One of the most satisfying aspects of Riot Quest is creating and personalizing your own Crew to scavenge the wasteland with. And with so many unique Heroes and Riot Gear card combinations, you can really dig deep and find a Crew that matches your preferred play style and looks great on the tabletop at the same time!
Today, we’re going to discuss the process of Crew building and some strategies you might want to consider next time you decide to go looting in the Arena.
For starters, this discussion is written under the assumption that we’re using the “Adventuring Party” crew format found in Throwdown. The vanilla rules for Riot Quest are simply that you need to use between 5–10 Heroes and a hand of Riot Gear cards the same size as your Crew. Adventuring Party, specifically, has proven to be an extremely popular alternate Crew-building format, one in which you must bring exactly 6 Heroes and 6 Riot Gear cards, and you must have one Hero from each of the six classes.
That means you need one of each of the following types of Heroes in your Crew: Guard, Scout, Gunner, Rogue, Fighter, and Specialist. Even with the requirement to bring a diverse class roster to your Crew, you can still tailor your Hero selection to focus on a specific strategy, one you can reinforce with your gear choices.
First, consider what you want your Crew to excel at. Do you want to bring tough Crew full of Heroes that are hard to kill? A highly mobile Crew that can speed around the Arena, grabbing treasure and bounties? A Crew of cold-blooded killers looking for a scrap? Once you decide on a strategy, try to fill as many of your Hero slots with Heroes that complement it, creating a cohesive tactic for your Crew to pursue.
Once you determine the Hero models that match your preferred strategy, make sure you pick Riot Gear cards that shore up your weaknesses, reinforce your strengths, or both.
To demonstrate, here are a few examples of strategy categories you could build your Crew around, the types of Heroes and Gear you want to look for when doing so, and some Crew lists.
Tanks
Look for Heroes with high super damage DEF stats—at least a 6 but preferably an 8. This will ensure your opponent cannot often deal more than a single point of damage to you in a turn.
Heroes with a High STA stat are important as well but be wary of any that have a large amount of health but low DEF stats. They will often get knocked out faster than you might imagine.
Heroes and gear that can heal your Crew are excellent choices, forcing your opponent to slowly whittle down your Crew only to have their work undone.
Example Crew
- Fighter: Stonelord Guvul Godor
- Guard: Bumbles
- Gunner: Destructotron 3000
- Rogue: Gubbin
- Scout: Flubbin
- Specialist: Doctor Stygius
- Gear: Echo Displacer, Dire Ale, Polarity Disorganizer, Transmutation Elixir, Hook Shot, Telescoping Blade
While you might not consider the brother and sister pair of Gubbin and Flubbin to be tanks, they have incredibly high DEF stats with a 5/6 each. To strengthen this, we have two different gear cards that give a Hero Cover, bumping the gobbers’ DEF up to 6/7 out in the open!
Our Guard slot has a lot of good options—it would be easy to reach for J.A.I.M.s here with her excellent DEF stat of 4/8—but Bumbles is, in fact, the hardest Guard in the game to knock out by a mile! Strong DEF stats, a higher than average STA stat, can heal himself, and your opponent cannot roll more than one Action Die against him or his nearby allies. Bumbles is an absolute (cuddly) monster of a tank.
It’s difficult to find any really hardy Specialists, so instead we want to look for one that helps strengthen our game plan, and no one does this better than Doctor Stygius. As the only Hero currently in the game who can natively heal other Heroes, Stygius is an indispensable addition to any tank-style Crew.
Our gear selection includes two cards that provide our Heroes with Cover, a healing card in Dire Ale, a “get out of jail free and go heal” card with Transmutation Elixir, and then some standard attack buffs to help us actually fight.
Speedsters
Look for Heroes with high base SPD stats, methods of increasing other Crew members’ speed, and ways to capitalize on their mobility. With this kind of tactic, we’re not looking to play “keep away” from our opponents but instead to maximize each Hero activation by covering as much of the Arena as possible to grab bounties, raid treasure chests, and in general just get to wherever we want to be.
We’re trying to outrun our opponent, hoping they will have a few turns where they weren’t in position to score a bounty, but thanks to our mobility, we can easily reach it on our following turn to prevent them from scoring points.
Example Crew
- Fighter: Black Bella, Duchess of Dread
- Guard: Sir Dreyfus
- Gunner: Ledfoot & Tredz
- Rogue: Flugwug
- Scout: Major Aline Bennet
- Specialist: Widget, Tinker Extraordinaire
- Gear: Hyperspring Boots, Rocket Skis, Magnetic Gloves, Wold Assistant, Bang Rounds, Scrizapper
This list is FAST! Even models that don’t have an incredible base SPD stat, such as Dreyfus or Ledfoot, are capable of playing to our strategy. Drefyus can leap 2 spaces, and Ledfoot can carry other models in your Crew around the Arena. This Crew isn’t hurting in the “fight” department, either, thanks primarily to Bella and Ledfoot.
Widget ensures that we can score many of the bounties that require rigging, and thanks to Hyperspring Boots and Rocket Skis, we can get her into position quickly on each turn. As for Flugwug…well, the little croak thief goes basically anywhere he wants to in the Arena thanks to his fantastic SPD and ability to leap just like Drefyus.
The first piece of gear we’re going to want to equip is Magnetic Gloves on Flugwug, and then just watch the Loot starting flowing in as we equip the rest of our Crew and run circles around our opponent.
Brawlers
Our strategy with this type of Crew is simple: score bounties that require us to hurt people and spend the rest of our time hurting people. We want to maximize the amount of deadly Heroes in our Crew, but we also cannot forget to include a few “gear enablers” along the way. Bringing the right gear is important, but making sure you actually equip it and have enough Loot to do so is vital to a Crew like this.
We aren’t trying to do anything fancy with this Crew. We want to fight, fight, fight. The more damage we can do the better, so we want Heroes that can cause super damage easily, that can attack more than once per turn, or that can cause damage before attacking to setup a knock out.
Example Crew
- Fighter: Boomhowler the Destroyer
- Guard: J.A.I.M.s
- Gunner: Boomhowler, Solo Artist
- Rogue: Underboss Vizkoya
- Scout: Helga on Wheels
- Specialist: Master Gurglepox
- Gear: Shard of Rathrok, Telescoping Blade, Pommel-Mounted Oraculus, Mechanikal Maniak, Wurmwood Sapling, Time Bomb
As you can see, we fight very well. Boomhowler the Destroyer can super damage even the toughest enemies, while Boomhowler, Solo Artist can shoot twice in a single turn. J.A.I.M.s, Helga, and Gurglepox all have methods of dealing damage to an enemy without attacking them, allowing us to pile up damage tokens before going for a kill.
We can fairly reliably take out an enemy with a STA stat of 3 from full health to knocked out with either Boomhowlers or our Heroes with Caustic Fumes. Our gear enabler is Vizkoya, who not only ensures we get the best Loot out of every treasure chest but can also fight as well!
Gear-wise, it’s fairly straightforward: we’ve taken things that help us attack our enemies better. The two big exceptions are Wurmwood Sapling, which we took to slow down enemies tht are attempting to run away from us, and Time Bomb….because sometimes you need to go all in to win the game and don’t really care if you blow up one of your own Heroes.
These are just three examples of the types of Crew strategies you could build around, but there are loads more. With the second season of Riot Quest just around the corner, even more options are on the horizon. Let us know what kind of strategy you look to bring to the Arena in your games, and we’ll see you in the wastelands! Jump in with a Starter Box at your FLGS or online.
