Designer: John D. Clair (Edge of Darkness, Mystic Vale, Space Base)

Artists: Jeff Brown (Cobras, Doomtown: Reloaded, Fallen, Gardens of Babylon), Alayna Lemmer-Danner (Edge of Darkness, Legend of the Five Rings, Magic: The Gathering)

Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group (Automobiles, The Captain Is Dead, Dice City, Guildhall, Istanbul, Love Letter, Love Letter: Premium, Love Letter: Batman, Lovecraft Letter, Mystic Vale, 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 Quest, Thunderstone: Dragonspire, Tiny Towns, Trains, Trains: Rising Sun, Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Kings: Afterlife, War Chest)

Genre/Mechanisms: card drafting, deck building, miniatures, worker placement

Funding Status: At the time of this posting, Edge of Darkness Cliffs of Coldharbor Expansion from AEG is already fully-funded.  In fact, pledges currently total more than 3.5x the initial funding goal with 6 days left to go on the campaign.

Player Count: 2-4

Solo Mode: no

Complexity: medium-heavy

Risk: low

What It’s About:  Edge of Darkness is the card-crafter John D. Clair was designing before Mystic Vale that AEG didn’t want to publish in full; instead, the cheaper and smaller-scoped Mystic Vale was produced to test the waters. After multiple expansions and a great amount of success with it, AEG decided to go ahead with John’s larger, more ambitious, and more expensive design. Cliffs of Coldharbor, the latest expansion, adds new locations and contacts to the game, expanding upon its depth and variability.

How It Works: Edge of Darkness is played over a prologue followed by 8 rounds. In the prologue players draft two advancements into their sleeves. Over the 8 rounds of play, players take turns during 2 phases each round: Assembly and Action. During the Assembly Phase, players take cards from their Guild Hall and add them, City side up, to their hands. They also take the cubes from their Threat Zone and place them on top of, or adjacent to, their hand of cards. Then in turn order, players draft cards from the Street until they have a hand of 3, pulling cubes at random from the bag (based on the sum of the cube icons on the bottom left of all slots on the cards in their hand) and place them in their Threat Zone.

During the Action Phase, in clockwise order, players: drop cubes into the tower, resolve Blight attacks (if any), sleeve any advancements onto a card in their hand, and discard cards. When any card on the tower receives enough cubes in the associated tray, that card attacks the player with the most colored cubes present. This adds combat to the game, and opens it up from just pure deck-building/card-crafting and engine-building.

After the 8th round, players will gain points for the following: 1 Goodwill for each slot filled in their Guild Hall or on their cards in the Street, and 2 Reputation for the player with the most Reputation tokens, the player with the most trained Agents, the player with the most Guild cards, and the player highest on the Defense Track. Then the following items pay out in victory points: 1 VP for every Trained Agent, Reputation, slots filled on Guild cards, and position on the Defense Track; and 1 VP for every 4 coins, 4 Influence, and 4 Goodwill. And of course, then the player with the most VPs wins.

Comparisons:  Definitely the best comparison is John D. Clair’s own Mystic Vale. Edge of Darkness inspired Mystic Vale, and both games use the same “card-crafting” system, assembling multiple card parts in the same sleeve to create more powerful cards. But whereas Mystic Vale introduced gamers to the card-crafting system the two games share, Edge of Darkness takes that system and ports it into a larger game with a system of mechanics behind it. Now instead of just crafting cards, you’re crafting cards… and then going on to use them to do other things.

Beyond that, the game that has the most in common with Edge of Darkness might be Thunderstone Quest, another card-based game from AEG (this time, more conventional deck-building) with lots of gameplay options included in an enormous box. Edge of Darkness can be played competitively or solo, and includes a bunch of different locations that can be swapped in or out, much like the different dungeon rooms in Thunderstone Quest. The base game in Edge of Darkness also includes 2 different campaigns involving multiple game set-ups linked together. Both games begin from a really solid foundation with lots of variability, and then throw additional game modes and linked campaigns to expand their reach and variability even further.

What Should I Pledge?:
$40 Cliffs of Coldharbor Expansion: the new expansion.
$120 Guildmaster Expedited for US/Canada: the Guildmaster reward pledge from the original Kickstarter, to be shipped early in November 2019; this pledge does not include the Sands of Dunestar Expansion (or the metal coins), though there will be limited qualities available to add on in the Pledge Manager for early delivery. The Cliffs of Coldharbor expansion will also be available in the Pledge Manager, but that item will not ship early, and will instead ship with the rest of the Kickstarter’s fulfillment in September 2020.
$120 Guildmaster Delivered in 2020: the same rewards as the Guildmaster Expedited pledge, just to be delivered with the rest of this Kickstarter’s fulfillment in September 2020 instead of early in November 2019. The other expansions, Sands of Dunestar and Cliffs of Coldharbor, as well as the metal coins, will be available as add-ons during the Pledge Manager.

Add-Ons:
$15 Extra Extra Sleeves: set of 300 tarot-sized crafting sleeves
$19 50 Metal Coins: three sizes, three color treatments
$40 Sands of Dunestar Expansion
$40 Cliffs of Coldharbor Expansion

KS Exclusives:
While there are no KS-exclusive rewards directly associated with the Cliffs of Coldharbor expansion, pledging for the expansion automatically includes a Guildmaster upgrade for the base game. While the base game is currently not available at retail, it may eventually be offered there, but retail copies will be the original Kickstarter’s Agent pledge and won’t include the many KS-exclusive upgrades like the 40 miniatures & bases, double-thick recessed player boards, or the slew of component upgrades offered as a part of the Guildmaster level pledge.

All-In Total: In the continental U.S. you’re looking at $120 for the Guildmaster pledge delivered in 2020, $40 for the Sands of Dunestar expansion, $40 for the Cliffs of Coldharbor expansion, $19 for the Metal Coins, and $38 in shipping, for a total of $257.

Edge of Darkness Cliffs of Coldharbor Expansion from AEG completes its Kickstarter on Friday, October 4th and tentatively ships in September 2020.