In this city that he has made into the pride of Kaan, the Ilkral has eyes and ears at every corner. He is a beloved ruler, but there is an ambition in him that will not rest until all of Kaan has bent the knee. I fear he will burn our homeland to ash and scatter it on the winds if it stands in his way.
Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan is a mythical action-adventure cooperative campaign full of surprising twists with a sprawling story and intense fights played in episodes of under an hour.
The game offers an accessible, RPG-like board game experience for 1 to 4 players. Meaningful narrative choices and action-packed combat scenes are the heart of the game. You will take on the role of a hero and backflip, double-slash and charge your way to victory! The app-driven story lets you navigate your way through a city full of intrigue and your choices will ultimately determine the fate of the empire.
Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan is an action adventure for newcomers and expert players alike. This app-driven game immerses you into a rich and involved fantasy RPG world without the need for a gamemaster, while also tackling the considerable learning curve of many dungeon crawlers.
The length of each game session is flexible. You can comfortably play through a single combat and several story scenes in 1 hour, or spend the whole evening with your friends immersed in a thrilling adventure.
After completing a carefully curated tutorial to ease you into the campaign, you will meet increasingly challenging situations and surprising encounters where you’ll have to combine the full potential of your hero’s abilities to succeed. The story adapts to the outcome of each combat, leading you down different paths of its sprawling branches, offering a unique experience with each playthrough.
The game consists of three types of scenes. During Story Scenes, you will proceed through the narrative of the adventure, exploring Easafir and its surroundings, interacting with characters and factions who remember your words and actions, and testing your abilities in challenges you encounter. Throughout the story, you will make choices that the world remembers and reacts to. There are multiple paths through this adventure that are shaped both by the outcome of story choices and tests, in addition to the objectives that you complete in the Combat Scenes. Many of the choices you make in the story, as well as your actions in Combat Scenes will have lasting consequences – at times minor, others major – that will cause the story to branch and, in some cases, affect the final outcome of the story. Your party will collect story cards as a record of your adventure; this will form your story deck. When the app instructs you to, take the required card from the unlock box and add it to your deck. Save the story deck after every play session. In Map Exploration sequences you will need to find your way around Easafir by navigating its streets. The app will display a hint that will help you find the target destination and any pertinent hints to reach it as well as a description of where the party is currently standing
Combat Scenes are the action-packed heart of the game. The game will regularly zoom into scenes where you will try to complete a number of objectives in just a few rounds, all while being pitted against a variety of enemies. Combat is done through a set of dice, each one representing an action that will be modified through a set of combo-able skills. You will need to collaborate with the rest of your party and each use your hero’s abilities to their full potential. But that’s not all! You also need to avoid as much damage as possible, as you will only recover a small amount of health after each Combat Scene. Also, make sure to stock up on food and/or health potions as you will only be able to heal once every two or three combats! Note that in most Combat Scenes the game will progress even if you fail the combat. The outcome might not be ideal for your heroes, but the game will progress nevertheless. Sometimes you will have to make tough choices as to what to prioritize in a Combat Scene. Every time you successfully complete a Combat Scene in the main story (not Side Quests) you gain a victory point. When you accumulate a certain number of victory points, you will be awarded a choice of two rewards in the app.
Finally, Rest Scenes will allow you to heal, buy equipment, and learn new skills by visiting locations in and around Easafir. Each Rest Scene is allotted a different amount of time for you to spend as you like. While your health does not reset, energy can be recovered for free in Rest Scenes. Health costs 1 gold per 2 to heal and will therefore use up valuable gold that could otherwise go towards improving your hero’s skills and items, which are crucial to facing increasingly harder Combat Scenes. As the campaign progresses, and depending on who you talk to and which locations you visit, you will unlock new Side Quests and rest locations that allow you to develop your hero in different ways.. Each Side Quest will have a threat level from 1 to 4, indicating how dangerous it will be for the heroes to attempt it; this is shown as a row of skulls on the bottom of the Side Quest’s card. Most Side Quests are removed after 2 or 3 Rest Scenes so make sure to prioritise the ones you want to follow!
During your journey, the app guides you like a true gamemaster. It remembers and reacts to your choices, often when you least expect it to. It also handles all the admin, tells the story and sets the atmosphere, so you can focus on the gameplay and be the hero in your adventure. The game makes it easy to save your progress both in the app and through the physical components. To save your session, take all of your hero’s purchased skills, current items, Corruption cards as well as the available tokens from your hero board (health, energy and special tokens) and place them in the provided ziplock bag. Then place this bag along with the exhausted tokens on your hero board (health, energy and special tokens), and all remaining unpurchased skills into the hero box. In the party box, store the party’s shared components like gems and your story deck. The app will save your progress automatically upon closing. Once the app is relaunched, it will provide you with the option to resume one of your previous campaigns or start a new one.
You may restart an Act at any time outside a Combat Scene by clicking the appropriate option in the Settings menu of the app. The app will remember the story choices and combat outcomes that were in place at the start of the current Act. You may change the player count and swap heroes, allowing new players to join the campaign or current players to leave it. At any time outside of a Combat Scene, you may swap an active hero for a new one. Unlike changing player counts, this feature does not require restarting an Act. You should only use this feature if a player in your group has been replaced and the new player would like to control a different hero. The new hero will be able to buy a number of skills equal in gold value to the sum of the skills of the hero leaving the campaign. The new hero also retains the Corruption cards and traits of the hero leaving.
Finally, For those that yearn for the sound of clashing blades and would rather skip bard tales of high adventure, Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan offers an alternate, standalone, single-session Battle Mode. Battle Mode consists of a number of questlines of varying difficulty levels. Each questline takes 2 to 3 hours to complete and is made up of a number of Combat Scenes, punctuated by Rest Scenes. Combat Scenes in Battle Mode are more challenging versions of those in the campaign, with changes to their thematic elements in order to avoid spoilers. If you complete all the primary objectives of all the Combat Scenes in a questline, you win it and are awarded a rating – Copper, Silver, or Gold – depending on how well you did. If the whole party gets KO’d in any one Combat Scene, you lose the whole questline.
My thoughts on the game
Fateforge is a game that I have been interested in for about three years now, seeing it develop further each time that I visit a Mighty Boards booth at a game show. While it is a sprawling campaign, it was also sold to me as a game that could be played in bitesize pieces – either a segmented campaign played in one to two hour bites OR as a singular experience in Battle Mode. So, while this sort of game isn’t normally my thing (I have a really hard time finishing long campaigns), the fact that this is playable in manageable chunks made it appealing to me.
While we’ve only scratched the surface of the game, I definitely like what I see – I’ve played through the first full chapter of the game as well as a couple of solo Battle Mode games. The rules are surprisingly intuitive to learn, and the first combat scene walkthrough in the app is a huge help to getting started. The game also is super easy to put away and get back out; and the app never loses track of where you are in your campaign. There are also really flexible rules on changing characters in and out, so even if you have a somewhat rotating cast of players, you can swap roles with ease. This really makes it really nice for groups that are trying to play this piecemeal.
The app is mostly well done; though I would warn you that there is a fair bit of reading to be done on the app. It automatically saves your progress, so that is one less thing to worry about. It does a fairly decent job of shepherding you though the steps of the game, but man, I really wish there was a BACK button. As you go through the different phases of the turn sequence, once you click off a screen, there is no way to go back! If you fat finger something or forget to do something, the app doesn’t care – it’s already on to the next step and there is nothing you can do about it. Once you know the flow of the game, it’s not a big deal, but in your first game or two when you’re still learning how everything works; it would be nice to have the ability to go back.
Other than that quirk, it’s nice to have the app take care of all the housekeeping and paperwork. At the end of the scenario, it’ll make sure that you’ve met all the objectives so that you know if you were successful or not.
The game is a nice gateway into the campaign game world. The individual fights are in digestible chunks, and you can come and go with ease. The fight scenes are well done, and they definitely require good planning and teamwork for success. Trying to get the right hero in the right place (and then have the right roll). You’ll definitely have to try to use the special abilities of each of the characters to win. I like the way that this game isn’t dependent on the die roll. Unlike many games of this genre, you roll the dice first! So, all the players can see what their results are (and what actions they can take), and then the group works together to accomplish their goals. For me, it’s a much better feeling than getting into the right position and then rolling the dice to see if luck favors you with a successful result.
It’s easy to see what you are fighting with the enemy cards set out for each fight and the nice supply of enemy discs. Admittedly, the setup time for each fight could feel a bit long (in our first games, as much as ten minutes) as you find the dungeon tile pieces, the enemy character cards, the enemy discs, and then set everything in the appropriate places, etc. However, once you got through that, the battle itself is enthralling, and you end up immersed in the action.
Component wise, we did have some issues with the miniatures. While the sculpting is great – as I’m not a miniatures guy – I have a super huge problem trying to identify the figures on sight. I just don’t have that skill. The main characters are all plain grey, and I had to keep looking at them to figure out who I was. We fixed the issue by putting colored stickers on the bases of the pieces, and that was a solution that worked for me.
You also have some interesting map exploration segues which is a bit more puzzle solving and observational than the fights. The map is big enough for everyone to see it, but some of the details are harder to see on the far edge of the map. The team will have to work together on this for sure (or just give the map to a single person to hold). The first few explorations were fun, though it admittedly gets a bit repetitive. It feels a little bit like the classic Bard’s Tale where you take a single step and then the app tells you what you see. Repeat on and on (sometimes 15 to 20 steps) to reach your destination.
That being said, the story definitely grows out of these episodes, so you have to pay attention to the choices you make while exploring the city. The world-building that we’ve seen so far looks to be deep and complex; though admittedly I’m only about half way through the game so far. Some of my fellow players (who were only listening to me read the passages on the app) did complain that there were A LOT of weird names, places, new words to learn, and it was hard to track them all only from listening to my butchered pronunciation of them.
In the end, I have enjoyed my time with Fateforge. Admittedly, this wasn’t going to be my sort of game. I knew that going in, and in fact I had a nice discussion with the Mighty Boards press rep about it when I accepted the game at Spiel 2024. Having dipped my toes in with a few sessions, it’s definitely a nice introduction to the campaign game/lifestyle. I had no problems with the rules and setup, and our game sessions have gone off with very few hitches – mostly thanks to the app which takes care of a lot of the busywork. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll finish out the full campaign here, but I do think that the Battle Mode will see some return trips to the table. I like the way that you can set up a 60-120 minute fight scene, have a bit of character development each time (so that the fights are always different), and then pack it up until the next time. From the Euro-gamer standpoint where I usually sit, this is great fun.
The game has been quite successful as it appears that the company is preparing a second printing which will include an expansion. The campaign is currently live now – so you can check it out!
Kickstarter link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyboards/fateforge-chronicles-of-kaan-second-print-and-new-expansion
Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers
I love it!
I like it. Dale (Battle Mode)
Neutral. Dale (campaign)
Not for me…
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