I don’t think I’ve played a murder mystery game in 8 years! The last time that I played was at a Murder Mystery Party hosted by Charlie and Allison sometime before the pandemic.

Recently, Sara was rooting through some of my new games and found Red Carpet in Ruins. She started looking at it, and said “Hey! We should play this!” I called Charlie and Allison right then and there. Although it took us a week to all agree on a date, we finally got a group of 8 together to play through Red Carpet in Ruins last night.

Murder Mystery 

In case you’ve never seen a murder mystery game, someone is murdered (pretend, not for real) in a group involving 6 to 8 characters: your group has to work together to find said murderer!

Each of these characters (see above) has a motive to murder the victim! In Red Carpet In Ruins, we are role-playing characters from a 1959 Hollywood film set where the main actor has been murdered! The group must uncover the murderer! However, there is a catch: the murderer is in the group of folks, and he/she will do anything to cover up the murder! Over the course of a night (3 to 4 hours), each player role plays a single character, usually going as far to dress up!

Throughout the night, little books tell you where you were, when you were, how you were, and things that need to be revealed as you play. At some point, after everyone has revealed all the relevant plot points, accusations start flying! Everyone writes down who they think did it, and you reveal the final murderer!

Differences

Charlie and Allison have played a lot of these (according to them, all of the “How to Host a Murder Party” mysteries) and they pointed out a few differences in this game:

1. Times are very well-defined: Inside the character books, players times are very well-established, so if you are ever asked about your whereabouts you can very clearly articulate your location
2. Map and character standees are included: If you really want to note where people were, a map and standees are included—many murder party games don’t included this
3. You know if you are the murderer right way: Some Murder mysteries don’t tell you that you are the killer (or not) until the final act—in this game, you know before you even come to party.

Charlie and Allison, the connoisseurs, liked all these new changes.  Although we didn’t really use the map that much to show movements, we could have. And knowing you are the murderer lets you concoct better alibis. 

Although, the murderer in our group confesses that it was very stressful knowing they were the murderer all night: they actually would have preferred not knowing (like some of the older games).

Preparations

Unlike most of the games in our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games, there is an awful lot of preparation for a Murder Mystery Party! This isn’t a game you can just pull off the shelf and say “Hey! Let’s just play this now!”

You have to send out invitations early: people have to know when it is so they can prepare.  Players have to prepare in multiple ways: they have to get costumes (although strictly speaking, you don’t need to wear costumes, it helps make the evening more fun), and they have to read about their character in their informational booklet.  See below: each character gets an invitations and an informational booklet.

Also, it’s very important than everyone commits to coming: even the host doesn’t know who the murderer is, so the game can run aground if not all players show.  This is why it’s so important to spend some time making sure everyone agrees on a date: the game will not work if everyone doesn’t show. (There are some mitigation strategies, but even those are limited because the info packet is needed to run a character: if the info packet is not there for a character, it’s unlikely the night can continue).

So that makes the Murder Mystery Party a little fragile: one player, by not bringing their info packet can completely derail the evening. Make sure everyone is committed.

Costumes

Costumes aren’t strictly necessary, but they really do throw you into the theme of the game.

My group didn’t go crazy, but we did just enough costuming to get us into the mood.  It’s up to your group how much you want to get into it: we did just enough to make it fun for us.

Do whatever your group finds fun!

Gameplay

Gameplay proceeds in three rounds over a night.  Each round is about an hour, and in that hour “pivotal plot points” need to be revealed: each character has many points (as described by their informational booklet) that need to be revealed: who they saw, what they heard, when they saw said things, and so on.  Once everyone (except the killer) has revealed the important plot points, play proceeds to the next round.  

We punctuated our rounds with dinner (between rounds 1 and 2) and dessert (between rounds 2 and 3): the game strongly encourages this ethic, and even provided suggestions of music and food on their web site! After the final round, accusations are made and everyone makes a guess as to the killer! And the final murderer is revealed!

One thing to point out: everyone has to tell the truth to the best of their abilities: this is how plot points gets revealed … except for the murderer: he/she is doing everything he/she can to lie and stop the truth from coming out!

Hard Core Board Gamer Thoughts

There is a weird thing I realized after playing last night: Murder Mystery games like Red Carpet in Ruins are Social Deduction games and Hidden Traitor games disguised as Detective games!  The accusations I saw flying around last night reminded me of games of Coup or Avalon: people behave just like Social Deduction games! Finger pointing! Yelling! Accusations! And then, there’s the Hidden Traitor element where the murderer tries to lie and remain hidden! Just like Shadows over Camelot or Nemesis!

I point this out because, on the surface, Murder Mystery games “feel” like they should go into Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games.  Nope nope nope nope nope.  Although there are elements of sleuthing and detective-type deduction, Red Carpet in Ruins was much much more of a Social Deduction Game with some Hidden Traitor elements. The lack of detective game is even worse if you are the murderer: you don’t get to play the detective part of the game at all … you just become the Hidden Traitor and lie lie lie.

I realized after playing that I don’t like Social Deduction games and I don’t like Hidden Traitor games.  The detective parts and engaging times with my friends kept this enjoyable, but I didn’t like the Murder Mystery genre nearly as much as I remember.  Caveat Emptor: Murder Mystery Games are not nearly as much a Detective game as you might think.

Reusing The Game

You can reuse the game when you are done: the only “non-resuable” pieces are the invitations. You’ll notice I just made a copy of the invitations and that worked fine.

My wife’s co-worker wants to try this, so I reset the game: I put the Objects back in their envelopes (there are objects that are revealed as the game plays), gathered the info packets, and put everything back in the box. I will pass it on, and suggest she makes copies of the invitations so she can pass it on …

Conclusion

The fun part of Red Carpet in Ruins was spending 3-4 hours with my friends: we got to dress up, solve parts of a mystery, and be roleplay silly 1959 Hollywood stereotypes for a night. Do you enjoy being a bit of an extrovert and roleplaying with your friends? Then you will enjoy this … just be aware there is a lot of preparation. If, on the other hand, you are an introvert and don’t like the roleplaying, this may not be for you. And to be clear, Red Carpet in Ruins is more of Social Deduction game (with a Hidden Traitor) than a strict mystery game. If you are an introvert hoping to engage in just the detective part of the game, you may be sorely disappointed.

Me and all of my friends had a good time last night. Decide for yourself if this is something you’d like .. maybe I can pass it along to you!

Illiterati is a cooperative word game for 1-5 players, Ages 7+, and about 30-45 minutes long. I backed this on Kickstarter back in March 2022 and it just arrived at my house today, May 10th, 2023. It originally promised delivery in April 2023 … that means it only missed by 10 days! That’s absolutely fabulous in Kickstarter terms, to be only 10 days late, so: good job guys!

The Kickstarter version came with Matte Card sleeves.

This box is a beautiful cover that pulls open, kind of like a hardcover book in a case: see below.

Let’s take a look.

Unboxing, Components, and Gameplay

This is a smaller than normal box: about the size of a big book like an encyclopedia … and I am guessing that’s the vibe they were trying for: this is a cooperative game about spelling words for books.

This is a word game: you will be spelling words using tiles. Players will work together and can share letters, but this is still a word game.

The letters  are on really nice tiles: they are drawn from this amazing draw bag … and discards go in the other bag. These bags are fantastic: I can fit my whole hand in!  They are NOT too small! 

On each player’s turn, they draw some letters … (depending on # of players and some other things) … trying to spell relevant words!

There are two types of books every player needs to “complete”: a red book and blue book (see above).  Each book has its own criteria: see above and below.

The basic flow of the game is that you have to spell words that match the book you currently have. Above, you can see the RED book criteria: I have to spell words (with a total of 8+ letters between them) that are “Things That Live Underwater“. There’s an additional criteria: the words have to use 3 (or more) letters with the yellow sun sign. (Ignore the right side of the card: that’s for final play!!!)

In the second round, I am able to satisfy the book criteria (spelling SALMON and PRAWN, with ONN being yellow letters), and I can “complete” this book. I discard the letters to the bag, turn the the book over (to show it’s complete) and draw my next book.

My next BLUE book requires 2 words that rhyme over 4 letters each!

Of course, this wouldn’t be a cooperative book if there weren’t some sort of Bad News cards every turn! The Illiterati cards (see above) are the bad guys: they are trying to stop us from completing books! At the end of every turn, an Illiterati card is flipped and something bad happens! See above!

If the same Illiterati comes up again, then he/she activates the new bad news AND the old bad news! See above!

Although you want to spell words for your book, this game is about survival from round to round: if you ever have unused letters that aren’t part of a word, you may have to burn letters! If you have to burn too many letters, then you lose!

The Burn Tracker tracks how many letters you have burned: see above. Interesting side note: no one can complete a book if any letters have to be burned on your turn!

Once each player has completed their own two books, then cooperative players have to do a Final Chapter! Independently! Above I have to spell “Holidays or Events” using 12 or more letters AND there has to be a match of 5 symbols! Whew! Note that the V and Y aren’t burn letters because there is a small shared “library” of letters that don’t have to be used and can float from round to round.

If you forget the rules, the summary cards are very good: See above.

In fact, you almost don’t need the rulebook: the difficulty Levels and rules are summarized on just a few cards.

All-in-all, this is a really nice production. See above.

Rulebook

The rulebook is pithy and short.  Thank goodness: we’ve had so many games with ridiculous rulebooks lately.

The game gets an A- on the Chair Test (it hangs over the side just a little). It’s easy to look over at the rulebook on the chair next to me when I have questions: in this way, I never have to take up precious table space, as the rulebook is easily accessible next to me.

The components and set-up are good enough.  I was displeased that the Set-up did NOT tell us to shuffle any of the cards: it’s obvious after you play once, but it really needs to be stated (for example, last week Valor and Villainy: Lludick’s Labyrinth went out of its way to tell when to NOT shuffle and when to!).  There were also a few times when I went to look for a rule clarification, and I couldn’t find one.  Luckily, most cooperative games make this easy to move on (and this one works: “What should we do?  Let’s come to a quick consensus”), but it was slightly annoying.

Overall, it was a pretty good rulebook.

Solo Play

The back of the rulebook gives us rules for Solo Play. Thank goodness they are so simple (and thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! The only real change is that you draw 10 tiles at the start of your turn instead of 7: This makes the game flow essentially the same (i.e., no real big changes for solo play).

See a solo game set-up above. I enjoyed the game solo. It wasn’t anything special, but I really like word games, so I had fun. It was, in a weird sense, like Bananagrams: if you’ve never played that game, you just spell words until you run out of letters. There was an element of that in there, because you almost never have the right letters for your Book (“Things that live underwater”) on the first round or two, so you just spell words to stay alive.

See me trying to spell words, just to stay alive! There’s not a lot of “sea” words in this lot!

After my second round, I got the right letters to spell some “sea” words, so I could move forward.

I generally had fun. I would play this again solo, but see the caveat below.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative Play worked well, and it didn’t. Let me explain: The cool part of cooperative play is that you can share ANY letters you want! I would call out “I need an X? Anyone got an X I can use?” Generally, you were looking at your own area, but occasionally helping your neighbor. Cooperation abounded as we shared letters and ideas for words! If someone got done early on their book, they could offer another brain!

My problem, and this might be just me, is that I like my word games to be … quiet. When we were playing cooperatively, people were asking for letters (“I need an E!”), muttering under their breath (“What is a Kwijybo?”), and helping each other (“Oh! You can spell QYZBUK!”), and generally making a lot of noise. This is good in MOST cooperative games, but not for me in a word game. This may be a me-only problem. In general, this was not too much of an issue … but a few times, I found that I couldn’t think about my letters with so much noise.

So, to be clear, the game has elements of frenzy, which may be fine for you. In a word game, that type of frenzy is not for me. I think I would prefer this game at two or maybe three players: at four and five players, this would be too much for me.

Realtime

So, this game has a timer … and we pretty much ignored it. This is SUPPOSED to be a real-time game, but we really don’t enjoy real-time games. There is definitely some notion of “you can play without the timer if you want” in the rulebook, and by gum, we did not use that timer! Like I said earlier, I don’t like my word games to be frenzied, and the timer exacerbates that chaos even more!

What’s even more funny is that the TIMER GOT STUCK SO MANY TIMES!! I tried using the timer a little in my first few solo games, and the sand would just stop falling. Once I poked the timer, it would start up again, but I can’ t tell you how many games I played where the timer just got stuck!

In end, the fact that we do not real-time games, I personally don’t like frenetic word games, and the timer didn’t work … completely discouraged us from using the timer. At all.

The only reason to use the timer, we think, was to avoid Analysis Paralysis for certain friends. I have friends who would probably spend 20 minutes on letters per round if left to their own devices (you know who they are). That’s fine if that’s how you want to play, but you have to know what kind of game you want. In the end, none of my primary game group has Analysis Paralysis, but we see the necessity of the timer “in certain situations“. Decide for yourself: we think using the timer “twice” would be the sweet spot: so, about 6 minutes. You just may have to use a different timer.

Word Games

I love word games! I mentioned in my review of Paperback Adventures that I love the idea of cooperative word games, because they are games I could play with my Mom! So, Illiterati is a word game I could play with my whole family, including my Mom! Illiterati’s game rules are quick and easy to learn. I think Paperback Adventures is the better cooperative word game: it’s not real-time, it’s easier to collaborate quietly, and it has more depth. But, having said that, I do like Illiterati: it’s a lighter cooperative word game that’s easy to bring out.

Illiterati is probably easier to bring out as a solo game than Paperback Adventures: if I want a quick word game, then Illiterati is much more accessible. Also, Illiterati works with 1-5 players, whereas Paperback Adventures only works with 1-2 players. That extra player count comes at the cost of a more manic and frenetic word game: Paperback Adventures is more subdued at only 1-2 players.

If you like cooperative word games, I think Paperback Adventures and Illiterati are both good choices: it just depends on what you want in your game.

The Vowel Problem

One problem to look out for is the Vowel Problem, wherein you have an assortment of letters with no vowels! In some games of Scrabble, you can get stuck without any good letters and no vowels!! Paperback Adventures has the innovative way of avoiding he Vowel Problem problem by always have a vowel from the monster you fight! In all my plays of Paperback Adventures, I always felt like I had a good assortment of letters to spell interesting words.

Illiterati almost has the Vowel Problem! Luckily, there is a quick rule you might miss on your first pass through the rulebook:

The Redraw Rule (on bottom of page 6): “When life gives you LMNS…” .. basically, you can redraw up to seven letters at the cost of an extra Bad Guys draw when you draw the Bad Guys. We didn’t use this rule, because it’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment, but it’s good to know it’s there for when you get LMNS … and no vowels.

Optional Rules

Do you want silliness? Completely optional are some silly rules called Pandemonium Powers on page 7 (see picture above). You don’t have to play with them (and we didn’t, as they weren’t our cup of tea), but I could see families liking these rules. They are just silly rules to make the game more fun for some groups: “Choose 1 player: They cannot use their hands this round!”

I like that they are optional. Generally, it feel like Illuminati has done a good job of making this package have enough ways to play for any group.

• Don’t like real-time? You don’t have to play with the timer!
• Want some silliness? Play with the optional Pandemonium Powers!
• Want PVP?  There’s a Player vs Player mode
• Want to play with younger kids? There’s a Junior Mode!
• Want a Solo mode? There’s a solo mode!

Seriously, I appreciated that: My group doesn’t like real-time, and we still could have fun with this game.

Conclusion

I liked Illiterari: it’s a lighter cooperative word game that works. The components for Illiterati are top-notch and I love the art and book aesthetic of the game. Even though the game is supposed to be real-time, we just never found ourselves playing that way (either solo or cooperative). The timer also didn’t work: the rules say it’s perfectly fine to pay without the timer, but we can see that timer being necessary for certain groups which are prone to Analysis Paralysis.

I think I would prefer Illiterati at no more than 3 people total: I liked the solo game, but cooperative game had too much frenzy. Too many people makes it harder to think about words. I prefer my word games to be quiet: at higher player counts, this game is not quiet! That may be just be me, but be aware of that.

I would give this a 7/10. I liked it, I would play it solo (especially when I want a quick word game), and cooperatively with one or mayyyybe two more people. You may love the frenzy and prefer the large player count for the whole family!

Appendix

This is a book game, so we have to have an Appendix, right?

We also got some bookmarks (that aren’t used in the game, but pretty cool).

The sleeves that came with the came were very nice, but I am not sure they were necessary. The cards were linen-finished, and you don’t handle them that much.

We also got a small expansion for another game: see above.

I Kickstarted Valor and Villainy: Ludwick’s Labyrinth sometime ago: back in July 2021. This promised delivery back in September 2022 … it didn’t quite make it. My Kickstarter copy delivered to my house about May 7th, 2023. I have been looking forward to this game: it made the #10 position of my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!

Strictly speaking, Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth is a standalone expansion to the original game Valor and Villainy: Minions of Mordock. See below.

The original of Valor and Villainy: Minions of Mordork was a one-vs-many game, where one player took the role of the Villain and the rest of team fought against him.  This new expansion Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth is fully cooperative and offers a campaign where all the players work together to fight the villainous bosses controlled by the game!  Although this expansion is completely standalone, you can do some combining of it with the original game.  

The Lludwick’s Labyrinth plays 1-6 plays, Ages 14+, and takes about 25 Min/Player. If you believe the box. Let’s take a look below.

Shipping Box Unboxing

This is the Kickstarter Deluxe Edition that came in a box … with a box within a box!

Note that I also got the expansion: Valor and Villainy: Antagonist’s Arsenal, which can make the original game of Minions of Mordok solo and cooperative, as well as the deluxe token token set! See below.

I am very curious about this Antogonist’s Arsenal expansion, because I can turn the original game into a co-op! That will probably have to wait until another day before we get through today’s game: Lludwick’s Labyrinth!

Today’s game is Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth (are you following all these games in the Valor and Villainy universe?): It’s a cooperative boss battler game, with an underlying campaign. It’s a big boy.

This isn’t quite as big as The Isofarian Guard from a few weeks ago, but it’s close!

This big mama-jama takes up the entire box!

See the poor Coke can tremble in fear at the size of this box!

Game Unboxing

Upon opening the box, you see … a pizza?

Ah! On the other side is a discussion of this deluxe edition of the game! This is great! It discusses how the deluxe edition of the game works with minis, cardboard tokens, and how the upgrades work.

My favorite moment in this unboxing is reading the last sentence of the second paragraph: “Once you have read this sheet, you can -DESTROY IT!” This tips me off that the game has a sense of humor and has really thought about how to explain how the Deluxe Edition fits in. I think I knew I was hooked when I read that!

The rulebook is next: it’s a good size and very readable.

Note that the side of the box shows you how to put this back together! That’s awesome!

The next two books are the Campaign Book at the reference sheet. Note how thick the Campaign Book is! I also am worried about this binding … I don’t like it when books won’t just stay open on their own! we will deal with this by GASP folding the rulebook … I didn’t like it, but we had to do it!!!

See above as it doesn’t stay open without some help. 

There’s a real nice reference sheet too!

Under all these books are … envelopes!

I said this was a campaign game: the campaign unfolds from the envelopes (you can reset the game: there are no legacy elements according to the rulebook). There are 8 chapters.

Underneath the campaign envelopes are the GameTrayz for the tokens.  Note that there are two of them: one for each side of the table!  This makes it really easy to unbox the game: just pull out the trayz!

Under the trayz are miniatures! Oooh! Pretty spiffy!

The little cardboard holder holds all the cards of the game.  Be careful not to necessarily unpack all your cards right away! The order of these cards is very important: these cards will guide your campaign and need to come out in a very specific order!

Ah! There’s all of the miniatures!

Under the minis are the dice and boards for the heroes (and a few other odds and ends).

You may THINK we are done, but no! Under the tray with the boards are a BUNCH of punch out boards Seriously! They are kinda “secretly hidden” under the last insert! I didn’t realize they were there until I went looking for the Board of Doom!

If you get the the upgrade tokens, you won’t need to punch out everything, so hold off on unpunching these too.

What a fantastic looking game! I love how this looks! I was so excited to moving forward!

Unwrappening and Unpunchening

Before I could move forward and actually PLAY, I did have to devote some cycles to unwrapping, unpunching, and filling the GameTrayz.  This was a little more chaotic than it should have been. 

First of all, the Deluxe Tokens have to go into the GameTrayz! The game box side shows a picture, but they aren’t notated very well. I had to kinda go by picture and guess.

This was not as easy as it seems. First, it’s not 100% clear which deluxe tokens replace which cardboard tokens. And it turns out, you still need SOME of the cardboard tokens!

See above as I punch out the shields but NOT a lot of of other tokens? Because not all tokens have replacements, but most do!

I spent a lot of time trying to sort the tokens: probably too much. It was good, in the sense that I had a better sense of all the tokens in the game, but annoying because the deluxe tokens aren’t labelled. They are kinda labelled in the pizza sheet on top.

And this just made me laugh: you are REQUIRED to keep the cardboard skeletons! They are needed to prop up up the inserts after you punch out what you need!! I was laughing my head off at this! I am the only person I know that keeps Cardboard Skeletons!! (I did a whole article on them here) So, it was funny to see a game require them! See below as the punchboard skeletons go back in the bottom of the box …

A lot of the other punchouts are either (a) tiles to explore or (b) backings for cards.

You have to be careful with the cards: I initially unwrapped all the cards, but the order of the cards matters!  A lot of these cards are revealed as you play!

Notice the DO NOT EVER SHUFFLE!

It’s also a little chaotic because you are uncardening and it tells you GOTO THE CAMPAIGN BOOK!! But but but … I am not ready!! Nope, get over to the campaign book now!

And that leads to the first play.

Rulebook(s)

The base rulebook is quite nice.

The rulebook gets an A- on the chair test: it sits on the chair right next to me very well (very little droopage). I used the rulebook a little, but the tutorial was so good, I didn’t really need to…

Tutorial

This is probably one of the best, if not the best, tutorials I have done! This really felt like I was doing an in-game Video Game Tutorial that taught all the basic rules! Two decks (Story deck and Event deck) guide you through an entire game!!! The decks showed WHAT to do, what NOT to do, explained what your choices were, how the game unraveled, how you explored, how to set-up the dungeon, how to fight, how to upgrade, how to get loot. Seriously, this was the most fantastic tutorial I have ever seen. Take a look at how intricate and well-spoken the tutorial card above is.

You can see the tutorial decks above: the Event deck and Story deck. These were so good at laying out the game. I feel like I haven’t seen a tutorial this good since Tainted Grail (see our review Part I and Part II here) And you know what? If I had a tutorial this good for The Isofarian Guard, I may not have sold that game.

This Tutorial filled me with confidence: I still see a large rulebook full of rules, but I feel like I understand a lot of the game from this tutorial. That really helps take the edge off how daunting this game looks.

Bright and A Sense of Humor

In case it’s not clear from the art and some the monsters … and the pizza on top of the game as you open it … this game has a sense of humor. I think that’s why I gave this a chance on Kickstarter: the game doesn’t take itself too seriously! I love the art! This game doesn’t feel like every other depressing fantasy game (speaking of Tainted Grail) out there! The art is bright and crisp! The game looks silly but still professional and fun!

It is still a boss battler with a lot of rules (which the tutorial really helps with), but you are chasing demons who stole the pizza making guy. Seriously! Or should say, … not so seriously. Grin.

This game would be a contender for my Top 10 Cooperative Games With a Sense of Humor.

Solo Play

The tutorial took me through my first play. See the Game set-up above (and we had to fold the Campaign book to keep it open! Nooo!)

Something that is a little weird is the border: it’s easy to set-up (surprisingly so: just follow the marks), but it constrains the dungeon to be no more than 5×5.

The first play has you play two characters: Welliam …

… and Rowan.

You use their miniatures on the map, and the Tutorial guides you through movement, combat, exploration, treasure. It tells you places you could make different choices, as well as things you CANNOT do. Like I said, a fabulous tutorial.

I had a great time. The nice thing about this tutorial is that it scales for 1-6 players: each player just alternates reading the cards, and all players just play the two characters out. Once you start getting into the game, you get to play your own character.

Cooperative Play

We used the same tutorial to play through with 4 players. It worked great.

I promised my group that if we tried this game, we’d watch the intro video on the big screen! See above, with the silly animation showing the kidnapping of Guiseppe, the pizza-making guy!

The video was silly but it gave a nice backstory and sense of what’s to come. It also doesn’t take itself too seriously: I get so tired of depressing fantasy.

As a group, we played through the same tutorial I played as a solo player. At the end, I asked the group “Do you want to continue playing?” The answer was: yes! We’ll be starting the full campaign next week. The real question is: will this be like Tainted Grail where we played for a while and stopped because were sick of it? Or will this be like Roll Player Adventures where we played all the way through and loved it? Only time will tell!

Conclusion

So, Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth is a silly boss battler with amazing components and just about the best tutorial system we have ever seen. This tutorial gives both me and my group a lot of confidence to move forward and try the full campaign. We’ll be running through the campaign over the next few months!

My game group has finished Roll Player Adventures and are looking for a new campaign (Spoiler Alert: We loved Roll Player Adventures! It made the #3 spot our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021). At the moment, we are intrigued by Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth: a funny, well-produced, brilliantly presented, cooperative boss battler. Check back in a while: we’ll let you know how it’s going. I suspect this will end up in my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023! (Or will that be Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2023? Strictly speaking, this is an cooperative standalone expansion for the original Valor and Villany!)

So, we are going to do something a little different this week: this week’s game is a Print & Play game that was #2 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022! I think the reason we were so interested in it was because they haven’t been too many cooperative roll-and-write games! We’ve seen Escape: The Cooperative Roll and Write (see our review here), and there are a few more coming out this year … and that’s about it! We are also super interested (no pun intended) because we really like cooperative Superhero games here at Co-op Gestalt! See our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero games here!

However, this is a new experience for us! This is a Print & Play from Kickstarter (see the Legends of Storm City Kickstarter here). It was released this January 2023! And when we say released … we mean that we got a bunch of PDFs in a google drive that we have to print ourselves.

Print: Headed to the Print Shop

My printer at home isn’t great for Print & Play (and the ink costs are ridiculous), so I though I’d head to my local FedEx store and print it there, using their super high-quality color printers.

It all fit in a paper bag (which will end up being the final home for it once we pack it away). What was the cost? And what did we get?

You can see out costs above and below:

So, 36 pages cost $20.33 + tax = $21.98. The printer was even smart enough to realize that some of the pages were black and white, so I only got charged 17 cents per page instead of 64 cents for the color pages.

Overall, they printed very well and look nice.

Cut: They forget a step!

I think they forgot a step when they named these games: They call these games Print & Play, but I think a better name is Print & Cut & Play! You still have to go through a lot of work to cut everything up before you can play!!!

Since this is a roll-and-write, you write on the sheets(s) and then throw away the sheets when you are done: think of a Yahtzee pad that you fill in and then throw away when done. That’s what a roll-and-write typically does.

What are our options?

• Print multiple copies of the game sheets like Yahtzee!  Mark up the sheets as I play, and then throw the sheets away when the game done.  Expensive, as you saw the prices from the Print step
• Do some erasing to reuse the sheets, but eventually throw them away.  Okay for the short term, but as saw from the printing prices, I don’t want to print more than I have to!  And erasing always makes the sheets look yucky
• Laminate the Cards and use dry-erase markers.  Great idea, but the margins are quite thin on sheets, and laminating only works when you have lots of plastic on all the edges.

None of these are great choices for this game. However, in this case, all the cards are basically “standard” card size: If I use card sleeves, then I can cut the cards out and place them in sleeves! Then, I can write on the card sleeves!

The card sleeves fit perfectly! See above. The only problem is that paper I printed on was pretty weak, so I chose to reinforce the card sleeves with real cards.

I have a bunch of empty cards from GamesCrafter, so I chose to use those, but I could easily see using cards from a plain deck of cards as well for reinforcement.

Cutting this out was … not fun. I even have a very nice little cutting helper, and it still took me 1.5 hours to cut everything out and sleeve it.

You can see above that I got decent results. If you are OCD, you probably don’t like that the papers don’t fit flush against the card stock: basically the white outline of the cards needs to be centered. Depending on how OCD you are, you can spend the time to center the pieces of paper … I didn’t spend that much time on that.

I spent 1.5 hours cutting and fitting.

A little tip: keep the PDFs nearby, or take a picture of your full sheets (like I did above). As you cut up the cards, you forget which backs go with which cards because the backs aren’t labelled. (They probably should be).

There are 6 cards types and 6 backs. See above.

By the time I was all done, I was pretty tired: this was a lot of work. I kind of wished I could have spent $30 to have the game printed and shipped to me. I paid $5 for the kickstarter PDF files, $21.98 for printing for $26.98. Them I spent 1.5 hours of my life cutting and fitting sleeves (not to mention the .5 hour at the FedEx store) .

I would have preferred a $25 kickstarter with $5 shipping. I don’t think I realized how much work a Print&Cut&Play was until now.

One final note: I want to say that the Legends of Storm City people did a phenomenal job making all the PDFs aligned! It was easy to just cut many sheets at once because everything was precisely aligned on the page. That probably cut (no pun intended) an extra hour of the cutting process. Thank you! It could have been a lot worse!

Read: Oops, Another Step

Before we play, we have to read the rules.  I think that turns this into a Print&Cut&Read&Play!

The rules are on standard pieces of paper … because that’s how I printed them. Strictly speaking, I did NOT have to print the rules or the scenario book (which would have dropped the printing price quite a bit): I could have looked at the rules on my phone or padd. In the end, I prefer to get away from my technology when I play games, so I went ahead and printed all the pages.

The joke here is that I only get a B on the Chair Test: the pages tend to flop over the edges of the chair a little! This is funny because I printed the rulebook, so it’s my fault the form factor isn’t a little better! It was nice, however, to have the rules easily flippable on the chair next to me as I played.

I will say, these rules aren’t great. I’ve had to read through them several times to get what’s going on. Some of the word choice and tense choice suggests this is a translation, so that explains parts of it. There were a bunch of places where I just had to “move on” as I read in hopes the rules would be clearer later.

I’ve played through now a few times, and the game does start to make sense. The rules are mostly there. I think the rulebook needs some better elaborations and organizational rethinks. Look, I only paid $5, so I can’t complain too much, right? Still, it was a frustrating read. But I did finally understand most of the game.

Go And Get Your Own Components!  This is a Print&Play After All

This seems like another step: Go And Get Your Own Components or GAGYOC.  Since this is a Print&Cut&Read&GAGYOC&Play game, we need to bring our own components (besides the sheets) to the table. The only components we’ve had up until now are the sheets we printed.  But, we need more!

The most important thing for us is the Ultra Fine dry erase marker!!  Because we want to be able to reuse all the cards, we have sleeved them: we will be using a dry erase marker to mark up the cards.  It is VERY IMPORTANT to get the ultra-fine for this system: the little boxes on the cards are pretty tiny, and any bigger marker will be completely illegible.  Even the Ultra Fine isn’t perfect (see below), but it works.  (We saw how important Ultra Fine Markers were when we reviewed another game with dry-erase boards: The Forests of Adrimon.  See our review here and how much we complained for NOT having ultra-fine markers).

We also need a bunch of 6-sided dice:

6 black dice (brown) for the bad guys,  6 white Dice for the good guys, 2 red dice for bad guy threats, 2 yellow Dice for good guy abilities, and one green dice for bad guy abilities (not shown).  Since I didn’t have any yellow 6-sided dice, I chose to use a 10 and 20-sided and re-roll when I don’t get a 1-6.   Hey, I am scraping by to get all the dice I need, all right?

The final step to GAGYOC is to gather some tokens. Now, the tokens come on a sheet you can cut-up (left above), but I think the Scythe metal coins work as perfect replacements! I don’t have to cut anything else!

The Scythe metal coins worked surprising well: it was pretty obvious what coins should be what tokens. See above.

So, that’s kinda all your components!

Set-Up: Are We Ready to Play yet?

Nope! One more step!  Gotta set everything up!  Let’s got through the cards and choose the appropriate cards to use:

Above are the 4 Hero Cards: each player takes a card to take the role of one of these heroes.  The game can play 1-4 Heroes.

The goal of of the game is to take out the Elite Villain before his/her Main Plan come to fruition.  Choose one Villain to fight (above, right) and take his/her Main Plan (above left).

Each Elite Villain also has some Henchmen: See above.  These are the Henchmen cards: you’ll choose three sets of these when you play, maybe all different, maybe some if the game.  These Henchmen work for the main villain!  (The Scenario book will help you choose these).

There are also Side Plans which cause problems for the Heroes: players must choose 1 Side Plan as well.

Finally, there are Intervention Plans (see above). Players will choose two of these.

The Set-Up from the book will show you how to set-up: see above.

In the end, your board should look something like this!

Play: We Made It!

So, we made it to the Play step of the increasingly misnamed Print&Play! I think, in the future, we will call these Print&Cut&Read&GAGYOC&Set&Play games. I mean, it was a lot of work to get here! The name should reflect that!

The main mechanic of the game is to roll dice and assign them to something. The Elite Villain, 3 Henchmen, and 2 Plans are all marked with a “random” but unique number from 1 to 6 (and marked on the card at the start of the game). On the Villain turn, when we roll the Brown dice and roll that number, we activate the appropriate card! The red dice activate threats in a similar way. Above, you see the Main Plan activated once (with a 5), the Side Plan activated twice (two 6s), and the little tiny die (supposed to be green) activates the special ability on the Henchmen (henchman 4).

It’s a little easier to see up close: See above as the Ninja is activated on 1s (1 in the white diamond tells us which card).

The bad guys do damage to use trying to take us out. Villains win if they activate the main plan, or if they defeat one of the heroes.

In fact, the Heroes lost their first game as Strike One lost all health (white, orange, blue, and yellow blobs).

The Heroes win if they defeat al Elite Villains or deactivate the main plan. Nefertary was only one point away from being defeated!

Actually … maybe we did win, since we took out the Main Plan before Nefertary killed us!! Heroes deactivate spaces (marked with Xs), Villains activate spaces with Os. Villains roll a 6 on the black dice to activate, Heroes roll 6s on white dice to deactivate.

The Hero turn is similar, except they roll and assign White Dice! (And you get one reroll). White dice on Henchmen or Villains means you need to roll again to attack, White dice on Plains deactivates them one space.

There are much more specific rules to the Villains and Heroes, but that’s the crux of the game: alternate between Villain and Hero turns until someone wins!

Solo Play

This game supports Saunders’ Law and allows solo play. And thank goodness! Since the rules aren’t very good, the solo player really needs time to go over the rulebook a few times and get a few games under his belt before he teaches the game!

Once the solo play gets going, it has a nice flow of rolling black dice, figuring out bad guy effects, then rolling white dice for good guys effects (with a possible reroll). I generally had fun once the game started moving, but it was pretty hard to get to that point. The rules made this hard to learn.

Cooperative Play

This was one of the more “interesting” plays we’ve had in a while.  Unfortunately, not in a good way.

Since I hadn’t played solo in a while, there was quite a bit of downtime upfront rereading the rules. And I was reminded how many rules there were!

We were using the crappy dice I had, when Andrew remembered I had Roll Player Adventure! With real properly colored dice!

From then on, he dice were SO MUCH better! That helped a lot!

This 4-Player game took about 1.5 hours.

And my friends did not like this.

In the end, we won, but we completely smashed it. It wasn’t really that hard.

Conclusion

This was my first real experience with Print&Play, and I think it really needs to be renamed to Print&Cut&Read&GAGYOC&Set&Play to represent all the work it takes to get to the final play!  I guess I don’t honestly think they’ll change the name, but I didn’t expect there to be so much work.

If you have a printer with cheap ink, then I think printing at home is probably good for you. Unfortunately,  the printing costs for me seemed to suggest I print someplace more professional, but I did pay for it!  With a $5 cost for the Kickstarter and $21.98 cost for the printing, and then several hours of work to assemble everything, I think I would have paid a little extra, like $30 for the game to be professionally printed and boxed and shipped.

In the end, I liked the game, but friends really didn’t.  Their scores were quite low: 3/10 from both Sara and Andrew, and 5/10 from Teresa. Essentially, they never felt involved, there were too many rules for a small roll-and-write, there weren’t a lot of choices, and they never connected with their hero.

What I would really love to happen is to see a bigger company pick this up: there’s a good game in here, but it’s a diamond in the rough.  The rules need to be really tightened and cleaned up.  And the assembly is so much work.  The best thing, I think, is if the game got a professional printing and you could write on the cards!  Silver and Gold is a great game where you can write on the cards with dry-erase markers: that’s just what this game needs! I suspect this game could even fit in the same sized box as Silver and Gold!  (Just make sure you get an ultra-fine dry erase marker)

I like The Legends of Storm City, especially once you get into the swing of things. But it needs some work: I’d give it a 5/10. I like it and I’d play it again, but I just worry about forgetting the rules because the rulebook isn’t great. As a counterpoint, remember that my friends didn’t really like this at all.

That said, I’ll bet I would bump this to 6 or even more if they tightened the rules and professionally printed Legends of Storm City like Silver and Gold.