Other Stuff Monthly #26!

 Testament is a trading card game released in 2008, where players compete to save the most souls before the world ends in the book of revelations. Luckily, Testament is also a board game released in Japanese in 2017 and in English in 2021, which has players working together to fight a series of big RPG-style bosses and their respective minions. It's this one that I'll be reviewing in this post.

 

It can be played with one to four players, though no matter how many actual players are involved, there always has to be four player characters, so really, you'll most likely want there to be one, two, or four players, since a three player game would have two players with a character each, with the third player controlling two characters.Anyway, though you can assign any skills to any characters, the manual suggest a recommended starting skillsets for each character that really do make the most sense. Going by these recommended skillsets, you've got a healer, a tank, a hard-hitting melee attacker and a group-hitting magic attacker. There's also two extra characters that I think were only added as extra stretch goals in the Kickstarter for the English version, but to be honest, I haven't looked into them much.

 

Each round of the game has three main phases: all the players do their actions first, then the regular enemies, then the boss (if it's appeared yet). Furthermore, the first five stages (of six) have two phases: the first few rounds will be the "exploration" phase, where most rounds have a few enemies turn up to cause trouble, but they can be beaten by the players to build up power on a super meter for a big powerful one-use attack (or a mass heal by the healer). There's also keys that can be found during this phase, that will weaken the boss very slightly when it shows up, at the end of the final round of the exploration phase.

 

When the boss appears,it also has actions it performs every turn, which include (but are not limited to) devestating attacks on the players, healing itself and its minions, summoning additional minions, and so on. The boss has three "health bars", and you've got eight rounds to get each one to zero. Go eight rounds without reducing the boss' health to zero, and you lose instantly. Get the boss' health to zero three times, and you've won the stage, and you can go on to level up your characters' skills!

 

Levelling up is kind of complicated: there's a few colour-coded skill trees (white is healing, red is melee attacks, yellow is support, and so on), each with seven skills numbered 1, 2A, 2B, 3Ai, 3Aii, 3Bi, and 3Bii. When levelling up a level 1 skill, you pick skill 2A or 2B, and if you picked 2A, you can level that up into 3Ai or 3Aii. On top of all that, each skill also has a rank value. Once you've done all your levelling for a character, adding the rank values tells you the character's new rank, though this mostly just determines their maximum HP.

 

So that's how it plays, but is it any good? Yes, but it's a complicated game that takes a lot of concentration, and it's really not a very accessible game for people who aren't experienced in playing board games. There's a lot of stuff to keep track of: skills characters have and haven't used, damage taken by characters, enemies, and bosses, special effects of boss attacks, and so on. But if you're the kind of players that can handle a game like this, it's worth a try. THe battles are very difficult, but because of this, it's very satisfying to win them, though it's a little disappointing that there isn't any kind of ending text in the manual for when you beat the final boss (the eponymous dragon Testament). That one niggle aside, the presentation is excellent, with great art on every card and board, and the Kickstarter price of 50USD doesn't seem above the odds. Assuming the retail price is about the same, Testament comes recommended for groups who want a very rules-heavy co-op game that'll last a few sessions (or one massive long session, as the box suggests a playtime of 500 minutes!)