For this final installment of the Widower’s Wood developer diary series, we’re taking a look at the game’s components and how they can be used in combination with The Undercity to enhance gameplay.

If you own a copy of both core games, you can mix and match the heroes when building a party. Each hero has its own way of dealing with the challenges presented in a campaign. Gardek Stonebrow and Agata are both melee characters that excel at close combat. While Gardek favors defense and protecting his allies, Agata excels at taking on multiple villains at once. A party that contains both of these heroes will have a substantially different play style than a party that doesn’t include either one. Pushing the party toward one extreme presents unique advantages and disadvantages. A party that consists of Canice Gormleigh, Skarg the Voracious, Vaskis the Knotkeeper, and Milo Boggs will be very good at eliminating villains from a distance but will not have a tanky character to keep villains occupied by absorbing damage. Likewise, a party that consists of Gardek, Agata, Pog & Doorstop, and Olo will have little trouble taking down villains in melee but will struggle to deal with villains at a distance.

With the addition of the three heroes available in the Kickstarter campaign and the upcoming heroes of the Black River Irregulars expansion, your options for mixing and matching grow and become even more interesting.

In addition to heroes, you can also mix villains from the two games and their expansions. The official rules for mixing and adjusting all villain types for each scenario will be available later. Before diving into the preview of what you’ll be able to do, let’s review some basics.

Each of the normal villains in a scenario has an index number, which determines when it spawns and helps determine when it activates. Significant villains, like bosses, don’t have index numbers. Index numbers range from 1–6 and are represented by an index token with a corresponding value. Villains can be assigned a single index number or multiple index numbers. The villain reserves refers to all of the villains that can spawn at the beginning of a player’s turn during a scenario. During a game, players setup the villain reserves next to the game board with the Villain stat cards, index tokens, villain figures. And lastly, Villain Action cards determine how villains activate during a round.

A very simple way to adjust the villains in the game is to pick a new type of villain to add and assign it the lowest index number from a villain in the reserves that is assigned more than one index number. For example, let’s say you are playing Undercity scenario one—which normally uses the sword thug and crossbow thug villain types—and you want to add swamp gobber pirates from Widower’s Wood. The sword thugs already have the index numbers 1, 2, and 3 assigned, whereas the crossbow thugs have the index numbers 4, 5, and 6. To add the new gobber pirate villain, simply take the 1 and assign it to the swamp gobber pirates. Now, the sword thugs have the index numbers 2 and 3, while the new villain type has an index number of 1 and the crossbow thugs keep the index numbers 4, 5, and 6. And don’t forget, when you add a new villain type to your game, you can add any number of its figures to the reserves.

It is important to assign the lowest index number to the new, added villain because it won’t have a card in the Villain Action deck that will specifically activate it. In the “Watch It Played” video, swamp shamblers were added to the first chapter of the Widower’s Wood campaign using these rules, and you can watch it here.

If you wanted to include both types of gobber villains in that same scenario, you would need to further adjust the reserves; the 1 index token would remain with the swamp gobber pirates, the 2 would be for gobber cutthroats, the 3 and 4 tokens would be sword thugs, and the 5 and 6 tokens would be for crossbow thugs.

Another way to adjust a scenario is by switching out villain types instead of just adding them to the reserves. This means you will need to exchange the cards in the Villain Action deck and the figures in the reserves. For example, if you want to try chapter three of The Undercity with four club gatormen instead of the ogrun brutes, not only do you need to swap out the ogrun brute figures for club gatormen figures but you also need to remove the two ogrun brute cards (21 & 22) from the Villain Action deck and replace them with two cards that activate the club gatormen.

When using one of the purple “boss” figures available in the Kickstarter campaign, you have a lot of flexibility. Each of these new bosses is based on a common enemy from the core game. Villains have a stat card with two sides: one for standard stats and one for epic stats. The boss villains’ standard stats are slightly more powerful versions of the common villains’ epic stats, making the epic boss a much more powerful character. For example, the standard side of the boss club gatorman card is the gatorman champion, which takes the epic club gatorman’s stats up a notch. The epic side of the boss club gatorman card is the gatorman chieftain, which is the most dangerous club gatorman available. The champion can be added to a scenario to act as a bodyguard for the standard boss, while the chieftain can be used to replace the boss of a scenario. When playing chapter one of the Widower’s Wood campaign, the gatorman chieftain can easily replace the two gatormen that act as the bosses, or he can be added in addition to them for a real challenge!

Lastly, almost all of the Side Quest cards can be used in either game with no adjustment. When using new Loot cards, simply shuffle them together with the Loot cards you already have. When using Encounter cards, only use a card that adds a new villain type that isn’t already in the reserves. Widower’s Wood includes a few Encounter cards specifically intended for use in scenarios from other games since they introduce gatormen and bog trogs into the chapter. When using Chain Side Quests, some adjustments may be necessary, depending on the card. For example, the Shadowy Figure card from The Undercity, which is the first card in the Dark Experiments chain, interacts with thugs. When using this card in Widower’s Wood, you could decide to apply its effects only to bog trogs, making things a little more difficult, or you could apply its effects to all villains with Vitality 1.

In general, owning more than one of the games in the Iron Kingdoms Adventure Board Game line gives you a big pile of components to play with, and the Kickstarter campaign adds even more.