Game Title : Grimoire
Publisher : One Draw
Game Designer : Jun-ichi Kisaragi
Game Thema : Fantasy battle using spellbook
Game Components
1 map
4 spellbooks and bookmarks
80 cards
28 chips
1 Japanese rulesheet
1 English rulesheet
2-4 players
60-90 minutes
Grimoire is published at “Game Market 2010” in Asakusa on the last day of May 2010.
In this event, there are 2 popular original sci-fi / fantasy games, such as “Terra Former” and “Grimoire”.
“Grimoire” means the spellbook in French. This is a very good title which sounds mysteriously and which shows the most important element of the game.
In this game, the spellbooks have very important role.
In the spellbook, variety of spells are written in ascending order.
I’m sorry this review goes suddenly to the spellbook. I should go back to describe the outline of the game.
Play is resolved by turns.
In every turn, the field cards are set up from the deck.
Quest cards are used to set up the field. Players can get one of these quest cards during each turn.
Quest cards contains a VP cards such as gold coin, silver coin and cupper coin and character cards which join the player and have special effect.
Once field cards are set up, players investigates them and decide which spell he cast this turn secretly. In this procedure, players must use their spellbook.
As I wote, the spells are written in ascending order. Player puts his bookmark in the page of his selected spell. The order of spell is very important. Basically the spells are cast by ascending order. In other words, smaller order spell is cast earlier than other spells. This order also determines who conduct his player turn first.
In each player’s turn, the player can cast the spell and conduct its effect, then take one card from the field cards.
If you have one card which you’d like to take it at all cost, you must cast the earliest spell as possible as you can.
On the other hand, the larger numbered spell usually have stronger effect than the smaller ones. Due to this trick, you have a reason to cast a slower spell.
We should look at each spells later.
Now, every player take one card from the field cards. Then, advance turn marker one space.
Speaking about the turn marker, it starts the game on 6 space and finish 15 space.
There are 15 spell in the spellbook. But, you can select the spell numbered equal or smaller than the current turn marker’s number.
Due to this limit, you can cast a spell from 1 to 6 in the first turn. You can cast a spell 7 in the next turn and so on.
This makes the early game milder and the late game more exciting.
The game ends when any player collected 10 treasure cards or 10 character cards. In addition, if the deck of quest cards is depleted, the game ends.
Each player counts up his victory points. Tha highest player wins the game.
Now, I’d like to describe this game from different viewpoint.
Speaking about the method to get the victory point, the first and most straight method is getting coin cards. Victory points won by this method are the most reliable. In other words, these points are usually not so vulnerable from other player’s attack. The drawback of this method is if your opponent would like to get your status, he can count every cards you take from the field cards.
Character cards also have the basic victory points. But, most of them only have 1 victory point, in contrast to gold coin cards have 3 victory points. This looks very disappointing.
But, they have special effect. There are many variety of special effects. For example, Thief card can give you 1 VP when you get the first order during order determination. In contrast, Archer can give you 1 VP when you get the last order.
There’s a mercenary which can give you a VP for eacb player who cast the same spell as you.
There are 3 royal family cards in the game.
The King can give you 5 VP if you collected 5 or more VP chips. This is a big bonus.
The Queen can give you 3 VP for each set of gold, silver and copper coin cards. Silver and copper coin eauals 2 and 1 VP usually. But, Queen makes these cards 3 VP in average as gold coin cards. In fact, these lower coin cards tends to remain in the field. Thus, the effect of Queen is very useful, because Queen makes theese easy-got cards valuable.
The Prince can give you 3 VP if you collected 5 or more characters. Because character cards are useful as their own, this additional bonus is very strong.
The wild card is Rogue. This card has 6 basic victory points which is unusually high rate. But, you must deduct the number of victory points chip from this basic number. Due to this backdraw, Rogue is difficult to stand with other character cards in your hand.
Oh yes, there are spells which can give you victory points chips directly.
Also, there’s one spell which can give you one treasury card. Treasury card can give you random victory points. But, the fluctuation of treasury cards is very high.
Based on the information above, let’s open up the spellbook.
There are 5 basic types of spell in this world. Normal spell, forbidden spell, attacking spell, defending spell, time spell.
Normal spells are a normal spell as its name shows. Forbidden spells are spells which directly give you VPs. There is one spell, “silence” on number 2. This spell negates all forbidden spell after this spell in the turn. Number 2 spell is effective because it can give you early playing. Due to this fact, forbidden spells are very uncertain tactics.
Attacking spells are the spells which can attack other player who has the most number of characters or most number of victory point chips directly. Due to these spells, it is very hard to keep the top during whole gameplay.
Defending spells are spells against the attacking spells. These spells can defend yourself from attacking spells. Unfortunately these spells do not have special advantage other than this defence. And usually these spells have larger number. Because of these drawback, it is difficult to cast these spells timely.
The last category is time spell. This spell make the order of spell number upside down. Since this spell itself has a big number, usually this spell make itself to have early playing chance.
By the way, this time spell has very troublesome sideeffect.
For example, Silence has number 2 and it usually has very early playing chance and negate all the forbidden spells in that turn. But, once time spell is cast, the order of all spell is reversed and all forbidden spell goes before the Silence and become effective. In other words, Silence has no effect and usually have very late playing chance.
The same thing happen to defensive spells which can work adequately in regular order. It is really sad ending when you cast a defending spell adequately but time spell mess up your tactics.
Expanding the variety of spell every turn make this game interesting. In early stage, only not so powerful spells can be cast. In late stage, there are many powerful spells cast by each player.
Oh I almost forgot one thing.
The depletion of quest cards deck is accelerated by one of the spell. One spell can give you 3 quest cards in discard pile. Usually discarded cards are not so good. But, if you have some tricky character cards, these cards might be valuable for you.
In Game Market 2010, there is a promotion card Pirates which is another tricky character card which can give you 1 VP when you get a gold coin card.
