Solomon Kane is a cooperative narrative game. You control Solomon Kane, a travelling puritan. Each player represents one of the Virtues of Solomon: Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Prudence, and can make Solomon act in the world.
The game is huge, there are tons of cards and components, tons of rules, and I’ve been confused on some rule points at multiple points. And the game is deadly. I’ve won a solo game in one of the smaller scenarios, lost tons of games playing with friends, and finally won another scenario with a friend of mine. We tackled the mission “The Witchfinder General” and succeeded after a long afternoon.
Each Virtue has a specialty: fighting, discussion, exploration, or buffing the other virtues. Each scenario is composed of 1 to 3 Acts, and each act is 10 parts. Parts can be “tales” which are played without a board, only using cards. Or “scenes” with a board and the miniatures. Your choices and the degree of success of actions in each part influence the way you start the following part. Failing to complete an objective could lead to starting with more opponents on the board in the next scene, for example. Solomon attributes are represented by 4 values: Strength, Compassion, Lucidity, and Danger. If one of those goes to 0, you die and lose. If you don’t manage to complete your objectives, you lose.
Scenes feature two kinds of miniatures: mortals (peasants, knights, monks…) whom Solomon interacts with, and immortals (Virtues and Shades) that influence the board by providing buffs or debuffs around them. To make actions, you use a deck of cards and some basic actions for each virtue, and roll custom dice trying to match the symbols for the actions you want to accomplish.
This doesn’t cover all the rules, but this should already give you a pretty good idea of the system. There are tons of other rules, from miracles, deadly sins, darkness cards, Luck and Mercy tokens, light and exploration tokens, and keyword activation…
Solomon Kane is a moving game where your objectives will reveal themselves and change when you interact with the world around you, making it quite difficult to plan when doing a blind run of a scenario. The game can therefore be quite unforgiving. But that’s also why it’s so fun to play! Trying to understand what’s happenning behind the flavor text, and sharing the control of Solomon with the other players is quite novel, I never played something like that before.
From my little experience with the game, I deduced that you should try to stay balanced with your attributes to avoid losing stupidly because an event card reduces your Strength when you thought you’d not need to fight anymore. You also don’t have as much time as you think you have to accomplish your action. All the resources are here to be used, you should not hoard mercy or luck tokens. Even tho the game is gonna surprise you, trying to guess where the story is going and taking bets to prepare hands or skills before the part where you need them can be good.
There are 100+ cool miniatures in the game that really improve the experience. Of course, I haven’t painted any of them yet, because I’m not playing enough of this game. Most miniatures are used in only one scenario, so it’s hard to justify for me with the number of painting projects I have on my plate.
Final thoughts
Solomon Kane is a great game when you have a big chunk of time to complete at least an act in one sitting. It works as a solo game, and is fun with friends, but you should be very careful when selecting which virtue to leave out if you’re not doing a 4-player game. The rules are far from simple tho, and I’ve encountered multiple times clarity issues stopping the game and killing the flow. I’ll try again some of the scenarios where I had those issues and see if, with more experience and the errata cards, I manage to complete them.