Tiny Epic Defenders

15th June 2021

It's a Tuesday evening at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club. Continuing a  theme, the second and concluding game of the night was another cooperative game.
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Previously; we'd defended the kingdom from invaders by rolling for adventure. Now, we're going to defend the kingdom from invaders by being tiny... and epic!

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What's in a game?
Like all Tiny Epic games, this comes packaged in a small, sturdy box with a bunch of tiny components.

• Player cards: There are 10 of these oversized cards, one for each playable hero. On one side it depicts info on the hero such as health and special ability, on the other is a larger illustration and a short backstory for the character.
• Defender cards: There are 4 defender cards in the player colours, they're also 2 'all-defenders' cards for 1, 2 or 3 player games.
• Artefact deck: There are 10 of these cards, artefacts are magical items that player's characters may equip.
• ITEMeeples: Not meeples, but ITEMeeples, there are 4 of them in the 4 different player colours. Each ITEMeeple has 4 sockets, 2 on the front and 2 on the back, which allow up to 3 artefacts to be attached to the sockets.
• Artefact items: There are 10 of these tiny 3D items that correspond to the 10 artefact cards. Each one has 1 or 2 pins, so that when a player equips them, they can be attached to an ITEMeeple.
• Heart tokens: There are 4 of them in the player colours, used to track a hero's hit points. There's also a 5th health token used to track the epic foe's hit points
• Region cards: There are 7 of these oversized cards. One of them depicts the capital and the other 6 areas are outer regions, they are areas like the plains, coast, mountain etc. Each region also has a threat track and apart from the capitol city, each region has a different special ability on each side.
• Epic foe cards: There are 6 epic foe cards and again, they're oversized. Each epic enemy has a health track and a couple of special rules/abilities and another ability that can be triggered when their health drops to certain points. Each of the 6 epic foes is also associated with a particular outer region.
• Dire enemy cards: These are normal sized cards and therefore only dire enemies instead of epic! Each dire enemy has a special rule/ability and like epic foe cards, each one is associated with one outer region type.
• Enemy cards: These are the games run-of-the-mill enemies. There are 9 of them and each one shows 2 of the 6 outer regions.
• Threat tokens: There're 7 of these flame shaped tokens and they're used to track the threat (Or damage really.) for each region, so it must depict how much everything is burning. My first thought was:
  ​How does Tiny Epic Defenders end? In fire! Thanks Ambassador Kosh! Yes, it's a Babylon 5 reference, deal with it!

The cards are, as would be expected, of a pretty standard quality and totally acceptable. This is a tiny epic game, so invariably, the tokens are all small and fiddly to handle, but that aside, they all look nice. The artefacts slot into the ITEMeeples with out issue, it's a gimmick, but I like gimmicks! Besides, it does away with that question; how many items can my character use?

Artwork on the region cards is nice enough and fairly evocative of their respective regions, meanwhile the art style used for the enemies and player characters reminds of  art used in various fantasy videogames, which is no bad thing, it's bright and colourful, which I like.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Player cards: Randomly deal (Or give.) a player card to each player, along with the ITEMeeple in the player's chosen colour.
• Create landscape: The playing area must be created.
  ​First, put the Capital City in the centre of the playing area, then place 2 region cards adjacent to the capital on it's left and right. Then place 2 regions above those 3 and the remaining 2 below the 3, they should sort of form a diamond/circle shape.
• Epic foe: Shuffle the epic foe cards and deal one face-down, keep the epic foe hidden.
• Turn deck: The starting turn deck will contain a mixture of enemy cards and defender cards.
  Select all the defender cards the players' chosen colours and the all-defenders cards as necessary per the number of participating players, shuffle them and place them into a face-down deck.
  Now shuffle the enemy cards and deal 3 face down, place all 3 on top of the defenders deck, this applies for the first turn only, in subsequent turns all the cards are shuffled as usual.
• Horde deck: The horde deck will contain a mixture of enemy and dire enemy cards that appear later in the game.
  ​Deal 3 more cards from the enemy cards face-down into a deck.
  Now shuffle and deal 2-4 dire enemy cards as required face-down, add them to the 3 enemy cards you just dealt.
  Now shuffle all the cards together and then place them on top of the epic foe card.
  ​This is the horde deck.
• Artefact deck: Shuffle the artefacts and create a face-down deck with all of them.

That's more or less it for setup other than setting out some tokens.

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On to play
To some degree, play in Tiny Epic Defenders is determined by the turn deck.
In each turn, reveal a card from the turn deck and activate it's action.

• Defender card: If the card revealed is 1 of the 4 coloured defender card, then the player with correspondingly coloured ITEMeeple gets to act and gets 3-4 action points.
  If a 'all-defenders' card is revealed, then the 3-4 action points are divided among all the defending characters as the players see fit.
  What can players use actions points for?
  Move: 1 action point allows the active player to move to an adjacent region. Players can only move to and from the Capital City region from the 2 adjacent left/right region cards, otherwise they move around the outer regions.
  Secure a region: If a player's character is on region that's had it's threat level increased due to enemy attacks, then the active player may spend actions points to lower that threat level at a cost of 1 action per threat level.
  Use special ability: Each character has a special ability that can be used for the cost of action points.
  Use regional ability: Some outer regions also have special abilities that can be triggered by the active player for action points, provided their ITEMeeple is on that region's card. Additionally, some outer regions have abilities that activate automatically.
  Fight epic foe: If the active player's character is on the same space as the epic foe, then they can spend an action point to attack the epic foe.
  Sacrifice health: Not an action per se, but the active character may once per turn sacrifice 1 health to gain an additional action point.
  Once defender actions have been completed, the card is put into the discard pile.
• Enemy card: If an enemy card is revealed, it immediately attacks the 1st and 2nd regions as listed on the card, increasing the threat level on both by 1.
  However, if any player has their character on one of the regions being attacked, that character can lose a point of health to defend the region and prevent the threat level being increased.
  Once the 2 attacks have been resolved, the enemy card is put into the discard pile.
• Dire Enemy card: When a dire enemy card appears, it only attacks a single region, however, dire enemies also have special ability that get triggered.
  When a character defends against a dire enemy, they must lose 2 or maybe 3 health, in doing so, the character gets to draw a card from the artefacts deck and equip it.
  As with enemies, dire enemy cards are put into the discard pile are being resolved.

That's basically how the turn deck works, there are a couple of other rules though .

• Threat levels: When an outer region's maximum threat level is reached, it's permanently destroyed, as is it's special ability. Further damage done to a destroyed region is redirected at the Capital City region and that's not good.
• Health: If a character's health is reduced to 0, they become exhausted, they can no longer defend, fight or secure, they may only move and use certain special abilities.
• Horde deck: Once all the cards from the turn deck have been revealed, take a card from the horde deck, then without revealing it, shuffle it into the turn deck, which is now ready to be used again. The new enemy will then appear at some point.
• Epic foe: Play continues until the last horde card is added to the turn deck. The next time the turn deck is depleted, the epic foe is revealed.
  Fighting the epic foe is hard and there are special rules for doing so. Each epic foe has a special ability and a lot of health, furthermore, when an epic foe's health is reduced to certain numbers, it will trigger epic events; these screw players over even more!

Endgame
When the epic foe is revealed, the endgame is triggered. The turn deck is still used, but no new cards are added and play continues until one of the following conditions is met.
The players must reduce the epic foe's health to 0 in order to win.
If the threat level of the Capital City reaches maximum at any time during play, then the players lose.

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Overall
Tiny Epic Defenders is quick to set up, learn and play, with those artefact tokens it also looks pretty cool when your ITEMeeple is tooled up.
It seems to play a little different to most other cooperative games I've encountered. Those other games tend to make players choose between working towards an objective or managing an ongoing problem of some kind. Tiny Epic Defenders' is mostly about the kingdom and characters surviving the attrition the game throws at them until the epic foe appears, then players have to balance their actions between defeating the epic foe and defending the kingdom.
Like other cooperative games, managing bad luck is vital to victory, in this case it from the turn deck.
This means it's a game about mostly adapting and optimising tactics in preparation for when the epic foe appears and I feel it's particularly important to defend against dire enemies as its the only way to earn artefacts, which can prove vital to victory.

How the turn deck works in conjunction with the horde deck seems like a clever mechanic; players will know how often they get to act and generally how many times enemies attack, but not the order. It makes the game feel like the luck mechanic isn't too unpredictable, which is no bad thing.
Adding cards from the horde deck however, introduces two further elements into this. Firstly, escalating the threat by adding more enemies and secondly, by also introducing a new random facet to the turn deck because the added cards are hidden until they're revealed.
All of this works to raise stakes and tension as the game continues.

Having said that, when defending against enemies, it felt a little unsatisfying and futile when they were only sent to the discard pile instead of being defeated outright, but I guess that's necessary for the turn deck to work.
I also found the tactics a little on the lighter side, ultimately, there were only 6 total locations that needed defending and decisions tended to be between lowering threat in a region or sitting a region waiting to defend it when it was inevitably attacked in an enemy action.
It's not a gamebreaker, I'm just not sure how well it holds up to repetitive play.

If you're looking for a fairly quick-to-play introductory cooperative game to try, you could do worse than look at Tiny Epic Defenders. Or if you like cooperative games and want something a bit lighter, it might also be for you.