Getting around a treacherous lair isn’t easy, especially as an Adventure Guild trainee. When you first enter a dungeon, you’ll be limited in your skills and it will take time and experience to develop them. Becoming a true Adventurer doesn’t happen all at once, but with some patience and dedication, you’ll be world class in no time.
In Lairs, you and an opponent design dungeon labyrinths for each other and take turns exploring the twists and turns laid out for you. Look out for monsters and traps as you search for treasure and a way out! As a trainee, your skills start off pretty raw, but over time, that will change.
When you’re taking a turn as an Explorer, moving through your opponent’s Lair, you spend Energy Cubes to take actions. Your first game, you’ll start with four Basic cubes as well as one Perception and one Quickness.
The most common way to move through a Lair is by creeping. You can spend ANY cube (but Basic cubes are particularly good to use here) to Creep from one square to an adjacent one. When you spend an Energy Cube, it goes from the Fresh bucket to the Spent bucket on your player board.
Using your Quickness cube, you can Hustle (Creep up to three spaces) and Backtrack moving through any number of empty spaces you’ve already visited. Very helpful ways to cover a lot of ground in a hurry.
You can use your Perception cube to Peer into adjacent squares. Your opponent reveals everything about that space including the walls and if there might be a hideous monster or devious trap lying in wait. Suffice to say, even trainees know, that is useful information to have before stepping into a space.
Your turn ends when you have no more cubes in the Fresh bucket. Most will be Spent, but some encounters might force you to send cubes to the Fatigued bucket or you might choose to Conserve some. At the start of the next turn, you Refresh your energy. Cubes in the Spent bucket move to the Fresh one, and Fatigued cubes move to Spent (they will come back to Fresh at the start of your next turn). Now you’re ready to continue exploring!
The more dungeons you delve, the more your training will progress. You’ll unlock new content that may contain ANYTHING, including new skills that will definitely be useful. Your training includes facing increasingly difficult challenges and the skills you develop will make your adventures much more manageable. You’ll eventually be able to customize your skills at the start of a game, choosing the type of adventurer you want to be.
Lairs is the new game by Christopher Westmaas and KTBG. It’s coming to Kickstarter on November 12. Follow the campaign here.
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