Kinfire Delve: Callous’ Lab review — The final piece

Callous’ Lab is the final standalone card game in the Kinfire Delve trilogy. With this, we have all six of the heroes from the Kinfire Chronicles universe. We also get one final dungeon and boss to give us our greatest challenge yet! You can read about the core mechanics in our review of the first set here. This review will cover what is new in Callous’ Lab and summarize the trilogy.

Characters

The final two characters brought in are Roland Wordforger, the stylish fire wizard, and Valora Helmsman, the noble archer. Once again, these characters are mechanically unique from the previous four. Roland is a very strong character with the ability to allow players he boosts to draw cards. This can really help the party hold off fatigue by not running out of cards as quickly. In one of my solo games with Roland, his ability, along with a lucky event, found me reaching the boss before having to gain my first fatigue.

Valora is more of a standard damage dealer with a bunch of combos using her bow. Any card with a bow icon will get to splash progress onto other challenges when played. She also has a card representing her bow, which will increase the damage of her other cards as long as it is in her hand. With the help of Roland, she can get a lot of value out of her deck. Her lantern ability is a classic snipe card, able to deal a ton of damage to a single challenge.

New Dungeon

Callous’ Lab somehow manages to bump the difficulty up another notch. Callous has a built-in timer, starting with progress on his card. If it runs out before you reach the bottom of the well, you immediately lose the game. However, rumor tells of an item that can be found in his dungeon to turn this ability against him, providing an alternate win condition!

Callous’ fatigue cards are the nastiest ones we have seen yet. Some of them will continuously drain the life of the players. Others will punish the players for particular strategies, forcing them to change how they play out their turns. It is very important to try to deal with fatigue as quickly as possible in this dungeon. And even then, some unfortunate fatigue right at the end can cause you to lose a really close run.

It’s not all grim despair, though. There are some special cards buried somewhere in the well that can help you out if you can find them, that is. And others that can help you succeed, but punish failure even more.

Variety

With a total of six characters now, the ability to mix and match your party adds a ton of variety and replayability. Even when playing with four players, which four characters you choose will change how the delve plays out. And now you can take your party into one of three dungeons, each of which has three possible boss forms. Add to that the natural variety that comes with the randomness of the well deck and every game of Kinfire Delve will play out very differently.

Conclusion

The saga is complete, and it is wonderful. The art is gorgeous and the component quality is amazing all the way through. The dice are the one component that I don’t feel look as good as the rest, but they are very readable. The gold foil on the character and boss cards is just over-the-top amazing. Each of these boxes going for $20 is just an incredible value, especially with new board games costing up to $100 for just the core box.

With incredible variety and dungeons of varying difficulty, this series is a must-have for anyone interested in solo or cooperative dungeon delving. Even with just one set you will get a ton of replay value. With the nature of randomness, sometimes your runs will feel easier or more difficult than others, but I don’t find that this takes away from the greatness of this game. Plus, the small box sizes make it easy to take the game anywhere.

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: