The Isofarian Guard from Sky Kingdom Games is a Solo/Co-op board game for 1-2 players. This narrative-driven adventure takes place in the snowfields of Isofar, in Telios; the same high fantasy world featured in The Stonebound Saga, the strategic card-based skirmish game also created by Sky Kingdom Games.
In The Isofarian Guard you’ll explore the various areas of Isofar through the eyes of eight members of the guard. You and your companions will travel vast distances across the country, working together to overcome a great darkness corrupting the land. The game includes four unique campaigns that can be played completely solo or with two players, spanning over 30+ hours of branching gameplay. Players will be presented with choices throughout their adventure that have different outcomes. These outcomes may present the players with varying rewards, or change the course of the game!
The Isofarian Guard also incorporates a fully voice-acted storyline with realistic sound effects and a musical score, powered by Forteller – a new company that specializes in creating highly immersive storytelling and narrative experiences for board games.
This interactive app gives players the option of listening to the story through Forteller, bridging the gap between digital and cardboard. Note that the Forteller app is not essential to gameplay, and that players can also read the storyline from the rulebook as they play through a campaign.
The game features:
- A highly immersive narrative-driven campaign powered by Forteller
- Bag Building
- Card/Tableau Building
- Action Point Allowance System
- Character customisation
- Unique crafting system for equipment
- Enemy AI System
- Zero Dice
- Open-World Exploration
The Isofarian Guard features 3 main phases of gameplay:
- Exploration
- Combat/Quests
- Narrative Events
Your characters are represented by a miniature that you’ll move across the map. You’ll have the freedom to explore the open world and travel to any location as you wish, but beware, you’ll have to manage your health to survive long journeys on the road.
Each circle-shaped ‘node’ area on the map denotes a place that you can interact with. Each location has 5 unique outcomes that may happen when you land on them, varying from random encounters, side quests, or interactions with people from the world of Telios. Many of the side quests will give you various choices that have branching paths; some may unlock incredible treasures while others may lead you to dangerous situations!
Scroll locations on the main world map represent a larger area that you’ll be able to explore. These larger locations have their own specific mini-map, where you’ll move your miniature between its various nodes. In these areas you’ll progress the main storyline that has Forteller voice-acted narration.
As you travel throughout the cities and wildernesses of Isofar, you’ll fight off enemies using a unique and highly customisable battle system. During each of the 4 campaigns you’ll control 2 Isofarian Guards, either solo or with a friend. You’ll track these characters on their journey with character dashboards that display their various stats and equipment.
Each dashboard features slots to equip a weapon, armour, an accessory, and one item. Various items won from defeating enemies are stored in the satchel area on the dashboard, and the character’s health and action points (AP) are tracked with acrylic cubes. You’ll use loot items to craft powerful equipment for your characters, and can even store additional equipment in the satchel area to swap between battles as you adjust your strategy for a particular encounter.
During combat your characters will each have a bag that stores multiple weighted chips representing their stamina in battle; their starting stats and equipment determine how many chips are within the bag. A sword chip is used to power offensive abilities, and a shield chip is used to power defensive abilities. Character abilities have various chip costs as well, with some requiring multiple chips of the same type, while others may require a mix of both.
As your characters progress you will find and craft various weapons, armour and accessories that can bolster the chip count in your bags. You will also gain experience from defeating enemies, and be able to unlock skills to add additional chips to your bag. Enemies will even add negative effect chips to your character’s bags that will hinder you in battle!
Most enemies use an 8-card ‘AI Deck’ (listing various conditional statements) that controls their actions in battle. Each enemy’s personal deck is composed of 3 pairs of identical cards and 2 unique ‘special ability’ cards. Unique enemies and bosses will have slightly larger AI decks that can’t be predicted as easily.
When you’re choosing to attack an enemy, the order in which you perform your abilities will affect what that enemy may do on their next turn. Timing is everything and counting the enemy’s cards to predict their next action can be critical for victory. Some of your character abilities can even be triggered by what the enemy does on their turn as well!
Also, ‘The Corrupted’ will soon emerge as the inhabitants of Isofar begin to take another form. It’s not safe once the sun goes down…
The Kickstarter for The Isofarian Guard has already achieved its funding target and is now unlocking a range of stretch goals to add even more content to the base game. The campaign will conclude on October 4th.
The art design looks really tasty, I especially admire the maps. I just went over to boardgamegeek to burrow in their forums – and guess what kind of thread I found, title: “why so white?” – A guy complaining about the lack of ethnic “diversity” in this game… Oh god, why have political issues to permeate every single one of my hobbies? Anyway, the game looks fantastic and sounds intriguing and I’ll follow its development. Thank you for the information!
Some people feel the need to complain about everything these days – outrage at non-issues!
The KS is nearly at the last 48 hours, at which point they’ll announce a final stretch goal. The game contents have expanded significantly during the campaign, and it now looks like a great story/strategy game.