A few weeks ago, I posted my initial impressions of Robit Riddle: a cooperative, story-telling game for 1-6 players.   I was able to get it played at RichieCon 2018, and I got some great feedback.

Number of Players

From my first thoughts, I mentioned that, although I was happy there was a solo mode (yay, Saunders’ Law), it wasn’t very fun alone.  It felt kinda … sad … playing and telling a story to myself.   Two player was better, but my group said “I can’t really see playing this with less than 3 people”.   We didn’t get a chance to play with more than that, but the overwhelming opinion was that this game needs 3-6 players.  It’s great to learn the game with 1 player (my preferred way to learn and teach), but the game shines at 3 or more people.

Why more people?  Because this is a game of shared story-telling. Taking the narrative and expanding on it.  It was fun and cute.

Audience

One of my friends who played the game is a teacher at mid-school, and another has a couple of younger kids.  They both echoed my thoughts: “This is a fun game, and I’d play it again, but it feels like it would go over best as a family game with kids 8-12.”  Yes, I think older players can play this, as it’s a fun light game (not a filler per se), but it would do best with kids.

Educational Content

My friend who is a teacher pointed out something quite interesting.  He uses board games in his classroom (for kids who are having trouble with reading and vocabulary) to help them

He has used both Mythos Tales and Tales Of Arabian Nights to help kids read—I’m the one who introduced Junkerman to Mythos Tales at RichieCon 2017!  He has great success in the classroom.  With Tales of Arabian Nights, he is getting kids to read, expanding their vocabulary (the vocabulary of Arabian Nights is quite sophisticated).  Kids who were lack-luster and uninterested in the classroom lit-up/engaged when playing Mythos Tales–it teaches problem solving, cooperation, reading, and literacy.  Both of those games were just so successful!

What did Junkerman think of Robit Riddle?

Continuing Narrative

Junkerman told a very interesting story about his kids and the kinds of things they are tested on.  In a recent test, the kids had to take a paragraph and “expand” upon it, using the same tense, voice, and narrative style, to continue a previous paragraph.    He thinks Robit Riddle would be perfect for this kind of exercise.  It has terrific educational content.

Continuing the narrative, like Robit Riddle does, engages the imagination, while the same forcing constraints on the narrative.    I personally believes this shows that imagination can be used in all contexts, not just free-form and untethered.

From this perspective, Robit Riddle really succeeded.  You know what, and the game was fun.

Conclusion

I still stand by some of the negative things I said earlier: The entire game (cards and rulebook) could still use another pass by an editor.  The cards were pretty low quality.  But, overall, this was a good game.  We had fun, and I would give it a 7/10 on the BoardGameGeek scale.   It’s probably best as a family game, but it would work wonders in an educational scenario.

So, this year’s RichieCon 2018 was a success!  Recall last year’s RichieCon 2017 was also a success. Thanks to everyone from Long Beach, Las Cruces, and Phoenix who came down to Tucson! In the summer!! To play Games!!!

Why RichieCon?

RichieCon was started … because I don’t like big conventions.  I have real trouble in rooms with lots of ambient noise.  I was thinking very hard about going to Dice Tower Con in Florida in 2017, and my friend pointed out “You hate big groups!”.   So, I decided to make my own Con!  The name RICHIE CON was a joke:  Really, I Can’t Haul myself to dIcE tower CON.  I also only invite people I know will be respectful and nice: friends of Richie.  (Reminder: Don’t be a jerk!)

Cool Stuff that Happened!

Joe made a board game table than can be played in the pool.  We had Martian Dice and Plastic Uno for that.  Go Joe!

Jeremy made barbeque with his new smoker!  Wow, was it good!

Many games were played!

Games games games!

Here were some games that worked real well:

•  The Unlock games!  I have all the Unlock games, and I think these were the most popular games at the Con. I myself played the new “Wizard of OZ” unlock game, and it was fun fun fun!  I think everytime I turned around, I saw an Unlock game being played!
•  Star Trek: RPG: A group of about 8 people played this for a significant amount of time in the afternoon, then took it back to their AirBnB for another 3 hours of playing!  People seemed to really enjoy this.
• D&D 5th Ed.  A small group had a a grand old time playing this for about 2 hours!
• Castles of Mad King Ludwig:  Played a lot, seemed well received.

There were some “not so great” moments:

• Okey Dokey works great at 1,2,3 and 4 players.  We hated it at 5: the last player always has to play the last card.  We think maybe a rule that rotates the last player would have fixed this.
• Tiny  Epic Quest:  The game box says 1 hour, right?  Nah, especially if you’ve never played.  A few too many rules for a group that wanted a game of about an hour.  They set-up, played a few rounds, and said “no thank you” and put it all away.

Some surprising “Favorites”:

• Burgle Brothers: This is an older game I picked up from the original Kickstarter.  I just happened to put it in the group of games.  A surprising number of people played and really liked this game!  This was many people’s favorite!
• Azul:  Not my thing, but it was a hit!
• Century Spice Road: original and Golem edition.  Great game(s), but everyone said the same thing: the Golem edition is SO MUCH PRETTIER!  That seemed to be the hit!

 

Top 10 Games That Need Fixing … and Here’s the Fix!

Stealing, I mean borrowing from the Dice Tower, Kurt Joe and myself did a “Top 10 games that need fixing .. and here’s the Fix!”

Richie:  My list was ordered from the Easiest Fix to the Hardest Fix.

• (10) Legendary: Why are there victory points? Just play cooperative and ignore the Victory Points at the end.  It’s what we always do anyways.
• (9) Witch Of Salem: Why can’t you talk and show people where the gates are?  The game is plenty hard as it is, so we just ignore this rule and we just talk!
• (8) Thunderstone Quest: No cooperative mode.  Add a Cooperative mode, please.  Like you promised when I backed the game.  (They will add it soon, but it’s gonna cost me $50!)
• (7) Professor Evil and The Citadel of Time: Too hard, too random.  Fix: Make it so Professor Evil DOES NOT LOCK THINGS BACK UP after you save an item.
• (6) The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game.  It’s too hard and the ending is too random.  Fix: Each player gets another card and you play open hand. See this blog posting for more details.
• (5) GloomHaven:  Get rid of the stupid Loot rule.  Have the players decide (as a group) when it makes sense to get the Treasure. More discussion here.
• (4) Bethel Woods: Add a few more actions you can do … the game feels rather samey after a while.  Add a Golem you can control, or a bunch of drones who have a different kind of movement. See the review and more dicussion here.
• (3) DungeonLords.  In DungeonLords, gameplay suffers immensely if the players go after the same resources.  The fix is to add a “Minor Improvements”-like deck (like Agricola) for when you try to get a resource and are thwarted by the other player—you instead can play one of your cards so you at least get todo something! See the deck here.
• (2) Zephyr: Winds of Change. Problem: too much combat … that’s pretty much all you do!  Great components, great combat, but I wanted more Adventure!  An Adventure deck maybe where the characters can get off the ship and have adventures?  Or some deck that makes the Zephyrs do MORE that just fight!  This is number two because I am not quite sure how to fix.  See my review here.
• (1) Deadline.  I hate it when I can’t investigate a crime correctly because I can’t go to Locations because I can’t do the proper symbols—it’s not thematic and it really brings me out of the game.  This is my number 1 because I am not sure how to fix it.  Maybe make the symbol matching easier?  Or allow me to discard cards to match symbols?  Or discard a card and force-go a to Location a few times per game?

(I am working on getting the Top 10 lists from Kurt and Joe …. watch this space for updates …)

Conclusion

 

As RichieCON floats away from another year, I declare it a success! Fun was had by all!  The Top 10 lists were a hoot!

Many people (including myself) commented, “Who decided to hold a Con in Tucson in the summer?”  Oh, that was me!  It was just timing more than anything.  Maybe in the future, we’ll try to run it when it’s actually NICE in Tucson …

 

 

I received Robit Riddle from Kickstarter about a month ago.  I just got it to the table last night.  It’s a cooperative story-telling game for 1-6 players, based in a universe where we are robots! In this universe, our Robits (pets) have disappeared, and we are working together to try and find them.

The ages listed on the box are 8+, and that seems apropos.  The game seems aimed at younger kids: I almost felt like it could have gone down to 7.

What’s In the Box?

Gameplay

After playing it though a few times, the best description I have for this game is Fate (the RPG) meets Choose Your Own Adventure Books.  The players collectively tell a story, advancing the plot.  There are decision points in the game, where players simply decide which way to go.

The core of the game are the Adventure books: the game comes with three.  The players choose which adventure to challenge, and start reading!  It’s very much like Choose Your Own Adventure books, as you read through the book, but with a difference.  First, you are cooperatively going through the story as Robot characters (and the reader/leader rotates) and secondly, there are challenges!

There are also challenges to overcome, based on your Robot’s abilities and some dice you roll.   Depending on the outcome, you go to a different place in the story.    Other players can also help, using story points.  These story points are a limited resource.

 

Your job is to solve the mystery/adventure presented.  The rulebook intimates that there is a large overarching story that you are discovering.  In the short term, you try and get as many victory points as you can.

Art

First and foremost, I really like the art!  The art does an outstanding job of bringing the theme out: I feel like I am a little robot in this world!   From the cover, to the cards, to the little black and white illustrations, wow.  This art really brings the game alive.

Components

The components are a mixed bag.  Some are good, some are bad.

The little adventure books are readable and well bound.  They are very usable.

The little story markers are little metal sprockets. Kind of cool.

The dice are fine: custom dice are always cool.

As much as I like the art, the card quality isn’t very good.  The cards are very thin and very dent/bend easily.   I just opened the the box, and I feel like the cards are already starting to get wear and tear!  They are fine, and they work, but I feel like this detracts from the amazing art on the cards.  I suspect cards sleeves would go a long way here.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is decent, but it could have used another pass by an editor (I found a few spelling errors and it was hard to follow at a few points). I struggled to get through the rules.  The rulebooks could have used a few more examples of game play and rules applications.  But, the rulebook did a good job of showing the components on the front cover (so you could separate them into semantic decks: see picture above!)

And the set-up was easy to follow: see above!

The rulebook starts off quite good, but I felt like it didn’t do a great job at explaining the game.  In the end, I got through it and it was just “okay” overall.

Having said that, the game summary cards saved the day!  Thank you for having these!  I don’t know why most games don’t have these!

Solo Play

So, the game has rules for solo play!  Hurray!  They adhered to Saunders’ Law! The basic idea is for the solo player to play several Robot characters.  I am happy they addressed this elephant in the room, but I feel like the best way to solo play this game is with a single Robot, especially on your first play.  I sort of cheated and gave myself another few Story Cue cards and that seemed to be enough to make progress.

I made it through a few games, and I have come to the conclusion that I don’t think this is a  good solo game.  I think the fun in this game, like Fate (RPG), is the interactions of the other players collectively telling a story.  Playing alone felt very … sad.  The game is set-up to have others help you out in a very interactive way.  Playing by yourself just wasn’t very fun.  I am glad Robit Riddle has a solo mode, but I think I will only ever get this out as a group game.  The more players, the better!

Comma Thief

My first play left me feeling like the game needed another pass by an editor.  It looks like a Comma Thief came along and stole most of the commas out of the adventure books!  Take a look at the very first page:  there are at least two commas missing!   All games have mistakes (and I am sure I have some on my blog), but the very first page has two errors!  As I went through the book, I found more missing commas and some awkward phrases.

The entire game needs one more pass by an editor.

Saving and Loading

In the old Infocom text adventures, you had to make sure you saved your game often.  It was easy to die in Zork (and several of the older Infocom games), so you had to make sure you saved the game frequently! Otherwise, you’d have to start ALL THE WAY over, and that was no fun.

And this is one of the problem I have with Choose Your Own Adventure games: you make a bad (under some unknown definition of “bad”) choice and die!  (It was one of my complaints of the Arkham Horror: LCG) But, Robit Riddle at least acknowledges this potential problem and includes … a book mark!  (Okay, this is kinda silly save system  … but …)

I think that the bookmark  is supposed to be the “SAVE GAME” mechanism.  It’s sort of a silly way to save your game, but at least it acknowledges the “Oops! Bad Choice!” problem of Choose Your Own Adventures.  In fact, I almost wish there had been more bookmarks so that I could  have multiple “Save Games” (like the old Infocom games!)

Overall

So what’s my first impression?  I think this is a good game, if aimed at a younger crowd—I could see this being a good family game.  There is a fun and interesting story here.  I don’t think this game really works as a solo game (it’s okay), but I am excited to try it with larger groups!  The art is really awesome, but the card quality isn’t great.  I really think another pass with an editor would have made a noticeable difference, but I think the game is still solid.  What I have seen of the story looks fun and the mechanics are interesting.  I realize my review sounds a bit negative, but my first impression is that this is a 6 or 7 out of 10 (on the BoardGameGeek scale).  If it goes over well with a big group, I suspect this will end up at a 7.  Stay Tuned.

(RichieCon 2018 is coming up soon, so I suspect I’ll get it played there!)

 

 

 

Recently, a friend of mine sent an email to several of us saying “Sentinels of the Multiverse is on sale for Android”.  Cool.  I was going to forward to some other friends, but then realized … they don’t like Sentinels.  And in fact, all of my friends who don’t like Sentinels seem to like Seven Wonders.

In fact, it seems, in my game groups, Sentinels and Seven Wonders are anti-correlated: If you like Sentinels, you don’t like Seven Wonders.  If you like Seven Wonders, you don’t like Sentinels.

Is this true in general?  Or is it just a blip in our game group?

BoardGameGeek Data

If we could just tap into BoardGameGeek, find everyone that rated both games and compare them, maybe we could see if this were a real trend!  But, alas, we can’t do that.  Or can we?

My friend Josh pointed out that BoardGameGeek allows an interface to download just such data:

https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BGG_XML_API2

With this interface, Josh downloaded what we needed (he used  a curl script to gobble the data and parsed the data with a Python script) and generated some stats and graphs.  It was easy: he did it in about an hour.

Findings

So what did we find?  In general, people who like Sentinels tend to like Seven Wonders, and people who like Seven Wonders tend to like Sentinels.  There DID NOT seem to be the anti-correlation that we thought!  Apparently, my little game group is its own little microcosm.

Here’s the data graphed:

On the left axis are the ratings (from 1-10) for Sentinels, on the right axis are the ratings (from 1-10) for Seven Wonders.  The height of the 3D graph shows how many BGG users rated the game (on BGG’s scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the best).   You can see that the data seems pretty consistently rising on both sides.  People who like Sentinels tend to like Seven Wonders and vice-versa.

Other interesting data from the time of the comparison:

• Seven Wonders had 61037 reviews
• Sentinels of the Multiverse had 12425 reviews
• There were 7880 overlapping reviews (i.e., users who reviewed both)

I am curious, what do other people see?

This last weekend, I went down to Las Cruces for many reasons, but really wanted to playtest The Island of Dr. Necreaux: Second Edition.  (And we will get around to comparing the First Edition and the Second Edition later in this blog).  But, we played lots of games that weekend, and one of them really surprised me: Muse.

Muse is basically a party game where you try to get your teammates to guess one of six pictures.

You give hints based one of the “inspiration” cards:

Whenever your team guesses a Masterpiece (pretty picture of art) correctly, your team gets that card as a point (like Apples to Apples).  When your team has 5 points, you win!

The rules are a little more complicated than that, but not much.  It’s a real fun party game.  We played a bunch of times early in the night and everyone had fun.

COOPERATIVE MODE!

Surprisingly, this game contains a cooperative mode!  In a 2 or 3 player version, the game becomes cooperative!  See the rules above, but basically you have to guess 5 cards before you fail 5 times.

This was a fun, low-key cooperative game.  It was late at night, and 3 of us just sat around playing this while another group finished up the Star Trek RPG.  Not a lot of thought, just fun.

Dixit

The only real problem with the game is that there are only 84 Masterpieces.  After a little bit, the cards started to repeat. 84 cards / 6 cards per play = about 14 plays before repeats.

After we played for a while, we started seeing the same “Masterpieces” again.  So, Kurt pulled out his Dixit cards and we used those for a while.  It worked fine!   We didn’t get to play with Mysterium cards, but we are pretty sure those would work fine as well.

After playing cooperatively for almost an hour with both Muse and Dixit cards, I declare this game a success.  Everyone who played wanted to get a copy.

Conclusion

Muse is pretty cheap ($18 on CoolStuffInc) and pretty fun.  It has some limited replayability, but both Dixit and Mysterium can easily be used for expansion cards.

This was a huge surprise as a cooperative game.  It was a light, fun, cheap cooperative game (for 2-3 people) that also happens to be a good party game for larger player counts.

The first K is silent.  Today’s blogpost is brought to you by the letter K.

Kallax, Kallax, Kallax

The Dice Tower people mention the Kallax shelves all the time for their games.  Zee Garcia even mentioned them in a “Top 10 Gaming Accessories” video.  So, it’s become almost cliche’ for a gamer to order Kallax shelves.  To paraphrase Yoda:

Kallax gonna come, poke me in the Kokonut.  And they did.  And they did.

I live in Tucson, and Ikea lives in Phoenix.  I was going to make a trip to Phoenix to pick them up, but they would deliver to to Tucson.  For an extra $79.  Well, given the time outlay (2 hours up, 2 hours back) and the money outlay (a full tank of gas), I chose the delivery. All in:  $199 + $79 + tax, so about $290.

They delivered the shelves straight to my house.  Even put them in the right place for me.  They were great.

Saunders’ Law in the Real World

So, I opened the instruction book and saw the “pictures only” instructions for assembly.

Hilarious!  The instructions say “Don’t assemble them by yourself.”  The assembly is (drum roll), a cooperative activity!  I think this is one of the best pictures I’ve seen to show “cooperation”.  Although I really like this one too:

The funny thing is, I invoked Saunders’ Law on the Shelves!  I made it into a solo activity!  Basically, my wife was visiting her Mom, and I was by myself.  So, I made assembling the shelves into a “solo game”.

Honestly, it wasn’t too bad assembling the shelves by myself.  I went slowly, made sure I read all the rules (I mean instructions) in advance and tried things out slowly.  It really almost felt like I was learning a board game by myself.  I will say this: the assembly instructions are quite good.

The final result?

I am pleased with how they came out.

Psuedo-Kallax Kshelves?

Shortly after I was proudly showing off my Kallax Kshelves, my friend Josh found an alternative shelf that looks almost exactly like the Kallax ones.  For almost half the price.  And free shipping!

I got some of the 4×2 shelves and liked them. They are similar (I think) to the thicker old-style Kallax shelves.

https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=better%20homes%20and%20gardens%20cube%20organizer

Shipping was free, which was the big kicker.

I think, at the time of this writing, those alternative 5×5 shelves are $158.  With free shipping.

Sigh.  So, I overpaid.  I offer up the shelves (above) as a public service announcement to the gaming community.  You can get basically the same shelves as the Kallax Kshelves, but you don’t have to pay extra money for the extra Ks.

Kontainers

Recently, I was helping my wife out at Target, and found these:

The 8 extra small Ziploc Kontainers are only $2.72 (plus tax, but -5% if you have a Target cards).  Each Ziploc Kontainer ends up being about 35 cents.  What a deal!

These containers are perfect containers for some games.  Case in Point: Ron gave me Terraforming Mars for Christmas,  Fun game!  But there are sooo many little components.  The bags work fine, but they add set-up and tear-down time as you pull all the little cubes out.

But, with these little Kontainers, set-up is trivial: pull the Kontainer out!  During gameplay, it’s easy to pass these little Kontainers around for everyone.

And they all fit well into the box.  So, for a little under $3, I was able to get some nice Kontainers!  I will probably get some more: they work really well in some of the standard sized game boxes.

 

One more thing: I found these Ziploc thingees on-line at Target, but you have to order $25 worth for free shipping.  So, it might be worth it to get 9 packages of 8 for 72 Kontainers?  And don’t go to Amazon!  They were like $6.99 for a package of 8! More than twice as much.  If you have a Target in your area, just it up on your next visit. (I assume other stores have them too…)

 

(Apologies for the overuse of the letter K; that was a stipulation for his support of today’s blog entry.  K feels he is overshadowed by his controlling, older brother C …)

 

So, about a week ago, one of my “Pandemic Legacy” friends had to cancel because he was sick.  Bogus!  My other two friends were still coming over, but what would we play?  It turns out my copy of Thunderstone Quest arrived early that afternoon!  So, I scrambled home early, unboxed, and started reading the rules so we could play that night.

Wow, That’s a Big Game!

Okay. So, that’s a big box.  It’s not quite as big as Gloomhaven, but it’s pretty big.

It has two levels!  See how tall it is above!  The top level has a little drawer with handles is for non-card things …

The main board and player boards are in the top tray …

… And then everything else under the boards!

The left of the tray has some little miniatures (they are nice), and some nice wood components.  The right side of the tray has a bunch of thick cardboard dungeon locations.  Really nice quality components.

Oh, and by the way, even though I took all these photos with my thought of doing a review, I am REALLY GLAD I did!  I wasn’t sure how everything fit back in the box!  In fact, I now always take some pictures of my games when I unbox for just this reason!

What’s Under The Tray?

 

So, there are a LOT of cards.  Like, a LOT.  I think I counted 30? decks of shrink-wrapped cards!  But, you’ll notice the middle two sections are empty.  Why?  C’mon!  You deckbuilders know!  So the cards will all fit EVEN WHEN IN CARD PROTECTORS.  And for expansions.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is good.  I have never played any of the original Thunderstone variants, so this game is brand new to me.  There are a lot of cards, and I wasn’t sure where to start, but the rulebook guides you pretty well.  Within an hour, I was set-up for a two player game.

My main frustration was not knowing if I should ONLY unwrap deck 1, and then unwrap deck 2 later?   You see, I had an EXCELLENT experience unwrapping Aeon’s End:

So, after festering a little, I came to realize: YOU OPEN ALL THREE AT ONCE.  AND SORT THEM ALL AT ONCE. The reason for three decks was more of a manufacturing reason.  I just wish the rules were a little clearer.  They also messed up in the first game: they tell you what cards to play, but one of the Adventurers is the wrong name!  So, I had to figure that out …

 

This is a minor pet peeve, but it bothered me: the players were Ashley, Drew and Adam.  In cryptography examples, they always use Alice, Bob, and Charlie.  Why?  Because all the names start with different letters (ABC) so you can tell which player at a glance is which.  Ashley and Adam are poor examples because they start with the same letter.

Yes, it is a pet peeve.  The rulebook does a good job or going through some sample turns, but occasionally you have to reread a section and ask “Wait, was the Ashley or Adam”?  It just makes things harder to learn than they should have been.

Components

The components are pretty darn nice.  The cards are great looking.

The board is easy to read and easy to get around.  It has rules labeled on it to help you remember things.

The player boards are incredibly high-quality!  They can FOLD!  They are of the same quality as the board!  The also have summaries of rules on there.  I applaud that!  Rather than having a separate card for the rules, the player board has just about everything you need to get through a turn.  These player boards were really phenomenal!

My only gripe about the boards is that each player has EXACTLY the same one. There are no special player powers in the game, but each player does gets his own mini.  It would have been nice to have a picture of the mini on the board … (but then they would be stuck with only 4 minis, and you can see that they give us 6 …)

So, each player can choose which mini they want.  But honestly, since there are no special powers, it doesn’t matter for gameplay.  It just looks nice.

The tokens are all wood.  Very nice, and you get plenty.  The dice were great!  But I couldn’t find ANY MENTION of using the dice in the rules?  Why were the dice included?  It turns out, after you deck build, some of the later cards require dice.  But, ya, you may not use the dice in your first few games.

First Game

So, my first game is all set-up and ready to go.  Looks good set-up, doesn’t it?  You’ll notice I have two players set-up.  Why?  THERE ARE NO COOPERATIVE OR SOLO RULES. 

“But Rich!  This is a Cooperative Games blog?  Why are you reviewing a game that doesn’t have a cooperative mode?”

That’s a real good question.   Let’s take a look at the Kickstarter:

We have had a lot of questions about co-op or solo play rules. Our developers have great ideas for these modes of play but they won’t start working on them until after work is finalized on the regular competitive rules. We don’t have an ETA on when we will have co-op or solo play rules ready but we’ll make them available as soon as they’re ready.

In more detail, from the FAQ (on the Kickstarter page)

 

• Can people play the game co-operatively, or is it only competitively?

  We have plans to write co-op and solo play rules for the game but we won’t begin work on them until after we’ve finished the rules for normal competitive play.

  Last updated: Tue, February 21 2017 10:05 AM MST

And finally, from Update 31 from the Kickstarter:

AEG Developer Bryan Reese is actively at work on Solo & Co-Op Rules for the game. He recruited a small group of playtesters to help and once they’ve progressed towards a more final ruleset we’ll be sharing those rules with you as well. This project has blossomed into something much more comprehensive than just a rules addenda and our plan now is to bundle the Solo and Co-Op Rules into a future Quest release. Our plan now includes special cards and other materials to facilitate Solo and Co-Op play.

 

In other words, no CO-OP or solo play comes with this game.

Granted, they never promised it would come with the game, but I guess I felt like they were implying (maybe I was just inferring) that a CO-OP mode would come with the game … just as soon as they finished with the competitive game.   And, it sounds like it will be another product I have to buy.  Sigh.  I am disappointed and feel like a little bait-and-switch happened.  But, yes, they didn’t promise it … but I really felt like I was lead down the garden path a little ..

 

Anyways, Part II of this review will come out AFTER they publish the solo and co-op rules.

 

Play

How does the game play?  I played a single player version with 2 players (just a few rounds to get the sense of it), then my friends Sara and Teresa came over and we played a three player game.

So, the game was fun.  It was a deck-building game with lots of little twists on that.

• Exploring.  On your turn, you can either go to town to buy something, or go exploring in the Dungeon and fight something!
• Wounds.  Every player take wounds when you fight.  You can heal those in town with cards or by going to special locations.
• Treasure.  You can get some amazing cards for your deck either by fighting a monster or buying it in town.
• Light.  You can’t go too far into the dungeon unless you have enough light
• Big Bad.  There’s a big bad YOU ALL FIGHT at the end of the game
• Tokens.  You can buy tokens with your money in case you don’t have enough for something big.  (Light, Healing, or Iron Rations). In other words, you always have something you can buy, even if you don’t have much.  The Iron Rations are nice because you can buy a ration for 2 gold, and use it for 1 gold on your next turn—it’s a way to “preserve” some of your gold for a later turn.

At the end of the day, it felt a little like Legendary (the super-hero version).  You pick adventurers (like superheroes in Legendary) to go into your deck, and you have to buy things to go into your deck.  And you fight a big bad.  And whomever has the most Victory Points at the end of the game wins!  At a high level, very much like Legendary.

Thoughts on Gameplay 

After playing through, we had fun.  We want to play again.  Players don’t really get in each other’s Kool-Aid too much.  Someone may fight a monster you wanted, or buy a resource you wanted, but that’s about it.  Again, very much like Legendary. 

One thing we DO with Legendary is just ignore the Victory Points at the end of the game and just play like it was a CO-OP.  Can you do that with Thunderstone Quest?  Kind of?   In this game, the Big Bad comes out at the end, and no one really defeats it, you just all fight it.  If you fight it and win, it doesn’t die.  It just gives you victory points.  And then the next player can fight it. And get victory points.   And that’s the end of the game.  So, you could play that way.   I guess?  It just doesn’t feel very satisfying or thematic in this configuration because the Big Bad doesn’t die.

One way to play solo would be to just take one player and get the most Victory points you can, and try to beat that score next time.  It’s not a bad way to play solo.

Conclusions

At the end of the day, I liked this game.  But, I think I like Aeon’s End better.  Aeon’s End is an amazing solo and cooperative co-op game: it was built from the ground up as a co-op.  This is a good competitive deck -builder that’s pretty fun to play.   And I don’t regret getting it (although I am annoyed how the co-op and solo modes fell off the radar).  When the co-op expansion comes out, we’ll see how well it fares.  Watch this space for Part II  of my review  … which may be a while … because they don’t even have it yet …

But, as a competitive game, it was good.  The components are amazing, there’s a lot of variety in all the decks, and the game just wows you with the components.  It was fun.  I’ll play again and my friends want to play again.  And my other friends want to try it out.

It was fun.  But be clear: THERE ARE NO COOPERATIVE OR SOLO MODES INCLUDED.  You must wait for some expansion you have to buy.

 

 

 

Sometime ago, I wrote a blog post called “Fastball Special” about Player Selected Turn Order in cooperative games.   The idea is simple: why can’t players select the order they get to act in a cooperative game?  It’s another place players can work together to get optimal results.  I have been buying lots of cooperative board games over the last year.   It’s been almost 2 years since I wrote the “Fastball Special” entry!   And I have only found 3 (well … 2 and half …) games with Player Selected Turn Order!  And none of them are well known games!  Here’s the ones I know of.

The Daedalus Sentence

I kickstarted this game quite some time ago and gave a review here.  This is the first game out “in the wild” I found where players could actively choose the order to use their action points.  Every player gets 4 action points, but you can use them (among the players) anyway you want!  You could even intersperse your actions among the actions of other players.  It was very cool!  But, in my plays of the game, we didn’t seem to take advantage of this.  Or rather, we didn’t seem to NEED to take advantage of this.  So, it was cool, but it wasn’t clear it was necessary to win.

Sharknado: The Board Game

Yes, you read that right.  There was a Sharknado: the board game.  But … this was a Kickstarter  that didn’t fund.  So, I count it as “half” a game.  According to the web site, they still plan to release this!  But I haven’t seen anything about it.  Anyway, here’s why it caught my eye at the time:

No specific turn order – The game plays in two phases: the Player phase and the Sharknado phase. During the Player phase, you and your team can take actions in whatever order works best for your strategy.

How cool!  But … I never saw how well it worked.  Because, at the time of this writing, it still hasn’t come out.

CO-OP: the co-op game

Yeah, the game I made.  It one of the central mechanisms of the game: players go in any order they can in the Player’s Turn phase:

On the Players’ Turn, they can choose to go in any order they want.  For example:

Players decide they really need goods in the Warehouse.  If CP goes before Henry, CP can give Henry the card he needs!  CP Junior goes first and gives Henry Hall a Distributor card.  Then, Henry Hall plays the Distributor, using his special power to get one more good to the Warehouse.

Sometimes, you don’t need this extra flexibility, but sometimes you do!  Take a look at this review from kh-km.com for further look and discussion of this.

Player Selected Turn Order Necessary?

I feel like Player Selected Turn Order is a “natural mechanic” for cooperative games.  For example, I house rule Sentinels of the Multiverse and allow Player Selected Turn Order when I play.  It makes it more “fun” (at least to me) as I  have more choices.

But there are reasons not to like it:

• It can make complicated games “more complicated” as you add yet “another choice” /”set of choices”  to a myriad of choices a player already has.
• It’s harder to notate.  In most cooperative games, players go clockwise, following the first player marker.  As soon as you make the players select, it gets harder to notate.  “Who’s played this turn?  Did I play?  Did you play?  Wait, how can I tell?” During my play testing of CO-OP, I went through a lot of different ways to notate it until I arrived at something that seemed to work well enough.
• Players aren’t used to it.  If there are only three (well, 2.5) games with this mechanic, players really aren’t used to it.  So, it may tend to confuse people more.

Are there other cooperative games I have missed (heck, I’ll even take semi-cooperative) with this mechanic?

Recently, The Games Crafter discontinued their purple coin game piece.  See picture below.  In other words, you can’t get games with the purple coin  (at least, made by the Games Crafter) any more.

Those of you familiar with CO-OP: the co-op game may know the purple coin as something slightly different: The Happening Dude token!   It’s very similar in function to a First Player Token but not quite the same: The Happening Dude doesn’t go first, he just reads the Happenings for that day, and then the marker rotates to the next player.

What Do I Want in First Player (or Happening Dude) Marker?

What characteristics do you want in a First Player (Happening Dude) marker?

The reasons I chose the purple coin as The Happening Dude:

1. Cost.  It was cheap.  Don’t discount this.  I printed 120 games and had to pay for every single piece!
2. Heft.  It had some heft.  Among the tokens in the Games Crafter menagerie, it was one of the larger ones.  You want to have something large enough to “pick up and pass around” the table.  Admittedly, the purple coin is smaller than I liked, but I didn’t have a lot of options.
3. Visually Distinct.  When passing the token around the table, you want something visually distinct that you can pick out from across the table. “Who’s the first player?  Oh, you!”  I remember the first player token from Arkham Horror getting lost in the shuffle sometimes because it tended to blend with a lot of the other components.
4. Thematic.  You want it to fit with the game.  The purple coin was fairly generic and had a happy guy on it: The Happening Dude!  But yes, I admit, it wasn’t particularly thematic for CO-OP: the co-op game.

In a perfect world, I would have had something “fun and unique”.  We talked about a hat, a talking stick, a bead (seriously!), and a headband (Hippies like headbands).   In the end, the purple coin was “good enough” for the price.  Recall that CO-OP wasn’t as cheap as I hoped: my cost was about $34 per game.  The purple coin was only 10-12 cents If I recall correctly.

The “obvious” Happening Dude token would have been a ‘peace sign’ on a poker chip or a large cardboard cutout.   A poker chip would be cheap, but the way stickers work in the Games Crafter made it complicated (and more expensive) to make that work.    Similarly for a card board token.  (If you buy a sheet of stickers or cardboard, you have to buy the entire sheet, regardless of how much you use it.  And that’s PER GAME.  The Games Crafter charges you PER GAME for one sheet, even if you only use a little bit of the sheet.  And you can’t split the sheet across games, unless you (the buyer) do it manually off-line in a  separate order.  Like I said, complicated.)

In the end, I made a tradeoff.  The cost was probably the main reason I didn’t choose a “funner” piece.

RIP Purple Coin

Oh what great times we had Purple Coin!  I’ll miss you!   Your friend looks like he’s a pretty Happening Dude.  Do you think he can do your job?  He’ll never replace you, but he can have fun with us.

 

 

What do you think?  He’s a pretty cool Happening Dude (or Dudette)… I mean, I can see right through him!

 

2017 was a pretty great year for cooperative games!  I personally have bought over 30 cooperative board and card games this year!  Some were bad, some were okay, some were good, and some were great!   This list captures the best 10 (well, maybe 11 or 12) cooperative board and card games of the year.

One thing that was reinforced heavily this year was that cooperative games need a solo mode (aka Saunders’ Law). Recently, my friends and I, as a group, tried to learn Sword and Sorcery (a cooperative dungeon crawler).  It failed.  Miserably.  It was just too much to learn as a group.  (It might be a perfectly good game, but the group learning and rulebook  were so frustrating, I haven’t been able to get it back to the table).  This reinforced (to my group anyways) that someone needs to learn the game first, then teach it to their friends.

So, all the best games of 2017 below will also be graded on how well they follow Saunders’ Law: Does the cooperative game have a viable solo game?

Honorable Mentions

Venom Assault

Venom Assault (2016): Strictly speaking this came out in 2016.  I received my Kickstarter copy (yes, there will be a lot of Kickstarters on this list!) in December 2016, and I don’t think it hit distribution until 2017.  So, you could argue that most people didn’t get this until 2017.   But technically, this can’t qualify for 2017, but I think it deserves a mention.

Venom Assault is a cooperative deck-builder set in the world of … something very similar to,  but legally distinct from, … G.I. Joe.  You play together as a group fending off the hordes of VENOM (the bad guys) as they threaten locations around the world/board.  I love the art in this game: the art on the cover (above) belies the art on the cards.  Every card looks like a panel from a well-illustrated G.I. Joe comic.  The game is interesting too!  It’s a deck-builder, but it adds a combat mechanism with dice that works pretty well.  I haven’t gotten this to the table as much as I like, but I think this is a really good game.

Playable Solo?  No, but it is easy to play 2 characters.

Battle for Greyport

Battle for Greyport (2016) is a cooperative deckbuilding game set in the world of The Red Dragon Inn.   I did a full review of the game here.  It is a pretty game, has lots of content, and was a lot of fun (although I wish it had solo player rules).  Again, like Venom Assault, this came out officially in 2016, but Kickstarters didn’t get it until December 2016 and most people probably didn’t get it until the 2017.    Fun game!

Playable Solo? No, and it is difficult to play solo.

Okay, let’s head to our top 10!

Number 10: Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

Playable Solo?  Yes, but needs some slight tweaking.  See this post.

After all is said and done, I seem to like this game more as a solo game.  It did okay with my game groups, but not great.   I really liked it, though, and I thought it was very thematic.  The art was great and the gameplay is short (30 minutes).  It’s really easy to learn (the rulebook is good) and it has some interesting card mechanics I haven’t seen elsewhere.  It’s not the best game in the world, but if you liked the Dresden Files book series, you will enjoy this.

It’s at number 10 because I liked it a lot more than my game groups.  See Part I and Part II of my full review here to see if you will like it.

Number 9: Rising 5

Playable Solo? Yes!  And good rules for solo mode in the rulebook!

Given that this game is basically just cooperative Mastermind (a pattern guessing game), it went over very well both solo and with my game group.   The game is basically two parts: playing so you are allowed to earn a guess, and then guessing the pattern.  The art in the game was beautiful and the game is simple enough to get into quickly, but the pattern matching makes the game very thinky.

The art is amazing and really helps keeps you engaged.  Simple, beautiful cooperative Mastermind.

See my full review here to see if you might be interested in the game.

Number 8: Witches of the Revolution

Playable Solo? Yes!  And it has good rules in the rulebook!

This is a cooperative deckbuilding game.  Yes, there are a lot of those around now, but this one is different in a number of ways.  First, the theme is interesting!  You are all witches working together to help the colonists win the American Revolution!  (It’s a neat theme, but it’s not necessarily pervasive).  As a deckbuilder, it has an interesting new mechanic: when you buy new cards, you destroy the cards you buy with!  In other words, you cull your deck when you buy new cards.  As you play, your deck tends to get smaller when you buy!  Culling and buying are coupled into one mechanism.

The game has a pretty good rulebook.  The game itself isn’t terribly complicated.  The art isn’t great, but it’s good enough and thematic enough. See below.  The cards and the components are good.

The board itself (above) notates a lot of the rules on the board itself, which was very helpful.

Overall, my game group liked it and I liked playing it solo.

This game definitely cries out for an expansion: I feel like this might move it up my list with a little more content.

Number 7: Tie!! Aventuria the Card Game and Gloomhaven

Playable Solo?  Yes.

Some of you might be saying, WHAT?  “How is Gloomhaven so low on your list and tied with a minor Adventure game?” Calm down, let me explain.  Both of these games satisfy my “I want a dungeon crawl adventure game” itch.   Sometimes I want a long crawl, taking all day.  And Gloomhaven scratches that itch.  But sometimes, I want a quick crawl, taking an hour.  And Aventuria scratches that itch.

Aventuria reminds me a little of the Warhammer Adventure Card Game::

Warhammer Quest  was a simple RPG-lite  card game that cried out for more content, but unfortunately Fantasy Flight Games broke up with Games Workshop! And we never saw any more content (well, we saw 2 new characters but no new adventures).  Aventuria fills the gap that WQ left: it already has 3 new adventures/expansions (which I already picked up)!

Gloomhaven, of course, has 100s? 1000s? of hours of content!  It’s an amazing game!  The gameplay is fun!  The game is huge and the components are amazing!   It’s an amazing RPG adventure!!  Really!!!  It’s Tom Vasel’s favorite game of all time!  Only, I have a few problems with it (which is why it didn’t make it up further on my list).

1. Playing Lawyerball.  The rulebook is 52 dense pages.  It is a very good rulebook!  Let me make that clear!  But, as I played, I felt like I was a lawyer reading Tort Law (“Section 3.2 refers to subsection 12.3 about the Stun rule”).  I am sure that once I know the game, it flows faster, but there are a lot of rules.
2. Set-Up.  It takes a long time to set-up a scenario digging through all the cards and scenarios and markers.   It can take a while and it will take it out of you if you aren’t in the mood.  Again the components are AMAZING!  But, sometimes I am not in the mood for 30-60 minutes of set-up.
3. The Loot rule.  I have played Dungeons and Dragon in MANY different incarnations (original edition, first edition, advanced, second edition, third edition, 3.5, Pathfinder).  And, in 99% of those games, you kill the monster THEN you get the treasure.  In Gloomhaven, you have to go out of your way DURING COMBAT to get your loot!!  Which means, as soon as you kill the last Archer, you CANNOT get the treasure chest that was 20 feet away from the Archer because you didn’t LOOT during combat???  What???  This seems very athematic and it doesn’t make sense to me.  This one rule really took me out of the game and frustrated me.  I will get used to it, but it’s a rule that maybe belongs in a simple card game NOT a full-fledged adventure almost RPG!

Both Gloomhaven and Aventuria are RPG-like games I want to play.  They belong together at number 7.

Number 6: The Aeon’s End Suite (Aeon’s End and War Eternal)

Playable Solo?  Yes.  And good solo rules in the rulebook.

Aeon’s End was a very pleasant surprise!  I didn’t get to it right away, but once I did, wow!  I loved it as a solo game and my game group loved this game.  One of my friends even went out and bought it right away!

Aeon’s End (and War Eternal) are cooperative deckbuilding games.  (War Eternal is a standalone game or can be combined with the original Aeon’s End).  I know, there’s a lot of these on my list!  But, Aeon’s End puts a real nice spin on the deckbuilding mechanic: you don’t have to shuffle your discard! Thus, when you discard cards to your discard pile, you can discard in any order you want so that you can build combos.  When you are ready for more cards, you simply flip the discard deck over!  No shuffling!

The players take the role of mages cooperatively fighting a big bad monster.  You buy spells, relics, and gems (much like a Dominion style marketplace with cards and coin).  But there’s so much more here!  Spells, breaches, cooperation, major spells to be recharged …

When you first get the game, it does a VERY GOOD JOB of teaching you the first game!  The decks are labeled and tells you what cards to put out first!

At the end of the day, we loved this game!  It was fun, it was a good cooperative game for a group or solo play!

See my full review here if you are interested.

 

Number 5: Escape Room Games

Playable Solo?  Sure, but then they are used up!  These Escape Room games make more sense to play with a group!

Wait, do I see a list within a list?  Do I see a GASP … sublist?  Yes.  There are 4 main sets of “Escape Room in a Box”.  Unlock, Exit, Escape Room in a Box, and Deckscape. And those I played were a  blast!  Here’s my top 3!

 

• 3.  The Unlock series.  The House on the Hill  went over great with all my game groups.  Since this game is reusable, I was able to play it again (or rather, watch it be played)  with multiple game groups!   I wasn’t sure about the app integration at first, but it worked well enough.
• 2. The Deckscape Series.  Deckscape: Time Test was a pleasant surprise.  It was easy, fun, and we got through it in an hour.  And its reusable!    It was probably the simplest of the Escape room games, but it was really enjoyable.  
  Honestly, I thought this would be my number 1 Escape game.  But then, one of them surprised me!
• 1.  Unlock: Tonipal’s Treasure.
  
  This is the closest thing to the Monkey Island video game I’ve ever played in a board game.  As some of you know, I love Monkey Island!  And this really reminded me of an Adventure Game.  The time ran out at 1 hour, but we kept playing for another hour because we loved it so much!  (Yes, it’s very hard).   I liked this Unlock game so much I WILL PLAY IT AGAIN!!  Yes, that’s right, a one-shot game was so much fun, I will play it again!  So much fun!

Honestly, all the Escape Games I’ve played I have enjoyed.  The Exit games are pretty amazing, but you can only play them once.  At least the others can be played again by some of your friends.

Number 4: Unicornus Knights

Playable Solo?  The rulebook does not specify a solo mode, but the game plays great if the solo player controls three characters in the game.

This game I truly like.  I want to play it again and again.  There’s some really interesting mechanics and art.   It’s a cooperative game where the players work together to help the Princess retake her kingdom from the baddies.  The only hitch, she’s very, shall we say “Spirited” and wants to just walk right in and take it back (and that’s a suicide mission).  The players, as her trusted advisors, clear the way for the Princess so she won’t die before she gets to the big baddie.  You go along her path and befriend or neutralize other characters who may try to stop her.

This game has so many things going for it.  Great art, great new mechanics (the Fate mechanic deserves it’s own mention!), a great cooperative experience. It should a truly great game.  (See my review HERE)

But the rulebook is terrible. The way combat is described seems easy until you go to play.  There are so many unspecified combinations and ideas.   This game might be higher on my list if the rules were better.   A second edition of this game would go a long way towards generating interest in what I think, is a truly great game.

I still love it as a solo game, and my friends seem to like it as a cooperative game.

Number 3: Spirit Island

Playable Solo?  Absolutely!  Great rules!

Spirit Island is probably (except for Gloomhaven) the most complex game on my list.  It has a lot of mechanics and rules, and is probably best described as a euro-cooperative game.   Players work together as spirits on an island to beat back some settlers who are trying to colonize their island!  It is the inverse of Settlers of Catan!  But it is great.  I loved it as a solo game, and all my friends loved it as a cooperative game.

The rules were complex, but I found the rulebook very readable.   When I taught the game to my friends, I sat out  and helped shepherd the game along:

As of this writing, the game is kind of hard to get a hold of.  I originally got the Kickstarter, but CoolStuffInc keeps getting in stock and it sells out quickly.  If you find the game, I strongly recommend picking it up.  It’s great fun!

Number 2: The Captain is Dead

Playable Solo?  Yes, but the suggested rules aren’t great.  Read this blogpost for a better way to play solo.

This entry might surprise some of you.  First of all, the original Captain is Dead came out quite a while ago (2014) as a Kickstarter using the GamesCrafter.  The game did so well that AEG picked it up and reprinted it and the reprint came out in 2017.   So, the AEG version is eligible for the 2017.

This game is awesome!  It’s basically a cooperative Star Trek game!  The captain of the Enterprise (or whatever the legally distinct name of the ship is) has died from the first salvo of an alien attack!  The rest of the crew has to work together to get the ship out of there before the aliens take over/destroy the ship.  Players play very recognizable characters (Transporter Chief, Engineer, Admiral, etc) and have variable player powers.  (My favorite is the Janitor.  It makes me think that would have made a great Star Trek character.  But I digress …)

This game works great solo, and up to 5 players (and recently became my goto cooperative game for 5 players).  But, it doesn’t work above that: we had proof of that at RICHIE CON when a 7-player game went poorly.

I love the theme, and I’ll play it anytime anyone wants to.  My friends all liked it (except for the 7 player game) and I love love love playing the game solo.  Such a fun and thematic game!

Number 1:  CO-OP: the co-op game

Playable Solo?  Yes, and there are several more solo modes on BoardGameGeek.

This game Kickstarted at the end of 2016, but the game wasn’t delivered until February 2017.  This is kind of a cheat to put this on the list, because I designed it.  But here’s the thing, I still like playing it!   I have played CO-OP probably more than any of the other games on my list … combined!    It has a lot of things I want in a cooperative game:

1. Player Selected Turn Order: I get so frustrated when I can’t control the order of turns in cooperative games!  If we are supposed to be working together, why can’t we go in any order we want?  So few games have that, but CO-OP: the co-op does and it an ESSENTIAL part of the game
2. Short Game/Small Footprint/Easy Set-up:  It usually takes 30-45 minutes to play a game, and it’s a small box.  The set-up … well, it is easy once you’ve done it a few times.   I recently added a QuickStart Guide on BGG to help newbies set-up.    Overall, it’s a game you can get going quickly.
3. A Sense Of Humor:  I love games like Spirit Island and GloomHaven, but they are all so serious!  It seems like most cooperative games are SO SERIOUS!  “Work together or we all die!!! Ahhh!!!”    I learned gaming from the well of Monkey Island, which is NOT a serious game.  It has a sense of humor, but still manages (in my mind) to be a great puzzle and a great game without sacrificing gameplay.
4. Variable Player Powers:  All the people at the CO-OP can do something different!  Every time you play, you can play someone very different.
5. Lots of “Bad News” Events: The “bad news” cards (Happenings) have enough variety to keep the game very different for a long time.
6. Works Great Solo.

There are some shortcomings to the game (the lack of art/graphic design is probably the biggest shortfall), but at the day, it’s my favorite game of 2017 and I will play it anytime you want to.  Or, I will play it solo anytime.