Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave is an immersive dungeon-crawling board game for 1-5 players. Choose your preferred game mode: solo/coop or game master mode and discover atmospheric adventures. The intuitive rules prevent unnecessary long preparation times!
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.

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 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
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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.
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A Bestiary of Fantastical Creatures Like heroes, creatures have unique skills that make them dangerous opponents.
How to Play? The rules for Ballads & Tales are intuitive and easy to learn. The large number of card (abilities, equipment etc..) offers additional opportunities and expand the game considerably. Choose your heroes (who play very differently due to their abilities), buy your equipment, and set up your adventure.
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 according to our specifications 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!
Ballads & Tales: Journey of the Brave, Dungeons of Forbidden Necromancy, Under the Lost Ruins, Castle in the Endless Mist | copyright © 2016 - 2024 Benjamin Brinckmann All rights reserved.
FAQ

The base game includes 30 double-sided printed tiles. There are several scenarios: Dungeons, outdoor areas and houses.

Photo of the prototype

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:
Blow up the exits of the extensive goblin caves. Enter the deadly decomposition and recover a valuable tome. Break an ancient curse that turned a poor merchant into a gold coin. Escape the invulnerable Nightmare. Free a young maiden from the hands of the Norgs.
Profile scores determine your movement range, your combat prowess (for melee and ranged combat), your chances of dodging, and how many wounds you can take at most before you are knocked out. Combat is action-packed and fast: Both opponents create their dice pools from their profile score, their weapon/spell and, if equipped, their helmet and shield. Both players roll the dice and compare the result: Whoever has the higher result wounds the other, if they’ve both rolled the same, the result is a tie.
Example: The Dwarf creates his dice pool: One yellow combat die (profile score), one green combat die from his Axe, an additional yellow die due to the turn bonus (also on the creatures' turn due to the Ability card) and one white defense die from his Heater Shield. In melee, characters with longer weapons reach have an advantage over characters with shorter weapons reach: For each hit, they can wound their opponent while the other character can only move closer to them by one space for each attack they’ve won.
Example: The Wizard has a melee weapon range of two squares using the wand, the Kobold Warrior only has a range of one square. While the Kobold Warrior is engaged in melee, the Wizard may move away from the Kobold Warrior without fleeing or even cast a spell on the Kobold Warrior, as the Wizard himself is not engaged in melee. If the Kobold Warrior were to attack the Wizard, the Kobold Warrior wouldn’t be able to wound the Wizard, but if it was successful, it could reposition itself by one space to fight its way up to the Wizard. With its next attack, the Kobold Warrior would then be able to wound the Wizard. Trophy cards pose additional challenges during an adventure (e.g., cause three points of damage with one attack), earning the heroes ability points they can spend on new abilities.