When I looked at Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto last month, my conclusion was optimistic. Kevin Wilson’s sidequest in his Kinfire universe was rather good, with colorfully realized characters and a solid deck-delving system. If it also happened to be too easy, its titular villain wadding up like a spent hankie, well, at least our heroes were relieved to not require a potion to recoil their intestines.

The second set, Scorn’s Stockade, continues the spin-off’s tradition of pairing a negative trait with a generic destination. Mechanically it’s the same game, but what a difference the new cards make.

The little quotes on the cards are… well.

Here’s the warp speed recap. You’re a hero. Maybe one hero. Maybe two. Provided you have at least two sets, maybe three or four. There’s a baddie who needs slaying. So you face challenges by spending cards and rolling dice, gradually peeling cards off the deck until you reach the bottom and face off against the boss.

As sidequests go, it’s boilerplate, the sort of thing that might be found in one of those proc-gen Skyrim tasks. But it’s the journey that counts. That and Wilson’s veteran hand at crafting characters, dungeons, and monsters.

This time around, the foe is Scorn, a nasty piece of work whose monsters look like a kid took a magnifying glass to three or four plastic miniatures. Both he and his dungeon are every bit as distinct as Vainglory was, swapping the original set’s orchestral setting for a prison crowded with possessed inmates, striding watchtowers, and towering hermit crabs scuttling around with castles on their backs. Both the illustrations and the combat descriptions work overtime to sell the stockade as a twisted and hostile place, one redolent of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s destinations.

And it’s harder. Considerably. Part of that has to do with the aforementioned monsters and traps. The stockade is often brutal, featuring enemies that undermine your ability to face challenges. That roving watchtower, for instance, bumps up the difficulty of every other challenge by two. Naturally, then, you’ll want to defeat it first, right? Easier said than done. At the same time you might also be facing a parliament of fused owls that transform failed rolls into injuries, obelisks that automatically end the game if too many of them appear at a time, or towering cliffs that shuffle back into the deck when completed, threatening to result in a never-ending clamber to the top.

The art is perfect. And gooey.

At the same time, certain challenges offer respite. Scorn’s throne room is curiously absent of danger, permitting rest and healing. Certain artifacts can be melded into an alternate victory condition, rewarding those who spend additional time peeling through the deck rather than ripping through it as fast as possible. In one session, we were nearly spent until we combined a master key with an ancient lock. That latter challenge is unsolvable without the key. This time around, what might have otherwise been a frustration was our surest route forward.

Another contributor to this set’s amped-up difficulty is the characters themselves. As before, two are included in Scorn’s Stockade, and they’re designed with synergy in mind. There’s the katana-wielding barbarian who becomes more powerful as she absorbs wounds, a potent ability that can drive the table batty since health is pooled. My favorite of the two, and possibly the best of the four I’ve seen, is the bard who jams on his lute like he’s soloing “Free Bird.” His deck revolves around permitting rerolls, a handy ability in a pinch, and drawing extra cards.

While our heroes are both impressive, they don’t riff on one another’s abilities quite as smoothly as the defender and finisher of Vainglory’s Grotto. That’s an observation, not a complaint. In theory, the barbarian absorbs hits for offensive power while the bard ensures rerolls and draws, while also offering the occasional (costly) bit of healing. However, striking the proper tempo for such complements is hardly easy.

But this is also an opportunity to highlight something I expected would become the case once there were multiple sets of Kinfire Delve available: that much of the joy of this thing is mixing and matching heroes. It’s not only possible to swap heroes into other dungeons, but also to play with three or four characters at a time. This alters the difficulty in interesting ways. It’s easier to boost attacks and collaborate attacks, but fatigue becomes a dire possibility now that more heroes are running out of cards. Rather than charging your kinfire lanterns at every opportunity, it’s becomes necessary to use your big abilities to suppress those fatigue draws.

This guy is wrecking those monsters with his oud.

The result is an impressive second showing, heightening the danger and showcasing the game’s coolest character yet. I’m not sure how much further this system can stretch, but for now it’s an exciting way to pass half an hour poring over card combos and chucking dice.

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A complimentary copy was provided.