Terror

A single descent asks whether you can clear the twelve. A campaign asks something harder and more interesting: whether you can clear them three times running, with only what you dragged out of the last one.

Terror is three descents. Each is the twelve you know, and beneath them, where the Ancients used to be the bottom of the world, one more.

The Empyrean

Fifty Dominion. Twenty-five Strike. The Apex of the Great Ones was never one of the twelve; it has been underneath them the whole time.

It wears a different face in each descent, and the face decides which Force it denies. The same boss is a different fight every time you reach it.

If you land the exact Dominion on it, you recruit it, and it is worth 25 in hand. That is the largest card this game can put in front of you.

What carries

Finish a descent and you keep two entities and three other cards. Lose one and you keep one of each.

Those cards are the same physical cards, so they come out of the next deck. An Ancient you kept as a trophy does not rise again, which also means carrying it shortens the next Pantheon by one. They are dealt on top of a full hand, so a descent finished with something left starts the next one over the limit.

Losing is not the end of a campaign

You will lose descents. When you do, the campaign holds: you keep one entity and one card, and you go again at the same descent.

This is not generosity, it is arithmetic. Three wins in a row with sudden death needs a per-descent win rate of 75 to 85% to be completable even half the time, and nothing I measured comes anywhere close to that. A campaign that ends the first time you die is a campaign nobody finishes.

One more card

Campaign hands hold one more card than usual. Eight at two players, seven at three, six at four.

That single card is the whole difficulty of the mode. Without it, completion across 2, 3 and 4 players is 28%, 88% and 47%: three player counts playing three different games. With it, it is 62%, 86% and 64%, which is one game.

I tried the more obvious levers first. A rule that recycles the Grave at every tier made it too easy rather than more even. A shorter Pantheon made it actively worse, because the Spawn are the cheap kills that feed everything later. One more card in hand beat all of them, and it makes a campaign shorter, not longer, because what costs you time is losing and going again.

Two players, four players

Terror needs at least two of you. Solo has never finished a campaign in any configuration I have tested, and I would rather not offer you something you cannot complete. Descending alone still has the two coaches, which is its own kind of campaign.

Expect seven or eight sittings to finish it.