Nightfall: Blood Country Mini Review

Since I love Nightfall, I am glad that I was able to try out Nightfall: Blood Country. In this review, I will assume that you are familiar with Nightfall - if not, I recommend checking out my review of it.

Here is the extent of the changes in Blood Country - when drafting, all of the extra cards that will be shared by the players are revealed before players select the cards for their private archives.  That's it.  This is a nice change, as you can actually draft knowing whether or not your cards will work with some of the center cards.  However, it's obviously not a huge change.

The first thing that I will talk about with Blood Country is that the packaging is very small.  Because of this, some people might balk at the MSRP being $35.  However, the box comes with 24 new archive cards.  Considering that the "promo" archives that they offer wind up being $5 per archive, $35 for 24 archives really isn't very expensive.  Secondly, if you decide to combine all of your cards into a single box (for ease of carrying), then why would you want a large empty box?  All of the cards from Nightfall, Martial Law, and Blood Country easily fit into the original or Martial Law box.  Plus, if you want to carry around just Blood Country (or a different subset of cards), the box is large enough to hold all of the new cards as well as the starter decks and wounds from the other sets (as well as a few favorite archives), and takes up much less space.  So, overall, I think that the packaging (though initially causing the expansion to look way overpriced) is ideal for what you receive, and the product itself seems priced appropriately.

Those are really the only additions and controversial issues with Blood Country.  So, now I'll just mention a few of my favorite cards.

The first one is called "Pipe Bomb."  Pipe Bomb lets you shuffle the bottom two wounds from the wound stack (the extra wounds), and shuffles them into one of the archive piles.  This card really seems very unique, and can also be very powerful at slowing down (or at least punishing) a player that is buying lots of cards from single archives - especially if they are coming from his private archive.

Another one of my favorite cards is "Harley Doberman."  Harley forces all players to discard a card from their hand each time they put a minion in play - and if they can't discard a card (or choose not to), then they receive a wound.  I love playing a couple copies of this card at the end of a really long chain. Because of how the chain resolves, Harley will be in play before the other minions, and so your opponents will either have to discard all of their cards, or (more likely) will wind up receiving a lot of wounds for the minions that they have in the chain.

Overall, I give Nightfall: Blood Country an 8.0/10.  If you are a Nightfall fan, I think that this is a great option for adding a lot of extra minions in a fairly inexpensive way.  Plus, several of the minions add new strategies to the game aside from just gaining minions and dealing direct damage.

If you like the darker theme of the Nightfall games, you might also check out Mob Ties, Gloom, and Betrayal at House on the Hill.

I would like to thank AEG for providing me with a review copy of Nightfall: Blood Country.