Aeon’s End: The Descent. Review After Full Playthrough

Aeon’s End: The Descent (an expansion in the Aeon’s End universe, but also a standalone cooperative game) was on Gamefound back in Februrary 2024 and promised delivery in January 2025. Guess what? It actually got here early right before Thanksgiving 2024 (Nov 20, 2024 or so). That’s right, it’s almost 2 months early! Holy cow! That never happens in crowdfunding land!

I went all-in on the new stuff and got the two expansions* (three if you count XAXOS inside), the mat, and the box!

I freely admit I was on the fence on backing this. I do love the Aeon’s End system and its ilk (Astro Knights (see review here), Astro Knights: Eternity (see review here), Aeon’s End, Aeon’s End: War Eternal (see review here), Aeon’s End: Outcasts (see review here) etc etc etc), but I have a lot of Aeon’s End content already. I mean, this is a great cooperative deck-building game system with a mage theme, and it basically made the #1 Spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Deckbuilding Games!

In the end, I chose to back Aeon’s End: The Descent because I was excited for the new Friends and Foes module which can be used in any game. Not to bury the lede, but I think that new module makes the game that much better. We’ll discuss that in detail below.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a pretty standard sized box: see Coke can above for reference.

If you are considering getting this, I recommend the mat. Of all the mats I have, the Aeon’s End/Astro Knights mats always seem the most useful: look above at how they well they help organize the play! The mat from Conquest Princess last week was pretty good for solo, but not really useful for cooperative play. This mat, for Aeon’s End: The Descent worked so very well in both solo and cooperative contexts.

Just be wary that the mat a little big (see Coke can for scale above) and it’s a little harder to carry around (see below).

There’s a little rulebook for the Friends and Foes module; I think it’s separate so you can use it with other Aeon’s End games easier. See picture above.

There’s a narrative booklet: this is to take you through the adventure with some text. See above.

And the main rulebook: see above.

At its core though, Aeon’s End: The Descent is a card game: see SO MANY cards above and below!

Luckily, these cards are very well organized: they have stop signs cards to surround each deck.

One of my favorite features of this game (and all Aeon’s End games) is that EVERY CARD IS WELL-LABELLED: see above as the Treasure card is from ATD-4-02 (bottom left of the card). If you ever need to put everything back in original order, you can.

Spoiler Alert: I played through the entire campaign, and I was able to reset the entire campaign (sorry, they are called Expeditions here) back to its original pristine state. And you can! See above as I try to separate the cards back!

At its core, each player takes the role of a mage, and his cards become his casting deck (which he has to try to build up using deck-building). See some mages above … and some other ones come out later!

Generally, the mages are fighting a Big Bad! See some above! To win, you usually have to reduce the Big Bad to zero hit points by casting spells to do damage!

Along the way, you make some Friends and Foes, who help or hinder you just a little bit … and more come out as the Expedition unfurls …

There’s a bunch of tokens which you do need to notate moneys, power, charges, and some other stuff!

Generally, the components are pretty high quality, the art is good, and the production looks great. See above.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is .. fine.

It flops over the edges, making it harder to keep open on the chair next to me. It really needs to be a smaller form factor: it gets about a C on the Chair Test. I find myself grumpier and grumpier with rulebooks which are huge when opened up. At least it does sit flat.

The Components page is nice* (*modulo one issue we had with Astro Knights: Eternity: the Component pages STILL doesn’t label the Turn Order cards as coming from one of the 1X decks … you might find yourself searching in vain, until you open up all the 1A-1D decks).

Set-ups are nice, but if you get the Play mat, you really don’t need this section.

Generally, this was a good rulebook with good annotations, lots of pictures, and readable text. It even used color to differentiate new rules (in yellow) from older games.

This is a pretty good rulebook, but it had better be after making 5? 10? different versions of Aeon’s End. Although there is still one quirk in the solo rules … see later below.

Gameplay

I always forget HOW AMAZING the Aeon’s End games are for that first set-up! Aeons’ End: The Descent is no different! See above and below as the sheet that comes with the box helps you quickly unwrap and set-up your first game!

If I ever get an Aeon’s Box in the mail, I am never worried about my first set-up*, because it always goes so well!

I don’t want to say too much about gameplay because we’ve discussed it before in previous reviews. Also, there are a lot of great videos on the internet if you want to see how it plays. But I just want to say, there are a number of new mechanisms and somehow, they keep squeezing new ideas out of the Aeon’s End system! Every game in the Expedition has a new “angle” or “mechanism” that keeps the game fresh! A new Mage? A new weird way to defeat the Big Bad? Somehow, Aeon’s End is still fresh after all these years!

Friends and Foes

Without a doubt, my favorite new thing about Aeon’s End: The Descent is the Friends and Foes module. Basically, two new characters become embroiled in your story: a friend and a foe!

They are so embroiled, that the friend and foe each get their own turn within the turn deck! See above!

Each friend and foe slowly evolves something: the friend is building up something good for the players, and the foe is building up something bad! See above as The Corrosion can add his Draining cards! The nice thing about the friends and foes is that they aren’t too bad; you usually have to make a choice about the goodness/badness every turn they come up! I really enjoyed having that extra choice!

Do you add a few charges to the friend or foe? Do you take some damage to Gravehold to avoid that charge? The players almost always GET TO MAKE A CHOICE: what kind of good news or bad news do you want? The players decide!!

See above as the The Scavanger Foe makes players draw a card and either suffer damage to Gravehold or let the Scavenger charge up!! What do you do? What do you do??

As much as I like these choices, what I like best about the Friends and Foes is that they even-out the problems with Variable Turn Order gameplay. What do I mean by that?

Kickstarter Edition of Aeon’s End and Aeon’s End: War Eternal (with update since I was an original Kickstarter)

Those of you have been following my blog for sometime know that I am not a huge fan of Variable Turn Order: see the blog entry here for A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness. Basically, Variable Turn Order can be too random and cause pathologically bad draws which can make the game less fun. To combat the problems of Variable Turn Order in Aeon’s End (and its ilk), I allow myself a simple House Rule: the Nemesis is never allowed to go more than 2 turns in a row.

It turns out that I didn’t have to use this House Rule in any of my games in Aeon’s End: The Descent!! Why? One of the things we discovered when working with Variable Turn Order in Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze was that the bigger the deck, the less likely you are to have pathologically bad draws! See blog entry for more Discussion here.

Because the Friends and Foes “fill-out” the Variable Turn Order deck from 6 cards (original length) to 8 cards (with one Friend and one Foe), there didn’t seem to be a need to invoke the House Rule!

In the end, I love this new Friends and Foes module for multiple reasons: it mitigates the Variable Turn Order issues I have in Aeon’s End: The Descent, it allows more choice into the game, and it has some really new ideas for how to push Aeon’s End into fresh territory. Not to mention, you can use Friends and Foes with any Aeon’s End game!

I guess I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think the game still needed one slight House Rule: the rules say that the Charges “must go off” when the Charge track is filled (see above). Sure, this makes sense for the Foe, but not the Friend!!! I played several times where the Friend’s ability discharged … and it was completely useless for me!!! But, the Friend is your friend! Ask them to hold on until next round when they activate! This seems like a minor house rule, but I think it feels more thematic and more empowering as a choice-You don’t have to discharge the Friend’s ability just because it’s full.

Otherwise, Friends and Foes is a fantastic module. I probably won’t play without it from now on if I can help it.

Expedition

So, this game comes with a Campaign of 4 Sessions (4 battles): they call this an Expedition (much like in Astro Knights: Eternity … see here). The basic flow of the game is described by the Narrative Book (see above and below).

Each section starts with a TON of text. I have to admit, I was a little daunted the wall of text, until I realized that using the character sheets/mats made it more interesting and visual!

What I did: I found the character mats for each of the Mages described in the text (and the Friend), and then I put them next to the Narrative book! So, as I read, I could correlate who was speaking, who was acting, and who was who! See above! This brought me more into the story, and I recommend the same for you!

After the text sets up the story, the yellow boxes direct you how to set-up the game: see above for instructions on how to set-up Battle 3 (note, not really any spoilers in the set-up).

Most of the special context for the Expedition Battles is in one of three places: The Envelopes, the Specially Wrapped Cards, or the “unspecial wrapped cards”.

The Envelopes typically contain Friends and Foes, a new Nemesis, some dividers, and possibly some new boards. Minor Spoiler for Envelope 3: don’t look too closely at the picture above, but that’s what’s generally in an Envelope!!!

Most of the cards you need come from the special decks: For example, you open 2B at the end of Battle 2!

Or open 1A, 1B, and 1C at the start of Battle 1!

There’s a ton of other decks in the game which just “augment” your game: this allows you to have other choices for your Gems/Relics and Spells.

Although your first game will have a rigourous set of Gems/Relic/Spells (see above), you can choose other cards for these.

Although there are some instructions for reseting the game, I strongly recommend you take pictures (like I did) of all the stuff in the Envelopes: Again, minor spoilers for Envelope 4! See above!

After playing through the Expedition solo (see Solo Play section below), I went ahead and re-sorted all the decks back to their original state! I used rubber bands (I know, some people don’t like rubber bands) to keep them together.

It took about an hour or so to re-sort everything and put the box back to the original state. You can do, but it is a lot of work. I did this so I can play the Campaign with my friends all over again.

Solo Play

So, Aeon’s End: The Descent supports solo play (thanks for following Saunders’ Law). And it has choices!

You can either play true solo mode, where the solo player plays exactly one mage OR you can play solo two-handed. And for true solo, they mention the simple rules “You are your own ally!” (I would have LOVED some better solo play description like this for Freedom Five from a few weeks ago: Oh, Freedom Five, I wanted to love you so much …). In the end, I played true solo: one mage per Battle!

This true solo is interesting, because some variants of Aeon’s End only support the solo player having three turns and the Nemesis having two turns (most notably: the App for iOS! See our Discussion in Seven House Rules For Cooperative Games). This version of Aeon’s End: The Descent seems to let the true solo player have four turns (it’s unclear, because the set-up for the players has rules for 2,3, and 4 players … but not 1-Player? See page 8!). In the end, the defining text seems to be: “The turn order deck is always composed of four player turn order cards and two Nemesis turn order cards” (p. 8, Turn Order Deck).

Over the course of about 4 days, I ended up playing the entire Expedition! Although the game box says 60 minutes per game, I kind of think that’s bogus: I am an experienced Aeon’s End player, and I think I took about 2 hours per game. To be fair, when I play solo, I tend to be more thoughtful and take longer turns.

I chose to use a different Mage for each game: I started with Thraxir, went to Mezahaedron for my second Battle …

Used Raven in my 3rd Battle …

And finally ended Battle 4 with Brama .. the Leader!

Using a different Mage for each battle was absolutely the right thing to do! I got to play 4 VERY DIFFERENT Mages throughout the game! Each play style was very different, and it was fun to try to learn and discover the strategies for each Mage! I had to use Destiny tokens, Knowledge tokens, and all sorts of new stuff I had never seen before!

It was an absolute delight getting through this Expedition. I had a blast!

Although the true solo game has the solo mage advance quickly, I always worry that they may die sooner, because they only have 10 hit points total! At least playing two-handed solo, there are 20 hit points total between the two mages … Luckily, getting too low was never an issue. I don’t know if I just chose well, but my Mages never skirted death! I always worry about the true solo player dying too early because there are no hit point balancing mechanisms (i.e., solo player has 12 hit points or something), but it hasn’t seemed to be an issue.

My only complaint might have been that maybe it was too easy? I didn’t lose a single solo game along the way! And all of wins were pretty decisive! Like I said, I am a fairly experienced Aeon’s End player, so that’s part of it. Luckily, I noticed that every Nemesis does have a “advanced” mode, so if I play again, maybe I’ll do the advanced mode so it’s a little harder …

In the end, I had a great time playing the Expedition solo. I was able to learn the game to teach my friends (see Cooperative Play section below), but still enjoy a full story and campaign! If I never play Aeon’s End: The Descent again, I feel like I still feel like I got my money’s worth. The thing is, I would like to play it again! It was fun!

Cooperative Play

So, Robert, Becca, and Jeff and I played the first game of the Expedition! A 4-Player game!

We ended up winning and generally having a good time!

Becca, who doesn’t really like cooperative games that much, liked it enough that she expressed interest in ordering a copy! I showed her the little catalog (above: came with the game) of all the Aeon’s Ends …

Generally, everyone was able to feel part of the team! But, each Mage has their own personality, and I think everyone felt like they could do something interesting on their turn! Sure, there were moments when one of us “took it for the team” and had a crappy turn, but it was always a conversation! Everyone was always involved, either figuring out their turn, or talking with others!

The only “real” problem was that the game lasted a good three hours! Granted, this is a learning game for most everyone but me, but 3 hours is a lot longer than the 60 minutes on the box! Still, we were engaged the entire time and had fun.

Cooperative play went well, even with 4 people who are all very independent. And none of my friends (except Becca) are really “gamers”, but everyone took to the game pretty well! Generally, it was a smashing success and we had fun.

One final thing: the 4-Player cooperative game seemed harder than the true solo game. I think if we played through the entire Expedition as a 4-Player game, the game would have been much more challenging. The game just seems harder with more people.

“Emergency Sleeving!”

You don’t have to sleeve the game, but you really really really should sleeve the Turn Order Deck (see above). Why? You touch the Turn Order Deck every turn! I didn’t sleeve my Turn Order Deck in the original Aeon’s End, and it got a little grody.

Just as we were starting the Cooperative game, I remembered how “grody” the Turn Order cards, so we had to have an “Emergency Sleeving!!!!”

Okay, you may now resume your regularly scheduled program.

What I Liked

The Campaign, er, Expedition Story: Once I got into the Expedition, I enjoyed the story. I needed the graphic support of pictures of the characters to jumpstart me into the story, but once I got into it, it was surprisingly enjoyable. And maybe even a little moving?

The Length of the Expedition: I liked that the campaign was only 4 Battles: it seemed like just enough to be achievable. It wasn’t too long to drag on, nor too short to leave me wanting more. I said the same thing about the campaign in Astro Knights: Eternity: 4 Battles seems just right!

Friends and Foes: I adored the Friends and Foes addition. It not only fixed the Variable Turn Order problems (or at least strongly alleviated the issues), but also added some extra choices to the gameplay. Overall, this module is a major win for the Aeon’s End system, and may now be a necessary module moving forward.

Still Fresh: Everything seemed “fresh”: the new Mages, the new Nemeses, the Friends and Foes, the new Gems/Relics/Spells, the new mechanisms (Knowledge, Destiny, etc)! Somehow, even after 8 years since the original Aeon’s End, all this content still seems fresh!

New Narrative Booklets: I like that the Narrative Booklets and the Expedition mode gives you an “excuse” to play through all the content. I like this idea! An excuse! It sort of went under the radar, but this also included Narrative Booklets for both the original Aeon’s End and the Aeon’s End: War Eternal. If I need/want an excuse to playthrough those games again, I have it! I think it’s really cool that Indie boards and cards “retro-fitted” the Expedition onto the original games!

Standalone: Were you always curious abut Aeon’s End but were turned away because of something (maybe Variable Turn Order)? Maybe you found the Friends and Foe module alluring? Maybe the idea of a just-right campaign is alluring? You do NOT have to get all the other Aeon’s End content … you can just get this standalone game and be very happy for a while!

What I Didn’t Like

Wall of Text: I grew to like the story that came out, but that wall of text from the Expedition booklet is very daunting; I suspect it will actually turn some people away. I would have considered putting in some relevant pictures in with the next, or at least “suggested” that players keep out the Player Mats so they can have pictures of the characters as they interact.

Friends Ability Activation: I really think that the players should allow the Friend to activate abilities with a little more choice; right now they friend “must” discharge all their charges and activate their ability even if it’s not useful. These seems against the theme; they are our friends, why can’t we work with them so they activate their abilities at better times? This is my only real complaint in an otherwise wonderful Friends and Foes module.

Rulebook and rules: The Rulebook and Narrative books are pretty good, but have a lot of weird discrepancies! Why is one-player set-up not mentioned in the Turn Order Deck section? Why are Treasures not emphasized more? It’s one page in a floating box you will miss on your first read! The set-ups in the Narrative book seem a little … spartan? There needs to be more emphasis that we can choose Gems/Relics/Spells between Battles! And the Turn Order cards are referenced in the Components but “hidden” in the intro decks … it needs a slightly better sentence there.

These are all minor things.

Conclusion

I am not quite sure where I come down on Aeon’s End: The Descent, because I liked it so much! The Friends and Foes module, for me at least, is always necessary for any Aeon’s End game I play from now on! My friends loved this game, even the non-gamers! The cooperative experience has always been very strong in Aeon’s End: my plays with my friends accented how well it works!

My solo games during the Expedition were so much fun, they will probably make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

Aeon’s End: The Descent breathes new life into the Aeon’s End system. I loved it. I think I will give it an 8.5/10 or maybe a 9/10. I don’t know, maybe even a 9.5/10? It was such a great experience both solo and cooperatively!

My only question: should it make my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024 (because it’s a standalone game) or my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 (because it expands other Aeon’s End games)?

A Fashionable Cooperative Space Game! A Review of Conquest Princess

Hear me out; this game is better than it looks. I know, I know, I don’t love that cover either, but once you get inside, this game really does come alive.

Conquest Princess is a cooperative bag-building game with elements of boss-battling and collection. This game was on Gamefound back in June 2023. It had a fairly small pledge group of about 668 people but it did succeed in being funded. I went all in! I got the base box, plus the mat, plus the acrylic tokens, and the bags!

If I were to describe this game to you, I would describe it as The Captain is Dead (which is a cooperative space game we reviewed here, here, and here) meets a bag-builder like Invincible (a cooperative bag-builder we reviewed here).

Let’s take a look!

Extra Specials

I am very pleased I went all-in on this; I got some pretty great stuff. Normally, I worry that a game with such a small crowdfunding presence won’t have great all-in stuff, but boy was I pleasantly surprised! I am SO PLEASED with the extras!

This is a bag-building game, remember?

This upgraded “extra” bag is fantastic!

It can even stand-up on its own! See above!

And the acrylic tiles that come with it are gorgeous! Bag of Destiny: totally worth it.

Standees of Utmost Elegance? Very good! Anyone who know follows this blogs knows that I love the acrylic standees, even over miniatures! The acrylic standees from Tokyo Sidekick (see here) and from Kinfire Chronicles (see here) have convinced me that I prefer the acrylic standees!

The Standees of Utmost Elegance box comes with a bunch of standees (right), bases (middle) and some acrylic danger tokens (left): see above.

All assembled, those look pretty great! See above! The art is a little cartoony, but I think that’s why the clear acrylic standees work so well in this game; they accent that comicy nature! I am very very happy with The Standees of Utmost Elegance! I wish the art was just a touch nicer, but I still liked it.

Look at all that great acrylic standee stuff!

The third and final box is the coolest: Lights Of Opulent Extravagence!

It includes metal first player token (right: above) and 16 action coins (left). Wow!

More importantly, it includes the light-up standees. You heard me. Light-up standees!

Each character can “transform” in the game, and when they do, they get the cool light-up standee! See above!

The extra specials for this game gave me a WOW and put a giant smile on my face! This is the feeling I wanted when I opened Freedom Five from a few weeks ago. I got that WOW feeling from Conquest Princess instead!!

Totally worth getting the extras and all-in.

Upgraded components are great, but what about the game?

Unboxing and Some* Unpunching Required

The base box is fairly tall, but width and height is pretty standard. See Coke can above for perspective.

I sort of had a weird dillema when I opened everything up! A lot of the tokens are already acryclic, so which ones do I punch out?

So, I ended up punching out about half the cardboard punchouts; the other half were from the acrylic standees and metal tokens.

I mean, everything looks pretty cool, right?

Gameplay

1 to 4 Players assume the roles of the 4 characters in the game: see above and below.

This is an action point game; actions are notated on the Wrist Blaster board (bottom board in photo above). Each character gets 4 action points on their turn, denoted by the metal tokens. The player will slide the token down to indicate a move, shoot, or engage action. Occasionally, you can use energy to get an extra action (last column). The armor on the side is armor to prevent damage.

The Fashion Plate board (above and below) is where you place special cards, pets, and powers.

This game is a space game with a large dollop of fashion in the theme! You heard me, fashion!!! One of the catch phrases of the game is “Fashion is Power!!” Generally, this is a space game, where some of the equipment you’d get in a pure space game is instead accented as fashion accessories.

You can see a little of that in the gear (I mean fashion accessories) above: Carbonite Kicks, Hsi Sniper Sleeves. It’s more fashion accessories than gear, but it’s also gear.

I’ll say this: if you want to play Conquest Princess as a pure, straight-up space-theme game, you can almost ignore the fashion part and just pretend it’s a pure space-themed game. But if you really want to embrace the “Fashion is Power!” vibe, you can have a lot of fun with that. This weird cross-pollination of space and fashion may seem like a turn-off, but it’s not; you can choose to embrace either side (or both sides!) of that theme and it still works. I generally played it solo as a pure space game; whereas my cooperative games with my girl friends embraced the fashion part.

The T.I.A.R.A (above) is generally the main ship and this is where I get a lot of The Captain is Dead vibe from! Players move around the ship taking out the Minions in orange thongs (yes, you heard me right, orange thongs) and keeping the ship clear of baddies.

The ship has all sorts of different subsystems: Teleporter (above: for moving off ship), Engineering (above: for repairing subsystems), Mendenry (above: sick-bay), Comms (below: show upcoming bad news cards) and finally the Wardrobe (below: the weapons sills).

If the minions get attacks off while in the ship, they put those subsystems into disrepair. See above as the Wardrobe has been critically damaged! Keeping the ship healthy and in repair is a huge deal; it keeps your systems active. Every single one of these subsystems is useful! Healing! Better gear (I mean fashion accessories)! Looking ahead at Bad News! Teleportation!

Those of you who have played The Captain is Dead (see board above) will find this subsystem stuff very familiar!

If all you did was keep baddies off the ship, the game wouldn’t be very interesting! In the Standard Game, you have to worry about two planets where stuff is happening! On Planet 1 (standard game) is the Invasion! See above!

On Planet 2 is the Mechapede!

These Planets do change: in the Advanced game, there is the Dark Portal (see above).

So, while you are keeping baddies off your ship, you are also teleporting to the planets to achieve your mission goals! Sometimes your missions are to collect items, sometime your missions are to keep the chaos on planets under control, and sometimes your mission is to move to the Dark Portal!

What you do depends on which of 4 scenarios you are playing! See the four scenarios that come with the box above! For the record, you can play any of the scenarios, but it’s recommended you play them in order as a campaign from Tutorial, Standard Mission, Advanced Mission, to Boss Battle! The game just gets harder and harder!

So, Conquest Princess is a balancing act of keeping the ship free of baddies, the planets under control, and staying alive!

This game has a peculiar, but consistent and interesting loss mechanic: you cannot lose unless you run out of power! You only run out of power if the Power Up deck (above) is ever empty! It starts with 28 cards!

But every time something goes bad that would immediately end the game (where a character takes a third damage, or too many minions overrun the ship, etc, etc) instead you take a disruption! Your ship has a time-travel mechanism to prevent the bad thing, but the cost to stopping the badness is huge! A disruption causes players to discards Power Up cards equal to the Danger Level (most games start with a Danger Level of 2: see above), and every disruption increases the Danger Level by 1! If you ever can’t discards enough cards to handle a disruption, players immediately lose!

I like this loss mechanism, as it scales, it is simple to explain, and handles all endgame cases consistently. There is only one loss mechanism; just don’t run out of of power!!!

If players can collectively succeed in their quests before the power runs out, they win!

Comic/Tutorial/Scenario Book

There’s quite a bit of reading material.

The comic book is just flavor for the adventures; you don’t have to read it.

I found the art inconsistent with the rest of the game (see above), so I thought it actually detracted from the experience. My friends read it while I was making dinner and they said it offered some nice thematic basis; they liked it. Read it if you want, you don’t have to.

The Tutorial, on the other hand, was AMAZING! See above! It walks the players through the first 3 rounds of the game very explicitly! You ABSOLUTELY must and should read the playthrough from the Tutorial! This does what a great Tutorial does; explain what you can do, what you shouldn’t do, and make you feel like you can play without needing too much of the rulebook! The Tutorial is a shining star in this game.

Finally, the Scenario Book (not particularly well marked, above) has the directions for play and set-up for the other three scenarios in the game. It was … okay. There are a LOT of new rules in later scenarios, and it could have done a little better job explaining some stuff. I think it just needed some more edge cases explained. I think you will be going on BoardGameGeek a lot for these scenarios to look up rules. In general, this scenario book was ok.

Rulebook

This rulebook is generally okay. It has some flaws but some nice features too.

See above as it flops over the edges on the chair next: it’s not great. I’d give this a D in the Chair Test: the fonts are good, the pictures are good, but the rulebook is just too big and can’t sit on the chair next to me; it flops over the edges. See above!!

We’ve seen this “rulebook-too-large” problem a lot lately (See our Batman: Gotham City Chronicles and Tidal Blades 2 reviews): luckily, there’s a decent workaround! Put it on TWO chairs next to you (with the spine in the middle so it stays open). See above.

I wanted to like this rulebook; it has a good-sized font, lots of pictures, and even an Index! At the end of the day, I didn’t love it. I feel like there were some edge cases missing, and I didn’t like the way the certain things were expressed. But, they made a good faith effort to make a good rulebook, so I will say this was good enough.

In a Second Edition of the game, I want another pass by an editor please. And a smaller form factor, please.

Solo Play

If you get the player Mat with the game, recognize that it is two-sided. One side has the set-up for SOLO play: see above. That’s the way I played. For the record, this is THE BIGGEST player mat I have (even bigger than Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition from a few months back!!).

So there is a solo mode! (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!) Unfortunately, like Heroes’ Resistance, Set A Watch, or Cyber Pet Quest (from last week), the solo character must control all 4 characters! In fact, no matter the player count, all 4 characters must be in play.

Of course, a 4-character solo play isn’t ideal; there is context-switching overhead as you switch from character to character (you play one character at a time), there is extra maintenance as you play (as typically the maintenance scales linearly with the number of characters), and there is simple intellectual pressure to use all four characters well together.

I will say that Conquest Princess works well as a solo game if you like a longer solo game and if you embrace Player Selected Turn Order (we’ll discuss this down below). Conquest Princess is basically a puzzle to solve with spinning plates: you try to keep the bag in a good state (remember, this is a bag-building game), while keep the ship and planets under control.

Solo, I have now played the Tutorial once, the Standard Games about 4 times, and the Advanced Game once. The Tutorial was relatively quick, but the Standard and Advanced Games were pretty long games, taking about 2 to 2.5 hours each.

The extra context switching and maintenance overhead tends to elongate the solo game that much more! The box says 45-70 minutes? No way. It’s at least 2 to 2.5 hours for a solo game.

But, I feel like every step matters in this solo game: each character gets 4 actions (5 if you waste a power token), and each turn matters! What’s the best way to keep the chaos under control AND keep the bag in good shape?

I liked the solo game. A lot. It was fun trying to figure out how to keep the characters working well together. And the solo game did a really good job at teaching the game so I could teach my friends. Again, that Tutorial is phenomenal for the solo player (and the cooperative players).

Cooperative Play

The other side of the Player Mat made the weird choice to have no set-up information or templates for the cooperative: it has only flavor text and pictures. It wasn’t too bad, but I thought it was busy (from a graphic design perspective) and got in the way just a little bit. It was fine, but the Mat for the solo mode was much more helpful. See above.

Cooperative play at 2 and 4 players is ideal: in 2-Player mode, each player operates two characters. In 4-Player mode, each player gets their own character!

Unfortunately, 3-Player mode makes one player operate two characters (which is usually me, since I have played the game more than anyone).

Whereas my solo plays embraced the pure space game, my cooperative plays embraced the fashion parts! That is probably because I played with the two friends Sara and Teresa!

There’s a decent amount of discussion going on as you play, as players need to figure out how to work together and share their fashion plates.

For example, players WANT to be on the same space as the Green character because then they can do multiple ENGAGE actions (usually, a single ENGAGE ends your turn). So, sometimes players may travel in packs to reuse their Fashion Plates! But then, you can’t get enough done if you stay together, so sometimes they have to split up! What’s the best thing to do? The sharing of Fashion Plates and that discussion really does facilitate the cooperation in the game.

The Tutorial also worked fantastically in the cooperative game! Players would read the parts of the tutorial relevant to their character and then act it out! Again, this tutorial worked really well.

And the cooperative game also moved along a little faster, as there was shared maintenance, and each character had the agency of a single player! The game still feels a little longer than 45-70 minutes, but it was definitely shorter than the solo game.

Generally, my friends had fun and want to play again. One major complaint was that the rulebook wasn’t great for edge cases (a similar complaint we had initially: see as Sara tries to find a ruling and fails).

Player Order

In the rulebook and rules (page 8 above), there is an entire page discussing player order and who is Lead Agent (first player). The rules are complex and they depend on something called “LOAD” and how many players are playing. If there is any question about LOAD then players select. What is LOAD? LOAD is a messy notion about the number of MISS tokens on your board.

See above as the RED player has too much LOAD, so probably can’t go first.

We need to get real for a second. I like this game. A lot. but there is a LOT of randomness that can detract from me liking this game. There is just enough mitigation between bag maintenance and special powers and so on to keep me involved. But I am on the cusp. The rules for first player need to be completely streamlined: it’s too much intellectual effort and it feels … random. “Oh, I should go first, but I can’t because I drew poorly and got LOAD last turn??” No no no no no no no.

This game needs Player Selected Turn Order: players simply should simply decide the order they play on their turn. This will allow characters to support each other to feel like they have gigantic turns! Get the RED character to help you so you shoot better; get the GREEN character to move to you so you can ENGAGE twice! These are decisions the PLAYERS should make, not have some esoteric mechanism (Lock and Load and LOAD) deciding player order.

Blow away all the rules for player order (an entire page in the rulebook) and just let the players decide what order they want to go! This makes the game that more cooperative as players will now discuss the order they should go! It helps cooperation!! Without Player Selected Turn Order, this game becomes too random for me and I would give it a 6 or 6.5/10. With Player Selected Turn Order, I feel powerful, potent, cooperative, and engaged! And the game is much better, an 8/10 or 8.5/10. It makes THAT big a different for me.

Yes, this is a House Rule. Play with or without it, but I suspect you like the game that much more with Player Selected Turn Order. Decide for yourself.

What I Liked

Acrylic Standees: If you can get Acrylic Standees, I would recommend it. They really complement the comicy vibe of the game, and they just look great on the table.

Transformation: It’s very cool when you transform! If you have the light-up standees, that makes it even cooler, but it is such a cool moment in the game when a character transforms to their super! The character gets an immediate power, becomes more powerful, and heals up! It feels like a movie moment when a character becomes powerful just in time to save the crew!

Components: Even if you just get the retail version of the components, the components are still nice. I am very glad I got all the premium upgrades, but that’s up to you.

Bag Maintenance: This is a bag-building game, and you have to keep the bag in shape! If you have too many “MISS” tokens in the bag, you just won’t be able to do well you attack, so you have to make sure to keep as many “HIT” tokens in the bag as possible! You may to use the COMMS ENGAGE action to scoop up all the HOT tokens on the ship, or take out one line of the MECHAPEDE to put all those hit tokens in the bag! As you go around, you must keep the bag state in mind or you will lose! Even if you do draw MISS tokens (see above), you can trade them for POWER tokens in future turns! (You can use POWER tokens for future actions or to transform!). I love that!! Even if you fail, you can still do something good LATER in the game! I hated Freedom Five from a few weeks ago because all failures were independent … at least here, a Failure can bring you choice! (And putting a failure on your board keeps it out of the bag too! Maybe you keep it out of the bag just to help your friends!!)

There are just enough mechanisms in the game to help you keep the bag state under control that you feel like you have agency in how the bag is. I love that; It doesn’t feel too random.

Star Trek Vibe: There is a Star Trek vibe here in Conquest Princess. Just like The Captain is Dead. Now, I love The Captain is Dead, but it was always centered on the ship only, and Star Trek is all about beaming down to the Planet. Here, in Conquest Princess, we can beam to TWO planets! And they are very different! I feel like Conquest Princess does a pretty good job of embracing that Star Trek vibe.

Sense of Humor: This game has an sense of humor. Wardrobe Malfunction as a card name? Ha! It’s even thematic as you lose your core suit. There are little bits like this all over the game.

Play How You Want: Play this as either a pure space game or embrace the fashion aspects, or both! If you don’t like the fashion aspect, don’t let it drive you away: this is a good space game.

What I Didn’t Like

Rulebook: The rulebook and scenario book need some work; mostly edge cases need to be specified more. There were just too many times when it wasn’t “clear” what needed to done or how to deal with something. I’ll give the rulebook credit; they did a lot of things right. It’s just that each scenario has SO MANY rules, it’s hard to get everything right.

Turn Order: Jettison the entire set of rules for player order and lead player (an entire page!) and just use Player Selected Turn order. It’s simpler to explain and makes the game more cooperative. The game even makes it easy to notate as you have to move the action tokens!

Conclusion

Conquest Princess was a bit of surprise! I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did! At first it looks like just a pure space themed game, but it has a strange auxiliary fashion theme which you can choose to embrace or not! So, don’t be turned off by some of the fashion references; you can play this as a pure space game and still really enjoy it! Or you can embrace the fashion theme wholesale!

There are so many great things about this game; from the Transformations, the bag-building, keeping the ship intact, keeping the bag well-seeded, helping each other, and communicating! There are no communication limits in this game, thus players can work together well!

I can’t recommend this game unless you jettison the turn-order and first-player rules; they are complicated, messy, full of exceptions, and take up an entire page (page 8) in the rulebook. With the turn-order rules as-is, I would probably give this game a 6 or 6.5/10: those action rules are too complex and make the game too random so that players can’t support each other! If, instead, you throw away page 8 of rules and instead embrace Player Selected Turn Order, this game moves to an 8 or 8.5/10! When players support each other, the game feels more engaging! Players have more agency! Players have more powerful turns! Players communicate more! Yes, this is a house rule, but I think it’s critical if you are considering this game.

I love all the upgrades they have for this game, and maybe you will too; just be aware it’s a fair chunk of change to get all the upgrades.

Despite the 4-character solo mode, I had lots of fun playing this as a solo game. This may make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

So, there it is; I like this game and would recommend it but only if you embrace Player Selected Turn Order. I guess it’s not a surprise I liked this game: it’s basically the Captain is Dead meets Invincible, and I love both of those games.

Wilmot’s Warehouse: Can A Cooperative Memory Game Work?

Wilmot’s Warehouse is a cooperative memory game for 2-6+ players; it also has some real-time aspects as well.

Wait! Don’t run away yet! Despite it being both a memory game and a real-time game, it’s actually pretty good. Really. I’m not kidding. Keep reading! Please!

Gameplay

There’s not much to the game: as a group, you place tiles down “cooperatively” down on a board: this board is the warehouse in Wilmot’s Warehouse. (And I have no idea who or what Wilmot is).

Players have some random tiles (see above) that originally come out of a bag. Players, as group, get to look at the tile and decide cooperatively what it is! See tile above: “What is this? A yo-yo? A Coffee cup?“

Once players, as a group, have decided “what it is”, they place it facedown on the board. To help remember it, players (as a group) are coming up with a “story” or “theme” to help remember WHAT IT IS and where they placed it!! There will be 35 facedown tiles(!) by the end of the game (7 cards “per day” over 5 days), so players need something to help remember what’s what.

For example, we had a row which was “food stuff”. And some stories about Mario.

The first 7 tiles (Monday) are easy, but the each day, management has “new requirements” that make the game sillier and harder. For example, Language Barrier is what we drew (see above): we couldn’t talk, but we could grunt and point. Yes, we became cavemen. Yes, this sounds stupid, and it was. But it was surprisingly fun.

After all 35 tiles have been placed facedown, there’s a real-time phase where players take “customer cards” and have to match them to the facedown tiles!

There’s a lot of these customer cards: some of them will be on the board, but most of them won’t! As a group, you are going through these cards AS FAST AS YOU CAN to find the cards you are using, while tossing the ones you aren’t.

The object is to memory-match the real customers to the real facedown tiles. I KNOW! I KNOW! This doesn’t sound fun. But it was really was!

Your “score” is based on how fast you matched, as well as how many you mismatched (you gain a penalty of like 10 seconds for each failed match). Then, you can lookup a video telling you how well you did: see Matt from Shut-Up and Sit-Down telling us how well we did!

Solo and Cooperative

This game is officially for 2-6+ players (with the + implying you can play more). We found that it worked great for 4 players. Could you play it solo? I think you could, as a way to “explore your memory palace”, but, it would get a bit “samey” solo. What keeps the game silly and fun are the limitations cards!

In a solo game, the Language Barrier (above) would have no effect (“I can’t talk to myself, ok”) and wouldn’t make the game more fun .. and most limitation cards are something that affects how the players may communicate with each other. In a solo game, these limitation cards would have no effect: It would just make each round about the same … which is not a bad thing, but the variety of these cards made the game quite fun. (One limitation made us only be able to talk with words that started with one of W I L M O or T. Very silly!)

As a cooperative experience, this game really shined! We all talked (well, when we could talk) and explored ideas together as we had to “classify” and “organize” the tiles. This game felt very cooperative: everyone participated and had fun.

Conclusion

Wilmot’s Warehouse is easy to describe and easy to jump into. I was very skeptical of this game at first (“A cooperative memory/real-time game? I don’t know …“), but my group had a surprisingly good time playing this. In the end, this feels like a heavier party game: it’s silly enough that you could classify it as a party game, but it’s heavier than you might expect, as you have to spend some real brain-power to play the game.

Pretty unanimously, this would get a 7/10 from my game group! They liked it, and they would play it again. The only real major problem is that you can only really play Wilmot’s Warehouse once a night: the memory overhead makes it a little cumbersome to try multiple times in one night. “That’s it! My brain is full!”

An Odd Little Duck! A Review of Cyber Pet Quest!

Cyber Pet Quest is a cooperative boss-battler campaign game. This game was on Kickstarter back in April 2024, and it promised delivery in October 2024. My copy arrived late October just before Halloween, so it arrived right on time! Congratulations to Dead Alive Games for shipping on time!

My version is the deluxe version with lots of little Kickstarter extras (see above).

This is a smallish game, but it still has a 6+ chapter campaign game contained therein!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a small game: see the can of Coke for perspective.

Yet, there’s quite a bit crammed into this box!! See above! So, what is this game all about?

Players each take the role of the cyber pets (above, left-to-right): Roman the Canadian Goose, Clay the Australian Cattle Dog, Freya the North American Racoon, and Jane the Bionic Cat!

You can choose to pick up the pet minis, but I prefer the wooden meeples that come with the game (much like Run Run Run! from a few weeks ago!) Wooden meeples for the win!

Players embark on a 6+ campaign (starting with chapter 0 to get you acclimated) working together to find their master! The campaign is all documented in the little book that comes with the game. It’s a tiny but long (at 108 pages) book describing the rules and the campaign.

Each cyber pet is actually quite different! The cards (above) describe the differences: how many Dodge dice, how many hit points, what actions you can take and their costs, and their special powers! If you look closely, you can see that each pet is very different than the others!

For example, see above for the Actions of Freya with their cost!

Each cyber pet gets a nice dual-layered board for marking energy, luck, hot points, and “sneak status”.

On a cyber pet’s turn, it is either sneaking (metal name token above turned upside down) or in AGGRO mode. When sneaking, most things cost more energy (except for healing which is cheaper) and that pet can’t attack! When the pet has the AGGRO token (bigger metal token), it may attack … but the bad guys are naturally drawn to it AND it takes one more damage from them! Choosing when to sneak and AGGRO is an important strategic part of the game!

There are bad guys to fight: this is a boss-battler after all! The bad guys are the red, green, blue, yellow and BIG BOSS pink meeples! See above!

You generally have 4 CyMS (Cyber-Memetic Sociopaths) … these are generally “the minions” of the big bad boss. See above as we choose 4 for the start of the game! (That dual layer board with the CyMS is the top of the box. …. what??)

Each Chapter on the campaign happens in a group of Location cards: See above for the apartment (where the cyber pets live and start on space 1).

Each Location generally has some items of interest (like the Massage chair) where you have to “interact” or “look at it” to activate it!

Once the cyber pets get comfortable with the mechanics of the game (chapter 0), the CyMS come out! See above as the cyber pets try to get out of the apartment with the CyMS chasing them!

Over the course of the game, you get many things to help you in your quest to find your master! Sometimes you get Items like above (which are one shots) …

Or you may get extra powers that help you! See above as Roman gets a Level 2 power!

There’s also “Charms” which are permanent items that are usually powered by the “luck” resource.

Finally, each cyber pet levels up as they get further into the campaign See above as Roman is on Level 3 … which influences his hit points, powers, and actions!

At the end of most chapters, the pets get some kind of upgrade, and usually it’s a choice! Level up the character card? Get a charm? Get one of two powers? The pets really do feel like they get better as you play!

This is a boss-battler, so there will be big-bad bosses that you fight long the way! See above for the bosses you may encounter!! The story has a few turns along the way, so you may not see all the bosses on your first play-through!

In the end, the components are a little small so they can fit in the smaller box, but they are all well-labelled and very readable I have played through at least one full campaign, and I never had a problem with the smaller components: they are quite nice for this little game. The theme is a bit odd with cyber pets. And the game is surprisingly small. So, this is an odd little duck of a game! (EDITOR: maybe better said, this is an odd little goose … since Roman is a GOOSE not a duck …)

Rulebook and Campaign Book

The rules and campaign are all found in this little spiral bound notebook of about 108 pages (yes, 108 pages!). See the Coke can above for perspective: I wanted to point out how little the rulebook is!

This is about a B or B- on the Chair Test: I can leave the rulebook open on the chair next to me while I am playing , but the form factor is just a little too small; the font is just a little too small to be well-readable. Since the spiral notebook stays open, we leave the grade in the “B” region, as it is still very usable.

Now, the rulebook doesn’t have an index or glossary (booo!), but it does have a nice Table of Content (see above).

The rulebook is replete with Story! It starts off with a nice intro (see above), and continues a story (I should hope so with 108 pages of rules and campaign!).

Although there are pictures of most of the major components, there are aren’t a lot of pictures of set-up except the one above. There were MANY MANY time where the rules referred to some component, and I just had to guess which it was (I found the sleeper components, I think I found the Horde token, but I never found the Hack tokens).

The rules were okay. There were a lot of time when I really wish there had been further elaborations of some of the rules. Many times, I just make the best call I could knowing the basics of the game.

There’s a lot of cute story here, the rules are pretty good at getting us going, but there were just too many times when things were underspecified (which token? Explain this rule please?) so I can’t call this this a good rulebook.

It was adequate to pretty good. I was able to play the game and move forward quickly most of the time.

Solo Rules

So, Cyber Pet Quest does support solo play! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!)

Unfortunately, the solo mode for Cyber Pet Quest is “play and operate all 4 Cyper Pets!” In fact, at any player count, all 4 Cyber Pets must be in the game at the same time!

Some of you might remember Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles from earlier this year: it’s solo mode also has the players operate all four characters at the same time! See above!

It’s not that uncommon to have the solo gamer play all four characters: recall that both X-Men: Heroes Resistance and Marvel Zombies: Hero Resistance also have the solo player play all four positions! See above.

In Set A Watch, although we initially had our reservations about the 4-character solo mode, it really grew on us and became the default way we played the campaign game Set A Watch: Doomed Run! See above. This is because the Set A Watch characters are simple enough that it’s not too much work to context switch between them.

Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance is harder to play solo with 4 characters because the characters get more and more complicated as the game goes on.

Cyber Pet Quest sits somewhere between Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance and Set A Watch. At the beginning of the campaign, it’s pretty easy to context switch between the Cyber Pet characters as they don’t have too many powers, items, charms or actions. So, the initial games are easier to play. But later in the campaign, after each character has levelled-up significantly, each character has a wide array of Powers! Charms! Actions! Each character gets MUCH harder to play, as there so much to do!

See above as the characters have so many cards in the final game: Powers, Charms, Items!!! I admit, the sheer amount of options for each character does get overwhelming … BUT … as the solo player, I have been playing and upgrading the characters by myself! It’s gratifying to see all the characters get better. I think since they have been levelling up gradually (between campaigns), it doesn’t feel that bad. I think it’s actually harder in Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance to deal with the powers creep as the characters go up quickly in the same game! At least with Cyber Pet Quest, you have a chance to become familiar with the new powers/abilities between games.

Still, there is a lot of context switching between characters as you play. I can recommend playing the first Chapter 0 solo to see if you think you can handle this 4 character solo mode; even if you don’t like this solo mode, the Chapter 0 solo mode makes it easy to learn the base mechanics to teach your friends.

I have to say, despite the complexity of the 4-character solo game, I had fun! I found myself playing through the entire 6+ campaign game in a solo mode last weekend! Wait, what?? It so easy to play each game, it was fun to level-up, it was interesting to see what happened next. I must admit, I am a little surprised I ended up playing the entire campaign solo last weekend! But I was having fun! And the fact that each chapter is under an hour contributed to that.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative mode is a little bit more fun than solo mode: for one, you have more people controlling the 4 Cyber Pets! Above, Teresa and I split up the Cyber Pets so that she was operating two (Roman and Freya) and I was operating two (Jane and Clay). I do think it’s interesting that we got very invested in our characters; so much so that we really did know them by name!

This is a light cooperative campaign, where cooperation seemed to happen pretty naturally. Clay was VERY good at taking out the CyMS, while Freya was VERY good at dealing with items and passing them around. Jane was the mover, getting to far-away stuff and distracting the CyMS. And finally good old Roman was good at doing a little bit of everything! We focused on each pet’s strengths and naturally felt empowered and potent as we moved around the apartment.

The game is light and fun! I suppose the best recommendations we can give this game is

1) I am playing it again cooperatively EVEN though I have already gone through the entire campaign!
2) We are planning to play more games (cooperatively) in the future

In a family situation, I can see this “4 characters” working out okay! Maybe give the “favorite” character to the little ones (Teresa really liked Roman, so she got Roman), but they can still give input as how the rest of the pets work. In other words, assign the pets in the way that brings the kidlets in the most! And the “adults” can just make sure the game stays on track!

What I Liked

Game Length: Even though this is a campaign game, I like that each chapter feels “doable” in under an hour. The game box says the game is 30-45 minutes and that’s about right! (Oh! And you can jump into any single game of the campaign if you want a one-shot! There’s a nice page that describes “get theses upgrades for set-up if you just want to play a single session!”)

Sense of Humor: This game is kind of light and fluffy; it has a sense of humor! See above as one of the cards is Red Dog Energy! And there is a Cat Videos on the Internet item as well! This is a campaign game, but it’s light enough that the game never feels “overwhelming”. It just kind of fun.

Readable: I was very worried, since this game was so small, that the components would suffer readability issues. Although I wish the rulebook was bigger, in general, everything was readable at the small size!

Story: The story is quite cute and keeps you in the game. It’s a light story, but still engaging.

Upgrades: At the end of each chapter, there are SO MANY ways you can get upgrades! Charms! Powers! Levelling-Up! And you get choices: Level 1 or Level 2? Side A or Side B? It feels really great to be moving foward and making so many choices! We saw a lot of this same feeling in Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders from a few weeks ago!

Cooperation: There were a number of mechanisms in the game that encouraged cooperation. The Pet Collars that you got in the very beginning allowed Cyber Pets to do extra stuff, but only if they were close to other pets! This made for interesting tensions! And many times, there were things to interact with that required TWO cyber pets in the same round to do something! I liked that! It felt like the pets were cooperating to get stuff done!

What I Didn’t Like

Underspecified: As the campaign gets further and further along, it feels like there are more and more places where the game needs a little more elaboration/specification. The final villain you fight has some real questions about how to operate him (Do you round up or down when you halve? How many hit points does he have?), and these kind of questions came up more than they should have during the game. As an experienced gamer, I know when to just make a ruling and move on. But I worry a family-friendly game like this might cause problems for families that aren’t as comfortable with under-specificity. Caveat Emptor.

4-Character Solo Mode: Although I had fun playing the solo mode, the fact that you always have to have all 4 Cyber Pets in play isn’t ideal. I made it work, I had fun, but it’s hard to recommend the solo mode with a 4-character mode.

Left-To-Right: Every set of Locations had the Cyber Pets move left to right. The topology was fixed in a straight line, and the pets almost always had to move all the way to the right from the left. Although this kept a lot of rules simple (with the AGGRO token and CyMS movement), it felt a little “constricting” that every single Location set “moved left-to-right”. It got a little tedious ALWAYS going left-to-right; I wish there had been some more topology to move around in. And I am tired of saying left-to-right.

Turn Order

The gameplay for Cyber Pet Quest has something of interest from turn order perspective: the game play alternates between pets and CyMS! It’s still variable, as you don’t know which pet is coming out or which CyMS is coming out, but it keeps the game balanced between the two! Recall we have discussed Variable Player Turn Order many times here at CO-OP Gestalt (see here for a culmination of that discussion)! The solution that Cyber Pet Quest employs against the problems of Variable Turn Order is the same as one from Adventure Tactics: Adventures in Alchemy: the Static Initiative Invariant. Basically, this just means we alternate between Heroes and Villains.

Now, I have to admit, even though I do like this solution overall, I was worried it might still be a little too random. But, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the game introduce Charms and Powers and Items that would mitigate some of that randomness! See above as the Honk and Bonk Charm gives the pet some agency over turn order! As the game goes on, and the players become more powerful, they CAN affect the turn order!

So, I was happy to see both Static Initiative Invariant here as well as Power/Charms/Items to help the players control the turn order!

Conclusion

I like Cyber Pet Quest. I really didn’t expect to go through the entire campaign solo this last weekend, but I had so much fun playing, I went ahead and finished it! I like heavy campaign games like Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders (from a few weeks ago), but sometimes it’s nice to have a light campaign game (like Cyber Pets Quest) that feels “finishable”: there’s only 6+ chapters to this game, and you can do it in a weekend! I am living proof!

There’s just enough wonkiness with the rulebook being underspecified that I worry non-gamers might get frustrated with the rules. Although there’s a lot of unique and interesting set-ups and interactions in the game, sometimes they aren’t that well-specified. Just be aware that you might have to make some rule judgements in order to move forward.

I think this game is better as a cooperative game, since it’s just easier to share control all four cyber pets with more players. But I still quite enjoyed the 4-character mode; but you have to be aware what you are getting into with all the extra context switching!

This is a fun little cooperative boss-battler for 1-4 players; it has a cute story and a light vibe that’s quite enjoyable. I’d give it a 7/10 overall: it loses some points for some of the rules wonkiness and limited left-to-right topology, but Cyber Pets Quest was an overall enjoyable experience!

coopgestalt

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Unboxing

The Rulebook

Gameplay

Friends and Foes

Expedition

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

“Emergency Sleeving!”

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Extra Specials

Unboxing and Some* Unpunching Required

Gameplay

Comic/Tutorial/Scenario Book

Rulebook

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

Player Order

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Gameplay

Solo and Cooperative

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook and Campaign Book

Solo Rules

Cooperative Play

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Turn Order

Conclusion

Menu