Hey everybody!
It’s game day here at spalanz.com, and it’s time to look at another expansion to that deck-building classic Thunderstone – we’re heading to the Thornwood Forest in search of the Stone of Blight!
Thornwood Siege was released in 2011, and is the fourth expansion to the game, coming out after the big-box expansion Dragonspire. While there is a level of thematic expansion here, as we get some hero types who have more of a woodlands-theme to them, in the main this is very much a “more of the same” type of expansion for the game, with a lot of the sort of generic items and spells that would be playable in any game of Thunderstone.
The heroes include the Krell that features one of the rare – if not the only – hero type that can be levelled up four times rather than the usual three. The others, as I say, are fairly standard fare for the game at this point. It’s a similar story with the village items, though with some twists such as the Guiding Light magical item that gives all players a universal +1 light for the rest of the round if you defeat a monster while it is in play. However, while this feels like a very co-op orientated idea, there is also the Stalking Spell spell that forces other players to enter the dungeon on their turn, which can be used in a very player-vs-player way.
It’s also worth mentioning the Time Bend spell, which lets you keep an unused card from your hand to add it to your next hand. This tempo-shift comes into play more strongly with the new monster mechanics (more shortly), but it’s something that’s always useful to have in deck-building games!
The new mechanics, however, are featured on the new monster cards we get in the expansion: Raid and Stalk.
Raid is a new mechanic that represents the raiders coming out of Thornwood Forest to, well, raid the village. The mechanic forces you to destroy cards from the village stacks, meaning that over time there will be fewer items to choose from. They tend to destroy the most expensive cards as well, adding some pressure if you want to save your gold to get the good stuff! There are also Siege cards that function in a similar manner if they breach the dungeon hall, for instance, further adding pressure to the game.
Stalk is a keyword that will take effect on your next turn, adding to the tempo-shift mechanics mentioned earlier on the Time Bend spell card. When you reveal a monster with the Stalk mechanic, you take a token that matches the card’s effect, and then proceed with your turn as normal. Then, on your next turn, you suffer the effects of that token (or tokens) at the beginning of your turn. It’s an interesting sort of mechanic that plays around with the established turn structure, at any rate.
Thornwood Siege, while offering much of the same in terms of game content, is still a fairly decent expansion to the game. Of all of the original line of Thunderstone expansions, this one is weirdly the one still most readily available (at the time of writing this blog, at least), which perhaps leads me to think it didn’t sell so well?
Thunderstone still has one expansion left for me to feature here, at any rate, so hopefully soon I’ll get round to the final battle at the Heart of Doom! Stay tuned for that!
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