Avalon: The Riven Veil

In 2024 I backed a board game called Avalon: The Riven Veil on Kickstarter. It was supposed to be delivered end of 2025, but had a pretty typical delay of around half a year and arrived this summer. The game is very pretty and has great table presence, but it also takes a lot of table space, a lot of time to set up, and a lot of time to explain the game until everybody understands the iconography. That makes the game take too long for my regular game nights, if I try to play it with new players.

The game suggests some ways to make the game shorter. For example to play for just 2 turns instead of the regular 3, or to leave out the asymetric player powers. Unfortunately those shortcuts also make the game less good. For example, there are cards that give you something for future turns, which are balanced for being useful when the game has 3 turns, and thus become extremely weak when you play only 2 turns.

According to reviewers, Avalon: The Riven Veil is a rather good game when you play it repeatedly with the same people. Once everybody knows the icons by heart and knows what to do, turns speed up, and one might even be able to play a full 3 turn game in little over 3 hours. But for my use case, where I bring the game to a board game night and have to set it up, explain it to new players, play it, and get it back into the box within a 3.5 hours window, this game just isn’t suitable. If I ever want to play it, I’ll have to organize a seperate board game afternoon or evening without a time limit.

That is of course an inherent problem of backing a game via crowdfunding. The game is frequently not fully finished, or has stretch goal added to it during the crowdfunding campaign. So you can’t possibly know details like how long it actually takes to play. From just having a visual representation it is easy to misjudge how heavy and/or long a game is. The time given in the description and printed on the box is very frequently underestimated, and always only considering playtime for a group of people that already know the game.

So I annoyingly I have another $200 big Kickstarter board game on my shelf and don’t know how and with who I will play it. It’s no wonder I am crowdfunding fewer and fewer games these days, and then frequently just the most basic version.