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chuckroThe world of Haven is under assault from the forces of darkness, specifically the 13 demon lords and their minions. You’re either brave or foolish enough to face the darkness and try to defeat the demons and bring peace.
The game is “inspired by” and intended to emulate Diablo, and to a lesser extent Darkest Dungeons and Soulsborne games. It’s meant to feel like a procedurally-generated dungeon-crawling combat game, where the details are abstracted but the punishing difficulty is real. Honestly, I’d argue that the D&D board games already have a solid handle on that mechanic and this was unnecessary, but those also aren’t the types of games I’m really into, so I’m sure there are important distinctions I’m missing.
The resolution mechanics are all based on a standard set of playing cards: You get dealt a hand of cards (number determined by you stats) and try to assemble groups totaling 13 for success. The face cards count as 11 (Jack), 12 (Queen), and 13 (King); and also every attack and ability has special effects depending on whether you play a face card and/or if it’s the suit that corresponds with your class. And that leads to problem number one: EVERY ability has a set of four non-standard special effects, and every weapon has a huge damage range depending on your luck. Players either need extensive cheat sheets or you’re going to slow down the game constantly looking up bonus effects.
There are four classes, each with four possible focuses, and each of those with a skill tree for their various powers. Interestingly, they’re basically all wizard classes: Elementalist (blaster mage), Faithful (cleric), Hexxer (necromancer/debuff mage), and Stalker (druid). That’s an interesting departure from the D&D formula that you see in a lot of dungeon-crawler games, in that every character is going to end up with both martial and magical abilities. Which I suppose is also sensible, because if all you can do is chop things with an axe, you’re going to be at a serious disadvantage against the lords of hell. The magic system itself is based on MP, which regenerates with rest or potions. I feel like MP-based magic has been out of fashion in ttrpgs for a very long time; probably because of the bookkeeping involved versus spell slots. The spell lists take up a lot of pages, but each class/focus only gets 8-12 abilities they’ll ever learn.
There’s also a grand list of weapons and armor that’s broken up into Tiers; plus dozens of enchantments and also magical gems you can “socket” into your items to enhance them further. Oh, and every Demon Lord has a set of unique items they can randomly drop. The video game inspiration is extremely strong and honestly I can’t believe they actually playtested this extensively, because if they did they would have concluded this should have been a video game.
The story of the world centers around the demons creating a fake religion, very similar to the real one, and getting a sizeable chunk of the humans to worship them by pretending to be good. Then the world is plunged into multiple wars of faith, at least one of which totally razes a city. If that didn’t tell you a Scotsman wrote the book, the fact that all the places and notable NPCs have Scottish and Scots Gaelic names would. But the cities and the people of the world are at best secondary in the book, mostly there to give flavor to the “safe havens” for resting between delves and purchasing equipment. The worldbuilding is there to explain which places you can go to find monsters and kill them. At no point does this game expect you to broker a peace between Clan MacDougal and Clan MacHattie; or even reveal that the local Laird has been possessed by a demon. This game is about going to the dungeon, fighting through 10-20 rooms of monsters to the boss monster, and defeating that to receive loot and XP so you can go to the Rank 2 dungeon over the hill and do it again.
Overall: I bought this on impulse at Worldcon direct from the designer; the card-based mechanics seemed interesting and I like supporting independent developers. But it’s not actually that good even if the Diablo-inspired gameplay loop was my thing: The systems are bloated with too many unnecessarily detailed mechanics and edge cases. Ah, well, can’t win them all.
The game is “inspired by” and intended to emulate Diablo, and to a lesser extent Darkest Dungeons and Soulsborne games. It’s meant to feel like a procedurally-generated dungeon-crawling combat game, where the details are abstracted but the punishing difficulty is real. Honestly, I’d argue that the D&D board games already have a solid handle on that mechanic and this was unnecessary, but those also aren’t the types of games I’m really into, so I’m sure there are important distinctions I’m missing.
The resolution mechanics are all based on a standard set of playing cards: You get dealt a hand of cards (number determined by you stats) and try to assemble groups totaling 13 for success. The face cards count as 11 (Jack), 12 (Queen), and 13 (King); and also every attack and ability has special effects depending on whether you play a face card and/or if it’s the suit that corresponds with your class. And that leads to problem number one: EVERY ability has a set of four non-standard special effects, and every weapon has a huge damage range depending on your luck. Players either need extensive cheat sheets or you’re going to slow down the game constantly looking up bonus effects.
There are four classes, each with four possible focuses, and each of those with a skill tree for their various powers. Interestingly, they’re basically all wizard classes: Elementalist (blaster mage), Faithful (cleric), Hexxer (necromancer/debuff mage), and Stalker (druid). That’s an interesting departure from the D&D formula that you see in a lot of dungeon-crawler games, in that every character is going to end up with both martial and magical abilities. Which I suppose is also sensible, because if all you can do is chop things with an axe, you’re going to be at a serious disadvantage against the lords of hell. The magic system itself is based on MP, which regenerates with rest or potions. I feel like MP-based magic has been out of fashion in ttrpgs for a very long time; probably because of the bookkeeping involved versus spell slots. The spell lists take up a lot of pages, but each class/focus only gets 8-12 abilities they’ll ever learn.
There’s also a grand list of weapons and armor that’s broken up into Tiers; plus dozens of enchantments and also magical gems you can “socket” into your items to enhance them further. Oh, and every Demon Lord has a set of unique items they can randomly drop. The video game inspiration is extremely strong and honestly I can’t believe they actually playtested this extensively, because if they did they would have concluded this should have been a video game.
The story of the world centers around the demons creating a fake religion, very similar to the real one, and getting a sizeable chunk of the humans to worship them by pretending to be good. Then the world is plunged into multiple wars of faith, at least one of which totally razes a city. If that didn’t tell you a Scotsman wrote the book, the fact that all the places and notable NPCs have Scottish and Scots Gaelic names would. But the cities and the people of the world are at best secondary in the book, mostly there to give flavor to the “safe havens” for resting between delves and purchasing equipment. The worldbuilding is there to explain which places you can go to find monsters and kill them. At no point does this game expect you to broker a peace between Clan MacDougal and Clan MacHattie; or even reveal that the local Laird has been possessed by a demon. This game is about going to the dungeon, fighting through 10-20 rooms of monsters to the boss monster, and defeating that to receive loot and XP so you can go to the Rank 2 dungeon over the hill and do it again.
Overall: I bought this on impulse at Worldcon direct from the designer; the card-based mechanics seemed interesting and I like supporting independent developers. But it’s not actually that good even if the Diablo-inspired gameplay loop was my thing: The systems are bloated with too many unnecessarily detailed mechanics and edge cases. Ah, well, can’t win them all.
