Time for another My Little Pony: Adventures in Equestria preview!

It’s time to reveal the troubles that await you in this epic finale of this blog series! Hurdles and Final Challenges provide not only a game timer in which you won’t have all the time you desire to make your deck as best as possible, but also, they provide that teensy bit of drama and excitement that’ll have you clinging to the edge of your seat.

There are 3 levels of Hurdles seen in the game, and to set up for your first adventure, we recommend setting up a stack of Level 1, 2, and 3 Hurdles, in that order. We don’t recommend starting with a Level 2 Hurdle as you may find that really, really difficult. You may also slide in a couple of extra Hurdles to prolong the game and make your decks that more powerful, however let’s stick to the easy plan to start.

Spike vs. Owlowiscious was a battle of endurance as both Spike and Owlowiscious wanted the attention and praise of one Twilight Sparkle! To overcome this, players will need to work together to possess 3 Pink Sugar Cubes per player. So that means, in a 4-player game, you’ll need to have a whopping 12 Pink Sugar Cubes in total between everyone! That’s a tough task, but we know you’re up for it.

You must also complete this task within a set number of Clouds that are added to this Hurdle. For Spike vs. Owlowiscious, that is 2 Clouds per player. Each turn, normally, players must add 1 Cloud to the active Hurdle in play. That means in a 4-player game, you’ll need to complete this Hurdle before 8 Clouds accumulate on it. No pressure, right? Well, actually there is some pressure. You see, at any time on a player’s turn they have reached the Cloud Limit, the group will suffer the Setback. In this case, 1 Cloud is added to the Final Challenge for each Location in the discard pile. Remember how you all were handling those Location Tasks so well? For each Location you’ve completed entirely, take 1 Cloud for each of them! The game can be quite rude, sometimes!

Finally, take a look at the bottom-right of the Hurdle. That’s called Chaos. With each attempt at overcoming the Hurdle or Final Challenge, you must flip over unused Hurdle cards for their Chaos, meaning you don’t know what else you’d have to muster up to finish the task at hand! Quite rude, indeed

If you did manage to overcome the Hurdle requirements, and you addressed the Chaos, congratulations! You gain the reward, even if you didn’t complete the Hurdle in time. For Spike vs. Owlowiscious, you gain 2 Sugar Cubes of your choice, which will be extremely handy if you paid all of your Sugar Cubes to overcome the Hurdle in question.

Then it’s on to the Final Challenge. This card is all sorts of bad news! Let’s take a look at Best Night Ever? Which was when The Grand Galloping Gala was supposed to be the most amazing night for our heroes but nothing went according to plan.

Let’s look at Cloud Cover. When the active Hurdle no longer has space to add additional Clouds, any excess Clouds are then added to the Final Challenge. Also, when the team fails to address any Situations in the Adventure Row, each Situation will add 1 Cloud to the Final Challenge. The more Clouds added to the Final Challenge, Cloud Cover may come into play. At any time that 3 Clouds are on this Final Challenge, moving to Locations becomes more expensive, and at any point 8 Clouds are on the Final Challenge, players cannot gain those useful Resource tokens! That’s so brutal, right?

It’s always best to hold off on playing cards that add Clouds and address those Situations as soon as you can. These effects can be no joke, even if the game gets a kick out of them! Boo you, game!

The Final Challenge also has one more devastating trick up its sleeve, and that is that each player must contribute Sugar Cubes to overcoming it. With Hurdles, some players may contribute more than others if the team decides that’s the best course of action, however, the Final Challenge makes it mandatory that all players need to contribute the same number of specific Sugar Cubes. We recommend paying close attention to your teammates’ controlled Sugar Cubes, and then utilizing Character cards and Ally cards to assist where you can. After all, there is no “I” in “TEAM”!

The game will throw you some curveballs in the Chaos, so anytime that your team decides to overcome the Hurdles or Final Challenge, we recommend having extra Resource Tokens and we even recommend waiting a turn or two to accumulate more than what you need. The silver lining in these cards is that you do not lose any Sugar Cubes or Resource Tokens if you fail to address the Chaos. Just be aware of how many Clouds the Final Challenge has. If ever the number of Clouds meets the Cloud limit of the Final Challenge, it’s game over. You lose, the game wins! And we want the opposite to happen!

There’s some game nuances to understand once you read the rulebook from start to finish, but these series of posts will already help you to understand the game with a degree of expertise! We’re really excited to have this game come out for you, and we hope you can have an amazing adventure along with your friends and family, and your fellow pony pals!

Got questions? Head over to our discord server! We've got dedicated channels for My Little Pony, where staff such as Chris Chung (Lead Developer for My Little Pony: Adventures in Equestria) and Jordan Gaeta (Community Manager) hang out and answer questions!