Siege of Valeria: How a Campaign Expansion Fixes Everything
Lead the defense against all that threatens the land’s great cities across a short, connected campaign in Siege of Valeria.
Admittedly, I was more than a little excited to dive into the expansion for Siege of Valeria. The base game felt a little too formulaic and repetitive. With a 3-game campaign that promised all sorts of variability, I was prepared to defend the trio of cities against the encroaching enemies and siege engines! Only the walls needed to stay together… As did I!
Game Overview
Game Name: Siege of Valeria
Publication Year: 2022
Designer: Glenn Flaherty
Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
Publisher: Daily Magic Games
Solo Mode: Designed for Solo (Included in the Base Game)
Tower defense reminds the main element of play, which takes place over 7 days. Troops threaten to damage the wall, while siege engines move closer and closer. In the campaign, leaders and bosses create plenty of variability and more exciting moments as the siege must be stopped!
First Play
January 19, 2023
Complexity
2
Latest Play
December 23, 2023
Expansions
1
Setup Time
5 Minutes
Lifetime Plays
12
Play Time
35 Minutes
High Score
5
Game Area
24" x 24"
Low Score
0
Dukes & Commanders
During setup, a random duke adds a special ability to the defense. I drew the Templar, who looked ready to take on anyone! She allowed me to ignore a magic requirement.
Conversely, the enemy’s troops aren’t just out there running about: There’s a commander! This bounty hunter depleted the heroes deck at a quicker rate. Come on!
Aside from the mechanical abilities, this immediately made me feel tied to the battle with some small stories.
The campaign would unfold differently based on success or failure at each battle. Quite an interesting premise!
A Familiar Battlefield
Not much changed in terms of the starting setup, nor the way the battlefield operated. There were the same lovely troops and siege engines, ready to overrun the city.
Stay back! I actually liked this element, as it kept the core rules mainly the same without needing to re-learn ideas.
Most of the new content came from adding elements in setup. Some of them were obvious, while others were in there and ready to come out at some point…
Perhaps most important of all, I felt there was a purpose that wasn’t there in the base game. Defend that city!
Just a Little Boss
Hello, Vermithrax! This is one of the elements that is added during setup, but isn’t revealed until the card is flipped over. That’s right: Bosses now exist!
A single one is used during a play and shuffled into the bottom few siege engine cards. In practice, this means the boss is out there for about 1-2 rounds, depending on luck.
Each has 2 separate requirements, along with matching attacks. Ouch! Definitely a much bigger threat.
That was also welcome, though: In the base game, I felt like I got more powerful without a new, final challenge.
A Lost Battle
Try as I might, the final day of the siege just didn’t quite pan out. There were a lot of siege engines and not enough luck for me with the dice. I’ll get back to that eventually…
In good news, though, Vermithrax was defeated! I left 3 siege engines out there, though, which overran the city.
This loss resulted in the death of my duke, which seemed fitting. The commander remained in play, while I would face a new boss during the next battle. Simple, but nice!
Although the highest scoring tier was out of reach, I could still win the war if the next battles went a little better.
Learning to Un-learn Base Game Concepts
For the most part, this campaign expansion builds on the base game and adds new elements. Awesome! Yet there was a specific strategy I had to quickly abandon. Originally, the more troop cards in hand, the more victory points would be collected at game end. So I was quietly teaching myself to not utilize these cards whenever possible.
In a way, that helped me conserve them for the final round… Yet it wasn’t an exact conversion of the concept. Many of the troop cards weren’t as helpful with the base game, so I never learned how to use them. That had to happen pretty quickly! I struggled a little bit since I was more concerned about collecting troop cards as much as possible.
Although I love the game with the campaign expansion, it still feels like an odd design decision to split it up like this. Is this designed to be more of a challenge? Possibly, but the omission of the campaign seems strange. I very well could be on my own, though. That’s really my main issue with the game. If you have it all, you’re in good shape!
The Abomination
For that initial failure, I also drew a random penalty card. The deck was pretty large, so that also added a nice bit of variety. Rewards were there, too… Just not this time!
Normally, punishing a loss in an ongoing campaign can be terrible, yet I found these penalties to be pretty mild. More like an incentive to actually pull off the win each time.
The second battle went much better, despite the curse. This Abomination fell, and I actually defended the city!
It felt like a much more exciting time, especially with the ongoing story. And the saga wasn’t quite over yet…
New Elite Troops
That wasn’t all of the new content! During setup, 4 special elite troops replaced the standard troops. All unique, each offered a very special sort of ability.
The trick, though, was in defeating them: They required exact dice rolls, as indicated by the underlined strength.
I definitely enjoyed them, but found that they could be a little too swingy. Coming out too late made some useless, while others just didn’t offer the right kind of benefit.
Still, they made the battles more interesting with the promise of what might still be in the deck of troop cards!
Acting Like a Cavalier
The siege of Shilina was the ending, and my duke survived to continue helping out. He was immensely helpful in rearranging the battlefield at times. Excellent!
With the bounty hunter out of the picture, we were up against a fantastic shapeshifter. This meant a new commander card came into play each round. Yikes!
But again, just take a look at how much these cards add to the battle. They create characters and stories right away.
It looked like another difficult battle ahead. I won once, and lost another time. Who would be able to survive?!
Dangerous Shapes
Things went well enough to start with, especially since some of the shapeshifter’s abilities didn’t do anything during the first few rounds. I had it all under control!
But then… I didn’t. I could see the way things were going and how the siege engines weren’t being taken out quickly enough. The capital! Desperately, I looked for choices.
The difficulty level felt like it went up tremendously, yet in a good way. I found myself thinking more carefully.
And those easy victories with the base game? Just a memory of the past, which was what Shilina would be.
Session Overview
Play Number: 5-7
Expansion: Siege of Valeria: Campaign Expansion
Solo Mode: Designed for Solo (Included in the Base Game)
Play Details: Campaign Mode
Outcome: 1 Win and 2 Losses
Alas, it was a pretty bad outing according to the epilogue! The queen was defeated and I definitely wasn’t Defender of the Realm anymore. Yet what a fun experience! Most of my issues with the base game were immediately resolved. It’s just a shame that this is a separate expansion, since it adds so much and makes the game feel complete.
%
10 Plays
Affordability
Price & Value
8
Functionality
Challenges & Mechanics
9
Originality
Design & Theme
7
Quality
Components & Rules
9
Reusability
Achievement & Enjoyment
7
Variability
Distinctness & Randomness
4
+ Pros (Positives)
- A connected trio of plays adds an overarching storyline that still keeps the campaign reasonable in length.
- Rewards and penalties help provide more variety based on the battle outcomes, although a loss isn’t the end.
- Dukes and commanders provide realistic characters to add faces to the battles and provide special abilities.
- As the defenses gain bonuses, the challenge increases with the addition of a boss that takes a lot to defeat.
- Elite troops can be a bit of a hit or miss, yet their addition means that anything could come onto the battlefield.
- There is a fun and interesting puzzle of managing damage and attacks on troops or siege engines during play.
– Cons (Negatives)
- Splitting the campaign expansion out robs the base game of the full game experience while adding another cost.
- The random order of the troop cards and luck with the dice are the main elements that lead to success.
- Although complete, the expansion rulebook is ordered a little oddly so that information can be hard to locate.
- Many of the boss icons aren’t intuitive, leading to the need to look these up and find clarifications each round.
Victory Conditions
Score 9+ Campaign Points
- Overall Goal Progress 67%
Goals and Milestones
Score at least 13 points with the base game.
Win at least 1 game at the standard difficulty level.
Score at least 6 points with the campaign expansion.
Continue the Conversation
What do you think of Siege of Valeria and its expansion? Do you prefer to play one way over the other? I definitely found everything I was looking for with the campaign, yet it would have been nice to see all that from the start. There are all sorts of fun stories to tell in the midst of these battles! One day, I’ll triumph and actually save all the cities!
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