Battle for Greyport

Harbor Heros

Coming back from a hard day of adventuring, the heroes return to town intending to hang out at their favorite place: The Red Dragon Inn. Instead, they find the city of Greyport under attack!

Based on the Red Dragon Inn characters and setting, this co-op deck building game is fantastic. The game is for 2-5 players and sports a very engaging turn system. Instead of players waiting for the game to get back to them, everyone can participate on every player's turn, keeping everyone engaged and allowing them to make the difference between success and defeat!

The original game comes with five heroes that players can choose from to represent them in the game. These heroes come with their own small starting deck of cards. As the game progresses, the each player hero will 'level up' and players will get to spend their hard earned coin to buy better equipment and hire local heroes, collectively called 'recruits', that will help the players along the way.

First Few Forays

Each mission in the game has a difficulty rating, mostly based on the difficulty rating of the enemy monster decks being used to generate the monster groups. This game is actually quite difficult if players don't work together. For groups with any number of new players, probably play an easy mission.

One of the missions is a tutorial type mission. If there is at least one player in the group that has played before, your group may not need to start here, but it is still a ton of fun and the whole game has great replay value because of the randomized nature of the player's draws from their decks as well as the order of recruitment cards. Our group has played this starter mission half a dozen times and it is still great fun!

The edition of the game that my wife and I have printed this mission as a two location adventure, but Slugfest Games has (through feedback and additional play testing) decided to provide a free errata to this mission, making it an easier (and I would say more fun) three location mission. I have played it both ways and while two locations is doable, the change does three big things for the mission that are worth noting:

1. With three locations, all missions in the box now have three locations

    -This is more relevant to recruitment coins than anything else, more on that later

2. The mission has more time to 'ramp up' to the boss

    -With only two locations, you get a 'trash mobs' fight and then you dive right into a boss fight! 

3. The players get more recruitment purchases

    -While two locations was exciting, the boss fight is a little tougher as the players get half as many upgrade cards for their decks before they have to take on a potent adversary.

Tandum Tactics

I cannot stress this enough, especially in the higher difficulty missions: You MUST WORK TOGETHER. The turn structure is brilliantly designed to let players get through it, but the more crafty players are with their order of operations and play choices, the more successful the whole group will be. There are quite a few tips that I could give, but to make sure the game isn't 'solved' by the time you buy it, I will only give a couple here.

1. Make plans for the round, not just the turn.

Each player has a hand of five cards. These cards have to make it the whole round! The defending player will get to replenish their hand at the end of their turn, but everyone else's resource pool will continue to dwindle. 

By nature of the replenish timing, this means that more often than not, a player will actually be responsible for the monster's in front of the player to their left because the defending player will likely have played out most of their hand by  the time it is their turn and will not be able to defend themselves.

2. Use Random Damage before Static Damage.

All of the cards that players can use will either have a colored die that they will roll to determine damage (random damage) or the card will have a set number that tells you how much damage it does (static damage). If Static Damage will kill a monster, don't waste Random Damage on it, but if their is a high priority target, throw the Random Damage first. Good rolls might kill the monster, but other times, bad rolls will mean that the attack comes up one or two damage short. If the Static Damage is used first, a good roll on the Random Damage can be overkill, and that kind of waste in this game can actually be devastating in the long run.

Saved! For Today...

The base game has six standard missions that have an extremely high replay value because of the random nature of most game pieces. Because of this, a group could play a mission a dozen times and still not get bored! On top of that, the hard missions really are tough and may take a few runs to finish successfully. 

The whole time I have been playing Battle for Greyport though, the players have really only ever had a problem with the recruitment cards will sometimes come up with choices that the buying player really doesn't want. That wasted money feels terrible on the purchase and drawing the card later never feels good either. We have a house rule for recruitment cards that has worked pretty well and we have a few other ideas that we might try to see if we like them better.

Overall, I would give this game a 9/10 and my game group plays it fairly regularly. We have some house rules in action and some more in the works, ideas for new playable characters, and we are even working on monsters and missions! I will most certainly be posting more on this game in the future to cover these ideas as well as some in-depth ideas on game mechanics and play strategies.

As always, happy gaming!

 -Zenfall