For the Order, we are unlocking Hogarth, one of the favorite heroes of the Orcs Must Die! Unchained beta. He is a frost-based character, who is also a shield – a “tank” if you’re familiar with MMO terminology. He works the same in our boardgame. He is the sturdiest of all the heroes in the game, and helps shield his friends from the enemy, so he’s good to be in the same room with. Though he is a “defensive” hero, he is just as useful on the offense, protecting your attacking forces from the foe, so they can deliver their damage.
Hogarth Orcs Must Die
For the Unchained, we are unlocking the Kobold King, a cunning sneak. He scavenges discarded items and uses treachery and cunning to win. In the team game, he is at his best when he is hanging around the enemy players to cause trouble. This is in direct contrast to Hogarth – not that Hogarth fears the enemy, but that he shines when he is associating with friendly players! The Kobold King is really fast and flexible, and as he gains his upgrades, by the final onslaught of the game he is the fastest of all the heroes.
The “Lions” are actually named Pride Hunters in the digital game, but since they look like lions and hunt down players we call them Lions in the board game. Now you get 2 more Gnolls & 2 more Lions enabling even bigger, more challenging maps to be forged.
The Gnolls & Lions are unusual enemies, because, uniquely, they do not target your Rift. Instead, they follow players around and inflict damage on them. Their stats are as follows:
Orcs Must Die Stats
Both Gnolls & Lions move 2 tiles, and move towards heroes. They can even move backwards on the map to find a hero. The Rift Lord gets to pick whom they attack, if they have a choice of tiles. Otherwise they just move towards the Rift. Even if they enter the Rift, however, they don’t pass through it or damage it. They just seek out heroes.
First level lions are slightly easier to kill than gnolls. Lions are somewhat more dangerous than gnolls at 2nd level. In the 3rd level, gnolls are easier to kill, but also do more damage, so lions & gnolls are comparable in terms of threat, but function differently. Last-onslaught lions are more persistent and more resistant to traps, but inflict less damage. Last-onslaught gnolls tend to be more like eggshells with hammers, if you get my meaning. They pack a big wallop, and then when you devote your full attention to them, they melt away. Of course the aftereffects of that wallop can be quite debilitating.
Dobbin has the ability to tunnel himself or another hero in his tile to any tile on the map. He has pretty good health, is a dwarf, and is really good at killing smaller enemies, such as orcs or kobolds. His attacks are less helpful against large creatures such as ogres, however.
His Super is highly strategic, and lets him rearrange all the traps on your map just before they fire! This can be used to group the right assortment of traps to kill a key enemy, or to move now-useless traps to obscure corners of the fortress. His Rivalry ability is an offshoot of his Super – basically, if he is in the enemy fort, it lets him rearrange the Unchained traps instead. This, obviously, ruins the Unchained trap setup, and, more specifically, keeps their traps from killing more than a handful of enemies on the turn he uses it. It does means when he enters Unchained fortress, he becomes a high priority target!
Orcs Must Die Dobbin
Mystery Hero B
As with our last Mystery Hero, this guy has been in playtest for months, but his image and identity is not yet released by Robot Entertainment. I have taken the stance that we can at least tell you his gender, though. Anyway, he is pretty vulnerable to enemy attacks, but has a good store of health. His weapons give him the power to turn a certain number of Brain results into Wilds, which makes him absolutely love it when he rolls Brains, and causes him to actively seek out weapons which produce Brain results.
He is definitely a support-style hero, who lets his allies purchase traps & items during their Hero turn, instead of waiting for the Upkeep phase. This gives his team a lot more flexibility in placing traps. His Super and Rivalry abilities are related – with his Super he can mind-control an enemy minion to move and attack as he pleases. His Rivalry lets him do the same to an enemy HERO! Of course, since it is associated with his Super, it doesn’t happen every turn.
She is a support hero, best used as part of a solid team. She is good to have along whether you are attacking or defending. She can shut down enemy heroes to an extent, and supercharge her allies. Her weapons give her a lot of flexibility – she is able to target any kind of foe, but she doesn’t do a lot of damage at any one time.
This is contrast to some other heroes, who can really dish out damage, but only vs. certain enemies. (Cygnus the Master and Temper are examples of the latter – Cygnus is highly effective against gnolls, kobolds, and the ilk, but somewhat less so against orcs, while Temper is the reverse.) Apprentice by contrast can always inflict some harm.
Blackpaw the Gnoll
He uniquely can move twice in a turn, so he could, for example, move, attack, then move again to get out of harms’ way, which enemies find frustrating. He has a large number of fairly generic attack dice, but is weak defensively (like the gnoll minions in the game), so he is helped by defensive items. Without any kind of protection, he is an eggshell with a hammer. His speed does let him escape a lot of sticky situations though.
The Ancestor looks like a creeptastic undead. He started out as the noble founder of the Order, and was an Order character during the Orcs Must Die Kickstarter, but then Robot decided to transfer him to the Unchained side. He is relatively low in health, and easy to strike, but he gains health by killing his enemies (or wounding them, in the case of enemy heroes). As a result, his health is constantly fluctuating.
He has to time his Super for the right moment to get the best result out of it. While it drops his health to 1 briefly, he gets to add a LOT of damage to his attack, which heals him right away.
His weapon upgrades are amazingly flexible – giving him a choice of different specialty dice for each upgrade, so he can craft each individual attack to kill the most possible enemies, which of course then also heals him!
Orcs Must Die Ancestor
Stinkeye
Stinkeye, as befits his nature as a huge monster, has decent health, and quite excellent resistance to damage. It can be hard to beat him down. His special ability is used to mimic his ability in the online game to plant totems. Basically he can “plant” 1 skull in a tile per turn. Later, when he is in the same tile with one or more planted skulls, he can add 1 attack die per skull, after which he has to discard only one of the skulls. So he can use this to either discard a single skull for 1 die, or he can plan ahead, laying down dice multiple turns in a row to get a better deal. For example, if he spends 3 turns planting skulls, then when he finally attacks, he’ll add 3 dice, but only discard one skull.
Then he can attack again next turn, for 2 bonus dice, discarding another, and so forth.
In effect, by planning ahead, he got 2 bonus dice per skull. His Super is fantastically good, because it lets him get The Perfect Roll, in which every die is absolutely what he needs. If he can combine this with his skull “totems” he can really wreak disaster on the enemy. His weapons wield arcane damage, which is not always useful, but his other abilities mean he has the potential to be deadly in any situation.
