My regular tabletop gaming group kindly agreed to try Thornwatch during our last session. I read through the rules when I received the game earlier this month, but this was the first time trying it out at the table.

I hadn’t punched out any of the pieces, so the first several minutes were spent just getting those out and sorted. There’s not a ton of information about how to use those until you’ve read through the rules, and when you do, there’s a fair bit of jumping back and forth to do. I don’t expect that’s usually a problem, as the rulebook is quite short, but I was using a PDF on my phone, so this was not ideal. I suspect we missed several important aspects of the game, so keep that in mind as you read this discussion.

The game board, enemies, and setup are dictated by the scene. The opening scene is usually chosen by the Judge – that was me, in this case – but I threw the options out to the table. We decided to play through May He Die in the Forest, which, for the uninitiated, is one of the suggested starting scenarios from the base set.

We had three players, and the group composition proved to be critical to party success. The players chose Greenheart (healer/support/melee), Sage (support/ranged), and Blade (melee/ranged). This seems to have been a spectacularly effective combination.

Setup is focused on the board. The scene dictates which tiles to use and how to put them together, which is a neat mechanic, but it isn’t the best gameplay experience. The art on the board tiles is blurry and complex, so it’s hard to match against the board setup as it’s shown on the scene card. It also means the board feels muddled. Sideways stairs and weird crystal columns beside a cozy hut in the woods give the whole thing a dreamy “unplace” feel. Maybe that’s your thing! Not mine, though.

There are also a lot of symbols to figure out, and we missed at least a couple of steps. This is also the point where the Judge role kicks in in earnest, which was unfortunate for me, as I hadn’t fully absorbed the gameplay yet. I didn’t know what to do with my pool of Ebb or how to decide where monsters should go.

In general the Judge role feels quite odd, at least in this kind of mechanics-heavy playtest. Your resources are tightly constrained, and there isn’t so much play space that you can make much happen with good tactical play. I’m not sure if there should be more options or if we missed something important in setup/gameplay, or if the Judge is just meant to be a lighter role than I’m used to.

The primary thing that the Judge has access to beyond the monsters themselves are the momentum track and the damage mechanics. There are two parts to this equation, the NPC damage mechanic and the player wounds mechanic. 

The momentum track acts as both initiative and NPC damage. It’s an interesting system that can suffer badly when players aren’t rolling well, as it can be straight-up impossible to kill the bad guys for extended periods. There are other options for handling this situation – the Sage’s board control powers, for example – but success still frequently hinges critically on making the bad guys go away somehow.

The wound mechanic, on the other hand, seems badly under-tuned. There are 10 wound cards for each player, and the scene is lost when this collection is exhausted. If the party has a Greenheart, however, it’s hard to see how this could possibly pose an issue, as the Greenheart’s healing abilities are extremely potent. If you don’t kill the party in the first couple of turns, the Greenheart has a good chance of simply preventing any meaningful threat from wounds.

Speaking of under-tuned mechanics, the Judge’s ebb supply also feels a bit wanting. Player dice that show the @ (ebb) symbol supply one point of ebb, and deck reshuffles supply two. Perhaps my players were simply amazing from the get-go, but I was having trouble maintaining my supply, and that meant my monsters often lacked the Ebb-infused trait, which meant they were kind of pathetic, inflicting very little damage and succumbing quickly to focused attacks.

As you can tell, we focused on the mechanics over the roleplaying for this test. We did use Traits, but didn’t get a lot of value out of them in this session. They’re an interesting mechanic, but it eventually became clear that they make a lot more sense if you’re treating the game as much more of an RPG and much less of a boardgame.

That feels a little in opposition to how the game is actually built, as much of the focus is on the board, tokens, and mechanics, but the trait mechanic is  simple enough that it doesn’t interfere with normal play, and it does encourage a small degree of roleplaying even in a mechanics test.

Overall, Thornwatch is an interesting game, and one I’d like to give a second go with more involved roleplaying at the table, but also one I currently feel is going to need some house rules to really “finish” the play experience. I hope to stand corrected on that at some point.