Flash Point: Golden State Heroes. A Solo and Cooperative Review After Full Playthrough

Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is a cooperative game about being firefighters rescuing people from a fire! It’s the third or fourth (or even fifth?) version of the Flash Point series of games. This particular one was on Kickstarter back in June 2025, promising delivery in January 2026. It arrived at my house in April 2026, so it’s about 4 months late (which isn’t bad in Kickstarter land).

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty thick oversized box!  See the Coke Can above for scale

The reason it’s so thick is because there are 4 double-sided boards!  (2 of them go together to make a third board, so there are really only 6 different “boards”).

Each player assumes the role of a firefighter, each with different abilities!  The firefighter markers are above …

But you want to pick one of the characters.  The base game comes with 9 different characters (and if you got the Back In Action expansion, a bunch more!)   Each character has a special power that really changes how they interact with the game!

You might notice “Hey! Those are envelopes! Rich, why are they envelopes? That’s weird!!” Yup, this is a campaign game, and you will get to keep your gear in those envelopes between games.

So, this is a campaign game, with a 6 episode arc!  Don’t get TOO excited, because there’s not really that much stuff that follows you between games.  Really, the only thing that follows you is your gear.  Now, each GAME is actually quite different, as described by the Call Guide book above. 

Each episode of the Campaign has some new rules/new concepts for just that game: see above for the rules for episode 4.  It’s not really much of a spoiler; there’s no real story unfolding between games that will be revealed.

The gear is pretty cool; you usually get 4 and choose 2 at the start of the game (in later games, you draw 2 and use the previous gear).  But you get to CHOOSE extra powers to augment your built-in power!  

See as Lisa Beckett (whose base power is to mitigate Fire cards) chose stuff related the Supression Blast actions, so they can augment each other!  That’s some of the fun of this game, is that you get to CHOOSE some of your gear to go along with your innate power!

To win, you have to save 7 people (dogs and cats are people too) before the building collapses, or before 4 people get burned up!  That’s right, if you fail to save someone (because the fire engulfs them), people (dogs and cats are people too) will die!  So, this is a race to save 7 people!

Players traverse a map, looking for POIs: “Points of Interest” (the blue ? markers above).  Usually, the POIs are people (remember, dogs and cats are people too), but sometimes the POI is empty! NO!  

To save a POI (after you flip to a people side), you have to carry them out.  Sometimes, they are healthy enough to walk out on their own, but you need to get them to a “safe place” (usually the ambulance) to count as a “saved person”!

Along the way, smoke and fires comes out!  Every turn, you will roll dice and place a smoke on the cross: see as we place a Threat on 6-8!  Now, normally that would be a smoke (which isn’t QUITE fire), but since it’s adjacent to fire already there … that smoke immediately becomes fire!

This is an action point game: each player has a certain number of action points to spend per turn: see chart above.  (These are nice player summary cards).   It’s only one action to extinguish smoke, but two actions to extinguish fire!  Usually, it’s just one action point to move, but saving people around is pretty intensive, it’s 2 AP to move a victim with you…. 

To be clear, this is NOT a real-time firefighter game!  Players decide how to spend their actions WITHOUT a timer.  If you wanted a more frantic real-time Firefighter game, check out Firefighters on Duty!  See our review of that here! 

There are lots of other little rules, but the most important is that if you have to place a threat on a place with fire, it explodes!  This might a little like  Pandemic, but instead of disease cubes exploding, fire explodes out in all 4 directions!  It’s so much harder to fight fires after the fire explodes and spreads!! Even worse … those fires it may weaken the structure of the building and it may collapse!  Fires are bad, mkay?

This game has a LOT of nice components.  Nothing is super awesome, but all the components are good quality and easy to read.   And there are QUITE a few components in here (see above), which is why you need the extra tall box for this!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good; I have a few issues with it.  

The rulebook gets an A- on The Chair Test!  It fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it has plenty of pictures that are easy to see, and a font that’s easy to read!  It doesn’t waste too much space.  I think the only reason it isn’t an A is that I wish the font were just a little bit bigger.  But Solid A- on the Chair Test!  This rulebook is the perfect size and doesn’t droop AT ALL on the chair next to me!

The Components and intro are good enough, if a little cramped.  

The rules are generally well-spelled out, but as you get into the game, there are a lot of new rules that come out and some of these interactions are not well-specified. There’s going to cracks, helicopters, lift-basket, new gear, new spaces, new vehicles, new rubble, … all sorts of new stuff!  You’ll have questions about how things interact.  Sometimes it will be there, sometimes it won’t.  The nice thing is that this is a VERY thematic game, so can kinda make a call based on theme.

A simple example is my rock, Camila Ruiz (Camila followed me throughout all my 6 games of the campaign).  She can remove a threat marker for free.   I assumed that a threat marker was anything that was a threat!  Fire, smoke, hazmat, livewires … right?  Those are all threats?  I was beginning to think that was overpowered so I went searching.  I downloaded the PDF rulebook and searched for the word threat.  There were ONLY two places; one was a mention (without a definition) and the other was a picture of THREAT next to fire and smoke at the very front!!  So, yes, a “threat” token is sparsely defined to be ONLY a smoke or fire token.  Seriously, we could have used a sentence anywhere in the rulebook, even on Camila’s card (“A threat is a smoke or fire token”).  There’s not even an excuse for not enough space:  see how little writing is on Camila’s card and how much is on Lisa Beckett’s??? See above.

This was just an example of things could have been a little clearer.  It’s not a bad rulebook, and there was a lot of good stuff.

You know, this might be a textbook defintion of why we need an Index or Glossary:  If you had to put together an Index or Glossary, they would have realized “Oh! We don’t have a real good definition of Threat to refer to!”  There are SO MANY new rules that come out as you play, that an Index or Glossary with all the rules might have been helpful?

Anyway, I learned the game from the rulebook, but I made some mistakes.  You might too. 

 

The Campaign

As a campaign, this is probably the least campaigny campaign I have ever played.  Basically, every game was completely independent from the previous games (the final game just uses rules from previous games).

It’s cool that at the end of each game, you get more stuff; Gear and Boost usually.  See above after the end of call 1 (game 1).  I don’t feel any guilt about spoilers because it’s just a few things!

The campaign tries real hard to have an ongoing story: see above for some flavor text after game 3.  I gotta be honest, I never read the flavor text.  It really didn’t add much to the game for me.  My friends enjoy the flavor text a little more than me, so we read some of it in the cooperative game, but … it didn’t really add a lot.

What the campaign is, more than anything, is an excuse to play through 6 different games that come in the box.  There’s really just 6 different games with a little more gear and boosts available.  The grand finale (the 6th and final game) does a little bit more by bringing in rules from previous games, but even then there’s no “state” between games.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the campaign.  It was a fun excuse to play all 6 boards in the box!  But there’s realllllly not a story or any state that moves from game to game (you can save gear, but that’s about it).   The flavor text that’s there is there if you want it.  I didn’t really read it.  Shrug?  Maybe you and your group will really like it?  It’s there?

Solo Game

So, Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is very clear on how to play solo!  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) .  On page 4, the rulebook very clearly states you simply play with 2 (or more) and the solo player operates them! See above!

So, this is not true solo play, but neither do we have to worry about any wonky new rules to adjust solo play!  Just play the game as it was meant to be played!  Like I said, Camila Ruiz was my rock as a I played; she was in every game of the campaign. 

Interestingly, during set-up (each call has its own set-up in the call book) encourages you to use one of the characters explicitly! Call 1 (game 1) encourages using Steve Sullivan by giving him a little bonus at the start of the game! (See the text above in blue).    This was a nice way to make players cycle through all the the different characters in the game to really get a sense of everything in the board.  I applaud this; it gave you a “reason” to cycle through different characters!

I played the entire campaign with Camila as one of two characters.  Each game adds some very different rules (firefighting on a boat, in an amusement park, on the edge of a cliff!), so it was nice to know one of the characters really well so I could concentrate on the new rules being added every game.  Don’t get me wrong, the base game doesn’t change THAT much, but there was some very different and interesting firefights.

I played through the entire campaign solo.  Each game was its own thing; remember there’s not “really” any holdover state from the previous games, but each board was VERY different!

I liked playing through this solo, modulo one or two issues (see below for discussion).  I would play it again.  Playing two characters worked great!

 

Cooperative Game

I wanted to see where this would land with the cooperative game.   I was hoping I could convince my friends to play through the campaign with me, or at least a few games!

What happened: we didn’t do great in the first game.   Or rather, the dice didn’t go our way.  We cleaned out the board quickly when we started, but we got some explosions and empty POIS at the WRONG times.  We played for about two hours and lost.  We lost two ways, out of building cubes and 4 people died!  We weren’t sure what we would have done differently, and I think that really depressed my friends.  

Sara made the comment: “Ya, this is how the game went last time we played”.   We have played previous versions of Flash Point (Legacy of Flame), and had a similar result.

Last week, when we lost our first game of  Firesiege, my friends wanted to play again to redeem themselves! (See review here!)  This week, they were just done and didn’t want to play again.  The game wasn’t broken or anything, but it just felt like it might have been a little too random.  Losing the dog in the fire was the last straw.

Randomness

This is the hardest part of the game to come to terms with; there’s a lot of randomness.  EVERY turn, you roll two dice and place a smoke/fire (see above) … and sometimes you place more!  If you roll poorly, you can cause explosions all over the place!  The more explosions there are, the more fire there is, which makes it easier to have more explosions and fire!   A few bad rolls can really wreck your game.

I got lucky when I played the solo game, but maybe this game is a little easier with two firefighters. 

Flash Point is very similar to another cooperative game called Pandemic in many ways: players travel around a map trying to keep something under control (diseases or fire), players have action points, players have special powers, players need to keep things under control or they will explode (diseases or fire)!  For a while, when I was trying to introduce new people to cooperative games, I pointed to Flash Point!  Who doesn’t love working together as fire fighters to stop a fire?  Over time, I have deferred more to Pandemic as the better game and less random (as there’s fewer axes of randomness), so I would recommend Pandemic first … it’s just the theme of Pandemic is harder to get over sometimes.  We all lived it at some point.

Which Flash Point?

Flash Point has actually been around for some time!  I Kickstarted the original Flash Point back in July 2011!  And then the Extreme Danger Kickstarter too! See picture above!  But, as you can also see … I never got my Extreme Danger out of shrink wrap!  

Then I was SO EXCITED when Flash Point: Legacy of Flame went on Kickstarter in March 2024!  See above!  The game arrived in 2025, and I fully expected this to be as great as Pandemic Legacy!  But after two games of Legacy of Flame, it just fizzled out.  No one wanted to play again. And it all boils down (no pun intended) to the randomness of the game.  No one wanted to play a Legacy game where there was SOOO MUCH Randomness in the dice rolls!  If you start off with a few bad games, you’ll completely screw yourself!  My friends, I think saw this and didn’t want to pursue Legacy of Flame.

The nice thing about Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is that each game IS so independent, you don’t have to worry about being screwed by your previous game!  I think that of ALL of the Flash Points I have played, Flash Point Golden State Heroes is my favorite version.  Why? Because you get 6 VERY different firefighting scenarios that you can play at any time!  You don’t HAVE to play the campaign: you can just jump into any game you want!   The legacy issues of Legacy of Flame don’t become an issue.

House Rule

There’s one House Rule that I don’t think the game can live without.  Sure, the game can be random on dice rolls when the smoke/fire comes out, but the fire dice rolls “generally” distributes the fire pretty evenly over the board.  The game is random at you; that’s what games do.

The problem is the Fire Suppression action.  You spend your entire turn (4 actions) to roll dice and you MIGHT hit some fire.    Are you an incompetent fire fighter?  Can you not see where the fire is?  This is so ridiculous that you roll dice and pretty much have no control over this!

You might remember Lisa Beckett (see above) we mentioned earlier: I went ALL OUT trying to make her the Fire Suppressions expert!  I gave her two Gear related to that!  See above!  And she still sucked!  Because I rolled bad!  Now she’s not just rolling poorly, but she is actively contributing to losing because she has 4 actions THAT DO NOTHING!

The Fire Suppression, I think, is broken.  In fact, I remember playing the original Flash Point, and I tended to eschew the action!  “Oh, you have to roll to see if it’s successful?  And it takes all 4 actions?  And it may not do anything?  No thanks, I’d rather just do something that I know will make some progress”.

We added a house rule: you have more control.  The players, as a group, get 4 tokens. THAT YOU CAN ONLY SPEND ONCE!!  For a  Fire Suppression action,  roll the dice normally (with flips), then you can spend a token to up/down any/either dice any number of times (up to 4).  This makes it so you can maybe can’t cheat and just Fire Suppression the rest of the game, but the few times you do need it, you have SOME control, and not just random crap! This kind of limits the Fire Suppression to 1 or 2 shots … but that’s kinda what you want?

I won’t play without this House Rule.  If I do, I simply won’t do any Fire Suppression.  It is SO AGGRAVATING to spend 4 actions and do nothing.

Conclusion

We’ve sorta been all over the place in this review, and it may sounds we don’t like Flash Point.  We do like it!  It just … it can be frustrating.   As a solo gamer, I really enjoyed playing through all the campaign (even though it’s not REALLY a campaign, just 6 different boards).  I pretty much had to add the house rule about cleaning up the Fire Suppression action, or I might have hated it too.

The cooperative game didn’t go as well unfortunately.  I think my friends would play the game again but the randomness that can happen will prevent them from ever playing any campaign.  

I personally think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes IS the best of the Flash Point games.  If you like the idea of a cooperative fire-fighting game that has a Pandemic feel, I think this is the one to get.  It has so much variety (the 6 boards are all so very different) and you can play any game you want!  It’s not REALLY a campaign; it’s just an excuse to play all the boards!

I think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes has to get a ranged rating from [6-8] out of 10.  Whenever I give a ranged rating, it means the randomness can overwhelm the game and make it not fun, but when the game “behaves”, it can be fun!  The lower end of 6 is when the dice don’t behave; the game still works but it’s much less fun.  When the game is challenging but not too random, it’s fun and can be an 8!  

If you take away my house rule for Fire Suppression, this rating falls an entire point and would be [5-7]. 

 

Firesiege: Underdone But Still Tasty! A Solo and Cooperative Review

Firesiege is a cooperative Tower Defense games that was on Kickstarter back in May 2024.  It promised delivery in April 2025, and missed by about a year.  I got my copy in early 2026.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a fairly standard sized boxed.  See Coke can above for scale.

Players each take the role of a warrior that can earn special powers!

Each warrior starts with NO special powers, and has one of two conditions to flip them to their more “powerful” side with more hits, some powers, and usually more hit points.  See above as Gestha can flip to the other side if she either (a) she spends 5 energy or (b) has any bar reaches its max.

Once the warrior flips, they are more powerful!  And actually have special powers!  One of the tensions in the game is trying to figure when to keep the invading hordes under control and when to work on powering-up your character!

What’s being invaded you might ask?  The citadel!  The citadel is the center of the tower above!  If a bad guy reaches the center, players immediately lose!  Note that there are three lanes in which in the invaders may invade: red, green, and yellow.  

At various points during the game, the “bad news” cards will come out (see above) and cause the bad guys to spawn and move.

There are actually all sorts of different bad guys in the game but the main ones are the Skrell hunters (smaller: with 1 hit point) and Skrell Mothers (large 3 hit points).  See above.  They look NOTHING like Aliens from the movie Alien or Aliens.  Or maybe they do.   We pretty much called them “aliens” when we played.

There are also some “super” bad guys that can come out during the game at various points.  See above.  These typically have a special power and a few more hit points.

Luckily, the good guys summon little white warriors (see above) to help them or even “someone distinct from Hela, but is pretty much Hela”.

How do you win?  You need to get 6 Victory Points, and you win!  There are 3 cards that control the 3 main ways to get those 6 victory points.  The first one (far left) shows victory points you get from killing spawn points in the game … you always have this.  Killing a green spawn point nets 1 Victory Point, killing a yellow Spawn Point 2, and red 3.  Summoning Hela can help you in different ways (and summoning her gets you 1 VP).   Basically, the game can vary quite a bit, depending on the cards you get! 

There is shared tracker which tracks (1) movement (2) summoning (3) extra swords and (4) energy.  As you play, you can choose (as a group) to move these tracks up and down!  The higher the movement, the more you can mover per turn!  The higher the summoning, the more white warriors per turn!  The higher the swords, the extra oomph you can add to a combat! The higher the energy, the more you can power the special powers of the characters!

Each character has a bag of tokens that they draw from to form their turn.  The tokens are unique to the character (and color).

The player draws 3 tokens for their turn and places it on their board.  Note that the tokens have a white side and a black side!  The light side is good things the player can do with that token: actions, healing, energy, moving the V track, adding/removing walls, and a few others things  See the white tokens above.  The black side is (usually) bad stuff!  Roll the black dice!  Advance the V track!  Summon/spawn Skrell!

An interesting thing about this system is that when you choose a tile, you must do BOTH sides!  Good news is on one side, and BAD news is on the other!  So, you must do both sides!  This is a real interesting idea as you are choosing BOTH the good news and the bad news at the same time!

Even weirder is that you can’t see both sides of the tile!  When you draw, you can only see one side, but the REST of your teammates CAN see the other side!  If you have ever heard of Indian Head Poker or Hanabi, this is exactly the same idea! 

Players basically just play until they win (get 6 Victory Points) or they lose (someone dies or the hoarde track reaches the middle).  

The way the game proceeds is quite interesting; the act of selecting a tile causes things to happen (good and bad).   The game is activated by every tile you choose.  It’s kinda different and interesting.

This is a tower defense game where we, as a group try to keep the Skrell and other bad guys from reaching the middle and killing us!

 

Rulebook

Sadly, this is not a great rulebook.

Firstly, it does poorly on the Chair Test.  I think this is a D-; it droops really badly on the edges, has a small font, as is very hard to consult on the chair next to me.  It doesn’t fail completely because I can sorta use it on the chair next to me.

The components page starts on a good note: the components are well-labelled with a little pictures.

The set-up is “fine”, but it’s where also start noticing rulebook issues.  Some things aren’t even labelled (step 7?) and so we have to guess at a few things.  

Over the course of the first night with my game, I had SO MANY questions and issues with the rulebook that I started writing them down! 

I ended up with 2 full pages of questions and notes!  This was not a good rulebook.

If I just had a few rules questions, I would typically head on over to BoardGameGeek and try to get them resolved.  The problem was that there were just too many questions.  I was generally able to “make an assumption” and move forward for most if not all of them.  But this will be a non-starter for some gamers.

This rulebook is missing a lot.  But it has some good things too.  I like that they have a campaign, I like that it has rules clarifications for all the special cards (victory cards, super bad guys, warriors, etc).  But the rulebook is missing too much to be able to call this a good rulebook: it underspecifies the game.

Solo

So, there is a solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! 

This is a true solo mode, with one player taking the role of one warrior.   The only real differences are that TWO bad guys must enter the Citadel (instead of one) to lose … AND the solo player can elect to flip a token using one energy.  Other than that, the game plays the same!

There’s a lot of maintenance for the solo player (Skrell, super bad guys, the track, spawn deck), but it’s not that bad.  It slightly brings down the game (it’s better in cooperative mode when all those systems are shared).    I was able to get my first game going pretty well … I don’t think I made too many rules mistakes (despite the underspecificity of the rulebook).  I had fun.

My second game went a little better as I understood how the systems worked together.  I was looking forward to my second game.

Something about this world is very appealing: it’s easy to get into, the components are top-notch, and generally the game flows really well.  I liked the solo game and would play it again.

The only thing I would change; the game is a little neutered because you don’t have others “sharing” what tiles you might have … the solo game tries to compensate for that by forcing you to spend an energy if you want to flip a tile.  I feel that energy cost  to flip a token isn’t in the “spirit” of the game … I think a better way to handle that is simply: “If you ever have all white or all black tiles in you hand, you may flip one for free.”   That way, you can still make decisions but don’t get “stuck” with all white or black tokens.  It’s a very minor house rule.

Cooperative Play

So, my group played two cooperative games in a row: we lost the first one but wanted to redeem ourselves with the second game!  And we did!  Once we had a “flavor” of the game, we were able to plan and come up with some strategies to win the game!  This is always a good sign when your groups wants to play AGAIN!

We probably could have done better with the limited communication; we sometimes probably overshared.    I hate to say this, but limited communication games typically have this problem!  Unless you are Hanabi with explicit exact rules on what you can say, then most limited communication rules are wonky.  “How Much Can I share?”  To not bog the game down, we just moved forward if we weren’t quite sure.   

Another thing we did which helped the game was share the load: Teresa took care of the super bad guys, Sara handled the Skrell, Andrew handled the spawn cards, I took care of the shared tracks.  Doing this much maintenance for the solo game does bring down my solo score a little, but sharing the load made it so we could concentrate on playing the game rather than maintaining the game as we played.

We did end up using a House Rule: we used Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained: see discussions here) .   This allowed us to be more strategic about choosing the good news/bad news token!  “That’s a real good good news … but can we take the bad news?”  I really did NOT think this Hanabi like mechanism (where everyone can see everyone else’s token, but not their own), but it really did promote discussion as we played.  And I am surprised that it worked.

I kind of think I would only recommend Firesiege when using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained).  Why?  Because without PSTO, then you are STUCK with the tokens you have and you have to play them (your only choice would be the order the 3 tokens you have are played) … that’s the game playing you!   But if all players can discuss playing their tokens, it becomes more interactive, more cooperative, more strategic, as it gives the players more choice!   I played a token, then Andrew played two, then Teresa played one … we got to choose which bad news to take and which good news in the order that was more strategic!  THOSE conversations in the cooperative game made the game for me!

Conclusion

Here’s the thing; objectively, this game has a lot of problems with the randomness, the underspecificity, and the vagueness of the limited communication.  Objectively, I’d probably have to give this game a 4.5/10 or 5/10.  There’s too many problems.

But here’s the thing; I kinda liked it.  I liked the pieces, I liked how much variety is in the game, I liked the ideas that we get to choose how we move forward (bad news/good news) and I liked the way the game unfolded.  Granted, I had to throw a few house rules at this game to like it (fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order especially for the cooperative game), and a few “I think this is how you play” rules.  But I enjoyed every game I played, despite all the issues.   Subjectively, I personally would give this a 7/10; I’d be happy to play it again and teach it again.  But this HAS to be using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) to get the 7/10!

My friends were a little more underwhelmed and might give this a 6/10.  There’s a little bit of caveat with that score:  I gave my friends the best games possible (by limiting their exposure to all the wonky issues), but they did want to play it twice in a a row after we lost the first game, so that’s a good sign.  If they had to learn this from the rulebook, I am sure this would have been a 4/10 … my group would hate the underspecificity.

Obectively: 5/10, Subjectively 7/10. Overall probably 6/10.  

The game was underdone, but was still tasty!

Star Trek: Star Realms + Borg Invasion = Great Solo and Cooperative Experience!

So, I downloaded Star Realms to my iPad years ago … and I play it all the time. Even after all these years! It’s so easy to play on the iPad! You can play it solo against the computer, and that’s the only way I play. So, Star Realms to me is a solo game.

I even have the original Star Realms little box game (see above).  I think I have played that physical copy … once?  

I was kind of interested in Star Trek: Star Realms because I love the Star Trek theme. The back of the box even claims there is a cooperative mode in here!

Let’s be 100% clear; what the box (see above) is referring to is a team-based mode, where teams of more than one person play against each other … the teams are cooperative within themselves, but this is NOT what we mean when we say a game is cooperative!! This base game is a team-based game; there is no cooperative mode.

And that’s why we are here! The expansion Borg: Invasion DOES indeed add solo and cooperative play to Star Trek: Star Realms!

Let’s take a look!!

Unboxing Star Trek: Star Realms

See game box above with Coke can for scale.

This is obviously a little nicer than my little Star Realms box! It has a full rulebooks! (The original Star Realms little box has a fold-out for a rulebook!! UGH!!!) It has a mat to keep things straight, and hit point tokens. Oh yes, and the cards.

This is a simple deck-building game: see decks above. The decks above are the four different factions in the game: Federation, Klingon, Romulon, and Dominion. Honestly, these are pretty much exactly the same four factions from the original Star Realms, but using Star Trek empires!

There’s also starting hands (Scouts and Raiders, see above). You use coin (gold coins on cards like Scouts generate coin) to buy new cards every turn, hoping to upgrade your deck. Each card does damage (see red 1 on Raider) to do damage to your opponent.

Each player starts with 50 authority. It’s weird! I would have called it Hit Points (because when you get to 0, you lose/die), but the game uses the more … thematic? less-damagey? more PC? term of authority. Weird. I will probably slip and call it Hit Points.

Me vs. Me

Everything I have seen leads me to believe that Star Trek: Star Realms is exactly like Star Realms (modulo the theme). After playing a Me vs Me game (a solo game where I play against myself by jumping from side to side), I can tell you with 100% certainty: this is Star Realms … with a different coat of paint, but the exact same game and cards underneath.

I didn’t do a card-by-card comparison, but everything I saw was an exact copy of a card from the original game. That’s a good thing in some ways, because it means the balance and original luster and gameplay of the original game has been preserved: it’s just now Star Trek.

Just so you know what you are getting.

Borg: Invasion Unboxing and Gameplay

Let’s be 100% clear!  A copy of Star Trek: Star Realms is required to play with Borg: Invasion! 

See box above with Coke can for scale.  Note that this is exactly the same size as the Star Trek: Star Realms game!

The Borg (which will be played by some AI rules) has its own mat: see above.  The Borg ship you start with depends on the number of players!  See above as the Borg Sphere (not as powerful as the Borg Cube) is the starting Borg ship for the solo or 2-player game; it has 25 Hit Points to start with.  There is a notion of starting hand, but that’s only is a player is playing the Borg! One player can play the Borg against the other players, but we are concentrating on the solo and cooperative rules where the Borg are played by an AI.

To the far-left of the Borg mat are the force-field cards!  When you hit the Borg with some damage, the Borg “modulates” their shields so that race can’t do damage next turn! Gulp!  This is super thematic as it reminds us of the Federation modulating the frequency of the their phasers to keep doing damage to the Borg!

The marauders are deemed “neutral” damage, and even they can be defended against! by the Borg!!  Luckily, if three force-fields come out, they will be dispersed at the end of a player’s turn.  So the force fields don’t stay out forever … but they are really annoying. 

The right side of the Borg mat has places for Hive Assimilation cards! Whenever the Borg assimilates a card, it activates a Hive Assimilation card of the appropriate color!  These are placed on the right side of the Borg mat and activated.

In the middle of the mat are all the cards the Borg have assimilated!  The number of cards is the value of the attack by the Borg that turn!  GULP! The more cards the Borg assimilate, the more damage it does every turn!

The Borg ship itself moves left-and-right on its mat; it’s trying to assimilate the “best” technology (where the card of the highest cost is considered the best).  Like many places in this game, if there are ties for a decision for the Borg (two ships cost the same) , the players get to choose. The Borg always assimilates the ship it’s over (it just tries to move one space towards the expensive), and that’s when the Hive Activation cards activate!  See above as the Borg assimilates the 7 cost card!

The card is then placed on the Borg ship!  It hasn’t FULLY assimilated yet!  If the players can do enough damage to the Ship being assimilated, they can detach it from the Borg ship and put it in their discard!  

The players have to be able to do enough damage (same as the cost of the card).  If the players can’t extricate the card from the Borg, it becomes fully assimilated!  From then on, it counts as another damage towards the players!

The Borg have another avenue to attack … they beam Drones (see above) to you!  About 30 of these cards are shuffled into the Market deck.  If you ever draw one, they immediately go the active players area!  As long as you keep drawing drones, they go to your area!  And they will immediately assimilate cards from your discard onto the Borg Ship!  If you have 5 drones land in your area, they will assimilate cards that cost 5 (starting with the biggest cost cards).   They steal from your discard!

You can fight the drones on your turn (one damage per drone) and they go to the scrap yard.

Now, it sounds like the Borg have WAAAAY too many advantages … and they do!  But, each player  also get two gambit cards. 

These gambit cards can come out at any time of the player choosing, so that they can use a special power.

Basically, the Borg attacks, then the players attack. The AI for the Borg is relatively straight-foward, if a little wordy (just to describe what’s pretty clear).

And yet, when the player takes a turn, it’s mostly like a normal turn of Star Realms! Attack the enemy (the Borg)! Buy ships! The difference is that they player can also attack the Drones (if any have beamed onto his space) OR try to de-assimilate a card that’s about to be assimilated!

Players go back and forth with the Borg until (a) either the Borg is defeated (and the player instantly win) or (b) all players are defeated (and the Borg win)! As long as one player survives to destroy the Borg, all players win!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent to pretty good.

This gets an B on the Chair Test. It fits well on the chair next to me, the font is a decent size,  but it is a little too “thematic” a font; I think it detracts from the rules just a little. Also, the pages are black with white text, which I usually hate for rulebooks.  This probably should be an A on the Chair Test, but the color choice  (white on black) and font choice drop it to a B.

The components pages are nice, but they tends to drift over a few pages, explaining as they go.

It works.

The set-up also works.

 

The rulebook works decently.  I would have made a few changes (for example: you discard all the Hive Integration cards at the start of the Borg turn … I would put that as an explicit step for this instead of it being buried in the description of the Hive Integration cards).  I think all the rules were here, but sometimes you had a took a little to find them.

Does this rulebook need an Index? I don’t think so, and it doesn’t have one so that’s fine.

 

Solo Play

So, we finally have a true solo mode for Star Realms! (I could argue that my iPad had Star Realms solo for years, but that’s an iPad thing, not a board game thing). Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!

The solo mode is a true solo mode as you operate one position against the Borg! It’s you vs. the Borg!

Set-up is some work: you have to shuffle 30 drone cards into the market deck. I mean, the market card deck is pretty big (151 cards?) so shuffling in about 30 cards is kind of a lot of work! You need to make sure the drone cards get shuffled in well, and that requires some real good shuffling; I pile shuffle because I don’t know many people who can riffle shuffle 180 cards!

It takes a little bit of time to get into the groove of the game. The player turns are pretty quick (play some cards, buy some ships, do some damage), but the Borg turns are a little more work. Once you have played a number of Borg turns, it starts to go much quicker. At some point, both sides take their turns pretty quickly. The game gets into a good groove.

I have played a number of solo games, and it always feels like the Borg are just crushing you! See as the Borg assimilate a cost 6 card early in the game!  I can’t get that back early in the game!  “No!  The Borg is totally kicking my butt! I’m screwed!!!” 

After those initial few turns, you start to feel a little more power, but man, the Hive Integration cards really do a number on you in the first few turns.

After a few turns, you finally get your deck going and you feel like the tide is turning!  Well, usually.  Sometimes you just lose because the Borg does so much better … they got all the good cards!

To be fair, this arc really reminds me a lot of Star Realms solo mode on the iPad.  I have played SO MANY games of Star Realms that you think I’d always win, right?  Nope!  Sometimes you are just at the whim of luck and will get bad cards while the opponent gets good cards!  And it will be frustrating! But I keep playing because it’s fun.

After a few solo games, I can pronounce … I like this! I can see myself playing again!  The game feels very thematic as you watch the Borg assimilate cards, then try to wrest those cards from them before they get fully assimilated!  The drone cards in the market deck are an interesting twist, and feel thematic as Borg just “teleport” to your ship!  This game really embraced the Borg theme well.

One thing we like to talk about in a solo game is maintenance: how much maintenance does the solo player have to do in a game?  That usually divides into three sections:

  1. Set-up Maintenance
  2. Game Maintenance
  3. Tear-down Maintenance

The absolute WORST part of this solo game is tear-down!  Set-up is annoying, but not terrible.  The Borg turn maintenance, once the game gets going, is doable.  Once you get to tear-down, you may cry a little!  You have to separate all the drone cards from the market deck, separate the Borg Invasion cards from the Star Trek: Star Realms cards and generally sort a lot of cards.  

Sleeve Your Cards!

This is deck-building game; you should sleeve your cards,  I played my solo games without sleeving, but after touching the cards a lot, I realized I should probably sleeve them,  See above as Teresa sleeves them.

The Borg: Invasion cards fit in sleeved … barely. See above.

The Star Trek: Star Realms cards ONLY fit if you remove the insert.  If you sleeve, you will have to probably nuke the insert.

Cooperative Play: Pregame

Before we played a cooperative game, we did a quick head-to-head game (with two people per side managing one deck); this is the way the original Star Realms is meant to be played, and the easiest way to learn the flavor of the game.   None of the my friends had ever played ANY kind of Star Realms!  Granted, they are all experienced players, but they don’t know this variety of deck-building that Star Realms  offers.

It was a pretty quick game (as are most Star Realms games) and my friends got the feel of this deck-building game before jumping into the cooperative game.

I think I recommend playing a quick head-to-head game of Star Realms to learn the system before you jump into the solo or cooperative game.  It just makes it easy to absorb all the new rules that the Borg: Invasion introduces if you already know the flavor of gameplay.  And it’s quick enough, you don’t have an excuse not to!

Cooperative Play

We played a 4-Player cooperative game of Borg: Invasion.  The games scales simply: when the Borg does damage, it does the same amount of damage to everyone!  Thats’ really the only scaling the game has; no other mechanisms really need to change.

There were a bunch of things we noticed.  

  1.  4 players works, but we feel like it is not the best player count. The game stretches out a little longer and it does take a while to play.  We kind of think that 2 or 3 might be better.
  2. Having more players definitely helped with the load and keeping the game running!  Andrew managed the force fields, Sara managed the Hive Reactions, Teresa handled hit points and counters, and I ran the Borg.  This shared load made it a lot easier to keep the game running.  It also helped out a lot when we had to tear-down!  The worst part, the tear-down, was made a lot better by simply having everyone sort and shuffle together.  It may sounds silly to dwell on this, but as someone who tends to always set-up and tear-down games, it’s really nice when the players all help.
  3. There was frustration.  Sara in particular kind of got shut-out of her deck (the Drones kept stealing her tech) and didn’t have a great game.  The force-fields can be really frustrating in the beginning of the game!  You can’t do anything to stop the drones or assimilation or anything because you have such a weak deck!  Everyone was surprised by the game arc; The Borg tromps you, and if you can survive and build a deck … you have a chance!  This is a very different arc than many cooperative games!
  4. There aren’t a lot of cooperative mechanisms. .  There aren’t that many mechanisms in the game to help each other!  You can’t kill drones in someone else’s area, you can’t share cards during normal gameplay, you can’t share healing.  In fact, the only real mechanism in the game for helping others is when you die: You are allowed to throw one card at someone! This game is very multiplayer solitaire.
  5. There is some high-level strategy.   We did notice some high-level discussions emerge as we played. “Don’t do damage this turn!  I have to kill the drones!”  Honestly, almost all the discussion centered on the force-fields!  We would discuss when/why someone would do damage so that we wouldn’t get locked out on damaging things!  It was a little surprising that so much of our conversation was on those (very annoying) force-fields.

Although the game is pretty multi-player solitaire, there was lots of discussion (esp. on the force-fields) and the load was shared well among all the players.   The arc of the game was strange and different for a cooperative game, but it was interesting.

In general, I think the game was a hit, if a little long and a few moments of frustration.

House Rule

The Gambit cards are really cool, and generally have an effect on how you play the game, but you really don’t have any choice on what you get!  You just get 2 gambits and that’s it!  I think a much more fun house rule is that you get 4 Gambit cards (see above) and get to choose 2!   It just makes it feel like you have more choice, and maybe you can even get Gambit cards that suit your play style a little more.

Conclusion

Star Trek: Star Realms is a great game, as it’s just the great Star Realms with a Star Trek theme pasted on. Up until now, you have no way of playing solo unless you got the iPad! Now, with Borg: Invasion, you can fend off the Borg either solo or cooperatively! EDIT: I think there are some ways to play the original Star Realms is solo/cooperative, but this is the first solo/co-op for Star Trek: Star Realms.

I think the Borg: Invasion is a fantastic expansion! Sometimes I worry that “expansions that make a game solo/cooperative” either do too much (so there’s too many rules: Dice Throne Adventures, I am looking at you…) or do too little (so the game is just some shared victory points: Amber Mines, I am looking at you…). This expansion adds just enough rules to make the game thematic, challenging, and interesting but not so many rules that the game becomes unwieldy! There seem to be just enough new rules, and the game just seems soooo thematic!

The cooperative game is very much multiplayer solitaire, as there aren’t really any cooperative mechanisms for helping each other out (just one: when you die!). Having said that, the high-level discussions about the force-fields and the Market and the drones really do seem to keep everyone engaged and caring about other players turns, so there is some cooperation that definitely emerges.

Solo: I’d probably give this a 7.5 or 8/10. Cooperatively about 7.5 or 8/10. The only reason this isn’t a little higher is that there is a little frustration that emerges in the early game that can be debilitating; that game arc is weird, but still interesting! I suppose if embrace that early-game frustrating arc, this could be an 8.5 or even a 9. It’s so thematic! Just like an episode of Star Trek with the Borg!

Neat game. Fantastic Expansion.

Tales Of The Arabian Nights: 40th Anniversary Edition Review: There’s a Solo Mode??? And If You Squint … A Cooperative Mode???

Tales of the The Arabian Nights is a game I both hate and love. When it’s at its worst, it’s random with banal crap happening to you that you have almost no control over; it’s long and tedious. At its best, it creates some of the most memorable stories (with laughter and tears) on game nights that you’ll remember forever. It’s the best of times that I remember, and so that’s why I chose to back the 40th edition on Gamefound (see above) when it came out.

The original edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights (see above) got quite a bit of play back in my playgroups in Las Cruces. And at first, I hated it. It seemed so random; things would just happen to you!! If you were “lucky” (if you had the right skill at the right time), … things would just go your way. But, if you were unlucky, your entire story became a slog as you failed check after check. If, however, you just realize this is an adventure that “just happens to you”, and you just enjoy it for what it is, you can really have a good time. But ya, you could still have a very bad game. And it could still suck.

BUT in order for this to be a good experience, everyone has to know what they are getting into, and how random this, and how you just “gotta grin and bear it” sometimes. If you play with someone who is too serious, or who get aggravated by random stuff, or who just think “this is unfair” … you will not have a good time. Everyone has to be in on the joke. And you kinda have to be in the mood for it. That one person who doesn’t enjoy this will bring this game down very quickly. So, in some ways, this is a very brittle game because one player can easily ruin it. But if you get the right group, with the right frame of mind, with the right mood, with the right sense of humor, this can be a magical Arabian Night!

Does It Need An App?

So, this is a storybook game with a great physical storybook (see above and below). You read lots and lots of flowery text to each other.

I remember when we used to play the original version of Tales of Arabian Nights, and we’d all say “Ah, I think this game would so much better if it had an App. These books are huge! It’s so hard to remember how to look stuff up! And there’s some fiddliness! It would be better as an App!” Sure, an App could make looking up the text simpler. Sure, an App could handle the fiddliness. Sure, an App might make this easier to haul around if there were no books. But now, after reflecting back to the original version and the new version: it’s better with the books.

The books invest people into the game; people have to dig into the book and get involved! It’s a commitment to consult the grid and find the right entry! The person on your left and the person on your right are helping you look-up things in physical books! You make the choices, but everyone is staying involved! There’s a certain sweat equity in looking up and reading passages from a book;“This had better be good, darn it, because I am doing some work to make sure it moves forward!” You are invested because you are making the choices, and your neighbors are invested because they are consulting grids and charts! Everyone is invested in your ridiculous story!

It’s the physical investment in books and charts that makes this game magic. That’s the magic word; invested. You are physically and mentally and emotionally invested.

Don’t get me wrong; some of my favorite storybook games have Apps: Forgotten Waters, Freelancers, Wandering Galaxy are all excellent storybook games that take great advantage of the electronic genre with voice acting, dynamically generated content, and constantly improving stories!

Yet, Plaid Hat games did go out of their way to make physical copies of their storybooks (see above). Why? Because there is a certain magic to the physical books.

Solo Mode

Crazily enough, they made a solo mode for this game. Whaaaaat? Let’s be 100% clear here: the original Tales of the Arabian Nights did not have a solo mode! And it seems weird to have a solo mode because the fun of the multi-player game is the shared reading and shared experiences in this world. But, I think the randomness of the base game is just too much for a solo player. In the multi-player game, we can laugh at the stupid and random things that happen to each other (“Remember the time that Efreet enslaved you? That was hilarious!” “Yes It was!” ), but somehow that seems less fun in a solo mode.

So, PlayToZ wrote some solo adventures and added it to the box! The solo adventures come in their own booklet (see above) with about 15+ directed adventures. Note my use of the word directed—you still explore this world, but there’s a real underlying and scripted story that unfolds for each adventure in the game. To be clear, there are still plenty of random moments (as you still take some turns like the original game), but about half of the game is a story that’s really unfolding (from the Solo Tales book) and the other half of the game are the silly and random stuff from the base game (from the main Storybook).

My first adventure felt like I was playing a novel! The writing seemed quite good and the story was engaging! This was more like a Choose Your Own Adventures tale with real story and real writing!

The only problem with the solo mode is that the stories are limited: there are only 15+ adventures in the Solo Storybook (see above). Sure, that’s probably enough for most people, but it can limit replayability. The good news is that the story path you take does change if you make different choices, so you can play an episode again and get a different story line, a different timeline. Anyways, after 15+ stories, I will probably forget them and so I could start over. If you have an eidetic memory, you won’t be able to play the stories over without some repeats.

I am shocked this has a solo mode. But it really works well.

Base Game

So, this is a cooperative games blog, but the base game, the game everyone knows and loves, is not cooperative; it’s competitive! Tales of the Arabian Nights is a competitive game about who can get the right glory and destiny (two kinds of victory points) and make it back to Baghdad! “But Rich, you can’t talk about games that aren’t cooperative! That’s off brand for you!! You only talk about cooperative games! And sometime solo games!”

Ah, but there’s two issues here I want to address;

  1. The game is cooperative in the sense in that you are having a shared experience and working together to read the adventures out of the book.
  2. With the advent of the solo adventures, you can make this game truly cooperative by playing team solo: play the solo mode as a group pretending to be the solo player!

Granted, the base game actually has a lot of take-that mechanisms (“Choose a reaction for your opponent!“ “If you have a disease, you can give it to others!”), so I have to admit it’s not really cooperative. Okay, you got me there. But the reading of the storybook gives you that shared experience which feels like a cooperative game.

But the team solo is truly cooperative! You can play through the solo adventures as a team! The solo mode is a little clunky, as the solo player has to choose reactions, look-up in the grid, find the storybook entry, read it to himself, then “pretend” not to see too much on the page (so he doesn’t cheat). With a group of friends playing team solo, all this maintenance (like the base game) can be shared.

So, ya. The team solo is totally a fake thing that’s not in the game; it’s a house rule we made up. But it really works as a cooperative game.

The Base Competitive Game

Like I said, I love and hate the base game. And me and my friends played a competitive game of Tales of Arabian Nights the way it should be played … and I loved it and hated it.

I love it because I loved all the shared mechanisms, the cooperation, the interaction as everyone stays involved. See a 3-Player game above: everyone is involved in reading , listening, and consulting.

And yet, I still kinda hated it. The randomness from the original game is still there if you play the competitive game. It’s still goofy, it’s still fun, you still have to be in the right state of mind, and I still loved it, but I still kinda hated the randomness of the base game. I would maybe give the base competitive game a 6 or 7/10 … it’s very random. But still fun.

Team Solo!

We played as Team Solo one night! All 4 of us playing the solo mode as a group! What happened was that we simply played the game like the solo game, but the books and active player would rotate through everybody. I thought the game would be more cooperative, but what ended up happening was more that the active player tended to make “the choice” and we’d just say “I don’t know if that’s a good idea …” or “That sounds great!”

But, like I’ve said so many times in this review, just the act of consulting charts and reading books is very cooperative! So, instead of inflecting disease upon our fellows, we participate in the shared story … with one person being in the hot seat every turn “making decisions”.

I personally prefer Team Solo mode much more than the base competitive game, but some of my friends actually prefer the base competitive game (“because there are more choices”). So, I had more fun this week (Team Solo!) and Andrew and Teresa had more fun last week (competitive mode). In fact, Teresa likes Tales of Arthurian Knights better in the cooperative mode!

I think the team solo works for a cooperative mode (I liked it), but Tales of Arthurian Knights (see review here) is a stronger cooperative game.

Conclusion

So, this 40th edition of the game is really nice. The base game essentially feels the same as the original Tales of the Arabian Nights! If you play in the original mode, this still feels like the original game. Like I said, it’s a game I both love and hate. If you have a group in the right mood with the right sense of humor, the crazy and random things that happen to you can be hilarious! It can also be very brittle: a single player who isn’t getting it can bring down an entire game, or too many random events can just make the game feel unfun.

The solo mode is probably the most surprising addition to the game, partly because it works so well! It takes the base gameplay and adds direction and true story to the game, giving the solo player a very satisfying experience! I was also very impressed by the writing in the solo mode stories!

But, if you squint, you can also make this a cooperative game! The team solo idea works reasonably well; we tried it out one game and were happy with the gameplay. If you want Tales of Arabian Nights to be a truly cooperative game, you can do it!! Just play the solo mode as team solo … but it wasn’t everyone’s favorite way to play.

If you think you will hate the basic ideas (reading from storybooks to each other, suffering random effects as you play, even in the solo and cooperative mode), you will hate this; you know you. But if this idea of a storybook game with crazy things and lots of reading appeals to you, I think you can have some amazing experiences! And if your group is looking for a little more story, a little more cohesion, a little more cooperation, the solo mode can bring it … for both the solo player or team solo.

9 out of 10 for me for everything this does for solo! This is a fantastic production! I love it! Just be aware of what this is; you may hate it. I honestly would give this a 7/10 if it were only the original base game, but the new solo mode really expands the ways you can play the game! Solo! Cooperative! Competitive! And I liked the cooperative mode of team solo, but my friends still like the original competitive mode better.. as broken and random as that can be.

If you just want a good cooperative storybook game, Tales of Arthurian Knights is better. For a more directed solo game, Tales of Arabian Nights is better. For the competitive game, I think whichever theme appeals to you is probably better.

Burgle Brothers 3: Future Flip. A Solo and Cooperative Review

This is my official first true game of 2026! It came in mid January 2026!

Burgle Bros. 3: Future Flip is a cooperative exploration/grid movement game for 1-4 players. You and your fellows are doing a heist, but it’s in the future! You have to hack the main mainframe and get out to win! This was on Kickstarter in July 2024 and promised delivery April 2025; it arrived mid January 2026, so it’s more than a few months late.

This is definitely a little outside the theme of the previous Burgle Bros games!  Burgle Bros (the original) is a small game about doing a heist! The second one, Burgle Bros 2, was a bigger game, but still a casino heist!  See our review here of that.  Although this game, Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip has the same DNA, with floors to explore and tiles to flips and enemies to evade, it does feel a little different.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is an interestingly shaped box: see above for the curved corner!  The corner doesn’t seem to get in the way (I have opened and closed it multiple times and it hasn’t been a problem), so it does look cool but it doesn’t cause issues.  Also, see can of Coke for persepective.

Each player chooses one of the 10? 14? (if you got the Kickstarter, you got a few more characters) characters that comes with the game.  You’ll note that each character has a special ability, as well as number of actions (clock) and hand limit (hand).  This is a cooperative action point game; each player will get so many actions on their turn.

The wooden meeples correspond to the players.  Weirdly, they chose NOT to have the character cards be the same color as the wooden meeples?

In fact, if you aren’t careful, you may get flummoxed when you can’t find your character!  Where’s the character meeples for the two characters above???

It turns out each character has TWO sides: geared and disguised, and the meeples  ONLY correspond to the disguised side.  See above.  I am pointing this out because it might trip you up a little in your first play.   

Each character also has their own personal gear: note the little character symbol in the upper left of the gear cards.  These are special cards that are one-use abilities during the game.

There are also plenty of generic gear you can pick up after you hack a SysOp; it’s your reward for a successful hack!

The SysOps are various flavors (green, red, and OMEGA PROTOCOL): these are the baddies roaming the floors of the building trying to keep it under control.

The floors of the building are represented by neoprene mats; one for each floor!  And yes, I believe these come standard with all versions of the game!

The Patrol cards (above) control the movement of the SysOps: see above as they set the destination of the SysOp (D3 or D4).   Note that there is a different pile for each floor.

As the characters explore the floors, various tiles come out; see them above!

These are all kept in a nice bag (really, it’s nice and it fits all the tiles well).   The reason for the bag is that the tile you choose depends on either the floor you are on, whether your geared or disguised, or various other things!  This is different from other Burgle Bros games where you just put the tiles out and flip ’em when you PEEK or MOVE.  Here, in Burgle Bros 3, you have to draw a tile and flip it to the appropriate side!  And yes, that’s why it’s called Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip!

As the game unfolds, the floor unfurls and you can see where alarms, walkways, coridors, etc are.   

One of the most important things in the game is to stay out of the SysOps ways as they roam the floors!  Each player has some “cool” and some “stealth”. (eee above: the blue cube are “cool” cubes, and the masks are “stealth” tokens).  While you are cool, you are in your disguised mode but if the SysOps moves to you, you lose 1 or 2 cool cubes!  Once you “lose all your cool”, you flip to the geared side!  And now, when they move to you, you lose stealth! If you are ever reduced to zero stealth, ALL PLAYERS LOSE THE GAME!

The nice little summary cards list all the things the players can do: PEEK at a tile next to you (to avoid setting off an alarm maybe), MOVE to a tile and activate it (because you need to reveal stuff quickly), CHARM (to get some hack cards), LINK and SWAP (to share gear or hacks) or use your Tool.

What’s this CHARM thing??? That seems new???  You can CHARM the co-workers of the building (hey, most people don’t like working for evil corporations and will help you with a little coercion) to give you HACK cards.  Well, they are called PROGRAM cards, but these are the cards you use to HACK the SysOps!

To win the game, you have to HACK the final SysOp on the Mainframe space!  See two such evil baddies above!  Note how many Program cards you will need to hack the final SysOp!  (There are some other preconditions: both floors have to be in OMEGA PROTOCOL and you have to be on the Mainframe space and you have to have all the Program cards!)

Once the main SysOp has been hacked, if all players make it back to the Air Ducts (see above), we all win!  Shared victory!! If anyone loses all their stealth, we all lose!!

Really, this production is fantastic.  I feel like they fixed a few problem we had in Burgle Bros 2!  We’ll discuss that more in the What We Liked Section below.

Overall, great production.

Rulebook

This was a very good rulebook.

It gets an A on The Chair Test: the rulebook fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it stays open, and it has a big, easy-to-read font.   There are also plenty of examples and well-notated parenthetical boxes.  See above.

The Components list is what you want: pictures of all components with an annotation underneath,

The set-up is perfect; it spans two adjacent pages, so you can set-up without having to spill over into other pages!  It’s got a picture for set-up, and it’s well marked.

In general, this was a very good rulebook.

I am on the fence on wether this should have had an Index; this is a pretty straight-forward game, so I am not sure it needed one.  But it would have nice to have an Index to differentiate things like MOVE vs ENTER and a few other concepts.  The rules are all there, not always quite where I expected them, but they didn’t take too much time to find.

This was a good rulebook.

 

Solo Play

Interestingly, Burgle Bros 3 lists solo play as a Variant (see above)  But I loved this!  They specified the  solo mode perfectly.  This is how I want to play solo modes!  Two-handed solo!  Thank you !

See above as I am set-up for a solo (two-handed, playing two characters)!

Your characters start on the Air Duct space, getting ready to explore!

I have to admit, I didn’t enjoy my solo game.  Many, many times, I got stuck.  It’s clear you don’t want to go near the SysOps, because you lose cool/stealth.  Sometimes, you just get stuck in a corner; you could move over the SysOps, but then you lose your precious cool.   The overall theme for this game is patience.  Sometimes, your turn is almost nothing.  It’s unfortunate, if you don’t move on your turn, there’s usually very little you can do.   Sometimes you can CHARM, sometimes you can LINK/SWAP.  But many times your turn is “well, I’d better stay here or the SysOp will move over me”.

I lost my first solo game pretty badly.  I got stick in corners too frequently, and the luck of the dice and Patrol cards just went sour.

I was very frustrated.

 

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game went a little better, but not much.

The same problems that plagued the solo game plagued the cooperative game.  Sometimes, a character would just get stuck in a corner and couldn’t do anything.  They’d have maybe one viable action, but have to basically just waste their turn.  They’d get stuck because a KEYCARD space came out, or the pattern on the floor cornered a character, or the SysOps simply always was coming towards you!  It’s even harder to predict what the SysOp will do when 3 people play after you!  Will you lose your cool???

The best part of the game was the endgame.  Once all the tiles had been revealed, then we could be smart and try to figure how to get out of the building!  In the endgame, we had fun as we tried to puzzle out the best way to use the spaces on the board!!

Unfortunately, I didn’t like the process of GETTING to the endgame.   It just felt so  … reactive.  All we could do was “react” to the state of the board on our turn.  There was a little bit of strategy about where people might go, but sometimes the board layout or the SysOps pattern just stopped you from doing anything.  The game felt like … stuff was just happening to me and I could do very little about it.

I hate to say it, but the game just felt too random.

What I Liked

Rulebook: this is an amazing rulebook; it’s so well done.  The parenthetical notes were just icing on the cake!

Meeples: In Burgle Bros 2, we joked that puting the stickers on the meeples was a legacy game!  Don’t mess up the stickers!  Here, in Burgle Bros 3, they got it right: have the meeples come pre-noted.  See above.

Bag:  The bag is well-done.  It would be easy to screw up how this bag worked, but they didn’t.  it’s easy to pull tiles from it and “shuffle tiles” inside.

Neoprene Mats:   The neoprene mats work well, and they fit back in the box.  (This was another potential issue from Burgle Bros 2: the mats fit weirdly).

Two Share Actions!  I adore that there are TWO kinds of sharing actions!  If you are on the same space, you can SWAP!  If you are both far away, but on a LINK space, you can still share stuff!  Most cooperative games only have one notion of sharing, and I really really liked this!  In fact, it made the endgame so much more fun because we had multiple ways to get Program cards to people to do the final hack!  

Production: In general, the production is fantastic modulo one or two issues.

Endgame: Once all the tiles were out, you could be smart. I loved how the endgame played out.

What I Didn’t Like

Frustration.  Many times, you feel like you can’t do something on your turn.  Sure, you have to be patient, but it just felt there were too many turns where “the smart thing” to do … was to do nothing.  In fact, the frustration was so palpable in the cooperative game and I noticed us getting testy with each other.  I think this is a function of the frustration level!

Colors?  Why aren’t the character cards color-coded to match the meeples?   This seems a strange decision especially because the meeples are kind of small!  The color is the main feature you can see! Making the character cards all the same color makes it harder to distinguish who is who.

Reactions

Andrew liked this the best; he was always thinking of ways to get around stuff.  He gave this a 6 or 6.5, which is actually quite high for him.

Sara liked it okay, but she got frustrated a lot.  She gave the same rating: 6 or 6.5, maybe leaning towards a 6.

Teresa generally liked it.

Rich had to most trouble with it.  He found it too frustrating and too random.  The solo game he’d give a 5, and maybe maybe a 6 to the cooperative game.

 

Conclusion

Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip is an amazing production; the rulebook, the cards, the meeples, are all great.  In order to enjoy this game, you have to be patient.  You have to be able to suffer turns where you do nothing.  If that doesn’t sound like fun, you won’t enjoy this game.   In fact, the game can be down right frustrating when you get stuck.

The best part of the game is the endgame; if you can make it to the point where the board is unfurled, then you can be clever and win the game and get out!  Unfortunately, in order to get to that point, you have to suffer through the random flips and turns which may lead to frustration when you feel only reactive.

This game was a little divisive in my group; some people liked it, some people didn’t.  Hopefully this review will help you decide if this is for you.

Which Witch Is Which? A Review of The Witching Hour

To me, Agatha Harkness will always be the old lady from the Fantastic Four comics who helped out the Fantastic Four when they needed magical consultations! But, of course, this Marvel United expansion is set squarely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Scarlet Witch being a Villain (like the second Dr. Strange movie), and Agatha Harkness being an anti-hero; both hero and villain from her own Marvel TV show. And yes, there is a reference to the song “Agatha All Along” within this set.

The Witching Hour is an expansion for the cooperative super-hero game Marvel United.

In order to play this, you need the tokens, cards, and Locations from one of the many base games: see above.  You can ALMOST play The Witching Hour by itself, as it has a bunch of heroes and villains (their cards and minis).  Alas, you need one of the base boxes.

This was originally on Gamefound about a year ago: January 2025!  It promised delivery in June 2025, but it is almost 6 months late.  Usually I don’t mind when a kickstarter is late, but in this case The Witching Hour has been available at Amazon for almost 6 months BEFORE we got ours!  (It was, now it’s not?  But I do see it at GameNerdz and other places) Basically, I could have ordered from Amazon, gotten free delivery, and gotten it 6 months earlier!  That didn’t sit well with me.  It turns out the one available on Amazon was the 1st edition with some errors in the printing, so waiting for the 2nd edition meant I got the corrected version.  So, that’s good I guess.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

I am used to my Marvel United expansions being about the same size as the original box.  Nope!  This one is a lot smaller! See above and below.

This little box is packed to the brim with cards and minis.  See above with Can of Coke for scale.

The quality of the insert isn’t great; see above as just the slightest pressure causes it to bend.

And it’s also a tuck box?  Tuck boxes are one of my least favorite ways to store things.  They always seem to cause damage to something when you fold the tab in.

Besides those issues, this looks great! The quality of the cards and the art and the minis is all consistent with Marvel United in general.

Be careful; there is an equipment card in the game that’s very small and easy to lose!  It’s also crucial when you play Agatha!  Don’t let this fall out of the box!

The quality of the cards and minis is great.  The insert is ok, if a little cheap.  I also don’t love the tuck box. 

And be careful with the Darkhold!  I guess that goes without saying …

 

Villain Centric

We’ll take a villain-centric view of this expansion.  What do I mean by that?  We are going to fight all the villains, with all sorts of different combos of the Heroes.  Those combos will show the strengths and weaknesses of the Heroes, but it’s the villain who will define each session.

The other reason for this is that most of the heroes in this set are a hodge-podge of heroes from Convention promos and other sources that weren’t mainstream.  The heroes are a pretty eclectic collection, and not really thematic to the magical motif of this set.

So we’ll just squint as say this set is “Witchy Villains!” … and some Heroes  (Which are all pretty cool but not witchy).

There are two new villains; Agatha Harkness and The Scarlet Witch. 

I mean, I know Scarlet Witch is both a Villain and Hero in the comics (depending on when you find her), but in this set she’s a Villain.  (Her Hero version is in the Season 1 Stretch Goals set).  Also, be careful, as there is another Villain Scarlet Witch/QuickSilver in the X-Men: First Class Marvel United expansion set (which we reviewed here).

Strictly speaking, Agatha is an anti-hero (which is why her figurine is purple) which means she can be either a hero (blue) OR a villain (red).  She just can’t be both, because you only have one figurine.  Although … I could imagine something where you used another figurine for the villain.  Maybe Agatha’s body got taken over by Scarlet Witch!!!  Or something silly like that.  Somehow, something crazy like that seems like it would happen to Agatha anyways, …. you know what, I think I just an idea for a new session …

We’ll take the heroes and villains through their paces and see what we see!

Sessions 1,2, and 3: Scarlet Witch vs Agatha and Deadpool (X-Force version)

This is an unlikely pairing:  Deadpool from X-Force and Agatha!  Note that Agatha has the DarkHold equipment.  Spoiler Alert: it makes a big difference in helping the heroes!

The Scarlet Witch is a harder villain.  She has a 6 Darkhold pages (Threats) on the board! 

Whenever a Darkhold Page gets 3 crisis tokens on it, it clears!  This might seem like a good thing (as it reveals the special ability on the Location), but  …

… Scarlet Witch wins if she gets all 6 Darkhold pages!!! (“clears all threats”).   After numerous games against Scarlet Witch, I can tell you that she usually wins by clearing the threats!

She’s also very interesting in that anything that deals with Crisis tokens on threats is completely disabled! See her starting card above!  I suspect this is simply to handle any edge cases that might happen: simply disallow it.

My first game was a loss as Scarlet Witch found all Darkhold pages!  I think I didn’t realize how important it was to try to keep the Threats from all being cleared!  Usually, you WANT all threats cleared … not here!

My next game, just a replay of the first game, armed with a little more knowledge.

See binding above!!! Basically, since Agatha stopped Wanda from moving, I kept her from finding all the pages and Deadpool was able to beat her senseless!  However, I didn’t realize I stopped her moving, so we played put the last turn and we lost! If I count the Binding as happening, we won!

An important rule you might easily miss is that you can use Heroism (as well as punchees) to do damage to Scarlet Witch.

After one loss, one pseudo-win, and one absolute win, I can declare we beat Scarlet Witch. 

Deadpool is all about the punches, but his Regenerative Healing Factor (see above) always kept him with plenty of cards, which gave him plenty of options on his turn.    His Improved Resistance to Everything was useful here (as it mitigates the Master Plan effects), but almost feels too overpowered?  It’s pretty awesome; we’ll revisit this resistance in Agatha’s villain section!

Agatha was, in general, great.  As cool as her Magical Protection is (which is a unique card in her deck), it didn’t really make much of a difference in the Scarlet Witch villain; I think other places she would be HUGE.

Honestly, Agatha using the Darkhold was both thematic and very useful, as it allowed us to plan for what Scarlet Witch would do.  It’s cost is high to recharge (losing a Thug or Citizen from a mission), but somehow it seems thematic for this morally ambiguous character to recharge it all the time.  “Who cares if we  lose another thug in the world? We’re trying to save the world!”

These games with Agatha, Deadpool (from X-Force) vs. Scarlet Witch were very cool.  This is why I like Marvel United so much!  This was a very different kind of fight with very different heroes and villains!

 

Session 4: Scarlet Witch vs Juggernaut and Mr. Sinister

Just to bring out the more heroes, I tried Juggernaut and Mr. Sinister against Scarlet Witch.  They got their lunch eaten.

The problem is that Mr. Sinister special abilities require him to occasionally be on the same space as other heroes.  In a 2-player/2 -Hero game of Marvel United, he never got to use his special ability!    Players are too busy chasing down Scarlet Witch and saving citizens and thugs … if they don’t, they will lose!  Unfortunately, this means Mr. Sinister almost never ends on the same space as another hero … so his special powers are never invoked, which make him less useful.

Mr. Sinister probably needs to be in a game of 3 or 4 Heroes to be useful (so more heroes can be close by).

Juggernaut was mostly smashy-smashy…kind of what you expect.  

These two did not make a great pairing.

Session 5: Scarlet Witch vs Grey Hulk and Juggernat

Surprisingly, Grey Hulk and Juggernaut made an effective team against Scarlett Witch!

Both heroes are pretty punchy-punchy.  But that worked for them!  They went in a beat up Scarlet Witch pretty badly once she because vulnerable!

See above as Hulk and Juggernaut beat the heck out of Scarlet Witch in round 4!

Sometimes raw punchee is what you want.

 

Session 6: Agatha Harkness vs. Deadpool and Mr. Sinister

Agatha is a very interesting and very different villain!

The threats she puts down are RUNES!  See above!!  Her Master plan cards  activate whatever RUNES are on the board!

When Agatha comes under presure, the RUNES flip to the opposite side, which allows Heroes to dispatch them … but they are still active!  These are pretty powerful!

Agatha also has a special Mission: the Witch Trial!  If it ever fills up with civilians, you lose!

As we noted earlier, Mr. Sinister is terrible in a 2 Hero game.  Deadpool and Mr. Sinister lost.

The real question is: does Deadpool’s resistance ability apply to Agatha’s spells?  Since the runes are activated by the Master Plan special effects, you could argue YES!  But since the RUNES themselves aren’t actually on the Master Plan, you could argue NO!  Also, it’s a matter of how you define “special abilties” on Agatha’s cards … do they count as special powers?

The interpretation of Deadpool’s resistance can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Session 7: Agatha vs Deadpool and Grey Hulk

It’s clear after Grey Hulk and Deadpool lost, that punchees are not enough.  It was very clear that heroes with tons of heroism are needed!  Basically, you need to save civilians as fast as possible because Agatha’s Witch Trial will remove them from the board … and you lose almost certainly lose because the Witch Trial fills up.

 

Sessions 8 and 9: Agatha vs Deadpool and Batman (?) (!)

It was very clear that we needed a hero with lots of Heroism!  The morally ambiguous lot from The Witching Hour is probably not the best group of heroes to display Heroism.  But Batman (fresh from the DC United: Batman Hush set: see review here) has a lot of Heroism.  And his toys help too.  

The first game was close; but we still lost.  Batman’s gadgets were VERY helpful is getting things under control early,but we still had a run of bad luck.  

This was very comic-booky!  We lost the first round, but Batman and Deadpool learned from their mistakes and were able to take out Agatha on their second pass!

Heroism was key, but Batman’s gadgets were pivotal in cleaning things up early.

Session 10: Agatha vs Agatha and Captain America

So, it turns out you CAN play Agatha vs Agatha … with a little help.

This was kind of a silly game, but it was really fun.

We used Agatha (purple) figure as the hero figure and Scarlet Witch (“Who took over my body? I am possessed by an Agatha from a different multiverse!!!”) as the evil Agatha!  See above.

This was a blast, as good Agatha used the Darkhold to see what evil Agatha was going to do!  And Captain America is FULL of Heroism, which is so critical to take out Evil Agatha!

So, you can play Agatha vs Agatha, and it works well.  You just have to squint and use a different mini.

Cooperative Play

You may noticed the last 10 games were solo two-handed games.  Let’s just make sure this still works cooperatively!

So, we tried a 3-player game against Scarlet Witch!  Me as Mr. Sinister, and Teresa as Agatha!

The only way I could get Andrew to play was to promise him Dr. Strange!  And it turns our Dr. Strange makes the game REAL interesting! 

With Dr. Strange, you can remove Scarlet Witch’s starting card from the master plan!  Once you do that, you can actually keep the Crisis tokens under control!  We took this tack to give ourselves a little more time to get to Scarlet Witch, because she usually wins by getting all threats removed!  Dr Strange, and his Eye of Agamammmasdjhajhsjdhjkasfhjajksdf (I think that’s how you spell it) were able to disable Scarlet Witch’s Cthon Master Plan card …. which enabled us to last longer and kill Scarlet Witch!

The cooperative game was full of highs and lows as all of us got KO’d!  The Master Plan deck was almost out of cards!  But than Agatha went in for the kill and punched and heroismed for the final takedown!

The game was fun, cooperative, as we discussed what symbols to put out to help ourselves as well as our compatriots!  Generally, it worked well!

And what about Mr. Sinister?  He was able to use his DNA ability … once.  I still feel like I didn’t take best advantage of his ability.  But it was still better to use him in a 3-Hero game than a 2-Hero game.

Conclusion

The fact that I played eleven games of this silly expansion with a crappy plastic insert and awful tuck box should tell you what I thought: I’d liked it quite a bit!

Scarlet Witch and Agatha (as Villains) and Agatha (as hero) are the reasons to pick this up.  The other characters were fun, but I think the witches were the winners.

If you liked Agatha All Along and you want play some games with these Witchy characters, pick up the Witching Hour.  Even if you don’t love the Marvel show, these villains in particular are pretty interesting and fun.  The heroes (other than Agatha) are fine (and to be clear: Agatha is so interesting!) , but none of them really spoke to me (except maybe Deadpool X-Force)?  Hopefully this far too wordy and pictory review will give you a sense of whether or not you may like it.

I liked it a lot.  That’s why I played eleven games with it!

 

 

The Case For Adding Player Selected Turn Order as a Mechanism to BoardGameGeek

For turn order in many traditional board games, many games use the simple tried-and-true model that “play proceeds clockwise around the table”. The turn order is dictated by where you sit. It turns out, in many modern cooperative games, we have seen a rise in a new mechanism called Player Selected Turn Order which changes this up!

What Is It?

Player Selected Turn Order is a mechanism by which players in a (almost always cooperative) game select as a group the order in which they take their turns. Players together choose the order of play within a turn! This cooperative mechanism gives the players more agency as they can choose the order in which they takes their turns, so as to reinforce another character, set-up another character for a combo, or just get out of another player’s way. Surprisingly, there is no official name for this mechanism!

We have written a few articles about the mechanism over the years:

  1. Player Selected Turn Order In Cooperative Games: This is a high-level article from many years ago surveying the landscape. See https://coopgestalt.com/2018/02/06/player-selected-turn-order-in-cooperative-games/. The same article was put on bgg, and there were some interesting follow-ups. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1934592/player-selected-turn-order-in-cooperative-games
  2. Fastball Special: This is an article discussing why something like Player Selected Turn Order is necessary in cooperative games so you can set-up combos like Wolverine and Colossus’ Fastball Special: see https://coopgestalt.com/2016/07/15/fastball-special/
  3. Seven House Rules For Cooperative Games: This is article talking about some House Rules which make some games more fun; #7 is Adding Player Selected Turn Order to a Cooperative Game. See https://coopgestalt.com/2020/09/20/seven-house-rules-for-cooperative-board-and-card-games/

A game that most people know with Player Selected Turn Order (even if that’s not what they call it) is Marvel Zombicide: Heroes’ Resistance. In this game, the players control 4 Marvel heroes (always 4 heroes), and the heroes are allowed to go in any order they want.

“Spider-man gets out of the way so Hulk can smash! If Hulk smashes enough, Wasp can move and attack other zombies, otherwise, she can finish off the the zombies that will eat J. Jonah Jameson!”

By allowing the players to choose the order they activate their heroes, they can strategize together and also react to the results of the previous heroes’ turn! They can plan strategies and back-up strategies by choosing the order the Heroes play.

  • Player Selected Turn Order makes sense in solo games as well as cooperative games; for example in Heroes’ Resistance, the game requires that there always be 4 heroes in play, so the solo player gets to make activation order choices just like the cooperative game.

Coarse-Grained vs Fine-Grained

There are two flavors of Player Selected Turn Order: coarse-grained and fine-grained. The difference only shows up when a player can do multiple actions on their turn.

Consider Heroes’ Resistance: each hero gets 4 actions to perform on their turn, but they must complete all 4 actions before the next player can go!! This is coarse-grained Player Selected Turn Order: each players must take take their entire turn before the next player can do anything. It is called coarse-grained because the turns are “coarse” and large; all actions must be taken before proceeding.

In games with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order, each hero gets some number of actions, but these actions can be interspersed among the players!

An example of a game with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order is Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles (or any of the Set A Watch games). In these games, each player rolls some dice, and each die can be “activated” to do something (used for damage or activating a special power). When it is the players’ turns, they can choose to activate a die in whatever order they want! The Golem can take out the front heavy hitter with his 12, and he can keep going, or let someone else go. Maybe after everyone else has gone, the Golem can use his last two dice to play clean-up! It’s up to the players to decide the order they will activate their dice (or powers)! No one has to “complete a turn”, players just activate their dice in any order they want!

Basically, with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order, the actions of the players can be interspersed however they want; there’s no notion of a player completing their turn before another. See above as each character has 3 dice to activate, and they can be activated in whatever order the players’ choose!

It’s called fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order because the player’s full turns are broken up into a finer sub-actions, and these sub-actions can be activated in any order the player’s choose.

No Official Mechanism?

Given how prevalent cooperative games are now, and given how many modern cooperative games have Player Selected Turn Order, it’s surprising that BoardGameGeek (the world’s authority and go-to place for board games) has no notion of this mechanism when it describes game!

When you go the mechanisms of a game, say Heroes’ Resistance (see link here or picture above), you’ll see no notion of Player Selected Turn Order for this game! It’s Cooperative, has Variable Player Powers, but … does it have Player Selected Turn Order? We happen to know it does, but it’s not clear from the mechanisms page!

Proposal

We’d like to propose that BoardGameGeek add the Player Selected Turn Order to their list of mechanisms so that cooperative and solo games can list it! It probably makes sense to add both Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) and Player Selected Turn Order (coarse-grained) since they are technically important sub-genres of Player Selected Turn Order!

In the next section, we document about 30+ modern cooperative and solo games that have Player Selected Turn Order (with notes of fine-grained vs. coarse-grained, if known). This is definitely an incomplete list that we will keep adding to! We also include links back to some of our original reviews so that we “document” that the game has Player Selected Turn Order.

Some Games With Player Selected Turn Order

Arkham Horror: The Card Game. See bgg link here.
Battle For Greyport: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Chronicles of Light: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
CO-OP: The co-op game: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Daedaelus Sentence: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Darkest Night (1st Edition): coarse-grained PSTO. Currently the earliest example of PSTO? See bgg link here.
Descent: Journeys Into the Dark: coarse-grained PSTO. See bgg link here.
Etherfields: fine-grained PSTO. Thanks to Hans
Fateforge: fine-grained PSTO. Thank to Hans
Hacktivity: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Mansions of Madness: coarse-grained PSTO. See bgg link here.
Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
… and so many Zombicide games
OathSworn: fine-grained PSTO. Thanks to Hans
Paleo: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Reckoners: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Sammu-Ramat: fully coarse-grained PSTO in solo mode, stilted in cooperative mode. See link here.
Secrets of Zorro: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG: coarse-grained PSTO.
Set A Watch: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Set A Watch: Doomed Run: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles. fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Sharknado: I don’t think this ever came out? See link here.
Space Cadets: Away Missions: coarse-grained PSTO. Thanks to Scott R.
Slay The Spire: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Spark Riders 3000: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Spirit Island. fine-grained, as players play. See bgg link here.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Slaughterhouse: coarse-grained PSTO. Thanks to Edgar
Viticulture World: coarse-grained PSTO (a little stilted like Sammu-ramat). Thanks to Lon.

Are there any we are missing?

Crime Unfolds: How Do You Express That?

Welcome back to Detective Month!  Last week, we looked at the storybook cyber-noir detective game of LA-1!  This week, we take a look at the Escape Room game of Crime Unfolds!  A Pop-Up Escape Game 3D: Immersive Crime Game!

Every few months, my friends Charlie and Allison and I get together to play games … usually Escape Room games! They are my Escape Room buddies! This month, we are trying out the Crime Unfolds cooperative Escape Room game! Nominally, we are detectives solving a crime!

We’ll discuss our first impressions and thoughts on the Crime Unfolds system. It also brings up a few questions to ask yourself about Escape Room games. Why do you like them? Or maybe … Why do you dislike them?

Requires an App

Crime Unfolds requires an app!   That is maybe the first thing you should know.  Some people love Apps with their Escape Room games, and some people don’t.  It’s really not clear by looking at the book that this requires an App.  It’s not a big deal, as Charlie went and got one real quick.

There are 6 cases interspersed in this game.  We started with case 1.  We also, like many escape room games, started with lots of “random stuff we know will be useful later”.

 

Solve The Puzzle vs. Express the Answer

Over the course of one night. Charlie and Allison and Richie embarked on the first case!  It’s supposed to take an hour … it took us more than two hours.  And we are experienced Escape Roomers?? What Gives?

The problem we had over and over was not “how we do we solve the puzzle” but “how do you express the solution”?  We easily solved a bunch of the puzzles, but inputting into the app was the main hurtle!

For example: At one point, we had “shifted” away from a screen that had the arrows for directionality, so we thought we had to express NSEW via UP/DOWN or North/South/East/West using letters on the command line?  We lost at least 15 minutes … when we realized the App had those arrows in another screen.  It was very frustrating!  We had solved the puzzle, but the app had made is less than intuitive to enter.

We were pretty frustrated after this game, but after thinking about it overnight, I have come to realize that most puzzle games are like this!  You have to do two things:

  1. Solve the puzzle
  2. Express The Solution

Solving the puzzle is usually the funner part, and some games make it very easy to express the solution.  We loved Doomensions (see our review here), as expressing the solution was easy; it always took the same form as a 3 or 4 digit code.    Here in Crime Unfolds, the solution expressed itself in so many different ways! Sometimes it was interacting with some widgets on the app!  Sometimes it was saying the right thing at the command line interface!  Sometimes it pressing the right buttons!  

Our frustration with Crime Unfolds was how to express the solution!  Many times during the game, we felt like we solved the puzzle, but couldn’t move forward because the solution wasn’t expressed in the way we expected it!

After cogitating on this some more, I realized this expressing the solution can be just as interesting as solving the puzzle!  To express your solution, you have to change your perspective!! What’s the best way to express this solution?  What’s the most thematic way to express this solution?  What’s the perspective of the player in the game?  All of these contribute to different ways to express the solution.   To be fair, sometimes the expression of the solution is poorly done, and that’s just a frustration of this genre.  I think if you reset your thinking that expressing the solution is part of the puzzle, then it can less frustrating. I realize how hard it can be to do in the heat of the moment, so it’s easy to say this. 

To enjoy Crime Unfolds, you will absolutely have to enjoy thinking about new ways to express a solution to a puzzle.

 

Pop-Up Cool!  But You Need A Magnifying Glass!

One of things that was very cool about Crime Unfolds was the pop-up scenes that came out of the book!  It turns out 6 rooms in the book, and you take a turns visiting some of these rooms in each case.  They look really cool!  See above!

Unfortunately, some of the text/symbols on the board are hard to read!  At one point, Charlie went and got his “fine work” magnifying glasses/helmet!  We also used our phones to zoom in so we could see things!  

The pop-up stuff works well, but be aware that you may have to really zoom on the board.  There is just a little bit of “Where’s Waldo” and “I can barely see that” in this game.

 

Conclusion

Did we like Crime Unfolds?  Yes and no.  We only played one case, but we think it is fairly representative of what this game is.  The pop-up system works and has a very “toy” and “fun” factor to it; that was something we definitely liked.   We liked solving the puzzles but found expressing the solutions frustrating.  I think, upon further reflection, that if you go into the game knowing expression the solutions is PART of the puzzle, that might help make that more enjoyable.   

I hope I can talk Charlie and Allison into playing more cases from this book; I think there’s some fun puzzles here, but I hope we can just get over the frustrations when expressing the puzzle solutions.

 

LA-1: The Heat Is On! A Solo and Cooperative Review

Welcome to the Detective Month here at CO-OP Gestalt!  This month, we take a look at several new games in the cooperative detective genre!  We begin the month with a Richard Launius design!

LA-1 is  cooperative cyber adventure and exploration game in a post-apocalyptic future with hints of the detective noir genre.  This was #2 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2025!  We were really looking forward to it! 

This was originally on Kickstarter back in Oct/Sep 2024, promising delivery in August 2025.  My Kickstarter copy arrived in January 2026, so about 6 months late.

So, this is not a detective game per se; see the back of the box as the game fully admits “LA-1 is not a deduction game, but a story-driven cooperative adventure …” There’s a lot of thematic detective things like clues, stakeouts, and police, but this is not a deduction game but rather a story game! That means this would NOT end up on our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games or Top 10 Cooperative Light Deduction Games, but it might end up on our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook Games!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing/Gameplay

This is a pretty normal sized box: see Coke can above for scale.

I ordered the Kickstarter version of this, which includes upgraded pieces, some minis, and a new case.

The base game itself comes with 4 case files for 4 cases: see above.   These case files give the flavor text, set-up, winning and losing conditions for each case.

The cases are on cards!  See above!  The game comes with over 800 cards in this box!  I want to emphasize this is where the story is in the game, on these cards.

For some reason, the cards were packed in reverse order that you might expect (1 is the very last card instead of the first?).  It’s not  big deal, but a little confusing on first unpacking.

Some cards are specific to cases (and marked by the case graphic: see above) and some are more generic.

Each player takes the role of one of the several cyber/noir roles in the game.  

The base game comes with standees and cardboard pieces for each character.

The deluxe version came with some plastic minis.  Eh, they are ok.  What they really needed was colored bases; I think the standees might be better for distinguishing the characters on the board because their colors are so distinct!  I am not sure you need the deluxe minis.

It is probably worth getting the Upgrade of the other components though!  Most of the base components (clue tokens, basic tokens, heat, etc) are all cardboard punchouts: see above.

The upgrade pack (which came with the kickstarter, and I think you can get separately) is probably worth getting!  These are some really nice wooden components!  

There are wooden heat tokens, plastic money, wooden Karma, … just really nice.  And you don’t have to punch them out!

Each character has their own deck: you can tell by the little icon in the lower left whose deck is whose.  As you can see above, there are different types of Skills in the game; and this game is all about the skill check!   Some characters are better at Mechanical checks, others better at Mind Checks, other better at Moxie … !   Each deck gives the character a different flavor.

See above as Tina Woo (Hacker) has her own deck!

Each character gets their own little board to keep track of resources; karma (karma is a resource!), money, passports (to get to the nice parts of LA), and heat tokens.  The back of each characters deck tells them what they start with.

There’s also a little flavor with each character (see bottom).

Each character also gets something called “Heat”: see the 5 tokens above.  Basically, it’s something you can trade in the game to get stuff done, but at a cost of bringing more interest upon yourself!  Play it safe, and you take no heat, but then it’s harder to get stuff done.  Take too much heat, and the cops rough you up!  You decide what’s the “right amount” of heat!

When a player is all set-up, you can see all the resources.  See above!  This is Tina Woo, and she’s a hacker!

Players explore the cyber-noir city of LA-1!  This is a huge 8-fold board that does NOT fit on my table very well!  See above with Coke Can for perspective!

There’s three parts of LA:  LA-1 (Old Angeles), LA-2 (Underworld), and City of Angels!  City of Angels is so exclusive, you have to get a passport to travel around there!

As players traverse the city trying to find out whodunnit, they will explore different locations in each part of the city. See Ashtown (jn Old Angeles) above.

This wouldn’t be a detective game of any flavor without clues!  There are CLUES (orange) which help you solve the mysteries, and basic tokens (which give you useful resources).  You need CLUES to solve the mysteries, but you need the BASIC tokens to keep your resources up! 

The clues are distributed all over the city!  See above as each Location in the city has “about” 4 tokens next to it!  Some are CLUES, some are basic tokens, and some are hidden so you don’t know what they are!

It’s not clear until you’ve played a little, but successful encounters at Locations allow you to (usually) take the top token at a Location!  If we have a successful encounter at the Mutant Warrens in Underworld (above), there’s a good chance we can take the CLUE (orange eye) at the top!  

Skill checks are resolved using the Fate deck and the player’s decks; we’ll talk more about those later.

The game  is somewhat on a timer; see the Darkness track above.  If the darkness marker ever gets all the way to the right; game over and you lose!

The Darkness track typically advances every other turn or so; it really depends on what comes up in the Darkness deck!  Many time, the Darkness just advances.  See above. But you also get to make choices, maybe you want darkness to advance in exchange for a clue you really need!  Most Darkness cards come with choices!!! See above  as you can choose to move to any Location and grab the top token (which could give you a CLUE you desparately need), but it costs extra darkness!

Every case is very different, but typically you do Detective-like thing like show Motive, Means, and Opportunity!

If you can solve the case before time runs out, you win!  There are usually several other ways to lose as well …

The game has a great production, especially if you get the token upgrades. See above.  To be clear; you will need a LOT of table space for this!!

Rulebook

The rulebook is generally ok.

My main complaint with the rulebook is the form factor; it gets  D- on the Chair Test!  It droops over the edges, being almost unusable on the chair next to me.  It barely works, which is why it doesn’t fail completely, but the “rulebook as large as the game box” needs to go the way of the Dodo Bird.  Please publishers, make rules reasonable sized so we can open them without needing a giant table!

The Components page was good enough: see above as it shows components and some correlating text so you know what’s what.

The set-up seemed a little squished onto one-page; see above.  It works, and steps are notated, so it’s good enough.

The set-up drifts into the next page, and that doesn’t work as well. Each case defines its own Set-Up and this was a little more unclear.  I would have the first “recommended” case have more info … maybe a first play guide like we’ve seen in many games.

The rulebook packs a lot of stuff in just a few pages. There are pictures but I wish there were a few more.

There is a nice summary on the back … which I used maybe once in the solo game and never in the cooperative games.

The rulebook is ok.  It teaches the game. I feel like this rulebook probably should have had an index: there are a lot of subsystems within the game, and an Index would have made it a little easier to navigate. 

One-Shot Game?

What I mean by asking this?  Most Detective games are “one-shot” games! Once you have played the game, you know the solution so you can’t really play it again!  The solution is indelible imprinted on your brain (that’s the legacy part), so you can’t play it again!  Is LA-1 one of these games?  

So, should I be worried that I am giving spoilers by showing some of the case cards from the game?  Yes and no!

Each case will have a basic outline which is nominally the same, but it will change when you play it.  How?  The cases are in the cards, and there are multiple versions of some cards!  See above as there are two 42 cards!  Sometime during the game, you will be given the instructions “take a Random 42 card”, and the card you take will cause a different path!   So the game will NOT be the same every time!  Sure, you can choose the exact same cards next time, but it’s unlikely.  It felt like there were about 12-15 points where the game could take a different path (by taking a different card).

So, there is a case, it has an outline, and it even has multiple outcomes.  But it’s not a detective game.  You aren’t trying to use your deductive reasoning like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (“Hmm.  There’s ice on the floor.  Clearly the murder weapon!”).  You aren’t being smart like Poirot or Sherlock or Father Brown or any of your favorite detectives to solve cases.  You are more “exploring” this world and this case, and trying to do well on Skill Checks!  Successful Skill Checks reward you with “progress” on the case.   

The text that comes out during the game is very thematic, as there is an outline to this case!  It does have a bit of a solution.  But, it’s exploration and skill checks that keep this game moving forward, not “Sherlock smarts”.

An analogy that will come up again and again: this game reminds me SO MUCH of Arkham Horror: 2nd Edition.   In Arkham Horror, you explore the city so you can kill monsters and close gates.  In LA-1, you explore the city so you can find things to solve cases. 

LA-1 is an exploration game with a detective theme, but it’s not a detective/deduction game.

Solo Play

So, LA-1 does support solo play! Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law!

It’s not true solo play, as you must play two characters and alterate between them: see rules above.  It’s very clear what the solo rules are and I applaud LA-1 for being so clear on this!

My first solo game was playing Tina Woo (hacker) and Roni Mace (investigator).  Usually, I put my characters side to side, but I ran out of room!  That 8-fold board of the city is SO HUGE it took up too much room!  

This was a bit of an ordeal, trying to operative two characters in my space!  See above!

I got a lot of rules wrong as I figured it out.  The rulebook is ok.

I was able to get a couple of solo games together before teaching my friends. There is quite a bit of maintenance as you play; it’s a little much to play 2 characters, but that load feels less and less heavy the more you play. To be clear, there is a lot of flavor text on the cards, and a lot of directions on the cards, and a lot of systems in this game (CLUE bag, BASIC bag, damage system, fate resolution, Location actions, darkening Locations, advancing darkness, dealing with heat, karma, money, passports, etc etc). It’s probably gonna take about 2 to 3 plays to really get the game down. My first two solo games were about 2 to 3 hours each. Granted, they were learning games, but LA-1 feels more like a 2 to 3 hour for the solo game than a 90-120 minute game. Especially if you are trying to read all the flavor text and immerse yourself into the game.

Did I have fun as a solo player? Yes. Will I come back to it and play it solo again. Maybe?

Cooperative Play

I think LA-1 is a better cooperative game than solo game!  For me at least, the game feels a little more immersive as I play just one character and interact with my friends.   The solo game makes you play two characters, but it’s usually a lot more fun when you can inhabit ONE character and become that character for a game!

See my friends smiling and laughing as we play!  We typically (as a group) really like storybook games, and this game really tickled our fancy.

If the solo game were harder to play because there’s more maintenance per turn, then the cooperative game shares the maintenance load and makes it easier to play!  See above as Andrew reads Sara’s storycard!

As a group, we enjoyed this.  I mentioned that there’s a campaign (you can play the 4 cases of the box in a full campaign), and my group seemed very interested in continuing our adventure!

The game was very interactive as we all shared the story, the reading duties, and the load for set-up and tear-down.   

This was a fun cooperative game.  The only real downside is that this game has a lot of systems and subsystems to maintain (Fate deck, karma, money, Locations, Skill deck, etc), so it might be harder to teach this game to less experienced gamers.   Still, if you know what you are doing (play the solo game first), you can teach this fairly easily.

The Arkham Horror Comparison

This game feels so much like Arkham Horror: Second Edition!  And it should, as Richard Launius (one of my favorite designers) is also the main designer of the original Arkham Horror!  I don’t love everything he does (see our review of Freedom Five), but I generally like his designs (see our list of Top 10 Cooperative Superhero games with Batman: The Animated Series game and Top 5 Cooperative Games Of All Time!)

Let’s be clear; the theme is very different!  LA-1 has you hanging out in a cyber-world in a post-apocalyptic future world as a noir detective!  And Arkham Horror: Second Edition has you hanging out in a 1920s world, fighting horrors from the Cthulu mythos!   And yet, the core gameplay feels the same.

  1. Move around a world and search for stuff to help you: In AH, you visit places in Arkham, In LA-1, you visit places in LA.  
  2. Perform Skill Checks: dice based in AH, Fate deck based in LA-1
  3. Take Damage: hit points in AH, Damage cards in LA-1
  4. Read Thematic Text off Cards: In AH and LA-1, when you visit a Location, you read a card with thematic text (scary Cthulu stuff in AH, creepy cyber stuff in LA-1)
  5. Perform a macro-level Task to win: In AH, everything you do is in support of closing gates.  In LA-1, everything you do is in support of solving the case
  6. It’s a big game!  Both in board space, time, components, rules, both AH and LA-1 are big games!

This isn’t meant to be a ding against LA-1, not at all!  Arkham Horror: Second Edition is one of my favorite games of all time!  See discussion here of my Top 5 games of all time, and a discussion of what I want in Cooperative games!

Some people don’t like Arkham Horror: Second Edition because it is a little dated.  Does LA-1 fix these problems?  I think LA-1 does fix a lot of problems modern gamers might have with Arkham Horror: Second Edition.  Let’s take a look!

A Sense of What’s Coming

One of my favorite things that Arkham Horror: Second Edition does is that it gives you a “hint” of what kind of reward you might get at a Location!  See above at Walder, as you might get money ($) or an Item (gun).  If you are looking for money because you need to buy an Elder sign, or need a plain weapon to fight Horrors in the street, maybe you’ll choose to go to Walder? 

In LA-1, when you go to a Location, the card gives you a “hint” of what Skill check you might have to do there!  See above as the Mutant Warrens indicate you’ll “probably” need some mechanical skill or some punchees!  Tina Woo isn’t very punchee, so maybe she’ll suggest Mace goes there!  You can make decisions on what Locations to visit to go based on what Skill you might need!  What you might get at the Location is “generally” the top token (but not always).

So, when you visit the board, you have a better sense of whether or not you’ll succeed because you know what Skill cards you have ready!  

You can make a much more informed choice of places to visit based on what skills you have in hand, and what the Locations offer!  And this feels very thematic; “I knew, going to the Mutant Warrens, I might have to get into a fight to get any information … but I was ready for it.”  

In some ways, this is an improvement over AH because you have a better sense of whether or not you might succeed, based on your cards and hints on the Location!  You will “probably” get the top token, so you also have a sense of what you’ll get!   There are also lots of places in LA-1 where you can “flip” or “swap” tokens to have a better sense of what you get!

“Sometimes you spend your time just trying to find out what information you need to even find a clue.  It’s just the life of an investigator.  It’s just the way of life for us.”

It doesn’t feel like just random exploration: you have hints of what you will get, and that makes it feel like your choices matter.

Fate Deck vs Dice

One of my least favorite things about Arkham Horror was how all skill checks depended on a roll of the dice. There were clues to help mitigate that, but in the end, you just rolled dice.  I remember one game of Arkham Horror extending to 6 hours because of 1 bad roll … and everyone just sort of died inside.  What should have been a 3-hour game (which is still quite long) became a 6 hour game. Oi!

But Skill checks in LA-1 feel much less debilitating and random via using the Fate deck now.  It’s just a little deck of cards, and it’s basically some randomness (plus or minus) to a skill check.

A Skill Check usually comes form an encounter.  See above as I can choose to do a Mind (6) or Moxie (5) test.

Looking at my hand of cards, I think I have a better chance with Moxie rather than Mind, so I discard two Moxie (1) cards to give me a base of 2.

I draw from the fate deck; I always keep the first card (see above as I add another +1), but since the card matches the test (Moxie), I can keep drawing!  

I draw until I don’t match anymore … oooooh, bad luck … -2 Fate.  So, my test fails. 1 + 1 (two cards) + 1 (Moxie fate card) + -2 (Fate -2 card_= +1.  I fail

If you have Karma tokens … you can discard one to keep drawing and ignore that last -2 Fate cards!   Karma tokens from LA-1 remind me of Clue tokens from Arkham Horror: you can discard them after the checks have been made to keep going!

What I like about this system is that you have choices along the way: if it’s clear you CAN’T make the Skill check, you can try to mitigate the resource cost and not invest any Skill Cards or Karma tokens: you just take it.  But, if you really really need that test to succeed, you can use Karma and special abilities, and others can help you (of in the same Location or maybe even same CIty Block).   But of course, if you went to a Location that needed Brain and you had NONE, that’s your choice!  

This Fate Card system is a little more complex than rolling dice (and it takes a few tries to explain it and get it right: “Wait, I keep drawing because I matched the test?”), but this system gives you choices and decisions (rather than just rolling dice and spending clue tokens from Arkham Horror).  I feel like this is a major improvement for resolving Skills checks in the world of gaming.

 

Storybook Game

The card below is a little bit of a spoiler, but out of context, it’s not too bad.  I show it below to show you how much story is on the cards in this game.

This is absolutely a Storybook game like Vantage from last year (see our review here) or any of the games in our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook games! 

Players read cards to each other as they choose what kinds of skill checks to make and advance to story!

One of our favorite things about Storybook games (and what we loved about Vantage) was reading story to each other!  See above!  This keeps everyone involved as one person reads one person has to make choices, and everyone else hears the story unfold!

I think if you saw that cover, you would NOT think that this is a storybook game!  “Oh, it’s s detective game!”  Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.  This is definitely a storybook game with lots of text to be read!  You can choose to read your own encounters, but’s it a lot more fun and interactive if everyone reads aloud!   The story becomes shared as we team of investigators try to figure out what’s going on and share this adventure together!

Replayability

This is a little more replayable than most story games because the story cards can come out randomly. See above as there are multiple #3 and #5 cards!  The story you experience depends on which #3 and #5 card you draw!

 

Heat

One last thing I want to mention is the Heat system.  This worked so well!  Players can CHOOSE to take Heat to move the game forward faster (“Hey, if I take some Heat we can get a CLUE sooner”), but taking Heat will likely have some repercussions later in the game!  Taking Heat is just adding tokens to the Heat space (see above).

Many Bad News (Darkness)  cards will target players with too much heat, making the Bad News even worse!  But, you can “lay low” for a turn to reduce your Heat.

Each player starts the game with 5 Heat (see Heat tokens above), but taking Heat is almost always a choice.  And you can always “lay low” for a turn (so thematic in a Detective Noir game!) to lose Heat.

Heat is a really neat mechanism that is thematic, adds tension to the game, but it is still a choice; you have to deal with the consequences of taking too much Heat …  but maybe you have to take Heat to get the case solved!  

Campaign Game

So, there is nominally a campaign here: you can play the games in order and keep a few of the cards between games.

And you gt a few extras too.

But honestly, it’s not really much of a campaign with lots of “continuing story”.  It’s more of an excuse to continue play all the cases in the box.  I have to tell you, I am surprised how much my friends wanted to continue playing this (kinda lame) campaign.  When you are enjoying the experience, I guess any excuse to keep playing will keep you going!  So, the campaign, while not “too campaigny” (in terms of story or holdovers), it was an excuse to keep playing.

Conclusion

I think LA-1 might be a Hidden Gem!  Unfortunately, it’s Kickstarter only had 597 backers, and it only made $68,000 … which is not a lot of money in board game Kickstarters.  But if you like the theme and like Storybook games, this is a fantastic game!  There’s plenty of choice and hints in the game that the exploration of this Cyber-Noir world feels directed and fateful, and not just random.  And the mechanisms of the game (Heat, Fate deck) make the Skill checks seem like that have much more agency than a random die roll!  You still have choice, even if sometimes things go against you!

Be aware that this is NOT a Detective game (like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective), but more of an exploration and Storybook game!  I admit I was a little disappointed that this wasn’t a detective game … it’s more of a detective-themed story book game.  Just be aware of what this is before you jump in.

As a cooperative game, me and my friends really enjoyed LA-1; enough to engage in the Campaign game over 4 Cases!  The choice, the story, the gameplay, makes this a 8.5/10.  I like the solo game, but this is much more fun to play with my friends reading and sharing, so I’d give the solo game 7/10; it still works, but the shared story among friends is what makes this great. UPDATE: this might even drift to a 9/10 for the cooperative game!

If you know what Arkham Horror: Second Edition is and loved it, I think you will really enjoy LA-1 as well!  LA-1 has the same feel as AH in many ways, even if the theme is completely different.  If you didn’t like Arkham Horror: Second Edition because it was too random or too long, you might still like LA-1; it takes a lot of the mechanisms that lengthened/randomized games of Arkham Horror … and fixes them.

 

Appendix: Remembering Arkham Horror: Second Edition

For many people, Catan was the modern game that brought them into the hobby.  For me and my friends, it was Arkham Horror: Second Edition.   It was complex, overwrought, way too thematic, but we adored it!  It was a cooperative game before cooperative games were popular.  Many people say it was Pandemic who introduced them to cooperative games; for us, it was Arkham Horror: Second Edition.  And Arkham Horror: Second Edition came out BEFORE Pandemic! 

There are some things that Arkham Horror: Second Edition still does a little better than LA-1.   For one, the city feels like a city!  When you need to get it healed, it’s clear you need to go the Hospital!  When you need sanity, it’s clear you go to the Sanitorium!  When you shop you go to the General Store!  It was intuitively clear, based on the board, where to go.  LA-1 doesn’t quite have that intuition; it almost feels like a Worker Placement game (partly because you can do actions on spaces) than a city.

The thematic immersion in Arkham Horror was also a little more complete; the monsters wandering the streets, the other world encounters, the spells, the closing of gates, it just felt … a little more immersive.  And these characters felt a little more real; I can still tell you the name of my favorite character: Mandy Thompson.   Something about this game was magic for us.

I think LA-1 is a better modern game than Arkham Horror: Second Edition; it’s less random, more streamlined, cleaner systems, and modern sensibilities.  Yet, there’s something magic in Arkham Horror: Second Edition that anything has yet to capture.  

The Peak Team: Solo and (kinda) Cooperative Review

The Peak Team is a cooperative game for 1-5 players.  This feels like a pick-up and deliver game, as you traverse a map trying to reach flags; strictly speaking,  BGG doesn’t classify this as a pick-up and deliver (see here) but more hand management and pattern movement.

It’s also odd that the BGG entry lists the name of the game as The Peak Team, but the cover clearly seems to show The Peak Team Rangers?  Shrug?

This is a game about players working together to traverse a map and find animals!  The first few games, we joked, were like Pokemon!  Find them all!  You are traveling around a map to complete missions and, along the way, record seeing some animals!  A very fun theme!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

The box is a little smaller than normal; see above (with Coke Can for scale)

There are two rulebooks; basic rules and then advanced manual: see above.

There’s a little bit cardboard to punch out.  The carabiner hooks are pretty thematic for a game about traversing the wilderness.

There’s a really neat map: it has two sides!  One side for 1-3 players, one side for 4-5 players.  The map is easy to read and well-notated.

The most important piece in the game are the Supply Cards!  See above. These are nice linen-finished cards that are the heart of the game; they are multi-use cards that players discard for actions.

There’s simple Missions cards which note Missions a ranger might be undertaking.

There’s also some nice player aids.  Note that this game has 5 levels (!) of play.  We’ll discuss that later.

There’s some player mats (above) with unpunched tokens.

There’s some neat little wooden flags, wooden player tokens, and wooden marker.  These really look nice on the board. See above.

Overall, the components are pretty great; they are easy to-read, well-notated, and have a fun zingy quality to them.

Rulebook

We need to get this out of the way; this is one of the worst set of rulebooks I have read in a while.  They have three major failings.

First of all, these rulebooks completely fail the Chair Test!  Each rulebook is some sort of weird multi-fold rulebook that is impossible pull apart.  It’s not a rulebook with staples; it’s 4 pages in a weird quad-fold.  This is SO HARD to access!  I can’t really set it on the chair next to me, it totally droops!  The font is pretty small, so that doesn’t help.  It does have a lot of pictures, but that doesn’t save it.  This rulebook is almost unusable.    I can’t emphasize enough how horrible this form factor is.

Secondly, splitting this up into two rulebooks seems a weird choice.  The solo rules are in the second rulebook, but the solo mode requires you knowing all about how base game plays.  Each of these rulebook is clunky enough with it’s weird quad-fold, but now, when I go looking for rules, I have to scan two horrible quad-fold rulebooks?

I think abstractly, I like the idea of slowly building game that gets harder and harder, but breaking all those rules into two rulebooks (with rule text scattered everywhere) just makes it that much harder to learn.

Finally, the rules just seem poorly organized and missing some edge cases.  I feel like they did everything they could to make the rules on as few as pages as possible, with a tiny font, and tiny examples you can barely read.  And the solo mode is the worst; the way they solo rules are set out, you can’t “really” play the solo mode until you absorbed ALL the rules of the 5 base games.   The solo mode was just so poorly specified, I had to just make a few judgement calls to move forward.

Let’s be clear: most of the rules are in the rulebook (modulo a few edge cases), so you can pick-up these rules and get through a game.   The set-ups and components lists are fine.

This was a horrible set of rules: the form-factor was terrible, the decision for multiple rulebooks seemed a mistake, and the poor organization was frustrating (especially the solo mode).  BUT you can learn the game.

Once you know this game, you can look back on learning the game as a distant nightmare.  I got through it.  Done.

The real question is; once you know the game, is it a good game?  That’s an interesting question!

Gameplay

The crux of the game is going around the board trying to get your missions (notated by a flag on the board) done.  You get your mission done by moving to your flag.

You discard supply cards to move along paths (each card tells you which path you can take and how far: see above).  These are multi-use cards; you can also discard the card to “record” an animal!  Find them all!!!

You can see a game in mid play (above) as the flags notate where each ranger needs to go!  And you can also see the paths: each one different.  The colors of the Locations indicate which animals are in the area; if you have an animal card of the right color for your spot, you can discard it and see it!

To win, you need to get all your missions done AND see all the animals!

The game graduates from level 1 to level 2 to level 3 to level 4 to level 5!  Each new level adds new mechanism(s) which make the game more challenging: more bad stuff, more good stuff, more mechanisms, more choices!  By the time you get to level 5, you are playing the full game with Special Missions, Weather Events, special Powers, Wildlife with special powers, and road blockers!

Solo

So, The Peak Team does have a solo mode; thank you for following Saunders’ Law!  See above as the Advanced Manual has an entire section on it.

Unfortunately, this solo mode is a “variant” of the base game: you have to read the full rules for the base game (for ALL FIVE LEVELS) to play the solo game.   See above! This was very frustrating.   I muddled through the base game rules for level 1 and had to figure out which rules did/didn’t apply for the solo game.

The solo rules are there (see above) and I did get through them, but the experience with this rulebook was (again) sub-optimal.

The solo game has the solo player take control of 3 rangers on the board.  See above.

The solo player then puts out a grid of 12 cards (3×4 for row-major).  See above.  This is a shared hand (among all three rangers) for the rangers to do stuff.  Note how you can see some of the cards, but not all of them!  The hidden cards will be revealed as you take other cards below, but you still have enough information to make some plans (as you can see the cards at the top).  Cards MUST be taken from the bottom of some column to play it.

The game starts with each ranger having a starting mission; they need to go to that Location to complete their Mission!

To get more missions, some ranger has to end his turn on Ranger station, and then Missions can be doled out. Note that each ranger can “only” have two missions at a time!

Once the solo player decides he’s done, he can stop and go to the next round, exposing new missions.   Remember, however, that all missions must be completed to win, so the missions simply move up to the next day!  And if too many missions are unsolved between rounds, you also lose.

The solo player soon learns to do the bare minimum to not take any penalties, because he can keep cards from previous round!  See above: We have an extra card leftover from the previous round, so the next round will have 13 cards (instead of 12) to be able to do more!

You start the game of Level 1, the simplest mode.  Once you feel comfortable with that game, the next level adds a few rules and makes the game more challenging.   I generally played about two per games per level; the first game was a learning game where I wold lose horribly, but then the second game typically felt like a comfortable win.  I think I played 12 games overall in the solo mode!

I want to make sure this is clear; I wanted to play all those 12 games in the solo mode!  This was a real fun solo mode!  I felt like I had lots of choices (but see House Rules below for more discussion), and I really enjoyed traversing the board to get all my missions done!  There’s a lot of fun decisions; When do I travel?  Who travels?  Do I discard 4 symbols to get a wild so I can force a travel?  Do I pick up an animal because I am here, or do I wait?  Should I force a completed mission so I can have space for a future mission?  Because I am making decisions for 3 different rangers on the board, it always felt like some of the cards I had were useful to at least one of them!! But, it goes without saying that the game is definitely subject to the whim of the cards you get.

It turns out, because this rulebook is such a stinker, that I played a lot of rules wrong.  As I played my 12 games, I’d realize “Oh, I got that wrong” and “Oh, that seems dumb”.  By the time I played my 12th game, I think I had the rules correct.  But I also realized places I cheated, and frankly, some of my cheats made the game more fun.  I’ll note those in House Rules below.

I liked this solo mode a lot.  I was excited to show my friends the cooperative mode!

Cooperative Mode

So, in many ways, the cooperative mode is a very different game than the solo game.

Each player takes the role of ONE ranger and will only have 4 cards to “do something” (keeping leftovers from previous rounds)   The cooperative game uses a form of cooperative drafting; each player gets 4 cards to distribute, passing 2 cards to their left and 2 cards to their right.   During this drafting phase, there is NO TALKING.  So, each player has to just look at the 4 cards they get, then try to decide what your neighbors need.  See above as Teresa passes 2 cards to me (her left neighbor) and 2 cards to Sara (her right neighbor).

Note: This is the same number of cards (4 x the number of rangers) as the solo game, but now the cards are evenly distributed among the players for their turns.

Abstractly, I thought this cooperative drafting would be a really neat idea!  But what happened was that me and my friends got very frustrated quickly.  First of all, there was no communication, so each player had to make choices for their friends.  What if it was the wrong choice?  I am now choosing what cards my compatriots play!  Let’s be clear; this means I AM BEING TOLD WHAT TO PLAY.  Because I have no choice in what cards I get, I have to play what I get.  Sure, this is a cooperative game.  Sure, my friends want to help me. But when I am playing, I feel like I lost some agency along the way; I can only play what I was given!  Even worse, what if my friends had terrible cards?

In the solo game (see above), I could usually apply my cards to at least one of 3 rangers on the board.  But now, in the cooperative game, each player is stuck with ONLY 4 cards, and may have a turn where they can do absolutely nothing.  With one ranger and four cards,  each player is much more at at the whim of the deck.

And what if my friends, when drafting, chose different paths for me?  My friends can’t talk, so they might choose different directions for me to go!  This feels like a dysfunctional family!  We can’t talk about what we can do, so we just do something.  That’s really not fun.

Another interesting part of the cooperative game; each player has a wild action, but you can’t use it directly; only your compatriots can use it (by asking).  You can always refresh your token by discarding 4 symbols.  It was kind of neat that you had this option asking someone else, but it was just so expensive to refresh.

So, my friends and played two Level 1 games one night.  We lost horribly the first game.  And frankly, we only did a little better the second game.  Nobody really wanted to play any more.

Besides the dysfunctional nature of the limited communication, we often found ourselves either overly constrained or simply at the whim of the cards and couldn’t do anything.

Overly And Arbitrarily Constrained

What do I mean by overly and arbitrarily constrained?  It often feels like you only have one choice or no choices many times during the game.

For example, when playing the Missions from a Ranger Station, you choose a person to take the mission and THEN choose the next mission!    You simply are stuck with the missions in the order given!  First of all, this severely limits your choices.  Second of all, it doesn’t seem thematic … I am at the ranger station giving out missions: I can’t see them all?  This just feels like an arbitrary constraint that does nothing but increase the randomness and make the game harder.

Another place: I can only have one animal token (with possibly special powers) at a time.  Why?  This seems like an arbitrary constraint just to force you to use the other animal powers before getting more, even if they aren’t useful.  It just seems like you have to “throw away” some animal tokens sometimes just to get the power of the next one.  What a waste!  I can’t even have two of these tokens at a time?  Dumb!

Another place:  For quite some time, I was under the impression that you could discard an animal to get it because the rules said “if you are on a location in the same region”.  My original reading of this was regions like in Pandemic Iberia, so that at (for example, see above) Location 6 I could get EITHER the deer or the lynx!  Nope!  It’s the color that makes that determination (and it is in the rulebook) … even though 6 is in BOTH the regions.  I think this an artificial constraint; couldn’t it have been BOTH?  Give me more choice, don’t take choice away!!!!

Another place: The ranger station can only pass out missions at the end of the turn if you end there.  ONLY AT THE END.  If someone is on a ranger station, can’t you just distribute missions?  If someone is on a Ranger station at the start of their turn, what if that were their turn?  So, now to get missions distributed, you have to waste turns making sure someone ENDS their turn on a Ranger Stations when thematically, it seems like it should be an entire turn, or also be the start of the turn.   This one really made me mad; it seems very arbitrary.

House Rules

For the solo game, because the rules were so bad, I ended making a lot of calls to just move forward.  As I played more and more and understood the rulebook better, I got to know what the rules really were.   The more I learned the rules, the more annoyed I became with the game because of the arbitrary and overly restrictive constraints.  Here’s some House Rules that made the game more fun.

  1. If any Ranger is at a station, they can distribute missions.  It does not have to be the end their turn there.
  2. If you plan to distribute 3 missions, you may look at 3 missions and then decide how to distribute them.
  3. (optional) you can have at least 2 animal tokens with abilities

These are really House Rules more for the solo game.  This is (mostly) how I played the solo game, although I did play by the rules at the end … and I enjoyed the game a lot less when I played the rules they way they were meant to be played.

I have to admit, I think the cooperative mode just didn’t work for my group at all, so I don’t know if house rules would fix this game for me and my friends.

Conclusion

I am surprised how poorly the cooperative game of The Peak Team went for my group; so much so, that I can’t really recommend the cooperative game.  The dysfunctional communication rules and artificial and restrictive constraints just frustrated my group.  I can’t really call this a full review, because we never even got past level 1.  But it’s hard to move on to later levels when none of my friends thought the cooperative game was fun; they didn’t want to play again! My group was pretty unanimous with 5/10 for the cooperative game.

The solo game, on the other hand, was quite fun!  I found myself playing over and over and over and having fun playing 12 games to get to Level 5 of the game!  I “accidentally” had some House Rules (because the rulebook is so bad) that made the game more fun; with my House Rules, I’d probably give this an 8/10.  As-is, the solo game is still fun, but it’s too artificially and overly constrained, so it would be 7/10 as written; still enjoyable, but could be better.

I wanted to like this more.  I can’t recommend the cooperative game, but maybe that’s just my group.  Maybe you and your group will like it better.