What’s a tile? Does a tile have to be a thick square piece of plastic? How about a thick piece of cardboard? How thick does a piece of cardboard have to be in order to classify as a tile? Can just a playing card be a tile? Our answer: A piece is a tile if it’s used like a tile in a tile-placement game. Although this definition sounds specious, it represents the reality that there are a lot of tile-laying or tile-placement games that use cards as tiles rather than piece of thick plastic/cardboard. It’s a tile if it’s used as tile and its placement matters! Below is our top 10 list of cooperative tile-placement or tile-laying games.

Now, there are some cooperative games that have tile-placement in them as a minor mechanic (such as Robinson Crusoe), but to be on this list, the game has to have tile-placement as a main mechanism in the game.

A Thought Experiment: Mechanical Beast

At first, it looks like Mechanical Beast might be a pure tile-placement game, but as you play/explore, you realize you get no choices when placing tiles! You have to place the top tile on the space you explored, without even the option of rotating the way you want! (You have to place the tile along the arrow).

What makes this an interesting spin on tile-placement is that, even though you have no choice on tiles when they come out, you can later rotate one or many tiles using the gear mechanism! This gives you some choice in the topology of your tile grid. Mechanical Beast is weird, and while not strictly speaking a tile-placement game, it kinda looks-and-feels like a tile-placement game once you get into it. Strictly speaking though, you have no choice when you place a tile: its orientation and placement is set, and so we don’t consider this a tile placement/tile laying game. (Arguably, you have choice as which room you build from, so you can influence topology, but it’s not quite enough choice).

The main point of this discussion of Mechanical Beast: for all of The Top 10 Cooperative Tile Placement Games, players have some choices when they place a tile (orientation, placement, side, topology, etc) and those choices makes a difference in the game. Some games will, of course, have more choice than others: in general, the higher a game is on this list, the more choice you have in your tile placement!

10. Chainsomnia

Solo Game:  Yes (but must play 3 characters)
Players: 1-4
Time: 40-60 Minutes
Tiles: square medium-thick cardboard

Chainsomnia is #10 on this list because there’s probably the least choice in tile placement: when you explore, you must place a tile legally connected to the room you are in, but you do get choice in orientation which entrances connect (as well as the topology, as you control which room you explore from).

As you play, you have get all tiles out to expose the exit: players only win if at least one player makes it to the exit and all nightmares are discarded!  

This is a cute and lighter cooperative tile-placement game, where the topology does matter because you have to make sure to keep a way to the exit open as you explore, but still manage to keep the nightmares under control!

9. Cities: Skyline

Solo Game:  Yes
Players: 1-4
Time: 40-70 Minutes
Tiles: polyomino cardboard tiles, medium thickness

Cities: Skylines is based on a video game.  In this board game adaptation, players cooperatively execute urban planning for a city (this is a city-building game after all).  

What makes this is a little different than other tile placement games on this list is the tiles do have slightly different shapes!  We did not necessarily specify that the tiles all had to be the same shape, and in this case they are not!  (Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there probably are NOT that many cooperative polyomino games!)

This is a fun, but more complicated tile placement game where tile placement absolutely matters!

8. Forgotten Depths

Solo Game:  Yes (you can play from 1 to 3 characters)
Players: 1-3
Time: 60 Minutes
Tiles: square cards

Forgotten Depths is a dungeon crawler game where the tiles come out as you explore the dungeon.  This is still a dungeon-crawling adventure game, but the tile placement is a main mechanic that influences the shape of your adventure.  When you draw and place tiles (Map Tiles), there are a few rules you have to follow (“All edges of the new Map Tile must match the edges of all the tiles they’ll touch”), but in general you have some choices as you place tiles.  You’ll want to try to create Legendary Locations to provide XP and cool story elements, you’ll want to put the campfire close enough, you’ll want to make sure monsters, doors, chests, are close enough/far away.   

You have three different “ecologies” you play through, so there’s quite a bit of variety.

The choices you make when placing the tiles in your dungeon have an effect on how your game unfolds.  It’s pretty fun: the tile-placement is more about how you want your adventure to run than “scoring points”, but it’s a main and important mechanism in the game.

7. Sub Terra/Sub Terra II

Solo Game:  Yes (but must play 3 characters)
Players: 1-6
Time: 60-75 Minutes
Tiles: square medium-thick cardboard

Sub Terra and Sub Terra II are lower on the list … not because they aren’t great games, but because the amount of choice in tile-placement is less pronounced.  Certain powers allow the players some choice in choosing tiles that come out  (The Scout in Sub Terra or The Archaeologist, The Aristocrat, or The Foreman in Sub Terra II), players can also have some choice in orientation of tiles (as long it’s legal) that come out, and basic actions allow the players to reveal a tile before moving on them, but the amount of tile choice is a little more limited: generally, most players take the top tile and place it where they are going.  

Having said that, both of these still feels like tile-placement games, as you play tiles in the play area!  Sub Terra II definitely feels more like tile-placement, because the shape of your exploration (where you explore) helps influence where the final Artifact shows up!  Both of these are great cooperative games: I would give the nod to Sub Terra II as it has a little more true tile-placement, but Sub Terra is still a great game and has that tile-placement feel.  Take a look at our review here of Sub Terra II to see if it’s something you might enjoy!

6. Escape: Curse of the Temple

Solo Game: yes
Players: 1-5
Time: “realtime” (really, that’s what the box says)
Tiles: larger, heavy thickness tiles

Escape: The Curse of the Temple is probably the odd duck on this list: it’s a real-time dice-chucking cooperative game about exploring a temple as fast as you can!  Your tile-placement choices seem less consequential, but they are absolutely vital!  You need to explore quickly, placing tiles! You can only place tiles (“discover a chamber”) from your current tile, but you can choose how it connects via orientation.

All this exploration is happening in real-time, so the dungeon is being explored by everyone as they play.  You need to be talking as you explore and keep some players under control: “Don’t explore too far that way or you’ll make it too hard to get to you if you get trapped!!”

The topology matters in this game!  If you explore too far along a long corridor, you may isolate yourself or the exit from the rest of the team!  So, where you explore (as you are crazily rolling dice) really does matter.   So, it may seem like a quirky choice, but the tile-placement choices  (the speed of choice, the collaboration of choice, the choice of orientation of the tile) do matter in this game.  And it’s really fun!

5. Dead Men Tell No Tales

Solo Game: no
Players: 2-5
Time: 60-75 Minutes
Tiles: medium sized, medium thickness tiles

Dead Men Tell No Tales is a favorite in my game groups: I got two copies when the original Kickstarter went up, giving one away as a birthday present.  Players each take the role of a pirate (with special abilities), and players work together to loot a pirate ship before it explodes!  It’s not real-time (although it sounds like it might be)!  

There’s a lot going on here, but the tile placement is essential to the game: every turn, one player must draw a tile and place it legally somewhere on the pirate ship that’s exploding!  Not only does the topology matter, but things like where treasure, monsters, and Fire Dice placed also matter! 

Where and how you place the tile on the soon-to-be-exploding pirate ship matters a great deal!  This doesn’t, at first, look like a tile-placement game, but it absolutely is.

4. Castellion

Solo Game: yes
Players: 1-2 (although it’s easy to have 3 or 4 people playing cooperatively as a unit)
Time: 60 Minutes
Tiles: smaller, medium thickness tiles

Castellion is a game in the Oniverse line of games, and it is all about laying tiles!  Players have to place tiles on a board with shapes and colors on the tiles affecting how tiles can and can’t be placed.

There are some really interesting decisions when you place your tiles.  We ended up expanding the player count to 3 easily: we all just work together make the decisions as a single player would and deciding how to play the tiles. 

This is a pure tile-laying that was challenging and fun!  The typical arc of our gameplays would be to lose the game but then want to play immediately to try again!  It is quite fun and challenging!

3. Tranquility

Solo Game:  Yes (slight variation, main game is cooperative with multiple players)
Players: 1-5 
Time: 20 Minutes
Tiles: square cards

The joke is that Tranquility is not tranquil at at! It’s all about placing cards in a 6×6 grid so that the numbers are strictly increasing .. and it can be very stressful how/when to place your cards! The cards are numbered from 1-80, and when you place a cards, you have to place it such that it is in increasing order … but if you place next to another card, you must discard cards of the difference between the two numbers.

If you ever run out of cards or can’t play a card in order, you lose!  This is also a hidden information game: you are not allowed to talk to your fellow players as you play.

This is a surprisingly fun small game, with lots of interesting decisions about where to place cards.  Although there’s no real theme here (it’s just a tile/card placement game), the sailing ship and cute art really enhances the game.

2. Sprawlopolis/Agropolis/Naturopolis

Solo Game:  Yes (generally, this is regarded as a solo game, with cooperative rules tacked-on)
Players: 1-5 
Time: 35 Minutes
Tiles: poker-sized playing cards … just plain cards

We love all three of these tiny 18-card button shy games!  Each one has a slightly different theme (build a city in Sprawlopolis, build in a rural environment with Agropolis, or a natural environment in Naturopolis), but they all work essentially the same way! 

Players choose 3 of the 18 cards as scoring conditions (see above), then players use the rest o the 15 cards to score the best they can! One of the reasons this game is so high on our list is how much agency you get in the game for laying your tiles!  Players get 3 cards per turn, choose one, and can place it anywhere on the board (over cards, next to, above, with a few restrictions) with one of two orientations! The amount of choices and agency is why it is also so high on our Top 10 “Small” Cooperative Games list!  See also our review of Agropolis here.

1. Mists Over Carcassonne

Solo Game:  Yes (easy to do: just take 3 meeples in each of 4 different colors and play normally)
Players: 1-5 
Time: 35 Minutes
Tiles: square light-thick cardboard

Mists Over Carcassonne is the tile-laying game that inspired this list! Each tile, when lain, has so many juicy decisions: Do I try to set-up scoring opportunities for my fellow players? Do I mitigate ghosts? Do I score? Can I do many of these things at once? It’s also so interesting how the tile itself is both the good news and bad news!

The solo game is a wonderful little 35 minute puzzle, with 6 levels of difficulty to keep the player engaged. The cooperative game seems to inspire so many discussions! Even the Alpha Player is kept at bay, at least a little, as each player owns the tile he/she places. Mists Over Carcassonne is a fantastic, easy-to-teach, quick-to-set-up, simple but deep game that works great as a solo game and a cooperative game (and a competitive expansion for the base game to boot)! Mists Over Carcassonne was also a nominee for the best cooperative game in the 17th Annual Golden Geek Awards!

Monster Pit is a cooperative Boss-Battling game for 1-5 players: it was on Kickstarter back on March 2022. It promised delivery in November 2022, but just delivered to my house about a week ago (April 7th or so). It’s about 5 months late.

This game is for Ages 14+, and takes about 60-minutes to play. There is a solo mode!

Let’s take a look.

Unboxing

This game is gorgeous! It has a similar kind of art as Rescuing Robin Hood (which we reviewed sometime ago here). My group really loved the art!

The Kickstarter version came with an extra monster.

Generally speaking, this game looks fantastic.

Overall, I was very very pleased when I opened the box.

There are just tons of really good looking components. If I had one complaint about the components, it would be that the cards weren’t linen-finished.

Rulebook

The rulebook looks great and very-well produced, but it sometimes was very frustrating.

The rulebook starts great with a well-annotated list of components. This was great!

There’s a quick game overview that gets you the spirit of the game quickly, with a link to a Let’s Play! (I usually just read the rulebook than watching videos, but you may love the videos).

The set-up spanned a number of pages, but it worked well. The set-up described set-up in detail!

So far, I am very happy with the rulebook. The next few pages look great as well. I was able to essentially get through the rules pretty quickly.

The problem is that, as these rules are great for first start-up, they seem to be missing a lot of rules and edge cases and general things that come up in the game. This game makes you think it’s an easy game, but there’s quite a few rules that don’t seem to be fully thought out.

For a set-up and getting into the game, the rulebook was great. For follow up with rules, the rulebook was lacking. I was very frustrated with this rulebook: too many rules seem unspecified.

Gameplay

Monster Pit is all about rolling dice.  You roll dice to see how far the “end of game” token, you roll dice for combat, you roll dice for activating the monster, you roll dice to see what areas of the city get affected … everything is dice rolls.

It’s also “kind of” a worker placement game, as you place your marker on a city space to “do something”.  Each city district has a few spaces where you can activate one of the abilities.  There are a lot of things to activate!

The game summary that came with this is one of the best I have seen: there are enough for all players, and it really does describe all the things you can do when you place your character marker.

This is a Boss-battler: to win, you have to take out the big boss: see Vaiel above.

Each character chooses a board and Captain: as the game goes on, you accumulate more warriors to your board (see above). Each warrior you acquire helps you with more dice, and either defense or offense: each character starts with a Paladin.

Generally, a lot of the spaces on the city board (“worker placement spaces”) allow you to draw a card which helps your captain with a new warrior, a mount, an item, a wizard: see some examples above.

If you can defeat the Boss before the tracker reaches the end, you win! Otherwise you lose.

Solo Play

The game fully supports a solo mode, and it’s easy to play: you just play one character with some scaling factors.

The “end of game” marker moves a little at the start of each round: the solo player rolls some dice and advances the marker that far. Given how many spaces there are on the track, it doesn’t seem to move that fast. I won my first game and it was only half way around.

The game looks great set-up, but I didn’t enjoy solo play. I felt like I couldn’t do very much per turn: the bad news comes out, I get exactly one action, and the night phase comes which activates more bad news. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Although I did win my first game, it felt like there was a lot of upkeep to the one action I had per turn. I didn’t like it.

I was hopeful Cooperative Play would be better.

Cooperative Play

Unfortunately, cooperative play went just as badly as solo play. The dice conspired against us, the end of game marker moved very quickly, but the game still felt like a trudge: it always felt like we were waiting for everyone else’s turn to end. There was a lot of downtime.

Problems

There were generally three major problems with Monster Pit: too much randomness, a poor action economy, and too many rules for a simple game (which were poorly specified in the rulebook).

Just about everything in the game is decided by dice … and that led to a lot of frustrations on all my players. A bad start with bad rolls is hard to overcome, as you can’t get money which means you can’t buy upgrades, which means you don’t do much on your turn. And then the Monster actions are decided by dice. And combat is decided by dice. And bad effects are decided by dice. Everything was just so random.

By itself, the randomness wasn’t necessarily bad: a lot of people wouldn’t be affected by this. The problem was that the action economy, which is about the only thing the player has a choice in, is very poor. You only get one action per turn when you place your marker! In the meantime, the bad news engines of the game are pumping out Monster actions, little monsters, and all sorts of thing to deal with. It was very frustrating that you felt like you only had one action per turn: this was even more frustrating in the endgame when a lot of the places on the board were “blocked”.

The game was too random and my group felt like it had very little agency even when we could act. And we were frustrated that the rulebook seemed to miss explaining a lot of rules.

Fixes?

A simple fix might be to let each player start with one more soldier, one more item, just something so that if your starting rolls are bad, you don’t feel like you can’t do anything.

A bigger fix would be something to allow more actions per turn: Having 2 to 4 workers per turn would make the game feel more engaging. The problem is, that’s a very big change and would require substantial rebalancing.

There is a good game hidden in here, I just don’t think the current version of Monster Pit is quite it.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, I can’t recommend Monster Pit as-is. It would probably get a 7.5/10 or 8/10 for components because it’s a beautiful game! But the game just wasn’t fun in solo or cooperative mode: all of us would probably give the game a 4/10. It was too random, the action economy was out of whack, and the rules were poorly specified.

Having said that, if there were ever a 2nd edition, I would look at it again! I do think there is a good game hidden in here. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough house rules to fix the current version.

Indiana Jones: Sands of Adventure is a real-time cooperative game for 2-4 players, Ages 8+ and lasting about 45 minutes. I pre-ordered my copy online from Target back in January when I first heard about: A cooperative Indiana Jones game? Count me in!

So, this arrived at my house June 18th, 2023 at about 1:30pm. I know the date and time because I had invited a friend over to play the game with me at noon, and it still hadn’t arrived! While we were waiting, we played through Bogeyman: a cooperative kind of horror game by Antoine Ferrara (we’ll take a look at this in the future). It finally arrived! Let’s take a look!

Components and Gameplay

This is a smaller size box from Funko games. It’s about the size of Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game from a few weeks ago. This size makes sense: the cooperative games from Target all seem to be about the same size. I believe, at the time of this writing, that this is currently a Target exclusive game.

There is a major toy factor going on here in the timet! The timer is actually a fairly complicated structure!

The timer structure has to be assembled, see above. It is supposed to swing upside down as you fill the bucket on top with gems:

This is the main centerpiece of the game and it looks amazing on the table!

There are two parts to the game: the gather phase (which is not real-time) and the fight phase (which is real-time!). During the gather phase, you are trying to build up your hand to fight the bad guys. To win: you have to defeat all three bad guys over 3 rounds of gather/fight.

Each bad guy has an ever-increasing number of hit points! You don’t have to take out the first two to win, but not defeating the first two bad guys puts you at a disadvantage on the the next round: you DO have to defeat Rene Belloq to win!

Each player takes the role of an iconic Indiana Jones character, with a special power! See the 4 choices above!

On their turn during the gather phase, players move to any location on a track of five: see above; once they take the action there, they have to roll a dice to see the “consequences”.

Generally the consequences are losing cards or putting a gem into the timer tower!

As players “gather”, they are collecting cards with symbols and colors and “fight”: see above. The cards are like UNO cards in many ways, because you can only play a card on the deck if you match the current top symbol or color!

The only way to win to to play enough “fight” cards (see the character cards above) to knock out the current bad guy, but you can only play those “fight” cards if you can match the card on top (symbol or color).

Once you have played too many gems, the timer tower will flip! See above! That’s when the real-time phase starts! This part of the game reminded us of Escape: Curse of the Temple! You are trying to play fight cards and draw cards as fast as possible, but if you ever draw a SNAKE card, you have to roll the red dice until you defeat the snake!

The real-time phase is furious! You are trying to play fight cards as fast as you can to knock out the bad guy! If you do before the time runs out, you move on to the next gather/fight round!

This is a really great production!  That timer tower is really cool to see in action!

 

Movie Arc

This game really felt like it had a movie arc: as you playing in the “gather” phase, it felt like you were trying to gather information about the bad guy, occassionally hurting him, but making the final fight inevitable! Once the timer tower flips, it feels like the battle at the endof the movie has started! It’s furious! It’s crazy! It’s fun!

The game really does feel like an action movie.

Replayability

Our major concern for this game is replayability: there are only 3 villains and you fight the same three every time. Also, the locations are a little limited: they do have an A and B side AND you get to change one of them every round, but a few more villains or locations might have helped this game. We enjoyed the game, but you play the same three rounds every time: gather/fight, gather/fight, gather/fight.

Other Thoughts

This game looks great on the table, If you have this set-up, I’ll bet a bunch of people will stop by! It’s very appealing visually!

The rulebook was pretty good: we read the rulebook as a team, and we got going on the game pretty quickly. It had a big font, was easy to read, and enough good pictures (including set-up).

You may want to consider sleeving your cards: you touch them a lot, and you handle them a lot during the sweaty, grody, real-time phase. The cards aren’t linen-finished, so they will grody faster.

The Lost Arc of the Covenant In The Room

So, if you like real-time, you will probably like this.  If you don’t tend to like real-time … you may still like this.  The real-time phase is easy to teach and easy to play: it’s frantic without too much annoying freneticism.  I personally don’t tend to like real-time games, but I like this.

 

 

Conclusion

Indiana Jones: Sands of Adventure was a surprisingly fun real-time game, and I don’t like real-time games generally. The game felt you were in a movie:the gather phase feeling you were gathering information and resources, but knowing that a big battle was coming … you just didn’t know when! When that timer flips, it’s an adrenaline rush!

The game looks fantastic on the table, and the toy factor of the timer tower cannot be denied! You will want to play this just to see the tower! And it will attract others to you .. “What is that you are playing?”

The cards could be better (you may want to sleeve them), but the biggest concern is the replayability! Indiana Jones: Sands of Adventure was a blast to play, and we had fun, but the game is pretty much the same game every time with the same three villains and the same game arc. It might have been nice had there been a few more scenarios (find the arc, find the crystal skull) to vary the game.

Your first play is so dynamic and fun, you might give it an 8.5/10 out of the gate because it’s so quick and fun and cool! You will probably calm a little and drop it to a 7/10 or less after a while just because the game arc doesn’t change.

I’m glad I got this: I will be pulling it out at RichieCon 2023 and introducing to everyone I can! This feels like a perfect convention game!

Just Arrived! Component Errata To Legends of Sleepy Hollow!

We love Legends of Sleepy Hollow … despite its component issues. We discussed a lot of the component issues in our review here, but it is still worth noting that Legends of Sleepy Hollow made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022!

The Kickstarter has been talking about printing and upgrading the pieces for some time! My upgrades/errata (see above) finally arrived June 13, 2023. It’s a surprisingly big box (see above) for such a smallish product (see below).

Inside the box are (1) upgrades for a map (2) some replacement cards (3) a new rulebook (4) a new adventure book!

The original map for Chapter 2 was definitely problematic: it was too dark and it had discontinuities!

See the original map above: I have it separated where the discontinuity is: you can see that the map pieces don’t quite line up AND it’s a little dark.

The newer map is both brighter (a little hard to tell from my picture) and it all fits together: see above.

You can see the differences are much more pronounced when you put the new (left) and old (right) maps next to each other!! See above and below! I am very happy we have a new map.

The next thing was a new rulebook. This rulebook needed a little updating: I am glad to see that it got one! See below.

It’s hard to tell the difference between the rulebooks in the first few pages: they seem almost the same.

Once you get to page 9, you can see some new rules were added in!

There’s basically about 5 new sub-bullets for Character Special Abilities, new on page 9.

A few new rules show up near the end as well:

It’s good to see further elaborations on the Spawn rules and a few other rules. I think these all help.

One comment I made in my review was that sometimes the boards/game was too dark. You can see they took that to heart as well: the newer rulebook (left) is lighter than the original (right) (and to a lesser extend, the Storybooks below).

The Storybook, although there is a new one, appears very similar to the original. There don’t appear to be that many differences at first blush: I went through both storybooks at the same time, doing a quick visual comparison and didn’t really see any differences. I am guessing the editing was tighter.

There was one minor difference we spotted:

Because the second chapter map was updated, I think the chapters that references to the map looked updated and cleaner.

The final updates are the cards: those seem to be minor fixes (typos) to make the game better: they seem to just replace the equivalent card in the game.

I am very happy that Greater Than Games sent me these component upgrades. Honestly, the component issues kept me from wholeheartedly recommending the game: I believe now that these issues have been resolved, I can say without reserve that Legends of Sleepy Hollow is a fantastic game if you want a rich and deep storytelling game! Supposedly, the errata pack will be free to order from Greater Than Games website if you bought this from a retailer (I went looking fo a link to post here and couldn’t find one, but this literally just came out, so wait?). If you bought the Kickstarter (like I did), it should be coming to you free of charge.

My friend Nevin (yes, he’s that Nevin from the C++ committee) introduced me to the competitive game of Carsassone many years ago: he and I live in different cities, but base Carcassonne was a game we could play over the Internet. At the time, it was one of a very few games you could play online. At a hotel in Chicago, Nevin showed me the game, hoping to strike my fancy so we could play online! Alas, it didn’t really strike my fancy. Nevin tried a few times afterwards to get me interested, but for some reason, Carcassonne didn’t work for me.

Fast-forward to 2022: Mists Over Carscassone is a cooperative version of Carcassonne taking Germany by storm! It even becomes a nominee in the 17th Annual Golden Geek Awards for 2022 for best cooperative game! I have heard about this game for sometime, but I haven’t been able to get it over the USA! Officially, I believe it’s due to be released in the USA August 2023, but I was able to find a US store that had a copy in stock and ordered it! It arrived late May 2023.

Mists Over Carcassonne is a cooperative tile-playing game for 1 to 5 Players: it is for ages 8 and up and lasts 35 minutes, as per the box. These parameters seem in sync with reality.

To be clear: this is a standalone game! You do not need the original Carcassonne to play.

Components

This is a smallish box. It’s a pretty standard size for a Euro game (about the size of Agricola), but it looks small compared to all the kickstarters we have been looking at lately (Deep Rock Galactic, Valor and Villainy: LLudwick’s Labyrinth, The Isofarian Guard, etc.).

This is a tile-laying game, so the majority of the pieces will be tiles in punchout boards. There are also some meeples (and ghosts), a rulebook, and an expansion manual.

You can see a lot of the tiles above in “pre-punchout” form (above) and “post-punchout” form (below).

The meeples are in a curious wax packet.

The game’s components are good enough: they are usable and easy to read.

Rulebook

The rulebook is good: it explains the game well even to people haven’t played Carcassonne! (Well, I did play 15-20 years ago, but I don’t remember a thing).

Mists Over Carcassonne gets a full A on the Chair Test: the rulebook fits perfectly on the chair next to me, and is easy to look up rules!

My only real complaint is the game shows how the game plays though examples with limited description of the rules. This works because, through a well-selected series of examples, you see how the game plays. But I felt like I could never go look up a rule: I’d just have to look at the example to understand the rules. This style is great for a first time player like myself, but I don’t like it when I don’t have a full grasp on the rules. I suspect this rulebook style has evolved over time for the Carcassonne series; they’ve certainally had a lot of feedback and chances to make the best rulebooks: maybe this style works best for them.

It may just be me: I had this same problem with Sleeping Gods rulebook, The Flourish rulebook, and (to a lesser extent) The Isofarian Guard rulebooks. Please, just tell me succinctly and completely what the rules are, using the examples to illustrate the point: don’t let the example become the sole realization of the rule.

“Excuse me, Rich? Rich? Are you paying attention? Look At the back of the Rulebook!”

Oh! After playing the game like 6 or 7 times, I finally saw the back of the rulebook! This is the best of all worlds: this is a very concise description of all the rules, with an explicit ordering of operations (many of our questions came up were order of operations questions) AND it uses the back of the rulebook for something useful. Okay, I am eating crow here … this rulebook is great. Just make sure you look at the back cover!!!

I learned the game from the rulebook: the font was good, the text was readable, the examples were good. Job well done. Just make sure you look at the back of the rulebook!

Gameplay

This is a Victory Point game: in order to win, the players must work together to get the desired score (as set by the level). There are 6 levels of difficulty in the game, with different scoring constraints.

The Victory Points needed are described very iconically on one of the boards: for level 2, you need 75 victory points: See above. This same board also describes the starting conditions: for level 2, you start with 15 ghosts, the graveyards, and the castles, but not the hounds.

Levels 4, 5, 6 starting conditions get worse and worse as the game gets harder and harder … see above!

The starting tile is placed out (above) with starting ghosts. This is a tile-laying game: you place a tile every turn, trying to score points while trying to keep the ghosts under control. If you ever place a tile and can’t place the appropriate number of ghosts, you immediately lose. The ghosts are a limited resource: you have to keep them under control as you play.

See above as the tile place will have 2 ghosts.

Basically, a player has a very simple turn: pick a tile (face-down, you can’t get see it), place it legally (roads must connect roads: no dead-ends, stuff like that), and then place a meeple on the placed tile if legal and desired. The meeple placed on the tile helps that player to “own” that road, castle, city, etc. for scoring later. When you actually “close” a road, city, whatever, then you have the opportunity to score!

Notice the tile above closes the city so players can score!

Cities score 2 points for each tile in the close city, Roads score 1 point per tile in the closed road, and there are other scoring criteria.

You only score when you “close” something, so if you make it to the VP limit after scoring, you immediately win!  You lose if you run out of ghosts or tiles.  That’s it!

Ghosts

Although you can lose my running out of tiles, every single game we have lost were because we ran out of ghosts! See a losing game with too many ghosts above! (Strictly speaking, we lost because we couldn’t place enough ghosts on the next tile to come out).

There are three ways to mitigate ghosts:

1. When you would score (because you “closed” something), you may instead chose to remove 3 or fewer ghosts from any single tile.
2. When you place a tile and “close” a mist area, you can remove all ghosts in the closed mists
3. When you place a tile and “extend” a mist area, you put one fewer ghost out

This gives the players really interesting choices every single turn: do I set-up a scoring opportunity, do I “close” mists to mitigate ghosts, or can I do both and reduce the number of ghosts? The hardest choice is to forego scoring in order to keep the ghosts in line!  Such a hard decision!

What I enjoyed about this is that a tile is both good news AND a bad news at the same time!  Does the tile have what I want? How many ghosts do I need to worry about?  Can I leverage my tile to do any good?  Do I just have to mitigate ghosts?   And the players have so many choices on their turn.

Ghosts “scare” The Alpha Player Away!

One of the nicer things about Mists Over Carcassonne is that the Alpha Player can be kept at bay (the Alpha Player is that annoying guy who attempts to takes over the game: See our full discussion of the Alpha Player “Problem” here). How? Because on your turn, you get a tile in your hands and you have the agency to to try to place it. The other players can’t necessarily see the tile, so the Alpha Player can’t see your tile, unless you choose to show it! But, you can ask for help with the tile, if you like!! Each player can do what they want: what I’ve found is that everyone helps by pointing out places the tile can/can’t go, reminds each other of the ghosts situation, reminds each other of places we’ve set-up cooperative scoring, but in the end: it’s the player’s choice where the tile goes! It really depends on how play is evolving: if the game feels collaborative, the player can place the tile and show all players the tile …. but if the game feels “Alpha Playery”, the player can just keep the tile hidden in their hand until they are ready to play.

By physically taking a tile into his hands, that player is “owning” the tile and tacitly rebuking the Alpha Player: “This is my tile, let me place it”. The Alpha Player Problem is typically not a problem with most of my game groups, but I believe Mists Over Carcassonne is a cooperative game that will have less issue with The Alpha Player.

Solo Play

This game fully supports solo play (thank you for following Saunders’ Law): At the top of page 3 of the rule is simple and explained: “For the solo game, take 3 meeples of 4 different colors”.

As the solo player plays, he has the choice to play different colored meeples out when places a tile: see above as the solo player has a many different colored meeples out!

You might ask, “Why does the solo player have 4 different colored meeples?” One rule we haven’t covered yet is that when you close an area, you can close an area belonging to multiple different meeples, and you score for each colored meeple! Consider the example above: When the solo player closes the city, both the pink and blue meeples are in that same city, so when it’s closed, BOTH colors score! Blue scores 5 tiles*2 points=10, pink scores 5 tiles*2 points=10 so this one tile scores the group (or solo player) 20 points!

This shared points rule is critical to winning the game, as they are worth so much! It makes Mists Over Carcassonne more strategic, as you try to set-up more complex scoring opportunities! Again, more choices for the players: do I try to set-up a shared point situation so we can all score? Even at the cost of the ghosts going crazy?

I played about 4 to 5 solo games over a couple of nights: I was able to beat Level 1 a few times, then got trounced at Level 2. The thing is, this game is so easy to set-up and get to the table quickly, and it really is about 35 minutes. If you want a nice “end of the night” puzzle, the solo game works well for that. It’s a nice, quiet puzzle. If it ever gets too easy, there are 6 levels to try, each harder than the last!

Oh yes, and the solo game did its job: I was able to learn the game so I could teach it to my friends.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative plays worked fabulously: it was easy to teach the game … and my friends jumped right in. 

The best part of cooperative play is that so many discussions flowed easily, as everyone saw things others didn’t see!  There is a maxim in Open Source software called Linus’ Law:  “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow “.  I think that same idea applies here: many eyeballs on all the tile possibilities really opened up the game. 

After we trounced Level 1, we jumped to Level 2: This is a good sign: my friends wanted to keep playing even after we won our first game!

Conclusion

This is a really easy game to get to the table: both solo and cooperatively. Mists Over Carcassonne has lots of hidden depth and strategy for such a simple set of rules. Every turn feels juicy as you have many choices: do I set-up scoring, do I score, do I mitigate ghosts, do I set-up shared scoring, and the best turns are when you can do many things with just one tile!

The solo game feels like a nice puzzle: do I want a puzzle for 35 minutes? Mists Over Carcassonne quickly sets-up and presents a nice challenge, which can easily be scaled to your ability (via the Level system).

The cooperative game works really well too, as the system tends to encourage discussion: your compatriots see things that you don’t! The collaborative strategizing about shared scoring and ghost mitigating seems to naturally flow.

Even if you didn’t love Carcassonne (I am one of those few), Mists Over Carcassonne solo and cooperative modes might be something that still appeals to you. This game is easy to teach to anyone and offers lots of replayability with its Level system. Fantastic Game: 8.5/10

Oh yes, Mists Over Carcassonne is also a straight-up expansion to competitive Carcassonne. So, even more reason to consider it!

Yes Nevin, you are probably getting this for your Birthday…

The Stuff of Legend is a Hidden Traitor game that was on Kickstarter back in October 2021.  We’ve been looking forward to this for a while:  it was on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022  mostly because this is a Kevin Wilson design (one of the people responsible for the amazing Arkham Horror 2nd Edition).   The game promised delivery in June 2022, but it didn’t arrive at my house until May 27th, 2023, so it is just about a year late.

The version we got was the Kickstarter Bogeyman version, with a slip cover: see above right.  The retail/normal version will look more like the above left.  We’ll discuss differences later below.

The Stuff Of Legend

The Stuff Of Legends is a best selling Graphic Novel … which I knew nothing about when I backed this game. The Stuff of Legends universe basically provides the backstory and setting for this game: players take the role of toys trying to save their kidnapped boy from the Bogeyman!

Even though I didn’t know the IP, the universe and art are quite compelling.  In fact, my Kickstarter version came with a nice-sized comic book called The Dark, Book I.

The art is fantastic in this graphic series, if a little dark.

Components

The production is very good. 

Cooperative or Hidden Traitor Game?

Those of you paying attention might have notice that the game box says that this is a Cooperative game (see above), but we introduced it (at the start) as a Hidden Traitor game: which is it?  It’s kind of both and neither. Let me explain.

Like many Hidden Traitor games you might have seen, everyone is given a loyalty card at the start of the game.  All players are on one of two teams: the toys trying to save their boy (Loyal to the Boy) or trying to help the Bogeyman kidnap the boy (Loyal to the Bogeyman).   Most players are Loyal to the Boy, and at most 1 or 2 (depending on the number of players) are loyal to the Bogeyman.

Here’s the thing: At player counts 3 and 4: there is a 50-50% that no one is loyal to the Bogeyman!! At the start of the game, you shuffle together 1 Boy Loyalty card and 1 Bogeyman loyalty card, and only one of them it goes into the the deck with all the other loyalty cards.  So, it’s possible that no one is loyal to the Bogeyman at the start of the game!  The remaining card is placed on the board, and through a wacky card called “Muddying the Waters” players can swap loyalty cards with that!

Those of you who follow hidden traitor games may find this seems reminiscent of Shadows Over Camelot, the old Days of Wonder game (out of print for many years).  It’s possible that no one is a traitor in that game as well! In fact, we tend to play Shadows Over Camelot with a house rule that makes the game fully cooperative by never selecting traitor cards: See our Top 10 Games That Can Be Played Fully Cooperatively.

Having said that, if you play with 5 or 6 Players, you are guaranteed to always have at least 1 and maybe 2 loyalty cards of Bogeyman.  

What’s weird is that there is a card called “Muddying the Waters” that can really mess with this: it allows you to swap your loyalty card with the one in the center.  If it looks your team is about to lose, you can play that and maybe swap teams!  Your loyalty can be dynamic in this game.

“But Does It Make Sense to Play Fully Cooperatively?”

Does it make sense to play this fully cooperatively?  I think it does!  We played a 4-player game and they just barely scraped by a win for the Boy team.  I ended up being the Traitor!  Here’s the thing: I couldn’t do very much to sabotage the other team: since actions are mitigated by voting, I couldn’t do anything too horrid.  And there is no special advantage to the Bogeyman team for revealing! In Shadows Over Camelot and many other Hidden Traitor games (like Battlestar Galactica and Unfathomable), once you reveal the Traitor card, you get some special actions to sabotage the others!  Nope!  Nothing like that here!  At the end game, all I could do was just say “I don’t have anything I can do” and discard a card or two, hoping to cause a Coin Flip.  

This lack of special traitor ability is both bone and bane for this game: if you have to have special rules for the traitor team (Bogeyman), then you have to obliquely ask to see the rulebook and try to find all the things you can do.  But then you sometimes feel like you can’t do a lot, even if you are a traitor!  In fact, about the only thing you can do near the end of the game is try get your hand discarded quick so you can force a Coin Flip (which forces the endgame closer).

From a cooperative perspective, I feel like this game could be played fully cooperatively because the game was still hard!  At the end of the game, the Boy Loyalists still had to guess to win, and they had a 20% chance of losing still!  I think we could house rule this and say “Let’s just play cooperatively and force all of us to have Boy Loyalist cards”.  I think this still works (but only at 3 to 4, since the balance of the game shifts with more players).

Solo Play

Straight out of the box, you can’t play this solo.  This is a Hidden Traitor game, so you typically need lots of people.  But, as we pointed out in the cooperative section, just above, you can play this fully cooperatively!  And our experience was that the game was still hard even when playing cooperatively!  So, what if we simply play solo as the fully cooperative house-ruled game?  What if the solo player plays two or three toys and manages them as if it were a 2 or 3-player cooperative game?

So, we are stepping beyond the bounds of this game!  We are stretching the rules to make it fully cooperative! Then we are stretching it again to make it solo!  Does it work?

It does!  See above as I play a solo game handling 3 characters!  It’s a bit overwhelming managing three hands, but I was able to play this way.  In fact, the extra overhead of managing three hands sort of balances the fact that you have perfect information in the solo game: playing only two hands might be too easy.

You might think “Oh, this game is too easy if you have perfect information”.  It didn’t seem that way to me!  I lost my solo game because I chose the wrong exit!  The thing is: I had to make a choice of exits, because I was running out of time!  The Boy would have been lost had I not chosen an exit!!  I needed to look at more of the exits, but I ran out of time.  

That extra intellectual overhead of managing 3 hands helps balance the perfect information, so it was still an interesting game solo.

Kickstarter Version

So, I backed the deluxe Kickstarter version of The Stuff of Legend called The Bogeyman Edition.  Here’s the thing: I think the normal version is probably the way to go if you are interested in this game.  Why do I say that?

First of all, the miniatures that come with the Kickstarter version, as great as they are, seem  … less useful.

The cardboard standees seem thematic to the game as you are playing toys.  The miniatures represent the toys in their “violent phase”, which is also kind of a light-toned color reminiscent of flesh.  I think, if there were a reveal moment in the game, where the traitor flips from toy to traitor, maybe these miniatures would have made sense (I got from toy to standee!) But there is no such moment in the game! 

You “suspect” who the traitor(s) are, but there’s no accusation mechanic in the game which causes a reveal.  Maybe you can do that if you are accused? But why would you?  There’s NO reason to reveal you are the traitor: there’s literally no special rule or advantage for the traitors once they are revealed.  It’s better to just stay hidden and sow lingering doubt as to whether you are the traitor or not.

Every one of my friends preferred the cardboard standees (over the minis) for the action selector: it seemed to evoke a more a sad toy vibe, which seems more representative of the overall vibe of the game.  After all, you are trying to save your boy, so you are sad toys until you rescue him!

In fact, the only time we used the miniatures for action selection was when Sara said “I’m being violent and shooting troops this turn, so I’ll use the mini instead!”  A silly reason probably not worth the extra $$$ I spent.

Another reason: even though the Kickstrarter metal coin (which is needed to flip) is super cool as a giant metal coin (and it’s really big), it is actually harder to flip than the same size plastic coin! People were so scared of ruining the coin or the board as they flipped the coin, they just made me (the owner of the game) flip it, as any damage it did was mine! It’s cool, but may be easier to flip as a plastic coin!

As crazy as it seems, I think the retail version might be the way to go if you are interested in this game: it’s just easier to play, cheaper, and maybe more thematic. Decide for yourself.

Interesting Hidden Traitor Ideas

One of the most innovative ideas in this game is that your hand of cards is a scarce resource: every time you run out of cards, you have to flip the loyalty coin to refresh your hand.  Every time you flip that coin, something bad happens:  the Boy moves closer to death or the Bogeyman acts!

The Boy is a maker on the right side of the Board: every time the Boy side is seen, he advances one space. If he ever makes it to the bottom, the Boy Loyalists lose!

If, on the other hand, your coin flip reveals the Bogeyman, you have to draw bad news Bogeyman card!

This whole tension of trying to use your cards as best you can to avoid coin flips is really interesting!  Am I discarding early because I am trying to force coin flips, or do I really just have bad cards and need a new hand?

There’s also an interesting idea of stained helper cards. Sure, many hidden traitor games have the idea of “helping out” with support cards, but any card that has the black ink (see the card above) is “tainted” and causes the character to invoke his weakness!

For example, the General’s weakness (Doubt) will cause him to discard a random card if any of actions becomes stained. Again, this is interesting: “I can only offer 3 red symbols if they are stained!” Is the person offering to help because that’s all he has, or is it because he is a traitor and wants to stain your action? Remember that action cards are a scarce resource: you may have to settle for a stained action rather than causing yet another coin flip!

Exploration

Something that’s unique to The Stuff of Legends is the exploration! I haven’t seen many Hidden Traitor games is the idea of exploring! (Arguably Battlestar Galactica has it, but that board is much more static) But, The Stuff of Legend has it! Lots of Location and Encounater cards are randomly laid out at the start of the game. The players must explore the world of the Stuff of Legend to find the proper exit, but exploration has painful consequences, invoking troops and leaders and general bad stuff! But then there are mitigation cards for exploration (you can peek and swap Encounters and avoid a path), which makes it feel like you have some agency on your exploration!

Every location in the game has some cards which will generally cause bad stuff to happen, but every so often you find a way to peek at the exits!

This exploration worked really well in both the Hidden Traitor and Fully Cooperative version of this game. As cool as the exploration is (I prefer games with exploration), it does tend to make the game longer. Generally, most hidden traitor games are shorter: under an hour or even under 20 minutes. The exploration does tend to make this game longer: about 1.5 to 2 hours. Caveat Emptor. (Interestingly, my solo game clocked in at one hour).

Conclusion

From an objective point of view, The Stuff of Legends adds some interesting ideas to the Hidden Traitor genre: the stained Action Cards, the Action Cards being the scarce resource that cause coin flips, the exploration mechanism, and the dynamic loyalty cards. It’s a little frustrating as the Hidden Traitor because you can’t do too much to sabotage the others, even when it’s clear you are a Hidden Traitor: that’s probably the biggest complaint we had. But, the gameplay was interesting: the game can sit in this weird almost cooperative phase which just makes the game tense and interesting. Completely objectively, I would probably give this a 7.5/10. If you like Hidden Traitor games, this is really different: it may be a bit long (mostly from the exploration), so I suggest you give this a try and see if you like it! It’s probably better at higher player counts, like most traitor games.

Completely subjectively, I don’t like Hidden Traitor games, and if that’s all The Stuff of Legend were, I would probably immediately sell it! But, with a little nudge, you can play this fully cooperatively. The game is still hard enough even without the traitor(s), so it does make sense to play this cooperatively: Extending that idea even further, you can play this 3-handed as a solo game, and it works as a solo game.

Objectively, this is a 7.5/10 if you like Hidden Traitor games. The fully cooperative game is probably a 6.5/10 or 7/10. The solo game is probably a 6.5/10. If you like solo or fully cooperative games, you can play it that way and it’s still pretty good.

Of course, if you like the Stuff of Legend graphic novel, that probably adds a full point to the rating: there’s a lot of theme here. We saw our rating of Deep Rock Galactic go up recently when we played Deep Rock Galactic with someone who really liked the video game!

Appendix

I sleeved my Loyalty cards because I was worried we’d be touching them a lot. Nope, not really. BUT the Loyalty cards have to stay pristine: any imperfections in the backs (a ding on the edge, a scratch) will make them identifiable to other players even when flipped. It’s probably best to sleeve them anyways: It was only 9 cards.