Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave is an adventure board game for 1-5 players. Choose your preferred game mode: solo/coop or against a game master and discover atmospheric adventures. This immersive dungeon-crawling retains the roots of classics and expands on them with exciting, modern elements. With the simple rules, you can enjoy exciting adventures without much preparation.

GAME

NEWS

ADD-ONS

DOWNLOADS

ABOUT US

• Boardgame • Action-RPG • Immersive • Tactical

• Solo/Coop • Game Master • Replayability • Eventful Gameplay

• Treasures • Traps • Magic • Fantasy

60 Min.

Age: 14+

1-5 Players

Become a party of daring heroes with your friends and face off against bloodthirsty minions. Travel through dangerous forests, descend into dark dungeons, explore the ruins of formerly magnificent fortresses. Come to the aid of helpless villagers and become fabled heroes that the bards will write ballads and epic poems about. Another player can alternatively choose the role of the sinister Game Master: Your role is to lay cunning traps for the heroes and play your arsenal of perfidious Event Cards that will create ever-changing dangers for the heroes through their many different configurations. Use Weapon Cards to increase the strength of your already fearsome creatures even more. Send out warlords with powerful Boss Cards to pick off the heroes one by one.

This illustration shows a small selection of the components in the base game of Ballads

&

Tales:

Journey of the Brave.

Thrilling Adventures in a Spellbinding Atmosphere The lovingly designed components that allow for the visual creation of many different scenes invite you to dive deep into the magical world of Ballads & Tales. There’s so much to discover: Dungeons, ruins, forests and villages Valuable treasures Magical artefacts Rare materials to upgrade armor and weapons Interesting characters

A Variety of Unique Heroes Varied gameplay and a very high level of replayability have been part of our self-imposed goals for the game from the start. Nowhere does this become clearer than in the heroes of Ballads & Tales, an element we’re particularly proud of: Each hero has their own special ability. The choice of heroes determines the strength of the party as a whole. Depending on the heroes in play, different ways of supporting each other emerge.

A Bestiary of Fantastical Creatures The Game Master’s reigns over an army of fearsome creatures that await the heroes in deep dungeons as well as dark forests or even in the middle of villages. Just like the heroes, the creatures have elegantly designed creature sheets that show off their wicked abilities.

Easy-Entry Components It was very important to us to make the rules for Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave intuitive and logical so you won’t have to reread the whole rulebook every time you take a break from playing. If you take a look at our character sheets, you can easily see the results of this aspiration: All profile stats have been visualized with symbols. Available dice are color-coded and easy to identify. To the right of the hero’s portrait, on the green boundary line, you can see which categories of weapons and armor are available to this character. The hero’s special abilities take up most of the space. On the back of the character sheet, you can find a short summary of the hero’s backstory as well as some other information, for example their class.

The Assassin’s character sheet. She’s sneaky, fast, and absolutely lethal.

A Playable Work of Art Central to the design of Ballads & Tales is the fantastic result of our intensive collaboration with the highly talented artist Valbona Atanaskovska, or Bona for short (www.bonaskunst.de and Instragram). Having been fans of her works for a long time, we were overjoyed when she agreed to visualize all of the characters in her unique style. Instead of just creating the characters digitally on a PC, Bona painted all characters in Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave, as well as its expansions, in oil on canvas in loving detail. This passionate effort is rare these days, and it helped turn each character into a highly crafted work of art. Bona’s talent for expressive and aesthetic faces and the nature of radiant oil paints in particular make her paintings and the characters come to life in unique ways and lend an incomparable and nostalgic flair to Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave. Besides the characters, Bona also painted the cover, the card backs and the items on the playing cards as well as the event and Spell Cards. We think they turned out fantastic!

The Event Cards drawn at random ensure exciting and dangerous situations during an adventure and thereby also increase the eventful gameplay.

The adventures dictate how many Equipment Cards the Game Master may draw. He can lend these to his creatures as he pleases, to make them an even greater threat to the heroes.

Not only do Boss Cards allow for exciting boss fights, they can elevate any ordinary creature into a powerful individual.

The wide variety of Trader Cards will give players lots of choice at the beginning of the adventure when they need to decide on the right equipment to take along.

Treasure Cards contain rare weapons and armor as well as magical accessories.

Key items in this deck can open up new paths when used in the right location.

Resource Cards allow players to upgrade weapons and armor.

There are two decks of Spell Cards, one for the heroes and one for the Game Master’s creatures. Magically gifted heroes and creatures may use their spell points to equip an individual deck of Spell Cards.

Legal Notice

FAQ

The base game includes 20 double-sided printed tiles. There are several scenarios: Dungeons, outdoor areas and houses.

Photos of the prototype (German version) of the base game Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave.

Both the base game Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave and the expansion Dungeons of the Forbidden Necromancy will thrill players with atmospherically staged single adventures whose creative challenges make each of them a unique experience: Boss fight Escort Escape Fortification Sneaking Time loops Each adventure poses a new challenge through its optionally increased difficulty level. The story expansion Castle in the Endless Mist additionally offers an epic campaign. The included progress sheet allows you to pause and continue the campaign at any time. Its mysterious plot centers on a village shrouded in nightly darkness and thick wafts of fog and features complete audio narration. Epic fights and exciting puzzles await you!