For centuries, peace reigned over the world of Molthar, until one day the magician, Ulfried, destroyed the balance of Good and Evil with black magic. Darkness fell across the land and the only hope remaining to the people of Molthar was an ancient prophecy that one day, when the time was right, a hero would come forth and free the world from darkness...

Go to Molthar, collect magic pearls, and build a team of allies from legends in Portal of Heroes! Portals provide ways for fantastic creatures and helpers to stand with you! Strengthen your power and fulfill the prophecy… the one who collects twelve Power Points saves the realm, becomes the true chosen one, and wins the game!

Portal of Heroes is a fun, simple, card game that uses a shared deck of characters and a second deck of pearl cards. Pearl cards are numbered from 1-8. During each player’s turn, they take three actions from the following choices, and can repeat an action if desired: take one pearl card:

When a player claims a character, they can place it on their portal. Each player can have two characters on their portal at any given time. If they can’t cast a character, or see one they want more, they can take a character off their portal and place them in the discard pile, but it’s almost always better to try and cast those characters.

To activate a character, players must play combinations of pearl cards from their hands. One character might require three odd cards of any denomination, say 3, 5, and 7 to summon. A different character might require any three pearl cards with a value of 10, and so forth. There are too many combinations of pearl cards to list here, but there’s a handy synopsis in the rules included with the game.  

Once a character is activated, they provide two benefits to the player: power points and special abilities. Power points are what you use to determine the winner of the game. Every character in the game has a value of 0- 5 power points. Generally, characters that grant a high number of power points are either very difficult to summon or provide very weak special abilities. Once one player has 12 power points, you continue play until the end of the current round and then each player gets one more turn. After this last turn, the player with the highest power points is declared winner and savior of Molthar!

Special abilities are extremely valuable and assist players either once when the character is summoned, or every turn throughout the game. For example, some characters immediately grant the summoner three extra actions, allowing them to draw cards or claim additional characters. Other characters permit you to discard a character off an opponent’s portal, look at an opponent’s hand, or take one of their pearl cards. Characters whose powers are permanent are especially important to winning the game. These characters might allow the summoner to have a larger hand size, grant an additional “virtual” pearl card the player can use to summon characters, or even grant an extra action every turn.

There’s one final card and these are diamonds. Diamonds allow summoners to alter one of their pearl cards, adding +1 to the face value. The only limit on diamond cards is that only one can be applied to each pearl card and they cannot make a pearl card’s value more than 8.

As you can see, Portal of Heroes packs a lot of strategy, gameplay, and replayability into a small package. No two games are alike and the range of characters will force players to adapt their strategies based on the cards available and the actions of their rival summoners. We hope you’ll keep Portal of Heroes in mind the next time you’re shopping for a quick, portable game and join us next month for another exciting preview of a Mayfair title!

About Portal of Heroes: Designed by Johannes Schmidauer-König with graphics by Dennis Lohausen, Portal of Heroes is for 2-5 players ages 10 and up, with games taking approximately 45-minutes to play.