Kinfire Chronicles was a game on Kickstarter back in September 2022. My copy arrived at my house in late July 2023, being early by one week! The Kickstarter originally promised delivery in August 2023, and it actually arrived early! Is this the start of a new trend? My Race To The Raft (from a few weeks ago) arrived early from its Kickstarter!

Kinfire Chronicles is cooperative dungeon crawling type game for 1-4 players.

The game box says 45-60 minutes, but I suspect that really varies, as there are quite a number of scenarios in the box! It probably really depends on the scenario. The Age 14+ seems appropriate, but the art makes me think younger players will be attracted to the game …

The game has almost a comic book vibe and art style, which might be appealing to younger players, but I think the game is complex enough to require older (14+) players.

Unboxing

The Kickstarter delivery box was pretty big: see the Coke can for scale.

So I backed the Kickatarter game at The Premium Collection Level, which means I get an extra box called the Upgrade Kit … which has some cool upgrades we’ll see later.

The base box and the Upgrade Kit are both pretty big boys!

I am spending a lot of time on the unboxing because this is a weird beast. First of all, notice the pull tab? That’s so you can pull out the board. But, you might not notice at first: the top and left and right of the box IS A GAME BOARD!

Weird, huh? The pull tab pulls out the Welcome box (see above). Word of Warning!! don’t pull too hard on the pull tab! I accidentally tore my box a little:

The Welcome Box includes the Map Atlas:

This Map Atlas makes me think this is going to be something like Artisans of Splendent Vale, with combat taking place on the map (and it does: see above): it also has an Artisans of Splendent Vale vibe from the art too (see below)?

Below the Map Atlas are the rest of the intro components.

There are some hit point wheels to make your characters, tokens, and the instruction manual.

The cards and nice and Linen-finished. The wheels (for notating hit points) were just “okay”, they kind of slipped and slided in the plastic knobs. They worked, and the instructions for putting them together were good, but they felt cheap.

Below the Welcome Box are a bunch of other boxes! These boxes look like “Adventure Boxes” (and indeed, the joke was that this looked like a DVD collection).

Other boxes are character boxes: the game comes with six characters you can play: see above.

Finally, the big box above the DVD collection is a box full of “unlocks”. You aren’t supposed to open it, but I peeked inside real quick: it looks like a bunch of cards that will get unlocked as you play.

The components are really nice, the art style is comic-booky and consistent, and the boxes all forbode that a lot of adventure coming! The cards are linen-finished and very nice. Overall, the components (those that I have seen: I suspect a lot more will be unlocked as we play) were very nice.

We’ll unbox the the Upgrade Kit in the Appendix if you want to see that.

Forteller

Before I got too far, I made sure I got the Forteller App and the Kinfire Chronicles content.  I used Forteller in the Isofarian Guard Review (if you are wondering where that review is, I deleted the review after not liking the game but realizing I may have misplayed some of it), and I had kind of the same experience.  Using the Forteller app was suboptimal.

The app was not a good experience. It’s not a clear menu system, it’s not clear how to use the code (I got a free code with the Upgrade box), it’s not clear that you are currently downloading it.  After cursing at Forteller a few times, I finally got the content on my phone.

And after all that … I forgot to use it in my first adventure!  After I finished my first playthrough, I went ahead and listened to what was in the app.  I think the app will augment the experience.  but I was annoyed that my user experience with the app was suboptimal.

Rulebook

This game takes a different tact for teaching the rules: it teaches them “a little bit at a time”. The first rulebook, called Getting Started (from the Welcome Box) tells you how to set-up and get going.

But it’s just a slice of the rules. This first rulebook is just about getting set-up:

It’s clear that more rules will come out when you open later of the DVD boxes.

The rulebook gets a B+ on The Chair Test: it folds open well, is easy to read, and looks nice but the font is a little small for the rulebook.

This piecemeal approach for the rulebook seems to work for the game: rather than being inundated by tons of rules (I am looking at YOU Gloomhaven with a 56 page rulebook), this game does the Jaws of the Lion: Gloomhaven thing (see our review here) and slowly brings you into the game. I find this approach is a breath of fresh air, and not stressful! Sometimes knowing you will slowly be brought into a game takes some of the stress away: “we’ll learn it as we go”.

I wonder if that approach will make this game standout: I am already excited to play it again!

Character Set-Up

This is a cooperative dungeon crawler game set in a fantasy universe. Each player takes the role of one of six pre-generated characters: see three of them above. Each character is a prototypical fantasy character: see the Bard, Archer, and Rogue above.

Each player gets a box with their components.

The back of the box describes some backstory as well as each character’s special power.

Each box has a player mat (specific to that character), a deck of 18 cards, and a little acrylic standee.

You end up having to assemble your character standee and the little hit points wheel. NOTE! Not all wheels are the same! Make sure you find the one for your character! (I got the wrong one for my characters at first).

The hit point wheels are specific to the characters, as each character has different starting hit points to balance their powers (like the Magic User in AD&D had a 4-sided die for hit point dice and the Rogue had a 6-sided die for hit points).

Don’t forget to take the plastic off the standees! They look much nicer!

Notice how each mat describes the special abilities AND what you can do in a turn! Very nice!

The cards are also nice linen-finished cards. They are very easy to read, even if they won’t win any awards for design: they are very functional.

For my first game, I played with Roland and Valora.

Gameplay

You might find this hard to believe, but this is a bag-pulling game. I can’t say YET if it’s a bag-building game just yet, as I don’t know if later boxes will have more tokens … but I strongly suspect this will be a bag-building game. Let’s just call it a bag-pulling game for now.

There are a bunch of tokens that go in the bag: see above for all KNOWN tokens (seriously, I will bet you $10 that later Adventure boxes will have more tokens). But you don’t put all of them in the bag at the beginning:

Each character has their own tokens: you only put (some of) your characters tokens in the bag. These tokens, when drawn, let you know its your turn!

The rulebook has some nice pictures of what goes in the bag. The 1-12 will be events “probably bound” to the bad guy: so when those are drawn, the bad guy will act.

In the first adventure, you see the Wyvern set-up: see above. If the token drawn matches the numbers, then the Wyvern goes, invoking the ability next to it (the Wyvern has three actions it can perform).

The board really does document all the tokens fairly well: see the Combat Flow text above, marking all the tokens, what they do, and the remains going in the overflow.

The only two bag tokens we didn’t discuss were the heart and the curse token: they cause time to advance. If the time advances 4 times, everything goes back into the bag and it resets!

During combat, if you are really worried about losing, you can discard a Fate Tokens to draw 4 tokens from the bag and choose just the one you want. This one little mechanism seems a very thoughtful way to help you out of a jam.

So, the tokens really control when players and monsters acts! When a Valora token is drawn, then Valora can act and can play an action card: see above. (Note: there are rules for always making sure you have at least one action card).

An action card is labelled clearly with the word ACTION at the top: see above.

Note that there are 3 types of action cards, color-coded as to the type of action: red, green, and blue.

After you play your card, your compatriots can all play a single BOOST card to try and help you (this is a cooperative game after all). Each other player can play a single BOOST: note that you can NOT BOOST yourself I like this mechanism, as it clearly is designed to keep everyone involved as you play! Even though it’s “my action”, all my compatriots can BOOST my action!

The color is important, as you can only BOOST the same color. I suspect there are more complicated rules for BOOST coming as we play further…

First Adventure

As I said before, the rules for the game come out piecemeal, so the intro to combat came in the first Adventure Box: The Road To Vinna.

Oh, the intro to the first adventure was under the flap for the first box! I almost missed it because I am not used to important text being on the box itself!

Inside the box proper was a rulebook, some cardboard (with the Wyvern cardboard), and some cards.

The little deck of cards in the Adventure Box controls the story. They tell you how to set-up the Bad Guy, the story, and what happens. See above for the set-up card.

See above for some of the story: a little spoiler, so don’t read too close. I am just pointing out that the story unfolds from the cards.

So, we set-up on map:

Set-up the Wyvern:

Set-up our two characters and our bag, and we’re off! Fighting the Wyvern! The cards from the Adventure Box control the story, and the Bag controls the combat.

Incidentally, the acrylic standees from my pictures come from the Upgrade box: the base box has a cardboard standee.

So, after several rounds of pretty quick combat, we defeated the Wyvern! Pretty easy and pretty quickly! I’d say the combat rules were pretty intuitive. I had a few questions over the combat, but I always seemed to find a clarification either on the board or in the rulebook in a few minutes. (Can I have multiple conditions on a Wyvern’s ability? Yes. How does Armor work? Do I have to discard all of them? No. Etc)

Solo Play

So, thanks to Kinfire Chronicles to having solo play! (Yay for following Saunders’ Law): The rules do say it’s probably better to play Kinfire Chronicles with multiple people, but the solo player can take the role of two characters to proceed. And that’s what I did.

It’s a little harder to play two characters, because there is a lot of info for each character: the action cards, the Lantern ability (which flips active when you have to redraw cards), and the Boost cards. So, when you draw a character token, you have to play one of their action cards THEN consult the other character to see what BOOST card to play (if any).

It’s interesting that the main rule that makes this game really standout as a cooperative game (the BOOST cards played outside a player’s turn) actually detract a little from the solo game. It’s still a good mechanism, but it’s just a little more maintenance and context switching for the solo player.

The game is a little of a table hog: see above as I set-up two characters to play a solo game.

I will say that there the game flowed decently well, but that first play was rocky is just a few places. There could have slightly better directions on set-up, there could have been some better pictures of set-up, and a few tokens could have been labelled better. But I figured it out.

Cooperative Play

I set out Kinfire Chronicles for my group: they seemed really excited to play. “We love the art! The game looks cool! Oh wait, it’s a campaign? Let’s finish our other campaigns first! We need to finish the Valor and Villany cooperative campaign first!!!” (We started the Valor and Villainy cooperative campaign a few months ago: recall that we talked about that here).

That’s right, it’s a campaign over 21 adventures. There are so many campign games out there right now, that I wonder if that will be a detriment to this game? I liked this game cooperatively, and even tried to sell it to my group, but they made it clear they want to finish our current campaign!

What I Liked

I really like the art: it has a comic-book vibe.

I love the Acryclic Standees!! They look so cool! I think I like Acrylic Standees better than cardboard standees and plastic miniatures! Recall how great the acrylic standees looked in Tokyo Sidekick!

I like the fact that you CAN buy the acrylic standees for all the monsters in the UPGRADE box!

I like they the rules come out piecemeal: you don’t feel like you have to learn everything at once! You can just take in what you have so far. I think this really reduces the stress of learning the game.

I really like the compnents: they all seem pretty high quality.

I like that you can use forteller with this (even if the app could be better).

What I Didn’t Like

I both like and don’t like that it’s a campaign game: this means this will require an investment by my players … which I currently don’t have! I am excited to play through the game, and I can’t until I get my group through Lludwick’s Labyrinth!

Some of the boxes tore a little too easily. I think the Tab on outside of the box might be too much.

Although it’s a cool engineering feat that the main board is the outside-the-box protector, but is that a good idea? I’d much rather have my box be a normal box (with the board inside) and not have to worry that I might damage the board if I stack it wrong.

My biggest concern is the token/bag system. I didn’t love it in Isofarian Guard. I think my main concern is that teh bag system feels like the order system in Aeon’s End, Adventure Tactics, and Astro Knights: the players have a possibility of being completely shutout for a number of turns in a row if you just draw many monster tokens in a row! And that’s not fun. We discussed this in detail in my blog entry for Seven House Rules for Cooperative Games. This bag system is my biggest concern. (And yes, I am aware there are the FATE tokens to help mitigate that: that does ease my concern a little). Will it be too random?

Conclusion

I am cautiously optimistic that me and my group will like Kinfire Chronicles. My solo experience was good, but it’s interesting to me that the solo experience is actually a little tarnished by the BOOST system which I think will work great for cooperative play! I think this game will be more fun as a group, but it still works as a solo game pretty well.

Even though there are a lot of campaign games out there, and Kinfire Chronicles is fighting to be a voice in that space, I think its piecemeal approach to doling out the rules slowly makes this very appealing as a campaign game: there’s no stress about learning 56 pages of rules! You just learn as you play: that maybe Kinfire Chronicles greatest strength!

I really like what I’ve seen so far, I love the acrylic standees, I love the art, and everything looks great. If you have are interested in the game, I would recommend getting the UPGRADE Kit if you can: it really does make the game shine a little more. See our unboxing of that in the Appendix below.

My only real concern is that the bag-pulling part will make the game too random for me. Luckily, there is the mitigation method with the FATE tokens, but that is still a limited resource. I am going to have to see how the game plays out once I have convinced my friends to embrace Kinfire Chronicles. I don’t think it will be a problem getting them to play: it’s just that there are too many campaign games and we have to finish those first!

Appendix: Unboxing The Upgrade Kit

The UPGRADEKit came with the Premium Collection Kickstarter pledge.

You get 6 nice little mats for the 6 different characters:

Each character has their own mat! The mats are nice because they tell you where to put the cards.

What else is in here?

See the beautiful sleeves for the cards! Seriously! These are great! On the order of the sleeves for Dice Throne!

The only issue with he sleeves is that it feels like you shouldn’t sleeve your Lantern card (because it has a different back than your other cards.

I get the forteller code!

The best part of the UPGRADE box is the amazing number of acrylic standees you get for the monsters!

YOu also get metal coins …

A make-your-own Adventure and Monster Box .. (pretty cool)

And a few other alternative art cards for the characters and a “secret” sealed envelope!!!

I am so glad I backed to get the UPGRADE Box. It’s worth it for Acrylic Standees, sleeves, and character mats. The other bits are just gravy.

RichieCon 2023 was just this last weekend of July!  RichieCon is the gathering of friends of Richie in Tucson every year to play games! 

The last few years were quite nice because the monsoons kept the temperature down.  Unfortunately, the monsoons weren’t quite as prevalent this year, and we had some 111 degree temperatures.  Luckily, we were all inside playing games!

A few brave souls did enjoy the pool at RichieCon (there’s a kiddie pool and bigger pool)!

We’ve done 6 RichieCons over the last 7 years (missing only one year due to CoVID).  See here for 2022 report and here for a 2021 report and here for a 2019 report and here for a 2018 report  (we didn’t do reports for the earliest years).

This year’s 2023 token glowed in the dark!  Did you know that 3D printing to flourescent material can wreck your print head?  I had to pay Max an extra $20 for a new print head!  Thanks for Josh for designing this year’s token and Max for printing it!

You must have a RichieCon token to participate.

Prep

Prep is a lot of work as we have to get the sodas, waters, and utensils! Thank goodness for CostCo!

The other part of prep is getting games in boxes for people! Thank goodness for Sam and Teresa!

Preplay

A lot of people come from out of town, so I try to go out of my way to special things with my out-of-town friends! See above as Lon (from Pittsburgh, PA), Kurt (from Las Cruces, NM), and Lexey (from Hayes, KS) play AquaGarden. Kurt is a big fan of this game .. And of Mike Delisio from the Dice Tower who introduced this game to him. I saw Kurt teaching this at least a few times over the next few days. People (except for me) seem to like it.

RichieCon House

The Rec Center (where RichieCon proper happens) is only available for Saturday and Sunday, so this year we got a house as a venue for the out-of-towners to play games. And Ivan, Joe, and Jeremy (from Las Cruces, Las Cruces, and Denver resp.) all crashed there! This was a great decision, as it gave people and place to play games which was “lower stress” than RichieCon proper.

The house was quite nice, and the owners were very friendly. They even anticipated some of our needs!

Little plastic holders that allow you to eat Cheetos without touching them and the cards! Neat!

Set-Up At RichieCon Proper

Recently, the Rec Center was renovated and the carpet was replaced with vinyl floor! WHile it looks great, we knew noise would be an issue (it had been in the past when it carpet, now it would only be worse!).

To this end, we bought a some mats from CostCo (about $18 each) in hopes they would damped the noise. They did … a little. Currently, the Rec Center knows about the noise problem (we emailed them) and they will be working with an interior decorator to address the problem (curtains? Area rug? panels?). So, hopefully next RichieCon will be better!

But of course, the games were the most important! This was a selection from my collection of what “I thought people would like”. People also brought their own games.

In general, the Rec Center looks nicer this year!

Games Of The Con

There were some surprising and not-so-surprising games played!

The first “official” game of the Con was Arkham Horror 2nd Edition! This game is a favorite in my game groups, and it makes my (admittedly outdated) Top 5 Cooperative Games of All Time!

Indiana Jones and The Sand of Adventure was played! We reviewed that just a few weeks ago .. it seems ideal as a convention game!

Ares Expedition was a pretty big hit (we reviewed it here)! I saw it played numerous times, using the 5 and 6 player expansion!

Mystic Paths was a surprising hit! It was played many times!

Earth was quite big! Kurt taught this many times and people seemed to love it!

Fiesta De Los Muertos was also a surprising hit! This huge cooperative party game made this group laugh so many times! It also made out Top 10 Cooperative Party Games!

We won a game of Pandemic: Hot Zone, a smaller game version of Pandemic from our Top 10 “Small” Cooperative Games.

I was the champion for Marvel United and both me and Jeremy and Alex played it, as well as me and Jon G! We love Marvel United here at Co-op Gestalt and have talked it about here and here and here and here.

We got Return To Dark Tower played! This was a “What in the world is That?” Game as many many people stopped (asking that question) by as we played! It’s a cooperative game which won the BoardGameGeek 2022 award for best cooperative game and is a redo of the old Dark Tower game from 30-40 years ago!

Flamecraft was also very popular! See our review of it here!

A staple of every RichieCon has been Canvas (see above: we reviewed it here). I have seen this played at least three times every year for the past few years!

Race To The Raft was quite popular! We literally just got this in (and reviewed it last week) and it was one of the more popular games of the Con!

Summer Camp was a big hit: a light deck-building game with a cute theme seemed to get played a lot.

Oh yes, many Dwarf games got played! The cooperative Renier Knizia Dwarf game Siege of Runedar was Sara’s most anticipated game for her brothers! (And we saw it reviewed here). We also saw Deep Rock Galactic (not pictured) played at least three times! It was quite the hit! See our review of that here!

Another surprising game (which is a huge favorite of mine) was The Captain Is Dead! We love this game so much, it made our Top 10 Cooperative Space Games!

Some people really got into Dune: Imperium!

Oh ya, and we already mentioned Ares Expedition!

A few other games that seemed to get played a lot: Planted, Golem Edition Century Spice Road, and Illusion. These lighter games got played quite a bit!

Interesting Games Since Last Summer

We used to do a Top 10 List at other RichieCons, but we decided to make something more “interactive” so the crowd could participate: we started this last year and continued that tradition this year.  This year, we asked 6 question about Board and Card Games we’ve played since the last year: this was “just an excuse” for us (as a group) to talk about Board Games!  So, me and Sam led a panel and posed the question to the crowds (with our own answers of course).

The Quintessential RichieCon Experince

Rich Campbell wanted the quintessential RichieCon experience: play a game with Richie at RichieCon while playing a game Richie designed!  See above as Rich Campbell (not Richie), Mike, Lexey, Jake and myself play CO-OP: the co-op game.

It was unfortunate that we were not able to save the CO-OP: we were all groovy, but we were off by $1 at the very end! Ah well! It’s not a fun co-op if you win all the time!

Pictures

Conclusion

Another year of RichieCon has come and gone. Thanks to everyone who came from out of town! Thanks to everyone who made it! Thanks for Josh and Max for making the RichieCon 2023 token! Thanks to Will F. who made the chocolate chip cookies!

I look forward to seeing everyone next year!

Race To The Raft arrived at my door Monday, July 17th 2023: I know this date exactly because my friend Kurt reached out to me to ask: “Did you back this?” the day it arrived! I absolutely did back it! It was Kickstarter back in November 2022: see here. This arrival is fantastic because the Kickstarter promised delivery in September 2023, and here it is 2 months early! High five to Frank West!

Race To The Raft is a cooperative tile-placement game for 1-4 players taking 40-60 minutes. Honestly, that time can be either way short or way too long: there are so many variables that will affect the length of the game, that length should be taken with a grain of salt.

Components and Gameplay

Players work together to try to save the cats! Note that no one is playing a particular cat, you are just working together to save the group of cats! (Did you know a group of cats is called a clowder of cats?) So, save the clowder of cats!

There is a giant fire on the island that the cats live on, so the players must move all the cats to the raft before the island fire consumes them! See above. All cats must be saved (collectively) to win the game!

This is a tile-placement game: generally players play a tile (square cards, also called pathway tiles, see above) on their turn to try to make a path some some cats(s).

On your turn, you will get three cards (six in a solo game), but you get to choose any three from the four piles. Note that each pile notates the “frequency” of path type! The amount of color on the back of the card denotes the distribution of color! For example, the circle deck (above) is likely (33%) to have a lot of red path, likely (33%) to have a lot of ocean path, less likely to have some desert and grass path (17%). The back of the card gives you the odds that your tiles will have certain path types! The circle deck has NO purple, so you know you wouldn’t want cards from this deck when you are trying to construct purple paths!

The path colors are important because a cat can only traverse a path of its color: see above as the purple cat can take the purple path all the way to the raft!

If you do play a pathway tile on your turn, you must play a fire polyomino at the end of your turn! The cost of your setting a path is to spread the fire further! See the polyomino tile above.

The bag you draw the fire tiles is surprisingly big! (Which is great: the Sub Terra II bag was a little too small for its tiles).

This is also a limited communication game: you can only speak at certain times (basically when someone is NOT playing), but you can use certain tokens to “speak up” if needed:

Playing the cat token (above) allows to say “Meow” at any time. More useful, playing the “green girl” token allows you to speak up even when you can’t normally talk. The “Meow” token is pretty funny, because usually you play it to indicate you are worried about a placement (either pathway tile or file polyomino) so you sound like a mad cat!

The other action a player can do on their turn is to “move a cat” by discarding a card: see above as we moved the red cat to the raft.

When you move a cat, you exhaust it it so it can’t move that turn (until everyone has played all their cards … if you really need to, you can move it again if you discard two cards). When you move a cat, you don’t immediately pull a fire polyomino: only after you have moved four cats …. so you can defer, at least for a few turns, the drawing of a fire polyomino by just moving a cat. Of course, you can’t win the game until all cats have moved to the raft!

If, at any point, you can’t legally play a pathway card, you lose, or if you can’t play a fire tile legally to the map (because there’s no space), you lose.

If all cats make it to the raft, you and your group win!

The components to this game are first rate: the cardboard is thick, the cards are linen-finished, the boards are colorful, the cats are cute! The components don’t quite fit back into the box very well: the huge bag of fire polynominos, while great for play, make it harder to close the lid!

Rulebook

So, I have the Kickstarter version which has three books. The rulebook, the campaign book, and the kickstarter pack book!

The Kickstarter book just tells you what’s different from the base game: this is really great that they did this: this keeps the retail version clean, but gives the kickstarter backers a clear indication what’s special!

Basically, the plastic cats minis, the wooden tokens, and some special island boards are the special pieces for only the Kickstarter version. The special boards are used in campaigns found “only in” the Kickstarter book.

There is a campaign book: this describes many, many different layouts of the island and cats to save!

“Wait, wait, this is a campaign game?” Not really? Campaign implies you have some state saved from a previous session/game. Strictly speaking, I guess your scoreifrom the previous game is the shared state, but even that’s a stretch. This is more of a scenario-based game: the campaign book (probably should be called Scenario Book ) shows configurations of the island, fire, and cats where you have to save the cats. It’s just the set-up for a “save the cats puzzle”. It’s pretty cool, as there are a lot of scenarios that get increasingly difficult.

The rulebook proper is good, if not great. We’ll get to why it’s not great, but we’ll concentrate on why it is good first.

It has a nice intro up front: everything is a big and colorful and easy to read.  Right away, you kow what this game is.

 

The components page describes and names the components well: see above.

The set-up is well described and presented:  It spans two pages in an easy-to-lay out book.  So easy to get going!

I liked the rulebook, but I wish there were summary card. The limited communication rules, although reasonably well specified, have lots of weird starts and stops that really should have summarized on a summary card. See he cooperative mode below for more discussion of that.

Solo Play

This game has a fantastic solo mode: Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!  The real difference is that the solo player gets six pathway cards (see above) at the start of their turn (rather than 3), but three they can see and three in standby (see below).

After the solo plays a pathway card (moving a cat or placing a pathway tile on the board), they take one of the cards from standby.  Basically, the solo player will play six cards total in a round, with access to (at most) three at a time.

I love this game solo! It presents a great little puzzle for the solo player. I am really glad I played it solo a bunch of times before I taught it to my friends, because I realized all the little spaces where I messed up the rules.

• I am embarrassed how many games I played before I realized you have to draw fire polyomino every turn you place a pathway card!  “Gee, this game is easy!”  Ya, if you don’t draw fire!
• Fire polyominos must be placed next to some other fire space
• Pathway tiles can be placed ANYWHERE, as long it doesn’t cover fire, a cat, or overhang the main board.  That ANYWHERE qualifier reminds you to play more strategically and build paths backwards, and forwards (not just starting where a cat starts).

It’s not that this game is hard to learn/teach: on the contrary, the basics are very easy! The issue is that the rulebook needs just a few tweaks.

Choices

What makes this game great (yes, I used the G word) is that you have so many choices! The player really feels like he/she has a lot of agency! There’s agency in so many places:

• Playing Pathway cards: when you play the card, you can play it in any orientation and anywhere on the board (except for covering file,cats, or hanging).  This means you can choose to work on the path backwards or forwards or even in the middle!  And whatever orientation you want!  There’s so many places you can play!
• Choosing Pathway cards: When you choose three cards for your hand, you can use information on the backs to inform your choices!  While we loved Mists Over Carcassonne, you could only take “some random tile” when it was your turn: by giving the player some frequency information (encoded in color strips), players have some choice/some agency!
• Placing Fire Polyominos: When you place a fire polyomino, you block some moves on he map for your and your future comrades.   You get the choose, to a certain extent, what paths gets blocked!  
• Moving Cats: Many times, you may move a cat to clear a section of the board for fire polyominos, sometime you move a cat because you have bad pathway cards, and you are trying to mitigate the fires, sometimes you need to move the cat twice … and you can!

There is a delicious back and forth between trying to keep paths opens by where you play pathway tiles and where you DON’T play fire polyominos!  This tension makes you feel like everything you do matters.  And it does, it really does!  The third game, I realized I had hosed myself by placing a fire polyomino in such a way that it precluded any more pathway cards at the location!

The amount of choice in this game makes this game great. 

Cooperative Mode

Cooperative mode worked well, and we had fun, but there were some issues.

For one, there are “no communication” rules that seem a little draconian. Basically, players can talk all they want at certain times and can’t communicate at all during other times. The rules for “no communication“, although fairly well-specified in the rulebook, seem to have to starts and stops that really need to be denoted much better. I wish that there were a summary card which showed this is some graphical detail, or summarized when you can talk/can’t. We found ourselves “accidentally” cheatting because the “no communication” rules seem chaotically specified. I think there just needs to be a simplified overall rule that describes when you can talk.

I think the “no communication” rules can be summarized more succinctly. Here’s my attempt:

Once any transaction has started (drawing cards, playing a tile, playing fire, moving a cat), all communication ceases until the transaction has ended. Players are allowed to communicate as much as they want outside those transactions.

I really think a summary card per player describing the “no communication” rules could help tremendously.

Let’s be clear: the “no communication” rules keep the game moving so each player feels like they have agency on their turn to play their cards. Said another way, the “no communication” rules keep the Alpha Player at bay (much like King of Monster Island rules help keep the Alpha Player in check). My groups don’t tend to have that problem, but I do get why this rule is here.

One other problem that came up during play is that you want to “try” your tiles on the board. However, the game does NOT allow you to fully share your pathway card info with other players: You are only allowed to share your card info fairly obliquely. “I have a lot of green” is fine, but “I have a straight-across green” is too much. So, imagine, it’s your turn: you can’t communicate, and you aren’t allowed to show what cards are in your hand. But, the best way to proceed sometimes it try rotating a few of your tiles and see how they actually fit on the board … in front of everybody … which means strictly speaking you are giving away info about your tiles to the other players! You really can’t do that, strictly speaking, but we did and I suspect most people will! It’s natural to want to try some tiles out!

I think this easy to get around: “If someone is trying tiles on the board, please look away so you don’t cheat and get extra information.” And I think this needs to be stated! I think everyone will want to try tiles. … I think if players feel like they can’t “try tiles on the board manually” (because a strict interpretation of the rules will preclude it), that will take away from their enjoyment of the game. This is easy to get around: just look away.

One final thought, this is cooperative game. If you feel like the limited communication rules are stifling your cooperation, consider backing off. I am worried some people will hear the limited communication rules and say “No Thanks”, but I think they can still enjoy the game! I think the intent of the limited communication rules are to give each player agency and to avoid the Alpha Player. (I know the Communication tokens help this, but maybe that’s still too much for some people). I think as long as you obey the spirit of the limited communication, I think it’s okay to help each other out occasionally.

The entire purpose of a cooperative game is to play with your friends and have fun: if you need to relax the limited communication rules slightly, I think the game will still work great.

So Much Stuff

We haven’t really gotten into it, but there is even more stuff in the box! There is an advanced mode (which has Bad News cards), there are new rules for Rescuing Friends, Close to, Oshax, Symbol Objectives, and even more! If you think you might get tired of the base game, do not worry! There are tons of new things to add the game! It almost feels like teh base game comes with a bunch of expansions already baked it. Now, I haven’t played them yet, but knowing there are future refinement really make me think “I am not going to get tired of this game!”

Conclusion

Race To The Raft is a great game! I think it might take the #1 spot on my Top 10 Cooperative Tile Placement Games! There are so many delicious choices ! Each player has so much agency in laying their tiles, fire polyominos, and cat movements that they feel engaged and relevant the entire game!

When you win, it feels great! You saved the cats!

I think the solo game absolutely fantastic and would give it a 9.0 or 9.5 out of 10. It was a fun puzzle, and there were so many levels of difficulty,I know it will have tons of replayability in the future as I get better and better. There is so much choice, I enjoyed every precious decision!

The cooperative mode is good, but the limited communication rules might need some slight adjustments. A player summary card describing theses limited communication rules would go such a long way towards clearing some of that confusion. And there needs to be something said about physically trying tiles in front of everyone: “Just look away” seems the easiest response to keep the rules lawyers happy. Race To The Raft is still good cooperatively, but you might need to slightly adjust the limited communication rules to work well with your group: I am very worried strict interpretations of limited comms will make some people (who would really enjoy the game otherwise) turn away. I would give this 8/10 for cooperative mode.

This is a great game. I loved it and it will absolutely make my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023. My only real complaint is that the game is in dire need of player summary cards with the gameflow, limited communications rules, and placement summaries. Maybe by the time you read this, there will be such a beast on Board Game Geek in the files section.

The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City originally appeared on Kickstarter some time ago: July, 2022: see here. At the time, they were offering three games for about $350. Why were these games so much money? Because these games are augmented reality games! You physically set-up some components and then use a special app on your phone or iPad to look at the components … and it inserts “stuff” into the scene via the app. See below.

In the example above, we built just a few buildings in Gotham City with the included components, but when you look at the city through the app, you see other buildings! Other features! There are inserted into the reality! So, your app becomes a view to the world of Gotham City.

When the original Kickstarter for this game came out, I went back and forth as to whether I should support it. It looks fantastic, but it was a technology-based game on Kickstarter. Experience, mine and others, makes me very leery of any kind of Kickstarters with technology. Why? Typically, Kickstarters deliver late, delays make technology obsolete quickly, support for technology can dry up quickly after a Kickstarter, and technology Kickstarters typically are more expensive. In the end, there were too many reasons not to support it, so I didn’t back it, but instead I chose to see what would happen.

What Happened?

So, Infinite Rabbit Holes did deliver a game! I saw it being referenced (early July 2023) on a few sites, and I thought to myself: “Oh, they did actually make a product! Let’s check it out!” So, for about $135, I ordered a copy of the game and had the game delivered to my house.

For a game with a lot of augmented reality, it sure comes in a big box! See the Coke can for reference.

This seem to be a shipping trend now, a box-in-a-box: the outer box takes the shipping damage, leaving the inner box less touched.

What Is This?

Panic In Gotham City is a cooperative Escape Room/Adventure game with 5-6 hours on content for 13+.

The game bills itself as a “Mixed Reality Adventure” (see above), but it’s really an Escape Room over 6 hours (that’s right, 6 hours) that uses your app/ipad for augmented reality interactions.

Before you blanche too much at the running time, you can save your game and come back to it. There are seven chapters to the game, so you can stop at any point at the end of a chapter and come back to it at a later time. It’s a very cooperative Escape Room game: players work together to solve crises in Gotham City,

How Do You Review This?

How do you review something like this? You can’t talk about the plot too much because you don’t want to give away spoilers. You can’t talk about the puzzles of augmented reality too much because some of the best parts of the game were discovering the solutions and the augmented reality. The surprise is part of the fun!

What we’ll do is give some snapshots into our gaming experience and show you what we saw: out of context, I don’t think these will be spoilers, but you can sense of the game. So, this is more a snapshot of our experience with the game.

Experience

Four of us gathered one night, with the intent on playing all 6 hours of content over two sessions. We’d play the first 3 or 4 chapters, then leave the game set-up for next week. This was a commitment: we knew this would be a big game, but we were all up for it!

The iPad drove the game: we would constantly set it up on top of the box to watch content and videos to move us to the next session. The introduction video makes it very clear you need a well-lit space and a lot of room to move around! We ended up getting rid of all our chairs and just standing around the table and box, frequently peering into the iPad.

The intro video”suggests” you broadcast the video to a TV nearby so it’s easier to watch the videos and content. If you were to use a phone instead of an iPad, you should absolutely do that! There’s no way you should just play this game on a phone. You frequently stand around watching videos or other content, and a phone screen would be way too small. So, caveat emptor:

• Play this on an iPad with a big screen so everyone can see OR
• Play this with a phone broadcasting to a TV everyone can see

For all that is holy, I think just playing this on a phone would be a terrible idea!

Mixed Reality

There really is a lot of physical real-world stuff in here. You end up making a city (which is one of the reasons you want to leave the game set-up for the next session: it’s too much work to put this away!)

Like any Escape Room, there will be puzzles and clues hidden all over the augmented reality and components that come with the game.

Physical Exertion

One thing to be aware of: this game is actually physically challenging!  Like I said, you have to constantly rove around the board, so you are standing the whole time.  And you are holding the iPad up and looking at the board at weird angles: crouching, standing, extending, and other weird positions. I would pass the iPad to other people frequently, so they could all stay involved and so I could sit for a second!  We joked that the last time we had this much physical exertion was playing Dungeon Fighters (from out Top 10 Cooperative Dexterity Games)!  

I joked that I was going to wear kneepads for the second session, and I probably should have.

A Few Caveats

There are a few things to be aware of with this game.

One: this is a game, that once you’ve played it, you won’t play it again because you have solved all the puzzles!  Luckily, you CAN reset the game!  I plan to reset it and give to Charlie and Allison, my Escape Room buddies.  Of course, I have found that if I wait a few years, I forget most of the puzzles and I can replay it again, but that’s up to you.

Two: one of the reasons my friend Junkerman doesn’t like Escape Room games is because he feels that a few people take over the game.  While that can happen, it can be a little more pronounced with Panic in Gotham City because the player holding the iPad is controlling the action!  I think that’s why the game recommends you transmit the scene to a TV so everyone can see it easily.  To be clear, this “alpha player” issue did not happen in our game, but it could be more likely in this game unless you broadcast the scene to a local TV. Caveat Emptor.

Over Two Nights

We ended playing over two nights, but we probably should have split it into three nights.  The game is quite challenging, both physically and mentally! Although we finished it in two nights, I think we might have enjoyed it more over three nights.

Conclusion

If you do the appropriate amount of planning, The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City can be one the best experiences of the year. Make sure have a big enough area to move around, make sure you allocate the proper amount of space, make sure you set-up in a place where you can leave the game over a few weeks (It really is 5-6 hours of content), and make sure you share the duty of holding the phone/Ipad for the city. And be ready for some physical activity!

Having said all that, I think Akham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City is my contender for Game of the Year for 2023! As I was playing, I kept saying “This is so cool, this is so cool“. My friend Teresa described the experience as absolute joy. We really got into this game and enjoyed it immensely.

Playing the game over two sessions was absolutely imperative (and maybe it should have been three).  I do think the first session left such a good impression (like 9.5/10) that the second session actually wasn’t quite as good (maybe 8.5/10). 

If the price tag doesn’t scare you away (I paid $135), and you do some proper planning, I think this will be a fantastic experience overall for you: 9/10. I realize it’s a one-time experience, but it was so worth it.

Appendix

You can reset the game: see above as Sam, Teresa, and Sara put the game BACK TOGETHER. It took about 20 minutes, but since the game is pretty expensive ($135), it’s good to know you can get a few more plays out of it.

I also plan to demo this at RichieCon this year. Stay Tuned! RichieCon is coming soon!

Comic Hunters is a competitive drafting game for 1-4 players that’s currently only available in Brazil. Using this dark corner of the web called “Ebay”, I was able to secure a copy … paying way too much money. (I’d rather not say how much. Really. Please, stop asking. Just go look for yourself and see how much it is on Ebay).

I was really interesting in this game because I collected comics in a former life, and I actually have some of the comics depicted in the game.

To be clear: the cards depict actual Marvel comics covers! See above. In fact, I have all 10 of the comics above! Anyone who has been following Co-op Gestalt for any amount time knows how much we like Superheroes (see our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero Board and Cards Games)! So, Comic Hunters was a natural buy for us!

Sleeves

This has been a bit of a journey for us.  Since the game was so expensive (please stop asking how much, allright?), we went ahead and got some matte sleeves for the game.  We found a list here on BoardGameGeek of sleeves that fit the game.  You need 135 sleeves: we went ahead and chose the Gamegenic sleeves for the game. See below.

Over about 40 minutes one night, I sleeved all 135 cards.

The sleeves seem very nice: they aren’t too shiny.

Portuguese

Those of you paying attention might remember Comic Hunters is from Brazil … which means the game is mostly in Portuguese.  Luckily, the comic cards themselves are all language independent (with the original Marvel comic cover in English) : they have icons, so the cards don’t need anything special. See below.

Most of the board is pretty iconic, with numbers and symbols. The only section that really sees Portuguese is the Round Tracker: see below.

What does that mean? Luckily, it’s very easy to correlate the round with the drafting by just matching the text to the round description (to the left of the round marker): that picture shows an iconic reference for the four types of drafts in the game (see below).

So, for most of the game, you can get by not knowing Portuguese … except for the rulebook. This is a fairly complicated game, and you can’t get by without an English translation of the rulebook. See the Portuguese rulebook below.

Rulebook

So, there is an official English translation of the rules on BoardGameGeek in the files section (in fact, there’s two of them!) They look almost exactly like the original rulebook, in graphic design and sectioning, but in English! See here.

For about $7, I went ahead and printed the rulebook in black and white at my local FedEx copy center.

The rules work fine, although I did have to trim the edges manually to make it fit in the box. (I left the top part on for possibly stapling it later).

For about another $24, FedEx was also able to make a much more professional color English copy, with a nice coil binding: see above.

So, I have three copies of the rulebook: one color copy in Portuguese (the original), one B&W copy in English, and one color copy in English. See above. They all fit in the box.

Why did I get a B&W copy as well? As it turns out, it takes a few days (potentially) to make the professional copy. I really wanted to play right away, so I had FedEx make the cheaper B&W to get me going. I think it will be an advantage to have multiple copies of the rulebook for this game: there are some quirky sections that will benefit from multiple rulebook copies.

The rulebook gets about a B or B+ on the Chair Test: It opens up nicely and looks great, and fits on the chair next to me and it fits in the original box. The only problem is that the font is just a little small.

Overview

In Comic Hunters, thematically you are trying to collect a certain set of comics to get the best collection! There are eight main Marvel superheroes you are tracking: Captain America, Black Panther, Black Widow, Dr. Strange, Hulk, SIron Man, Spider Man, and Thor.

Mechanically, this is a drafting game with cards (like Seven Wonders or Sushi Go), but with four very different kinds of drafting: to win, you need the most victory points at the end of the game.

You can see the Seven Wonders-like scoring pad that comes with the game, but it’s all in Portuguese. I just used a 3×5 index card to emulate the scoring pad. (I think BoardGameGeek has more official English scoring pads, but I didn’t really need them).

Scoring

There are several competing scoring criteria for your comic collection: Size, Variety, Highlights, and Secret Stash.

For Size, you consult the board (above), and it tells you how many victory points you get for each collection (For example:5 Dr. Strange comics will score you 12 points). See above.

For Variety, the number of hero collections you have gets you points. If you have just Spider Man, Dr. Strange, and Iron Man comics in your collection, you would only get 5 Victory Points. (You have no variety, man!). You need at least 3 comics of that hero to count against Variety. See above.

For Highlights, you check the board to see how icons you match (See above). For example, If you have the most Number One issues, you would get 15 Victory Points! There’s New Look, First Appearance, Special Edition, Epic Battle, and Number One. There’s only three highlights in play per game.

Finally, for Secret Stash, you just score the number of points on that chart (see above).

Drafting

Like Seven Wonders, this is a victory point drafting game. Like Seven Wonders, there are three rounds (Ages) to the game. Like Seven Wonders, there is scoring at the endgame to find who the winner is. But the drafting has some big differences from Seven Wonders!

First of all, there are 3 drafts per round, notated by the Itinierario! And four very different types of drafts!

The first draft (Loja or Store) is the most like Seven Wonders: each player gets 4 cards from Era 1 comics, chooses 1 to keep, then passes the rest to the left/right (depending on the round). By the time you are done with this draft, everyone should have 4 comic cards!

The next type of draft is Sebo or Flea Market!  Players set-up n rows (where n is the number of players) with a starting card.  See below for a 3-player start! On your turn, you can either add a new card to any row OR take a row!  

Here, you are trying to balance when a row is great! If you take a row too early, you get fewer cards.  If you take it too late, someone else may get the row you want!

Convencao, or Convention is when you set up a large 5×5 grid of comics and take either a row or column (after being allowed to move one card). Each player gets two chances to take a row or column.

The final Drafting type is Site De Leilao or Auction Website. It’s basically just an auction using the secret stash counter as money.

In the auction, there are some asymmetric rows put out (depending on the number of players). For the solo player, only two rows are put out: one row with 3 comics and one row with four comics. Winners gets the row of choice.

Avengers Assemble!  Collection! 

At the end of each round (after 3 drafts), you take your comics and figure out which ones to actually buy: This is Organizar Colecao or Assemble Collection part of the round. The comics you acquired over the round (over the 3 drafts) become either money (to buy other comics) or comics to keep (which must be bought with other comics).

The Market Value of each comic (its sale price or buy price) is the Era it comes from: recent comics are Era 1 (worth 1), 80s-90s comics are Era 2 (worth 2), and silver age comics are Era 3 (worth 3). This info is on the back of the cards as well as the front.

This is where you are trying to make collections of your comics, keeping in mind the scoring conditions at the end of the game. You also have to make brutal decisions on what comics you have to sell to keep the ones you really wants! Cards that are sold go to the Convention deck and players keep the bought ones. (You can also move comics you already from previous rounds between collections).

After three rounds, players add up victory points and the most points win!

Solo Game

Even though Comic Hunters is competitive, it does have a solo mode, which is why we feel justified talking about this here in our cooperative blog. We can always play any game with a solo mode cooperatively like we did with Eila and Soomething Shiny (see here), Flamecraft (see here), and Canvas (see here): just play the solo mode as a group.

In the solo mode, you play against Jeeves (the Avenger’s butler). As you play, basically Jeeves tends to get the comics you DO NOT get, but he does’t have to pay for him! As you play, you try to get the best comics for yourself as well as trying to limit Jeeves’ options.

You collect comics are normal… see above …

And Jeeves gets your leftovers! See above.

Although the game flows the same, the rules for draft are altered in order to compensate for the solo player and Jeeves. So, there is an entire section to the rulebook about how each of the drafts changes to deal with Jeeves. It’s more complicated than you might expect, even if you know the base game. I found I had to re-read the rules a number of times in solo mode to get the nuanced differences.

The solo game is fun! I have played it a number of times and it took a while to get it! What’s cool about the solo mode is keeping track of three things: which cards you buy, which cards Jeeves gets, and which cards go to the Convention deck! Some of the cards you don’t acquire go to the Convention deck, which means you may still see it again! As you try to limit Jeeves’ options, you may decide to discard certain cards to the Convention deck so you can see them again! That little twist, of comics going to the Convention deck (so they can reappear in later rounds), makes the solo mode that much more interesting. I think that helped elevate the game for me.

The major flaw of the solo game is simply that the rules had to be readjusted fairly heavily to accommodate solo play. Even if you know the base game, it’s still quite a bit of work to get into the solo game.

But the solo game is fun.

Cooperative Mode

I wish this game had a cooperative mode.  Like I said, we can always play this cooperatively by simply playing the solo mode as a cooperative group, but I feel like this game deserves a really good cooperative mode: It’s really great.

UPDATE: We put our money where our mouths were and made a cooperative version of the game.  See here!

Coming To America?

Part of the reason I picked this up is that it’s not clear if Comic Hunters will ever come to the USA in its current form. For licensing reasons, it’s unclear whether an American company could get the rights to all the Marvel comics covers.  There have been whispers that some company may bring it to the USA in 2024, but it’s unclear if the game will have to be re-themed (for licensing reasons) with different artwork.  See this BoardGameGeek thread here for more details.

Conclusion

Am I glad I spent way too much money on this game?   Yes!  The art is phenomenal (well, it does contain some of my favorite Marvel comics covers) and the gameplay is really different and original.  I am enjoying the solo mode quite a bit: there’s quite a few interesting ideas, and I just love living in this world of Marvel Comic Hunters: 8/10.  If you think you would love this world, give it a try:  I know that many conventions have a copy of this game in their game library (Dice Tower) to try.  We’ll also have it out at RichieCon-7 this year for people to try.

If someone had showed me Comic Hunters before Seven Wonders, I don’t think I would have ever played Seven Wonders, but I suppose Seven Wonders and Sushi Go did have to pave the way for drafting games to be popular before this could flourish.

I just wish this game had a good cooperative mode.

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

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

A Thought Experiment: Mechanical Beast

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

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

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

10. Chainsomnia

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

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

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

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

9. Cities: Skyline

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

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

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

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

8. Forgotten Depths

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

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

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

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

7. Sub Terra/Sub Terra II

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

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

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

6. Escape: Curse of the Temple

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

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

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

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

5. Dead Men Tell No Tales

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

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

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

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

4. Castellion

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

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

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

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

3. Tranquility

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

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

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

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

2. Sprawlopolis/Agropolis/Naturopolis

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

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

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

1. Mists Over Carcassonne

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take a look.

Unboxing

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

The Kickstarter version came with an extra monster.

Generally speaking, this game looks fantastic.

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

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

Rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solo Play

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

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

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

I was hopeful Cooperative Play would be better.

Cooperative Play

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

Problems

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

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

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

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

Fixes?

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Components and Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Movie Arc

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

The game really does feel like an action movie.

Replayability

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

Other Thoughts

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

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

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

The Lost Arc of the Covenant In The Room

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

 

 

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Just Arrived! Component Errata To Legends of Sleepy Hollow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was one minor difference we spotted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Components

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

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

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

The meeples are in a curious wax packet.

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

Rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gameplay

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

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

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

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

See above as the tile place will have 2 ghosts.

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

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

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

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

Ghosts

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

There are three ways to mitigate ghosts:

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

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

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

Ghosts “scare” The Alpha Player Away!

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

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

Solo Play

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooperative Play

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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