Quests of Valeria Review

You know when you are playing an RPG (either paper or video game) and you roll up to an NPC quest-giver? Ever wonder what they do all day besides waiting for you to show up and get a quest from them? How do they decide which quests to give each adventurer? How do you get a job like that? I want to be a quest-giver NPC! Well now you can. Enter Quests of Valeria.

Quests of Valeria is another great game in the Valeriaverse, but this time the players are all essentially agents, or Guild Masters, that assign quests to eager adventurers just loitering at the Inn. Can you manipulate, I mean use, the adventurers’ strengths appropriately to complete quests and gain fame and notoriety? Will you be able to manage your resources to pay these adventurers for performing these quests in your stead? Such is your plight in Quests of Valeria.

DISCLAIMER: I do not intend to cover every single rule included in the rule book, but will describe the overall game flow and major rule set so that our readers may get a sense of how the game plays. For more in depth rules, you may purchase a copy from the publisher directly or from your FLGS. -T

To setup, each player is dealt a Guild Master card that they must keep secret for the duration of the game. These cards outline how each player can earn bonus points at the end of the game for completing specific categories of quests. Deal each player three citizen cards to start. Numerically place the tokens in the Tavern (middle of the table) to denote how much it will cost (in discarded cards) to recruit citizens that reside under them. Deal out six face-up quest cards above the Tavern line. Determine who will be the First Player, give them the corresponding token and the 1 & 2 tokens. You are ready to play.

On your turn you will be able to take two actions – and that’s why you have the 1 & 2 tokens to keep track. Turns can be lengthy, so it is important to keep track of which action you are on currently. Your action choices are Draw, Hire, Reserve, and Quest. To use a Draw action you simply draw a citizen card from the top of the deck. Done. To Hire, you need to discard cards from your hand or your tableau to meet the cost of the card in the Tavern line. For instance, you want the Merchant, but he is currently sitting under the 2 token in the Tavern line. So you discard 2 cards, hire the Merchant, place him in your tableau in front of you, and then reap the benefits of the hire printed on the bottom of the Merchant card. This could be Drawing another card, performing another Hire action, or several other combinations of actions. You can grab a quest card from the face-up area above the Tavern line and place it in your tableau when you perform a Reserve action. You may only have one quest in your tableau, but that means that no other player can complete that specific quest. You may complete that quest by using a Quest action in the future and paying its completion cost. Each quest card also has benefits to enjoy upon completion, and counts toward the end game condition of one player completing their fifth quest. Once that happens, the round is completed so that each player has played an equal amount of turns. Count up your VPs from your completed quests and from your Guild Master to determine the winner!

Components. This game is in a small box (a la Tiny Epic style games) and has a few cardboard tokens and a lot of cards. The tokens are all thick and of great quality. The cards are really nice and feature incredible art by The Mico (as do all of the Valeriaverse games). The iconography is easy to understand if you are familiar with other Valeria games. While they make perfect sense to me, the icons may be a little confusing to new players, but luckily the rule book explains these nicely, and the players are provided player aid reference cards. I never have any qualms with Daily Magic Games’ components and they always deliver high-quality games.

At the time of this review composition, I have not yet had the opportunity to play Corsairs of Valeria or Margraves of Valeria. That being said, while I view Quests of Valeria to be the weakest of the Valeria games, I still rated it a 5 out of 6. This game is really good and gives me the flavor of Lords of Waterdeep in a much smaller package with less play time. That’s a GOOD thing. I love Lords of Waterdeep, but I know I will be spending well over an hour teaching and playing LoW, when I can spend less than an hour teaching and playing Quests of Valeria. I feel that though this isn’t necessarily considered a worker placement game, there are certainly elements of it: you spend your citizens to complete quests that nobody else can complete. You reserve quests so that others cannot complete them. Sounds like worker placement to me. Only missing the meeples. All in all, this is a great game that should not be overlooked. If you are a fan of the Valeria games, you owe it to yourself to give this one a shot. Don’t want to buy it? Ok, come visit and I’ll play it with you. Purple Phoenix Games gives this one a shadowy-figure-in-the-corner-of-the-inn 15 / 18.