Tanares Adventures was my favorite games from 2023. Some of my main complaints were that storage and setup were onerous as well as having to juggle multiple books between the adventure, quest, and city phases.
Today’s review is a little different than most as it’s looking at the Ultimate Tanares Edition, which is a storage solution for this massive game. Do you need it? And if you’re trying to choose between editions, which one is right for you?
Expansion Overview:
The ultimate edition is two Kallax filling boxes filled with smaller boxes that help organize a lot of the content for Tanares Adventures and Arena the Contest. The game content it holds is: Arena the Contest, Legendary Box, Tanares Adventures, Prenumbral Pack (Which is the Prenumbral expansion, class pack, mystic pack, villains pack, class pack, and scenery expansions)
Extra boards, Madness box, dragon collection, Phoenix, and Tarrasque boxes/models do not fit into these two boxes. I’m not certain, but I don’t think the player dashboards or deluxe conditions will fit either.
The two storage boxes are organized so most things you need for individual play would fit in “Storage I”, so you only need to take one giant box with you to play the game somewhere else and/or that’s the box where most of the game components you’ll frequently need will reside.
Storage Box 1 contains:
1. Tiles, Tokens, and Accessories
2. Scenario Miniatures and Save Slots
3. Books, Board, Map, and Extra Cards
4. Cards and Big Monster Miniature
5. Monster Miniatures
Storage Box 2 contains:
1. Books and Extra Cards
2. Hero Miniatures
3. Walls and Extra Miniatures
4. Cosmetic Scenario Miniatures
Game Experience with the Expansion:
First off, if you’re mid-campaign, it’s going to take a while to get everything organized to where it makes sense. There’s a YouTube series by Phlanx06 on how to organize the game that was put together before the final documentation was finished.
My two hopes for Tanares Ultimate was to save space and make the game easier to set up.
Starting with set up: it does seem a little faster after going through it a few times. While it’s technically going through more boxes (5-7) than before (3) components are all grouped together so terrain tiles all live in one place instead of two places (Arena and Tanares). And as much as I love the look of the walls and other 3D elements like doors, not using them saves going into Storage box II.
There’s also a relatively space-efficient token tray for in-game tokens. A quibble with that is there are two wells for the three different condition tokens I would’ve preferred each condition token had its own slot.
Meanwhile, the card storage is not as elegant. While there is plenty of space and there are a lot of dividers they’re not pre-labeled for how the game is played. For example: NPC’s that you recruit during the city phases can be broken into several stacks including the pile you’ve recruited, a stack of available NPC’s, ones you can’t recruit yet (future weeks), and the discard pile that you’ve culled from your deck. There’s only a single NPC divider provided. Meanwhile, there’s a divider for each building in your city which doesn’t feel as necessary.
Because Arena the Contest was reworked to play with Tanares rules a lot of Arena’s cards are removed from the game (Campaign, villain, boss attacks, boss spells, and evil power) as well as the campaign tome, quest guide, and quickstart card. I find it challenging to throw away game components because “what if I need that later?” or “what if I want to play the simpler Arena way for some reason even though it’s been replaced by a better system?” Welcome to my first-world problems.
I like having the standard objective miniatures all in one spot along with the treasure chests. I was a bit bummed that the save slots in the smallest box can’t hold your cards (and there’s no party divider included either for the box of cards). The save slots looked a little small and when I checked against some of the largest character miniatures a few larger character minis didn’t quite fit into the save slots. As an example a sword would overhang slightly, but most will, and even the overhang may not be an issue—but if you paint your minis and happen to pick the bigger characters, it’s something to think about. Some of the normal storage trays are also a bit of a tight fit but that may be a tolerance issue tray-to-tray issue and isn’t dissimilar to other games.
Going from some nitpicks to a highlight—one of the best improvements is that the books have been combined so you only need one thick tome on the table at a single time (plus the rule book). They also eliminated a stack of quest cards and updated the campaign sheet. This part may take players some time to figure out where they are in the campaign and get themselves reconfigured properly. The rewards system and campaign log have also changed a bit so that’s another area you’ll need to update. The campaign advancement is much smoother as the mastery tracks are replaced with standard rewards being granted as you earn war points in the four factions.
The new spiral-bound quest/journal/city phase books are broken down by weeks including an extra book which has additional scenarios, including the original Arena the Contest campaign adjusted to the Tanares ruleset. This is a much better solution than one 600-page book.
The paper city and world phase maps have also been replaced with a board that looks and feels more in line with the rest of the games’ high-quality production. But another small miss is that the ultimate edition can’t fit both the base game board and the extra one that came with it.
Will this save you space? Without a doubt: maybe. If you have all the things, then yes, this will condense a lot of the smaller boxes into these two large boxes. But, if you’re like me and trying not to all-in all the games, then you’re going to be storing empty spaces in the Ultimate edition and still need to find a home for the large monster boxes. Overall, the two Ultimate Tanares boxes are larger than the Arena, Legendary, and Tanares boxes combined (about 5” taller between them).
Space saving or not, if you find a way to organize the decks of cards, tokens, and stuff you need to play, then this does speed up the setup and teardown time of each game by putting tiles in one location and most cards in another.
In some of the iterations I was experimenting with, was taking the new trays and putting them in the old boxes but ended up landing on the new solution as the optimal storage solution. I’ve ended up leaving the boxes on my shelves open so the smaller boxes can slide out more easily. But the cover art on these boxes looks great and presents a more striking appearance when you’re between campaigns.
Final Thoughts:
If you have Prenumbral Pack, then the Ultimate edition will save you space and makes a lot of sense as a storage solution. I’m still working out a better way to store all the cards that works for me but even currently sub-optimized, I think this is a noticeable improvement to setup.
I’m a huge fan of Tanares Adventures and, overall despite the pedantic criticisms above, I’m happy with the Ultimate Tanares storage solution and game improvements. It’s easy to recommend this version for both new players and returning players. My final ranking is “buy” but if the Tanares system was just okay for you or you are only interested in the RPG or minis, this isn’t going to change your mind about the game itself and should be a pass for you.
Hits:
• Improves setup time by keeping like components together
• No more juggling multiple books for each adventure
• City and World map board replaces paper map
Misses:
• Takes up more shelf space unless you have prenumbral or other small box add ons
• Not enough and/or properly labeled card dividers
• Reconfiguring mid-campaign is a hassle
Source: Board Game Quest
