Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall Components Overview and Impressions
When I review games, we always like to do a separate components overview and impressions article prior to writing our full review. Components in a game are pretty important in my opinion, and can impact your enjoyment of a game. When publishers – like Incredible Dream Studios who sent this over – also send us the upgrade kit, we like to talk about that as well. So let’s hop into this one: is the high price tag attached to Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall demonstrated in the production? Let’s take a look!
When it comes to campaign games, not enough companies offer you the opportunity to learn as you play. Oftentimes you’ll get a massive rulebook and a box full of crap, and it’s up to you to figure it all out. Not here, and that’s where I want to start. When you lift the lid off Kinfire Chronicles you are met with an interior removable box, your Welcome Box.
Inside the Welcome Box you find your first of many little rulebooks. It shows how to construct the various health dials, how to construct the player boards (found within character portfolios), details your deck and how it’s structured, and so much more.
It really is a “Welcome to the game!” sort of moment where you learn all the basics. Also included in this box is the Destiny Bag where chits will go, and the chits for the bag, beautiful little plastic pieces. For a game that has you reaching into a bag and pulling out stuff, I love that plastic is part of the base game.
The first rulebook will encourage you to open the first quest portfolio, and inside you find the next rulebook. And this will continue through various quests until you’ve learned all the mechanics of the game. It allowed us to get playing much faster than maybe we would have otherwise, and I’m so appreciative of that.
The interior of the box is well organized. All of the nearly 2 dozen quests – a mixture of main quests and side quests – are neatly organized in a row, each labelled on the spine, and when put together they create a nice panorama picture.
Nestled next to the quest folios is the Loot Box, which includes packs of cards – copper, silver, and gold – that you’ll open as the game progresses, cards for when you arrive at towns and cities, and a bunch of other stuff. Also in the box are the character folios, which includes player boards, an acrylic standee (included in the box), and a players starting deck.
The game uses quite a bit of cardboard, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing here. It’s amazing quality, and when you need to punch them out – again, slowly provided to you as you need them, like the rulebooks – they come out so easy; we never tore any pieces.
There are cardboard coins that you’ll spend at shops, Kinfire tokens that provide you the ability to customize your deck, and chips that allow you to sway destiny in your favor. Within the various quest boxes you’ll find quest cards – these can include prompts, overlays, and a variety of other things that we don’t spoil – enemy shits which are linen finish and quite large, and cardboard standees for the enemies. The art on the standees is fantastic, as is the art across all the cards in my opinion.
Overall, the components in the core box are phenomenal, and if that’s all I owned, or perhaps all I knew, that would be that. But there is an Upgrade Kit 2.0, and well…
The Upgrade Kit
Listen, I generally tell people to not purchase upgrade kits or “bling” out their games unless it’s something they really enjoy. When I saw what came in the Kinfire Chronicles Upgrade Kit, I knew I had to have it. The neoprene player mats are cool, but generally unnecessary, but everything else in the kit was something I really wanted.
Acrylic enemy standees replace all the cardboard standees. Metal tokens replace some cardboard tokens. But most importantly, in my opinion, there are card sleeves themed for all the characters. In a game where you shuffle cards a lot, having sleeves is going to be pretty important. And while I recognize that I can easily buy sleeves at a much cheaper cost that are NOT Kinfire Chronicles themed, having themed sleeves for each character is just a really nice upgrade.
If you think Kinfire Chronicles is something you are going to enjoy, then buy the Upgrade Kit. I’m not saying that because it’s required to offset a flaw in the base experience, but because it elevates it in really positive ways.
Overall, I’m impressed with everything we got here from Incredible Dream Studios, and we cannot wait to dive into this experience more soon! Oh yah! Did I tell you the lid (cover) for the box doubles as a board? How awesome and useful is that!
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Article By Adam Roffel
