This week we take a look at a cooperative cat dexterity game: Nekojima! It can also be played competitively, but we focus on solo and cooperative play here.
There’s been a trend recently towards more cooperative cat games: just a few months ago, we saw and liked the cooperative cat game Hissy Fit!See our review here.
Will Nekojima fare as well as Hissy Fit and Race To The Raft? Let’s take a look!
Unboxing And Gameplay
We got the deluxe wooden Collector’s Edition: see above (it comes with some extras). We’ll talk about what’s there, but we will focus on what comes in the base game.
This is a cooperative dexterity game where players place poles and cats! See above! If the poles ever fall over, players lose! It’s kind of like cooperative Jenga …
The poles must be placed on the platform above: notice how there are 4 different colored regions!
Each turn, a player will roll two dice (see above), and the dice will indicate where the two regions to place the poles in!
There are three different variety of poles: blue, red, and white. See above.
The pole color you draw each turn is chosen by drawing a cube from a bag! See above as the white cube is drawn, and the two poles have to go between the red and green districts on the platform!
If players draw a black cube (see above), they must also place a cat (see below) to hang from the poles!
The goal of the game is to build your poles as long as you can without toppling them! Like I said, kind of like Jenga! (Well, reverse-Jenga because you add wood blocks here, whereas you takeaway wood blocks in Jenga).
Every cube you draw is placed in a Level score chart: this shows you what your “score” is at the current stage!
If a single pole falls over, it’s game over! Your score is the last level you achieved! Actually, when one pole falls … generally all of them fall! See above!
That’s the basics of Nekojima! See the components above!
Rulebook
The rulebook describes the basic rules pretty well: see above. The set-up and components are described above on page 1 in one fell swoop.
The rules are like 4 pages! You’ll notice (if you look closely above), there are some restrictions on how the poles are placed (you can never touch the wire, you can never wrap the cord, etc).
You’ll also notice how the rulebook commits the cardinal sin as being the same size as the square box: it gets a B- or C+ on The Chair Test as the rulebook flops around and hangs over the edges,
The rulebook is short: the game is easy to describe! The only difference (really) between cooperative and competitive is in the focus: play still keep building poles and adding cats until everything falls down. In the cooperative game, all players worked together to get the best score and win/lose together! In the competitive game, the person who knocked the poles over is the loser … only one loser and everyone else wins! The mode changes the unfolding of the game a little, as the cooperative players will try to set-up their compatriots for easier moves, but the competitive players will try to set-up their foes for harder moves!
Solo Mode
The solo mode is described on the last page of the rulebook: see above. Thank you for following Saunders’ Law and having a solo mode for this cooperative game!
Basically, the solo player just keeps adding blocks and cats as long as possible …
… until the poles fall over. Whatever the highest level is (see above) is the solo player’s score!
Solo mode worked great for learning the game: it was basically the same set of rules as the cooperative game! The solo player does the best he can to set-up the next player (who just happens to be himself) for easier placements!
I mean, from scratch, I learned the game and played the game in 15 minutes. It was very easy to get this to the table.
Cooperative Mode
Cooperative mode works great.
The first game ended quickly in heartbreak as the poles fell over.
Undeterred, my friends wanted to play again to do better! THIS time, we stood up! We stood away from the table so as not to shake it! We did everything we could to prevent any “accidental mishaps!”
We made it much farther in the second playthrough! See above. But alas, the poles will always fall!
The great thing about the cooperative play is that people seemed to want to play again!
Too Many Expansions?
There are waaaaaaay too many ways to play this game! See 4 variants above!
There’s another two variants that comes with the Collector’s Edition as well!
But in the end, my friends and I were happy with just the base game. I am not convinced we will ever play anything beyond the base game. It’s nice that all these expansions are in the box, but the extra expansions seem to “muddy up” the experience.
Abstract or Thematic?
This is a fun cooperative dexterity game, but it’s probably more an abstract game … that just happens to have cats. Nekojima seems to really lean try to lean into the cat theme! See the cat placemat that came with the game! The cat tokens are nice!
But, at the end of the day, this is probably an abstract cooperative game. Just don’t tell the cat lovers.
Some Issues
The Collector’s Edition BARELY fits in the box: in fact, it strains the clasp on the wooden box. And the stuff that came with it?
The extra dice tray is problematic as the dice bounce right out! And the extra game mode with the arches (see above) … ??? I will probably never play that mode, as cool as it looks.
If you find yourself interested in this game, I don’t think it’s worth getting the Collector’s Edition: just pick up the base game. You’ll be happier for it and have saved a little more money.
Conclusion
I got Nekojima delivered from Kickstarter sometime in 2023. Unfortunately, because I get so many games, this one just kinda slipped through the cracks.
Nekojima is a fun, cooperative dexterity game that leans pretty heavily into the cat theme … but it’s still pretty much an abstract game. The cats do make it cuter though.
Nekojima would probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Dexterity Games if I ever redo that list. This is probably a solid 7 out of 10 overall, with the cooperative game being more fun than the solo game.
I suspect Nekojima will be played quite a bit at RichieCon 2024 this year: there are a number of people who love their cat games and this game just looks so great set-up on the table.
Appendix: Furoshiki
One of the things that “seems” to be in the base box is a cat placemat.
I thought it was just a placemat for the game. Nope!
Nope! Apparently, it’s for Furoshiki! See the back of the pamphlet above! It’s about the art of folding and carrying things.
Skytear Horde: Monoliths is a standalone expansion for the Skytear Horde game system: this is the first expansion. This is a tower defense game! This game system is an odd duck for player counts: it is a solo game (1-Player), cooperative (2-Player), or competitive (2 or 3-Player) tower defense game. The game type is closely tied to the player count! We will only be discussing only the solo and cooperative gameplay today.
Skytear Horde: Monolithswas on Gamefound back in May 2023 and delivered to my house in May 2024. They said it would take a year to deliver and they weren’t wrong!
This is a smallish box: see the Coke can above for scale.
The original game (which had the deluxe box) is a little bit bigger.
This is mostly a card game: although there are some punchouts and a rulebook, this is an expansion with 250 new cards.
There are 3 new Alliance Decks: Green, Red, and Blue (see above). Recall that the solo and 2-Player games have each player take an Alliance deck: they are 40 cards of goodness per deck (for 120 cards of Alliance decks).
The good guys are protecting their Castle: they choose one of 6 new Castles at the start of the game (see above).
Of course, there has to be a big bad for the players to fight: the expansion comes with 3 new Epic Monsters! See some above.
There are three new Horde decks (87 cards total): see above. Recall that the Horde decks are the “Bad News” decks that summon bad guys monsters that you have to fight!! The type is notated in the upper right, with the difficulty marked on the very bottom: each deck can be configured to be harder or easier based on the difficulty icon on the bottom.
There are a set of portals that control the summoning rate of the Horde: see above. There are a different set of Portals for solo, co-op, and competitive modes.
There’s some new cards (Roots and Troops) …
Altogether, the new cards are gorgeous with art consistent from the original game.
There are also some tokens, of which you will need some!
I have the original deluxe version of the original game, which comes with the playmat AND some plastic tokens. Even if you have the plastic tokens from the original game, you still want some of the tokens from the expansion to play!
Basically, the temporary tokens (with the white middle) are really necessary to track temporary statuses. I found this out the hard way (during my first game) that you really do need these temporary status tokens.
Overall, the expansion looks good.
Rulebook
This new rulebook is 24 pages. This is important because the original rulebook was only 16 pages: we’ll see why this is important in a second.
There is mention of a video for learning the game on the cover: we prefer learning from the rulebook (so we can lookup things easier later). But, it’s good to know there is an official video.
Skytear Horde: Monoliths gets an A on the The Chair Test: I can see the rulebook on the chair next to me, the rulebook stays open, and the font is pretty readable. Weirdly, there seems to be a lot of white space: I would have preferred a bigger font and less white space? The white space choice bothered me. Otherwise, it does very well on The Chair Test.
The Components page is very good at listing all the cards and pointing out features of each set of cards. See above. I spent a decent amount of time on this page correlating the cards to the Components page: I feel it’s important to touch and see all the components as a step towards understanding the game.
It’s a good Components page. The token discussion was quite nice (on the opposite page) as well.
The set-up is quite good too: See above. Interspersed in the text, there’s even suggestions for monsters and characters and bad guys for your first game! Thanks Skytear Horde: Monoliths! My first game(s) were easy to set-up!
The rest of the rulebook is pretty good too.
I ended up keeping pages 12-16 open and active as I played: it just seemed easier to help me keep track of where I was in the game.
This was a pretty good rulebook, but not great. Recall, from our review of the original Skytear Horde that we felt the rulebook could have been a little better. They have definitely evolved the rulebook: it’s better, more readable (especially for the first-timer or virtual first-timer), but it still doesn’t have lots of examples or FAQs or edge case discriminators.
In both one and two-player game, a bunch of questions came up as we played, and we struggled to find some edge cases (Can we attach an item to a compatriot or only ourselves? If we “kill” a minion, but something heals it, does it reactivate to Pillage? How does a Castle get minions if it can’t engage?). I am sure there is something online (the designer seems very active in the BGG forums), but I wish there had been a little more in the rulebook.
There’s a table of Contents (yay … see above), no Index (boo), but there is a Glossary (yay … see below)!
This was a pretty good rulebook. I want more edge case rulings or a FAQ, and the white space bugs me (but I am pretty sure that is a me thing). In general, the rulebook has evolved for the better and I was able to jump in pretty quickly.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Skytear Horde: Monoliths is pretty much the same as the original game, but with new ideas peppered in (Troops, temporary armor/attack, new Hordes, new Alliances, etc). If you liked the base game and just want more, this is a perfect expansion.
I ended up playing with the plastic tokens and game mat from the original game, but I didn’t need them: they just made the game spiffier. You can play the whole thing by itself without needing the original game.
That’s pretty much what I did: I wanted to see all the new content, so I only played with new stuff!! Monoliths!
The rulebook (by being a very nice guide) has made the gameplay “seem” smoother in the new game, even if it’s just a by-product of my imagination.
Nothing in the expansion is ground-breaking, mind-altering, or life-changing. It fits in the basic flow of the game easily and just adds more stuff.
Solo Mode
So, Skytear Horde: Monliths follows Saunders’ Law and there is a viable solo mode. In fact, I almost feel like this is a solo game first, and then the cooperative and competitive modes are afterthoughts … well-developed afterthoughts, but not the primary way to play.
As proof, the cooperative mode is listed as an afterthought AFTER the solo play is explained ..
… and the competitive mode is listed after the co-op and competitive modes. See pages from the rulebook above.
I really do like that the solo mode is a pure solo mode, where the solo player takes control of just one Alliance deck! Solo is so easy to jump into; I picked the blue Alliance deck (above) and was able to start playing pretty quickly!
My first solo game went really well, but I realized I was cheating a lot! Not on purpose, but I just kept missing a lot of nuances and edge cases (like I said, I wish the rules were a little better on edge cases!)
Once I got a few more games under my belt, the solo game became a much more interesting puzzle! See above as I just barely win with 1 Alliance card (just 1!) after defeating the Epic Bad Guy! I just barely won and it was glorious!
It took me about 3 games to feel like I got all the nuances. The first few learning games were fun, but I think you need a few games under your belt before the game starts firing on all cylinders.
Playing Skytear Horde: Monloiths solo reminds me why Skytear Horde originally made my Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023! This is a fun puzzle! And Monoliths is more of the same!
Cooperative Game
This time around, I was able to get the 2-Player cooperative mode played … you might recall in our review of the original Skytear Horde, I never was able to get my friends interested in playing! Luckily, I have been doing a lot more 2-Player co-ops lately, so I was able to get both Sam and Teresa interested in playing!
Unfortunately, these games didn’t go quite as smoothly.
Although it seems a natural extension of the solo mode, as each co-op player takes an Alliance deck, the game didn’t seem to play as smoothly.
It seemed like we were playing a little more multi-player solo than really cooperating. Sure, we needed to discuss what monsters to engage, but there didn’t seem to be as much cooperation as I had hoped.
One thing that seemed to really keep us down was that the Mana allocation was lesser (it’s only +3 per round) for two players. It felt like it was harder to get things going in a 2-Player game because of the Mana restriction … and that was more frustrating.
We also had some bad luck, even with the Mulligan in set-up rules.
I feel like it would have been nice to have a few more cooperative mechanisms:
share Mana? The small portions of Mana might have felt less debilitating if we could apportion the Mana? Say “the team” gets 7 Mana per turn to apportion as they wish, instead of 3 each? This can help mitigate bad card draws.
share Attachment? At the time we played, it was unclear whether Attachments could go to the other player. I think, after some hunting through some rules, that Attachments can go to either player. This needs to be stated much more explicitly!
share cards? Not necessarily “pool cards”, but it might have been nice to have a mechanism to share cards better? Maybe each turn players could swap one card?
I wanted more cooperation in my cooperative game. Don’t get me wrong, the cooperative game works, but it felt more like multi-player solo. That maybe a good thing for some people: a lot of people don’t like it when the Alpha Player (see our discussion of Alpha Player Syndrome here) tells them what to do! The cooperative mode definitely avoids some of the Alpha Player pitfalls, but at the cost of some cooperation. Caveat Emptor: this may be the perfect cooperative mode for you and your friend! I just wanted more cooperation.
The cooperative mode just wasn’t quite as smooth as the solo mode.
What I Liked
I like Skytear Horde! The Monoliths expansion gives me more of the same … in a good way!
The card art is pretty phenomenal. Even when we were having a bad cooperative game, my friend Teresa said “I really enjoyed the cards and art“.
Speaking of the cards, they are well-notated, easy to read, and usually very clear.
I really love the solo mode.
What I Didn’t Like
Even with the Mulligans during set-up, sometimes you can get completely screwed by a bad card draw. We had to take a Pillage of 11 cards (like more than 1/4 of our deck) during the first turn because we could get nothing going! I am pretty sure that’s why we had such a bad first cooperative game, but there’s not much you can do to mitigate the randomness of some card draws …
It would be nice, for example, to have a choice of two cards when you draw (when you kill a monster, you get to draw a card). Currently, there is no mitigation of the luck-of-the-draw: you just get the card you get. It might be nice if we got to choose the card we got?
The rulebook needs a FAQ or some more edge cases description.
Conclusion
I like Skytear Horde and I like Skytear Horde: Monoliths. It’s great that Monoliths is a standalone expansion (so I can just play the new stuff) or an addition (so I combine old stuff and new stuff). There’s nothing ground-breaking here: just more of the same, in a good way! If you like Skytear Horde, you’ll like Skytear Horde: Monoliths!
I think I prefer Skytear Hordes: Monoliths as a solo game. The cooperative mode is pretty good, and maybe perfect for you if you want to avoid the Alpha Player in your games (at the cost of some cooperation).
This is a good game with a good production: we recommend it wholeheartedly for the solo player, and a little cautiously to the cooperative players. Hopefully our review will help you figure out if this is something you would like.
When I was an undergrad at college, a lot of my friends played a game called Rogue on the vt100 computer terminals.
It was a little dungeon crawler that my friends spent HOURS and HOURS playing.
“It’s a Dungeon Crawler? Fun! Do you save you characters very often?“ “Uh, … no. You just play until you die. You don’t save characters.” “I’m out!”
And that was pretty much where I learned to dislike Rogue-like games. If I play a dungeon crawler spending hours leveling up my character, I want to save it! Part of the fun, for me at least, is returning to my character that I’ve invested in. I have no desire to play a formless character that just dies.
To be fair, my opinion has not aged well. I have been informed by many people that Rogue-like games have some saving capability. Still, my malformed opinion has persisted through the years.
Slay The Spire
Because of my prejudice against Rogue-like games, I have never played the original Video game Splay The Spire. I must admit, though, that I was intrigued by Slay The Spire (a cooperative deck-building game) when it appeared on Kickstarter back in November 2022. The original Slay The Spire video game was really only a solo game … maybe the transition to cooperative board game would make it something more up my alley?
This arrived at my house in May 2023 (see above); it had promised delivery in Dec 2023, so it’s about 5 months late. In the world of Kickstarter, 5 months late is not bad.
This is a cooperative board game for 1-4 players, Ages 12+, with only 60-90 minutes per Act! I was intrigued! To be fair, a lot of my friends seemed “excited” to play this game, so I freely admit that their enthusiasm was contagious.
Let’s take a look!
Unboxing
This is a pretty tall box (see Coke can above for perspective), but it’s about the same form factor (in length and width) as a Ticket To Ride size box.
The top of the box has the rulebook and Upgrades and Items guide.
Don’t be too impressed by this Upgrades and Items guide: all it does is show all the cards! It has no disambiguating text!
There is a very nice boxing/unboxing guide for putting this together and taking this apart. See above.
Are you like me as one of the few people and didn’t know that Slay The Spire Video Game was a deck-building game? Well, the board game is also a deck-building game! As a deck-building game, this game comes with SO MANY cards! See above and below. And its own sleeves! For more discussion of Cooperative deck-builders like this, check out our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games!
I have been informed that the cards and art look exactly like the Video Game.
And there are a ton of cards and boards! See above! This game looks really fantastic! See above!
And it looks like the Video Game.
I want to be 100% clear about this: this production is amazing! It’s a deck-building game that comes with sleeves! The tokens come in an easy-to-use tray! The cards can all be stored very easily in the box! The box is easy to repack! They really knocked it out of the park on the production of this game!
Gameplay
Each player chooses one of 4 characters to play: see the characters above. I have been informed by players of the Slay The Spire Video Game that these are straight out of the Video Game!
Each player also takes the corresponding figurine: these will be used to notate which “row” you will be fighting in; we’ll describe that more below.
Each player has their own deck of cards to start with: each deck is a little different and really represents a different play style. Simplifying a little too much: the blue deck is defensive, the red deck is offensive, and the green deck is all about poison.
Players together choose a “path” to take to get to the final Bad Guy (at the top of the board above). These decisions can have you fight a monster, summon the merchant, build a fire (“smith” or heal: I learned the word “smith” from one of the Slay The Spire Video Game friends), fight Epic monsters, or take events. I was informed these choices were very reminiscent of things that happen in the Video Game.
When you fight a monster, each row next to a character gets some monster(s) from the Encounter Deck! See above as “the red guy” fights a Shelled Parasite. (I don’t know “the red guy’s” name because it is not notated on his board). Note that the monster has some hit points (left and right of card), and some icons: those icons tell you what the monster does when it attacks you.
As a card game, you play cards to attack your monster and/or defend yourself!! Shields up your defense (blue icons above), and swords up your attack (red swords above). You only have a limited amount of energy per turn to spend to play a card (usually 3 energy worth), so that limits which cards you can play (the energy cost is in the upper left corner).
You draw up to 5 cards every turn, and discard all when you are done. That feels very much like a deck-builder.
Typically after you win a battle with a monster, you can add an upgraded card to your deck: you deal 3 and choose 1 (apparently, just like the Video Game). See an example draw above.
See above as some of my cards have a GREEN text for the title? This means that I was able upgrade the card BY FLIPPING IT OVER! Each card has two sides, a normal side and an upgraded side: you can “Smith” to turn the card over and therefore improve it!! This is a really neat mechanic in a deck-building … and rare! I can’t think of another deck-builder that does this!
You can also occasionally get new additions from a rare deck (see yellow outline): these are much better cards!
To be clear, each character has their OWN upgrade deck to draw from and their OWN rares deck to draw from! See above: the red guy has a starter cards (grey outline), upgrade deck (black outline), and rares deck (yellow outline). This makes each character very distinct as they are built to upgrade a specific way. Like we said earlier, the red guy’s decks concentrate on attacks, blue guy’s deck concentrate on defense, and green guy’s decks concentrate on poison.
You occasionally can buy stuff from the passing merchant, including potions or treasures and even random cards. This even includes a way to cull cards: we call this The Andrew rule:A deck-building game MUST have a fairly systematic way to cull cards. Luckily, Andrew would (and does) like this game because he can cull cards.
Along the way, there are all sorts of other cards that come out: Events, Monsters, Potions, Treasures, Epic Treasures, and deck-cloggers (Daze and fire). I have been told this is just like the video game!
But of course, the purpose of all this is to take down the Big Bad Monster at the top! See above as I fight the Big Bad Bronze Automaton and a Bronze Orb!
Like many cooperative games, all players win together when they defeat the Big Bad, or they lose if any of them dies! So, it’s in everyone’s best interest to cooperate and keep each other alive!
The Rulebook
I need to talk about the rulebook. It’s okay, but not great. It really should have been better given how great the production of the rest of this game.
It does well on The Chair Test: it only droops over the edges a little, the font is big and readable, and the book stays open on the chair next to me so I can see the rules without taking up precious table space. This rulebook gets an A- on The Chair Test!!
The game starts off great with a Table of Contents, a link for a Companion App, a link for a How to Play video, and a list of all components (most) with correlating pictures!! Very very nice! I felt very happy to see this! My only fix might be that I had wished they had labelled the tokens better … there are a lot of tokens and I didn’t know what any of them were!!
The set-up is pretty good, but this where the cracks start to develop. This is my first example of this rulebook being too minimal: I accidentally shuffled the Summon deck, but it doesn’t say WHY you shouldn’t it! I didn’t know how to recover?!?!??! It turns out the Summon deck should “probably” just be alphabetically sorted so you can find cards easily … that’s the only reason to not shuffle it, you just make your life harder when you have to find a card. Really, I could have used a sentence:
“Don’t shuffle the Summon Deck because you will be searching for cards (alphabetically) in it later in the game. Just sort the deck alphabetically if you accidentally shuffle it!
But other than that, the set-up went fairly well.
This rulebook is pretty well annotated with lots of pictures and examples. See above. In general, the rules are fairly clearly set out. But the real problem with this rulebook is that it seems to assume that you have played the video game. There are a lot of places where a rulebook for a normal game would be chastised. I can’t tell you how many times I played with Jon and Keala (who have played the Video Game A LOT), and when I went to lookup a rule, they told me “it’s just like that in the video game! So it probably means that!” So many times, they clarified a rule by saying “it’s like that in the video game!” … which is not good for those of us who haven’t played the video game or other Rogue-Lites.
My canonical example of this was the Regret curse. I actually got two curses one one turn, Regret and Injury (see above)! My reading of these was that Injury was a worse curse because it keeps clogging my deck as I draw it and shuffle it back in. I though Regret was a better curse because you just got once and it was out of your deck. Nope! It clogs your hand so you draw fewer cards! You draw up to 5 cards, so if Regret is in your hand, you can only draw 4 cards. I didn’t think the rule was well-specified in the rulebook, but when I asked Keala and Jon they said “Oh it’s just like the Video Game, you can only draw 4 cards!”. I really wish the rules had made this clearer! This is just one of SO MANY examples where Jon and Keala said “Oh it’s like that in the video game!”. This rulebook should have been vetted by someone who has NOT played the video game so as to clarify a lot of finer points.
Even though this game doesn’t have an Index (and it really should), the back of the rulebook had an invaluable list of Abilities and Keywords.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff in the rulebook, but it was too minimal in a few places (For example: a few more sentences about the Retain keyword or why Summon deck shouldn’t be shuffled). I was able to learn the game and playthrough solo … and I had fun. I was able to play cooperatively with a bunch of friends (who hadn’t played the Video Game) … and we all had fun. It wasn’t until I played with seasoned Video Gamers that knew the game that I realized this rulebook needed some more clarifications: it depended a little too much of knowledge of the video game.
Solo Game
Like the Video Game, you can play this solo (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! See above as I set-up the red guy for a solo game. There’s not really a lot of special rules or exceptions for the solo game, you just play! The main balancing mechanisms are really in combat:
In plain combat, a monster comes out per row (i.e. per player). Thus, the solo player will be fighting just one row of monster(s).
In Big Bad combat, the number of hit points is scaled to the number of players.
So, in general, you can just jump in and play the solo game without any real special rules! Thank you Slay The Spire! It was SO EASY to jump in solo!
I had so much fun playing solo that I played through the first three Acts of the game! I had a blast! There are so many places where you upgrade or get new cards, that you always feel like you are making progress! You always feel like you are getting better!
Really, solo was fun. I had a blast. I played wrong on a few points (one to discuss below), but even without knowing the Video Game, I had a good time.
Cooperative Play with Players Who DO NOT Know the Video Game
I ended up playing a full 4-Player game of Slay The Spire with three of my friends who have never played the Video Game! We ended up playing through Act I in one night in about 90 minutes (with a little extra time for set-up and tear-down). So, I just had to teach the game as-is … no one (including myself) had ever played Slay The Spire the Video Game!
The biggest conceptually difference, of course, is that this is a fully cooperative game! Slay The Spire is always thought of as a solo game! But the board game is fully cooperative!
The biggest change is that every character gets his/her own row of monsters to fight! See above! While you nominally tend to fight the monster in your row (it sort of becomes “your responsibility” as it does damage to you only), you can target any monster in any row! So, if a monster has a particularly bad effect for everyone (certain monsters can attack everyone), or if a comrade just needs a little help, players may choose to work together to take out particularly vexing monsters!
My favorite rule in this game is that it allows fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order (see more discussion of PSTO here). The rulebook calls this out on page 12:
“Players can play cards, use potions, and activate abilities in any order they choose.”
What this means, is that we (as players) can intersperse our actions to accomplish things! If we need Sara to play a Potion, then Andrew attacks to add a Vulnerable, to which then Sara can play another card and attack (for double damage), we can do that! Players can work together to find the best combination of their interspersed actions to take down the baddies!
In fact, in some ways, Slay The Spire gets the best of both worlds! Since you “generally” need to fight the monster in your row, players can do Simultaneous Actions to fight their own monster, but defer to fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order if they really need to! The Simultaneous Actions helps keep everyone involved … rather than waiting for “your turn”, you can all fight the monsters at once … this means there is much less downtime.
I think this is where Slay The Spire shines the brightest as a cooperative game: the players can choose the best way to play to either help each other (with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order) or move the game along quickly (with an easy way to Simultaneous Actions fighting your monsters!) It’s the player’s choice, and I noticed we shifted between these modes pretty seamlessly when we played! It was something I didn’t notice until I looked back on our plays.
The cooperative game worked fantastically, probably better than the solo game because I got to talk and strategize and have fun with my friends!
Cooperative Play With People WHO HAVE PLAYED The Video Game
So, I wanted to make sure I played this game cooperatively with some friends who have played the video game: I wanted to see what they thought. Jon and Keala (above) are both fans and have played (and like) Slay The Spire the video game.
What happened sort of surprised me: we fell into a rhythm fairly quickly. Every time there was any rules question, Jon or Keala spoke up and said “Well, it’s like this in the video game”, so we didn’t spend very much time pouring over the rulebook. The Video Game became the reference implementation of the game! This was both cool and annoying. It was cool that the game seemed to fall inline with the Video Game, but it was annoying that the rulebook didn’t do better at explaining a lot of things.
We had so much fun playing, we ended up playing Act I and Act II in one night! The game just seemed fun to everyone.
Jon saved our bacon a number of times: he had the ability to shield other players (as the blue guy), which worked out very well! I would be able to attack something (as the red guy) and Jon (as the blue guy) would shield me or Keala (the green guy) so that we wouldn’t die! This cooperation seemed seamless! It just happened that way!
The game really clicked for everyone that night: I feel like I know the game better (with all my friends’ comments on how the Video Game works), and I was able to bring my friends into the card game quickly from reading the rules. We had a great time and plan to play again!
A While
It’s taken a while for me to get to this point. I initially had some misgivings about the game.
At first, I was grumpy at the rulebook for how minimal is was: it really needs a lot more elaborations on the rules. There was one rule in particular I was enchanted with, until I realized I was playing wrong. The “Draw 5 Cards: there is no maximum hand size” (p. 12) lead me to believe that maybe I had more choice of which cards I could discard. Maybe I could keep cards between hands? Why else would you emphasize this rule of no maximum hand size? Jon and Keala had to tell me this, but you always discard all your cards!! All of them! … just like in the video game. (to be fair, it is in the rulebook but it is one sentence). I think that rule is there to show that during your turn you can draw as many cards as you want.
Another thing that threw me off for a while was the art. I had just gotten a new deck-building expansion for Thunderstone Quest (see art above), and the art and graphic design for Thunderstone Quest (above) is significantly better than the art for Slay The Spire (below).
Comparatively, the art for Slay The Spire is a little anemic after looking at Thunderstone Quest. But I seem to be the only one who doesn’t love the art. I will admit, the art for Slay The Spire has grown on me a little: it’s very simple and not too busy. It’s also very readable. But since I have never played the original video game, I was not as “enchanted” with this art as others.
Flaws
This is a funny flaw in the game: you can’t (easily) have multiple games going on! You can save your game fairly easily (putting the appropriate cards in the appropriate slots), so you know you can come back and do another session. The problem is, if you want to play another game, you can to reset ALL THE CARDS for each deck!! We worked around it by taking pictures of our decks: if worse comes to worse, we can always use the picture of all our cards (see above) to recreate our save game. I suspect many people will want to try this game, and we won’t be able to easily have many games going on. In some ways, this is a product of its own success: it’s so much fun, people want to try it! But, be aware that a single game is easy to save, multiple games will require taking pictures of all your cards. And also the Unlocks sheet (see below) .. which presents more issues.
Another problem with this game is it’s really unclear how you move on once you play through Acts I, II, and III. The Ascension decks (see above) add some variety and keep the game interesting, but it’s kind of unclear how this fits in. Do you start a new game at Act I with the changes? Do you start a new deck? To play Act IV, you have to unlock it, but are you playing Act III again and again and again? Like everything I have seen in this rulebook, I wanted more elaboration! This rulebook frustrates me! Give me an example, give me a few more sentences, give me a page! I have played a solo game all the way through Act III. What do I do now? Add Ascension cards? Start over at Act I? This is very unclear!!! This is probably my biggest ding against the game: I don’t know exactly how to move forward. Sure, I suspect I will post to BoardGameGeek and someone will respond, and I will be able to move forward. But this rulebook does not make it clear how to move forward after Act III. UPDATE: I had lunch with my friend who has played the Video Game. He told me that in the Video Game, you just reset everything (including you deck) back to ACT I, but make a few cards (like the uncoloreds) available. I really DID NOT get that sense from the rulebook … another instant where knowledge of the Video Game helped and the rulebook didn’t.
Conclusion
Honestly, this Slay The Spire board and card game has really grown on me: I have played it solo numerous times, and I have shown it to many diverse game groups. The more I play it, the more I seem to like it! The upgrade paths makes this game great: there are so many opportunities to augment and upgrade your deck as you are playing! The fact that each players is so distinct in both powers and upgrades really contributes to how great this game is!
The production is fantastic, and the art is … thematic to the game. I have grown to appreciate the simple art and graphic design, but I still think the art and graphic design is a little anemic.
The solo game is great: it’s about an 8.5/10. It’s easy to play, and there’s really no exceptional rule changes needed to get the solo game to the table.
The cooperative game is about a 9/10: the base game is all there, with all the upgrade and augment paths, but the cooperation really shines brightly! Players can choose so many ways to help each other with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order, with Simultaneous Play keeping everyone engaged at all times! And even though these play modes seem mutually exclusive, players seem to weave in and out of Simultaneous Play and PSTO without even noticing!
Players who know Slay The Spire the video game might find this to be a 10/10 for them: the game is great and also evokes so much atmosphere from the Video Game!
Over the course of many play sessions (both solo and cooperative), I ended up liking the game more and more. There are some issues with the rulebook, as it seems to assume players know Slay The Spire Video Game pretty well! Other than my issues with the rulebook, the game is great. Putting everything together, this feels like a 9.5/10 as an overall production! This game surprised me how much I liked, especially given my anti-Rogue-lite tendencies.
Hacktivity was a game on Kickstarter back in June 2022: see link here. This is a cooperative hand management game for 1-4 players. It originally promised delivery in February 2023, but didn’t deliver to my house until late April 2024: this makes it over a year late!
I was originally a little concerned about this game because at some point there was a Kickstarter update saying they lost their manufacturer! I was worried that this meant we might never see the game, but the Hacktivity people persevered and did deliver final copy! I was actually quite impressed with their positive attitude and communication during the Kickstarter! I’ve had a number of Kickstarters recently with poor communication and it was nice to see someone owning every step of the process!
Let’s take a look!
Unboxing and Gameplay
This is a fairly standard sized box (“about” the size of a Ticket to Ride sized box): see Coke can above for perspective.
In this game, each player takes on the role of a special hacker. See the four decks above.
Each hacker has their own board as well: see the boards above.
Each hacker’s deck is different and has a different emphasis or/and special powers. See two such decks above.
The players are interacting with a board (see above) with three separate regions. Notice how nice the plastic components of each region are!
This is a game about managing cards. The purple cards are the virus cards that have bad effects … we’ll dub these the “bad news” cards. The blue cards are the player cards that keep the bad news (the viruses) under control. We’ll call the blue cards the “good news” cards. See above.
The leftmost board (yellow) keeps track of activity: you move the leftmost yellow cube up as a “bad news” as the games plays. If all yellow cubes make it to the top (see above), players lose!
The middle board (blue) is a place where you can “isolate” viruses that come out. This isolation defers their effects and makes you deal with them later.
The right-most red board keeps track of “the strange bug”: this is usually what you are trying to keep under control. In the first game, you need to keep the “strange bug” in the white area to win.
In order to win, players (usually) need to make it through all of the bad news cards (purple cards) and all of their own cards (blue) without losing! See above, a winning game! All bad news (purple cards) are in the discard! And “the strange bug” was kept under control in the white zone!
What’s interesting about this game is that every turn presents a lot of choices! The first choice: how many bad news (purple) cards do you take and how many good news (your character cards) do you take? See above as we choose two good news (ArTeMis) and one bad news (A1). You have to work your way all the way through both decks eventually, so you can’t always take more good than bad! You have to balance that out!
Once everyone chooses their cards, everybody flips and has to deal with their cards!
Every card offers one of two choices. For the bad news card above, you can choose the top or bottom: either isolate the virus on the blue board (notice the blue circle on the TOP CHOICE) with hope to destroy it later OR you can destroy it immediately, but pay the full cost on the bottom of the card.
But it’s a choice.
The good news cards (your player cards) are also a choice: the top choice is usually a lesser choice, but with no side effects. The bottom choice is usually more powerful, but with a bad side effect! On the card above, the upper choice is an attack of 2 on an isolated virus … but no side effect. The bottom choice is a more powerful attack of 3, but having the side effect of raising the activity (the yellow board).
Players continue to play until they meet the winning conditions! Usually, this means playing though all decks (bad news and good news decks) and keeping “the strange bug” under control!
Given that the Kickstarter had to switch manufacturers halfway through, the game has really nice components! My only major complaint is that I wish the cards were linen-finished: you do handle the cards a lot as you play. But I liked the art and three-part board works well.
Rulebook
The rulebook is two-sided: one part is in French and the other in English! It’s much less daunting when you know it’s only 12 pages (with the other 12 pages being the French rules).
The game does pretty well on The Chair Test: The rulebook fits on the chair next to me pretty well. The rulebook is a little bigger than I wanted, but it still stays open. The font is a little thin and a little small, so it’s a little harder to read than it should, but it still works: this is about a B+ on The Chair Test.
The components are well-labelled. See above.
The Set-up (above) is pretty well documented: this set-up spans two opposite pages, so it’s easy to set-up by just leaving the rulebook open.
The rules are generally pretty good and well notated.
The biggest flaw is that there is no index (boo), but the last page of the book has a nice list of symbols.
I was happy with this rulebook. This rulebook was obviously a translation, but there were only a few places where that was readily apparent.
Solo Play
So, the game does have a nice solo mode (thanks for following Saunders’ Law)!
The solo game is NOT playing two characters: basically, you combine the decks of two characters (see above as I play BLASSST!!! and ArTeMis!) and just play that one deck (setting up the rest of the game as if it were a 2-Player game). I was worried about this solo mode at first … “Is this really different from the cooperative mode?” And it’s really not. You just have more cards to play through. I am surprised I like this solo mode: I usually prefer playing two separate characters with two positions (see Leviathan Wilds from a few weeks ago), but this combined-deck solo-mode worked for me.
So, the solo game combines two decks and has the solo player become a “cyborg” of those characters (I am taking artistic license here). See above.
Interestingly, I played my first solo game when I got the game a while ago, but it took a while to interest my friends! So I had to remind myself how to play with a few more solo games right before I taught them how to play. I am happy to say that I enjoyed the solo mode more the more I played it. It’s only a 40-60 minute game! It moves quickly! And it was easy to remember how to set-up and play.
I liked Hacktivity solo and I liked the solo mode that came with it.
Cooperative Mode
The cooperative mode was easy to teach. The basic flow of the game is pretty simple once you get the idea.
I think the least favorite aspect of the cooperative game were the limits on communication. Strictly speaking, you can’t say much about your hand: you can sort of hint about how much damage you can inflict, and you can hint at stuff. As we played, we kind of ended-up slowly moving around this restriction … because it wasn’t fun! We play cooperative game because we want to talk and interact with our friends: we usually dislike cooperative games with limits on communication.
There are a lot of little icons in this game as well: that took a little to get our heads around, and the rulebook had to be passed around a little (see above). After a while, the icons took hold and we could just play: it didn’t take too long (and the little player aid cards helped a lot).
In general, the cooperative game went pretty well, but not great. The real issue was the limit on communication. And we get it: sometimes you need that restriction to keep the Alpha Player in check … but we ended up just going around the communication restrictions.
What I Liked
The color-coding scheme worked very well. The blue section of the board … gets affected by the blue markers. The yellow part of the board … is affected by the yellow icons. This was very clear and very well done. This color coordination really helped move the game forwards, as it appealed to your intuition (“this color goes here”).
The order in which you resolve your good news and bad news cards is players’ choice: You can even intersperse your card resolutions between players! You can do good news first, then bad news, or all at once! It’s players’ choice!! This is fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order at its finest!! This is where the cooperation shined (shone?) most in this game! As a group, we had to figure out the order to resolve cards, and we felt clever when we could avoid certain bad news effects by playing these certain orders! I really really liked how they used Player Selected Turn Order in Hacktivity! It really made the game feel that much more cooperative.
Every card is a choice! This is great! Every single cards has to be resolved, and you have a choice of whether to take the top or bottom option!
The game is easy to teach and play quickly. And it’s a pretty quick game at 40-60 minutes.
We didn’t get into it too much, but there is a campaign here if you want to pursue it.
What I Didn’t Like
This is more of a missed opportunity than a dislke: the backs of the bad news card don’t mean anything (unless it’s a yellow activity card, which happens just a few times). See the A1 and A2 above? They mean nothing useful for gameplay: they only denote which player count decks you are using. Paleo did the wonderful thing (see our review here) of having the back of the cards be a “hint” as to what’s on the front of the card. The A1 and A2 on the backs of the cards above …. don’t really mean anything. They SHOULD give you a hint to “how hard” the bad news is, but they really don’t.
Since you are drawing bad news cards without knowing anything, it makes the game feel a little more random. How many Bad News cards should I draw? I don’t know … I don’t hav a sense of how hard each one is!!! I think a “hint” of some kind would make the game feel less random.
The limited communication rules felt too constraining; they hampered our enjoyment of the game. The best combinations we played in the game where when we could keep the bad news cards from having any effect … and we could only do this if we were more sharing. This game needs an Open Hand rule:
“If you and your friends are comfortable with Open Hand, go ahead and play with all cards showing. Realize that Open Handed may make the game easier, invite analysis paralysis, and/or cause Alpha Players to take over the game.”
Really, this communication limit drop probably dropped by friend’s rating of the game: see below.
Conclusion
I liked Hacktivity! I enjoyed all the choices in the game: choosing how many good news/bad news cards to choose, the order to resolve the cards (fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order), and the choices per card! All of this really made me feel like I was making choices that mattered as I played.
I was be remiss if I didn’t include my friend’s opinions: I liked this more than them. I would give this a 7/10, and suggest we play Open Hand. My friend Teresa liked it ok (no rating), but Sara said “I would give it a 4/10: I liked it okay, but there’s a lot better games to play!” I don’t necessarily agree with her, but you may feel as she does. The main issues for Sara were the lack of Hints on the back of the bad new cards and the stifling of cooperation. The limited communication can be counteracted by playing Open Hand, but the lack of hints can make the bad news feel too random and I am not sure what we can do about that.
I would be happy to teach this to you: I think Hacktivity is a quick and easy game to teach/learn and it promotes a lot of choice. The solo game was fun and the cooperative game was fun once we added Open Hand.
As we look back at 2023, we’ve played quite a number of solo and cooperative games and expansions! There were a number of surprises in this list: some of the surprises were bad, some were good, and some were mixed! I want to highlight some of the games that we played that we might not discussed elsewhere: these are all different games than our Top 10 Solo Games of 2023, Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2023 and our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023! These are ordered in how much of a surprise it was!
10. The Stuff of Legend
This is at the bottom of the list because it’s the least surprising in one way, but still very surprising in another! The Stuff of Legend is by famed designed Kevin Wilson (of Arkham Horror 2nd Edition fame), so that makes it likely for me to enjoy it (no surprise there)! What’s surprising is that I like I liked it despite it being a hidden traitor game: I usually hate hidden traitor games, but this one has some surprising mechanics that make it it fun!
This was a surprise because it was better than I expected! It’s seems a dubious proposition: “Let’s mix Dungeons and Dragons with an Escape Room Mystery!” … um … this feels a little like a cash grab, just cashing in on the Dungeons and Dragons name.
The game is very simple, (with an element of randomness that I thought would be too much), and the mystery is pretty simple. But, I had a great time playing through all 3 Acts with my friends Charlie and Allison! It’s better than you think! If you are expecting a deep hard-core mystery with lots of hard-core Dungeons and Dragons elements, you should look elsewhere. If you like Dungeons and Dragons and escape rooms, go in with an open mind: this might surprise you. See our review of Bedlam in Neverwinter to see if this is something you might enjoy!
8. Express Route
So, I picked this up for my friend Robert so we could play a cooperative map game when he came to town. It’s a cooperative game about delivering packages.
The production is better than I expected, and the cooperative gameplay was very pronounced! We had to cooperate well to win! Even though the theme for this game does absolutely nothing for me, I was surprised at how engaging this was for a cooperative game. See our review here to see if Express Route might be a game you like!
7. 14 Frantic Minutes!
This was a cooperative real-time game that kinda came out of nowhere: It was from a very small Kickstarter. And yet, I liked it! It presented a very unique and interesting cooperative puzzle for 1-4 players!
Kimberly from Tabletop Tolson is one of the few people I know who liked it as much as I did! See her Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023! After all is said and done, I think I prefer this is a solo puzzle game, but this is a really unique game: it’s surprising how much I liked it, given that I usually eschew real-time games!
Okay, what? They’ve made a new mystery solving game in the Clue universe? The surprise is how much fun it actually was!
This is a lighter Escape Room game that I got at Target (so it’s fairly easily available), and it was surprisingly good! It’s a play-once mystery, but it’s fairly inexpensive, and the mystery was very interesting! We were shocked at how good this was, considering how inexpensive and “Hasbro” it was. See our review of Clue: Treachery at Tudor Manor here!
5. The Big Pig Game
What a light and silly game this is! And yet, it enchanted my game groups! It made the RichieCon 2023 discussions because it was just so fun and surprisingly good! The Big Pig Game is a great gateway game or end-of-the-night game when you want a light and simple, but surprisingly engaging, cooperative game!
I love the production of Awaken Realms games, but I have bounced pretty hard off most of their games after I got into them. The surprise here is that Tamashii is probably my favorite Awaken Realms (technically, Awaken Realms Light) game! We still talk about how much we disliked the grind in Tainted Grail to this very day … (see Part I and Part II of our Tainted Grail review here).
Tamashii didn’t quite make any of my Top 10 lists of 2023 (Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023, Top 10 Solo Games of 2023), but it almost did. The programming mechanism is very interesting and unique: I liked it! The only thing that holds this game back for me is that the trace rolls are just a little too random and game-changing. I still like it, I will keep it, and I suspect I will play it solo more than cooperatively. See our review of Tamashii: Chronicle of The Ascend here to see if this is something you might like!
3. Lord of the Rings: Adventure to Mount Doom
What a bizarre combination: roll-and-move in a cooperative game … in the world of Lord of the Rings! I had trouble getting my group to play it because of that weird combination, but it was pretty good. It played quickly, it was easy to learn, easy to teach, and still a decent little cooperative game.
The surprise here was that it was much better than I expected. Although I probably won’t play it very much, I am still keeping it as a decent gateway cooperative game, especially for new gamers who love Lord of the Rings! See our review here to see if this is something you might like!
2. Daybreak
I love the games of Matt Leacock: he’s one of my favorite designers. Pandemic (and all its ilk) and the Forbidden series (Forbidden Desert, Forbidden Island, etc) are some of my favorite cooperative games of all time! And yet, Daybreak didn’t work for me. The surprise was how much I disliked Daybreak.
The game was on the Kickstarter (pardon me, BackerKit) and Daybreak even made our Top 10 Anticipated Games of 2023! Yet, when I got it, I found it just waaaay too random. There are four independent sources of randomness (dice, card draws from different decks), and hidden “bad news” you simply can’t mitigate because you don’t know what’s coming! I gave it a number of plays and I just bounced off it hard! Everyone else seems to like it, so this is obviously just me. I found Daybreak to be way too random to be fun. (To be clear: I don’t have a problem with the theme! It’s an exploration into making energy more sustainable … very interesting! Some people who have spoken out against this game are because of the theme … that’s not me).
I love Matt Leacock: this is a huge surprise how much I bounced off Daybreak, especially when everyone else seems to like it.
1. Artisans of Spendant Vale
I am surprised this game hasn’t done better! I haven’t seen it on any Top 10 lists for 2023, and I haven’t really heard anyone talk about it! It’s basically a cross of Jaws of The Lion (with the storybook and combat) and Crusoe Crew (with its shared books) and some Forgotten Waters (with its upgrade system)! It’s a gorgeous game with amazing production! See our review here to see if this might be something you enjoy.
I personally had a problem with the dice mechanism because the dice kind of tell you what to do: I’ve never liked that mechanism … (see our review of Batman: Shadow of The Bat for more discussion), but otherwise I should have loved this game. I think the reason we haven’t heard more about this game was that its theme can be very divisive: it’s all about playing characters who are gay or non-binary … that may have turned off some people.
It’s a big surprise to me that this didn’t do better: there’s a lot to like here.
Eppi is the second series of games in the Paper Point-and-Click line of games from Lookout Games.
The first game in this series was Cantaloop by Friedemann Findeisen: see our review here! We loved Cantaloop so much that it made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021! This was a series of three games: we liked all three of them! See here, here, and here!
What makes these games so interesting is that they are the paper book equivalent of the old “point-and-click” video games!
Think of the Secret of Monkey Island, King’s Quest, or the more recent Thimbleweed Park. Players “point-and-click” at objects in their world (on the computer screen), combining objects to solve puzzles! Players also move around, exploring the world they play in!
These games are all about combining objects and exploring the world, trying to solve the puzzles in the story you uncover along the way.
However, instead of a computer screen, these Paper point-and-click games have book and cards! You combine cards, solve puzzles, and flip through the book exploring the story therein!
Let’s take a look at Eppi!
Unbooking
We can’t have an unboxing, as this is mostly a book. So this is an unbooking.
Eppi is a book first and foremost: everything else is contained in the front pouches at the front of the book.
The big bottom pouch contains the inventory page, the play sheet, a postcard map, but most importantly … the red decoder!
This little red decoder is the main gimmick of the game! Hidden text in the book waits for you to unearth via the red decoder! The red decoder reveals important text in the adventure! See above as you encounter Eppi for the first time in the hall!
Most of the “objects” you will interact with come from the three card pockets. As you reveal text in the game, you will uncover more cards which you can combine!
One thing that’s differentiates Eppi from the original Cantaloop series is that about a third of the cards are stickers rather than cards: see above That’s right, this is a legacy game (but see below)! As you explore, you will put stickers on locations to reveal new options or hide old options that are no longer relevant!
The map tells you where you can go in the house, and the corresponding pages of the book. Note that you can’t get into certain rooms until there are unlocked via triggers! (You can’t get to Saira’s Study until you hit trigger D4!)
The play sheet comes with a little matrix of “triggers”: as you explore and combine objects, you will mark triggers on the sheet to show you’ve “accomplished certain things”.
This same Play Sheet also has your “TODO” list: in order to win the game you have to accomplish 5 goals! See above. (Why are there two Play Sheets above? Keep reading!!).
The rest of this game is the book!
The introduction and tutorial is fabulous and tells you how to explore and combine objects!
The next section has the 12 Locations (2 pages each) in the game
The next section are Cut-Scenes (further expansion of the plot as you move forward)
Finally, the last section is a Help Section
This game looks great! It has a very family-friendly and welcoming vibe to its art. It’s very clear this is aimed at younger kinds and families! I mean, it says that on the cover, but the art choices reinforce that.
Legacy or Campaign Game?
Since you are supposed to put down stickers as you play, this is pretty much a legacy game! You won’t be able to replay it again … or will you? You really can’t remove the stickers (they are very sticky), and you also mark up the Play Sheet with the triggers. So, this is a legacy game (but see below)! And honestly, what kid doesn’t like putting on stickers? For some families, the stickers may the best part of the game.
Having said that … If you are very careful, you can reset the game: you can use little pieces of tape to “tape” the stickers in the book rather than stick them.
I was able to play the entire game all the way through, using just little bits of tape on the edges to hold the stickers down (see above). After I was all done, I was able to reset the entire game by just carefully pulling off the tape! If you use small, little pieces of tape, you can keep the stickers down without too much work to remove it later. The bigger the piece of tape, the harder it will be to remove!
The only thing other thing you need to do to reset it: make a copy of the trigger sheet! That’s why I have two copies of the Play Sheet above: one is a copy!
So, with those two “tricks” (tape and a copy of Play Sheet), I was able to reset the back to pristine condition after full playthrough (it did take a little bit of time to undo the tape).
It’s a little fiddly to keep making little pieces of tape, but I suppose no more fiddly than trying to stick the sticker on and aligning it just so. However, I suspect the best way to play is to just put the stickers in: the best part of being a kid is playing with stickers!
The only reason you may not want to put stickers in your game is that this is a 3-Part series (I think): this is Part I after all. The next Eppi book is “probably” a year away, so you may want to replay this game again just before the next one comes?
In general, it’s probably more fun to put the stickers in (it’s a legacy game)! If you are just a little careful, you can get by and make it resettable (making it a campaign game). It’s up to you!
The World
Most locations in this world look like the above: the left side of the page has a lot of hidden text (to decode with the red acetate) and the right side of the page is a picture of the room you are currently in (with objects you can combine with). As you explore the room, you will combine objects and read some of the text on the left!
The typical way to combine objects is to align the left side of a card with either a location or the right side of another card. If the two letter code (u6w6 from the picture above) corresponding to the arrows shows up on the appropriate sheet, you can read it with the red decoder! Otherwise, if there’s no such code, nothing happens! (It’s like trying to combine a bowling ball and a feather, it doesn’t make sense, so nothing happens).
Sometimes, the little red decoder will tell you to read a cut-scene: it looks like the above, where characters talk to each and further push the plot and character development.
This game is all about “trying” things in this world: Do these objects combine? Do this object combine with this location? Nothing here? Let’s look around at a new Location! You try stuff, go to new Locations, and just keep exploring this world.
Flow
This is an adventure game: you will start off making tons of progress, then slowly and slowly start making less and less progress until you hit a wall. Eppi has the same ebb and flow as most adventure games: sometimes, when you are stuck, you just have to go around and just “try stuff”! Arguably, the least exciting thing about adventure games is the brute force approach is sometimes needed: it can be boring and soul-crushing to just try stuff that makes no sense. Even worse, it’s harder in this game because you physically have to do a lot more work to just “try stuff” (turn pages, combine items, look up text, see if it decodes: Lather, rinse, repeat). But once you break through that wall, it’s so exciting! The story picks up again, and things make sense again!
Eppi is an adventure game! Every point-and-click adventure game I have ever played has this same flow: lots of cool stuff then some frustration, then excitement, some more frustration, then more excitement!
Help
If you do get stuck, there is a Help Section in the back of the book (see above). In this case, you lookup help sections by seeing what trigger conditions you are missing! You correlate your Play Sheet and find the lowest trigger you are missing! This is usually where the problem is!
A few times, I had to look up some help, but I had to look at more than one trigger to find what I needed. But it was there! It’s a little confusing the first few times you try to use the help. One of my biggest problems was that I sometimes forgot to mark off a trigger, so that prevented me from moving forward!
This isn’t the best Help system, but it seemed to work for me once I kept at it.
Story: Solo vs Cooperative
So, Eppi is a family friendly story! In fact, the main characters of the game are a family! Mom and Dad and some kids of all ages! As you explore this game, a story moves forward. But, why read a story when you can play it?
The two main ways to play Eppi are solo or cooperative. Cantaloop (the first of this kind of games) definitely felt like more of a solo game, although arguably you could play it cooperatively. Eppi feels like it is better at being both solo and cooperative: it absolutely works solo (that’s the way I played it), and then it absolutely works in a family environment (a 7-year old girl and her family gave us some feedback).
Solo
I ended up playing the entire game solo one Sunday: it took about 5 hours (the box says 5-8 hours, so that’s accurate).
I definitely stopped and took a break at some points when I was getting frustrated, so wall-clock time was probably more like 7 hours, with 5 hours of play and 2 hours of taking a break.
This would be easy to reset if you needed to: you just take a picture of the cards you have, and put everything away. If possible, it’s probably just a little easier to keep everything set-up between sessions, but you may not have that luxury.
The solo game worked pretty well. I got stuck a few times and had to consult the Help. In general, it was pretty fun.
Cooperative Family Mode
What I Liked
Turning pages to explore and move through Locations worked great: the binding is good for that, and the pages are high quality: they definitely learned from the Cantaloop experience! The very first Cantaloop game had lesser quality paper, and it actually made a difference, as you were much more careful turning pages (afraid to tear them)! With the higher quality paper and binding, it’s easy to make your way through the book.
The stickers are cool. In Cantaloop, they “new scenes” were on cards, and if you turned the page, you would have to reset the scenes. By putting the “new scenes” on stickers, you can work through the book quicker, as you don’t have to worry about “new scenes” flopping around! Besides, stickers are cool … especially for kids! (And, like we said, if you are careful you can get the equivalent experience with taping the cards, but you should use the stickers!!!)
By making the Eppi game more “family-friendly” (to be clear, Cantaloop was NOT family-friendly), it opens the door to cooperative play more than the original Cantaloop: the story and art is very inviting in Eppi! It’s just something the whole family can be immersed in. This definitely feels the cooperative mode is much more accessible. I loved Cantaloop, but it really is best as a solo game. I think this might Eppi might be more fun as a cooperative game.
I adore this genre: the Point-And-Click Adventure game is fairly rare! I am so glad Cantaloop did well enough to spawn further games in this genre. I love this genre so much! More games like this please!
The tutorial was very good: it showed what you can and can’t do when you combine objects.
What I Didn’t Like
In the original Cantaloop, when you combined cards, the lowest number card ALWAYS had to be on the right: this reduced the number of ways you could try to “combine” two objects. Why didn’t Eppi adopt this rule? You effective may double the amount of work you have to do to combine objects, as you may have to combine the cards twice!
I liked the story here, I did. But, the wit of the original Cantaloop isn’t in here … which makes the game seem like a little more work. Even if you got a puzzle wrong in Cantaloop, frequently there were funny jokes or amusing turns-of-phrase! So, every time you worked for clue, you got rewarded by either advancing the plot or some joke! I didn’t realize until I played Eppi that the jokes in Cantaloop distracted me from all the physical work you have to do to move the story forward! Let’s be clear: there is a lot of physical activity of moving cards, combining objects, reading red text, turning pages, marking triggers, turning to cut scenes! Whew! All physical activities!
I think some of this will go away if you play cooperatively, as the game is more about the cooperative experience with your family. But I think the “work” to move the game forward is a little more prevalent in Eppi if you solo it.
The final puzzle was pretty hard. I feel like it was almost out-of-scope/too hard for a family game: I suspect you will have to use the Help System to finish the game. That last puzzle seemed a little too much, even with a whole family looking at it.
Conclusion
I am so happy there are more Interactive Adventures like Cantaloop! Eppi is a fun game solo or cooperatively, but I think the best place for it is the cooperative game with the family …
… and that’s what the cover says! It doesn’t lie!
I like Cantaloop better overall, partly because of the non-stop humor, but I had a lot of fun with Eppi. This is a solid 7.5 solo, maybe 8 cooperatively with your family.
Union City Alliance is a cooperative super-hero deck-building games that was originally on Kickstarter back in March 2021. The game looked great and promised delivery in October 2021! I was so excited for this game that Union City Alliance made the #1 spot on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!
Unfortunately, the game is about 2.5 years late: The game arrived at my house April 30th, 2024! It’s basically been 3 long years since I backed the Kickstarter.
Interestingly enough, I was never worried that this wouldn’t finally arrive. The designer would do a pretty decent job of keeping us updated (with Kickstarter updates): he would offer full timelines of delivery and discussions of progress. I was grumpy that Union City Alliance was 2.5 years late, but at the end of the day, the Kickstarter was well-run … and they delivered!
Let’s see what we got!
Unboxing
The base game is about the size of a Ticket to Ride sized box: see above with a Coke can for perspective.
The rulebook is the full-size of the box on top!
There’s a lot of punchouts; these are just handy tokens to keep track of Heroism and other resources (Valor, Speed, Might). Interestingly, the Heroism and Damage tokens, which persist between rounds, are circular tokens. The Valor, Speed, and Might tokens, which evaporate between rounds, are square tokens. Even though the game never calls this out, that subtle consistency (persistent vs. ephemeral) was a nice touch.
Also included is a source book; It has both set-up for various scenarios and tons of flavor text and back story for the heroes and villains: see below.
There are a TON of pre-punched standees that are both the Villain and Hero markers. See above.
There’s also a GIANT (see can of Coke per perspective above) pile of Locations! These Locations come out slowly as the Heroes explore the city!
But, this is cooperative deck-building game. So, at its core, this game is all about the cards. When you first open the box, it’s a little daunting to see so many cards!
From an initial Unboxing perspective, this game looks great!
Uncardening
I feel like this needs to be a new phrase: uncardening. It’s the event when you have take a lot of cards out of a new game box and sort them appropriately. But it’s not just sorting: it’s about collecting together “like” cards, figuring out where the cards go in the box, and making sure they are ready to go for play!
Basically, we had to do the same thing in Earthborne Rangers: go through the cards, sort them, put like cards together (for some notion of “like”), and figure out where they go in the box. See above. Earthborne Rangers had a fairly grumpy uncardening (see our review of Earthborne Rangers here): the components page was misleading, and we spent far too much time trying to uncard the game.
I almost think that the word uncardening (which is a word we coined for Earthborne Rangers) has a negative connotation: it implies you have to spend an extraordinary amount of time putting cards in order.
I remember when I first got Legendary: A Marvel Deck-Building game some 10 or so years ago. It has the worst box opening experience I have ever had! I just have tons of cards and no idea how to put cards together! The rulebook is completely silent on how to sort! As a gaming nubie at the time, I asked my friend John N. to help me (because he had Legendary), and with his help, I was able to put things together. The phrase uncardening applied to Legendary, it applied to Earthborne Rangers, and unfortunately, it now applies now to Union City Alliance.
If you think all deck-building games need a negative uncardening, I suggest you look at the Aeon’s End series of games! They do an amazing job of making the uncardening (in a good sense) easy. See our review of Aeon’s End and Aeon’s End: War Eternalhere, and Aeons’ End: Outcastshere!
The first two pages of the rulebook … DO NOT address how to take the cards apart, sort them, put like cards together, and fit them back into the box. I am actually annoyed by this: The Union City Alliance rulebook wasted two very large pages (see above) with huge fonts for credits and an introduction. I am all for getting credit, but I was very annoyed at these designers because it was so hard to uncard their game! They SHOULD HAVE used those two pages for something useful: how to uncard the game!
A simple question: why is there a Playable Hero and a Team-up Hero for Wrangler? See above. Which cards for Wrangler go where? This is an easy concept (once you know it) that should have been presented on those first two pages.
And it takes some knowledge of board games (and perception) to know to look in the lower right corner of the card: the Wrangler cards are the W! See above!
Once you start looking around some more, you’ll notice there is a manifest on the back of the dividers! Yay! They list both the number and the card title (good job!).
I am SO GLAD they have both the title and the card number on the manifest! The card number on the cards are SO SMALL as to be almost unreadable!! I had to zoom in pretty heavily with my phone in the picture above to see the #2 Captain Jupiter card! But having the titles on the manifests helped.
There’s just a lot of cards. I probably spent about an hour and half, maybe two hours uncardening this game. It really shouldn’t have been this much work, and it really shouldn’t have been so cumbersome. The cards are well-labelled, but throwing someone at the game without any directions is a misstep. I am an experienced gamer (now), so I was able to get through this, but I worry a newbie will just give up in disgust trying to uncard this.
But, everything is labelled (once you know where to look: bottom right, and the divider manifests) so you can get there. And once everything is back in the box, it’s very satisfying. See above. This lack of uncardening direction may be the biggest misstep in the entire game: the uncardening just needed a little bit of discussion in the manual.
Rulebook, Er, Play Guide
This rulebook is gigantic, being the same size as the box.
How does this rulebook do on The Chair Test? Unfortunately, it gets a D on the Chair Test.
It is almost impossible to have this on the chair next to you spread open because it was so big! It does have lots of good pictures and good font, but it was almost unusable on the chair next to me.
However, this game has spawned a new test: The Two-Chair Test. If you put two chairs together (see picture above), you can have the rulebook open and readable without taking up valuable table space! So, the rulebook gets a A in the Two-Chair Test (a second tier test) So, the rulebook lays flat, the fonts are big and readable, and I can read it easily from my chair. In the end, The Chair Tests are all about keeping the rulebook(s) off to the side so I can look stuff easily and not take up valuable table space!
I have to admit, I was a little non-plussed to learn that this wasn’t the full rulebook! It was only the Play Guide! See above: “… but it is only a quick reference...”. You have to go to the website for a full rulebook. It’s cool they have all this on the website (FAQ, full rulebook, etc), but at the time I went there, the web site wasn’t up yet! See below.
At the time of this writing, however, the web site is up. But, I had to play using only the Play Guide!
Once you get past how HUGE this rulebook, pardon me … Play Guide … is, it’s pretty good at getting you into the game. I don’t usually like thematic fonts for rules (see our review of Hour of Needhere and Obliveaon here), but it works here. I think I like it because it’s a very big font, and it’s peppered with a lot of supporting pictures and colors: see above.
There’s no Index to the Play Guide (boo), but there is a Glossary (yay)! See above, In fact, the Glossary seems very complete; it covered just about everything that came up when I played.
Once we got going with the two chairs and through the uncardening, the Play Guide was pretty good at getting me set-up: there were lots of pictures, lots of flavorful text, lots of helpful annotations.
I am still annoyed I didn’t get the full rulebook. I look at computers all day; the last thing I want to do is look online for full rulebook for a board game. The Play Guide has been “good enough”, so I have been just pushing forward with that. I haven’t needed the web site … yet.
Gameplay
Union City Alliance is a cooperative super-hero deck-building game. That tells you a lot about this game already! See our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games for more discussion of deck-building games!
Each player chooses a hero to operate: that player gets the Playable Hero deck for that character: see above as Player One chooses Captain Jupiter.
An interesting thing that Union City Alliance does is the cards are divided into two groups: your initial deck (with the 0 in the upper right corner) and the Power deck (with the green in the upper right corner). See above. Power cards are separated out, and only that player can buy those Power cards later in the game, using the (green) resource Heroism. It’s a real neat way of keeping each character very distinct, as each character has their own set of Power cards!
So, when you set up, you have your normal intro deck and your Power deck “tempting” you with some cards you can buy! See above as Captain Jupiter sets-up with two Power Cards available to buy, with her initial 5 card hand at the bottom.
Each card can be played for Resources! The three main resources are Valor (blue), Speed (yellow) and Might (red). See the Plucky Interns above giving 1 Valor! Valor is generally the resource used for buying Hero Upgrade cards!
You need at 2-4 characters to play: see above as Doctor Tomorrow and Captain Jupiter are set-up!
One of the curious things this does as a deck-builder: you don’t usually get upgrade cards you can buy unless you go exploring! As you explore the city, more Hero cards come out that you can buy! This is different from other deck-building games like Legendary and Dominion and Aeon’s End where there’s just “9 types of cards to buy!”. See an example from Aeon’s End below.
As you explore Union City, new cards come out: see below.
Every time you explore a new Location, two new Hero cards come out! (And a City Card, which is typically Bad Newsish).
This is interesting, as it forces the player to explore and look around to get upgrades. There’s no “set set” of upgrades: you get what you get as you explore! And you can only buy (generally) Hero Cards from the Location you are on! This is a nice and thematic twist on the deck-building genre.
To win, players must take out the baddies! See above which represents “the bad guys!’ The bad guys in Union City Alliance are pretty complicated to run: there’s a Peril deck, a Plot deck, issues #1-4 of the Plot Deck, and specialized baddies (Mobsters and Gangsters in this case). To win with Pterano-Don and the Dino-Mafia, players must defeat all the Mobsters!
It’s quite hard to take out the Mobsters!
The city has to be big enough for the Mobsters to come out (a rule requires that), so that also forces the exploration aspect! See above as the city is pretty huge with one of the Mobsters looming!
To win, take out all the Mobsters! As I took them out, I put them in “jail” on top of the box! See above!
Solo Play
Unfortunately, there is no provided solo mode in the game! See above, as the game is only listed for 2-4 Players.
It’s very discouraging that they didn’t follow Saunders’ Law here: no solo mode! So, I went ahead and played my first game two-handed solo. That’s right, I operated Doctor Tomorrow and Captain Jupiter and just played this as if it were a 2 Player game, alternating between the two.
I think I know why they didn’t include the two-handed solo mode in the game: it’s pretty complicated. I ended up playing my first game (granted, a learning game) in about three hours. Each character in the game is very distinct with a very different play-style! There is a lot of context switching between the characters, as each character has their own specific cards and Power deck that players need to be thinking about! And the game can get pretty overwhelming as you play: see the picture above near the end of my solo game! There are a lot of distinct Hero cards and distinct challenges and distinct Locations!
And the Villains are complicated to play too! Plot card, Peril Cards, issues, distinct baddies! So, the solo player has to run two characters AND the Villain deck!
See above at the end of my first solo game! The board is a bit of a mess between two characters, the villains, the Locations, and all the cards!
I can see why the Union City Alliance people chose to avoid the two-handed solo mode: this game is very overwhelming in solo mode! My first solo game took about three hours to play! It probably wasn’t the best way to learn the game, but I believe in trial-by-fire for learning games: the only way to learn is to jump in! So, I think, if you are determined, the two-handed solo mode will work. And once you learn the game, the basic flow is pretty straight-forward.
Cooperative Mode
My second game was a two-player, two character game! I learned quite a bit in my solo game: things to do and NOT to do!
First, I learned to allocate signficantly more space for the Locations! See above as I leave half the table for that!
I also learned to be more methodical when placing Locations: each Location (when explored) adds Two Hero cards and one City Deck card. Since space is at a premium, we tried to make sure the two City Cards are on the bottom half, and the City Card (whether a challange or a Bad guy) is on the top of the Location. Since each Location also has a unique ability, we made sure that text was readable! So, there are four things you need to see on a Location: let’s make sure they are consistent and readable as we place! That makes the game … less messy … as the city gets explored!
See above as the city is a little less daunting as we have more space and the layout is a little more consistent.
Even though each player runs their own character, which tends to make the players more isolated turns, Union City Alliance still encourages cooperation. Players have to work together figure out how to take out certain monsters and challenges to clear the way to take out the Mobsters! The game ramps up in difficult pretty quickly, and some coordination between the heroes is necessary to keep the badness under control.
I liked the solo game, but the game is better at two or more: there’s more people to share the responsibility! Union City Alliance can be very overwhelming (there’s quite a bit of maintenance per round) as solo gamer, but the sharing of responsibilities made this much easier to get through. Teresa was in charge of The Green Death (that was here hero) and the Locations, and I was responsible for Captain Jupiter (that was my hero) and the Villain decks. Off-loading some of the maintenance to other players made the game much more fun! I could play without worrying about keeping the game up!
Solo was fun, but the game is just more fun with more players. I see why they chose NOT to put 1-4 Players on the box.
Theme
This game is dripping with theme!
Each hero is very distinct and plays very differently, representing the sum of their powers!
There’s a ton of flavor text on the cards, which you can ignore if you like, but it really does draw you into your character.
The Source Book just digs even deeper into each character! You want back story? You got it!
The Power Decks, which are unique to each character, also contribute to making each character just feel so different and flavorful!
The Villain deck is quite complicated to run, but is very thematic! The “harder” cards come out in later issues of the game! There’s quite a it happening per round with the Villain deck, but it is all unique to the Villain .. again contributing to the theme.
The larger than normal standees (especially for the dino-mob) makes the game feel thematic! They are so cool looking!
If you haven’t noticed, just about every card has unique art on it! It’s all the consistent from the same artist and just draws you into the game!
This game has so much theme to it: I’d give it a 10/10 for theme. The events, the characters, the Locations, the heroes, the art, the standees, the vibe of the game: 10/10.
You do pay a price for this theme, though: from minor costs like flavor text (“Oh man, there’s flavor text on the card I should read“), to annoying costs (“set up the next city Location“), intrinsic costs like understanding you Power cards, to major costs (like running the very distinct Villain decks). My games of Union City Alliance have run about 2.5 to 3 hours. Some of that time is just the sheer maintenance of immersing yourself into this universe.
The Art
I love the art in this game. It’s pretty clear the art is mostly the product of one artist (Antonio Garica), and I think he just knocked it out of the park! The art feels very comic-booky and super-heroey. It’s so thematic and so good.
My only complaint, and this is not even really a complaint … is that his style might be thought of as too cartoony! I don’t have any problem with that, but if you saw the game cover in a store, you might this this is a game for younger audiences. While Union City Alliance is generally family friendly, this is a deep complex game that might be too much for younger audiences.
The age limits of 14+ should absolutely be adhered to (see back of the box), as I think someone who’s just starting in games might think “Oh that game looks cartoony and kinda cute! Let’s get it!” Union City Alliance is much heavier than the art belies. Caveat Emptor.
Conclusion
If you want theme, you have to pay for it! If you want a lighter super-hero deck-building game, you should bring out Marvel Legendary: It has your Marvel heroes and is pretty straight-forward to teach. But honestly, I always thought the theme was lacking in Marvel Legendary: “Wait, you are buying a team of heroes? What?”
Union City Alliance is a deck-building super-hero game that has the theme I always wanted in Marvel Legendary. In Union City Alliance, characters have unique powers, Villains are distinct, exploration/upgrading is both natural and encouraged, upgrades are tailored to your hero, and the art is very consistent and thematic.
If you want theme, you have to pay for it: Union City Alliance takes longer than many games (2.5-3 hours), has more upkeep per turn, and has more complicated set-up and interactions. You pay for this incredibly thematic game by having a game that’s more complex.
I want that theme! Union City Alliance would easily make my Top 10 Cooperative SuperHero Games with a 9/10 and it will probably be near the top spot of my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024. It took about 3 years to get Union City Alliance, but I was totally right to make this my #1 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!
Leviathan Wilds was on Kickstarter first in July 2022, but then they pulled it down and re-tooled it: they were on again on May 2023 (see Kickstarter link here) and ended funding at a pretty good level at about $208K. This cooperative boss-battler game was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024 and finally delivered to me in early May 2024 (about 2 weeks ago).
This game has a very interesting theme: it’s basically the old PS2 game Shadow Of The Colossus!
The board game plays 1-4 players, but the original PS2 game was a solo game! In the original PS2 game, players have to take down very large creatures by climbing their huge bodies and attacking certain points, all the while with the Colossus attacking them! It’s a very interesting theme!
In this board game (see sample above), you fight one of 17 Leviathans (you can’t call them Colossus … you wanna get sued?) and win if you can free the Leviathan of its constraints! Leviathan Wilds has a friendlier theme than the original Shadows Of the Colossus: rather than attacking the Leviathan, you are healing the Leviathan by taking out the Binding Crystals. So, when you and your friends cooperatively win … you have freed the Leviathan, rather than killing it!
Let’s take a look!
Unboxing and Gameplay
Players choose a Leviathan to help from the Book of Leviathans.
Each Leviathan is a massive 2-page spread from the book! Sage, above, is the suggested first Leviathan to help.
Each Leviathan has its own small deck of Threat cards (5) and some story cards. See the Introduction above.
The 5 Threat Cards (just below the Leviathan) control what the Leviathan does at the end of the turn(s).
Some Threat Cards attack the current player with an area of effect!
See above as the area of effect above on the Threat Card (it’s just the orthogonally adjacent to the original site). If your climber can get out of the area by the time your activation is complete, you can avoid the attack completely!
At the end of 5 turns, the Threat deck is reshuffled and comes out again. To escalate the game’s difficulty, each Threat Card has two rotations: blue and purple, with the blue rotation being the “harder” challenge! See above!! As the game progresses, more and more of the blue sides are revealed, making the game harder!
To win, players cooperatively must take out all the Binding Crystals (represented by dice) at various points around the Leviathan. See one such Binding Crystal above. You spend Action Points (or cards) to reduce the value of the die, until it is zero, at which point you remove it!
There are quite a number of Binding Crystals set-up at the start of the game (purple and blue: purple Binding Points are straight-forward, blue Binding Points have side-effects). See above.
Each player takes control of one of eight Climbers! These Climbers climb (duh) the Leviathan to take out the Binding Crystals! See the eight different Climbers above and below.
Each climber has a personality and special unique ability: see above. Each climber also has a small hand of cards.
Climbers then choose a Class (one of eight) to play: See above. Each class also adds a number of cards to your deck.
Combined together, the Climber and Class form your personality and your deck! See above as Kestrel the Breaker takes form and becomes a character in the game!
The deck is what powers your character! You have three multi-use cards (in hand) every turn that you can use for Actions Points or their Special Abilities! See above and below.
Players have a certain number of Action Points per turn, depending on which card they play to start their turn. Like we said, the cards are all multi-use cards: you can either play them to get Action Points (upper left corner), or as-is to get its effect (bottom of the card).
There are basic Actions (see above for a list of actions on your character board) that each cost a number of Action Points. Some Climbers (like Kestrel) have special Actions only they can perform with their Action Points.
Every turn, a Threat card comes out, specifying what the Leviathan does. You may/will take that effect after you activate … sometimes you can avoid the effect completely if you play smartly (by either blocking or moving out of the way). The player takes his full activation and DOES STUFF: moving around, playing cards, and trying to take out the Binding Points. Threat cards take effect after the activation, and play moves to the next Climber.
Repeat until players take out all Binding Crystals or lose (by dying)! See above for a winning game with two Climbers!
Cool Things
The number of cards in your deck represents your grip: if your deck (left) is ever empty, you immediately fall until you hit a platform! This deck sort of reminds of Gloomhaven, but rather than the deck being your hit points, the deck represents how “well” you are holding on! It’s a cool ballet in the game, knowing when to rest (to recoup your grip) and when to push ahead (to get stuff done).
The multi-use cards are quite clever: you HAVE to choose a card to play for its Action Points at the start of your turn, but that means you can’t use the special ability on it! It’s a very clever way to make players really think about what they want to do with the cards they have!
The components are pretty top notch in this game.
There’s a lot of variety in this game: there are 64 combinations of Climber/Class, each with their own unique deck! There’s also 17 Leviathans, each with a very different Threat Deck! Some of the fun in this game is exploring the best combos for the different Leviathans! I expect to lose many games as I learn some of the later Leviathans … but with loss comes knowledge on how to win!
It’s also clever that the Threats don’t take effect until AFTER you have activated your turn: this sort of represents the interplay in a Video Game! You see what the Leviathan is about to do, and you can react! Sometimes you can mitigate the effect and sometimes you can’t, but it’s a clever way to that Video Game interplay.
One other multi-use card thing that’s cool is some cards that you play as Action Points have a “blocking” icon underneath the Action Points! If you play Hidden Paths above for 4 Actions Points, that also means you can’t lose any “grip” (cards from your deck) during your activation!
So that means you can using the cards for Action Points as well as possible blocking! That makes the choices even more delicious! The multi-use cards are just fantastic in this game.
Solo Play: Two Modes
So, Congratulations on offering an official solo mode! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) The official solo mode has the solo player operate two characters with a combined deck.
The Solo Play is described on page 11 of the rulebook (see above).
The solo player chooses two Climber and one Class deck, and then combines them to form “the solo deck”: both characters use this same deck for their play. Play alternates between the two Climbers, using that same deck for both characters. The idea, I think, is to reduce management overhead by only having one deck.
This is the official solo mode (above). It is fine. I played and was able to win with the second Leviathan.
However, I think the better solo mode is simply to take complete control of two Climbers, each with their own deck! (Like above)! I like the “solo player takes control of two Climbers with separate decks” rule better than the official solo mode. Why?
The official solo mode has “exceptional” rules you have to remember (only get 7 cards when you rest, both chars fall when the grip runs out, etc).
The solo player with two characters with separate decks is more like the cooperative game; I have to teach my friends this game, so I’d rather just learn the cooperative game as it is!
Basically, the official solo mode has exceptions to the base rules which I have to remember. I’d much rather just play the game in “normal” mode without any exceptions: it makes it that much easier to teach!
Both solo modes are very fine and very fun and very playable. The official solo mode has less management and takes up less space (see above). The unofficial solo mode with two Climbers and two decks requires operating more cards and takes up more space, but it feels more like the normal game (see below). I personally prefer the latter: play as if it were a 2-Player game, just alternating between the characters. Decide for yourself! They both work!
Cooperative Mode
Cooperative mode works great! Sara had a chance to watch a rules playthrough earlier, so we were able to jump right in!
We tended to mostly play our own characters, with a little bit of coordination about which Binding Crystals to go after. I think each player felt very different: my Climber/Class had a lot of blocking power, and Sara’s never saw a single blocking card!
Sara also reminded of a rule that tends to evoke more cooperation … you can throw Mushrooms to each other! The maps have some Mushrooms (see above) scattered about! And Mushrooms all do good things! You can throw a mushroom to help your compatriot … if you are close enough!
Generally, this game went over very well ! The theme really impressed by friends, they loved the art, and they loved the quick 60-minute game!
I think the amount of cooperation depends a little on the Climber/Class pairs you choose. The “Saavy” Climber (see above) tends to be very useful at helping everyone in the game at some point, so playing “Saavy” will elicit more cooperation! “Fix” (above), on the other hand, is just focused on “Hit It Harder”, so he will tend to just do his own thing.
The amount of cooperation will depend on a lot of things: the Climbers, the Classes, the Mushrooms, and the topology of the Leviathan! The game may feel multi-player solitaire in some games, and incredibly cooperative in other games!
Conclusion
Leviathan Wilds was, luckily, a good game! I was a little nervous about it, because frankly I hadn’t heard too much about it from any other source. But I think this game is great! It has some really unique ideas that make it feel almost like a video game: deferring Threat activation until after the player finishes, player cards that can be played instantly, multi-use cards, Threat Cards that rotate to get harder (levelling up!), and a Leviathan topology to maneuver!
I am a big fan of this game: the official solo mode works well enough (although I prefer the unofficial solo mode), but the cooperative mode works even better. There’s not too many rules, the game is a short 60 minutes, and yet it feels like this is a deep game with lots of replayability! The Climber/Class combination system works great for keeping the game interesting! The 17 Leviathans give the players lost of creatures to help!
This is a fun, fun game. Right now it sits at an 8.5/10 for me, but this could easily go up to a 9 or 9.5. This totally deserved to be on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! It’s a blast!
Set A Watch: Doomed Run (see above) took over my life and my game table (see below) for 10 days in late April 2024.
For those of you who don’t know, Set A Watch: Doomed Run is a campaign game set in the Set A Watch universe from Rock Manor games. If you don’t know what Set A Watch is, check out our reviews of the three standalone games: Set A Watch (see link here), Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin (see link here), and Set A Watch: Forbidden Isles (see link here). The summary: Set A Watch is a cooperative dice-placement game set in a fantasy universe. Four characters work together to travel home, fighting monsters along the way.
Set A Watch: a cooperative fighting game: protect the campfire!
The most recent Kickstarter (above) introduced us to two products: the standalone expansion Set A Watch: Forbidden Isles and the campaign version of this game called Set A Watch: Doomed Run. We reviewed Set A Watch: Forbidden Isles about a month ago (see our review here).
After a very long (but fun) 10 days, we were able to play through all of the entire campaign of Set A Watch: Doomed Run. Let’s take a look below!
Unboxing
Set A Watch: Doomed Run is a pretty big box: see Coke can above for scale. The box is definitely taller than the soda can!
Right when you open the box, there’s a little pamphlet telling you how to organize everything: we’ll come back this later …
In the top section of the box is the game board, the rulebook, the board, some extra characters, and a Foreteller: Doomed Run advertisement. Foreteller is an app that will use professional actors to read parts of the story to you … but you must buy it separately!
The original Set A Watch game(s) are self-contained with fairly small boxes where the board is the wrap-around board: see above.
The box here for Doomed Run is huge, so there’s no wrap-around board! The board just comes in the box: see below. But basically, the board is the same: it’s the dice placement board where the player who “stays back” chooses his actions.
Most of the box is surprisingly empty:
“Wait, how much did I just pay for an almost empty box???” Well, there’s two answers to that question …
First, there’s some content hidden under the top plastic divider!
This is a campaign game! Each stage of the campaign has extra cards packed into the appropriate Realm envelope: see above.
There’s some new locations, some new creatures, some new Unhallowed, some new ability cards, a few new summons, some new dice, and some dividers: see above! There’s more than you think in here … and at the same time, there’s not. What do we mean by that?
The Elephant In The Room
The elephant in the room is that you need to own all three standalone gamesSet A Watch, Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin, and Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles (and the Outriders small expansion) in order to play Doomed Run! See above. That’s right, you have to love this game enough to have bought all the content available!
The Doomed Run campaign pulls content from every single expansion over the course of the campaign!! See above: I have each expansion separated out so I can pull the appropriate cards.
For example: take a look at the rulebook above! It describes all the cards you need for Realm 1 (the first act of the campaign). The cards needed for Realm 1 are taken from the four expansions AND the Doomed Run box!
That’s why the Doomed Run box is so empty! They want you to store ALL OF YOUR EXPANSIONS in it!! Again, we will discuss this more later …
Rulebook
The Doomed Run rulebook is good.
I think the Doomed Run rulebook may get the best score on The Chair Test we’ve seen in some time! It’s an A!!! It fits perfectly on the chair next to me, the rulebook stays open, the font is big enough to read, and it’s a good font! It would probably get an A+ on the Chair Test if there were a few more pictures and it had a slightly bigger font!
The components page is well-marked: it does suffer from a lot of the cards being the envelopes, so you can’t pull all the cards out and “correlate them”! But the label at the top of the page clearly says “..some components listed here are separated and stored within the Realm envelopes in the box….” At least they show what the components look like!
The Set-Up spans 4 pages (!), but it does show a nice picture you can use. Part of the extra pages are needed because … this is a campaign game! This is significantly harder to set-upDoomed Run than the plain vanilla version of Set A Watch.
There’s discussions about winning and losing and saving the game …
Some save sheets:
But the most important thing is that the rulebook has the list of the cards needed for each of the 7 Realms (each Realm is an act of the campaign): See an example of Realm 7 list below. Note that each Realm has some flavor text on the left, with the cards needed on the right.
There is a no index (boo), but there is a Glossary (yay: see above).
The rulebook ends with a record of how you did in each Realm!
Overall, this rulebook was pretty good: A solid A on the Chair Test, good components, good set-up, readable font, and fair number of pictures.
My only complaints are more rules themselves: they could have been a little better! For example, I know that I read that Mythic Items don’t get discarded between realms, but I went absolutely spare trying to find the rule! You’d think it would be listed under Mythic Items section, yes? Or under the Set-Up? Only in Ending A Realm, a sentence says “Any Adventures not selected as the Warden must discard all their non-Mythic items”. I would have tried to be clearer! It’s okay to repeat yourself to make rules clearer! I would have:
(a) said this in a positive way: “Adventurers keep all Mythic Items between Realms, but return all non-Mythic items to the Items deck“
(b) reiterated this rule in the Mythic Items section
(c) made space on the Doomed Run historical record as a place to record each character’s Mythic Items (as they have space for all the Warden’s items). To be fair, the Mythic Items are listed on the Save Sheet Expeditions page, but it’s not clear that you keep them … and in fact, I never used the Save Sheet Expeditions page! I played through each Realm in one sitting, so I never used them!
(d) put this in a FAQ (see below)
As the campaign went on, there were several times when we had questions: a FAQ (that we’ve seen in the previous Set A Watch rulebooks) might have been nice.
So, the rulebook could have used a little more work. A FAQ and a few reiterations would have been helpful. So, the rulebook was good … it could have been great.
New Idea: Side Quests
There’s now Side Quests: at the start of every Expedition, players choose of one of 3 Side Quests to take! See above for three samples Side Quests! Basically, player take one, trash one, and put the third away. Now, these Side Quests aren’t little adventures that take time away from the game: they are just cards with a cost and a reward! The cost is pretty varied, but the reward is almost always either (a) a new Character to add to the party (b) a Mythic Item.
For example: if you want to get the Healing Staff (above) for the Cleric (so worth it!), you have to exhaust 3 ability cards! This is another place where the rulebook doesn’t do a good job explaining! Do you pay the cost immediately? Do you pay it as you play? Do you get the reward immediately after you pay the cost? Or do you get the reward at the end? This was poorly specified in the rulebook. We played so that we “generally” payed the cost at the start of the Expedition and got the Reward at the end; it was unclear.
Still, the Side Quest idea was cool: it made the players talk and strategize about the directions of the party: what do they want to focus on? The new characters are important, as they shape the direction of your campaign: you need diversity for new Wardens! You also really need new characters for sheer numbers: your characters can die the campaign, so you need to always have four characters available or you immediately lose!
New Idea: Wardens
At the start of every Realm (after the first), the players can choose one character to become a Warden and watch the Kingdom! There are two major benefits to choosing a character to be a Warden:
Each Warden offers a special good effect at the start of the Realm
A Warden keeps all of his items (both Mythic and non-Mythic) between Realms, whereas most characters can only keep the Mythic items (the non-Mythics go back to the item deck). (See what I did there? I repeated information to make it clearer).
For example, the Cleric (above), when he becomes a Warden makes it so the characters start with all abilities refreshed! (Usually, each player starts the Realm with one ability exhausted).
You can see on the Record above that the Cleric got the Healing Staff (so good!), as well as two other items. In my campaign, the Cleric was the Warden for Realm 2, which allowed the players to start fully healed! See below.
The only problem is that the character who is currently stands as a Warden CANNOT PLAY the current Realm! They can play later Realms (and come back with all their stuff), and indeed, the Cleric came back in my final Realm (spoiler alert!).
The Warden idea was really nice: it forced players to have a new character sit out every Realm and add a new character in! New characters were slowly cycled in and out over the whole campaign! It kept the campaign fresh!!! Over the coarse of 7 Realms, I got to play 4 + (7-1) = 10 characters! I’d keep three of the same characters as I moved from Realm to Realm (for consistency, since I had just played them and wanted to keep their play style active in my cache), but I would add a new character in at every Realm!
I really liked how the Warden system gave you a reason to keep cycling in new characters into the campaign! This was a very cool mechanism to force new blood!
New Idea: Nemesis
You might also notice the Cleric has a Nemesis notated on his Warden card: the Sewer Ghoul! See above. What does that mean?
This means that, whenever the Cleric is one of the four characters in play (not a Warden), the Sewer Ghoul must be shuffled into the Creature deck! In other words, it makes the game a little harder by having more creatures! The Nemesis seems to specifically targeted to the character and his powers! For example, the Cleric has can simply Cleanse Undead to get rid of the Sewer Ghouls if they show up …
The Nemesis idea worked okay: I think they are mostly to help balance the game a little. For example: The WarriorNemesis is needed to keep the big dice of the Warrior under control … see below.
The Enraged Farmer Nemesis (above) is pretty hefty! But the Warrior is a heavy-hitting character, so it helps balance out the Creatures so they are more balanced with the characters.
The Nemesis idea worked, but the idea made the game slightly more fiddly; I had to go hunting for the cards many times (“Oops! I forgot the Nemesis!“)! Since each character has a unique Nemesis, there is some looking around.
At least the Warden card tells you which game the Nemesis comes from! The little scarab next to the Nemesis name means Doomed Run: see above.
The Nemesis idea was slightly annoying to remember to seed the Creature deck, but it did seem to work.
New Idea: Mythic Items
We’ve mentioned Mythic Items several times previously during this review: they can only be obtained as a Reward from a Side Quest: see above.
As we said, Mythic Items persist between Realms, so it’s really great to get them if you can! Unfortunately, only the character listed on the Item can use it! The Healing Staff? Only the Cleric can use it!
There’s exactly one Mythic Item for each character. But, I think Mythic Items are probably my favorite new part of the game?!?! They felt so cool! When a character finally got their Mythic Item, they felt so cool and powerful!!
The only problem with Mythic Items: It was a bit of a crapshoot when choosing Side Quests though: Don’t you always want the Mythic Item? Only if you had or had a chance of getting the character who can use it! If you have already “thrown away” the Ranger, you don’t want to Side Quest for the Multiplying Arrow … no one can ever use it! (Although, every Mythic Item counts for points towards your final score). The Side Quest mechanism really did make these Mythic Items feel precious … and when you got them! Wowiee!!! So cool!
Mythic Items were very thematic and fun: they were my favorite part of the game. The Mythic Items reminded me of old games of Dungeons and Dragons when your Paladin got the +5 Holy Sword! It felt so cool!
New Idea: Game Break
The base game of Set A Watch is about an hour of playtime: players have 9 Locations to get through, and it moves along quickly. In Doomed Watch, however, each Realm is a little longer than the base game! Each Doomed Watch Realm has about 12-15 Locations (depending on where you are in the campaign), with later Realms being longer. The new notion of a Game Break comes after 4 Locations!
The Game Break seemed to do a bunch of things:
Keep the coins from accumulating too much
Cycle Side Quests in and out quickly so you see more of them
Keep the Creature deck “fresh”
The Game Break is also a natural save point for the game: since the Realms are longer runs, this gives the players a natural place to save the game if needed. The rulebook has some pages for saving (see below), or you can download some sheets from the Rock Manor website.
I never used the Save Sheet (above) because I always saved games between Realms, never at a Game Break.
To be clear: each Realm in the Doomed Watch campaign is longer than a base game of Set A Watch. Over the course of the campaign, I saw Realms take about 2 to 3 hours. The Game Break helps add more “save points” to the game.
Doomed Run Campaign
My Doomed Run campaign took place over 10 days. I played about one Realm a day (skipping a few days here and because of work): the earlier Realms were about 2 hours apiece, but the later Realms became longer and longer. I think the final Realm (Realm 7) was 3 hours of playtime.
To emphasize, that’s 2-3 hours of playtime! The set-up and tear-down for each Realm was also pretty hefty! I think it’d take upwards of 45 minutes to set-up and 20 minutes to tear-down. The issue is that you have to put cards back in the appropriate place!
Each card in the game is marked with where it comes from on the lower right of the card, mostly. Each Realm tells you where to get the cards from: see below for Realm 2.
After the game was over, I would spend some time putting cards back where they belong during tear-down so I could find them again.
To summarize, each Realm was about 30-40 minutes of Set-Up, 2-3 hours of gameplay, and 20 minutes of teardown. I think my final Realm was a 4 hour game: 40 minutes of set-up, 3 hours of play, and 20 minutes of tear-down. Whew! There was a lot of overhead in setting up and tearing down games.
But Was It Fun?
Yes! It was fun! I love the Set A Watch system! The newer ideas of Wardens, Side Quests, Mythic Items really helped evolve the game! There were new things to think about, new ways to strategize, and just more decisions. I don’t think I would played through all 7 Realms unless I was having fun! I really do like this game! I really feel involved at every step of the game, and the strategies of choosing Side Quests, characters to play, Items to buy, who to watch the fire, when to cull the Horde, when to cull the Unhallowed, and so many other things … keep the game from just being a “roll dice and kill things” game.
I’ve said it before: I like that dice can be used for their value AND/OR to activate character abilities! If you have a good roll, you can straight up do great damage! But, even bad rolls can be useful when you activate abilities!
Solo And Cooperative
The majority of the Doomed Run I played solo: this means I ran four characters at the same time. I admit, when I first encountered that “you must play four characters” for the solo game back in the original Set A Watch, I was a little turned off! The typical problems of context switching and game elongation rear their ugly head, but I’ve since grown to love the solo game. I love to think and contemplate, so even if the solo game takes twice as long as the multi-player cooperative game, that’s okay! I like the puzzle it presents! What’s the best way to use the three characters on watch? It’s so much fun to reason that out!
However, I was able to slot in two 2-Player games during the campaign! Teresa filled in for Realm 4 (see above) and did a great job!
And Sam filled in for Realm 6! See above. The two-player games just mean we play 2 characters each, but we still have fun communicating and strategizing together! In fact, I was worried Sam wouldn’t have fun with the Merchant character (see above), but he ended up having a great time!
It was VERY EASY to put new players in and out of the game! If some player doesn’t make it one week, or someone else comes, it’s still really easy to just slot them in to the game! Since new characters are cycling in and out all the times (partly because of the Warden idea), it’s much easier to slide new players in and out! Honestly, that makes this an easier campaign game to get to the table! Your group can change every week during a campaign of Doomed Run, and everyone would still have fun playing!
So, Doomed Run is a campaign where you can play both solo and cooperatively, changing the player makeup every game!
Theme or No Theme?
Is there a lot of theme here? Yes and no. When you are playing a Realm, it feels very thematic! This Realm has been built to have Goblins, or Undead, or some other theme to it. The game, when you are playing, feels very thematic as monsters come out and you have to deal with them!
BUT … the Doomed Run campaign itself, wasn’t particularly thematic. There’s some flavor text at the start of the Realm that sets the stage … and that’s about it. It doesn’t feel like the Reams are particularly connected. The Doomed Run idea is great: it’s an excuse to play all the Set A Watch content! But did I ever feel like I was playing through an integrated campaign with twists and turns? Nah.
The upside of the campaign being less-than-thematic means that it’s easier to bring in cycle in new players and characters (see the Solo and Cooperative section above). It also means you don’t really need to buy the Foreteller text for this: really, it doesn’t look worth it! The only thing it will do is read is the little blurb at the start of each Realm … which you can do in 2 minutes. And like I said, eh, it wasn’t that thematic.
When you are playing, the game is thematic and fun! But the theme and integration of the campaign is a whole isn’t really there. If you are looking for a campaign with lots of play twists, theme, decisions, branching narrative … Doomed Run is not the game for you. It’s still a fun game, but it’s just not particularly thematic overall.
Mixing and Matching
I really like Set A Watch: Doomed Run. But there are some things to be aware of.
First, you need to buy absolutely everything Rock Manor has made for Set A Watch to play the Doomed Run campaign: Set A Watch, Swords of the Coin, Forsaken Isles, The Outriders and Doomed Run itself! That will be a non-starter for most people.
It’s hard to reset the campaign! The Doomed Watch does NOT tell you what’s in each envelope! I think each envelope should have had a manifest, or at least labelled them!
Bizzarely, the Side Quests were labelled appropriately! I could immediately tell the Poison Recipe Side Quest belonged back in envelope for Realm 7 because of the R7!!
Luckily, I was taking pictures (for this review) as I went, so I was able to piece what was in the envelopes, but the cards were not labelled! It have been nice if the lower right of the card said DR1, for Doomed Run Realm, and DR2 for Doomed Run Realm 2, etc … (just like they did for the Side Quests!!) As you play, make sure you take pictures of what’s in the envelopes!
Although the Creatures, Unhallowed, and Locations are marked with which game they come from, it’s not clear some times! There was no legend in the Doomed Run rulebook which explained all the symbols! The flower symbol (on the Locations) above means Doomed Run, but which deck? I don’t know!!
Even worse, the Items cards are completely unlabelled! I want to be able to separate all my decks out when I am done, but I can’t resort the items! So, for my entire game, I only used the items from the Swords of the Coin deck!!! At least then, I knew which deck they went back to when I was done!
The ability cards are unlabelled as well, but it’s not as big a deal as you can always figure out which box (or envelope … if you take pictures) the cards came from, as each Set A Watch lists the characters that come with it.
This seems like a big deal: I wish that Rock Manor had labelled the cards better. It made it very difficult to reset your game. I did it, but the pictures I took helped me. If you decide to take the plunge, make sure you take pictures of what’s in each envelope!
Storage
The first thing in the pamphlet is the recommended storage: they want you to unpack all of your Set A Watch games and combine them in the Doomed Run box! Nope nope nope nope nope.
I want to keep my games separate! The base game is so easy to pull out and play! If you, all of a sudden, mix everything in one box, it muddies the experience! When Set A Watch should be a quick game to set-up, play, and tear-down, putting everything in the Doomed Watch will make this so much harder to bring to the table. The base game is small and approachable. The Doomed Run box is daunting. If I ever want my friends to play Set A Watch again … the games have to stay separated!!
In the end, I opened up and placed all the Set A Watch games on my table, visually separated so I could easily correlate which games held which content! See above!! I hated the idea of combining all my games into one box (especially since cards like the Items are unseparable and unlabelled)! So, I played with one half of my table taken up. It worked for me, but you may not have the space to try this solution.
It turns out you can have your cake and eat it too … you can actually store all 3 Set A Watch boxes (and the Outriders expansion) in the Doomed Run box without separating the games out! See above! Basically, the games slotted into the big bay on the left (see above).
So, I can store all my Set A Watch together, but not have the terrible terrible consequences of combining everything! That’s a win in my book.
My recommendation: do not separate the games out.
Conclusion
It’s hard to recommend Set A Watch: Doomed Run. You have to buy four expansions and the Doomed Run box to even play this! Yet, over 10 days in April 2024, I had a blast playing through this campaign! It’s rare that I get so excited that I want to play a campaign this long, but I love the Set A Watch cooperative dice-placement system so much that I couldn’t stop playing!
This campaign is unique because you can easily combine solo and cooperative play through out the campaign! The Warden system encourages cycling characters in and out, which makes it easy to cycle in new players as well! Although this cycling is a great feature, it partly comes from the overall campaign being fairly athematic: it’s easy to cycle in new players and characters partly because there is no theme connecting the acts of the campaign. Be aware: Doomed Run isn’t a deep, thoughtful campaign with lots of twists and turns! Doomed Run is really just an excuse to play through all the content of this game system.
If you find yourself intrigued by this campaign, pick up any of the Set A Watch base games and make sure you like it! If you find yourself wanting more, you can always get more expansions … and if, like me, you find yourself loving the Set A Watch gameplay, maybe the Doomed Run campaign makes sense to get. You just gotta get all the content!!
Doomed Run made my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! And I am happy that I got it! It will probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 this year! I had a blast playing it this year, and I expect I will play through it again in the future.
I picked up The Revenant Society from Kickstarter from March 2023, just about a year ago (it is late April 2024 at the time of this writing): see link here. This game seemed to be the unholy fusion of both a board game and a Role Playing Game (RPG). It has a core rules book, but also many supporting cards and tokens: see below.
What you see above is the pledge level The Revenant Society: Deluxe Box Set (for $75). There was also the option to just get just the core book in physical form ($40) or electronic PDF ($20). Anyone who has been following my blog for a while knows I prefer the physical copies, so I got the Deluxe Box Set (the exact one in the picture above).
What is The Revenant Society? The basic premise is that you have been murdered, but you are given a chance to come back as an undead creature to solve your murder! It many ways, it’s like Groundhog Day (the movie), as you repeat the same day over and over, hoping to find clues to lead you to your murderer! If you fail to solve your mystery after four days, you are stuck in the loop of your last day forever!
What a great premise! I was immediately drawn in and backed this.
The PDF delivered in late March 2024 (I have the PDF labelled as March 29th) from Drive Thru RPG. It has my name and my order number smeared on a number of pages, so don’t ask me to share this with you!
The physical copy of the box delivered in mid April 2024 (about April 16th).
This review is going to take a weird arc: we ended up playing the PDF version of the game in our first session, and then the physical version of the game in our second session! So, we’ll discuss how each sessions went: electronic PDF version vs physical version!
RPG or Board Game?
Is this more of an RPG or more of a board game? The little minis (above) and the cards (below) that come with the game offer some suggestion this has more than a little board game DNA.
After reading the rules and playing a few times, I can tell you this is 95% an RPG and 5% a board game! The boards that you use are “nice” for helping you keep track of events in the game, and the cards and tokens are useful like a board game, but at the end of the day, this is really an RPG!
The biggest clue that this is an RPG is that one player has to be the Dungeon Master (or DM) or Game Master (or GM): they are called the Fate Weaver! The Fate Weaver has to run the game for the other players, just like a GM would. A further clue is that this system is based on an RPG system called the Apocalypse: a lot of modern RPGs are “Powered by the Apocalypse“! So, this is really an RPG with just a touch of board game elements to keep track of a few things.
If you find yourself interested in this, be aware! This is really an RPG where one player (The Fate Weaver) will have to invest a lot of time learning and setting-up an adventure for this friends: this is not really a board game.
Session 0: Getting Ready
So, I ended up being the Fate Weaver and picking an adventure to run: this means I had to do a lot of reading and set-up to get ready! The core Revenant Society rulebook comes with six scenarios, and another expansion PDF (that comes with the deluxe version) another four scenarios. The game is set in either Paris France 1910s or New York City USA 1920s: about half the scenarios are in Paris (see map below), and the other half in New York.
Since the deluxe version hadn’t arrived yet, I made due with using the PDF version. This means I had to print out a lot of stuff to hand out to my players! See below all the stuff I have to print out!
Probably half the stuff I printed you didn’t need: some of it I wasn’t sure, so I printed it, and the other half you can just show the players some pages from the rulebook on your PDF. But you still need to print a awful lot of stuff! Luckily, this is ALL IN THE PDF RULEBOOK!! You just have to print the appropriate pages (near the end of the book).
Over the course of about four days, I read the rulebook a couple of times (it’s like 284 pages, but most of that page count is scenarios at the back of the book/print-outs); I tried to figure out what I needed to print.
I ended up using a paper cutter (see above) to help with some of that.
After reading the rules, re-reading the rules, choosing a scenario, and printing everything I needed, I felt ready to run the game.
Session 1: Paris Scenario: The Petals of Belladona
Like most RPGS, each player needs to create a character to run through the scenario. There are six basic archetypes in the game (one is “The Glamorous”: see above): each player chooses one and expounds on that basic framework to create a more personalized character.
So, my friends and I met for the first session. I had planned to “just” create the characters and explain the game! I “expected” that to last 2 hours, but it went very quickly! We got the characters created and got the the gist of the game in 45 minutes. So, GULP! We just jumped right in!
I think the reason it went so well was because I had spent a lot of time preparing, so I didn’t have to lookup too much stuff as we played! Don’t get me wrong: I still had to make up a lot of stuff as we played … which is typical: most Dungeon Master/Game Master have to be creative and make up stuff to respond to their players.
In the end, we made it through Loop 1 (where we uncovered a lot of the story) and ended with a dramatic reveal! This was all by the seat of my pants, but I think it went well.
Even though we had cheesy cut-out components, it actually worked pretty well. Again, it was probably because I over-prepared so I think I knew everything we would need.
We liked the game enough to want to play again! So, we looked at our schedules and decided to try again in two weeks!
Meanwhile …
While we were waiting to meet again, the physical copy came in the mail!
Instead of cheesy cut-outs, we now have real tokens! Real cards! Real boards! Real dice! And dry-erase boards to boot!
Probably the most exciting piece was the physical copy of the core book! See above and below!
I took a picture with a can of Coke to show how thick the book actually was! It’s a big boy!
In fact, I was worried about stripping the binding, so I made sure to open it and slowly open parts of the book so the binding would get some equal wear and tear as I opened it. We used to do this to all our AD&D books growing up … it keeps the binding fit!
So rather than a sheet of memories (used to generate content) like above from the PDF …
We get a full deck of cards from the physical edition! See above.
Instead of cheesy cut-outs (like above) …
We get plastic minis!
On the left, you see all the things I printed from the PDF … and on the right, you see the physical components.
A bit of a surprise was the character sheets in the deluxe version are dry-erase!
The deluxe version even comes with dry-erase pens!
The map is much nicer too. See the map of Paris above.
Besides the book, probably the nicest component was the Fate Weaver screen!
So, basically, everything now has “deluxe” pieces: the next time we play, we’ll move to the new pieces!
Session 2: Playing Loop 2 With The Deluxe Components
So, in our second Loop of the game, we embraced all the deluxe components. We decided quickly that the dry-erase boards are terrible for writing lots of text (upper left uses pencil-and-paper), but good for writing simple adjustments and damage (upper right uses dry-erase board).
We also put some ultra-fine dry erase pens on standby, but we didn’t need them (because we didn’t write any text on the dry-erase boards, just simple marks). See above as I have the Fate Weaver Screen and the big old Revenant Society core book in front of me.
I ended up putting some markers in the book to remind myself where certain sections were: I found out very quickly that this beautiful book DOES NOT have an index!
Sara ended up using a notebook to take notes through the adventure: she was never tempted to use the dry-erase boards. I will say that the map looks a lot better (see above) and the Fate Loop board is much easier to use with the dry-erase boards.
In the end, we had fun playing. I think we took the game a little less seriously in the second game …
We ended up bringing a very saucy NPC named “Skully” into the mystery … see Teresa cradle Skully in her arm. (They had to wrap Skully in something to shut him up … Skully liked to talk a little too much!)
We went ahead and finished our story that night, completing the second Loop and solving the mystery of the deaths!
We had fun.
Probably the place where the Deluxe Component shone most brightly was the One-Shot Loop dry-erase board with the little Watchers: that seemed to work the best of all the deluxe components. See above.
Well-Crafted Murder Mystery?
After getting through the game, I realized this was not what I expected: the game labels itself with the byline ‘Solve the mystery of your own death in this role playing game‘ (see the cover above). What I thought this meant was that The Revenant Society would provide several well-crafted mysteries for the players to solve. No no no no no no. That’s not at ALL what this game was! This a game where the players make-up-what-they-want about their character and most of the story and the Fate Weaver simply “responds” and tries to push the game in certain directions.
For example, take a look at the clue above: this is something the Fate Weaver is required to physically pass to the player at some point during the game. But this is not a clue about this mystery, this is the player making-up whatever-the-heck-they-want to answer the question!
Another example: at the beginning of every Loop, there are “questions” the Fate Weaver asks the players! (See above) And the players answer whatever-the-heck-they-want!
Detective: City of Angels Box Lid
If you were expecting something like Detective: City of Angels, or Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (or many games on our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) with well-crafted mysteries, thoughtful clues, and meaningful timelines, that IS NOT what The Revenant Society is! This is a game about the Fate Weaver and the players collaboratively making up whatever-the-heck-they-want. (Well, the timelines are actually fairly well-defined, so I take that part back).
I’ll be honest, I am very disappointed in what The Revenant Society is: I admit that I prefer my mysteries to be well-crafted and thoughtful! I was hoping to be a GM that slowly guided the players to the final solution, by dropping clues and hints as they played. What I got was a game where players do whatever-the-heck-they-want, and I, as the Fate Weaver have to somehow rectify that with the world and mystery they inhabit.
You might say “Well, play the way you want to then! Make up a well-crafted mystery and present that to the players!” I thought about that, but the mechanisms already in the game keep prodding the players to make-up whatever-the-heck-they-want: unless you alter the game drastically, this is a terrible framework RPG for well-crafted mysteries.
This isn’t what I wanted: I usually hate these kind of games, because they remind me of the TV Show: LOST. Things just happen with no cohesion or thought, and frequently things just don’t make sense or get resolved. I really hate shows like that: I want my shows (and my games) to be thoughtful.
Despite
Despite this NOT being a well-crafted mystery, I still had fun running it. Once I set my expectations for what this game is, I did the best I could to stay in the moment.
My friends loved the setting and the idea of a Groundhog Day meets Murder game!
I also did get some enjoyment trying to take my friends’ crazy ideas and turn them into a well-crafted mystery as much as I could! I have seen so many murder mystery shows, read so many books, played so many murder games, that I feel like I do have a chance to turn my player’s crazy actions into a well-crafted mystery. So I did enjoy it, once I got into it.
And Skully ended up being an unexpected fun NPC, even though he hit on Sara the entire night … but that’s just what Skully does.
A Comparison To Spirit of 77
My major compliant with the Revenant Society is that it really doesn’t have well-crafted mysteries: players just make up stuff as they go, and the DM/GM has to rectify what they do.
Spirit of 77: Get the Funk Out!
Another RPG I played that has this same “make-up-stuff-as-you-go” style is Spirit of ’77 … and I loved that style there!! See out review of Spirit of ’77 here! What’s the difference? Why do I love this in Spirit of ’77 and hate this is The Revenant Society? At the end of the day, the purpose of Spirit of ’77 is to make each other laugh! So, anything that takes the game in a weird direction is welcome! To me, the purpose of The Revenant Society is to solve a mystery (and it even says that on the cover of the book), so the “make-up-stuff-as-you-go” style doesn’t lend itself to any kind of well-crafted mystery.
Maybe if you love this setting in 1910’s Paris or 1920’s New York, you don’t care as much about the well-crafted mystery as I do.
The Book
We have to stay something great about the book: it’s very beautiful production. It’s very readable! It has a lot of (it looks like) well-researched history around the two eras of interest (Paris 1910s and New York 1920s)! The font is good sized! In general, it looks fantastic and is almost a piece of art.
Physical vs. Electronic
If you are interested in this game, should you get a Physical version (the Deluxe Components or just the book) or the Electronic version (PDF)?
Those of you know who know me would expect me to say “Get the Physical Product!” And you’d be wrong.
First, let’s talk about the Deluxe version.
Using dry-erase markers is a terrible idea for any meaningful amount of text!!! We saw this waaaay back in our review of The Forests of Admiron (see link here). First of all, the deluxe game comes with fat dry-erase markers … and they are hard to read! See below.
If you really want dry-erase markers, you need ultra-fine to have any chance of them working well.
In the end, Sara’s pen and paper system worked SO MUCH better: See above. We tried it both ways (pen-and paper in Session 1 and dry-erase boards in Session 2): pen-and-paper worked so much better. You really don’t want the dry-erase boards: they are clumsy, messy, and harder to read/write.
I do admit the map looks better (see above), but everything still works fine in PDF printed version (see below).
I am really not convinced the Deluxe version is worth all the extra money, and in fact, makes the game worse with the dry-erase markers!
Should you just get the physical book then? I mean, it it gorgeous and a beautiful production. That’s up to you: left to my own devices, I would just get the PDF. Why? For one, the PDF is electronically searchable, and the physical book DOES NOT HAVE AN INDEX!! For a book with 280+ pages, I am very surprised there is no index: how do you look up stuff in the physical version??? Answer, you can’t without a lot of searching. The only way to really look stuff up quickly is electronically to search the PDF.
Another reason: A lot of the stuff I want to print out comes from the PDF only! I had trouble finding the PDF pages I wanted online … I could only print them from the PDF I owned (to be fair: if you get the Physical version, I think you also get the PDF as well).
The most important thing to print for the players in the Basic Moves! See above!! Players consult this sheet ALL THE TIME: why was it not one of the things printed in the deluxe version? I went out of my way to make sure each one of my players had a copy of the Basic Moves (they could have maybe gotten away with this by putting the Basic Moves on the outside of the Fate Weaver screen, but the Fate Weaver screen has no useful info on the outside).
In the end, you the Fate Weaver still has to print the clues from the scenario (see the Hopeful clue #1), so what’s printing a few more sheets?
In the end, the pen-and-paper approach worked best, with my searchable PDF being preferable to the physical copy of the book (which has no index???). And my laptop also served as a Fate Weaver screen as well: see above. Overall, I strongly preferred the electronic PDF version of this: the dry-erase player boards of the deluxe version just didn’t work that well. I needed to print quite a bit from the PDF anyways, so even though the deluxe version has some nice components, it wasn’t worth the extra money.
Conclusion
Would I get The Revenant Society again? Even though I did enjoy my plays of this once I set my expectations, it wasn’t really what I wanted … but I would still play again. I wanted a murder mystery game with well-crafted mysteries: that’s not what this is. If you like the idea of playing in this thematic world with your friends, I think you can have a great time: we actually had a great time after setting our expectations!! If the game does sound interesting to you, I strongly suggest you get just the PDF version of the game: you find yourself having to print stuff from the PDF anyways, so you might as well print everything you need at once. We found the dry-erase boards experience from the Deluxe version lesser than a pen-and-paper experience, so even with all the cool stuff from the Deluxe version, it just didn’t seem worth it.
I did enjoy trying to turn the crazy ideas of my players into a well-crafted mystery as much as I could. But the game mechanisms in The Revenant Society don’t really lend itself to any thoughtful crafting: said mechanisms are too ingrained as a “make-stuff-up-you-go” style. This game is just antithetical to any thoughtful mystery crafting . I enjoyed my plays of The Revenant Society, I might even GM a few more games, but I wouldn’t pick it up again.
Maybe you would enjoy living in this world and having fun collaboratively putting together a mystery: decide for yourself! Just be aware, this is not a game with well-crafted mysteries.
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