Battle for Greyport is like an old friend I haven’t chatted with in a while. I loved Battle for Greyport when it came out: it’s a cooperative deck-builder with quirky comic book art and fun gameplay. I did a review almost six years back in 2017! See that review here. Battle of Greyport was quite popular in our circles at the time: it made the #4 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Deckbuilding Games, and its expansion Pirates! made the #4 spot of our Top 10 Cooperative Swashbuckling Games back in 2019. But, it’s been some time since we chatted with Battle for Greyport.

Chaos in Copperforge is a new expansion for Battle of Greyport that was on Kicstarter back in September 2022. This was an insta-back for me, as I love Battle for Greyport! This just arrived at my door about August 1st, 2023. It promised delivery September 2023. Seriously! It was two months early!! What’s going on here?? Recently, both Kickstarters Kinfire Chronicles and Race To The Raft both delivered early!!! It’s great to have Kickstarters actually deliver on time!

Let’s take a look at this expansion!

Unboxing Some Stuff

Speaking of trends on Kickstarters, when did Kickstarters start bundling my very different orders to save money?

I got both the cooperative game Where’s My Ride? and Chaos in Copperforge in the same box! I mean, they are both from Slugfest Games, and they both are from Kickstarter. It’s okay that they want to save some money, but I wonder if I got my boxes later because they had to bundle them. Should I be grumpy over this? I don’t think so?

Recall that I also got Astro Knights (see our review here) and Ares Expeditions Expansions: Discovery, Foundations, and Crisis (see our review here) in one bundle as well! Weird: I guess this is a new thing. Or maybe I back too many Kickstarters … maybe that’s the real issue …

So, this is true expansion in most senses: it just adds new content with a few new rules and clarifications.

I don’t love that the rulesheet is a tri-fold pamphlet.

Whatever: it’s still consistent with the original rulebook in font and look. It’s fine.

It’s an all cards expansion: it all fits in a decent sized box.

One thing you get in here are ten new characters: they are nine starting cards for each (see above).

For each of the ten new characters, you also get 3 oversized cards: see Wizgille above.

You also get 10 new Locations, 10 New Bosses, and 1 Boo Buggy.

There are plenty of new Locations and Scenarios to try out! There’s even a little checklist in the back of the rulebook for you to keep track of your plays of the new content.

See Gromitt The Foul, probably the first new bad guy you’ll fight!

You can see the Mech-Suit Mayhem and new Locations (above) for the set-up to battle Gromitt! It’s all in line with the original game.

New Mechanisms

There are two new monster decks (20 cards each): Constructs (above right) and Advanced Constructs (above left). The symbol in the lower right differentiates them. Many of these new monsters have a new mechanism called Contraptions: when you see the the little metal gear in red (like on Gizmoblin), that means a contraption comes out with him!

Contraptions augment whomever owns it! The contraptions come out with a bad guy, but if you kill the bad guy, the contraption turns into a card Item characters can use! See above as the Stabby Stick is +1 damage when wielded by a bad guy, but +2 AND Snipe when wielded by the character!

See the Robogre with the Flux Calculator! He gets +1 attack from his contraption when he attacks! And I sighed at the Flux Calculator joke …

When you play a contraption with a bad guy, you are supposed to slide it underneath the card to make it clear how it augments the bad guy: see above. It’s also good to do that so it takes up less table space. 

Another new mechanism is the Grey-Border items: they may equipped by any hero – physical or magical! The Mace of Korash (above) is one such item!

Another new mechanism is that some monsters are immune to certain colored die (recall there are 3 types of dice with different distributions of values).

An Old Friend

Sometimes when you reconnect with an old friend, you forget things and find out new things about your friend!

I had forgotten that Battle for Greyport was an early game that embraced the “Choose Open or Closed Hand“! We discussed this rule in our Seven House Rules for Cooperative Games in the Allow Sharing, If It Makes Sense section: it’s nice to see a game that’s open enough to embrace this choice in play style! Open-Handed is more interactive, but can suffer from Alpha Player Syndrome; Close-Handed can be less fun and less interactive as a group, but can feel like you have more agency over your own choices: allows you to choose the play style you like!

I had also forgot that Battle for Greyport uses Player Selected Turn Order: they don’t call it that, but again, it’s an early game that embraces the idea that coooperatively players can decide player order!

And I may have been playing the game wrong in a few places: a new look at the game forced me to re-read some rules: “Oh, I don’t remember that about you!” It doesn’t change any opinions, but it does open my eyes!

Solo Play

One of my major complaints about the original Battle for Greyport game is that it does NOT have a solo mode!   This is one of the games that I use as an exampler as why need Saunders’ Law: here is a great cooperative game that DOES NOT have a solo mode!

Yet, it is so easy to play Battle for Greyport solo: simply play two-handed (two characters) and alternate between them like you were playing a two-player game. See above.

You’ll be happy to know that it’s still easy to play this solo: there’s no new rules or anything in the new content that prevent the two-handed solo mode.

I should qualify that “easy” a little: playing solo is easy, but the game itself can be challenging (so the difficulty of the game is not easy). I lost my first solo game pretty bad! And that was on an easy scenario! And I lost my second game as well! This expansion does make the game harder …

However, it turns out that one of the new “clarifications/adjustments” in the new Chaos For Copperforge is the establishment of a house rule called Rest Healing that’s been around for a while. That house rule (now official rule) says: 

At the beginning of the game, you now choose a number of hit points to heal between encounters (when you level up).  In general, we recommend 2 … if you liked the game it was before, you can simply choose a Rest Healing of 0 (now called “Hardcore mode”).

I would have done significantly better on my first solo game if I had just chose some non-zero Rest Healing … but I still had a great time.

Two-handed solo mode still works great with Chaos in Copperforge, even if it isn’t an official solo mode. Given that they embraced Restful Healing house rule, I am surprised they didn’t just embrace the two-handed solo mode house rule.

New Content

How much of the game can you play with ONLY new content from the Chaos in Copperforge expansion?  Pretty much all meaningful content can be new except for the recruit cards: Items and Heroes … those two decks still have to come from the base Battle For Greyport. Everything else can be new content!!! There’s new player Heroes, new Monsters, new Scenarios, new Locations, and of course the Contraptions (which count as an item if you get it).   See above as a game with as much new as possible!

Of course, you still need the base game for the dice, the tokens (hit point, coins, etc), the Taunt token, and especially the rulebook (needed for describing lots of the keywords).   (There are a few new Heroes you can put in the recruitment pile, but it’s not nearly enough to supplant the base Heroes piles.)

Conclusion

The best kind of expansion is the kind that makes you remember why you love the original game! And that’s what Chaos in Copperforge is: a reminder of how great the original Battle For Greyport is! I felt like I was reconnecting with an old friend, reminding myself why I love Battle for Greyport and just enjoying the new content. Basically, Chaos in Copperforge gave me an excuse to reconnect with my old friend.

Chaos in Copperforge isn’t a flashy expansion: it just adds some new characters, new scenarios, new bad guys, and a few new mechanisms. But, sometimes, you just need an excuse to reconnect with your old friends, and this gave me a great excuse to revisit my old friend Battle for Greyport. 9/10. Despite its simplicity, this could be my favorite expansion of the year: I was just so happy to be in this universe again.