Kreel Manor
- Steve Berger
- May 29
- 3 min read
Kreel Manor is the latest release from Tristan Hall and his publishing company Hall Or Nothing Productions. Tristan Hall has a reputation for solo fantasy-themed games with high production values (including Shadows of Kilforth), and also for two-player historical battle card games like 1815, Scum of the Earth. Kreel Manor is a reimplementation of his 2021 release, Veilwraith: A Veil Odyssey Game, which has a deserved reputation for being a tough-as-nails solo fantasy card game.
Kreel Manor takes place in a fantasy world recognisable to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Kilforth series of games, and with some shared artwork so it will also feel visually familiar. The game plays over a campaign comprised of five individual adventures with multiple pathways, although you’ll end in the same final adventure. It comes with three classes: ranger, magician and fighter. There are also two expansion characters available: bard and necromancer. Each feels very different and has both unique playing styles and items to complement, with the mage and the necromancer being particularly fun to explore. Each adventure is comprised of five encounter decks, a boss or two (or three) and a character storyline, again with branching pathways - something new to this game that wasn’t present in Veilwraith.
The mechanics feel comfortably familiar to anyone who has played previous Hall or Nothing titles. You have an action with a power level determined by the card position plus any card and dice power. This is used to defeat monsters that march relentlessly into your threat area. Survive long enough to complete five plot cards and defeat all the foe cards, and victory is yours. Fail and you take a wound and go again. If you ever reach five wounds, you’re finished and it’s game over.
Kreel Manor is not as tough as Veilwraith: it feels like the difficulty has been dialled down slightly but, having said this, the final two adventures are still really challenging. Getting through them takes a little bit of luck, a good amount of deck building and some skill in the game.
Deck building comes in the form of selecting a starting hand of cards from the basic hero skill set: a suggested set is given but this will need to be tweaked slightly to fit the character and their own specific deck, so requires some consideration. Fortunately, the bar for entry is fairly low here and after your first adventure you’ll know what you feel you need. You have two skill upgrades after completing each level, so choosing what cards to gain and what to lose is a fun challenge. Luck is present: there are cards that can appear together and prove almost impossible to defeat, but again this can be mitigated by the cards in your deck. Firstly, cards appear in the shadows before entering play, and managing those cards, or at least having an awareness of what is coming can help, but again revealing them can prove challenging as many cards have a negative effect when revealed...
So how is the experience? Well, one of the best compliments I can pay is that I struggled to put the game away and immediately found myself wanting to see a campaign through to the end. From there, I wanted to try out different characters and story paths, and found the experience challenging and rewarding. The early adventures seemed simple, but by level 4 the challenge felt just right. A negative comment would be that the writing is at times overly verbose, and no adjective goes unused. The box insert is cardboard, and it isn’t immediately obvious how to store the cards - a central card divider would have been useful. The rulebook doesn’t cover every eventuality, and sometimes specific information can be hard to find, despite both an index and a glossary. Still, these are fairly minor negatives and don’t take away from the game. Kreel Manor is a challenging experience, and is playable solo or for up to three players, although the multiplayer option feels like an addition rather than the design intention. The stories the game creates, simply by setting up an adventure and diving in, are rich and compelling, and the game looks stunning when in play. This is one of few games where I was glad for the playmat, and would suggest that as an additional purchase. For those who already own Veilwraith, this game is still worth exploring as the story and experience are different enough to warrant both, and also keep an eye out for Wyvern Moor, the next game in the series. An excellent experience!
(Review by Steve Berger)
