Boardgame review: Thunderstone

Thunderstone, by Mike Elliott of AEG, is basically the hack and slash version of Dominion. Both Dominion and Thunderstone revolve around starting with a small deck of weak cards, using those cards to add better cards to your deck, and gradually improving your deck until you can start collecting victory points. While Dominion took this idea and made a game with very tight mechanics and a very loose theme, Thunderstone... well, they went a different direction. It would be easy to go down the line and compare every aspect of Thunderstone to Dominion, but that wouldn't be entirely fair. More importantly, it would be kind of boring, so I'll try to resist.


The basic turn of Thunderstone is simple enough. At the start of your game, you draw 6 cards of your starting deck of 12. Each turn, you play your cards, then discard everything, draw a new hand of 6, and wait for your next turn. During your turn, you can do either go shopping in the village, go fighting in the dungeon, or rest.

Resting just lets you remove a single card from your deck at the cost of your turn. Done.

If you go shopping, you lay out your cards, play any village effects that those cards might have, then you total up the cash value of all the cards you've played and buy one card that costs up to that much. Then, if you have any heroes in your hand, you can spend XP you earned in the dungeon to level them up. Then you're done. The cards you can buy are things like heroes, weapons, spells, and the occasional card that helps when shopping. The selection of cards is random each game, and never changes over the course of the game.

In addition to its normal function, each card can have a gold value from 0 to 3 that you use when purchasing. This means that you have to balance your purchases. Too many cards that don't have a gold value in your deck, and you can't purchase good stuff. However, there's not really a relationship between cards that are good for fighting being bad for purchasing. Some of the best weapons provide good income, while the only attack spell provides no income. Heroes, the most important cards for entering the dungeon, are almost never worth income, except for thieves. The overall effect is that the deck-building portion of the game feels muddied. There are two stages to building your deck, sort of; building the economic strength to buy the good cards, and buying the good cards to be able to take on the dungeon. But the unclear distinction between economic cards and combat cards just makes that all seem a little clumsy.


During the dungeon step, you lay out your hand of cards, assign any weapon cards to hero cards, use any dungeon powers to prepare yourself, then choose one of the three monsters to fight. The 3 monsters are in a line, representing how deep in the dungeon they are. The deeper they are, the darker the room is, which provides a penalty to the combat that can be offset by bringing light. The light mechanic is actually pretty nifty, and I wish they'd done more with it. It adds an extra variable to the combat that you have to consider, since light is an easy bonus to obtain, but any extra light beyond what you need to counter the penalty gives no bonus. [*]

Like the village cards, not all the monsters are available in every game. The monsters are divided by type into 8 decks, humanoids, dragons, oozes, etc. Only three decks are shuffled together in each game to make the dungeon deck, so you know ahead of time what monsters will be showing up. This mostly works well; it lets you know what situations you'll have to prepare for, which I like.

Once you've chosen a target, the monster performs its battle ability, and then you either win or lose. There's no randomness here, so in 99% of the situations in the game, you'll only choose a combat that's a forgone conclusion and there will be no surprise. There's also no way for other players to interfere with your combat, for better or worse. If you win, the monster is added to your discard pile where it is worth victory points, and you also claim the XP value of the card. If you lose, the monster simply goes to the bottom of the deck. Either way, the dungeon gets a new monster, so there's always three to choose from. The lack of randomness makes combat a little unsatisfying to me. There's no element of risk, no way to go for the long odds against a tough foe if you're behind, no way for a weak foe to have a surprise upset against a complacent player. Basically, it just comes down to meet-the-requirement-collect-the-reward.

The game ends when the Thunderstone leaves the dungeon. One of the cards in the bottom 1/3 of the dungeon deck is the Thunderstone. It can't be captured directly; to claim it you have to defeat the monster in the depth 1 slot when the Thunderstone is in the depth 2 slot. If the Thunderstone moves to the depth 1 slot for any other reason, the game simply ends with no one claiming it. Either way, whoever has the most victory points printed on cards in their deck wins.

So, how good is the game? Well, it's fun but it's also very, very flawed. Maybe even fundamentally so. My overall impression is that the game designers have played a lot of games (Dominion in particular) but have never actually studied game design, or even just looked at games from the perspective of what is and is not good design. It comes across as a very amateurish game with professional production quality.

For instance, the rules are just full of inconsistencies and confusions. The rulebook has been rewritten twice and still isn't quite right. Not even obscure things, either. It's all stuff that should have come up in playtesting. In some cases, the new rules actually contradict the cards. A simple note that the change is an errata would suffice, but the reading leaves the strange impression that the rules writer thinks the card says something different than it actually says.

Also, the endgame condition is, well, terrible. The Thunderstone itself only provides a small score boost, but it quickly becomes obvious that it's just random who will benefit from it. The random nature of the dungeon deck means that there's no buildup of weak monsters to strong monsters, so there's no last big challenge to claim the MacGuffin. The game ends with a whimper.

Thunderstone's attempts to do what Dominion did right backfire in the village. Simply put, there aren't enough different kinds of cards, and the distribution that does exist is strange in some ways. There's only one attack spell, and it's the most expensive non-hero card in the game. There are three different kinds of light source, one of which is guaranteed in every game. There are two different archery-themed heroes, but no bows.  Worst, the cards that are available to purchase at the start of the game are all that will ever be available. Going into the dungeon and killing the dragon will never net you an awesome unique sword or magic bauble. It's an RPG with no loot mechanic.

(Actually, sometimes you get spoils from defeating a monster, but that just lets you buy an item. Your cards still have to have a high enough gold value. This is less like collecting exciting loot, and more like making it back to town before the store closes.)

There are things that I do really like. The hero levelling mechanic is fun, and provides a much needed way to interfere with other players by getting to the heroes they need before they can. The darkness mechanic is interesting, as I mentioned, and it does let them pull off a few neat interactions. Even the flaws I mentioned aren't really deal breakers. They're not the sort of thing that makes me stuff a game back in the box and leave it on the shelf to collect dust. However, I can't quite recommend it as a purchase. In my case, my FLGS owner opened it up as a store copy, and from my point of view 'free' is the perfect entry fee to this game.

As a final note, I think that there is a really good game hiding here somewhere. I know that AEG intends to release an expansion, and if they take that chance to really shore up the deficiencies of the game instead of just aimlessly adding more of the same, then I might change my recommendation. But for now: get someone else to buy the game and play their copy.

[*]: Apparently, in Thunderstone Land, light is just the absence of darkness. Your penalty due to darkness can be arbitrarily high; there's no rule limiting how dark it can get. However, you can only add light until the darkness level is at 0, after that there's no more darkness to take away.