Critical Role: Heroes of Exandria Design Primer, Volume III

Welcome back to the Heroes of Exandria design primer series where I go over different parts of the release and provide some deeper insight and explanations. Today we will be discussing the Boss Fight encounters you’ll find as box-toppers in the booster boxes.

WHAT IS A BOSS FIGHT?

This is a cooperative mode pitting the players against a common enemy. The bosses have mechanics that allow them to be played without anyone in control of them, meaning you never have to worry about who will be the odd player out and forced to run the “bad guy.”

We introduced Boss Fights with the release of the Critical Role Vox Machina and Mighty Nein Challenger Series decks as an in-store play experience. This was a huge hit, and we received a lot of feedback asking for us to explore this idea further. Here is an example of the previous Boss Fight that was provided to stores at that time.

Now let’s dissect the aspects of this image:

• Health that scales with the number of players

• There are resource symbols presented.

• There’s two ratings that are new terms: “Agility” and “Toughness”

• A section titled “Retaliation”

• A section titled “The Briarwoods Activation”

• Additionally, there are base gameplay rules on the back not included in the image above

HOW TO FIGHT A BOSS

Rather than get bogged down trying to explain each item, I’m going to give an example of playing through a boss encounter with some of my friends.

Will, Jeremy, and I decide to sit down to play against The Briarwoods. First, since there are three of us playing, we’ll set the enemy health at 75. Then we set our decks into place and begin our setup. We each reveal cards from the top of our decks until we’ve revealed three Foundations each, and put those Foundations into our Stages. This takes the place of the normal first turn of a game, so that we can get right into the action. The rest of the revealed cards get shuffled back into our decks. After that, we draw our opening hands.

We will share a combined Combat Phase, altering the normal procedure of a turn from a normal 1v1 game of UniVersus. We will take turns playing one card at a time until we collectively decide to end the turn. So we choose Jeremy (who's playing Taryon) to go first. He plays an Attack and uses his first Enhance to use the Stun: 2 ability on it.

Since the Briarwoods don’t have Foundations, there’s a special rule for this in the Advanced Rules section which we’ve chosen to use. For every Stun rating of the ability, the enemy will lose 1 health. So in this instance they will lose 2 health (down to 73) as the Attack has Stun: 2. With no other abilities that he wants to play right now, we finish the Enhance Step. 

First we check the speed of the Attack against the Briarwoods’ Agility. With an agility of 7, any of our attacks will need to end with a speed of 7 in order to ignore their toughness. If it doesn’t, their toughness will reduce the amount of damage the Briarwoods take by the toughness rating. Jeremy’s attack has a speed of 5 and a damage of 6, so it’s too slow to ignore the Briarwoods’ toughness. They take 2 less damage and go down 4 health, to 69. 

Next up is Will. He’s playing Caduceus, so he’s taking up a support role in this match. He plays one of his Backups so that next turn he can get more out of his character abilities. His check to play the card passes, and it’s now my turn.

I’m playing Pike, and have a good number of Attacks in hand, so I play one. After playing that Attack, I use an ability on one of my Foundations to give a damage bonus. For my next Enhance, I use my character ability to give the Attack +2 speed from Pike’s character ability, taking it to 7 speed. I choose not to use any more abilities, and send my now 7 speed for 6 damage Attack, beating the agility rating and ignoring toughness. The Briarwoods take the full 6 damage and go down to 63 health.

Now that we’ve all played a card, the Briarwoods get to take their “turn.” We roll a d6 on the Activation table, and get a 3. This forces us to each discard a card and lose 1 health. Then, the Briarwoods will retaliate against the player with the fewest cards in hand–that means Caduceus gets attacked. So, let’s talk about how to do that.

When the enemy retaliates–in this case the Briarwoods–you’ll also roll a d6 and refer to the listed result. In this case, we roll a 4, so they will attack Caduceus with a 4 speed mid attack with 8 damage. At this point, Will only has 3 cards in his hand, and would really like to play another card or two–so I offer to block for him, since I have a larger hand. Will uses Caduceus’ ability to reduce the speed of the attack to make it easier for me to block in his place.

To block for someone else, you simply play the block like you’re blocking normally, but it comes at the cost of taking a little bit of damage if successful. So I use a +2 mid block and check a 5, passing the block. I lose 1 health for blocking for a teammate, but the attack deals no damage to Caduceus.

Now play passes back to us, with Jeremy playing the next card. Since we all lost a card from our hands due to the Briarwoods’ activation, we agree to only play one more card each this turn. Jeremy chooses to play an Asset and passes the check to play it. I follow up with a Foundation, and Will plays his second Backup and we finish that round of cards.

The Briarwoods roll a 4, making us lose health and commit a Foundation. This also increases their toughness for the rest of this Combat Phase, so we’re glad we made the decision to stop attacking. We all choose to end the Combat Phase, giving the Briarwoods one last attack at each of us this turn. To attack Taryon, they roll a 1, targeting him with a 3 speed low attack for 6 damage. He uses a mid block here and takes 3 damage for the partial block. Caduceus gets attacked with a high attack this time for 7 damage, and chooses to not block, taking all 7. Pike gets attacked with a mid attack for 8 damage. 

Now here’s a fun trick: during each attack, the attacker or defender may play as many Enhance abilities as they choose. But each other player may play up to 1 Enhance during that attack. So Caduceus uses his Enhance to gain back 4 health. I choose to block and commit all of my Foundations to pass my block, taking no damage.

We end the Combat Phase, clearing our Card Pools and Building the cards we played. Then, it’s time to repeat that process until we defeat our foes (or go down trying). We can’t choose the same player to go first, So Will becomes the first player, and we begin again.

That’s your inside look at how to play a Boss Fight encounter!

The new format for the boss fight cards is presented below.

The full rules for each boss will be hosted on the UVS Games Website to be available starting the weekend of your local game store’s Pre-Release events. To find and sign up for a Pre-Release near you check out this link.

As a final farewell, we’re leaving you with a preview of one of the new Bosses. The maniacal Laughing Hand! We can’t wait to see what terror he causes and what you think his activation effects might be. Please share your thoughts with us on all our social media platforms.

Want more Heroes of Exandria? Check these out:

Critical Role: Heroes of Exandria Design Primer
Critical Role: Heroes of Exandria Design Primer, Volume II
Character reveals from your favorite content creators!
Earn bonus Loyalty Points by attending a Heroes of Exandria prerelease event!