This is a light fully co-operative deck building game where 1–4 players represent archetypal dungeon class characters (barbarian, cleric, thief, bard). Each has a starting hand of 13 cards made up of six with a hit value of 1, six with a value of zero and one with a special ability. The latter are not especially well balanced (the thief's card, for example, seems particularly powerful) but that doesn't matter because the players are all working together as a team.
Players are working their way through ten 'dungeons' made up of decks of four cards. The dungeons are delineated by level (two of each from Level 1 to Level 5) and the top card is always face up so players know only the first of the four monsters they will face when they enter a dungeon. To complete a dungeon, they have to sequentially defeat the monsters on each card by at least equalling its power, which is adjusted depending on the number of players.
Players each draw three cards from their deck and they must play all of them. Their cards are combined to see if they have defeated the monster they are facing. If they win, the character who delivers the killing blow turns the card 180º to show its power and adds the power card to their deck. If the players lose, they are ejected from the dungeon and their token is advanced two spaces along a track towards the boss fight that ends the game. Players will obviously want to add as much power as they can to their decks, and hopefully streamline the decks by removing from play the basic cards with which they start (particularly the zero value cards), so they'll want to work their way through as many of the 10 dungeons as they can before encountering the boss. They advance along the boss track more slowly when they successfully complete a dungeon (beat all four monsters) and they also take an additional reward card.
Heroes of Tenefyr doesn't involve a lot of tactical decisions. In the main, players just need to decide each turn whether to keep and play the hand they have drawn or discard it and draw another. The disadvantage of repeatedly discarding and redrawing is that you may run your deck down to nothing. When that occurs, the party would have to 'rest' to recover the decks, and this advances their party marker towards the boss encounter... There is a further collective push your luck element in deciding whether and when to skip a dungeon and go for one with higher level monsters and better rewards: you will almost certainly not have time to work through all ten of the dungeons before your party has to face the boss...
Tho' the game is light on decision making, it is nonetheless enjoyable to play. You can expect to complete a game in a little over an hour, and it's relative simplicity means it's the sort of game you can play an enjoy without requiring heavy concentration. There's always a place for that kind of game.
Heroes of Tenefyr was designed by Pepijn van Loon with art by Emanuel Melo, Frank Attmannspacher, Manolis Frangidis and Jimmy Nijs. It is published by Broken Mill and is currently live on Kickstarter. You can check it out now at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brokenmill/heroes-of-tenefyr?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=tenefyr