Board game review of Amulet: Tetris-style monster hunting

At the beginning of the year, Amulet, the next Spieleschmiede project from the German game publisher Grimspire, started in collaboration with Jet Games Studio. Thematically, the game is strongly reminiscent of the popular book and video game series The Witcher, whose board game adaptation will soon be over Asmodee will appear. However, Amulet playfully chooses a completely different way to fight the monsters. You can find out how we liked the game, which can be played both competitively and cooperatively, in the following review.

Evil forces emerge from the dark ruins and terrorize the kingdom. 5 brave heroes try to fight these monsters day after day. To do this, they visit various locations to strengthen themselves, refresh their equipment and complete tasks. Only if they are well prepared can they emerge victorious from the battles, fill their amulet with power and rise to the kingdom's hero guild as the greatest monster hunter.

Mix of worker placement and Tetris

In Amulet, a round (day) consists of 4 phases: twilight, morning, evening and night. As twilight prepares for the round, morning and evening actions are resolved. At night, the undefeated monsters attack the players and activate one-time and ongoing negative effects.

To resolve actions in the morning and evening, we place our hero in classic worker placement style on one of the nine locations on the game board and carry out the corresponding action. While 3 locations are haunted by monsters that we have to fight, the remaining 6 locations are there to prepare our hero for the fights. For example, we can heal ourselves, repair weapons we use, buy special spells and potions, complete missions to get experience points and bonuses, and chase away undefeated monsters - from previous rounds - to strengthen our amulet.

If we place our hero on a place infested with monsters, we can fight one of the monsters in the place. These are hidden and only give us information about how many experience points and what reward we will receive if we win, as well as where the monsters' weak points are. Once we have selected a monster, we have to decide before the fight on up to two weapons that we would like to take into battle. The card can then be turned over and we can use our weapons to puzzle our way to victory against the monster. The weapons are polyomino tiles that have to be cleverly placed in the monster's 6×4 grid in order to fight it. In order to emerge victorious from the fight, all of the monster's weak points must be covered by the weapons.

While 2 of the 3 haunted locations contain “normal” monsters that can be fought with the support of a warrior and a priestess, the dungeon offers a legendary monster that is particularly tough and must be fought alone. Here you have to go into battle well prepared and ideally equipped with spells and potions in order to be victorious. In addition, you don't know beforehand where the monster's weak points are, which represents an additional risk factor. However, if you win the fight, you gain many important victory points.

The eponymous amulet

By fighting the monsters, you receive not only victory points but also experience points and a reward in the form of gemstones for our amulet. With experience points we can improve our hero individually and thus adapt our playing style a little, because each of the 5 available heroes has a unique skill tree. We improve this using the arrows from bottom to top. Once we have unlocked an ability, it is available to us for the rest of the game.

The amulet, on the other hand, gives us additional victory points if we equip its settings with the right gemstones. If we manage to completely surround a segment of the amulet with gemstones, we receive additional victory points. Therefore, when selecting monsters before battle, it is also important to pay attention to the rewards. If we cleverly choose the monsters that give us the gemstones we need, we can enter them directly into our amulet and don't have to go through a complicated route to exchange our gemstones.

The end of the game occurs as soon as the monster stack has been completely used up, which takes 6 - 8 rounds depending on the number of players playing. All victory points from defeated monsters, completed segments and smaller remaining values ​​are then added together with the minus points for debuffs. The hero with the most points rises in the Heroes Guild and is the lucky winner.

Can also be played cooperatively

In addition to the competitive mode, Amulet also comes with a cooperative game mode. Here we have to fulfill three challenges together and each player has to fulfill a personal oath. A game here usually plays out the same as in the competitive version, only now we pay attention to our challenges. At the end of the day, we shouldn't have too many monsters attacking us, because depending on the level of difficulty, a certain number of monsters must have been fought. In addition, our group of heroes must not die too often and must fill a certain number of segments of the amulets with power. If we fail to complete one of the challenges, the game is lost. The cooperative mode can also be played solo. There are only a few small changes here compared to the multiplayer version. Basically, it can be played just as well.

Conclusion

Amulet offers an interesting mix of worker placement and polyomino placement game, which we enjoyed but wasn't completely convincing. In its competitive version, the game offers little scope for interaction. You spend a lot of the time playing in front of yourself and figuring out your fights, because this is where the big focus lies. Missions, which, when completed, provide bonuses for everyone involved and also improve the action of a location on the game board, were largely neglected during our test games because the player simply didn't see the point in wasting their valuable weapon on more valuable monsters instead can defeat. To clarify: Orders can be completed by all players together, but you can only equip one weapon per turn. However, missions require at least 2 - 3 weapons to be completed. If the mission has been completed, the weapon is damaged. If it is not fulfilled, you have one less weapon because it is on the order.

Due to the strong focus on the fights, the eponymous amulet also seemed unimportant in terms of point distribution. In our test games, we always managed to fill the amulet completely through the fights. This means that the victory points generated were irrelevant for the final score, as everyone generated the same number of victory points.

In terms of cooperation, the game element of the amulet also does not offer us any significant added value. By completing the challenges and vows, the focus is simply not on earning points. However, the orders get more interesting here! Because now the idea of ​​competition is gone and we are fighting together to achieve our goals. Instead, improving actions here and there is more important than fighting monsters. In addition, Amulet cooperatively has a significantly higher level of interaction between the players. However, the game just feels out of place here too. The tasks of the oaths are thrown out as if at random and simply don't give you a good feeling once you've completed them.

When it comes to components, Amulet comes with double-layered player boards, high-quality miniatures, thick cardboard tiles and cards with a linen structure, but we are extremely disappointed that there are no storage options within the box. No inlay, not even a single bag in which we could store all the tokens. Everything flies wildly around the box and wears out quickly. For Amulet you definitely need a supply of storage options, otherwise the game setup will be hell.

In summary, Amulet's ideas are quite interesting, but there are a lot of problems with their implementation. However, we would like to emphasize that Amulet is by no means a bad game! In our test games we always had the same reaction “Yeah… it was nice” and that’s really true. You can definitely have fun with Amulet, especially if all the little inconsistencies don't bother you.

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