Designer:  Brett Satkowiak

Artist: Mirco Paganessi (Doomtown: Reloaded, Dungeon Alliance, The Princes of Florence)

Publisher:  Alderac Entertainment Group (Automobiles, Cat Lady, Guildhall, Istanbul, Istanbul: The Dice Game, Love Letter, Love Letter: Batman, Love Letter Premium, Lovecraft Letter, Mystic Vale, Point Salad, Smash Up, Smash Up: Awesome Level 9000, Smash Up: It’s Your Fault!, Smash Up: Monster Smash, Smash Up: Pretty Pretty Smash Up, Smash Up: Science Fiction Double Feature, Space Base, Thunderstone, Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin, Thunderstone: Dragonspire, Thunderstone Quest, Tiny Towns, Trains, Trains: Rising Sun, Valley of the Kings, War Chest)

Genre/Mechanisms: card game, deck building, expansion, miniatures

Funding Status: At the time of this posting, Thunderstone Quest: The Enemies Among Us is already fully-funded. Pledges currently total almost 5x the initial funding goal with 3 days left to go on the campaign.

Player Count: 2-4

Solo Mode: no

Complexity: medium-heavy

Risk: medium-low

What It’s About: “Features two new quests for AEG’s award-winning deck builder, Thunderstone Quest, featuring vampires, scions, and the epic return of Miricelle.”

How It Works: Like many deck builders, Thunderstone Quest has a player cycling through a personal deck of cards to purchase stronger cards and discard some of the older, weaker ones. Thunderstone Quest sends players into a dungeon to compete against each other by killing monsters and searching for treasure. Thunderstone sets itself apart from the pack by including resources like lanterns, iron rations, and potions, as well as a physical wound system, all represented with top notch wooden components; and through their physical board with an action selection mechanism allowing players to buy more physical resources, heal, level up their heroes, or buy cards from a market; as well as a series of quests that add in packs of cards, a campaign mode that allows players to continue to hold and improve their decks over a series of games, and other variants including Epic Thunderstone where all cards cycle through a card market, and never the same card twice.

Comparisons: Thunderstone Quest is one of the best deck builders I’ve ever played. Only the other giants in the genre can really compare: Dominion, Ascension, Aeon’s End. Some other really good deck builders include Dragonfire, Hero Realms, Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game (as well as some of the other Legendary deck builders), Shadowrun: Crossfire, and Star Realms.

What Should I Pledge?:
$50 Just the Quests: includes the 2 new quests only, Darkness Rising and Miricelle’s Return.
$75 Enemies Among Us: includes the 2 new quests plus a new SuperDeluxe Storage Box and 323 plastic dividers, upgrading the game’s card dividers.
$120 Champion Reward: the Champion Reward from the first Kickstarter, which includes the base game and quests 1-5 (including the KS-exclusive quest #2), the original SuperDeluxe Storage Box, and all associated stretch goals.
$350 All-In Gameplay Reward: everything published to date, including everything from the first 3 Kickstarters (the base game, To the Barricades!, and New Horizons), and the Enemies Among Us rewards from this campaign.

Add-Ons:
$25 Epic Thunderstone: duplicates of certain cards for needed to play the game in Epic Mode.
$20 Neoprene Playmat
$15 Pack of 500 Sleeves
$100 To the Barricades (the 2nd Kickstarter)
$50 New Horizons (the 3rd Kickstarter)

KS Exclusives
Quest 2 remains a Kickstarter-Exclusive, as do many of the cards that were stretch goals across the 4 Kickstarter campaigns.

All-In Total: In the continental U.S., you’re looking at $350 for the All-In Gameplay Reward, $90 for 6 packs of sleeves for all of the cards in the game to-date, plus $50 in shipping for a total of $490.

Thunderstone Quest: The Enemies Among Us completes its Kickstarter on Friday, October 9th and tentatively ships in September 2021.