Black Stars Rise Review

Black Stars are rising in the penultimate adventure of the Path to Carcosa cycle! It’s been quite a journey, all the way to the coast. I can only assume a nice day at the seaside is in order… As always, we give a short spoiler free overview, then explore the player cards before moving on to a full spoiler discussion of goings on and mechanics.

The way is open. You have seen where the Path to Carcosa will open up, and it is the very appropriate island monastery of Mont Saint-Michel. Trapped forever between sea and sky, this ancient fortress is the perfect setting for your final desperate search. The gate is here somewhere, but you will need to find it.

Black Stars Rise pulls a particularly impressive trick off to guarantee an exciting scenario however many times you play, albeit at the cost of a slightly confusing set up process. To create this rather wonderful puzzle, it continues Path to Carcosa’s gleeful toying with the agenda deck rules to stunning effect.

With the story racing to its conclusion, there’s no room for missteps here. While it is slightly disappointing that Path to Carcosa uses an almost identical story structure in its conclusion as Dunwich Legacy: a desperate race to get to through the gate and into the stygian realms beyond to face some big bad, it at least delivers on that with style.

Rating: Rising Star

Player Cards

Ho, boy! We start with some kick ass cards for Rogues and Guardians! Suggestion is simply amazing for Rogues with high head stats, especially Sefina. With this card, she can happily lead monsters on an endless dance while the other players get on with the scenario. It’s also the Rogue’s first Arcane card, meaning it won’t even take up one of your more valuable slots! Their second card, Narrow Escape is basically a must take card. Not only is the ability valuable, if highly situational, it has two evade symbols!

Stick to the Plan sticks by your side with its permanent ability to store a set of Tactic or Supply cards, allowing for some splendid combos. Prepared for the Worst for a near guaranteed gun from game start, even just Emergency Caches for a big early game start. On The Hunt doesn’t quite live up to the other cards, it’s interesting, but also very risky. Which I suppose is thematic if nothing else. You never know what you’ll find out there in the woods!

Seeker also gets a rare Arcane card in the form of Arcane Insight. At first glance this seems like little more than a flashlight that costs 4XP but then you pay a bit more attention and your mind is blown like the guy in the artwork. This applies all round, it stacks with flashlights, and because it uses charges, it can be refreshed with Recharge. OK, still quite expensive, but neat. What isn’t expensive is Guidance, but transfering an action from the player to another investigator is situational at best. Very handy for Leo-totting Rogues though.

Survivors also get a fascinating card in the form of True Survivor. Again, it’s not cheap, but the combo potential with Path to Carcosa’s Resourceful is too tempting to ignore! Build a deck around Innate skills and you could have a lot of interesting fun with this. In fact, Black Stars Rise treats us to a whole new skill to match with True Survivor, “Not Without A Fight!” Sadly, the broad mixture of skill symbols rather than a focus on one makes this of limited potential compared to just Unexpected Courage.

Finally, we have the mystics, who so enjoyed getting upgraded basic cards in The Pallid Mask that they’ve continued collecting them here. The best by far is Ward of Protection which now allows you to use its effects to benefit other investigators which is obviously very nice. On the other hand, the upgraded Arcane Initiate is barely any better than the basic one and costs a mighty 3 XP. St Hubert’s Key, Mystic’s only new card is very interesting but also sits a bit close to Holy Rosary from the base game. You are doubling the cost for an additional +1 book which might be worth it? But Mystics are hardly lacking in expensive cards and they are lacking in good resource generation. So I’m not convinced.

Spoiler Discussion

The centrepiece of this scenario is the pair of agenda decks! Because one isn’t bad enough! There is no act deck either, you really are alone on an unfriendly island here. So what is going on?

Mont Saint-Michel is trapped between two vortices, one spinning the clouds, the other driving the waves into a frenzy. Clearly, one of these two will open into the gate, but which? Here is the reason for two agenda decks: one the impact of the sea, the other the impact of the sky. Each of the decks have a pair of options for their second card, one card being the gate, the other a mistake. During set up these get paired with their opposite and randomly selected so that either the gate is in the sea deck or it is in the sky deck, and the other sees you realising your mistake.

Your mistake because whenever you place doom during a round, you choose which agenda deck to place it on. Advancing one side over the other means you are hoping that is the agenda with the Path. But of course, you don’t know which it is! So do you let one side rush so that you know what is what, and hopefully have enough time to deal with the consequences as the other agenda deck becomes the timer, or do you let both run down in step, but have less time to respond once the determination is made? As you might expect, such a choice will be a clear statement of conviction or doubt!

Whichever path you take, you must get access to the right building near the gate in order to escape through it, the Abbey tower for the sky, the small island for the sea. But both are locked and somewhere out there, some vicious creature is stalking.

It seems something already came through the gate! The terrifying beast of aldebaran appears when the ‘other’ agenda deck advances just to give you something else to worry about. As though the mountain of clues on the escape point were not bad enough! This is a scenario that demands some capable searching skills!

Interestingly the walls of Mount Saint-Michel, taking up a good two location cards, are nothing more than cruel time wasters, occasionally causing actual harm. Which is unusual! Many scenarios might not care exactly where you go (The Phantom of Truth, for example) but I’m a little surprised by a scenario with a clear(ish) destination throwing this red herring at you. It’s all about the Abbey.

Much like the penultimate scenario of the Dunwich Legacy campaign, Where Doom Awaits, failure here means failure of the whole campaign. As mentioned above, the race through the gate to face the terrible God on its own turf is slightly repetitious. This otherwise unique campaign was always going to end in Carcosa though, so I don’t begrudge it that crutch. I only hope that future campaigns can come up with a more original climax.

Our copy of Black Stars Rise was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £14.99 RRP from your local hobby store.

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