just the right amount to land on the locations he is angling to explore. He isn’t great at combat but functions as an effective scout, which is a role I tend to play well in these sorts of games.
Combat in Stormvault is deadly and heavily based on the luck of your dice. The combat dice is a six-sided dice with three hits, two blanks, and a miss. On a hit, you win; on a miss, the enemy wins and you die, costing your team one of their limited number of lives. For you math fans out there, that’s a 50% chance of winning and a 17% chance of dying. What complicates that even further is that each chaos faction has its own frustrating abilities to navigate. One faction turns your blanks into misses, increasing your likelihood of death to 50%. Another needs two hits in order to be defeated, requiring you to land two 50% chances in a row in order to clear that warlord off the board. The third faction has extra movement and prevents your own movement when you fail to defeat them. The final faction prevents quest card use when you share a space with them and forces you to discard a quest card when you roll a blank, giving you a 33% chance of losing one of your bonuses. Because combat is so dangerous and consequential, the heroes who can auto-defeat warlords once per turn are particularly useful to have around. When a hero manages to win, they get a hero point that can be saved up to purchase discarded quest cards.
These cards and tokens represent the game’s four chaos factions
That’s the game in a nutshell. Each player takes turns maneuvering around the board to explore locations for quest cards and trying to manage enemy positioning and numbers. If any one faction reaches seven warlords, that loses the game for the players, so while combat is dangerous it is also a necessary evil in order to keep that losing condition from coming into play. Quest cards that don’t turn out to be the game-winning gate shards still serve as useful tools for enhancing maneuverability or combat potential. Smart management of your movement around the board and use of your hero’s abilities can turn the tide, but a lot of the players’ success or failure is dependent on the fickle dice. Our first game ended unceremoniously and quickly because poor Mark rolled misses on basically every combat roll he ever tried. The rest of us all died once as well, but as an experienced tabletop player I can empathize with the frustration that comes from consistently rolling badly during the course of an entire play session.
Our second game went much better. Mark’s son was able to lock in a gate shard early – he found it on his very first turn and it was located next to the location where it was meant to be dropped off. I then managed to find not one but two other gate shards on the opposite corner of the board. This meant that we had a guaranteed win as long as I could make it to the other side, but we had a problem – the other players were all about as far away from me as they could be. The strategy we ultimately employed was for me to play evasively while they focused on maneuvering towards me and keeping the board clear of monsters. I was able to use my movement ability to go in circles while collecting quest cards and avoid encounters, and after a few rounds of this sort of movement I drew the right combination of quest cards to secure the game. One card allowed me to warp to Azyr while maintaining my gate shards; the other allowed me to storm strike to any location, not just the specified storm strike locations on the board. This allowed me to warp directly to the space next to the game winning location and then walk there with any value of dice roll at all, securing the game. It was a fun conclusion and a satisfying payoff for the character choice I had made.
Overall I would say Stormvault was a decent game. The components are nothing to write home about but the gameplay is solid and uncomplicated – once you know the basics of the phase progression and how combat works, you can move things along pretty quickly. The RNG of the combat is dangerous but the tools the game gives you to manage that RNG are satisfying to pull off, and the various quest cards open up opportunities for interesting ability combinations that can set up an exciting 11th hour victory. We didn’t have this happen during our playthrough but I can imagine that a session where the players have a hard time finding the gate shards would potentially get boring or frustrating – as far as I saw, there were no tools to make locating them easier. So I could see that as being another flavor of RNG that could really impact your experience with the game. It’s a solid beer and pretzels type fantasy game though, and I would say that I recommend it if you’re looking for something relatively easy to set up and play at a gathering.