HEL: The Last Saga is a narrative and cooperative board game with miniatures, set in a Viking fantasy world of survival horror. It mixes dungeon crawl mechanisms with exploration phases on a modular hex-tile board that allows you to gradually discover the island on which the adventure takes place; and mechanisms focused on resource management where you have to manage three fundamental resources to survive: food, wood and morale.
The game lets you lead a small group of 13 heroes, members of a clan, “Those who are Peregrines”, who have survived a horrific sea voyage to an unknown island to join their king. All these characters are quite heterogeneous, with different occupations, a detailed past not necessarily known to all, and ranks corresponding to their station in Viking society. But despite their differences, the survivors will have to cooperate if they want to survive the extreme conditions in which they find themselves: cold, hunger, madness and the threat of unknown “Hostiles”. Additionally, they will have to solve the mysteries surrounding the disappearance of their colony and prove themselves worthy of the Saga that will remember their name.
HEL: The Last Saga is played as a huge campaign made up of 13 “Songs” (or main acts), which are divided into 3 or 4 scenarios each. It’ll take you at least 80 hours to finish the campaign. If players fail in one scenario, the system and the story will modify their next attempt, for the better or for the worse, depending on the actions performed previously.
The game is designed for 2-4 players (but will also include a solo version (focused more on survival than the coop game), and unlike most dungeon crawlers, players do not play as a single character for the entire campaign. Instead, they will take turns playing each of the survivors and will gradually learn the individual stories and skills of each of them from one scenario to the next. Often, the scenario offers you the opportunity to draft from a selection of available heroes, but rarely the same ones. Each hero has a unique story and a particular faith that will influence his or her fate and progress, and for some, even a familiar. The heroes have RPG-like statistics that can evolve, and they can also acquire new skills, pets, allies or artifacts, usually in the form of cards. These improvements will sometimes also be an opportunity for the players who play them to learn more about the hero’s past and about their secret motives, if any. This will come in handy as our brave survivors become scarce and players are increasingly asked to play the same character more often.
Source: Mythic Games
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