The unusual perspective

🚪Keep the Heroes Out🚪 is a co-operative tower-defense style game. It was on Kickstarter originally, but we managed to snatch a copy at SPIEL. We got it to the table over the long weekend, and despite the charming artwork it turned out to be a lot harder than we anticipated. We have to play a few more rounds before we can give you a detailed review, but we couldn’t keep this cute awesomeness from you anymore! 😁

One thing is surely very interesting about this game 👆 -  it does my favorite twist on the dungeon crawler formula: Instead of playing as do-gooder heroes delving dungeons and slaying monsters, you play as the monsters who just want to defend their home against invading adventurers. Sounds familiar? I really loved this thematic twist in Spirit island too! 

At the core the rules are quite simple, yet clever - you control your monsters with cards, with some deck-building added in. The game has a dungeon book with a set of predefined room layouts (each with their own mechanics) which you have to survive with your chosen monster clans. There are actually 10 clans ‼️to choose from, each quite unique! You could pick any clans, however at 2p we felt that not each pairing is viable enough to win even the first scenario. (With 4p it might be ok to choose 2 support clans and 2 heavy hitters for example.)

We ended up choosing two less optimal clans for our first 2 games… and we lost big time. 🙁 We even started to ask ourselves if we missed a rule or two. 
Our 3rd game as different clans went a lot better, with the help of some min-maxing and optimizing. 😄

Nonetheless, there is a ton of replayability even with the limited amount (20) of scenarios.