In early August, The Marvel United Multiverse set arrived: see above and below. This is the #1 entry in my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!  

This is crazy, because now we have the original Marvel United stuff, the X-Men Marvel United Stuff, and now the Multiverse Marvel United Stuff!  Have we lost our mind?  Yes.  Yes we have.

Unboxing

The bigger box comes with a bunch of expansions: Coming of the Galactus (which we reviewed a few weeks ago), War of Kings, Age of Apocalypse, World War Hulk, Annihilation, Maximum Carnage, Civil War, and Secret Invasion.  Whew!  That’s right: each one of those is an expansion for Marvel United!

We aren’t done yet! The other box comes with the Stretch Goals (the big box with more heroes and villains), The base Game Marvel Multiverse, Campaign Decks, Team Decks, Pet Companions, and a few other Stretch goals!  Oh, and how can we forget Fin Fang Foom? Whew!!

Is This Ridiculous?

Yes.  Yes, this is ridiculous.  Do you want to know why?  I still have about 10 of the original Marvel United expansions STILL IN SHRINK WRAP!  I am super excited to play The Sinister Six!  Thanos! Asgard!  And yet, they are still in shrink wrap.  And here I am, ordering 7 new expansion, 1 new base game, and a bunch of other extras.  

Why do I do it?  I love my Super Heroes.  I know, someday, I will play all of them.  Even if I am in the Old Folks home playing through them, I will play through them.  I actually think I will.

In the meantime, I am trying to enjoy what I have when I can.

Stretch Goals Unboxing

The Stretch Goals box is pretty mammoth.

Look at how many new heroes and villains we have! Holy Cow!

The four sides of the box (after the lid has been taken off) so all the heroes and villains in play here!

The Stretch Goals box has a new mat (for a new Wrecking Crew play), some new Locations, some new Tokens, and a few new rules (see the rulebook above).  

Underneath the minis are all the cards: heroes and villains.

There are SO MANY cards in the Stretch Goals box.

The top-level (3 levels of minis) are the villains (red) and one hero (blue).

The middle layer is a mix of heroes (blue) and anti-heroes (purple: characters that can be either villains or heroes).

The bottom layer is all heroes.  Note that Cassie from Ant-man is a HUGE mini, as is Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.

The upper left corner is empty!!! What’s that supposed to be?

Relax, It’s just Iron Lad: it’s included as a special Stretch Goal box.

Oh my goodness, there are so many cards. So many heroes. So many villains.

Playing From the Multiverse Stretch Goals

Cypher is new in this box.  He is a New Mutants character that was killed off.  

Even though Warlock comes from the previous set, he seems the proper character to team-up with Cypher: there were inseparable in the New Mutants.

Who are they fighting?  Illyana … err, Darkchild … she went a little “bad” for a while.  But it’s up to Cypher and Warlock to bring her back to sanity!  Darkchild is an anti-hero in the new Multiverse set.  

I had a fabulous time playing my old friends (well, they felt like old friends) and trying to bring Illyana back from the dark side!  

In the original Absorption Expansion mess, I was worried about how well “untried” combinations would work together; recall, we have some trouble with Emma Frost.  Part of the issue is just that there are so many heroes and power and villains and new things,  I do worry that they may not work well together.   

Luckily, most of my games from this set so far have seemed fairly balanced.

Team Decks

The Team Decks are a new way to give you more choice!  Basically, there are “two extra” choices you can use on your turn; instead of your own cards, you can choose to not draw and just use one the Team Deck cards instead (there are usually 6 Team Cards total).

There’s a price to use the Team Decks …  well, two prices … well, three prices …
1) All members of the team have to get rid of the double-double wild card from their deck (for balance). 
2) There is also a “bad” Team Deck card, where you have to play it facedown to the storyline to get rid of it!  
3) You actually have to be a member of that team …

The Team Decks adds a little more “drama” to the game, but it also adds more choices!  It’s not affected by KO’d effects, it’s just another option in case you don’t have quite what you need.

I liked the idea of Team Decks; it simply adds more choice to the game.

The New Mutants Team Deck was in the Promo Team Packs, but there are several other Team Decks …  like tons of Teams and Team Decks.

I would recommend the Team Decks to “add some spice” to your Marvel United games.  Find a group of heroes you like, and use Team Decks!  I wouldn’t recommend using the Team Decks unless you are fairly experienced: Team Decks may throw off new-comers off for their first few games.

Help! I’m Drowning, But In a Good Way!

I am very happy I got the new Marvel United Multiverse set, despite the fact that I am drowning in Marvel United content.   Find me when I am in the Old Folks home in a number of years, and I’d be happy to play any of the Marvel United expansions that are still in shrink at that point … I mean, I promise I will play them eventually … the good news is that they will still be playable for many years to come! 

Defenders of the Wild is a cooperative tactical fighting game that was on Kickstarter back in October 2023.  It promised delivery in August 2024, and lo and behold, it arrived at my house in early August 2024!  A Kickstarter that delivers on time!  That never happens!

I was initially drawn to this game because of the art.  See above: The art of Meg Lemieur permeates the game and it is gorgeous.  I think that art is a big component of why this made the #9 spot on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!

The game looks to be something like a cooperative version of Root: cute animals are at war …  not with each other, but with the machines threatening to take over the forest!

This looks to be a cooperative game with some strategy and tactics.

I see a hex map (see above) and the game immediately has a war game quality to it. And that’s not a wrong assessment for this; Defenders of the Wild has elements of a cooperative war game.

This a slightly deeper and more technical game than some cooperative games, so the 14+ age requirement is fairly accurate. Most of my playtimes have been about 20% longer than listed (maybe 1 hour 20 minutes or so), but the play time on the box is still fairly accurate. I have also played the game at 1, 2, and 3 players, and it seems to work at all those player counts.

Let’s take a closer look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

I was surprised when Defenders of the Wild arrived: it’s a smaller box than I expected! See above and below with a Coke can for scale.

Despite the smaller size, the game is gorgeous.

In the game, each player chooses one of 4 factions to play: the factions define which deck of cards you get (see above) and the tokens you get (see below).

You can see why a Root comparison is obvious here with the cutesy but fighty meeples (above). Even the colors of the meeples seem to imply Root.

Each player then grabs up their player board, cards, camp, and chooses one of the two Organizers: the Organizers (see Thexuloa and Nextor above) are the “leaders” of your faction, and form the flavor of the Defender deck you get.

You don’t get all the Defenders from a deck: you only get a subset.  If you choose Thexulia, you get the Defenders listed above.

Nextor (above) gives your Defenders deck a slightly different flavor from the same deck of Defenders.

The Defenders (like Rintraw above) are the cards you play during the game.  You have twelve Defenders that you cycle through (and then reshuffle if needed).

Every turn, you must play a Defender: each Defender gives you three things (See Rintraw above as an example):
1) The number of action points (lower left: 4 for Rintraw above): how many actions can you do that turn?
2) Preferred terrain (upper left: Plains for Rintraw): what terrain do you travel best through?
3) Special: when you reveal “something” usually happens (bottom of card): what happens when I reveal the card?

Depending on where you are in the game, you will have three or fewer Defenders to choose from: see above as we have a full complement of Defenders.

You DO NOT get a new Defender card every turn: you ONLY draw back to your hand limit (3) when you build a new camp!  See above as the Zyrinn prepares to build a camp and get her three Defenders back!  You must be building all the time to get your Defenders back!

You can only build a camp if you have enough “support” in the game:  The little pawn on the circular support board above denotes “how much support” you have: you can’t build a camp until the pawn reaches the next campsite!

How do you get support?  A bunch of actions each give you one support: see the Summary cards above! Every time you Clear Pollution, Destroy a Mech, Breach a Wall, Rewild a Factory, you get a +1 support and your pawn moves forward closer to a camp.

This is a tactical game (with some strategy): players will be moving around the map cleaning up the pollution (the little hexes), taking out Mechs (the small silver claws) and breaching walls built by the machines!

This is a game about cleaning up the wilds: the pollution, toxic waste, the mechs, and the factories.  Players loses if too much of the forest becomes toxic, a factory needs to be built and there’s no more, or 2 Defenders from the same Habitat are killed.

How do factories, mechs, and pollution come about?  From the Machine cards: see above.  One machine card comes out after every turn and builds factories, spreads pollution, or generates more mechs.  The same 7 cards are shuffled and come out over and over.  Each Machine card is very distinct and generates “bad stuff” in a very particular way.

Players win if they “rewild” all of the 5 the 5 factories (see the purple hexes above: they used to be factories) and build all of their camps!  

The game has beautiful art and a very good production.

The components are high-quality with
1) wooden meeples, camps, and organizers
2) linen-finished cards
3) thick cardboard hexes
4) beautiful art

The game unboxes and makes you think: “This game looks cool“.

Rulebook

The rulebook is okay.   There are certain things I really like about it, and certain things I really don’t.

It gets a B- on the Chair Test: The font and form factor are both a little small, so it’s a little harder to see it on the chair text to me.  Also, there is a lot of text in the book (see above): it really needed more accompanying pictures.  But, it stays in the B range because the rulebook does NOT flop over the edges: it stays open and I can consult it on the chair next to me.

The Components page is great: it shows all the components and marks them so you can correlate the stuff.  Good job!

The set-up is pretty good, but it has some flaws.  For one, there’s a lot of text, especially since it spills over in the next page.

There is generally a lot of text in the rulebook (see above); it feels like a few more pictures would have helped.  Also, sometimes the rulebook reads like a legal document.

An index would have been nice; there’s a lot of rules in this rulebook.

The rulebook ends with a description of the cards/Defenders in each deck.  This wasn’t the most useful thing to put on the back because the descriptions don’t say anything more than the cards.  I would have preferred a glossary or something close to an index.

The rulebook was very text-heavy, needed some more pictures, needed a few more elaborations (see sections below), and it probably needed a glossary or index (as it’s very rules heavy).  It was ok. I was able to learn the game from the rulebook pretty well, but it took a few tries.

Solo Plays

Defenders of the Wild supports solo play (congratulations for following Saunders’ Law).  See the back of the box above.

Unfortunately, the solo rules take up half of a page, full of rules that are exceptions to the base game. See above.  The basic idea is that you play as a 2-Player game, but with some non-standard way of handling the Defender cards.

This game has so very many rules, I can’t recommend throwing another set of rules at the solo player.  I ended up just playing all my solo games as a two-handed two-player game, where I alternated between players like a normal 2-player game.  There are no exceptional rules when you play two-handed two-player; the game plays normally and  this seemed to work just fine.  For your first learning game, I absolutely recommend playing this way: there are far too many rules for you to be throwing another half-page of new rules at the players.  

My first solo game ended in a win, as I rewilded all the factories without dying!  See above. BUT, as it turns out, I got a lot of rules wrong.   It took me about four (five?) gameplays to get all the rules down; there are a lot of rules in this game.

My second and third solo games were pretty rotten. 

I got smashed by toxic waste in my second game (when three pollutions congregate on a single spot, it turns into toxic waste).  Too many toxic wastes came out, and I just lost quickly!  It was very depressing.

My third game, where I got most of the rules right, was a defeat as my second Defender got crushed (recall: you lose if a SECOND Defender from a faction dies).  I started to get the cadence of the game by the third game, as I was close to a win: I had one factory left.

Unfortunately, my loss on the third game had me worried that the game might be too random. Whether I won or lost depended on just a few die rolls or card flips.

Cooperative Games

My first cooperative play (after 3 solo games) was a 2-Player game with Sam. There were still one or two rules I was getting wrong: having Sam there forced me to rethink/resolve some of those.

Our 2-Player game was also lost by too much Toxic Waste: see above. We couldn’t get into the Factories to rewild them (for various reasons), so the Build Factories action becomes “spew pollution” when there is no enclosed space for a factory.

We were doing “okay” in the game until the Bad News (the Machine cards) just seemed to conspire against us: we had 4 factories built in so many rounds, then pollution just spilled out as we couldn’t clean up or shut them down.  It was very depressing.  We didn’t feel like we could do anything about it.

My next cooperative game was a 3-Player game.

Even after five games under our belt (solo and co-op), we were still “discovering” or “reinterpreting” the rules.  

For example: You lose if you can’t build the final factory, but what does that mean?  Does there have to be an enclosed area out (we think so, but we weren’t sure)?

Our game ended in a loss because of one card flip: we had no way to mitigate the Machine card that came out!  All Teresa had to do was use one action to build her final camp, and we lost because of the way the Machine cards came out.  I suppose it was suspenseful that we lost on a final Machine card, but it felt anti-climactic.  “Oh, we lost because of something random we can’t do anything about?”

One thing I will say: the game feels “easier” with more players.  Why? You have more Defenders that can die (6 = 3 * 2 for a 3-Player game), you have more camps on the board where you can rest or gain tokens at (as the camps are much more likely to be in reach with more players, as there are more of them), and Defender cards that help all players help more players, and there’s more “reach” as players can spread out to get the Factories/Pollution/Toxic Waste under control quicker.

In a 1 and 2-Player game, I/We struggled hard to get stuff done, to move, to clean, to build.  In a 3-Player game, it seemed a little easier to get stuff done.

What I Liked

One: This game looks good on the table and the components are high quality.

Two: I like how the woodland creatures are well-colored coded and consistent, and the Mechs are all silver and metallic. It’s very clear what are the natural forest pieces, and what are the metal intruders.

Three: I love the art in this game. Meg Lemieur knocked it out of the park.

Four: This rulebook isn’t great, as it misses some elaborations/descriptions of rules, but it does something that most cooperative games don’t do: Defenders of the Wild tries to specify what happens in all edge cases when there are questions.  Most cooperative games just throw their hands up in the air and say “players just choose something together if there’s a question” … which I always think is a cop-out.  I write about this issue in more detail here in Resolving Ambiguity in Cooperative Games.   For all of its issues, I really have to applaud Defenders of the Wild for trying to specify all edge cases!  This leads to some weird/fiddly rules (“you have to preserve the arrow direction on the factories when you move or flip them”, “Machines reset on hex boundaries after scanning in the direction of the Direction Circle”), but it’s all in the name of specifying the behaviour of the Bad Guys. 

I stand-up and applaud Defenders of the Wild for this.  It’s refreshing to see a cooperative game try to be complete in specifying edge cases.

What I Didn’t Like

One: Why are there Communication Restrictions? I didn’t discuss it in the overview, but this game has restrictions on communications when choosing the Defender to play: all players all shut-up, can’t say anything, and must choose the Defender to play in silence.  See rules page 10 (above).

I hated this Communication Restrictions and my friends hated this Communication Restriction.  Rules like this are almost always to keep the Alpha Player in check (so one player doesn’t tell everyone what to do).   In this game, I don’t think that’s much of an issue.  In fact, it made the game less cooperative, less strategic, and less fun.  Each player’s turn “tends” to be like a multiplayer solitaire turn anyways: a player takes his turn and others don’t really get involved; in fact, there’s nothing anyone else can do on your turn!  So, each player tends to take their turn “maybe” with some advice from others.

So, by taking away the ONE decision point where players might be able to help each other, this rule makes the game even less cooperative and strategic.  I really think this rule is a misstep; this game needs every little bit of strategy it can get.  Otherwise it becomes a random slog.

: 

Two: Not enough choice! There’s a rule that you only get new Defenders when you build a camp. I understand why this rule sort of “forces” you to build camps, as camps are an important part of the game: This rule strongly encourages you to build camps. But not having a full hand of three Defenders completely takes away your choice during the game. When you have a full hand of three Defenders (see above), the game feels strategic: “I can make choices relevant to the state of the board and the future and my friends“. If, for some reasons (say too much randomness, see below), you can’t get a camp built (and you have no more Defenders), you are completely at the mercy at the top card of your Defender deck (which you can’t even see). So, the game is playing itself! You just turn over the top Defender card and “see” what happens that turn! It is not fun, it doesn’t feel like you have any choice, and it feels like the game is playing you.

I really feel like a very simple house rule could fix this: it would be something like “you can draw a card after every turn“. There’s still a chance to play a support cards (which will exhaust your cards faster), but maybe building a camp STILL refills your hand to three Defenders. I feel like I should always have some sort of choice, or why I am even here? The game is just playing itself.

Three: Too much randomness!  We haven’t discussed it at all, but there is a 6-sided die in the game.  Whenever you perform an action next to a sniper Mech (see more Sniper issues below) or on the same space as a Hunter mech, you must roll the die.  A sniper hits you 50% of the time for 1 point of damage. A Hunter hits you 33% of the time for 2 damage and 50% of the time for 1 damage (83% of the time, you will take damage)!  That may not seem like much, but 4 damage kills a Defender!  And two dead Defenders means the end of the game.

If you roll poorly AT ALL during the game, you have to start play very conservatively!  Let’s say I was aggressive for one turn and rolled poorly, killing a Defender.  For the rest of the game, I CANNOT take any chances, as another dead Defender means Game Over!!  So, the game becomes like you are walking around on your tip-toes to get anything done.  It’s not fun as you feel like you can’t do anything. 

“We need to rewild that factory!  I’ll do it! Oh wait, I just 2 damage from a mech, one more roll and we lose the game, I’ll just run away, heal, and come back.”  

You might just say “stay away” from the mechs. That’s impossible; they are constantly being spewed out, and the middle of the board (where you need to be for rewilding factories) is full of snipers who will just pick away at you. Since you can NEVER enter the core, you just have to take it (unless you happen to get a Defender, there’s just a few who can kill Mechs from afar). This becomes a game of running up, doing one little thing, then running away.

In many games, I just felt like I couldn’t get anything done because of a few early bad rolls: once you have one dead Defender, your moves seem so tentative and dull and not fun …and you have to be careful, otherwise you will probably lose.

Four: Machine Cards are also too Random! In my first 2-Player game, we got 4 factories built in quick succession, just because of the way the cards came out, they spewed pollution and caused so much Toxic Waste! We had no chance! We couldn’t clean it up fast enough, and we couldn’t rewild the factories. We got destroyed.

If you have a few factories out and then get the two Factories at the end of the deck, reshuffle, then also get those Factories at the beginning, you can get 4 pollution spews in a row! You can’t come back from that! This is like the Variable Turn Order problem we see in games like Aeon’s End or The Plum Island Horror. If the “Bad News” cards come out in just the wrong way, you can get totally screwed. See our full Discussion here in A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness!

That discussion does offer a potential solution: maybe the players can have a few “fate” tokens which they can spend to “skip” or “redraw” a bad news. I am not proposing getting rid of a Machine card for a turn, but it would be nice if the players had a “hacker” token (more thematic than a Fate token) where they could choose one of the top two Machine cards. Only spend it when it matters and it would allow the players to feel like they have some agency in their own fate.

Five: Too many things underspecified. This is harder to say, because I really like how this game tries to specify everything. It misses some important things, and some things are so subtley described, it’s not clear. I sometimes feel like I needed to read the rulebook like a legal document.
Some examples:

Rockets: Rockets kill one Mech without a dice roll. It does NOT say whether it’s on the current space ONLY or also an adjacent space? A Rocket, thematically, feels like it could reach a space next to it. I am fine believing it’s just the current space (and that’s the way I played it), but it’s not clear. One sentence would clear this up. Or MAYBE a Rocket even will destroy ANY mech on the board? That would be game-changing! But it’s not clear. UPDATE: After the 5th game, we found a Defender whose text said “Rockets can be used to target adjacent hexes”, implying they could only be used in the current space all other times.

Hunters vs Snipers: A Sniper is defined by being a mech in a Factory, and a Hunter is defined by being a mech in a Habitat space. I think. I don’t think a Sniper can ever becomes a Hunter or vice-versa. I think. Why is this not clearer? What I did, as a house rule, was to place SNIPERS with the prongs on the top, and the HUNTERS as the mechs with the prongs on the bottom: see picture above. This seems like a very easy way to help visually distinguish the two types of mechs, but the rulebook just calls them both mechs. It’s very easy to miss the difference as you are playing. Again, I just wanted a few more sentences on this: the description in the rulebook feels like a legal document. “We are defining a sniper to be a mech on a factory”. (Does a Sniper turn into a Hunter if a tile is rewilded? Technically, a rewilded factory is still a factory, so maybe, but a few sentences would be helpful).

The Factories Machine card:  All the rules are NOT written on this card.  When you build a factory, you are ALSO supposed to deploy 2 Snipers to the Core.  (And you have to move everything with the new factory).  This is nowhere to be found on the factory card!!!  A few simple sentences on the Factories Machine card that would help make the game easier to play.  It feels like you have to keep your nose in the rulebook at all times or you might miss a rule!  I like the art of Meg Lemieur on the Factories Machine card, but I would rather have the Machine cards more complete and functional than pretty.

These are just some examples of missing or rules needing better descriptions.  If you don’t play with the right interpretation of any of these, this game becomes substantially different.

House Rules

We really want to like this game.  We love the art, we love the universe, we love the ideas, we love the basic idea of a cooperative kind of wargame.  But we are really struggling with the game, as it feels too random.   Here’s a set of House Rules that you might try in your game if you are struggling with it like we are;  maybe try some and keep the ones you like.

1. Always draw a Defender card at the end of your turn.  This isn’t a panacea, as you can still get down to fewer cards by using support actions, but it least it generally keeps you feeling like you have choices every turn.  A camp build will always bring you back to 3.
2. Turn the mechs upside down to denote Snipers, and rightside up to denote Hunters.
3. Have a pool of 2 or 3 (4?) Hacker tokens.  When a Machine Card is drawn that is decided to be too devastating, you can discard a Hacker token to take the next Machine card instead.  This helps give the players a little control over the pure randomness of the Machine deck.
4. Get rid of all Communications Restrictions. The game already feels like multiplayer solitaire! Allow the players to find the best Defenders to help everybody AS A GROUP so the game feels more cooperative!! (If you are having Alpha Player issues with this rule, then either don’t play with that person, or put a timer on Defender choosing).
5. Allow players to discard a Defender card rather than take a damage; not killed, but it definitely leaves the game: maybe it’s KO’d.  The randomness of the die is NOT fun: I wish there were more mitigation methods for it  (This rule is probably the one we feel most unsure about).

Granted, these will all make the  game easier, but the game is already pretty hard.  If you feel like these House Rules make the game too easy, there are also DIFFICULT Machine Cards which make the game substantially harder.

House Rules 2 and 4 are probably ones I would absolutely recommend for everyone!  You can probably take or leave House Rules 1, and 3 and … especially 5.

Reactions

Sam: “I currently give it a 6, I would like to play it some more to refine my opinion.“

Rich: “I am really struggling with this game. I want to like it so much, but it is far too random for me. There’s a lot of great things in the game, and I feel like there are people who would like this game as-is: Objectively, I would give it a 6/10. Subjectively, as-is, I would give it a 4/10 because I don’t ever want to play it again: it’s too random. With some House Rules, I would maybe move up a couple of points to a 6/10 or maybe more. There is so much to like in this game.”

Sara: “This is under a 5 for me. It wasn’t fun, and I was glad when it was done. It was just too random. I might play it again if someone really really wants to play, but probably not. I really wanted to like it.”

Teresa: “I dunno, a 5 or a 6. It was frustrating, but I had fun with the little animals. “

Conclusion

Defenders of the Wild is a game that introduces a wonderful world with a wonderful production.  The randomness of the game (from random die rolls to random Machine cards) held this back for me and my groups.  After a number of plays, it’s clear that you can get to strategies where you mitigate some of that randomness (as you do get better as you play more), so it’s not just a random slog.  But the question is: is it fun to get there?  My groups didn’t think so, but that’s just some opinions.

I think the target audience for Defenders of the Wild might be war-gamers looking for a cooperative adventure.  War-gamers are used to dealing with swings of randomness from skirmish to skirmish in pursuit of a greater victory: it’s clear, you can get better at this game as you play, so there is definitely both strategy and tactics.  If you were looking for a cooperative Root, this might be a decent pick for you! It has the cuteness of Root, the war-gamer nature of Root, but in a cooperative game!

This game seems to be better with more players, as there seem to be more opportunities to get stuff done on your turn (more camps, more chances to push your luck since dying isn’t quite as critical, etc), and that seems to lead to better mitigation of some of the randomness.  Unfortunately, the one and two player games just seem to succumb to the randomness too quickly.  

This might be the perfect game for you and your group: take a look at what we saw. Be aware that the randomness and some of the underspecificity of the game led my group to rate this from 4/10 to 6/10.  I don’t think any of us thought this was a bad game, but it just wasn’t for us.  

If you do find yourself wanting to try this out, I recommend playing this out with bigger groups for the best chance of a good experience.

Invincible is comic book series about a kid with “super-man” like powers; this comic book series is unique because it has one voice (Robert Kirkman) through the entire run of the series.  Most comics are lucky if they get a consistent voice for 3 years.  The series started at issue #1 in January 2003 and finished up with issue #144 in February 2018.  For 15 years, over the run of the series, we saw Mark Grayson mature and evolve from a kid to a man.  It’s a very mature series, but it is very well written.  Even the art stayed consistent (between two artists:  Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley) over the run of the series!

I really liked this comic book series (having collected the entire run from beginning to end), but it is quite mature: there is quite a number of mature topics.  The series is also incredibly violent and has very graphic fights.

Fast forward to July 2024: Dire Wolf has come up with an Invincible board game called Invincible: The Hero-Building Game!

This is a cooperative board game for 1-4 Players, 45-90 minutes with Ages 13+.  See above! Invincible is a cooperative boss battler game where players have to take out the big baddie (and do other heroic stuff along the way).  I will say this: the board game is much much much less violent and graphic than the cartoon or the comic series.  If you were worried about the violence or maturity, especially for a boss-battler game, don’t fret!  That 13+ for ages is an accurate depiction.

Invincible: The Hero-Building Game is an interesting twist on the cooperative super-hero genre: it’s a bag-building game!  We’ll see elements from other modern board games: Orleans (with its bag-building, especially with the Invasion cooperative expansion), Marvel United (with its super-hero theming and civilians mechanisms), Marvel Champions (with its super-hero theming and Threat mechanism), and Quacks of Quedlingburg (for the push-your-luck).

I ordered my copy from the Direwolf website, and it arrived at my house in early July 2024.  Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

I was grumpy when I opened my box: the rulebook had shifted around during shipping and got all folded and messed up!

See the can of Coke for perspective: this is a normal sized box.

Each player assumes the role of one of 4 characters from the Invincible universe: Invincible, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, or Robot.  See above and below.

Each player also gets a standee. See above.

This is a bag-building game (we mentioned earlier), so each player gets their own bag to put cubes into: see above for the bags and the cubes.

There’s a bunch of scenarios that come in the game.  You can choose to play them in order, as one-shots, or in an ordered campaign. See the first “suggested” scenario above.

There’s a bunch of civilians to protect: if the players ever have too many civilian casualties, the game is over! Players lose!

The game board is three regions of a city (A, B, and C).  Bad guys appear and fight our heroes, or threaten civilians (if there are any in their zone).  If a zone is ever bereft of civilians, the game is over!  So, it’s a bit of balancing act making sure the civilians are safe while still taking out the big bads.

The mechanism for keeping track of civilian casualties is pretty simple: there’s actually a casualties track below the main city boards.

Bad guys appear in the city and cause havoc, threatening civilians or just doing damage to our heroes!

Each players starting bag contains the cubes above: 6 black and 3 orange, yellow, blue, purple.  The cubes are used to “power” abilities in the heroes.

As the game progresses, you can “buy” more powers: see above as Invincible has more powers to put cubes on!

It’s fairly intuitive how to place the cubes: obviously, a single yellow cube will activate the power above!  And there’s also orange, purple, blue, and black cubes in the game!

The black cubes are a mixed blessing: they are wild (so can be used for any color on any power), but if you ever draw 5 black cubes, you crash!  A crashing hero has to stop and will take some damage (because he pushed himself too hard).   You can save a hero from crashing, but it stops another player.

A crashing player will roll the black/red dice to see how damage the “crash” did.  If someone tries to save the hero, then the white dice will indicate how successful the save was!  You aren’t even guaranteed to save a crashing hero!

There are also “bad news” cards (this is a co-op game after all): the event cards come out after all players decide to finish and quit drawing from their bag.  These symbols will cause different villains to do different things … usually hitting the heroes or threatening civilians!

If the heroes can handle the final villains, they win!   The above scenario needs the the heroes to defeat 3 Flaxans in order to win!

This is a boss-battling bag-building game!  (Say that three times fast!) The components are decent, but not super high-quality.  Most of the cardboard is kind of thin.  The cards aren’t great quality (they need linen-finishing I think), but the art of the cards is very consistent with the Invincible universe.   Unfortunately, this is not the same level of production as a giant Kickstarter: I can imagine a world where the cards are linen-finished, the boards are nicer, some of the villains have special tokens, and the hero standees are acrylic standees!  But that’s not what we have here.  Still, everything was very readable, and all the components worked.  UPDATE: After about 5 plays, the blue bag for Invincible has developed a hole in the bottom! Grrr…

Rulebook

The rulebook was pretty good.

It gets about a B on the Chair Test: I can put it on the chair next to me, keep it open flat, and consult it while I play.  It only gets a B because it’s just a little bigger and the paper quality is a little flimsy.  (Maybe I am just grumpy my rulebook got smashed before I even opened my box).

The Components page is excellent: it spans two pages and is easy to correlate all the components against their labels.

The rulebook even does a good job of separating what components you will need for your first game (Episode 1) vs a Full Game vs. Episode-Specific Components!  See above! That’s really nice!

The set-up pages do just what I want: two full pages (well three pafe) labelling and showing the steps with a giant picture showing up what things look like!  See above!  The set-up even separates “Episode 1” (first play) from Full Game!  Again, really nice!

Generally, this rulebook was good at showing pictures and explaining how everything works.

There’s no index (booo!) and no glossary (boooo!), but there is a Keywords and Card Mechanisms section.  This isn’t a super complex game, and I was able to find rules when I needed them, but an index would have been helpful.

The back cover was quite useful with a list of a lot (but not all) icons.

In general, I was happy with the rulebook.   The lack of index and my squished rulebook were my two main complaints.

Onboarding

It’s been a while since I had a game direct me through my first game so nicely.  The Episode 1 deck is all set for you: you don’t shuffle it at all!

The Episode 1 game is a simplified version of the game, showing off the main mechanisms before jumping into the full rules.    That first Episode 1 deck has everything separated out to easily set-up and play.

Luckily, there are instructions to resetting the first scenario!  I have played the first game (both solo and cooperatively) and the full game a few times, but I plan to teach this game a lot at RichieCon, (and I did: see here) so I will reset the game back to “Episode 1” for teaching purposes.   I think it might have been nice to label the Episode 1 cards so it would be a little easier to reset, but heck, I am just happy they had a list of instructions for that reset!

The onboarding was pretty darn good!  It wasn’t quite as good as onboarding as Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth (that game sets the bar very high for your first game: see our review here for more discussion), but it was pretty darn good.

Solo Play

There are solo rules!  Huzzah! The game follows Saunders’ Law and has a viable solo mode!

In the solo mode, you still have to take control of 2 heroes: See above as the solo player takes control of Invincible and Atom Eve.  

Basically, the solo player alternates between the two characters as-if it were a 2-Player game.  There is no true solo play (one character) in this game.  I suspect it’s because you need 2 characters to be able to catch each other when you crash (see Gameplay section above); that crash mechanism is brutal, and a second character helps mitigate that.

There’s some strange rules about sharing/not sharing the hands and confidence during the training phase … which I just ignored.  I just played the solo game as if it were a full 2-Character game: no exceptional rules. Having these weird sharing/non-sharing powers/confidence rules from the solo section takes me away from the main flow of the game! I want to be able to feel like I am playing the main game with no exceptions.  I understand why they wanted to do this: it feels like you have to think less about which powers to buy, but in the end since every other rule is just like a 2-Character game, (including maintaining two bags, two characters, and every other rule), I just played solo as 2 characters.  And it worked fine.  I recommend this way for playing solo!

There is quite a bit of maintenance to operate the game, as you operate two characters, the bad guys, the event deck, the confidence phases, and everything else!  But it never felt too overwhelming; I felt like the turns moved along pretty quickly.

My first game was Episode 1 with the two characters Invincible and Atom Eve.  The game took away just enough of the extra rules to make the game more palatable to set-up and play, but it still taught the core of the game.  I also appreciated that specific bad guys were chosen to come out: they were all “simple bad guys”, which is what you want in your first game.

I have learned now to keep two chairs out for games with Episodes: The rulebook and episode guide (see above).

I lost my first game because one too many civilians died in Zone C.  (Remember, if any zone is bereft of civilians, you lose!).  So, I “pretended” one civilian had survived, so I made my may to the endgame, just so I could see what that endgame looked like.

With that one change, I was able to defeat Flaxan Invasion! (Take out three Flaxan baddies: see above).

Obviously, the game was a bit challenging since I (strictly speaking) lost!  But it was close, and I had a good time learning how the game worked! See above for my “winning” game!

My second game was Episode 2: This is the full game!  Welcome to the Big Leagues!

The game still unfolds the game way, but now you have more powers to manage! Set-up is not too much more difficult, as (remember) the rulebook does have good descriptions for Episode 1 and Full Game mode!

Players now have Signature Powers and Ultimate Powers! The Ultimate Powers go beneath a power you have and can only be activated if the the power above has already been activated!

The Signature Power now goes on your board: See as Atom Eve has her Bubble Up Signature Power (in addition to get Starter Power: Convenient Creation!)

The game becomes a lot harder now, as you have to generally start worrying about more! Not only do you have to save the civilians and beat-up the bad guys, but you have to worry more about Threat!  Dealing with Threat reminds me of Marvel Champions: instead of fighting on a turn, you may try to add Threat markers (see Villain above) to stop him!  Above, the Villain is trying to blow-up the heads on Mount Rushmore, so you have to “eliminate that Threat!”

In the Full Game, you character ends up with a lot more Powers!  See above as Invincible has bought 3 Powers, and 2 Ultimate Powers, most of these needed for dealing with Threat!

The Full Game is great: I am really glad they have the Episode 1 on-boarding experience, but it felt great to jump into Episode 2!  It was challenging and interesting the whole way!

I look forward to more solo plays.  This is just a blast!  And you can play any Episode in any order!

But, I suspect my next few plays will be teaching this game cooperatively to my friends at my Game Groups and at RichieCon (Editor’s Note: I did teach it cooperatively at RichieCon!)!  I think Invincible will be a hot game at RichieCon!  (One thing to note for Set-Up: leave space beneath your character card for 2 cards so it’s easy to add Ultimate Powers!  You can see I didn’t quite leave enough space, and the Ultimate Powers are hanging off the board).

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play went smoothly: Sam and I started with Episode 1, and frankly it was very easy to teach.  We had a smooth time!  Sam didn’t even really know who Invincible was, but he still enjoyed the game.  I am an avoid Superhero gamer, but Sam was fairly neutral on the theme … but he still liked it!

Now that I have some plays under my belt, this was a breeze to teach.  The cooperative elements worked really well: we were able to “save each other” from crashes twice!  I asked for help a number of times: “Hey, if you can do one more damage, we can take this guy out!”  And Sam would ask for help when he needed it!

Sam liked the game! He said to me “After RichieCon, I want to play the campaign! This was fun!”

I also had ulterior motives to teach Sam the game: I wanted him to be able to teach Invincible at RichieCon!  I am pretty sure this will be a hot game!!!  The TV show is hot right now, the game is  getting good buzz!   If I can’t teach, Sam will be my goto teacher!

Things I Liked

O1) One of my favorite aspects of this game is that it embraces Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO): fine grained: See above as the rules describe how “Players can pull and play their cubes in any order they wish!”  This allows players to hold back a little when needed to coordinate their actions! It’s also cool because it’s fine-grained (meaning players can intersperse their actions across turns)!   But, what tends to happen is very similar as we saw in Slay The Spire: (see review here):  Play tends to proceed simultaneously (everyone draws from their bag and plays simultaneously) until we get the points where it’s clear we need to coordinate … if someone crashes, or we need to save some civilians (to not lose), or to take out a baddie completely, or whatever makes sense!   Like Slay The Spire, we paradoxically have Simultaneous Actions (which moves the game along) but also fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order (which keeps up cooperation when needed)!  I love how this works in Invincible!

2) I loved how you always feel like you are getting better and better in this game!  Every turn you typically buy a power and a new cube for your bag!  You just always feel like you get better and better as you play!  And you get choices: Which powers do I buy?  Which color cube do I buy? The level-up system just keep you invested in the characters!

3) I like how this game really embraces the Invincible comic vibe: the art on every card is different, like a “snapshot” from the Invincible universe!   People like me, who love the comic, really appreciate how this makes it feel like the comic.  People who don’t know the series can still enjoy the comic-booky vibe that permeates the game!

Things I Didn’t Like

one) At the end of the day, what you draw from the bag is still random.  And the Event Deck can be a little too random.  Although there are countless mitigation techniques for drawing cubes (you can add cubes, you can redraw one pull, you save another hero from crashing, etc.), sometimes that randomness can just get you … and it’s frustrating.  It’s very frustrating when you pull 3 black cubes on your first turn!  Ergh.  Like I said, there are plenty of mitigation techniques (including you can get KO’ed three times before the game ends) .  As for the Event Cards: I do remember Episode 1 ending because the event card  just destroyed so many civilians … I never saw that coming!  This randomness is just something to be aware of … but since this is a boss-battler, there has to be some elements of randomness to keep it spicy.

2) It feels like the production could be a little better: the cards aren’t great quality (even though the art is), and a lot of the boards feel a little cheap. And my Invincible bag developed a hole!!! I would love if there were acrylic standees this this! But, we get cardboard standees.  And, like I said earlier, the blue bag has already developed a hole in it! Argh!!

Conclusion

Invincible is a really good cooperative bag-building boss-battler.  Despite a slightly lesser production quality and some innate randomness, this game could easily be my favorite game of the year!

The upgrade path is fantastic as you feel like you are always upgrading and leveling-up your character!  The Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) and Simultaneous Actions make the game flow quick when it needs to and become contemplative when it needs to!  The game just naturally ebbs and flows!

The solo game is fantastic, as is the cooperative game! I could see chipping away at the campaign over time!  It’s so easy to get this to the table! It’s fun as a solo game, despite still having to run two characters!

Objectively, I would give Invincible a 9/10, but if you love the comic world like I do, maybe you’d bump it to a 9.5/10 or a 10/10!  This is a great game!  Invincible would easily make my Top 10 Cooperative SuperHero Games!

I picked up Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls from Target on August 3rd, 2024.  I think it literally just came out that day or just a few days before.

I had already pre-ordered it from GameNerdz or Miniatures Market, but I was just so excited to try it out, I picked it up at Target as soon as I saw it!  I suspect the extra copy of my Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls will be a Christmas present for some family friends this year!

You’ll notice I said “…a Christmas present for some family…”; This is a light-weight cooperative game that I believe is intended for families.  It really is a mass-market game.  Chronicles of Light: Darkness  Falls is a Disney themed game with Disney princesses: Moana from Moana, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Violet from The Incredibles, Maid Marian from Robin Hood.  It contains some lesser components, but it is still a decent price: I paid $29.99 (full MSRP) + tax.

This is a cooperative game for 1-4 players, taking 45-60 minutes, and it is good for ages 8+.  In fact, that 45-60 minutes might even be an exaggeration: I was able to play a few games in about 30 minutes!  

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is a smaller box: see Coke Can above for scale.

Unpacking the box, you see that the components are pretty decent for a mass-market game.  None of the cards are linen-finished, but it’s still a nice production.

In this game, each player takes control of one of the Disney Princesses: see the four boards above.

The minis are a little formless, but the clear plastic and color scheme makes it very clear which princess is which!

This game does a very good job of noting which components belong to which princess from the color scheme! The Belle character’s pieces are all yellow! See above.

Moana‘s pieces are orange (see above).

Violet‘s pieces are red (see above)! (Should they have been violet?)

And Maid Marian’s pieces are purple! 

In fact, the game even goes the extra mile by having plastic storage bags color-coded to the princesses!

You might be wondering “Why have all these princess’s from diverse Disney properties banded together? Why are they here?”  (If you said “Money: Disney wants money”, you far too cynical to play this game, and you should probably stop reading here).  A magic crystal Portal has opened and swept all these diverse Disney princess’s together into one realm!  They need to work together to defeat the shadow creatures, close the portal, and solve their own personal quests to win!

The shadow creatures are creatures that invade the lands the princesses have been swept to!  Note that each princess has her own set of creatures (the back is labelled in her color) that followed her through the portal!  See above!  One of three winning conditions is that you need to take out all Shadows!

Each Princess also has her own quest: the game comes with 4 quests per character, and players randomly choose one!  See above as Violet has to Break The Barriers!

These quests all have slightly different flavors: pick-up and deliver, collect resources, remove resources, etc.   But, all characters must complete their quest in order to win the game!

Each player has 5 actions they can do: see above.  Each character is very different and has action tokens which describe what they can do.

There’s no set turn order in the game, as each player chooses a token to act!  These tokens allow players to do what’s needed on their turn.  Once 6 total tokens have been played, the day ends and players take their token back, starting a new day!

Since this is a co-op game, there must be Bad News cards, right?  These are called Darkness Falls cards (see above) and they form a timer to how long until a game ends.  At the start of every day, one of these is drawn and resolved.  In a 2-Player game, there are only 5 Darkness Falls cards … so the game only lasts 5 turns!  Like I said, this game is over quickly!

This game has pretty darn nice components (see above), despite it being a mass-market game.  And the color-coding of the characters is very consistent and makes it easy to discover which pieces belong to which Princess.

Rulebook

For a family game and mass-market game, this rulebook is actually pretty good.

It gets an A- on The Chair Test!  This rulebook is easy to consult if I put it on a chair next to me: it has a big font and lays open just fine.  The only reason it’s an A- is that the rulebook is actually slightly smaller than I wanted!

The components list is great for cross-referencing all the component! See above!

The Set-up is remarkably well done on just one page as well!  See above!  The only thing missing is a picture of a complete set-up: it’s a minor thing, but I like having pictures of set-up. Still, this set-up still worked pretty well.

The rulebook is also quite short: only 8 pages!  And yet it (mostly) does everything it needs!  There could be a few more pictures, but in general, it was very readable.

It really is easy to read: see above.

Interestingly, the rulebook ends with a description of how to win/lose, and the solo rules.

The game is simple enough that I won’t fault it for lacking an index or glossary, but it probably needs a few more elaborations of rules.  For example: Violet can take out the IncredibleCar to take out barriers, but can she double-back once she breaks a barrier?  That one rule might make a huge difference because movement is so precious in this game.  And there’s lot of places, as you play, where you just have to make a ruling.  It’s not the end of the world, because the game is so simple, but I think the game needs a few more elaborations to be a great rulebook.

Otherwise, this was a pretty darn good rulebook.

EDIT: Unfortunately, we did find out after this review that there was one major issue with the rulebook: it’s not clear, but you can’t destroy the vortex until you’ve completed all quests.  The designer spoke up in this BoardGameGeek thread and said:

Fyi, you cannot destroy the Vortex until all quests have been completed and all shadows defeated. I re-read the rules and I agree this isn’t explicitly clear. I will make a note of this to clarify if the game gets a re-print.

Solo Play

Congratulations to Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls for having a solo mode!  Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!   It’s not a true solo mode: you always need at least two princesses’ playing: see the rules above:

For Solo Players: “Take control of a dynamic duo! Set up for a 2-Player game and play as both Heroes!”

It’s real easy to get this to the table as a solo game. See above as Violet and Moana work together to take out the Barricades and collect Moana’s treasure!  Oh ya, and take out the shadows!  Oh ya, And the portal!

This system of choosing tokens to play for an action works really well! The actions (above) are notated very well on the tokens:

And there’s no “player order” or “take a turn”: you just play the tokens you need to get stuff done!

It’s very cool that each Hero has their own quest, and sometimes others can help with the quest, and sometimes they can’t! Only Violet can pilot the Incredibile (I would have called it IncredibleCar: Incredibile looks like a misspelling) to take out barricades.

It’s interesting how movement and topology really matter in this game, considering that the board is not huge! Movement is precious in this game, and part of the fun is trying to figure out the best order to “deal with” things!  Do we take out some shadows first? The portal?  Do we get a quest done ASAP to unlock a special?  The order in which players “deal with” things may depend strongly on the topology and location of items!!  Players will have to plan their actions together if they want any chance of winning!

For example, in my opening game, I lost horribly as I didn’t really take into account the shadows!  I had done my quests, but I didn’t take down the shadows OR the Portal!  My first game was a disaster … but fun.

For my second game, I rebuilt the map differently! One of the set-up steps is that you “build the map!”  The first time through, the topology of the map doesn’t seem that important, but it really is! It sets the tone for how hard it is to move around!  Like I said, movement is precious in this game!

My second game went much better as a I strategized (with myself) the best order to deal with the Portal, the shadows, and my quests!  It is very important to look at the map!

For a very different solo game, I brought in Maid Marian and Belle to see how different they would be.   What really changes the game:

1. The action tokens for all characters are all different (although all players still have a +1 and +2 move/heal token)
2. The quest: each character has 4 different quests

As a solo game, this is very easy to get the table and set-up.  The color coding makes the process that much easier.  

I had fun solo, but it’s not too hard a puzzle once you get the flow of the game.  It’s a simple game The solo game works well for teaching me the game so I can teach others.  I think the game is better cooperatively, as a group experience.

Cooperative Play

For cooperative play, I taught the game to some family friends.  See above as two girls (9 and 11) play with their parents.

With the younger audience, I ended up being more like a shepherd.  The game is pretty straight forward to teach and play, but with a lot of stuff going around, it was easier to ease the kids into the game by teaching the rules (and not playing).  I would recommend learning this game before teaching it. Not that the game is hard, but it just makes it easier to ease “attention-challenged” kids into a game if you know it well.

They ended up playing and winning their 4-Player game!  See above.  I was a little worried that the 4-Player experience would be too much, but it wasn’t … as long as I was keeping everyone involved.  Since there is no turn order, I think you have to be extra careful to keep everyone on track.  For families, I again would recommend a shepherd.

Did my family friends like this game?  I asked them: “Would you like Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls for Christmas?”  I got a very excited “YES!” from the girls, so I think this was a hit.

What I Liked

1. The system for Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO):coarse-grained (see PSTO here) works really well here!  One of the harder things to notate in PSTO is “who has gone and who hasn’t”.  By having the tokens to notate when you have played them (on the team board above), that solves that problem!  See the player board above!!! In fact, these tokens also solve the problem of “what can I do on my turn”: the tokens are very well notated, so it’s very clear all the things a player can do on their turn!  We always love PSTO, as it usually adds an extra level of cooperation to a game as players work out the order in which they act: PSTO “makes” players talk and interact that much more!

   The fact that PSTO is in a mass-market game makes this game all the more impressive!  Sure, we have seen PSTO in gamery games like The Reckoners, Set A Watch, and X-Men: Heroes Resistance, to name a few.  But to see PSTO here in this mass market game is great! 
   

2. The color-coding of the characters is very strong and makes the game easy to set-up and tear-down!  It’s very clear which things belong to which Princess!  This just makes the game “feel” easier to play, even if it’s just an optical illusion. See above.
   
3. For a mass-market game, the components are really pretty nice!  I’ve tried to show lots of pictures in this review to demonstrate that.   See above.
   
4. I appreciate, in general, how good the rulebook is.  See above.
   
5. Variability: the fact that each princess has one of four different quests gives this game some variability!  Even if you play Violet a couple of times in a row, so can have a different quest each time, which gives the game some variability to extend the life of the game. See above.
   
6. The fact that each Princess has her own 5 action tokens adds to the variability of point 5.

What I Didn’t Like

1.  I have played a number of games now, and unfortunately, to win, the game arc will be the same.  You almost HAVE to take the Portal out in the first turn to have any chance of winning.  The Portal spits out Shadows every turn … and you have to kill all Shadows (as one of the winning conditions) in order to win!  My first game was a disaster because I let the Portal run wild.  It’s very clear: in order to win, you must take out the Portal first, then proceed to the rest of the game.  That makes the game arc a little “samey” each time.  EDIT: See rulebook discussion above, as we found after this review came out.  The designer spoke up in this thread on BoardGameGeek and said:

Fyi, you cannot destroy the Vortex until all quests have been completed and all shadows defeated. I re-read the rules and I agree this isn’t explicitly clear. I will make a note of this to clarify if the game gets a re-print.

2. Although I really like that the actions are well-labelled on the tokens, and that the tokens are different, they aren’t THAT different. Everyone has a +1, +2 move/heal. A lot of heroes have “something” that helps them move fast (move to another hero, move 3 over water, move 3 with a car), and then maybe one or two special. Don’t get me wrong: this is very cool, but the tokens aren’t THAT different. I almost wish each Princess had a special power not connected to their action tokens to make them more distinct.

3. At the end of the day, this is still a dice game.  They are some player actions to mitigate the dice, but it’s still easy to be overwhelmed by bad rolls.

4. My boards were a little warped.  It wasn’t a big deal, the game was still playable, but it was noticeable. See pictures above of the player boards and the maps boards.

Conclusion

I like Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls. It’s a light cooperative game that’s fun for families, or for the end of the night when you want something “less thinky”. Many heavier gamers will probably balk at the lightness of this game. I tend to like solo games for their puzzly nature, and although the solo puzzle presented here isn’t that challenging, I could see this being a really good gateway solo game!!

The niceness of the components, color-scheme, and gameplay can’t be overemphasized for a mass-market game. I am personally very glad to see a cooperative mass-market game with Player Selected Turn Order (coarse-grained); that mechanism really tends to elevate cooperative games for me. These are some minor issues with the game (see previous section: “What I Don’t Like“), but in general I found Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls to be a bright, fun, world to inhabit for about 45 minutes: 7/10.

Most importantly, my friends want it for Christmas!

Come along with me on my journey as I learn (from complete scratch) how to play Batman: Gotham City Chronicles in its newly released solo and cooperative modes! It’s a bit of a rough trip, but that experience has many moments along the way that will help inform whether this expansion is for you!

Batman: Gotham City Chronicles has been on Kickstarter multiple times.  Season 1 (see here) and Season 2 (see here) offered a ton of content and a ton of miniatures! The only problem for me was that the base game is a 1 vs. many game … neither cooperative nor solo.  Since this blog (CO-OP Gestalt) is all about  solo and cooperative games,  it didn’t make sense to pick it up!  As much as I love Batman and my Superheroes (see our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero Games), I had to pass on these first two Kickstarters…

The Season 3 Kickstarter (see here), however, offered an expansion for the game that makes it both solo and cooperative!  See the expansion box above!!  (It also offered an RPG, but that wasn’t what I was interested in).  I mean, that art also helps me like it! That’s a great cover!

This box (see back of box above) transforms Batman: Gotham City Chronicles from 1 vs. many into solo and cooperative! That’s something I might enjoy playing! 

So, this means I have to get quite a bit of stuff: the base game (see below) as well as the expansion! 

Wait … is this what I want to do this?

Trepidation

There was definitely some trepidation in getting this, because this meant that I had to get the base game … and it’s not cheap!

I also freely admit that some of my trepidation came from the Shut-Up & Sit-Down review of the original Gotham City Chronicles! (See link above) This is one of my favorite videos from those guys, but they pretty much trashed it. If you haven’t seen the video, there’s a link above! They do a good job of discussing gameplay and ideas … as well as destroying the game!

I love the Shut-up & Sit-Down videos, but over time, I realize that I am anti-correlated to their opinions! They loved Arkham Horror the Card game and hated Marvel Champions! I was completely the other way around! So, maybe I would love Batman: Gotham City Chronicles with the solo and co-operative expansion?

So, with some trepidation, I took the plunge and ordered the base game, some expansions … and the new solo/co-op expansion!

Day 0:  Ummm

I got two big boxes from Monolith in late June.  Ummm … I don’t have time to deal with this right now!  But I know exactly what this is!  I just don’t have time!

There’s a lot of stuff here.  I knew I’d have to “deal” with it.  Not now.  It’s very daunting … as excited as I was, I knew this would eat up a few days.  I wasn’t wrong.

Day 1: Unboxing 

I got a lot of stuff, but the first thing I opened was the solo/co-op box.

Two things stood out about the box: it’s surprisingly small and surprisingly sturdy! It’s a hefty box! See the picture above with a Coke can for perspective.

The solo/co-op box comes with both the English Directions/Cards and the French Directions/Cards.  There’s also a few language independent punch outs and a die.  Half of what I paid for was the French content, which I would never use.  That made me a bit grumpy.

The cards will be used to direct the AI in the solo/co-op games.  These are very readable: see above.

Unfortunately, there are production issues.   The rulebook contains the solo/co-op changes for the set-ups for the Scenarios from the game.  Although most of the English Scenarios are in English, both rule books had the last 10 or so Adventures in French!!  See above as I have the English rulebook and French rulebooks next to each other … and they are BOTH in French!!!  

If I ever want to play these Scenarios, I will have to use Google Translate to translate them to English.  That seems less than ideal.  I hope Monolith recognizes the problem and sends out another copy?  Or at least some kind of fix?  Monolith: please publish these scenarios in English on your web site so I can print them!!

Given how long I have been waiting for this, the solo/co-op box was a little disappointing: there’s not much here, it has a small but thick rulebook, it has some French content I will never use, and some scenarios are in French only.

Still Day 1: Rulebook

The solo/co-op rulebook basically gets an F on the Chair Test.   

The binding makes it so it can’t stay open on the chair next to me!  And the book is tiny.  And the font is tiny (because the book is small), so it’s harder to read.  I can’t put this on the chair next to me at all.  (There is an okay workaround, see below). 

Compare this to the original Rulebook and Scenario Book for the base Batman: Gotham City Chronicles!  These two (above) both get about an A- on the Chair Test, as they stay open, are large, and can sit on the seat next to me so I can consult them easily!  It’s very frustrating that the solo/co-op book is so hard to consult.

After playing around a little, I realized I could use the  solo/co-op expansion box to “hold open” the rulebook!  See above as I carefully set the rulebook in the box, and it “kinda” stays open.   This is a workaround for The Chair Test: it wasn’t perfect, but it’s a hack that might help you too. At least now I can “kinda” hold the book open and keep it flattish to consult it …

But then came the moment I was dreading, but I was pretty sure I’d have to deal with eventually.  In the first paragraph of the solo/co-op rulebook were these words:

“Therefore, you must know how to play the regular multiplayer game before learning the Solo/Coop mode”

At this point, it was time to stop reading here and start learning the base game.  That took the wind out of my sails, so I stopped for the day.

Day 2: Base Game and Essential Stuff/Printing

So, it’s day 2: time to learn the base game!  

I was hyper-aware that the rulebook for this game was supposedly problematic, so I was very nervous heading into Day 2.

Apparently, I have Rulebook version 2.0: see above!! Have they fixed a lot of stuff up?  I think so … this rulebook worked for me.

I was able to (start to) learn the rules straight from the rulebook.  I had read a LOT of rulebooks, and this wasn’t that bad.  I think Monolith has really fixed it up since the original version.  There’s a decent set-up,  table of Contents, no Index (booo!), but at least it has a Glossary (yaaay!).  It was actually pretty good. 

However, I encountered my NEXT roadblock: “Where’s the Skills and Traits Booklet?” The Components page (above) references that, the Map Board References, and Skill Sheets. I did not have any of those????? It turns out, you had to order the Batcomputer Files expansion box (or get it from the Kickstarter). See this link on BoardGameGeek for the discussion. I happened to miss that you needed that when I ordered my stuff.

Hope is not completely lost: you can print many of the things yourself! The Monolith website has  most of the content listed so you can print it. 

So I couldn’t get the exact Skills and Traits rulebook, but I was able to print the two sheets above! They were good enough.

Unfortunately, much like the Scenarios in the solo/co-op rulebook, some of the content was still in French (even though the downloads were in the English section)! See below.

See above as the content is still in French (even though it’s in the English downloads area).

However, I printed most of what I needed.  The most important things seem to be:

• The Map Reference Sheets
• The Character Sheets
• The Skill Sheets (Villain and Hero)

The Map Reference Sheets:  The board above above looks super cool and thematic!  But you have no idea how to traverse it!  What’s on different levels?  Where are the walls?  Where does Line of Sight work?

The Map Reference Sheets have a much much more useful description of the topography!  See above.  Honestly, I can’t imagine playing without these!   I found it easier to print each map separately on its own sheet of paper (you can save some space by printing double-sided, but my printer isn’t great for double-sided).

The Character Sheets are just as important, as they take the icon-rich sheet like above …

… and condense it down to a readable sheet of abilities!  Again, I think having these is critical!  For my printer, it made sense to have each one on its own sheet (also, since you never know which heroes you will use, it makes sense to have each character sheet separate).

Finally, you should print the Villain Skills and Traits.  I wouldn’t go two-sided: you want both sides up.  You can’t play the Villains without this: period.  This information is in no rulebook that I have.

So, when I am playing the Heroes: the Hero sheet is right there! See above! So much easier to play!

And the Map Reference Sheet and Villain Traits are right there next to the Villain! So much easier to see and play!

I think Batman: Gotham City Chronicles is probably nigh unplayable without these extras. Make sure you get the Batcomputer Expansion Box (which has these sheets) or print them yourself from the Monolith website. These sheets DO NOT come with the base game.

To be clear: this game is unplayable without these.

Day 3: Set-Up and Reading 

After getting everything I needed, the next day was all about reading all the rules and setting-up the game.  These actually kind of went hand-in-hand, as I learned rules, I set-up the game and I set-up the game, I learned the rules.  See above as I get ready to play!

This rulebook is 60 pages. Yep, it’s longer than Gloomhaven’s rulebook (I remember that the original Gloomhaven rulebook is 56 pages)! And this is just the base game! I methodically went through all the rules to understand the base game. And before you say, “Why didn’t you just watch the video?” (which there is one), I find that videos don’t work for me: I like to be able to go back and look at rules in written form.

And don’t forget, I still have to read and synthesize the solo rules! So this was a full day.

There’s been a lot bad press about how bad the Gotham City Chronicles rulebook is: I didn’t think it was that bad, but I also had version 2.0.

Day 4: Solo and An Icy Welcome

In the Missions Book is a list of all the Scenarios (see above) and how many characters come into play!  I chose, for my first solo play, a true solo experience with one hero:  “An Icy Welcome!”  You can absolutely play solo with multiple characters, but especially after last month’s solo experience with Weirdwood Manor, I prefer true solo to learn the rules for complex games!

I finally got everything set-up to play Batman vs Mr. Freeze!  “An Icy Welcome!” See above!! The board is all set-up with cool minis, the Map Reference is next to it, Batman is below with his reference sheet, the co-op scenario changes are to my right, the Villain’s board and set-up are to my leftish, while the rulebook is on a chair next to me, and finally the Villain sheet is on the table … within reading distance if I need it!  Whew!  It’s a bit much to get everything set-up!

The full Scenario is described in the “Missions Booklet” that comes in the main game (see above).

The changes to the co-op/solo mode Scenario  are described in the solo/co-op book. See above.

In this Scenario, Batman has to collapse an abandoned subway line to stop Mr. Freeze from getting access to the Bank!  To do this, he has to traverse the map, fight Thugs and Brutes (and maybe Mr. Freeze), and prime 3 bombs to stop the plans of Mr. Freeze!

To prime the explosives, he has to roll 3 successes!  See above as Batman primes one of the three bombs with 3 successes!

And then, heartbreakingly, Batman fails to prime the last bomb on the last turn!  Batman loses!  This is an especially frustrating roll (no successes at all), because you need at least 2 rerolls to fix it!  Batman loses in the last turn!  Arguably, this was incredibly thematic and tense, but it still kinda sucked to lose.

Here’s the thing: I had fun playing this, but operating the solo/co-op AI is a lot of work.  I mean, a lot of work.

The AI is pretty straight forward to operate, (basically the AI does one of three things: attack, protect, or advance), but it still is a lot of work.  On Batman’s turn: I do a few things and I am done.  On the AI’s turn, I have to activate every mini of interest! For example: the AI above activates the Villain group in position 1 in the river; it happens to be the Thugs: so, we have to activate all three Thugs!  Each Thug mini activation requires thought: “Can I actually complete this operation?”  Basically, if you can’t “complete” the action (you can’t attack, you can’t move, or you can’t advance), you have to fall through the next action (which is why all three actions are listed on the card).  So, for every Thug on the board, you can have to make a determination of what to do!  Which is work.  And then, they may attack! Or advance! Which means further work … for each mini!  

And then you have to do that AGAIN for the next column on the card.

Every AI activation card is a lot of work.  You get used to it, but then you still have to consult the Scenario to see what the special rules are for the villain.  And remember, these rules for the AI are ON TOP of all the rules in the base game!  Remember that 60 pages of rules for the base game?

There’s a lot of work to set-up (it took me a few days to get there, but once you get it, it’s not quite as bad), there’s a lot of work to run the AI, and there’s a lot of work to tear down the game after you win/lose. The solo player has an inordinate amount of work to keep the game going.

And yet, in spite of all the maintenance needed to operate the solo mode, I still had fun. I was Batman, counter-attacking, using Parkour to move around the city, using Martial Arts, throwing Batarangs, and just being Batman! “I’m Batman!”

My biggest complaint was just everything is decided by dice. In the final round I lost, not because of something I did wrong, but because I rolled badly. There are lot of places where rerolls are built-in, and you can always choose to use your action cubes for rerolls, so it’s not pure chance. But it was still frustrating.

Day 5: Solo and Deadly Riddles

With one solo game under my belt, I wanted to try another solo game and see how things went. This time I have to save the civilians (the orange minis)!

This time, I chose “Deadly Riddles”! In this one, Batman has to save 4 Citizens and/or solve riddles that the Riddler has put forth!  

With some practice from the previous scenario, operating the AI was a little less work.

I still had to consult the solo/co-op book quite a bit, because each scenario has differences that need explaining!  See above!! What I really want is for the solo/co-op book to be two separate books! One for the Scenarios (which I can keep open with a decent binding), and one for the actual rules (which I can consult when I have questions)!   

Set-up was better, as I knew what I was doing.  See above!!! I moved the Missions Book to a chair next to the Rulebook chair (see my left), I kept the solo/co-op book in the box (see my right), but I moved the Villain Traits and Hero’s Traits to the table so they were easier to consult!  In general, the set-up was easier, as I knew where everything was.  The set-up doesn’t quite as daunting this time.

The maintenance on the AI turn was still a bit much.  I think I fudged it a few times.  It almost feels as is the AI needs a flowchart: there are a lot of rules to operating the AI that can get lost in the sea of rules of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles.

The second game actually was a loss as well!  On the last turn, Batman failed to roll 3 successes on three dice … just like the first game!

This was heartbreaking, as Batman moved through the Drones to solve the final riddle of the Riddler, spent most of his points, but could NOT roll three successes, even with a reroll!  It was very frustrating. Again.

Things went better for the second game: set-up was quicker, the AI was a little easier to run, and tear-down was quicker.  Still, the AI was a chore to run.

Cooperative Play: Two Weeks Later

Because of the nature of game groups, it took about 2 weeks (after my solo game plays) to get some cooperative play in.

I did forget some rules and had to look some stuff up in realtime, but my friends were patient with me.  Over about 2 hours, we were able to get the game set-up and played!

Now, we did miss a few rules as we played (mostly Villains traits), but the game moved fairly smoothly once we got going.

The solo burden I had setting up the game was now shared: Sara looked for the character sheets and displays, Sara helped set-up the board with Teresa, and I unpacked all the Villain cards.  It certainly helped that I set-up the game by myself a few times; I was able to direct my friends in shared set-up.  This “set-up burden shared” actually kind of made the game feel more cooperative!  That’s a crazy thing to say, but we were all so “invested” in the game because we all spent so much time setting up.  I guess you could call that the equivalent of “Stockholm Syndrome” for board games! Nevertheless, we all felt involved in the game because we were all invested in the game because we all set it up!

The game itself seemed to have its own cadence based on the Scenario we chose: Batman was the fighter, Catwoman took out the Bombs (the real goal of the scenario), and Orphan was there to “lure” the Villains away from Catwoman.  It’s not quite what we planned, or maybe even wanted, but based on our powers, that’s how we won.  

Just like there was the “shared burden” for setting up, there was the “shared burden” of maintenance per turn.  Teresa and Sara helped execute the maintenance (moving/attacking/protecting) while I tracked down rules.   I became the default rules-guy (since the game is so rules heavy), and Sara and Teresa helped keep the game moving.

One of things that we enjoyed was there was no turn order: players can spend energy however they want, in whatever order they want, to execute their actions!  I’ve said it many times: Player Selected Turn Order makes a game feel that much more cooperative! We can decide (as a group) the order in which we want to play, engaging the group in cooperative strategy.
      “Let me set-up Catwoman so she can get to the bomb: I’ll clear the way! “

So, I liked this cooperatively: me and my friends had a good experience.  The girls liked the game, but they just noticed “there are a lot of rules here“!  I had to explain to them that our enjoyable two-hour session was the evolution of many days and reading and printing and set-up!  I had gotten to the point where I could shepherd the cooperative experience fairly well.  And that made a potentially horrendous experience into something fun and palatable.  We had fun.

The game was better cooperatively, but I think it’s only better cooperatively if the solo player has gone though all the pain to get through a couple of games.  Said another way, this is good cooperatively, but only if there’s a good shepherd.  A good shepherd can help guide the players through the rules, help distribute the “shared burden” of set-up, help distribute the per-turn “shared burden” of maintenance, and keep the game flowing.   I think this can only happen if the shepherd is experienced enough in the solo game.

This game would have been a disaster if we tried to learn everything “as a group”.  My friends would have bailed, and I would have been left with an expensive toy.   Learn the game solo: if you like it enough, keep playing a few more games until you become a good shepherd.  Only then should you bring this out cooperatively!  At that point, the shepherd will run the game smoothly with the “shared burdens” of set-up, maintenance, and tear-down making the game an enjoyable cooperative experience.

Reflections

Now that I have played enough, here’s some things to keep in mind.

Since this is solo/co-op: you can rewind the game if you want.  In my second game, I chose to pursue solving an “elaborate riddle”, so I started down that route … but after I got to the room of interest, I forgot about hindrance rules!  With the Riddler in the room when I tried to solve the riddle, I realized I needed one more success: WHICH I COULDN’T GET on the dice I had?? So, I backed everything up and took a different tact.   In the 1 vs. many game, you could never do that because that’s basically cheating! But, since the alternative is to start over, the solo/co-op mode can just “rewind time” and try again with minimal effort.   This “rewind” helps take some of the sting out of the incredibly long set-up and tear-down of the game.  In that way, the solo/co-op makes the game better.

I also think this is a lifestyle game: this is a game with so many rules, especially with the new solo/co-op rules, that unless you play this frequently, you are likely to forget the rules.   Case in point: See the previous section on Cooperative Play! After only 2 weeks, I started to forget some rules!  If this is only a game you pull out from time to time, I think it’s much harder to get back into it.  

I have a group of friends who play FrostHaven once a week: they all love Fantasy and don’t mind the complexity of that world.  I could see me and a group of friends playing Batman: Gotham City Chronicles once a week … but I don’t have any friends who love the Batman world as much as myself.

Counterpoint To Shut-Up & Sit-Down

I previously mentioned the Shut-up & Sit-Down video where they trashed the game. I want to reflect on a major point they made during their video, now that I have some experience with the game:

0) “We like hitting each other”.  One of SU&SD’s complaints is that the game requires players to be judicious about how they use their energy, rather than just beating each other up!  I actually like the thinky aspect of the game!  It makes it a puzzle!  And this thinky-ness is incredibly thematic, especially for a Batman game! Batman is all about being smart: knowing when to rest, knowing when to attack, and knowing when NOT to attack!  I think the way this works is quite clever, so I completely disagree with SU&SD‘s point on this.

Conclusion

I don’t think I can, in good conscience, recommend the solo/co-op expansion unless you adore Batman. The solo/co-op mode had so many production issues (French/English issues, rulebook form factor issues, needing separation of Scenarios and Rules issues, small book factor, binding issues), and there is so much maintenance per turn to operate the AI, I can’t objectively give this more than a 5.5/10. The solo/co-op mode works, but there are a lot of issues.

And then the randomness of the game with the dice can also be very frustrating, especially after spending so much time in set-up, AI operations, and tear-down.

Despite all these issues, I subjectively am going to give this expansion a 7.0/10.0. Why? Because I did really feel like Batman moving around, trying to be “smart” about how to use my energy, fighting only when I needed to (like Batman does), and trying to figure out the puzzle of trying to stop the bad guys! I can finally play Batman! I enjoyed the set-up with the minis, I enjoyed putting the board together, I enjoyed the experience, even as much work as it was. But, realize this is a me-rating: if this were a fantasy game, a space game, a Smurfs game, an Aliens game, I would probably hate this game. But the Batman theme makes me like this game: I like living in this world with these Heroes and Villains!

At the end of the day, can I recommend getting Batman: Gotham City Chronicles if you just want the solo/co-op mode? You’ve seen my journey: from knowing nothing, to set-up, to reading rules, to printing augments, to reading expansion rules to finally playing solo and co-op!! It was quite a rough road to get there! But, you know yourself better than me! Maybe all you needed was this solo/co-op expansion to finally dive into Batman: Gotham City Chronicles! Decide for yourself based on everything you’ve seen here!

If you do pick this up and want to play cooperatively, I think it’s imperative that someone plays the game solo to become a shepherd for the game. Without a good shepherd, I think the cooperative game will end in disaster. With a good shepherd, the cooperative game will be a fun experience! But it’s a very thin line!

Ultimatch is a light cooperative card game from Fireside Games.  This was NOT on Kickstarter: I ordered this directly from the Fireside Games web site.

This is a super light cooperative card game for 1-5 Players, taking 10 minutes to play, for ages 10+.   

Unboxing

This … is pretty small.  It’s a deck of 48 colorful cards, 5 Player Aids, and a pamphlet (sigh) of instructions.  See the box above and below (with a Can of Coke for perspective).

The cards are very colorfully labelled numbers 1-8 in six colors: 6 * 8 = 48 cards.  See above.

The pamphlet isn’t great, but it does teach the game.  See above and below.

Probably the most important part of the instructions are how to make a match … see the nice graphic on the back of the rule sheet.

This same match information is replicated on the Player Aid cards. Once you have the game down, it moves real quickly, but this Player Aid is quite nice to have.

There’s not much else to it!

Gameplay

Players make a pyramid of cards and try to make matches (on revealed cards) to slowly eat away those cards, until all the cards in the pyramid are gone!  If you matched ALL the cards in the pyramid, you win!  If you run out of cards (in your hand) on the way, you lose!  See above at the starting game!

As the game progresses, you remove cards from the pyramid: you can only match and remove the revealed cards. Once you match a card, you take it away.  If you ever take away both cards covering the level above, you flip the new card!   Think 7 Wonders Duel! See above as we have uncovered the leftmost card …we can now flip it so it can take part in matches!

To get rid of cards out of the pyramid, you must make matches.  You can match in one card: either the color or the number.  In the example above, the player hand is at the bottom: the green 6 can either match the Green 2 (color) at the bottom or the red 6 (number)!  Sometimes, you need two cards to match: in which case you can do math and add/subtract!

For example, Yellow 7 – Blue 5 is Green 2 … so that’s a match!

It turns out you can also combine colors (additively) to match! So the match above: BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN would also match!

Ultimatch

The reason this game is called Ultimatch: if you match BOTH color AND Number, then you get a special match called The Ultimatch!  You strive for The Ultimatches!  Why?  Because you start the game with a limited number of cards, and the Ultimatch is the ONLY WAY to get more cards!  When you make the Ultimatch, you discard both cards (and the card from the pyramid), but you get 2 cards back!  

Your life is about to change.  All you do is look for is the Ultimatches once you start playing this game.

Solo Play

Kudos to Ultimatch for having a solo mode (and following Saunders’ Law)! 

The solo player is given 13 cards (see the bottom) and told to get going!  The only new cards the solo player can ever get is from making Ultimatches, so the solo player tries to find all the Ultimatches he can!

I played 5-6 solo games in a row: it was so easy! Ultimatch really is about 10 minutes long per game.  But, I made mistakes, I forgot rules, but after about 5 games, I was starting to see some of the strategies: primary colors tend to be more valuable than composite colors because you can combine primaries to make composites, but not the other way around!   And it’s better to match with 1 card if possible!  And there’s all sorts of little things you learn.

Part of the fun of Ultimatch is playing a bunch of games quickly to discover some of the strategies.

I could easily see playing this solo while waiting for some friends to come over … it’s just so quick!

Cooperative Play

But I think this game shines in cooperative mode.  It’s also a little harder:

• There’s a trade phase you have to think carefully about
• You can’t share information about what’s in your hand
• You CAN share the Alta-hand and talk about how you might use the Alta-hand

The Alta-hand is a shared group of 3-5 cards (see photo above, the Alta-Hand is below the pyramid).  The players share the cards in the Alta-Hand: they can use those cards (as well as the unshared cards in their hands) to make matches.  Managing this resource (Alta-Hand) is key to winning.

We found, after losing quite a bit, that the trade action (action 1, “Trade A Card“: see above) is quite important! It allows people, who may not have an Ultimatch, to offer cards that may help.  It does double duty: a trade may give you an Ultimatch, but it may just be sharing information about the cards available.

Just like the solo game, we had to play multiple times to start figuring out a winning strategy.  But since the game is SO QUICK, it’s easy to try a bunch of hands and start developing strategies.  One strategy that worked for us was trying to get primary colors in the Alta-Hand!

Bandersnatch, Cumberpatch, Smoochy-Pants

The funniest thing happened: my friend, while looking at the scene above asked me:

“What’s the big matchee thingee called again? Ulti-smash?”
“Um, it says on the back of the cards. It’s the name of the game.”

From that moment on, the name of the game changed and morphed into Bandersnatch, Cumberpatch, Smoochy-Pants and many other variants!

The game is so light and fluffy that it’s easy to have some conversation going while you are playing! So, the name of the game devolved into the funniest variants of  the word Ultimatch we could think of!  We joked as we played.

I think this is a real feature of the game: it’s offers a challenge, but it’s still light enough you can have fun conversation going around the table.  And it’s cooperative, so you don’t hate each other like you do after a game of Uno.

Reactions

Generally, everyone liked the game!  But not everyone.

CC: “It was elegant, simple, easy to learn, challenging but not impossible to win, quick to set up and put away. Solid nine. Only thing missing is a theme or some kind and a way to vary play for some more replayability. I plan to pick it up.”

Joe: “Game 8/10, Name 10/10”

Kurt: “It was cute but not something I’d gravitate to. Maybe a 6? I’d play it but I wasn’t wowed by it.”

Rich: “Good times.  Solo game was pretty good: 7/10.  The cooperation really shone through in the multiplayer game: 8.5/10”

Conclusion

If you want to replace Uno with a light card game that’s cooperative, Ultimatch might be what you are looking for.  It’s easy to learn, easy to teach, and is quick to play.  We found ourselves wanting to play over and over to hone our strategies in the game.  

Ultimatch is light enough to have fun conversation going on while you play: we ended up trying to come up with funny variations of the name: Bandersnatch, Cumberpatch, Smoochy-Pants!  That was suprisingly fun.   Ultimatch is fun: you’ll find yourself playing multiple times to try to win!

Good times.