Thunderstone Advanced - Towers of Ruin

Thunderstone Advanced has me torn.  Some aspects of this game I love, some irritate me and some just don't make a damn bit of sense.  There is a Facebook version of this game, but it is not the advanced version and is irritating in its own way.

Thunderstone gives the players an option of going to the village to acquire items (weapons, gear or villagers), heroes and spells or going to the dungeon to fight monsters.  In the dungeon, each "rank" of dungeon is progressively harder due to light levels, with rank 1 being -2 to attack, rank 2 being -4 and rank 3 being -6.  Fortunately, there are various light sources that can be used to counter these penalties.  This is significant as the monsters at each level are randomly pulled from the monster deck and thus you can get high/hard monsters at the "upper" ranks and low/easy monsters at the "lower" ranks, making them much more difficult.  In addition, most of the monsters now also have battle effects that can seriously affect the game.

Ok, some of the good - leveled heroes, no dice, lots of cards and options for deck development.  Fundamentally, this is just like other deck building game - a system of which I have become a huge fan.  The items can make a huge difference in how fast you make it into the dungeon, but can also be challenging due to becoming hero starved.

Some of the bad, one of the stated goals of this "advanced" version was to allow you into the dungeon faster - it has failed at this every time I've played it.  In the scenarios, the spells have been weak and at least one hero was pretty much useless, if not worse than the starting basic soldier (see picture above) you can get for free every round.











That said, some of the heroes are amazing and it is usually blatantly obvious that they are the best and go the fastest.  I mentioned "leveled heroes" earlier and I really, really like this aspect of the game.  You can level up your starting "basic heroes" to the purchased ones on the board and level the purchased ones up to more powerful versions using the experience gained from killing the monsters - that is fun and very useful.  The leveled up heroes eventually become worth victory points, so leveling at least some of them is usually a very good option.  Surprisingly, experience points (the little thunderstone shard pictured below) are not worth victory points, so holding on to them is useless - this is a point often lost on new players.

I cannot say I agree with most of the online evaluations giving this game a fairly high score (8+/10 in most cases).  I think they have tried too hard to refine it and actually made a slightly less fun version.  I cannot say that I would actually recommend spending money on this version, but if you already have, perhaps the expansions can redeem it, but I won't be purchasing them.