Review: Return to Dark Tower: Covenant:: Return to Return to Dark Tower (a Space-Biff! review)

by The Innocent

Return to Return to Dark Tower

I’m wary of expansions. Doubly so when it comes to expansions for adventure games. Back in its heyday, Fantasy Flight Games couldn’t resist the temptation to overload any successful title with additional cruft. New decks, new characters, new sideboards. Shudder. So many sideboards. After a couple expansions, setup became so daunting that it was easier to leave it all in the closet.

So when Alliances and Covenant, the first two expansions for Return to Dark Tower, showed up on my doorstep, I was both excited and apprehensive. No small measure of the original remake’s appeal was its dedication to a streamlined experience. Would the addition of new stuff be the accidental conclusion of my love affair with Return to Dark Tower?

I shouldn’t have worried. As usual, the crew at Restoration Games has a preternatural understanding of what makes games tick. What follows are three ways that these expansions, in particular Covenant, get it right.

#1: Expanding the Geography without a Single Sideboard

Sometimes an expansion will shore up a weakness I wasn’t even aware the original game contained. Oh, I remember thinking to myself that the landscape of Return to Dark Tower was a little too easily traversed. In theory, hopping from one end of the kingdom to the other should be no small feat. But for the most part, our heroes could circumnavigate the entire continent by sticking close to the tower’s shadow.

Which is why wastelands, the most infuriating addition to Covenant, are absolutely wonderful.

On paper, they’re nothing of the sort. During play, they’re nothing of the sort. These tokens are added to the map courtesy of the app, one more event among all the other terrible things that can befall you. And yeah, they’re nasty. Whatever the big bad is up to, it’s despoiling the land. Every few months, another handful of territories are ruined. And these wastelands are awful. The gist is that your hero is halted in their tracks whenever they move into one. At first, it’s no big deal. The geography is sufficiently tangled that there will be ways around any obstacle. By the third and fourth month of the game, getting from one place to another is a real pain in the butt. In some cases, essential destinations will become isolated.

But in addition to being incredibly annoying to bypass, wastelands also produce high-stakes drama. Return to Dark Tower always thrived when it was forcing heroes to decide which threats to respond to. Now these decisions are more than a question of time, but actual positioning and reach. Need to slay a dragon before it steals your treasure? Hope to reach a quest before it expires? Worried that a village will be overtaken by blight? These questions are still present, but demand new considerations. Rather than beelining toward whatever objective is most pressing, now you’re asking whether you can actually reach them in time, or whether it’s worthwhile getting bogged down in the middle of a cluster of wastelands.

As a tidy side-effect, the map feels bigger and more dangerous. There’s more need for heroes to collaborate, to identify opportune meeting points to swap items, or to request aid from a fellow hero on the other side of the border. In some cases, one of the map’s quadrants might be riven down the middle, encouraging heroes to step outside of their native lands and patrol unusual borders. For such a simple addition with almost no overhead, these expand and enliven the landscape without adding even one sideboard.

#2: More, But Not More

One of my concerns with any expansion is that it will make the game it’s expanding too complicated. Return to Dark Tower works because it’s so straightforward. The heavy lifting is handled by the app, especially by shuffling all those enemy decks and backgrounding all those event tables, which is why it’s one of the few digital components that eases frustration rather than exacerbating it. But it’s a delicate balance. An expansion needs to justify its purchase without adding so much that the game tips over into clutter.

Both Alliances and Covenant add more stuff, but they’re smart about adding decisions and breadth without tossing in a whole bunch of junk.

Take the skulls as one prime example. As anyone who’s played Return to Dark Tower knows, skulls are important, both for marking how corrupted a location has become and because they’re the actual physical component you dump into the tower to signal to the table (and the app) that you’re done with your turn. Both expansions transform skulls from a secondary problem that simmers in the background and ought to be solved before it boils over, into a problem that may ripple outward and cause trouble elsewhere. In Covenant, the alteration is simple enough: some skulls are a black doom variant. Unlike their regular counterparts, these can’t be removed. Which means they need to be stacked carefully, or sometimes moved to secure locales.

Alliances has more fun with them. Power skulls they’re called, and depending on which baddie you’re facing they can have a range of effects. Frost skulls drain your spirit when you enter their space. Fire skulls kill some warriors. Blight skulls corrode your items. Because they’re tougher to deal with, they transform “skull maintenance” from a B-list chore into something everyone has to pitch in on.

The same goes for the other stuff in these boxes. One of my hangups with the base game was its inclusion of only four heroes. Now there are ten; two from Alliances and four from Covenant. This allows players to tinker with various combos. To be sure, some are more complex than others. There’s the Reverent Astromancer, who gets an entire deck of one-shot incantations to fire off, or the Relentless Warden, with her hawk friend that can harry enemies into ambushes. Even at their most complex, however, they never stray far from the basics. While a few of them require extra tokens or cards, these additional components are dead simple to use. It’s a tradition of adding more stuff without adding too much of it.

#3. Tradeoffs Are Everything

Another pitfall of expansion design is when an expansion thinks it needs to add too many new things to do. Return to Dark Tower works because its central quest is largely unfettered. Your objective is to kill the big bad. To do that, you need to undertake a few quests. To survive long enough to undertake those quests, you need to clean up skulls and slay monsters and not become too corrupted. To do that, you’ll need to gather warriors and items and level up your character a couple of times. The entire structure is nested such that your goals are always feeding into the next thing. While it’s possible to lose focus by chasing sidequests or developing an awkward compulsion for driving direwolves to extinction (Geoff), it’s never hard to get back on track.

These expansions keep that nested structure intact. They don’t send you off in new directions, but instead add tradeoffs. These might take you off the beaten path for a while, demanding time and resources, but following those threads offers significant rewards that hook back into the game’s core progression toward taking down the main boss.

In Alliances, the big tradeoff is the guild system. These are extra tracks that offer rewards as heroes keep towns clear of skulls and visit guildhalls, but might dip downward if they’re destroyed or guild quests are failed. The rewards are considerable, including guild-specific companions, but there is some extra complexity to consider. Sometimes too much, quirking the needle toward fiddly, especially thanks to that additional quest each month. It’s a fine addition, layering a strategic sheen over everything else, but it isn’t my favorite way to play.

The smoother option is found in Covenant. When the game begins, certain buildings are replaced with the foundations of special monuments. These are paired with objectives, things like “End your turn adjacent to two buildings with skulls” or “Lose eight or more warriors in battle.” When met, you add a cube to the foundation; after three have been added, you can travel to the foundation to build the monument itself.

And monuments are incredible. To give but one example, our most recent play saw me completing the Colossus of Björn. Things had grown dire: the enemy boss was roving the countryside, destroying structures willy-nilly, and so much of the landscape had been reduced to wasteland that we couldn’t reach him in time. Fortunately, the Colossus turned out to be a titanic automaton that could scoop me up and travel to any space on the map. Within only a few turns, it had dragged me to the remotest corners of the continent, where I slammed the boss into a pulp. Probably accompanied by the wailing of a hundred metal guitars.

All told, I’m thrilled with how these expansions turned out. Oh, sure, one is better than the other. (It’s Covenant.) And it would have been nice had the guilds and monuments been compatible with one another. But once again, Return to Dark Tower is still my reigning champion when it comes to a grand adventure in a single sitting, one that can excite both me and my ten-year-old. A day may come when a future expansion ruins the experience and relegates it to the closet — but it is not this day.


This review was originally published at Space-Biff!, so if you like what you see, please head over there for more. https://spacebiff.com/2024/04/04/return-to-dark-tower-2/

Also, I suppose I ought to plug my Geeklist of reviews: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/169963/space-biff-histori...

A complimentary copy of the base game was provided