A light, breezy, and fun cooperative card game that’s well worth diving into 🤿

Quick Info

BoardGameGeek Link
Designer: Kevin Wilson
Publisher: Incredible Dream
Artists: Katarzyna Bekus, Sandra Chlewińska, Weronika Kozyra, and Kate “vesner” Redesiuk
Release Year: 2023

Overview

Kinfire Delve is a snappy cooperative card game in the same universe as Incredible Dream and Kevin Wilson’s Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall, a much bigger and meatier boss-battler / adventure game. I have not played Kinfire Chronicles, so this was my first introduction to the world of Kinfire. There’s not much world-building in Delve—it’s mostly limited to a few paragraphs of small text in the rulebook, but if you’ve played Chronicles you’ll find some of the same characters in Delve.

Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto is the first in a trilogy of Kinfire Delve games. The second is already out, while the third is set to release in Summer 2024. Each Delve game carries the same mechanics and trades out the boss, well cards, and characters.

In Delve, you take the role of a hero either solo or with a friend. If you have another box, you can bring those heroes over to play with up to four players. Each hero comes with a unique deck of foil-backed, beautiful artwork. Each character carries a special twist to their deck—Khor, for example, has a special shield tag on many of his cards allowing the player to block incoming damage.

Each Delve box has a boss and unique “well” deck. Your task is to delve into the well, get to the bottom alive, and defeat the boss. In this first box, the boss is Vainglory. Each box contains three variations of the boss, which can mix up the game. As you delve, you will be playing cards and rolling dice to place progress on trap, puzzle, and combat cards. Each time you fail to place the full progress, you will receive a penalty, and when you succeed, you will gain a boon—usually the ability to delve further by discarding cards from the well deck.

Once the well deck is gone, you flip the boss card, find out what variation you’re facing, place out the boss’s gauntlet cards, and try to place enough progress tokens to defeat the boss without losing your final health, or failing another special loss condition.

Review

The first item to talk about is the production. The backs of the cards, in particular, have spectacular foiling. The other side of the cards are nice, but not spectacular, and the cards themselves have a nice finish. The game comes with a ten-sided die to track player health, which is more finicky than a health wheel like you might find in the Unmatched games. There are four more dice used to add some fog to how much additional progress you’ll add on each attempt. Overall, it’s a nice-looking game, especially for the price.

Kinfire Delve is a compelling game. It plays quickly—my plays have usually been 20-40 minutes, depending on how deeply I’m able to…delve. The core hook is simple and easy to explain. Just choose a card, optionally boost it, and roll the dice. But each character plays differently, and the delving mechanism means that you’re unlikely to see more than 25-30% of the deck in any given play. The wide variety of cards and abilities gives the game great replay value.

The quick pace and great replay value help because the game can be rather swingy. Several cards contain instant loss conditions (or close to it), and your fate often hangs on a dice roll. That will turn some players off, but in a game as quick as this, I didn’t find it a hindrance to my enjoyment most of the time. When you lose, I’ve found myself dwelling on what I could have done differently.

I plan to pick up every one of the Kinfire Delve games and I expect them to be a staple in my solo and co-op lineup because they’re so quick to teach and play. Every time I’ve played I’ve had surprises, cheek-gnawing decisions, and best of all—fun.