In just a few days, the Riot Quest Chilly Con Carnage Kickstarter is going to end! It’s been an awesome event thus far—it reached the project funding within just 35 minutes of launch. Thanks to everyone who has backed already and to everyone who will back before the project ends.
The first half of the Riot Quest Wintertime Wasteland season was also launched via Kickstarter and was much more Hero focused in its offerings. In that project, we had the new starter boxes to launch the season, a new map, and tons of new Heroes to customize your Crews. This second half, by contrast, is much more focused on gameplay expansions than it is on individual Heroes. Don’t get me wrong: there are some fantastic Heroes in this Kickstarter such as The Living Covenant, Mekanolyth, Tubbin, and others, but the most exciting aspect of this time around is giving you new ways to play Riot Quest.
Riot Quest was designed with several gameplay goals in mind. One of the biggest—and the one that took a lot of planning from the very start—was that the game would be very customizable and modular. Any Hero works for any Crew using any Riot Gear cards on any maps with any Treasure decks and any Bounty decks. Mix and match, and no matter what you bring to the table, it will all work together! Part of this planning was inspired by knowing that one day we would want to introduce alternate game modes to Riot Quest: completely different ways to play that would shake up the entire experience.
The first alternate mode we introduced was Boss Fights, a co-op experience in which players work together to vanquish a mighty villain before their Crews get knocked out. Season 1 of Riot Quest ended with the Malvin & Mayhem Boss Fight, and Season 2 has raised the stakes with the introduction of the harrowing Karchev & Deathjack Boss Fight.
However, we’ve introduced a new mode of play in this Kickstarter, and it’s the one I want to take some time to discuss in more detail today. And that is…Heist mode!
Heist, which provides a new way to battle against your friends, replaces the standard way of winning a game of Riot Quest with a more capture-the-flag style experience. For starters, you don’t use any Bounty cards or Scrap cards in Heist, and no one ever scores any Victory Points. You can use any Heroes, Riot Gear cards, and maps you like, but your Bounty and Scrap cards are instead replaced by Security and Bot cards. We’ll get to those in a bit.
In Heist, you play a Crew of exactly five Heroes, no more and no less, along with five Riot Gear cards. Unlike standard Riot Quest, all five models in your Crew can be in play at once! Once you’ve got your Crew set up and you’re ready to play, you’ve first got to establish your base.
Each player receives a base at the start of the game, which is placed on a random Spawn Gate that doesn’t already have another player’s base on it. When the game begins, each player spawns all five of their Heroes into play adjacent to their base. As the game progresses, however, knocked-out Heroes returning to the Arena spawn at a random Spawn Gate that isn’t another player’s base. This means your Crew begins to the game together and ready for action, but as the action progresses, your team will get scattered around the map.
Since each base belongs to a different player, that’s the location where they are trying to deposit all the “flags” in order to win the game, “flags” in Heist mode being represented, of course, by Treasure Chests.
After the bases are set up, the players set up all six Treasure Chests from their chosen Treasure deck, one chest per treasure beacon. Unlike normal Riot Quest, in which only one chest is in play at a time to be looted and discarded, in Heist mode all six Treasure Chests remain in play throughout the game. The chests can be picked up and carried by Heroes by spending Action Dice, and most important, they can be dropped off at a player’s base in the same way. Once a chest has been put down, it can be picked back up by anyone, even if it’s on a base, so you’ve got to defend any chests you bring back to base before the game ends!
As for Loot, well, those chests can still be opened by anyone who is carrying one, but neither the Treasure Chest nor its card gets discarded when this happens. This means you’ll have plenty of ways to get all that sweet gear equipped to your characters with all the money you’re making mid-heist!
There’s one last bit of set up to do in a Heist game, and that’s to build your Security deck and set up your Bots. The Heist expansion has fifteen different Security cards representing the security system of the place our Heroes are trying to rob. You randomly choose five of these cards, shuffle them, and lay them out face down in a line left to right. The unchosen cards aren’t used until perhaps your next game.
The five cards you’ve selected act at the game’s overall timer and as a way to mess with both you and your opponents as the game progresses. At the start of each round, you flip over the next card in the line. As long as a card is face up, its effects are in play. This means on round 1, you’ll only have to contend with one Security effect, but by round 4 you’ll have to contend with four cards, the ones flipped over at the start of rounds 1, 2, 3, and 4!
When the fifth card is flipped, that marks the beginning of the last round of the game. This means that games of Heist always last exactly 5 rounds. At the end of the fifth round, whichever player has the most Treasure Chests deposited on their base wins the game!
Check out a few of the Security cards you might run into during your games:
You might have noticed the reference to Alarm tokens on that last card. Alarm is a new resource your Heroes gain that causes very bad things to happen to them. Each time a Hero attacks, picks up a chest, or begins their turn holding a chest, they gain an Alarm token. When a Hero leaves the map for any reason, they lose all of their Alarm tokens. Different Security cards and Bot cards reference Alarm in different ways, but you can be sure that you never want to have too much of it at a time.
Speaking of reasons not to get too much Alarm, let’s talk about the Bots. While the security system of the Arena is represented by the Security deck, the physical guards of the place are represented by Bot miniatures and cards.
There are three types of Bots: Jailers, Sirens, and Protectors. Jailers are offensive Bots looking to knock out Heroes in the Arena; Sirens are trying to add Alarm tokens to everyone; and Protectors are trying to make Heroes drop any Treasure Chests they’re are holding.
The Heist expansion comes with two stat cards for each type of Bot, but in each game, you only use exactly three Bots. You have to have one Jailer, one Siren, and one Protector, and the multiple cards for each give you some variance between games. Once you’ve built the Security deck, you choose which Bot cards to use, and then set up the three Bot models in the center of the Arena. These Bot models can’t be damaged or removed from the Arena in any way, so you’re better off avoiding them than trying to punch them.
At the start of each player’s turn, that player rolls a d3 to determine which Bot is active during that turn and places the active token on the Bot’s card. When a Bot isn’t active, most of its rules aren’t in effect, meaning players only have to worry about one Bot each turn doing horrible things to them. Of course, Bots are usually attracted to those Heroes with the most Alarm tokens, so you can often use an active Bot to try to beat up your opponent’s Heroes with some cunning moves during your turn.
Check out this example of a Bot stat card to get an idea of what you might be facing:
And that’s the basics of Heist mode! There are a few other minor details, such as how Riot Gear that affects Treasure Chests doesn’t work quiet right in Heist, but you can read up on all those in the rules insert included in every Heist expansion. Everything you need to know about how to play the game is contained on a single double-sided full color insert, so the rules are simple enough…but they sure do change completely the way the game is played.
We hope you enjoy Heist mode, the new Boss Fight, and all the other new offerings in the Chilly Con Carnage Kickstarter! If you haven’t had a chance to back it, be sure to go visit the project page soon, as time is running out before the Kickstarter ends!
