I feel like I had to add the qualifier “board” to the title when I describe this board game this because “The Big Pig: A Cooperative Eating Game” sounds like something very different! The Big Pig Game is a lightweight cooperative board game for 1-4 players, Ages 10+, taking 40-45 minutes. It’s all about eating food cooperatively (yes, I know, that’s a weird sentence).

The Big Pig Game was on Kickstarter back in April 2022 and promised deliver in January 2023. It’s mid March 2023 (I got mine about March 10th, 2023 in the mail). So, the Kickstarter is about 3 months late: that’s not so bad in the grand scheme of things.

This is a very cute game: I got it because it had the same vibe as the Kim Joy’s Magic Bakery game which did very well in my cooperative gaming circles (see our review here): Kim Joy’s Magic Bakery even made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021!

Let’s take a look at The Big Pig Game and see what we think!

Unboxing

The Big Pig Game is slightly smaller than the standard Ticket To Ride box size: it’s about the same size as The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game from a couple of weeks ago.

You can probably guess that this game leans into the “cute” aspect pretty heavily. The characters are cute little animals eating food together: if you don’t like the cuteness, you might want to stop reading now. This game is jut a lightweight, cute game. It’s not deep. And it embraces cute. Caveat Emptor.

We liked the components quite a bit because of the cuteness (except for one major issue, see later below).

Rulebook

The rulebook is good enough.

The components are well-labelled on the first page.

And the “theme” is explained on the next page. It’s a silly theme about raiding the kitchen while the humans are gone: it’s very silly and cut! Like I said, this game embraces that cute factor.

The set-up follows and consumes the next two pages. It’s good set-up and description: note that it has a set-up section.

The game then explains the basic structure pretty well.

The rulebook does pretty well on The Chair Test: it stays open and is readable on the chair next to me.  The font is a little thin and small, but it’s still quite readable.  Probably a B or B+ on The Chair Test.

The back cover made me laugh: it’s a fake ad for chili!! I’ll forgive that they don’t use the back cover for something game related.

Overall, pretty good rulebook.

Components and Gameplay

Each players chooses one of the cute little animals to play: there are 10 in all. See above.

Each character has varying Hingers, Hand Sizes, Item Limits. Each player has 4 action spaces (the donut slots), but these actions do vary among the characters.

If you look closer, you can see what each action space does: again they vary by character.

To win the game, the players must eat all the food before the human family returns: the board above has a different track depending on the number of players. Basically, as soon as the humans reach the house, the cute animals get caught red-handed and lose!

To win, the cute animals must collectively eat ALL the food on the 4 boards before the humans gets home! Above, you can see the tiles on the four different foods. Every time the cute animals “eat”, they take some of the tiles, depending on their hunger. The cute animals can eat from any food they like, but they have have bonuses or penalties depending on many things.

One Bad Things card comes out at the start of every turn, causing bad things to happen.

If you are playing the more difficult game, you use Very Bad Things instead: see above.

Each player has a hand of cards (Actions) that do Good Things for you and the other players: this is a cooperative game!

There are also Items you can buy on your turn that generally give you some bonuses.

If you eat ALL of one food, you get a Bonus! See the sample Sweet, Savory, and Healthy Bonuses above.

There is a player aid to help you, but it is not great: it doesn’t really help with all the player actions.

The most important question in the game: How do you eat? Either one of your cards or one of your 4 actions allows you to MUNCH or RAVENOUS MUNCH.

When you MUNCH, you use you base Hunger (it’s 4 for Big Pig above), plus bonuses (Big Pig gets +1 for Sweet Foods, +1 for the action), plus any Penalties (usually from Bad Things, none here). So, a simple MUNCH of Sweets for Pig Big would give him a MUNCH of 4+1+1 = 6.

From one of the Sweet foods, Big Pig could take two 3s or one 6 to be efficient. Big Pig could still take a 4 or 5, but it would be wasteful and not use his full hunger.

When you MUNCH, you keep the piece and can use it to power the BOOST action on the bottom of the Action Cards (“Look What I found” above requires two BOOST pieces, “Hyper” requires three). RAVENOUS MUNCH usually is a bigger hunger, but you don’t keep the pieces for boosting: the immediately go to the side of the food.

Players win together when they have eaten all the food (see above for 4 empty plates) before the Humans get home!

Along the way, players can ENCOURAGE each other (notated with the little cheerleader tokens above) for an extra +4 or +6 hunger on the next MUNCH/RAVENOUS MUNCH. This is a cooperative game! Sometimes its better to help your friends eat!

So, this game is about cooperatively using your hunger to MUNCH and eat all the food!

Solo Play

The game supports Solo Play (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)!

The only real change to the rules is that game board uses a different track, depending on the number of players: the solo track is much longer since the the solo player only plays one character and will have many fewer actions.

See above with a set-up for a solo game.

The solo game works fine, but it has the Roll Player/Ares Expedition Crisis mode solo problem to a certain extent: with fewer players, fewer cards come out, fewer Items can be in play, and fewer opportunities for collaboration come out (See our discussion in Roll Player Adventures and Ares Expedition: Crisis mode). Don’t get me wrong, the solo mode works, it’s fun, but one solo character simply doesn’t have quite as many cards come out at the same time.

I liked my solo play okay: I was mostly grumpy with the components (see Issues discussion below), but I was able to get through the game and learn it so I could teach my friends.

Cooperative Play

This game shines in cooperative mode.

Players happily take some of the cute characters and inhabit them.

The cooperative game really felt cooperative! The little encouragement tokens, as silly as they are with little Cheerleaders, really encouraged that cooperative vibe!

And each player’s action were different enough! For this really light game, we found ourselves talking amongst ourselves: “I’ll eat sweet things if you let me have the sugar packets” and silly things like that. There were a surprising number of collaborative moments for such a simple and silly game.

The cooperative game was chill and relaxing. Cecil the duck stole everyone’s heart.

Issues

There is one major issue with the game: the tiles don’t really fit in the middle! This is the main gimmick of the game, and I found that I could either “force” all the tiles to fit, or have them hang off the side: neither solution was great. The “forced” tiles were very hard to get out of the board. The “relaxed” tiles looked messy and moved too easily.

You CAN get them to fit (see above), but it actually interfered with the playing of the game. I feel like just a slight tweak to the tiles or the board could have fixed this issue!! The tiles don’t need to be packed in there so tight!!! They should really be just a little looser.

I am grumpy about this because this is the main gimmick of the game: the food pieces/tiles fit into the dual-layered boards and it looks cool … but the tiles are too tight.

Conclusion

So, if you can get over that the tiles are too tight, this is a fun, relaxing, end-of-the night for multiple players. The solo game is okay (maybe a 6.5/10), but it does teach the game. The cooperative game is much better: it is just a great way to hang out with your friends and have a chill time! The Big Pig Game gets a 7.5/10 or maybe even an 8/10. When I want a relaxing game, this is a fun, light, and surprisingly interactive experience while still being an interesting game.

My friends like this better than Kim Joy’s Magic Bakery, and I think I agree. I had a such a chill time playing this. This would be great for families or a group wanting a light game.

I know lost the hard-core gamers a long time ago: I think they saw Big Pig and bailed. But you know what? They might actually appreciate the simplicity of this game.

Appendix

I sent an encouragement token to my friends (via text) this morning. See below. I could see this becoming a thing with us: those cute little tokens really are a cheer-up.

Last week, we reviewed Astro Knights: it’s a cooperative deck-builder (see our review here). The main hook of Astro Knights is that you don’t have to shuffle your cards when your deck runs out, you just flip the discard pile over! That’s great! No shuffling! One of the other hooks, related to this, is that you have some choice over the order the cards go into the discard pile at the end of your turn. It’s really cool that you have some agency over the order cards might go into your discard, but it’s actually fairy limited. When you buy a new card, it immediately goes to the discard. When weapon cards go off, they immediately go into the discard. The only choice you generally have is over some of your Power cards. In playing, that choice didn’t make “that much of a difference” because the only cards you could could re-order were very limited. We loved this idea of reordering, but it didn’t seem that efficacious in practice.

Potential House Rule for Astro Knights and Aeon’s End

We were going to propose a house rule for Astro Knights about the reordering last week, but it lead us down quite a twisted path: we need to discuss it before we formally propose it.

The proposed House Rule is called Full Reordering:

In Astro Knights or Aeon’s End, any card that would go into the discard pile this turn can be re-ordered in any way the players want at the end of their turn. Those re-ordered cards then go to the top of discard.

Thus, any card that was bought, played, or discarded (weapons in particular) on that turn can be re-ordered as desired into the top of the discard.  So, if you buy a card, it doesn’t immediately go into your discard: it only goes at the end of the turn after you have re-ordered all your cards for that turn!

For ease of maintenance, the player can keep a separate pool of cards discarded/played/bought for that turn (representing cards to be discarded that turn) and re-order them at the very end of their turn.  When they are done re-ordering all the pooled discards, the pooled discards will go into the main discard.

It seems like Full Reordering should have been the rule all along in both Astro Knights and Aeon’s End.  Why wasn’t it? Let’s look into this a little.

Analysis Paralysis 

The main reason the proposed House Rule of Full Reordering is problematic is probably time: if you give the players a chance to re-order 5, 6 ,7 or more cards, then amount of re-orders the user will consider grows quickly … by a factorial!  Thus, with 5 cards to re-order, there are 5! = 60 permutations, 6 cards has 6! = 360 permutations, 7 cards has 7! = 5040 permutations, and factorial grows very fast (approximately exponentially if you believe Stirling’s Approximation)!   And, unfortunately, many players will take all the time they can to find the optimal solution, this increasing the amount of time a player takes on their turn (slowing down the game substantially).

If you “just allow” re-ordering of just a few cards (as per the current ruleset), there are typically only 1 to 4 cards to re-order, which are much are much smaller numbers: 1! = 1, 2! = 2, 3! = 6, 4! = 24.  I suspect the real reason the re-order rule by default is so limited is to avoid analysis paralysis: there are simply too may permutations of the discards if the player is allowed to consider all possible permutations. 

Potential Savior

There is still a potential way that the proposed House Rule of Full Reordering could work: What if we allow the next player to start his turn while the previous player simultaneously re-orders their discards?  This would mean the “re-order discard” step and “start of next turn” would be happening simultaneously!  Simultaneous play is something we are seeing a lot of current modern games: Ares Expedition, Sidekick Saga, Seven Wonders, Race for the Galaxy are just a few modern games where the game has embraced simultaneous play to move play forward.  One of the reasons that Terraforming Mars has fallen off the radar in my group is that Ares Expedition does everything that Terraforming Mars does, but in one quarter the time!  Most of this time reduction is because players are playing/building simultaneously instead of waiting for full completion of the previous player turn.  See our reviews of Ares Expedition and Ares Expedition: Crisis for more discussion.

I would argue that many people already play Astro Knights simultaneously: 

Player 1: “Hey, you done yet re-ordering your cards?” 

Player 2: “Almost, why don’t you just start your turn?” 

As you become more and more familiar with a game, it becomes second nature to exploit the opportunities for simultaneous execution.  Take a look at our blog entry about Arkham Horror and concurrency in our post of Concurrency in Board Games. In Arkham Horror, we start taking advantage of the turn structure to introduce some simultaneous play (concurrency) to move the game along.

Pipeline Parallelism

Let’s take a brief detour into the world of computer architecture: we’ll see a useful metaphor which will inform our discussion of simultaneous play.

Probably the most used textbook in Computer Organization is Hennessy and Patterson’s Computer Organization and Design.  A major topic of this textbook is pipelining: this is a technique modern CPUs use to achieve major performance gains.

The idea of pipelining is simple: break up a task into multiple stages, and execute as many stages in parallel (simultaneously) as you can.  Another similar analogy to the pipeline is the assembly line.

Above is the simplified stage breakup of the MIPS 5-stage pipeline.  Let’s say it takes 5 cycles to execute a single CPU instruction: 1 cycle per stage.  Like the assembly line, there is one worker per stage doing just one job: the first worker can only do Instruction Fetch (IF), the second worker can only do Instruction Decode (ID) and so on.  To finish a task, all 5 stages must be completed in order.

By overlapping the execution of the stages, we can achieve some parallelism and speed up the execution.  See above as it takes 9 cycles to execute 5 tasks (instructions)!  Without the overlapping, it would take 5*5 = 25 cycles to execute the same 5 tasks!

To take that idea further: Without pipelining, 100 instructions would take 500 cycles to execute, as each instruction takes 5 cycles. With pipelining, 100 instructions take 104 cycles to execute, as we can execute the 5 pipeline stages simultaneously, overlapping some of the stages! That’s basically a 5x speedup!

In real life, there are issues as you can’t always necessarily overlap stages.  As long as the stages can be executed independently, (like finishing a turn and starting a next turn), this pipeline parallelism works great!

The problem are the hazards.

Hazards

Without getting too much into complexities, hazards happen when things interfere with simultaneous execution.  The entire discussion of hazards can be quite deep (Read-After-Write Hazards, Write-After-Write Hazards, timing issues, etc).  For our purposes, the hazards just “get in the way” of simultaneous play.  You’ll notice in the branch chart above that pure overlapping is not happening due to hazards/issues!  That’s the real world!

If you are interested in the idea of simultaneous actions or pipeline parallelism, the ideas found in the Hennessy and Patterson book can be informative: What are the type of hazards that can prevent simultaneous actions?  What are some of the workarounds? The discussion is very technical and focused on modern CPUs, but the ideas it presents are very relevant in other forms of pipeline parallelism.

Back Of The Envelope Timings

In our case for Astro Knights: it takes too long to re-order a large number of cards!  Even if we overlap “the end of a turn” and “the start of a turn“, the player re-ordering may still be re-ordering even AFTER the next player has played!  At some point, the re-ordering will interfere (become a hazard) with a player’s turn! “Uh, I can’t start my turn until I finished re-ordering…”

Let’s say it takes 3 minutes to play a full turn in Astro Knights. And it takes 1 second to consider each permutation.  For 5 cards, that’s 5! = 120 permutations or 2 minutes: that’s not a problem! The re-ordering will finish before the next player’s turn finishes. What about 6 cards?  That’s 6! = 720 or 7 minutes!   What about 7 cards?  That 7! or 5040 seconds or 84 minutes or 1.4 hours!!! 

This overlapping turns mechanism can only work for us if we can somehow keep the re-ordering step short enough.

Opportunity Cost

“But Rich“, I can hear you saying, “My friends and I don’t has that much Analysis Paralysis!  We could re-order our cards in under 3 minutes! No problem!”  

Even if that were true, there is another cost: interaction!  When re-ordering your cards, the player’s head is down, focused on the re-order task, which means they are NOT engaged with their fellow players!  In other words, all the cooperation we like in Aeon’s End and Astro Knights is thrown out the window because each player is spending too much time on re-ordering their cards.

There is an opportunity cost: we lose the the opportunity to cooperate and interact when re-ordering.

Conclusion

So, is our proposed House Rule (Full Reordering) even viable?  The number of permutations of cards to re-order is the first real big problem!  The overlapping turns can solve some of that problem, but even then, the simultaneous play is only a partial solution, as you lose some of the interaction/cooperation we like in Astro Knights and Aeon’s End.

Decide for yourself: if you think your group can overlap turns, quickly re-order their discards, and still interact effectively, then maybe Full Reordering is a viable House Rule.  I personally think Full Reordering is probably too fragile a house rule because the effects of any slight analysis paralysis will be devastating.

So maybe that’s why the re-ordering the discard in Astro Knights and Aeon’s End is so limited!

 

Astro Knights is a cooperative deckbuilder for 1-4 Players, Ages 14+, at about 60 minutes. This was originally on Kickstarter back in February 2022, and it promised delivery in October 22, 2022. I got it mid Febraury, so it’s about 5 months late.

Somebody (Stronghold? The Fulfillment company?) chose to pack my Astro Knights Kickstarter with my Ares Expedition Kickstarter: so, I may have gotten Ares Expedition early (and we reviewed it last week here), but I think I got Astro Knights late!? It’s not THAT late, because I am seeing people on the Astro Knights Kickstarter saying they are just getting their copies.

Let’s take a look at this! Will it shift into our Top 10 Cooperative Deckbuilders?

Unboxing

I backed at the Kickstarter level that includes the supplement and the Game Mat.

The Game Mat is a little busy, but I found it very useful for helping set-up the game: everything is well-labelled! (Contrast this to the Game Mat for Deep Rock Galactic which added little value). You don’t need the Game Mat for Astro Knights, but it does help.

The game is a little smaller than most game boxes: see the Coke Can above and below for scale.

The rulebook come with the top of the box.

And below the rulebook are a bunch of “bad guy” boards.

The components are all nice.

Rulebook

The rulebook was great. It immediately tells you the object of the game, and then jumps into a nice annotated list of components (with an immediate discussion of what the components are and do).

It’s always an interesting discussion: do you discuss the “anatomy of a component” before or after set-up?  There are arguments both ways (“Why discuss something you haven’t touched yet” vs “Why set-up something you don’t know what is first?), but it seems to work for Astro Knights to do discussion before set-up.

So, it’s not until after 8 pages we get to set-up! See below!

Generally, I was very pleased with this rulebook. The sections were well-labelled/colored for distinction and there were enough pictures.

They even used the last page for something useful:

Oh yes, Astro Knights gets a A on The Chair Test: the rulebook sets open very well on the chair next to me, being easy to consult.

Gameplay

Astro Knights is a cooperative deckbuilder in the same family as Aeon’s End. We really like Aeon’s End: we’ve reviewed it here and here, and it also made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Deckbuilding Games.

In Astro Knights, the players are galactic warriors working together to take out some big bad guys! See the 5 that come with the base game above (well, 4: Fission Parasite is an expansion but came with the Kickstarter version). To win the game, that big bad needs to be reduced to 0 hit points!

Each player takes the role of an Astro Knight. Each Astro Knight is slightly different, mostly in the main power on their board.

For example, Gavril (above) has his main (Blue) Power (if it has enough energy) to Deal 3 damage and some extra effects: each power is different per player.

The main tool of the Astro Knight is their deck of cards. There are three type of cards: Weapons (orange), Power (purple) and Tech (green). The Weapons must be equipped before they can be used, and then they go off next turn. The Power cards are used for currency to buy upgrades and new cards (this is the deck-building part). The Tech cards just give some cool abilities when you play.

What cards are available to buy? The supply has 6 different types of decks: Tech, cheap/expensive Power, cheap/medium, and expensive Weapons. You can only buy the card on the top of the deck.

The main hook of Astro Knights (and indeed, Aeon’s End) is that you DO NOT HAVE TO SHUFFLE YOUR DECK! You have some choice as you discard cards and can form (some) of the order as you put cards in the discard. When your deck runs out, you just flip the discard over! No shuffling! I freely admit that the shuffling of many deck-builders has turned me off a little—I always liked this innovation in the deck-building world.

Like many cooperative deck-builders, you are defending a home base! If the bad guy causes the home base to drop to 0 hit points, the good guys lose! (The base’s Hit Points are in the upper left corner). Each home base also has a special power that allows it to defend itself.

The game alternates between good guy and then bad guy playing: it’s self-balancing (for the most part) since the bad guy and the good guys always get the same number of turns.

Gameplay is very much like Aeon’s End.

Astro Knights vs Aeon’s End

Astro Knights is very derivative of Aeon’s End: if it were a different company making it, you might think it was copying! Essentially, Astro Knights is a simplification/streamlining of Aeon’s End.

What’s changed?

Prepping Spells vs Equipping Weapons: These are essentially the same ides: the spells/weapons are the “big guns” and interesting things you use to do damage the bad guy(s). The more expensive the spell/weapon, the more it does! And you still have to set it up so it goes off next turn. It’s the same idea, it’s just called something different. But…

Breaches: However, Aeon’s End had a notion of “opening your breaches”: you couldn’t cast spells out of some breaches until you had opened them completely. As a simplification, the idea of opening breaches is just gone from Astro Knights! Instead, you only need to spend 3 energy to increase your number of weapons slots (see Gavril above with 4 (yellow) weapons slots). The whole notion of breaches is gone, in favor of the simpler slots ideas.

The Supply: The Supply that you buy cards from has a very different nature. In Aeon’s End, you have 9 decks, each with the same cards per deck (above left)—when you buy, you choose one of these to buy from, and you you know exactly what you get. In Astro Knights, (above right) you only have 6 decks in the supply, and most of the cards in each deck are completely different. Each deck has a “theme”: cheap power, expensive power, cheap weapons, etc. But once you buy a card, you reveal something new from that deck which could be very different.

Cards and Startup Choices: When you set-up either Aeon’s End or Astro Knights, you get to choose which good guys and bad guys you use. But, in Astro Knights, when you just set-up the supply, there’s no choice. In Aeon’s End, you have to choose the start-up cards. This is a big deal! Astro Knights sets up so much quicker, but it has lesser variability. Aeon’s End takes longer to set-up, but it has much more choice/variability. What keeps Astro Knights fresh is that each deck has a variable cards.

Basically, in set-up and play, there have been some simplifications. For Astro Knights, the set-up is faster, the game is generally a little easier to play, and the games are a little bit shorter. The cost of these simplifications is some extra variability.

Art and Graphic Design

I adore the art in this game.  The art and color choices remind me of a comic book! All choices made in graphic design and art just embrace the comic book vibe wholeheartedly.  

I do agree that the Game Mat can appear busy, but when you are playing the game, that “busyness” (is that a word?) doesn’t get in the way too much. (It could be less busy: I do think the Aeon’s End Game Mat is better).

Of course, art is a very subjective thing: decide what’s best for you. I personally really like the look-and-feel of Astro Knights much more than Aeon’s End: I love the bright colors and comic book vibe here!

Solo Play: Single Knight

Solo Play is very well defined! Thank you for following Saunders’ Law and giving us multiple ways to this solo!

The simplest way to get into the game and learn it is to play it solo with one single Knight! See the solo game/single Knight set-up above. The rule changes for a single Astro Knight are very simple: you are your own ally, you don’t lose when exhausted, and you only use three player Turn Order cards in the deck. Other than that, you can jump right in!

I think I missed a few rules in my first play, but my second play, I think I had the game down. It was really easy to get a single Knight to the table and play.

Solo Play: Multiple Knights

From a perspective of fewest rule changes, the easiest way to play solo is to take the role of two Astro Knights and play as if a 2-Player game (alternating between them).

It’s when playing two-handed solo that the “no shuffling” mechanism really stands out a great thing!  My two-handed solo game could have easily bogged down if I had to shuffle, as  I became acutely aware how many times my discard deck became my main deck! I kept thinking every time I turned the discard over: “I am so glad I don’t have to reshuffle my deck!”

I had a nice time batting back and forth between the two knights as I played.  There wasn’t too much of a context switch cost, and the knights are generally simple enough: like I said earlier, the main distinguishing thing is that each Knight has a different power.  That’s both boon and bane: simpler characters means easy context switching, but less interesting characters.

In general, operating two Knights worked well. Some of the cards you play help your allies instead of you directly, so it sets-up some interesting combos helping out your allies.

I think I prefer the single Knight solo, but I miss the interesting combos/interplay between the characters when playing multiple Knights.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play … didn’t go that well.  We had a perfectly fine time, but for some reason, my group just didn’t resonate with this game. Andrew felt he could never get a “groove” going like he could in other deck-building games: he tends to be a frequent culler of cards, and it was much harder to cull in Astro Knights.  Basically, you could only cull cards if you find the right Power on top when it’s your turn.  I think Andrew would have preferred more ways to cull cards.

The turns didn’t seem that cooperative either?  For some reason, our turns felt more solitary than other games, even with the abilities that help our allies.

Not sure what happened: everyone said they’d be willing to give it another try, but Astro Knights didn’t seem to go over as well as I had hoped.  The general consensus was that the simplified supply deck (with only 6 decks) was too random, so it was harder to strategize to get a good deck going (as you were at the mercy of what cards were on top when you bought).  

The final result was positive in the sense that everyone liked it decently, but only half of us liked the game: the other half thought it was just okay.

Issue with the Turn Order Deck

There are two main issues you should aware of with the Turn Order Deck!  First, make sure you sleeve all the cards in the Turn Order Deck!  Arguably, you should probably sleeve all cards in your deck-builder, but you should absolutely sleeve the Turn Order deck.  Why?  You touch these cards many more times than any other cards in the game!  Your Turn Order deck will start to get grody if you don’t (believe me, I know from one of my Aeon’s End games where I didn’t sleeve them).  Just some advice!

The second issue is more personal preference: I have a house rule that states “If the Bad Guy ever gets to act three times in a row, instead reshuffle the third time card and let the players go.”  I have seen far too many Aeon’s End games end in horror as the natural randomness of the Turn Order Deck gives the the Bag Guy 3 turns in a row!!! In late game, you can’t come back from that! You just watch in horror as the bad guy wins without you being able to do anything.

We discussed this house rule (which we call “Curb Excessive Randomness“) in greater detail in the Top 7 House Rules For Cooperative Games! It’s the #1 rule!  That’s how passionate we feel about this house rule! We also use this same house rule in Adventure Tactics (see review here).

Conclusion

Astro Knights is a streamlining of Aeon’s End that works really well (well for some of us). The set-up is quicker, the gameplay is simpler, and the game length is a shorter. Despite having fewer cards and simplified rules, Astro Knights really retains the feel of Aeon’s End while making a simpler game.

Unfortunately, although I liked Astro Knights (both solo and cooperatively), my game group did not like it as much. Here’s our scores:

• Rich: 7/10 for both solo and cooperative
• Teresa: 7/10 for cooperative
• Sara: 5.5/10, but could be persuaded to try it again and give it another try
• Andrew: 5 or 5.5/10, would try again, but couldn’t get a groove going.

My group did seem to like Aeon’s End better (as we’ve had some fantastic plays) than Astro Knights, but I personally appreciate both.  I feel like I could teach Astro Knights to newer players easier than Aeon’s End.  Astro Knights is also better when I just want a lighter cooperative game. 

Astro Knights is lighter than Aeon’s End in most senses.

Marvel Zombies was originally a cooperative game on a Kickstarter here in 2022: in that game, the players play as the zombies. That is NOT the game we are reviewing here.

I have to admit, I don’t like zombies. At all. So, I had no interest in playing as a zombie, even if it were a cooperative game.

Note that there was also a Marvel Zombies: X-Men Heroes’ Resistance game in that Kickstarter as well, where you play the last remaining heroes fighting the zombies! Now that sounds like fun for me!! That’s the game I wanted! Unfortunately, in order to get the Marvel Zombies: X-Men Heroes Resistance game, you had to plunk down $240 to get the Resistance pledge and get the core Marvel Zombies game (where you play as zombies) as well (see above). What?!?!?! That’s crazy! I can’t just get Heroes’ Resistance? Nope!! Don’t believe me? Take a look at the Kickstarter!! I just wanted the Heroes’ Resistance!

Fast-forward about 8 months, and I was able to find Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance in early December at Barnes and Noble for $34.99! This is the game I want: play as heroes fighting the zombies! Sure, there are some zombified heroes to fight along the way, but the core premise is that the players are playing Marvel Heroes (Hulk, Black Panther, Spiderman, Wasp, Winter Soldier, or Vision), saving bystanders, and taking out zombies! Now that sounds like fun to me! So, I picked it up!

It was a little hard to find this game! I had heard it existed outside of the Kickstarter, so I sought it out! Strangely, when I was looking, the only place I could find it was locally at my Barnes and Noble! I could not find it online! Now, of course, as a I write this review, it’s available on Amazon and a few other places.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

See Coke Can for perspective above as we open the box!

There are quite a number of punchouts … see above and below!

The insert is pretty nice (at first … see below).  It houses all the minis and cards and some dice.

In this game, each player takes the role of a hero and plays that hero:

You can play Vision, Wasp, Winter Solider, Hulk, Spiderman, or Black Panther.  See the minis above.  Now each character has some unique special powers, as described on their player cards (below).

Below is a close-up of the Winter Soldier’s card: Notice he has two plastic markers.  The top marker denotes how many hit points the hero has: if any hero ever goes to zero hit points, all players lose.  Note: this is not immediate!  Interestingly, this check is made at the very end of the turn, so if the heroes happen to achieve the mission results before the end of the turn and everyone dies, they still win!

The left marker denotes “power”: many abilities in the game are powered by power.  For example,  Winter Solider can spend 1 power for his Combat Reflexes (see above).

If there’s ever any doubt that this is a zombie game, seeing all the zombie standees set-up will relieve all doubt!  The zombies are also very intimidating!  See the picture above!  In this game, zombies do what zombies do: move towards the heroes and try to eat them!  There are plain zombies, fast zombies and tough zombies!! 

Of course, some Marvel heroes have been zombified already, and act as very scary zombies!! See Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, Iron Man, and Captain America on the cards above. Once the Zombie heroes get on the board, the game becomes a lot harder!  They are much more difficult to defeat! See their awesome little minis below.

In the game, the heroes will have to rescue bystanders from zombies.  Each bystander, once you rescue it, will give you some special powers: see their cards below.

There are bunch of different scenarios in the rulebook, each  describing the set-up and objectives.  In general, the objectives are to survive, rescue bystanders, and escape! See the tutorial mission below.

Using the cardboard tiles to set-up the city, you’ll see the set-up for scenario 1 like below:

Players move around the city and fight zombies, trying to save bystanders!  Each player has 3 action points to spend on movement, opening doors, fighting zombies, rescuing bystanders, and a few other things (some special per player).

Opening doors is a big deal: once you do, you reveal zombies within buildings!

Combat is dice-based: each character has its own notion of “what’s a success” and “how many dice to roll”.  

For example, Winter Soldier gets 2 dice on a melee attack (see COMBAT BLADE) , and hits on 3+ on the dice. (You can also spend power points to add more dice: 1 per power points).

Every zombie you kill gives you experience: the more experience you get, the more powers you unlock! Winter Solider starts with only the power in the blue zone (Assassinate) because his experience is 0 at the start of the game, but as he gains experience for killing zombies, he gains more powers!  At orange, he gets an extra action! At red, he can invoke Combat Reflexes! And dark red, he becomes a Hand-To-Hand Expert!

… but, the more experience you get, the more effective and numerous the zombies are!  When you look at an event card, you activate all colors matching your experience level (strictly, matching the highest experience level of any character)!  So, you get better as the game goes, but so do the Zombies!

You can also spend some of your action points to get a Heroic Trait!  Heroic Traits are cards you can discard to do cool stuff, but unfortunately, you can only ever have two. See some examples above.

Like most co-ops, play alternates between the good guys and the bad guys until someone wins! The zombies can win in a number of ways, but essentially killing a hero does it.  The heroes victory condition changes per scenario (but typically you have to save some bystanders and escape). 

The components are pretty great, if a little tiny: the cards and minis all feel one size too small, but they still work fine.  In general, I was happy with the components!

Rulebook

This rulebook was ok.  In general, everything was there.

The rulebook gets about a B on The Chair Test:  See above.  Some of the rulebook edges are flopping over the side of the chair: you can still read it, but it could be better.

The rulebook looks long (32 pages), but don’t despair! The last half of the rulebook contains scenarios.

The rulebook starts great with a Table of Contents and labelled look at all components! 

The next page helps you through some set-up: putting some things together.

This set-up picture was nice to have, but it would have been better to be the introductory set-up scenario shown in the picture.  The steps were also unlabelled: bummer.

In fact, the set-up spans two disjoint pages, making it that much harder to set-up.  Honestly, that was kind of a misstep in this rulebook.  But the game overview is good.

But, the rulebooks shows lots of pictures, and describes a lot of examples! It tends to lean a little bit too much on the pictures (which are very good at showing  lot of rules) at the expense of slightly better explanations.  

Each scenario is described on its own pages:

The rules end with an index (which I did use):

… and the last page includes some useful game info.

In general, this rulebook was decent to pretty good. I was able to learn the game solo and then teach my friends (looking up some rules while playing).

Solo Play

The game plays 1-4 players, so it does follow Saunders’ Law.  But, no matter how many players you have, there must always be 4 heroes in play!  That means the solo player must operate all 4 heroes by himself!  Luckily, the heroes special  powers aren’t that complicated (at first), so you can get into it.  Unfortunately, as the game ramps up, each hero has more and more powers to activate, so that makes each character harder and harder to play: the context switch between characters becomes longer and longer.

I was able to win my first play solo in the tutorial mode.  And I liked it.  But I worry …  as the scenarios themselves  get longer and more complex (the intro was pretty short), each hero will be that much harder to operate! The heroes will have more powers to keep track of, thus making the context switches between heroes that much harder.

But, I was able to learn the game solo, allowing me to teach my friends cooperatively.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play is best at 4 players: each player takes the role of just one hero: that’s what we did! See above.

Something that seemed to emerge from cooperative play was some roleplaying!  Andrew, who played Hulk, really got into it …  and he was joking about carrying doors and J. Jonah Jameson around!  And I made web sounds for Spiderman, Sara made Wasp buzz, and Teresa made Winter Solder … get depressed … like he should!  Knowing the Marvel characters really helped up inhabit these characters!  It  naturally encouraged us to roleplay, making the game more fun.

Cooperation was bountiful: the Player Selected Turn Order really enhanced the cooperation.

What I Liked

Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance does have Player Selected Turn Order,  so that the heroes can decide per round in what order to play.  I’ve always really enjoyed this mechanism, as it helps encourage cooperation!  “What Order do we go in this time to make the best choices?”  I love that Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance has embraced this mechanism: it makes me like the game even more.  It gives us more choices!  (To be clear, this is coarse-grained PSTO, as players can choose the order to play, but each player has to take their full turn before the next player.  Other cooperative games, like The Reckoners have fine-grained PSTO where players can spread out all their actions across players!)

The game also looked really great on the board and everything was every easy to distinguish! See above!  The colored rings on the heroes really helped!  It’s why I spent so much time looking for rings in Hour of Need: the colored rings really help distinguish the heroes from each other.   The zombies, as orange standees, are clearly zombies!  The Zombie Heroes, as green minis, are clearly Zombie Heroes! The Bystanders, as blue standees, are clearly bystanders!  This, coupled with the city tiles really makes the game standout on the board.

I also liked that the zombies came out fast and really pretty terrifying! It really helped the game ambiance! If there were ever a game I didn’t want to come to life, it’s this one!  The zombie hoard was a bit terrifying as you saw more and more and more come out …

What I Didn’t Like

By far my biggest complaint in the game was the Target Priority: see the rules above.  Basically, when you are engaging in combat, players are forced to fight certain enemies before other enemies!  If there are 11 Walker zombies about to tear you to shreds, but a Brute and Zombie Hero is on the same space you must fight the Zombie Hero first, then the Brute, the Walkers!  This makes no sense to me: I should be able to target the zombies however I want! If the Winter Soldier wants to kill the Walkers so that Hulk can take out The Zombie Hero, you can’t do that! You MUST fight the zombies in Target Priority!! I hate this rule! It takes away player choice for no reason.  What’s even weirder is that Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance has Player Selected Turn Order, a mechanism that furthers player choice, but then removes some of  that choice with Target Priority!  Very strange.  I may never play with the Target Priority rule:  I really despise it! I feel like the game is playing me rather than me playing the game.

Another thing that seemed weird: the “1” on the dice is a “jaw with teeth”, but it kinda looks like a 6: see above.  “Did I roll 3 sixes?  Oh no, whoops! That’s a 1!”  I know the dice were doing that to be thematic, but the jaw choice looks a little too much like a 6.  It’s not a big deal, but it did trip us up a few times, really!

I also didn’t love that you always must have 4 heroes in play.  That’s great in a 4-Player game, seems manageable in a 2 or 3-Player game, but I think it has major maintenance consequences and context switch problems in solo mode.  

Another thing I don’t like: once you punch out the zombies out and try to pack everything up, the game doesn’t really fit in the box very well.  This was surprising, given how good the insert is.  The box just doesn’t close all the way …

Conclusion

I was surprised how much I liked Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance, especially since I don’t like zombie games!! It was fun, the rules weren’t too complex, the game looks great on the board, each player feels unique, there are a lot of interesting choices, and even a little but of roleplaying seems to emerge when you play! Despite its zombie theme, me and my friends really enjoyed this. I think part of the enjoyment is that the Zombicide rules (that this game is based on) have gone through a lot of evolution to become the streamlined ruleset we see here.

Honestly, Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance might have made my Top 10 Cooperative Board and Cards Games of 2022 if it weren’t for the Target Priority rule! That one rule just sticks in my craw because it takes away from all the other great choices you can make in the game! Of course you can ignore that rule easily, and I honestly suspect a lot of people will accidentally ignore it (because it’s not thematic and easy to forget). My advice: ignore the rule and enjoy the game for what it is: 7.5 or 8/10 without the Target Priority rule. This is maybe a 6.5/10 with the rule: I really hate that rule.

Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is a cooperative game for 1-4 Players, Ages 10+, set in the world of Lord of the Rings.

I ordered this online (from Target) in late January and it just got to my house yesterday (Feb 27th, 2023): I believe it was just released. This came from Target, and I believe this is a Target exclusive.

We’ve had some amazing luck with cooperative games from Target over the past year: Minecraft: Portal Dash, Horizons of Spirit Island, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars Pandemic! Let’s take a look and see if this game lives up to the Target hype!

Unboxing

Note: No shrink wrap on the game: the edges are all plastic sticker shut. It looks weird, but that’s the way other games from Target (Disney Sidekicks, The Princess Bride, others) have been! I suspect there’s no shrink wrap to save money.

It’s smaller than the standard Ticket TO Ride size box (see above with Coke Can for scale), but it’s the same size as the The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game we reviewed some time ago.

The rulebook on top is decent:

The Adventure Book is very cool and has thick cardboard:

And there’s not a lot in here: some cards, some minis and some tokens.

Weirdly, we don’t have to punch out any tokens: they all come prepunched! So, it’s cheaper to unpunch tokens than put shrink wrap on a box? This seems a weird tradeoff to me, but what the hey: it’s easier to unbox when everything’s unpunched already!

The game is pretty decent, although I wish the cards were linen-finished: After playing all the way the game twice, I think the cards really should be sleeved! So, my main component issue is that the cards either need to be sleeved or be better quality.

Rulebook

The rulebook is good: it’s concise.

It’s only 8 pages! It starts off with a component overview and set-up:

The font is nice, the rulebook is easy to read, and it passes the Chair Test with a A.

There’s even a FAQ per chapter that crosses to the last page. This rulebook was easy to read and easy to consult when we had questions. It was good.

Components and Unboxing

The main component of the game is the Adventure Book.  The game is a light legacy game, where players progress across 8 “chapters” in the book to try to throw the ring into Mount Doom.

The book unfolds into a 2-page spread for each chapter: see above.

Each Chapter will have a very specific set-up: See above!  Note that this is where we decide what figures to place on the board: In Chapter 1, it’s the Hobbits and Aragorn.

Surprisingly, players do NOT take the role of one of the titular Lord of the Rings characters: instead, players collectively will be manipulating all the characters that come into play.

To the right of board are the Challenges: players will need to fulfill the preconditions of each challenge, then discard some cards (see the colored symbols).

The cards to discard are the Story Cards: see above.  There are 6 main types (above).

There’s also some Special Story cards which the players earn as they move through the game: these cards have really cool special abilities (or can be used as a wild card).

The Ring cards are powerful because they can either (a) be wild or (b) be used in special “per scenario” uses (see above: the ring can move the Black Riders). But everytime you play (or discard) on the rings, you cause corruption.

Corruption is kept track of at a special board at the top of the board. If your corruption ever makes it to slot 15, the entire game is over and you lose! If you hit any of the eye symbols along the way, you cause corruption cards to come out, which have bad effects: see below.

So, to be clear: this is a legacy game on many fronts! Corruption you gain will stay for the entire game! When you start a new CHapter of the book, you retain the Corruption track from the previous game! Use too many Ring cards, and you will lose the game before you ever get to Mount Doom!

The Specials stay as well: (as long as you win the game where you gained that special).

To remind myself of where I left off, I take a picture of the cards I gained and the current state of the Corruption track: see above.

This game follows the path of many cooperative games: Player does good news, then bad news happens. Next player does good stuff, then bad stuff happens. Repeat until you win! The good news is done by playing the Story Cards: see above.

The Bad News cards (called Plot Cards) are numbered 1 to 15, and cause bad News t happen, depending on the Chapter you are in!

See above: Plot Card 10 causes 1 Black Rider to move 2 Spaces in Chapter one.

This mechanism is a simple way to vary to bad news per chapter: the Plot Cards are just an index to the Plot Chart (see below).

If you can defeat all challenges in your Chapter, you win! If you complete all 8 chapters and throw the ring into the Volcano, you win! There are many ways to lose along the way, but usually that just means resetting the last chapter and replaying. Unfortunately, if the Corruption ever makes to 15, the game is completely over: you lose.

Solo Play

For a Mass Market game from Target, the Solo Rules are surprisingly well specified (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! There’s one paragraph in the rulebook (see above). The only real change is that there is an “phantom hand” of 6 cards you can trade with.

See a set-up for a solo player above. My cards are just below the board, and the “phantom hand” of 6 is off to the side.

I had an absolute blast playing this solo. The rules are very simple, and the gameplay is very simple, but it feels like every action you take in the game matters! Without even thinking, I played through the first three chapters one night and finished it the next night!

What makes this so fun is that you are making interesting decisions: Do I use a ring, even though it will cause corruption? Who should I move to always progress? Should I discard now to defeat a challenge or wait until I have more cards? The game has an inherent timer (you lose the chapter if you reveal all 15 plot cards), so everything you do (especially in the later chapters) matters.

The other thing I started doing was keeping track of what cards have come out: I can probabilistically predict what Plot Card might come out next, and that can inform my play! See above as I have all the Plot Cards out by category!

One thing I noticed is that the “phantom hand” the solo player trades tends to fill up with Rings At least mine did: I play to avoid corruption, so I tended to pass all the Ring cards over the Phantom as I used his “other” cards. See above: the “phantom hand” has all Rings! As we’ll see in cooperative play, there is a very different dynamic with the Rings!

I had a phenomenal time playing this solo. I lost one chapter, but each chapter is short: 15-25 minutes! So, even if you need to replay a chapter, it’s quick!

Cooperative Play

Sara and I played through the entire campaign on a blustery Sunday morning (and into lunch). The game was so much fun, we wanted to keep playing! We wanted to get to the end and win! It was a ball!

Sara even brought her “Eyes of Sauron” water cup.

The main difference in our game is that Rings because more like “Wounds” in a deck-builder game: they took up space, since you can only have 6 cards in your hand! See above as I have 2 Rings taking up space in my hand. Again, we tend to play to only use ROngs when you have to, so the Rings (for us anyways) took up space. So, we ended up trading Rings back and forth as we played (I need a Sword: I’ll trade you a Ring!). This was a very different dynamic from the solo game, where the Rings just drifted into the “phantom hand”: we had to share/load-balance the Rings so we both had enough slots in our hand to do stuff!

One of things that completely saved our Bacon many, many times was Arwen’s love: that Special card (see above) was earned in the first chapter. It allows use to use Rings without their corrupting effect! This card was huge for us! It allowed us to do challenges and get rid of the “blocking Rings” from our hand! Both Sara and I wondered if we could have won the game without these.

We just barely won at Mount Doom: it could not have been closer. One fewer card, and we would have lost. As it was, we still had to play 4 Rings and take 4 Corruption to win on the last play!!! Luckily, we had kept the corruption down to pretty low in the game, so it wasn’t that bad. We won!!

What a fantastic time we had. Each Chapter was quick and very different, and we had a ball.

We do think that 2-Player is optimal: players can strategize closely to keep challenges under control. Much like Pandemic is easier with two players, but more chaotic and harder with more players, Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Games is probably best at 2 players, and not quite as good at 3 and 4 players.

Two Issues

Issue 1: In general, the components are pretty good (especially for a Mass Market game from Target),  but the cards really need to sleeved, or should be better quality.  After playing solo and cooperatively all the way through a couple of times, the card are starting to get a little grody: you touch them and shuffle them all the time.  Consider sleeving your cards before you play (if you pick this up).

Issue 2: There is an element of Luck. I lost one game (see above) horribly because I could not get a sword for like 4 turns in a row, and that just caused wasted turns. I couldn’t have done anything to mitigate it, I couldn’t skip my turn to draw extra cards or anything like that. Bad Luck as only been an issue a handful of times (and I have played it quite a bit), but it is possible you could get completely screwed on card draws. Luckily, the games are quick: a typical game is 20 minutes, and you can reset quickly. I’ve had many of game of Pandemic go bad because of bad card draws, so it can happen in any cooperative game. The good news (based on my many plays) is that Bad Luck doesn’t seem to happen very often: mostly, you just have toi make smart decisions.

Adventure Book Games

There are currently three Adventure Book games: The Princess Bride (which reviewed here), The Wizard of Oz, and Lord of the Rings (whose review you are reading now). There are all very similar: players cooperatively play cards to move characters around the board and fulfill challenges, and bad news comes with the Plot Decks and Plot Charts. It’s a fairly simple system which seems to work really well for putting on top of a Intellectual Property.

I think The Lord of The Rings Adventure Book Game is my favorite of the three: it slightly evolves the mechanisms of the original Princess Bride and has just a little more content. But, I like them both.

The Oliphant In The Room

So, if given a choice, which cooperative Lord of the Rings board game would I play? The Renier Knizia Lord of the Rings (2001) game has a lot of nostalgia, and I do enjoy playing it, but it is too hard: it would have to be the right group and circumstances to play. I thought the Fantasy Flight Lords of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth was just okay: you couldn’t just open it up and play, you had to always be in the middle of a campaign. (And I like Mansion of Madness a lot more if I want that system: you can always just jump into a game).

Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is by far the lightest and easiest to get into. You also can easily “cheat” and jump into any chapter for fun. It’s also incredibly thematic, given how simple it is. It may be too simple for some gamers: you may prefer the complexity of Journeys in Middle Earth, but I think the simplicity of Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is very appealing. I think it’s my favorite?

Replayability

One question you might ask: how replayable is this?  I’ve played through the full campaign twice already (once as a solo player, and once as a 2-Player cooperative play), and I still want to play again!  Each chapter is different enough to give some variety, and there are 8 chapters: so that’s quite a bit of variety.   I am also interested in seeing how the Specials you get as you advance affect the game: Arwen’s Love made a huge difference for us: will other Specials be as useful?

At some point, of course, you might get sick of this system and the chapters.  But I think it’ll be a while before you do.

Age Range

The Age Range (according to the rulebook) is 10+. I’d say that’s accurate … at first. The game scales up in difficulty and complexity as you play. I think having an older player needs to be available to either play with younger players or just shepherd younger players through the game. Each Chapter has a lot of rule changes, and I think an older player needs to be around to helper younger players.

Conclusion

I did not expect to like Lord of The Rings: Adventure Book Game as much as I did. I’d probably give it an 8 or an 8.5/10 as would Sara. This works fantastic as a solo game: I still want to replay through the whole campaign even though I’ve already played once before! And this is easy to take out for a cooperative game. My only reservation is that the 2-Player cooperative game is probably optimal (for fun, for winning): A 3-Player game would be okay, but I worry that the 4-Player game might bog down.

This light legacy cooperative game is thematic, fun, quick, and easy to play. It’s my favorite game in the Adventure Book series of games.

Deck of Wonders was #8 on my Top 10 Cooperative Anticipated Games of 2021! It is running quite late: it was a Kickstarter that promised delivery in November 2021, but it just delivered on February 1st, 2023 (a few days ago).

This is a solo or cooperative legacy card game for 1-2 players. It doesn’t label itself as such, but Deck of Wonders is “essentially” a tower defense game where you defend your “tower” (yourself) with your “troops” (minions). It also has some cool story and legacy mechanics: as you play, a story advances and you get to upgrade your cards with little stickers! It’s very cool! Let’s take a look.

Unboxing

What’s in this huge box?

This tiny box was in the huge box!  I think they overpacked it!

But you get a sense of how big this game is!

The components are actually quite nice.

Remember how we said this was a legacy game?  Part of the legacy cone part comes from the stickers above! The sticker sheet contains little stickers you can put on your cards to upgrade them!

The vast majority of this game is cards: see all of them in the box above.

The bottom row is a bunch of little card packs. As you unlock parts of the story, you get to open some of these packs and add new cards/rules to the game!

The middle section of the box holds the 3 main Villains.

The final box at the top: it’s a box of the player cards.

The cards all look fantastic: they have two sides!  When the text is normal, it’s your side. When it’s upside down, it’s for the villain.  Every card in the game can be used, depending on whose turn it is!

The components are pretty nice for a little box!

Rulebook

The rulebook is .. okay.  I think there were three main issues:

The first complaint: the font is too thin. I understand it has to be small to fit in this size, but it was so thin I had trouble reading it!  I think this may the first time I have ever had this complaint!

You can actually see how much more readable the font is in the other sections when it’s fattened up! See above.

The second complaint: there’s no FAQ.  I think my very first round of the game I had a question (does destroy count as an attack? Do shields stop a destroy?), but there was no place to go to look it up.

Having said that, they did have an “Easy rules to miss section” at the back. That was really helpful!

The final complaint was that the start of the game was under-specified in the start game.  Normal flow is that you draw 1 card on the bad guy turn, and 1 card on the good guy turn.  But in the beginning of the game, how does that work?  The villain plays 3 cards … are they consecutively? Do we do battlelines each time? Does the first card being a minion mean he gets to attack 3 times?   This really sets the timbre of the game if you take 4 damage three times from a really bad minion who just happens to show up.  A little more help here would have gone a long way.

Oh yes, the game completely fails the Chair Test!  There’s no way I can use the chair next to me to “just look” at the rulebook! It’s much too small!  See above. It MUST go on the table!  See below.

It’s not a terrible rulebook, it mostly taught the game.  It needed fatter fonts, a FAQ (especially with some keyword elaborations), and better startup directions.  There’s also some house rules I think should be in here (see discussion later).

Solo Play

By default, this is a solo game.  (There is a cooperative mode, but it’s not really that different).

At the start of the game, you mix two decks: your hero deck and the bad guy deck: there are about 28 cards in each deck.  This is the Deck of Wonders!  All gameplay comes from this deck, both good guy (you) and bad guys (the game) plays.

Both the good guy and the bad guys have a little hit point tracker.  (The game doesn’t come with any tracker tokens: I had to get my own).  To win, you have to take the bad guy to 0 hit points.  You lose if you are ever knocked down to 0 hit points.

The good guy (you) starts with 4 cards: notice that they text is right side up on the Title!  This means we are using the cards for the good guy side.   You can play as many cards as you like on your turn, as long as you have enough cards, and can pay the costs (some cards cost other cards to play them).  You start the game with 4 cards.

The bad guy starts by playing 3 cards from the Deck of Wonders.  When you are playing the bad guy turn, you always play the card with the title text upside down!  See the Forest Troll as a bad guy minion above!

Essentially, play alternates between good guy/bad guy until one side wins!

Most cards that get played are minions that “stay in play” until they are killed.  

There are also some one-shots: See Lightning Strike above.

Before you get into the game, three legacy decks are turned up: they show “conditions” to try for to unlock the decks! For example, the first deck requires us to defeat Cullin and still have 10 health remaining!  In order to fully defeat Cullin, we have to fight him until we can open his third and final deck (see above) and defeat his final “Fated Form”.    These deck conditions inform what you are trying for in the game.

Over the course of 2 or 3 three nights, I ended up playing about 10 games.  I won 3 of them and lost 7. Every time you win, you get to add an upgrade sticker to a card!

The game really is about 15 minutes.  Even though I lost 7 games, the game moves pretty quick.  The worst part of setting up a game is all the shuffling.

The solo game moves pretty quickly.  It was fun adding upgrades to cards (but see below).   As you unlock more and more decks, it was cool to see the story.

Art

I love the art in this game: it was one of the reasons I backed it.

The cards are very readable, and the artist, Lauren A Brown, did a fantastic job.  Since the cards are the main component you look at as you play, this art is just captivating the whole game.

Story

There is an interesting story that unfolds as you play.  The game starts with a brief back story ….

… which you can have read to you by the Foreteller app!  Now, I don’t know if the story isn’t quite done, but the only narration I found in the app was for the Intro.  There are a few other places in the game that narration would make sense: perhaps I just needed to unlock it with a code, or perhaps it’s not quite done yet.  Either way, I only heard the intro narrated.  It was cool.

After that, story comes out as you unlock story packs on cards.  Below is the intro for Cullin, the first villain to fight.

As you unlock more packs, more and more story comes out!

Honestly, I really did enjoy the story that came out as I played.  The new mechanisms it introduced seemed consistent with the story.  Hopefully by the time you read this, all the story will be in the Foreteller app.

Luck and Legacy

I love the idea that this is a “little legacy” game, where you can upgrade cards and put stickers on them to make the game better.  That’s a really great idea!  You can choose “how to upgrade” your deck!  The problem is that, statistically,  your upgraded cards will almost never appear, especially at the beginning!

Let’s look at the first set of decks you are playing: you start with 56 cards (28 from bad guys, 28 from your deck), but then immediately add 4 upon advancing: let’s call it 60 cards for ease of math. 

Whenever you win, you are allowed to add exactly 1 sticker to 1 card to upgrade it!  And that’s it!  Most of of the games I’ve played only made it through about 40 cards before the game ended. So, you have about a 40/60 or 2/3 or 66.6% chance of seeing your upgrade.  That’s not bad, except you have to consider that the upgraded card may be played by the enemy upside down!  About half the cards will be played the wrong way causing you to miss your upgrade! So, that cuts your chance of seeing the upgrade in half!  Your chances are now 1/3 or 33.33%! So, a single upgrade has only a 1 in 3 chance of ever even being played.  And the upgrades are pretty minor too: +1 here, +1 there, so they aren’t THAT helpful.

It’s cool that you can upgrade cards, but I think the upgrade path is too slow.  I played three winning games, and I don’t think I ever saw any of my upgrades … well, I did, but it was played by the enemy (which was infuriating).  In the meantime, the bad guys advanced much, much faster!  Cullin (the bad guy) gets 4 cards in the first upgrade which are pretty significant! By the third upgrade, he was doing two damage to everything on his turn: me, my minions, everything!  I was lucky when I did any damage to him.  I was getting massacred.

The legacy thing is cool, but the upgrades come out way too slow.  The odds of you seeing your upgrades  were very small.

Too Much Randomness and Possible Fixes

This game is too random for me. I played ten games, and every single one was completely unbalanced … either for me or against me.  It’s great when it’s for you when you are winning (for three games), but the ones I lost (seven)  were incredibly frustrating.  I never felt like I could do anything to fix my loss.  I just watched as the cards came out, with no chance mitigation on my part.  I could tell quickly whether I would win or lose. And that was it.   I mean, at least the game is quick and over in 15 minutes.

But I think a few minor fixes might make the game much more palatable and less random.

1. Speed up the upgrade path!  When you win a game, allow the user to choose 3, 4, or even 5 upgrades! I don’t know what the right number is, but I think if you saw your upgrades actually coming out and helping you, you would find the game more engaging.
2. Card Choice: The most frustrating thing is that you only draw one card per turn.   I watched over and over as I drew useless garbage  on my turn as the villain drew amazing cards!  Give me some choice: maybe I draw two cards, and keep one and discard one? This would also give the upgrades a better chance of appearing! And then I feel like I have a choice!  It would  keep me more engaged, rather than just randomly flipping cards.
3. Battlelines: Weirdly, I am forced to arrange my minions is priority order: I get choices on ties only!  Why?  This seems to just take away choice from the game.  This might be a balancing mechanism initially, but it’s so frustrating: my only choice on BattleLines is on ties and the order the bad guys attack!  I would rather be able to arrange my Battlelines the way I want!  Thematically, it almost seems like the bad guys should use the priority to attack, not me? The Battlelines seems reversed!  The choice seems intuitively and thematically in the wrong place.  I don’t know.  I feel like this mechanism needs a revisit.

I think with some of these changes, I might like the game more.  I was just overcome by the randomness and didn’t feel like I had much agency when I played.  Maybe these fixes would alleviate that?

Conclusion

Deck of Wonders has a lot going for it: wonderful art, easy-to-read layouts, compelling story, interesting upgrades, nice components, and straightforward gameplay.  Unfortunately for me, it was far too random, as I feel I didn’t feel like I had a lot of agency when playing.  Over the course of about 10 plays, I saw a very swingy game depending on what cards were drawn.  I wanted a little more mitigation of luck: maybe some of the possible fixes I mentioned (above) would help that.

I do, however, have to remind myself that many games of “plain Solitaire” with 52 poker cards are just as random! In “plain Solitaire” (such as Klondike, above), the hands of fate may conspire against you and you can’t win.  But it’s over quickly and you can try again.  The same can be said of Deck of Wonders: even if you lose, you lose quickly and can reset again!  And the art and story of Deck of Wonders are so much more compelling than a deck of cards!  

If you are looking for a solo game with about the same randomness of “plain Solitaire”, Deck of Wonders might be what you are looking for: it’s got great components, great art, great story, and some really interesting ideas.  In the end, it’s far too random for me, but you may enjoy this.

The Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis Expansion arrived at my house Feb 12th, 2023. This was on Kickstarter back in April 2022. The Kickstarter promised delivery of the expansion in December 2022, and just delivered to me: so about a month and half late. That’s actually quite good by Kickstarter standards! This is an expansion for the card game called Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition which came out about two years ago (which we reviewed here).

This expansion adds three new modules/sets to the game:

1. Discovery: Adds  new card mechanics, Awards, and Milestones
2. Foundations: Adds enough resources for a 5th and 6th player and a slightly new mode of play
3. Crisis: Adds a solo and cooperative expansion

This review will concentrate on the solo and cooperative modes with the Crisis module, but we will take a look at the other modules as well on our way there.

Unboxing

Something weird happened on the way to my unboxing:

I got Astro Knights AND Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis all in the same box!  And yes, they were Kickstarted completely separately!  I think Stronghold games owns Indie games, so they consolidated the shipping to save some money.  I had been hearing that Astro Knights has been out for a while and I was surprised mine hadn’t arrived yet … now I know why! 

I think to appease me for making Astro Knights so late, they gave me the Sherlock Files demo deck!

Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis is bigger than the base box.

One thing about this expansion is that it’s very daunting up front.

There are three expansions is here … what goes for what?  It’s really not clear … until you look at the rulebooks for the individual modes.  Each rulebook (there are three: one for Discovery, one for Foundations, and one for Crisis) has a very clear list of annotated pictures of components describing what’s in each.  However.  You do have to spend some time sorting through this.

Discovery Mode

Discovery mode is the most “just add new stuff” expansion to the game: it adds mechanics for Awards, Milestones, wild tags, and upgraded Phase cards.

There are multiple sets of phase cards which “look upgraded”.  There are multiple versions of upgrades and you can choose.

There are mechanics for upgrading your phase cards in the new expansion.  These phase upgrades are also used in Foundations.

There are two sets of upgrades, and you can choose between them when playing.

Foundations Components

The Foundations expansion is mostly about adding a 5th and 6th player (and components) to the base game, which only takes 1-4 players.  It adds more sets of phase cards, players boards, player aids, cubes,  and a new supplemental infrastructure board.  The infrastructure board add a new resource that needs to be upgraded before Mars is considered terraformed.  From a gameplay perspective, the infrastructure board just gives the 5th and 6th player other things to concentrate on.  Otherwise, it’s essentially the same game (modulo the new upgraded phase cards).

Crisis Mode Components

The Crisis mode adds probably the most new components for a new solo and cooperative mode.

Common Components

There are some components that cross all expansions: there’s 4 new trays.  Why?  So each module can store its own components!

There’s a bunch of extra cubes, which works with all modules … although arguably they are a necessity for the Foundations module (5/6 players) so there’s enough cubes for 5 and 6 players.

There’s also some oversized boards.

 

One complaint from the base game was that the Terraforming Rating track was always too narrow, as the first column was just wide enough for one cube!  They’ve now widened the track!  See above.  This new board, with wider track, will make it easier to play Foundations and Discovery.  Crisis Mode has its own board, but it also has the wider track.

There’s a lot of stuff in this box.

Crisis Mode Rulebook.

The Crisis mode (and the others) were all very good rulebooks.  They had lots of good, annotated pictures, super nice paper (linen paper), and easy-to-read fonts.

All rulebooks gets an A on the ChairTest: it easily fits on the chair next to me.  See the nice pictures of set-up above.

My only complaint about the Crisis rulebook was that the Detriments were poorly explained.  When do they go into effect? How long is that effect?  Does the effect happen immediately when the oxygen.oceans/temp changes to a yellow/red zone?  

We think the detriments only take effect during the “check metrics” phase, but we just needed one or two more sentences to elaborate.

But overall, this was a good rulebook for this expansion.  The pictures in each rulebook were CRITICAL to unboxing this thing!!!

Crisis Mode Gameplay

Congratulations to Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis for following Saunders’ Law and having a solo mode for this cooperative expansion (Crisis mode).

Solo play and Cooperative play are intrinsically linked in the Crisis expansion. The rules are about the same for both mode, which a few minor changes.

The key to the Crisis mode are the Crisis cards: see an example above. They are essentially the “bad news” cards you see in most cooperative games: they come out at the start of the turn, and (usually) cause bad things to happen. These cards will persist, with continual bad effects, unless you remove all the crisis tokens from the card. Each Crisis card describes the instant bad news, the continual effects, and what’s needed to banish the card.

The other interesting thing about Crisis mode is that the Teraforming is turned on its head: At the start of the game, Mars is already terraformed! Some meteorite has crashed into the planet and is causing the terraforming to revert! To win the game, you must keep Mars terraformed … but Crisis cards will conspire to dry out oceans, lower oxygen, lower temperature, and many other bad things.

At some point, the Dwindling Supplies Crisis card will come out, and you have just a few turns left to get Mars back to fully terraformed, or you lose!

This solo/coopeartive game still feels like Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition! Each player is still building their engine, figuring out which phases to play, and trying to get most resources to get stuff done! The core gameplay doesn’t change that much.

But now, you cooperate together. You figure out what phases to play as a group!! The victory points become a shared resource to eliminate crisis tokens!

If you like the base game play, you will like Crisis mode adds. You may prefer the competitive or the cooperative mode, but the game, at its core, still feels the same: build the best engine you can can, and choose the best phases for you.

Solo Mode

The solo mode worked well. It gave a me chance to learn the game so I could teach my friends. I generally felt like I had a lot choices, but I did feel just a little at the mercy of the cards I got (see more discussion below). My first solo game was a loss: I couldn’t keep the oxygen level up. After losing, I realized that the solo player really needs to do a little bit of everything to make sure he wins. My second solo game was much more balanced and I was able to secure a victory.

In many ways, the solo game reminded me of Agricola! Why do I say that? Because to do well in Agricola, you have to do a little bit of everything well: cattle, sheep, carrots, plots, house… everything! You can concentrate one one thing, but you will probably lose: the scoring system in Agricola is structured in a way that the best scores comes from doing a little bit of everything.

In the solo Crisis mode, the solo player must make sure to do pretty well in everything: oxygen, oceans, money, temperature. All must kept under control, or the solo player will lose. Just like Agricola. I hate to say it, but that makes the solo games a little samey: you must always played a balanced game to win.

Cooperative Play: Crisis Mode

Cooperative play went surprisingly well. Sara had never played Ares Expedition before, but she was able to jump in to the cooperative Crisis mode without any previous experience. From Sara: “The cards were well labelled, and I had very few questions as a I played. The text on the cards was easy to read and understand”.

Andrew had played the two-player only cooperative mode from the original base game Ares Expedition with me about 2 years ago: see our review here. Recall that the base Ares Expedition has a very limited/very simple 2-player only cooperative mode built-in: it kind of works on victory points but just doesn’t seem very thematic. According to Andrew: “This new cooperative mode is significantly better!”

Basically, the new cooperative mode is much more thematic: the Crisis deck really adds to that theme, as you are “dealing with things” (oxygen lowering, temperate lowering, etc) as you try to keep Mars terraformed. It feels like the things you are doing fit much more the idea of the game (as opposed to some generic victory point goal for the co-op mode of the base game).

The rules don’t change too much from the Crisis solo game to the cooperative game: instead of the Crisis solo mode dummy hand (where you get two cards per turn AND you get to choose which side you use), you get the Crisis Dummy Cards (where the number of cards you get depends on the number of players). See above.

The other thing that changes is that the Crisis decks are built differently for the number of players: see above. Basically, the more players, the harder the Crises are to dismiss. The balancing for the number of players seemed to work very well: I appreciate that the decks are very different for different player counts. It really feels like they went out of their way to make the cooperative game work well for ALL player counts!

Cooperative mode was a big hit! In the three player game, we collaborated to figure out many things: how to get the Crisis cards under wraps, how to get the most useful phases for everyone, what things we can do to help each other, and generally discuss how to move forward. At the same time, each of us had our own engine that we were building! So, we all felt engaged in our own board AND with each other! This is something we struggled with when we tried to add a cooperative mode to Arc Nova: how do you keep each person engaged with their own tableau as well as everyone else? By using the “everyone plays during the chosen phases”, Crisis mode seems to have solved that problem! Turns move quickly enough, because everyone is engaged, but at the same time we are still building our own tableau AND collaborating!

Our first 3-Player cooperative game took 2 hours and 15 minutes, but nobody cared about the length. Everyone was having fun the whole time.

Solo vs Cooperative

The Crisis solo/cooperative mode reminds me of Roll Player Adventures in one way (see our review here): hear me out.

The solo game of Roll Player Adventures doesn’t work very well: you frequently don’t get enough cards to do what you need to do. The solo play is much more at the mercy of the cards you draw for dice mitigation. The cooperative mode works better in Roll Player Adventures because more players means significantly more cards! So, someone will typically have the right cards to get something done. The number of cards in play (over all players) really changes how much you can do! The solo player just doesn’t have enough cards.

The solo player in Crisis mode has the same problem, if less pronounced. My first solo game was lost because I never got enough cards to mitigate the Oxygen issues. I was at the mercy of the cards to a greater extent, because the solo player brings out fewer cards in play (compared to a 4 player game which would have 4 times as many cards moving through the system). Now, as I said, this phenomenon is much less pronounced in Crisis mode vs Roll Player Adventures, but it still causes me to ding the game a little. I like the solo game, and I would play it again, but the game is better in cooperative mode … because there are significantly more cards in action to mitigate the randomness that comes out.

Conclusion

Ares Expedition: Crisis Mode had an astoundingly positive reception by my group. They all like the game, the theme, the choices, the cards, the components, the gameplay. Andrew and Sara are talking about buying their own copy. They would both give it a 7.5 or 8 out of 10.

I’ve played a few more games, so my score is slightly more nuanced: I’d give the solo game a 7/10 and the cooperative game an 8/10. I like the solo game and would play it again, but this game is better played cooperatively (with each player building their own tableau).

Is it worth getting the Ares Expedition Expansion: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis for just the cooperative mode in Crisis? Yes, I think it is. Is it worth starting from scratch and getting the base Ares Expedition Terraforming Mars game and then the expansion JUST for the cooperative game? I almost think so, if only because you get so much other great content at the same time.

And finally, the cooperative mode in the Crisis expansion blows away the lame 2-Player-only cooperative in the base game: Crisis mode so much more thematic. You’ll never play that lame mode again (but you might play the solo mode from the base game).

Just as we saw in last year’s list (Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Expansions of 2021), the expansions this year seem to come in three varieties:

1. Stand-Alone Expansion: Some games you thought might be on the Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2022 might have just ended up on this list because they are stand-alone games that can be played without a base game, but at the end of the day they also expand a base game!
2. Makes The Game Cooperative: Some expansions take a competitive base game and make the game fully cooperative with the expansion! We saw a number of these type of expansions on the Top 10 Games That Can Be Played Fully Cooperatively!
3. More Content: Some expansions just add more content (more cards, etc.) to the base cooperative game!

Honorable Mention: Grand Hotel Abaddon

Expansion Type?  Stand-Alone Expansion

Plays Solo:  Yes 
Player Count: 1-4 (it’s best at 3 or 4)
Ages: 12+
Length: 90 mins per session (there are exactly 3 sessions)

We have absolutely loved the Kosmos Games Adventure Games series.  The Dungeon made our Top 10 Cooperative Games in 2019 and The Volcano made our Top 10 Cooperative Games in 2020.  The problem with The Grand Hotel Abaddon is that we aren’t “quite sure” when it was released in the USA! (Darn COVID).  It absolutely came out in Europe much earlier than 2022 (according to BoardGameGeek, it was 2020), but I don’t think we got it here in the USA until 2022.  That’s why this is an Honorable Mention: although we played it in 2022, it’s unclear when it came out in the USA. (It’s also an Honorable Mention because maybe it should be in our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022 instead of here in the expansions?)

This campaign game spans three 90 minute sessions, as players traverse an adventure together, interacting with objects and rooms like the old  point-and-click Adventure video games!  Once you have solved the adventure, you are done!

This is a great adventure game experience! Check out our of The Grand Hotel Abaddon review here and see why we love this adventure game so much!

10. Cantaloop 2: A Hack of a Plan

Expansion Type?  Stand-Alone Expansion

We absolutely adored the first Cantaloop (Breaking into Prison) (see our review here), and in fact, it made our #1 position in the Top Cooperative Games of 2021!  It turns out that Cantaloop is just the first game in a series of three games! The second one, Cantaloop 2 (A Hack of a Plan) (see our review here) came out this year (2022), and a third one is coming soon.  This expansion is a stand-alone game that can be played by itself, but you really should play the first Cantaloop first!

Cantaloop 2 is just more of the same!  It’s the equivalent of a point-and-click adventure game, but in board game form!  You explore a map, find objects, solve puzzles, all while laughing at the silly jokes hidden in the game using red acetate.

This would have been higher on our list, but some of the last few puzzles were a bit too much, and there were some printing problems (the first edition absolutely needs an errata sheet).  We still loved this game, but these problems brought the game down: that’s why it’s only #10 on this expansions list.  We are still very excited for book 3 in 2023 though!

9. Thunderstone Quest: Enemies Among Us

Expansion Type? More Content

Thunderstone Quest goes back a long way for us: We have been following it on Kickstarter for years!  The original Thunderstone Quest was NOT cooperative (see our initial positive but grumpy review here), but then AEG Kickstarted The Barricades mode making it cooperative (see our reviews here and here)!   And they keep adding more and more content to the game! 

The Enemies Among Us kickstarter gave us a new box, two new quests (Darkness Rising and Miricelle’s Return), more Prestige Class Boards and Guardian boards (for the cooperative mode), more dungeon tiles, and just more stuff!  This expansion also gave us plastic dividers, which we completely unnecessary, but very cool. 

This is a true expansion: it just adds more content to a great game.  I think one of the reasons it’s a little lower on the list is that it’s so hard to get to the table! There are three huge boxes of content to unpack to get a game going: the base Thunderstone Quest game, the Barricades Mode expansion, and the Enemies Among Us expansion!

8. Marvel Dice Throne (+ Dice Throne Adventures)

Expansion Type? More Content (+ Makes The Game Cooperative)

“Wait, wait, wait…” I can hear a bunch of you saying … “Marvel Dice Throne isn’t cooperative!”  True: but with the Dice Throne Adventures expansion, players can take the role of Dr. Strange, Loki, Thor, Spider-Man, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, or Captain Marvel and travel solo or cooperatively through the adventures of Dice Throne Adventures!

Marvel Dice Throne really re-invigorated Dice Throne Adventures for us!  Now, we can play Thor and/or Loki, travelling through dimensions and fighting together!  This is the best kind of expansion: one that reminds us how good the base game is!

Granted, the game we are reminding ourselves of is Dice Throne Adventures, an expansion you must buy to make Marvel Dice Throne cooperative!  So, Marvel Dice Throne is an expansion to the Dice Throne Adventures which is an expansion to Dice Throne Season 2 which is an expansion to Dice Throne Season 1!  Confused? Check out our review of Dice Throne Seasons 1 and 2 and Dice Throne Adventures here for some more clarity!

7. Valeria Card Kingdoms: Darksworn

Expansion Type? Makes The Game Cooperative

This is an interesting choice because the solo game of the base game (Valeria: Card Kingdoms) was worth picking up by itself!  The cooperative expansion just took the ideas of the solo game and expanded them into a full cooperative game: Valeria: Card Kingdoms Darksworn. This is a lightweight card game with beautiful art by The Miko.

Although I think the solo game of base box is better then the solo mode of the Darksworn expansion, the cooperative mode of the Darksworn is pretty fun, especially if you are looking for a campaign game! It does make the game a little heavier, partly because of complexity introduced by the campaign.

Take a look at our review of Valeria: Card Kingdoms and Darksworn to see if they are something you might be interested in!

6. Sentinels of Earth Prime

Expansion Type? Stand-Alone Expansion

Although the timing of this expansion was very off (it took 5 years from Kickstarting to delivery: 5 years!), it delivered a very thematic and colorful expansion to the Second Edition of Sentinels of The Multiverse!   It’s luckily a stand-alone version, because the art really makes it its own thing: it has new heroes, new tokens, new villains, new environments: it’s basically is a stand-alone version of Sentinels of the Multiverse in the Mutants and Masterminds universe (an RPG universe by Green Ronin games).

The art just wowed us: this is the art and graphic design that I wish the original Sentinels of the Multiverse had!

Overall, the is a fantastic expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse (Second Edition).  The unfortunate timing of this (the 5 years to production) meant that Greater Than Games has, in the meantime, released a newer version of Sentinels of the Multiverse called the Definitive Edition (see our review of Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition here), and it’s still not clear if Sentinels of Earth Prime works with the Definitive edition!   Which is why this isn’t higher on this list …

Take a look at our review of Sentinels of Earth-Prime to see if this is something you’d be interested in!

5. Horizons of Spirit Island

Expansion Type? Stand-Alone Expansion

The Horizons of Spirit Island was an unexpected surprise for Spirit Island fans!  Although the main purpose of this game is to lower the entry barrier into Spirit Island (by making an inexpensive version with great components available at Target), it also happens to be an expansion to the original game! And it’s also stand-alone!

The game has some great new spirits that expand the original game: my favorite new spirit was Eyes from the Trees, who scare the pants off the settlers like in a Horror Movie!

This was a great expansion, and also an easier way to introduce people to the wonderful world of Spirit Island!  See our review of the Horizons of Spirit Island here!

4. Marvel United: Fantastic Four

Expansion Type? More Content

As part of the X-Men: Marvel United Kickstarter, there were a lot of Expansions for Marvel United and X-Men: Marvel United:  From that Kickstarter, The Fantastic Four Expansion was one of our favorite expansions from last year! The miniatures were really unique and different, with the transparent, fire, and silver parts! 

But what really made this expansion was the Teamwork card in the game: it created a very simple mechanism to encourage cooperation (well, more cooperation, in an already cooperative game).

The Fantastic Four expansion really makes Marvel United a better game: more minis, more heroes, more villains, more teamwork!  See our review here to see if you might like it!

3. Marvel United X-Men Expansion: New Mutants, Excalibur, Mojoverse, and more!

Expansion Type? More Content

This expansion is a little bit of a cheat, because you could “mostly” only get it if you backed the X-Men: Marvel United Kickstarter! To be clear: this is NOT the X-Men: Marvel United expansion (which we reviewed here), this is an expansion to that expansion! That may be a first for us: an expansion to an expansion … but they all collapse down the being expansions to Marvel United.

There were so many new heroes and villains in this expansion! This is really what you want in a Marvel game: access to all your favorite characters.  There were so many characters, mostly from mutant-adjacent comic titles, that this expansion really makes it easier to play whomever you want from the Mutant Marvel Universe.

We were really excited to see the New Mutants (above), as well as characters (both heroes and villains) from Alpha Flight, MojoVerse, Excalibur, as well as some “lesser known” X-Men!

We talked about how much we loved this X-Men expansion in our post of Expansion Absorption here!

2. The Reckoners: Steelslayer

Expansion Type? More Content

In any other year, this expansion would have been our #1 Expansion.  This was a fantastic expansion!  It took a great game, The Reckoners, and added more content!  The one place that The Reckoners needed a little more variety was in the final battle, so this expansion added two new Boss Epics to the game: Regalia and Limelight!

What really made this expansion stand out was how modular it was!  There were essentially 4 new things you could optional add in to your game: new Reckoners, and/or new equipment, and/or new Epics, and/or new Boss Epics!

This is the best kind of expansion: one that reminds you how great the original game is.  See our original review of The Reckoners here, and the review of the Steelslayer expansion here!

1. X-Men Marvel United: Days of Future Past

Expansion Type? More Content

If Days of Future Past this were judged solely by the miniatures in the box, this expansion would probably still make the Top 10 Expansions this year!

But this expansion took the core Marvel United game and made it more strategic! It made the gameplay more interesting and different! X-Men Marvel United: Days of Future Past could have easily been my #1 game of 2021, regardless of it being an expansion! The game plays great, it has great twists and turns, it encourages so much cooperation, and it looks fantastic on the table.

This expansion is top-shelf, turning a great game (Marvel United) into a fantastic game! See our review here for more thoughts on why we enjoyed this so much!

Deep Rock Galactic is a cooperative board game (based on the video game of the same name) that was on Kickstarter back in March 2022 and promised delivery in December 2022. I just received my copy last week (January 28th or so, 2023), so it’s only about a month late! Maybe this a new trend: last week, we saw Sentinels of the Multiverse: Rook City Renegades deliver on time, and this week we are seeing delivery within a month. That”s really great!

This is a cooperative board game for 1-4 players, ages 12+, playtime 60-150 minutes. Players become dwarves mining the galactic caves! I have never played the video game that this is based on, so I have no bias for/against the game going in. I just thought it would be fun to play dwarves mining in outer space! Let’s take a look!

Components

This box is HUGE.

It’s even bigger than our Thunderstone Quest box!

Even with the Coke Can above, it’s still not clear how big it is until you put the can right next to the box!

This is a big box!  It’s a little intimidating to be honest!

The game box opens with two books:  a rulebook and a Mission Book: See above and below.

Next comes SO MUCH CARDBOARD to punch out. See above and below.

Also in that bundle of cardboard is the board.

Most of the cardboard forms the terrain that you will be putting on the board.

In that cardboard punchout pack is the Hostile Creatures sheet: this is critical because it’s the only place that describes the monsters! (Even the rulebook doesn’t describe the monsters).  You’ll be referring to this a lot.

Underneath the cardboard are the dwarf boards: there are exactly 4 dwarves in the game.  These are really nice dual-layer boards, and they show a lot of the rules ON the board:

Finally, underneath all that cardboard we get three trays.

The top tray holds the cards, dice, and minerals (I mean, you are dwarves mining for minerals).

The tray under that holds a bunch of miniatures.

The third and final tray holds some of the bigger miniatures!  Pretty cool.

When you see everything on the table, you see why this box is so big!  It’s chock full of pretty cool components.

Miniatures

This is not a miniatures game per se, it’s just a mining game with dwarves that happens to have lot of miniatures! But the minis are really nice:

Most of the miniatures are bad guys aliens the dwarves will be fighting in the caves.

The dwarves themselves have pretty nice miniatures!  See below.

Overall, the miniatures really enhanced the theme.  They look really cool: and they even match the pictures pretty well!

See the Scout above with his miniature: his picture matches his mini.

My only complaint was that the labelling of minis (which mini is which) and where they go (into the trays) was subpar. I made very sure to take a picture of all my miniature trays before I took anything out.  

The minis are pretty distinct, but I thought they could have benefitted from some colored bases or rings at the bottom to help distinguish them (like we saw for Hour of Need in our Comparison of bases for Hour of Need).

Rulebook

So, the rulebook wasn’t great.  And it seemed to get worse the more we played (as we had to look stuff up).  But it seemed to have a lot of good intentions, and it did do a number of things right.

It starts with an introduction that has a little bit of a sense of humor: that goes a long way.  But, the Index seems more like a Table of Contents (?): A Table of Contents outlines major sections and where they are, whereas an Index is typically more comprehensive and allows reference to minor points.  So, it’s weird that this first page is labelled as an Index when it should be a Table of Contents.  But, again, at least their heart is the right place: they are trying to organize!

Great!  The next two pages describe the components!  I wish they had labelled a few more things (there are a lot of tokens and bad guys), but this was pretty good.  At least they showed a picture of most components with a label!

The gameflow/overview description was great!  The set-up could have been better, but again, at least it was “mostly” labelled and its heart was absolutely in the right place. 

This rulebook has its heart in the right place: it’s showing lots of tables, it’s showing pictures of things.  I can appreciate it is really trying to do the right thing.

The rulebook just felt like it really needed another pass or another rethink.  Even though Combat initiating from the Dwarves well-documented, the combat initiating FROM the Hostile Creatures was really not specified very well (“Hey, roll the Chompy dice … where was that in the rules?“). The Hostile Creature sheet is absolutely critical to playing the monsters, but I also never got a breakdown of that chart.  See below.

This chart above, THIS CHART is critical to the game, and there was never a  breakdown of it.  You kind of have to infer that the diamond is the hit points.  R is range, M is movement. And how do you notate that per creature?  We have a similar problem we in Batman: The Animated Series Game notating hit points for the bad guys (see our review here). When you have a bunch of bad guys, how do you individually notate their health?  The game says something like”put health tokens next to the creature“, but what do you do when you have  lots of them?  And the creatures move?  

This was a 1-or-2 GRRR rulebook, but the humor and a lot of other things done right helped quell too much anger.

I didn’t love this rulebook, but I forgave it a number of problems, at least in the beginning.  It’s kind of, mostly, all there, and there is lot of good stuff (good charts, good examples), but it really needs another pass: some rules seem either left off or very poorly specified.  It got more frustrating to look stuff up the longer we played.

Gameplay

Once you get past the daunting nature of the box, the minis, and the “not-great” rules, the game actually moves pretty quickly.  It’s not a super complex game from a gameflow perspective.

The back of the rulebook gives a nice summary of play: action/event/action/event/…. until players win or lose!  Once you get going, the game does flow well.

The End of The Game can come about in many ways: see the rulebook page above. The Dwarves generally win if they complete their mission (usually mining and getting back to the start position).  If all dwarves fall unconscious, then they lose.  If the little swarm track reaches the end, dwarves lose. See the Swarm Track below.

Each player takes the role of dwarf:

The dwarves all very very different powers and different weapons for fighting in the mines!

Each dwarf also gets to choose a secondary weapon from the group above.

You can see some of the sense of humor in this game: the secondary weapon can be upgraded to “overclocked” when you turn it over (obviously a nod to the video game).

Each dwarf also gets two one-shot cards: a Throwable (usually a grenade):

… and a Rock and Stone (a fun one-shot card).

These cards form the tools and weaponry of the Dwarf.

The Set-up from the mission Book (above) shows you how to set-up the mission, and what the objectives are.

Dwarves generally get three action points to do what they want: in three words, they can Move, Mine, or Fight. 

MINE: When the dwarves mine, they get shared resources to the MULE (middle space above) or carve spaces out or grab stuff.

MOVE: When the dwarves move, they move around the board trying to get to minerals scattered about.  Stalagmites and pits block the way, but they can be mined through.

FIGHT: Finally, the dwarves can fight!  Each of their weapons has a range and a set of dice they roll.

For example, the Bulldog Heavy Revolver above has range 5, and you roll the blue die to see the effects.  Empty rolls usually mean miss, other symbols typically denote hits with other effects.

Damage persists, so it may take a few tries to take out some of the bigger hostiles.

After a dwarf goes, they flip an event card (The Event deck is the “Bad News” deck): typically the swarm track advances and other stuff happens. See above for an example Event card.

When the Swarm track lands on a creature (see the lit bug above), you must draw a Swarm card!

Typically, the Swarm card (above) adds creatures to the board.

Then the next dwarf goes!  That’s basically it! Dwarf activates, Event Card, next Dwarf activates, Event Card, … until the game ends!  

The game looks very daunting (size of the box, size of miniatures, rulebook length and grumpiness, amount of components, mission set-up), until you get to the core of the game.  At its core, it’s a very straight-forward game.

Solo Play

Luckily, Deep Rock Galactic follows Saunders’ Law and includes