Splendent Vale was formed by a strange red meteor that changed more than just the landscape: flora and fauna were both affected in unusual ways, and settlers soon found that the remnants of the meteor—known as materia—had magical qualities. Four friends, each a different type of artisan, explore the valley and uncover its mysteries.
What Is Artisans of Splendent Vale?
Artisans of Splendent Vale is a legacy* campaign game for 2 to 4 players, ages 14 and up. The play time according to the website is 45–90 minutes per session, though in my experience it is significantly longer and I usually plan for 2 to 3 hours per session with my kids. It retails for $110 and is available directly from Renegade Games and other game stores. Artisans includes both a narrative portion with a lot of reading and a tactical battle portion, so if you’re playing with kids it helps if they have both strong reading skills and some experience with tactics. (I’ve been playing with my own kids—ages 20, 17, and 10—and we’ve enjoyed it, but we often assist the 10-year-old in the strategy portion.) I’ll also note that there is occasionally content that is more geared toward adults and young adults, such as when one of the characters goes to a local bar—there’s nothing explicit, but romantic encounters are implied.
*In a legacy game, some components will be permanently altered as you play the game: in Artisans, you’ll place stickers on things and you’ll write all over the character sheets and the map. The game is meant to be played through once to experience the story, though if you want to play it again (or give it to somebody else to play) there is a recharge pack available for $15 that replaces all of the components that have been used up or altered for another playthrough.
Artisans of Splendent Vale was designed by Nikki Valens and published by Renegade Games, with illustrations by MK Castaneda, Cleonique Hilsaca, Lisa Pearce, Christina Pittre, and Lil Chan.
Artisans of Splendent Vale Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
- Action Scene book
- Card Index box with over 200 cards
- Components box
- 2 Terrain tokens
- Adventure Log/World Map
- 4 Character books
- 4 bookmarks
- 4 pencils
- 4 Character boxes
- Initiative Tracker
- 5 Damage dials
- 12 dice
- 4 Character sheets
- 84 Condition tokens (8 types)
- 64 Meeples
This is a hefty box—it does fit in a Kallax shelf cubby, but it’s a double-height box, so it’ll take up about half of the cube by itself. And it’s heavy, largely due to the four character books—they’re softcovers, but each one has about as many pages as a full-length novel—which also come in a nice sturdy slipcase.
The action scene book is a large spiral-bound book; it includes a map for each scene, and you play directly on the book itself. It also includes an initiative track so you know the order that players and enemies will act each round, and includes rules for the scene.
The character sheets are tri-fold; one side is used during the action scenes and includes all of your abilities, your inventory, and tracks your damage, among other things. The other side (shown above) is used for spending your experience points (XP) and leveling up your character, as well as crafting. One of the really cool things about Artisans is that each character has a different way that they craft items—the sheets aren’t just cosmetically different, but actually give entirely unique methods of crafting.
There’s a map of Splendent Vale that has a lot of locations marked but they’re all blank—as you play through the campaign, you’ll learn of different locations and fill them in on the map, and then check them off once you’ve explored them. The back side of the map is your adventure log, with a section to record important events that happened each day—you’ll be instructed when to write something down.
The card index box has a magnetic flap that keeps it shut, and it stores a huge deck of oversized cards. The rulebook doesn’t actually say how many cards are included, and I didn’t count! The original Kickstarter campaign lists 217 cards, but the final count may actually have exceeded that. The cards have a little index number at the corner so you can sort through them easily, but because there are some duplicates (e.g. 21A and 21B) and some numbers that are skipped over, it wasn’t easy for me to tell at a glance. Many of the cards are color-coded for the specific characters, or else for the type of card. Also, many of the cards include stickers that peel off the cards and are applied to the character sheets or other cards when abilities are added.
The meeples are very cute, with lots of custom shapes and some screen printing for some additional details. There are three sizes of meeples—”smol,” medium, and large, with some special abilities that apply to characters based on their size.
The enemy meeples are numbered so that you can track specific units of the same type: there’s a little die icon screen-printed on each meeple. My only complaint about these is that the icons are quite small, so I often have to pick up a meeple to see which number it is.
The dice are pearlescent pink custom dice, engraved with various icons that you’ll use for the action scenes, from attacks to movement to defense.
You’ll see some more of the components in later photos, but overall Artisans of Splendent Vale has very nice components—the health dials are cleverly designed to be double-sided to allow for higher values, and the initiative tracker is metal (kind of shaped like a guitar pick, but thicker).
The artwork is terrific, too—colorful and filled with all sorts of fantastical creatures and a diverse cast of characters. This is a game that has a great look right from the box cover and all the way through the books and the rest of the bits.
How to Play Artisans of Splendent Vale
You can download a copy of the rulebook here. Artisans of Splendent Vale is a campaign game, where you will be experiencing a long story over the course of about 20 scenes. Each scene has its own specific goals, though many of them are battle-type scenes that involve defeating enemies or reaching a specific location before any of the characters has been defeated.
The game has two primary game modes, the narrative story portion and the action scene portion. There is some initial setup involved when you first begin the campaign to get your characters ready, but then you typically start each session by choosing a location to explore, which instructs you to turn to a specific chapter of your book.
The books are set up so that most of the book is the same for everyone, but there are also some character-specific passages and even entire character-specific chapters. Any player can read the main narration, and if you see a character’s icon in the book then you pause to let that player read their passage. (These sections are often little asides or observations, so you get a fuller picture if you have all four characters in play, but it doesn’t break the story if that character is absent.) The narratives sometimes have choices to make, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Many of the scenes will include a map of some sort, at which point everyone can look for numbers on the map. Each number corresponds to a chapter, and characters can decide what they want to explore, and then return to the map. Just like the narrative sections, there are often some slight differences for each character. In the photo above, you can see that one character has a “40” on their map, but another character doesn’t—that means that only one person has Chapter 40 to explore on their own, because it’s something that their character is particularly interested in, or has a unique ability to notice.
Inevitably, you’ll reach a point in the story where an action scene takes place. Some sessions have multiple (shorter) action scenes, but most of the time there’s one major scene each “day.” This is when you segue from the narrative part of the game to the more typical tabletop game portion.
Setup
Each action scene is on a two-page spread of the action scene book and includes setup instructions: which enemies are used and where they are placed on the map, how much health each one has, and any special instructions that may come into play.
You roll 8 dice to form your initial dice pool and then set the rest nearby in a supply. Each character gets to choose which of their equipment to bring to the scene—you get two hands’ worth of weapons, up to two trinkets, and up to two of their skills.
Gameplay
Turn order is determined by the initiative track at the top of the page, and it varies from scene to scene. Boss characters often get more than one turn per round, but player characters and minions usually only go once per round.
Enemy turns are pretty straightforward: you roll a die, consult the enemy’s chart, and do what it says. Enemies will move around (usually toward the nearest player) and then attack or add various conditions to themselves or others. Conditions can do things like strengthen or weaken you, speed you up or slow you down, and so on.
On your turn, you first roll three dice from the supply and add them to the pool, and then you perform two actions, with a maximum of one attack action. When you first start the game, you each have some basic equipment and similar actions available: move, punch, and defend. As you level up, though, you’ll be able to unlock new abilities and the characters start to diverge, and you’ll have access to more complex and powerful actions. These are all tracked on your character sheet, with stickers added when you learn new abilities (and sometimes stickered over when you upgrade an ability).
You spend a die from the pool to take an action matching that die on your character sheet or one of your items. Many actions will allow you to roll dice as part of the action—if you roll a symbol that matches the action, then it adds to the strength of the action. You may also optionally spend a boost (the + sign) to boost the action, increasing both the value of the action and the number of dice you roll.
For instance, Harinya’s starting weapon (pictured above) is a slingshot, which is a ranged weapon—here it has been upgraded so it does 2 damage (plus one die for bonus damage) and has a range of 3. It requires the “pow” face of the die to use. If you boost it, you add 1 to the underlined number, so it does 3 damage and you roll 2 dice for bonus damage, but it is still range 3. The back side of the slingshot card has two more potential upgrades that can be unlocked, in which case those stickers will be applied to the front of the card as well.
Skill cards are pretty powerful but can only be used once per scene, and are then depleted until the end of the scene.
Damage to characters is tracked on your sheet, and each time you get 6 damage, you’ll gain an injury—there are injury cards in the index box, each with their own effects. Various effects will help you recover from an injury or aggravate the injury. Unlike many games, damage doesn’t automatically reset at the end of the scene, so you do need to be careful taking too much damage and then charging into the next scene.
Since characters don’t die or get knocked out by taking damage—they just accumulate injuries—the action scene just continues until you have achieved your goal, often defeating a specific set of enemies but sometimes there are other goals. The instructions always tell you what chapter to read once you’ve achieved your goal, but some scenes can have multiple outcomes depending on what happened.
Each scene will award you with some XP, which you can spend to mark off spaces on your XP chart, potentially unlocking new abilities.
The end of each day includes an interlude card: each character has their own deck of interlude cards, and you draw one and choose an option from the bottom. Generally, there will be one option that is unique to that card and leads to reading a chapter, while the others let you either craft something or do something from your to-do list. There are some interludes that involve more than one character, so you can only choose it if all the involved players agree to do that one rather than anything else.
Crafting is one of the ways you gain new equipment or upgrade existing equipment. As I mentioned before, every character has a unique way of crafting. One of the neat things is that if not all of the characters are in play, they can still show up as NPCs to help you craft things. Soraya collects runes, and if she knows the right runes for an item she can craft to unlock new abilities, as in the Bear Figurine trinket shown above.
Javi’s crafting is actually tied into his XP track, so he spends material and XP together to create things. Harinya is the apothecary and creates various potions by choosing two ingredients and then consulting a chart to see what they make. Farah the tailor has to find inspiration from various places, which then combine to give them ideas of things to craft.
At the end of each day, you conclude by reading a chapter as directed by the adventure log for that day, which includes a transition into the next session’s adventure.
Why You Should Play Artisans of Splendent Vale
There’s an Instagram account I follow called Honest Board Games, which takes board game covers and changes the title to something funny but descriptive. Their take on Artisans of Splendent Vale was to title it “CuteHaven,” and I think it’s an apt description, though there are some important clarifications. Like Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, Artisans is a legacy game where you choose scenarios from a map and often experience a dungeon-crawl type of battle. And, yes, it’s colorful and cute! One thing that sets it apart (aside from the specifics of gameplay) is that Artisans is much more narrative-based, where the amount of time you’ll spend reading the story and exploring the map is a significantly higher proportion than the amount of time you spend reading the story portions in Gloomhaven.
I’ve mentioned Artisans a few times before—I’ve been eager to play it, but since I’m playing it with my three kids, we’ve had to schedule sessions for when my oldest is home from college and the rest of us are also free. Since it tends to take a big chunk of time to complete a session, that has led to some scheduling trickiness. (It’s complicated by the fact that we play on the living room floor, so then we also have to take into account when the cat isn’t going to be wandering through!) Although you can pause in the middle of a “day” and resume, that’s easier to do during the narrative portion of the game and harder to do in the action scenes, unless you have a place where you can leave it set up until the next time you play.
We did manage to play several times during the summer and a few more over winter break, so I’m up to about a dozen plays and my guess (based on the map) is that we’re about halfway through the campaign. Renegade Games’ website says the whole campaign takes about 40 to 50 hours to complete, but, at our pace, I think it may be double that. With that in mind, Artisans is a game that you’ll need a regular group to play with, and you should expect it to take somewhere around 20 sessions or so. I imagine with fewer players each session will go more quickly, but I did like having all four characters present for the fuller story. (I noted that the website says the game takes 45–90 minutes per session, but some of the action scenes list that they take up to 120 minutes, not including the narrative portion of that day, so I’m not sure how that math works out.)
The world of Artisans has been a blast to explore: there are lizard people and carnivorous flowers and what my kids call “goo people.” We’ve explored farms and forests, abandoned academies and busy warehouses. One thing I really appreciated was the diverse cast of characters and the way that you learn about their lives as the story unfolds: the four main characters are all people of color, most of them are queer, and two of them have visible disabilities. We even discovered while reading one of the chapters that one of the characters—the one that my trans son has been playing—is also trans, which was a very powerful moment to have that affirmation during the course of the game.
In fact, there have been a lot of ways in which the characters we chose have lined up with our own personalities, so we kind of lucked out. My youngest chose a character who is impulsive and chatty and loves animals; my middle kid gets excited about technology and scientific possibilities, sometimes without fully thinking through the consequences; my oldest loves being the tank in the battle scenes and defending everyone else. (My character doesn’t line up with my actual personality quite as much, but it has also been a lot of fun to dive into that role.)
One of the strengths of the game is simply the way that each character has their own strengths and quirks. Just one small example: at the front of each book, there’s a little section that describes all four characters from your own character’s perspective, and it shows you the sorts of things you care about. For instance, Harinya’s book lists each character’s birthday and favorite food, whereas Farah’s book notes each person’s favorite philosopher and also includes their dislikes. Little details like that really help to flesh out their personalities, which then also tie into the ways they craft items and the skills they can learn.
The level of customization has also been a big draw, especially for my kids. As you level up, you get to decide which paths on your chart to pursue. What I don’t know yet is whether we will eventually get all of our skills, or if there is a limited number of XP you can earn over the course of the game. I find myself hoping there’s not enough to reach every point on the chart, because that means your version of the character is uniquely yours, rather than just a step along the way of just getting everything.
There is one type of limitation, though, that will set your copy of Artisans apart from other players. There are wearable items that grant passive effects. Many of these can be assigned to any character—but you only get to make that choice once, because then the sticker is added to their character sheet and you can’t just move it to somebody else. What’s more, each character can wear one item each on their shoulders, arms, and legs (there are stickers customized to match each character’s portrait), so there’s an opportunity cost in selecting a piece of armor. (You do each get one alternate load-out option, so each character can have two outfits, but the particular combinations are set.)
The action scenes are the more typical tabletop game portion, and they’re fairly straightforward for the most part, with most being kind of like a dungeon crawl where you’re just fighting enemies, but there are some other types of scenes like escort missions where you need to get some ally characters to a location without taking too much damage, or chase scenes where you’re tracking down a bad guy. It does have some complexity to it—different types of terrain can hinder movement or cause damage, and there are lots of conditions to track—but it’s also a little easier than, say, Frosthaven. I enjoy that portion of the game myself, but my kids are a little less enthusiastic about it. I know my oldest is more interested in playing for the story and exploration part, and tolerates the action scenes as something we have to do to progress the story—but she’s impatient about only getting one turn each round, and then only getting one attack per turn. She wants to run in and double-smash things!
There was at least one action scene that seemed almost impossible to do—there were multiple possible outcomes, each leading to different chapters, and after playing it (and getting one of the “negative” outcomes), we looked back at our actions and what happened, and it was really unclear what we could have done differently. I don’t know that that scene was specifically set up for the party to fail, but it almost felt that way, and my kids were pretty frustrated feeling like we could have just saved ourselves an hour or so and jumped to the end of the story anyway.
One weird thing we’ve come across is when the gameplay doesn’t entirely line up with the narrative. For the most part, the action scenes are battles—you hit enemies, they hit you, and, at some point, you’ve eliminated the required enemies and the scene concludes. But the vibe of the story is that we aren’t warriors going out to conquer and subdue—we’re artisans. We make stuff. We run around looking for inspiration for our crafting, and it just so happens that sometimes we get mixed up in something larger, a mystery that we’re trying to solve. In one session, the story portion explained that the lizard people aren’t hostile—they’re just attacking because some villagers attacked them first, so maybe we can talk this out and not fight? And then the action scene began and… we punched some lizards. I think the disconnect comes because it’s still hard to break out of the established norms in games. So many of our games are built on ideas like colonialism: anything you find is yours to take, and anyone you run into is somebody to fight. We chased bandits out of a library to keep them from looting, and then “found” materials to add to our inventories. Old habits die hard.
Still, I love that this game is making an attempt, at least in the narrative, even if the gameplay doesn’t always match. This is a story that explores community and relationships and well-being as much as adventure and excitement. Sometimes we gather to help a character who’s feeling anxious; sometimes a character goes for a run by themselves to clear their mind. It’s a flawed but beautiful game that imagines a flawed beautiful world, in a way that expresses hope and joy, and that’s pretty great.
Artisans of Splendent Vale isn’t for everyone—it’s a deluxe game and a luxury to own, and it’s a big time commitment that can be difficult for many gaming groups. Depending on the age and experience level of your kids, it may not be appropriate. However, if you’ve got a committed group and they’re up for an immersive experience in a fantastical world, Artisans of Splendent Vale is a lovely place to spend a few months (or however long it takes you to complete the campaign!). I’m looking forward to this summer when the four of us will get to return to Splendent Vale to find out how the story ends.
For more information about Artisans of Splendent Vale or to order a copy, visit the Renegade Games website.
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
