This was a surprisingly full year for cooperative expansions! This list had to be shorn because there were so many candidates! As usual, we qualify our expansions are one of three types:

1. Stand-Alone Expansion: Some games you thought might be on the Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2023 might have just ended up on this list because they are stand-alone games that can be played without a base game, but at the end of the day they also expand a base game!
2. Makes The Game Cooperative: Some expansions take a competitive base game and make the game fully cooperative with the expansion! We saw a number of these type of expansions on the Top 10 Games That Can Be Played Fully Cooperatively!
3. More Content: Some expansions just add more content (more cards, etc.) to the base cooperative game!

This year we add a new characterization to expansions: Does it requires other expansions? At least two entries on our list require other expansions (besides the base game) in the same universe to play!

Some games you might have thought were here might be on our Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023! Check there for more delicious games of 2023!

Honorable Mention: Naturopolis

Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes (this game is probably best solo, but can play 1-4)
Requires Another Expansion?  No

Naturopolis is the third in “opolis” line from Button Shy Games: Spawlopolis, Agropolis, and now Naturopolis! They are small, 18-card cooperative tile-laying games that pack a lot of punch! This series of games made both our Top 10 “Small” Cooperative Games and our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying Games!

These small tile-laying games are thinky puzzles for 1-4 players (but really solo is best). See our review of the follow-up Agropolis for more info about this series!

This only makes Honorable Mention because it’s really a standalone game which “barely” expands the base game via Ultimopolis: The Naturopolis expansion includes a way to play all three “opolis” games at the same time! Ultimopolis! It feels like a cheat to call this an expansion when Ultimopolis is just a few cards … but it’s still pretty cool.

10. Valor and Villainy: Antagonist’s Arsenal

Expansion Type: Makes The Game Cooperative
Solo Mode: Yes
Requires Another Expansion?  No

Valor and Villainy is a competitive 1-vs.-many game that has really stylized (almost funny) art and interesting mechanics, but it’s not cooperative.  Valor and Villainy is basically a dungeon crawler, but with a sense of humor.  The Antagonist’s Arsenal Expansion takes the base game and adds a cooperative and solo mode!  One of the reasons this expansion is further down the list is because this doesn’t just add that much for cooperative or solo play: it really adds a little bit of content/rules to make the base bad guy fight the players with an AI … but the rest of the expansion is for the competitive mode.

The rest of the expansion takes the fully cooperative Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth (see our review of that there) and adds content to make THAT competitive!  But that’s still cool if you like competitive version! I mean, there’s quite a bit of stuff in this expansion!  Just … only some of it is for making the game solo/cooperative.

If you find yourself fully interested in playing a fully cooperative Valor and Villainy, then Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth may be a better option (as it has more gameplay but is more expensive). But, if you already own Valor and Villainy and want to try a solo game or a cooperative game, this expansion can help you test the waters to see if you might like Lludwick’s Labyrinth before you jump in whole hog!

See our review here to see if you might like this system!

9. Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate

Expansion Type: More Content 
Solo Mode: Yes
Requires Another Expansion?  Yes! Strictly speaking, you need The Jagged Earth expansion, but it would also be good if you had the Branch and Claw expansion!

It’s hard to recommend this game unless you are a hard-core Spirit Island fanatic!  This expansion requires the Jagged Earth expansion, which “almost” requires the Branch and Claw expansion (it has those rules, but it goes so much better if you have played Branch and Claw expansion separately).

Branch and Claw adds Event Cards, two new Spirits, but mostly the Beasts, Wilds, Disease, Strife tokens and Options. See above.

Jagged Earth (see above) expounds upon Branch and Claw, adding a lot of new spirits, some reminder cards, some new conditions, Wild Brush, and Aspects. See a game above with the base game of Spirit Island, Branch and Claw, and Jagged Earth!

Finally, Nature Incarnate (see above) expounds on Jagged Earth and Branch and Claw to add even more!  Incarna!  More Aspects! (And shiny foil spirits!!??)

In the end, Nature Incarnate makes a great game even better by having even more variants to play: mostly more Spirits with very different play styles! That variety in Spirits helps keep this great game fluid and interesting. It does make you wonder, though: will the next Spirit Island expansion require Nature Incarnate as an expansion (which in turn requires Jagged Earth)?

8. Thunderstone Quest: Deepwood Defenders (Nature’s Wrath and Rotten Roots)

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes (if you have Barricades Mode)
Requires Another Expansion?  Yes! Barricades Mode for cooperative/solo modes, and “other expansions” for more beasts/allies and other cards!

Boy, this train keeps on rolling, doesn’t it? The Deepwood Defenders Kickstarter is something like the 5th Kickstarter for AEG’s Thunderstone Quest fantasy-themed deck-builder game!

To be clear, to play these expansions cooperatively, you need the base game Thunderstone Quest (which is competitive: we reviewed it here) and the cooperative expansion Thunderstone Quest: Barricades’ Mode (which we reviewed here)! Only then can you play this expansion!

It’s actually quite a bit of work to get the base game, the cooperative expansion, and these expansions played! You are pulling cards from all three boxes, coordinating three rulebooks, and then adding some new rules! (And a few house rules: see our Seven House Rules for Cooperative Games here) It’s a bit exhausting! See one such mess above!

But it’s fun! Thunderstone Quest has a lot of great decisions as you build yourself up in town (left) and go adventuring in the dungeon (right). There’s always some great decisions in trying to do the best thing! This is a great game, and it has a lot of content. For example: I really liked the new Beastmaster class and really played into the allies from these expansions! (Below)

All in all, some great new expansions .. if you need new content. You may not need that much new content, since this is the 12 and 13th expansion!

7. Adventure Tactics: Adventures in Alchemy

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes (original base game solo mode: play 3 characters)
Requires Another Expansion? No

The best part of this expansion is that it fixed a lot of issues with the base game!  See our original review here: The boards were warped, there were some typos, some cards were wrong, and the class guide was inconsistent with starting cards (it still is, unfortunately).  By being on the expansion Kickstarter, I got a lot of stuff upgraded!

We were a little luke-warm on Adventure Tactics originally (see our review), but this update helped change our minds.  The new character class (Alchemist) and new story in the new campaign guide really added some new life to the game! Plus, the new character Laine is very cute! New classes! New allies! New campaign! New minis! New standees!  

So, this expansion did what expansions are supposed to do: make you revisit the original game and bring it back into your zeitgeist.  It worked! I think I like Adventure Tactics more after playing the Adventures in Alchemy expansion!

6. Mists Over Carcassonne

Expansion Type: More Content, Makes The Game Cooperative, Stand-Alone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes (very different way of playing but still works well)
Requires Another Expansion?  No

Mists Over Carcassonne is one of those rare games that does it all! It’s a standalone game in the Carcassonne universe, but it’s also completely cooperative!  It also can be used as an expansion to the original (competitive) Carcassonne game!

This cooperative tile-laying game lives in the world of Carcassonne!  It was so good it made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Placement/Tile-Laying Games!

See our review here to see if you might like Mists Over Carcassone!

5. Rook City Renegades: Sentinels of the Multiverse (Definitive Edition)

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes (original base game solo mode: play 3 characters)
Requires Another Expansion?  No

In another reality, The Rook City expansion for the 2nd edition of Sentinels of the Multiverse was my favorite expansion of all time!  So, this one had high expectations!  

In the end, I still like the 2nd Edition of Sentinels of the Multiverse better than the Definitive Edition, but I’ve said it many times: it’s just as good, it’s just what you are used to!  I still like the new system and I am collecting it.  The Definitive Edition is really a better game for people just starting out.

See our review here for Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition and here to see if you think Rook City Renegades might be right for you and your group!

4. Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis

Expansion Type: Makes The Game Cooperative, More Content
Solo Mode: Yes
Requires Another Expansion?  No

Strictly speaking, you only need the Crisis mode expansion to make the game cooperative, and that expansion is available separately.  My group really liked this cooperative expansion! See below.

As much as my group liked this cooperative mode for Ares Expedition (see our very positive review here), my friends in Las Cruces didn’t like it … but they did like the other two expansions Discovery and Foundations!!  See our discussion on this here (RichieCon 2023 and Interesting Games).

The 6-Player expansion (Foundations) got played quite a bit at RichieCon 2023!  See above!

It’s pretty clear that if you like Ares Expedition, you will like at least ONE of the 3 expansions: Crisis (the cooperative mode), Discovery (more stuff mode), or Foundations (6-Player mode).  Clearly, the best thing to do is to get the the box with all three expansions!

3. Cantaloop Book 3: Against All Odds

Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes (this game is probably best solo)
Requires Another Expansion?  No, but you probably want to have played Books 1 and 2

Cantaloop Book 3: Against All Odds is the third and final book in the Cantaloop Trilogy.  Cantaloop Book 1: Breaking Into Prison was so good (see our review here) that it made the #1 top spot of our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021!  It’s follow-up Cantaloop Book 2: A Hack of a Plan wasn’t quite as good (see our review here), but it still made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2022!

What makes the Cantaloop series so good is that they are what point-and-click adventure games (like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle) would be in book form!  And they have a great sense of humor! They are actually quite funny (like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle), if a little raunchy.

The game uses the little red acetate to hide clues throughout the book: you explore, combine objects, talk to people, and there is even a hint system!

Overall, the third book really knocked it out of the park and finished this fantastic trilogy with a bang! If you like humor and point-and-click adventure games, the Cantaloop series is fantastic! See our review of Cantaloop Book 3: Against All Odds for more information!

2. Battle for Greyport: Chaos in Copperforge

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: No (but you can play 2 characters and alternate: it’s not official)
Requires Another Expansion?  No

This might surprise some of you that this expansion is so high! Honestly, it just reminded me how much I like the original game!

It’s not flashy or large, but the newest expansion adds some new cards and humor into the Battle for Greyport world! Battle for Greyport is a cooperative deck-building game that I think is a hidden gem! See our of Battle for Greyport review here! It made the #5 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Builder Games! The expansion Pirates! made the #5 spot on our Top 10 Swashbuckling Games!

It’s more great stuff for a great game! See our review of Chaos in Copperforge for Battle for Greyport to see if this is something you would like!

1. Unmatched Adventures: Tales To Amaze

Expansion Type: Makes The Game Cooperative, Standalone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes (introduced by this expansion, but cooperative mode is significantly better)
Requires Another Expansion?  No, but see below

I have been waiting and waiting for Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze for some time! Honestly, I’ve been looking for a cooperative way to play all my Marvel Unmatched expansions! Now, with this new expansion, I can solo play any of the Unmatched Marvel heroes, or take a group into a cooperative Adventure!

Although this expansion is standalone (coming with 4 heroes to play), we ended up playing with Marvel Heroes from other boxs most/all of the time! See above!

The game was fun (see as my friends are smiling ear-to-ear) and having a grand time!

The components are amazing and this was quite good! See our review of UnMatched Adventures: Tales To Amaze here to see if it’s something you might enjoy!

Doomensions: Pop-Up Manor Mystery was on on Kickstarter back in October 2022, and delivered to me in mid November 2023.

This is essentially a cooperative Escape Room game for 1-4 players with 4 chapters with 4 puzzles per chapter (5 chapters if you count the finale). Players work together to solve puzzles cooperatively in this Mystery Manor world.

The back of the box hints at what this world is: it’s a pop-up game (yes, pop-up) in an ancient manor. The back of the box doesn’t really do it justice: it’s pretty cool looking. I was very excited to get this to the table!

This review has a lot of pictures, but it shouldn’t have any real spoilers unless you look too closely at the pictures.

Preamble

A few months before my game arrived, I got this letter in the mail from the Department of Archeology and Historic Preservation. See above.  I almost threw it away, because it looked like some kind of phising or spam letter.   Something in my mind said “Wait”, and I ended up opening it up.

It turns out, as part of the Kickstarter, I got a “herald letter” before the game came to me!   There are some puzzles in the letter (see above), and some back-story to get me excited for the game!  I have to say, this was pretty cool: I’ve never had a Kickstarter do this before.   This really did get me pretty excited for the game.

Unboxing

So, this game is a weird size. It’s long and thin and pretty wide. Also note I got another letter with the Kickstarter (which I can’t open until I’m done).

The Coke can gives you a sense of how big and long this box is!

The rulebook is long and thin, like the box.

It comes with a folder of clues (don’t open this yet!)

There are 4 chapters to the game: each subtab of the folder is for that section of the game. See above.

The version of the game I got comes with a really nice and big magnifying glass! To see how big it is, I place it next to a Can of Coke! It’s quite nice and weildy.

A very nice bag comes with a notebook (for clues) and a Hint Book: since this is an Escape Room game, it’s possible you will get confused. The Hint Book is to help you when you get stuck. I also got a little flashlight.

The notebook is also from the Department of Archeology. Inside …

.. are a list of Kickstarter backers. Hey! There I am!

But the most important thing is the mansion! It’s a GIANT pop-up book held together with some knots on the edges!! We’ll see what this looks like opened-up later on … it’s pretty cool!

The production on this game is through the roof! Everything in this version of the game is just fantastic!  And wait until you see the pop-up book opened!!!

Rulebook

This rulebook wasn’t great.

Although the rulebook has a very big font and is very readable, it gets a C- on The Chair Test because it’s not really usable on the chair next to me. It’s too big! It really doesn’t fit on the chair and its pages flop over. The font choice and size keep this from failing, but I really couldn’t use this. This really needed a better form factor.

I also don’t feel like the rulebook did a good job preparing me for the game (see Solo Game below). The rulebook had a lot of text: it felt wordy. I have played a lot of Escape Room games, but I didn’t feel like I was prepared for this game.

I don’t know. I wish the rulebook had been a lot better: it might have made my first experience better. It needed a few more pictures?

Game Session 0: Solo Game

So, you can play this solo: see the box above. I both recommend it and don’t recommend playing this solo. What do I mean by this?

I recommend playing through the first puzzle or two in the game to get acquainted with how this world works. This a little different from most Escape Room game because of the world you inhabit. It’s good to get a sense of everything before exposing your friends to this.

My first mistake in playing the game was “only” opening the book to one section of the mansion. Since the game is 4 chapters long, it makes sense that you only see 1 of 4 sections at a time? Right? See above as I open just the landing area.

Nope nope nope nope nope! You have to open the entire mansion up and look at all rooms! I didn’t realize this until I made no progress solving the puzzle and looked at the Hint Book.

The Hint Book for the first puzzle made it clear: you had to open the whole mansion up! This was an honest mistake, but I wasted more time than I’d care to admit. By the time I got to that point, I was sort of done as the solo player. I figured out how the mansion works, how the clue wheel works, and how the game basically flows. But I really wanted more brains to help me through this.

I think this is one of those games that more brains make it easier to solve: someone else may see something you miss. If you miss something, this game just feels like you are a dead end. The Hint Book is very good, but still, there are only 4 puzzles per chapter, and you want to get your money’s worth.

Play it just a little way solo to learn how the game works and the puzzles work (all puzzles have a 3 digit number for the solution) and then stop: play with your friends. This was so much more fun with my friends.

Game Session 1: A 3-Player Game

In game session 1, we played a 3-player game. It was absolutely more fun to play with 3 players: Andrew would see something nobody else would see, Teresa would then take it from there, or I would offer some insight. I really think this game is better at multiple players.

We ended up playing 2 sessions in one night: it was about 90 minutes per session. We got more tired in the second session, so I can see only playing 1 session per night. Weirdly, I feel like the game’s assesssment of length seemed too long (a rare thing). It seems to imply each session is about 2 to 2.5 hours: we seemed to do a little better.

The main takeaway from our gameplay: this was fun, but it would have been slightly better at 4 people! There are 4 sections of the house, and it’s easier to divide the work into the different sessions! Still, it worked well at 3.

Session 2: A 4-Player Game

Our next session of this game was 4-Players!  And boy what a difference that made! The workload seemed lessened (as each player took responsibility for a section of the house), and more brains made the game more fun!  Right when someone felt stuck, another person might take charge!

It was clear that 2 sessions, at about 1.5 hours each (for a total of 3 hours), was about the right amount of time.  Although we made it to the finale, we were all too tired to finish … 

But more brains made a big difference: if someone felt a little tired, there were 3 people to take their place! In general, we had a great time shifting from puzzle to puzzle, with different subsets of people working on the puzzles concurrently.

Finale: A 5-Player Game!

In the Finale, Sara brought over her sister and we played 5 players!  It seemed to go over just fine with 5-Players: it may get a little crowded, but I think it depends on the makeup of your group.  We didn’t have any problems having a 5th player in our final run.

We took about 2 hours to solve the finale!  It was pretty fun and relatively climactic!  Our only complaint was the first puzzle in the finale had a wonky solution that we all said “ya, that wasn’t great”.  But everything else was fun! It felt like we had a very satisfying ending an investigation into this mystery house!

Components

These might be the best components of any game I played this year. The magnifying class, the pop-up book, the puzzle wheel, were all just fantastic.

And how can you not be blown away by the Pop-Up Book? Once you see it on the table, it’s fantastic!

This game should probably win Best Components of the year.

Suggestions

Play this at 4 players: it felt like the best player count and offered the best experience. Over the course of four week, we played it at 1, 3, 4 and 5 Players. A 4-Player game was probably the best.

Play the first puzzle or two (puzzle A & maybe puzzle B) as a solo player to get a sense of how the game works, but then don’t ever play it solo again! By biting the bullet and figuring how the game flowed, it made it so much easier to teach my friends.

We ended up taking a piece of clear acetate from the Star Trek Pathways, and it really helped us do the puzzles!! We could trace a lot of the puzzles and both keep the components pristine, but also embracing the puzzles. We used this same clear acetate when we played Suspects a few weeks ago (see our review here).

Put the pop-up book on the edge of the table with nothing else in front of it: it makes it easier to circle and deftly look at the rooms. Generally, we put the chairs on the far side of the table so we could do puzzles there, but kept the chairs away from the manor side.

This goes without saying, but make you open up the entire pop-up book!  Don’t be me and only open “1 section”: that’s not right!

Get 2 oversized binder clips.  Why?

Although the ribbons are supposed to be tied to keep the book open and taut, it worked much better to have 2 binder clips to hold the book open: see above.

Also, make sure you are well-rested to play.  There’s a lot of mental and physical activity as we played.  I might suggest playing over 3 sessions; chapters 1 and 2, chapters 3 and 4, and the finale as we did.

Complaints

The puzzles are all independent, but they are labelled A,B,C,D, etc which implies they MUST be done in order. Nope! Our experience was the each puzzle was an independent puzzle. It might have been more fun to have be able to work on some of the puzzles concurrently: when I got stuck, I could have moved forward on a different puzzle and still felt involved. Sometimes, a puzzle just didn’t speak to you, and you feel useless. It wasn’t until we made it most of the way though the game that we realized “We could have worked on these independently!!” (at least per chapter). ABCD labels implies ordering. I wish they would have used labels that don’t imply order (obviously numbers wouldn’t have worked either): maybe some of the arcane symbols from the game?

This is NOT a kid’s game! That font and that cover picture and that pop-up book maight make you think this is for kids … no no no no no. First of all, the subject matter can be a little disturbing: there’s death, blood splatters, and some scary situations! Second, the complexity of the puzzles and amount of detail needed really wouldn’t work with kids. Maybe, maybe they could help play, but our experience was that we needed every brain with no distractions to really engage this game.

One last complaint, the flashlight that came with the game died within 2 sessions. Make sure you have multiple flashlights: they really do help.

Comparison

One of my favorite escape room experiences of all time was playing Escape The Room: The Cursed Dollhouse!  See our review here!   Although the components aren’t nearly as good as Doomensions, they did definitely awe us when we played this 3 years ago!  

The best part of the game was that each room had numerous puzzles, and we could concurrently work those puzzles!  We got to experience every single subset of 4 people solving the puzzles!  That really set a high bar for cooperation!  I think that’s why I complained that the puzzles were presented so linearly in Doomensions!  My experience with The Cursed Dollhouse really exposed how great that  concurrent mechanism can work.

From a components perspective, The Cursed Dollhouse can’t hold a candle to Doomensions.  But I think I enjoyed the puzzles a little more in The Cursed Dollhouse: they were all just a little different.  The puzzles in Doomensions “always” had to be a 3-digit number … which felt a bit tedious after a while.

Conclusion

This game is an amazing experience with amazing components, but it does require a a commitment to get through the whole thing. If you do decide you want a similar but more contained experience, The Cursed Dollhouse might be the better choice. But if you want to embrace a full multi-session escape room game in a scary universe, Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor is a great choice! To be clear, this was a fantastic experience with my friends! I strongly recommend checking out the Recommendations section if you do decide to play the game: those recommendations can really make or break this game.

After a frustrating start, this ended up being a pretty great game: This is probably an 8.5/10 for the overall experience! Amazing components! Just be aware: it’s probably not for young kids.

Even though our main focus here at CO-OP Gestalt is cooperative games, solo games are many times the other side of the coin of the cooperative games! Frequently, we play the solo game to learn the game so as to teach the cooperative game! We frequently talk about Saunders’ Law (the hope that a cooperative game has a viable solo mode)! We discuss ways to play cooperative games solo (The Changing Perspectives idea and Least Intellectual Overhead idea)! We care a lot about solo games, but this is our first year calling them out!

Honorable Mention: Marvel Midnight Suns

Our favorite solo game of the year wasn’t a board game or a card game, but a video game: Marvel Midnight Suns!  Strictly speaking, this came out in Dec 2022, but we didn’t get this until March 2023 or so.  So, because it’s a video game AND it didn’t come out in 2022, it can only make our Honorable Mention here in the solo games list. But we played it so much in 2023!

What’s weird is that this video game is a deck-building game!   Combat is performed via a deck-building like mechanism within the video game.  But what this game nails, and is part of the reason I liked it so much, was the exploration and the story!  There is such a great story that unfolds as you explore this world.  

This should have been our #1 solo game of 2023, but it can’t be because it’s a video game that came out in December 2022.  Considering we spent 100+ hours playing this solo in 2023, so it has to make this list at least as an Honorable Mention.

See our review of Marvel Midnight Suns here to see if this is something you would like.

10. Illiterati

A solo word game is a rare beast! Luckily, Illiterati is a word game which works well both solo and cooperatively!  The components, especially the plastic letters, are wonderful!

The solo gamer makes words using letters given a theme (by some cards).  You can choose to play this realtime or not: I personally prefer my word games to be untimed, but the game supports both real-time and off-line modes.

See our review here to see if Illiterati is the type of solo word game you want!

9. Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition

Strictly speaking, this is an expansion for the base game Lost Ruins of Arnak (so you need the base game and this expansion to play), but it really fleshes out the solo mode of the original game with a neat campaign! 

The solo gameplay stays relatively the same, but there’s a lot of new ideas: new story,  new cards, new leaders, and new approaches!

Everything about this solo mode is fun! It is a bit of a table hog getting both the original game (which was also a table hog) and the new expansion set-up with it!

8. Age of Comics

Age of Comics is, by default, a competitive worker placement game for 1-4 players: it’s a victory point game!  But it does come with a dedicated solo mode!  This is a game all about making comic books in the Golden Age of comics! 

The art and components are really evocative of the Golden Years of Comics, with lots of comic book 1950s style art on all sorts of components: cards, tokens, and boards!

If you want to play this solo, you really need to play the competitive version first! The solo rules make it clear: “You need to play the base game first!”  So, for my first play, I played me-vs-me to learn the rules:  see above for a 2-Player game (where the two players are me and me). I just barely beat myself by 1 point! It was a close game!

Finally, once I learned the base rules, I can pull out the solo rules by Nestor (see above).  The official solo mode is similar to the me-vs.-me game, as the solo gamer plays against a solo AI, trying to get more victory points that the AI!  There are a few places where the solo rules need some clarification (Sales especially), but it’s still very fun and very playable.  I am really glad I picked this game up! Age of Comics can give you a very nice solo experience: either me-vs.-me or using the built-in solo rules!

7. Roll For Great Old Ones

Roll For Great Old Ones is a roll-and-write game about stopping the Cultists of Cthulu (or your favorite Great Old One) from summoning terrifying creatures!

This Cthulu roll-and-write game was surprisingly thematic and surprisingly deep for a roll-and-write game.  You felt terror as the summoning approached, you felt dread as the dice conspired against you, and you went mad making choices  (… well, not really …)!  There’s even a re-roll mechanism in the game … but it has a cost … which is also very thematic!

This was a fun solo game (and cooperative too)!

See our review here to see if Roll For Great Old Ones is something you might like!

6. Find The Source

This was a surprisingly good year for solo and cooperative roll-and-write games!  Find The Source was solidly good roll-and-write that works well for both the solo or cooperative game.

The components are quite good, with thick boards and good pens (and amazing erasers!)  This game is easy to set-up, easy to learn, quick to play, and has a lot of interesting decisions.  The component quality and ease-of-play give this is a slight leg up on our other solo roll-and-write Roll For Great Old Ones (#6).

See our review here of Find The Source to see if this is a game you would enjoy solo!

5. Skytear Horde

Skytear Horde is one of those omni-mode games you can play solo, cooperatively, or competitively. Now, I only got to play it solo, but I really liked it!

This is basically a tower defense game: you play cards stop the attacking horde and defend your place of power!  There’s quite a bit of content here, but if you need more, there is an expansion coming soon which adds more content to this game.  The solo game is good fun!

The art on the cards is quite nice!  And the components quite high quality.

Take a look at our review of Skytear Horde to see if something you would enjoy solo!

4. Marvel United: SpiderGeddon

SpiderGeddon was a little hard to get a hold of, but it should be available soon (it’s on Amazon as this goes up)! It’s sort of the precursor the the next wave of Marvel United (Marvel United: Mulitiverse) coming out in 2024.

What made this stand out for us was that they finally addressed the weird solo mode that comes with Marvel United!  (See our discussion here and here). The solo mode that came with the original Marvel United (and X-Men) had some rules that required a bunch of exceptions: it felt like it really diverged from the main cooperative game! We almost always played solo with the 2-handed Solo games! 

Now, the newest Marvel United: SpiderGedden introduces a newer and more interesting solo ruleset (called Commander Solo Mode) for Marvel United!  This newer solo mode is precisely why this is so high on this list: it’s a much better solo game now!

3. Race to the Raft

Race to the Raft is a very puzzly and fun solo tile-playing game in the Isle of Cats universe!

At the time of the review, we had just finished our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Playing/Tile Placement game!  Looking back, I think Race to the Raft should be the new #1 on that list, except for timing! Ah well!

What makes this game stand out so much (and place so high on this list) is that everything you do is a choice! Which tile do you get from which pile? How do you place the raft tiles?  Where do you place the fire tiles?  I think Race To the Raft is a fantastic game, and the solo mode is just great!  I think I like to solo mode more than the cooperative mode! It’s such a great puzzle!

See our review here to see if Race to the Raft is something you might like! We loved it!

2. Earthborne Rangers

Earthborne Rangers is a game all about exploring.  It’s a thoughtful romp through a fantasy land, with deck-building (sort of) as a main mechanism.

The art is here is phenomenal, and, in a very chill fashion, you get to explore this wonderful world!

There are a lot of rules and a lot of things you have to absorb before you can really enjoy the game, but once you get into it, the game moves quickly and can be quite fun!   The game seems significantly better as a solo game (which is why it’s so high on this list), but my friends still had fun playing cooperatively.

See our review of Earthborne Rangers here to see if you might enjoy it!

1. Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper

This surprised me too!  My favorite solo experience of the year was playing case #1 from the Suspects box solo!  Normally, this game goes over great as a cooperative game, but the solo game works so well too! 

I think since the mystery is confined to the cards, it’s not quite as necessary to have a bunch of brains working on the mystery (as opposed to deeper mystery games like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective).  

If you love your murder mysteries like Death In Paradise or Midsomer Murder, why not solve a mystery rather than watch it? See our review of Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper here to see if this is something you might like!

My friend Robert loves his map and train games! Last year, we re-played Pandemic Iberia (a cooperative hidden train game with a map: see our retro review here) and had a grand time! This year, we were able to play a new game that just came out with the last two months: Express Route. I ordered this from The Op’s website and it arrived a few weeks ago (Oct 2023).

Express Route is a cooperative 1-4 Player game where players work together to deliver packages under time constraints! (This is called a pick-up and deliver game). The joke throughout the night was “Is this how Amazon trains its staff to deliver packages?” This is a game all about delivering packages across America.

Unboxing

This is a surprisingly big box: it’s standard width and length (like a Ticket To Ride sized box), but it’s quite tall/thick! See our Coke can for perspective above and below.

The rulebook is shaped just like box .. see above.

Under the rulebook is a map and a bunch of cardboard punchouts.

The map is gigantic! See as it takes up the entire one side of my table! See the Coke can above for more perspective.

There’s quite a number of things to punch out: there’s five giant punch out boards! You punch out tokens, summaries, but mostly the packages! There are SO MANY little cardboard packages that come with this game. See below.

See some more tokens above.

There’s also a number of cards: player cards (left), upgrade cards (middle) and some bad news cards (called “Breaking News”, right).

There’s also numerous thicker boards (cargo: left, player: middle) and some wood tokens (right).

The components overall very functional (easy to read), but nothing in this game looks great or fabulous. I guess it’s very thematic for a package delivery: it just looks ordinary. Again, the game is very functional, it’s just not particularly good looking.

Rulebook

This rulebook isn’t bad, but I struggled a little with it.

This rulebook gets about a C+ or B- on the Chair Test. It flops open and makes it harder to read the edges (see above). The font isn’t small (so that’s good), but it isn’t big. It’s okay for readability on the chair test, and it does stay open. The pages just needs to be slightly smaller.

The intro is fine, and it has a link to learn the rules online: I prefer to learn from the rulebook, but some people prefer videos.

The Table of Contents is fine. There’s no Index (fail), but there are Appendices with some FAQ/extra info.

The components page is great!  There’s pictures with labels correlating the components! 

And a lot of people could learn from this set-up page!

• You can leave it open (see above) while you are setting it up!
• It spans two pages for the board: it seems necessary and proper that the board takes a full two pages
• The arrows do a good job of pointing to what’s relevant as you set-up

My only complaint about the set-up is that the steps weren’t numbered, but maybe they didn’t have to be!

The rest of the rules were okay, but they seemed very wordy.  Not sure if it was the font, the organization, lack of highlighting, lack of elaboration in some places?

One rule that seems like it needed more discussion was the Demand Track: there are three different actions depending on whether its green, yellow, or red. But, there were a number of questions we had: if you are in the red, do you do the green and yellow actions as well? (not clear: I am pretty sure the answer is no). And here’s some confusion about how to fill the telephone track as well.

And the back of the rulebook contained no good summaries: it was just empty.

This wasn’t a bad rulebook, but I struggled through about four games before I felt like I finally got everything. This wasn’t a complex game, but something about the rulebook (The organization? The Way rules were expressed? Lack of an Index?) just didn’t flow for me.

I learned the game. The rulebook was good enough for that, but be aware you may have to struggle a little though it.

Gameplay

Each player takes the role of a character in the game: each character (there are 11, see above) has a special set-up ability (usually a few more movement or loads), and then a special ability to use during the game.

All the players ares working together to deliver packages using the four vehicles (three trucks and one airplane) on the board. See the yellow, teal, brown, and white tokens on the board above. To be clear, no one player owns any vehicle: player share control of all delivery vehicles!!

Each vehicle has its own capacity: each truck starts with a capacity of 1 and can be upgraded to 2 (the airplane starts with 2 and can be upgraded to 3).

Players need to deliver packages to keep the demand under control: if the demand every reaches the top of the track (45 or 35, depending on unlocks), players all lose! Amazon has failed to deliver their packages and customers are very grumpy!

Every turn a bad news (“Breaking News”) happens which messes up the players: these get progressively worse as the game progresses.

And some new packages are placed on the map every turn, spiking demand!

Each player has 3 actions (denoted by the 3 batteries): they can move the vehicles a few spaces or load/unload: see the player board above.

If players can collectively deliver 4 normal packages and then another 4 packages (with special constraints), you win!

One of the ways the game is interesting is that you can spend packages to get upgrades! Even though you need 8 packages delivered to win, you will have to spend some of those deliveries to upgrade you vehicles speed, capacity, and other things! (Thematically, this feels weird: am I stealing packages and selling them to upgrade my business?????)

Players win if they deliver the proper 8 packages, but they lose if the demand spikes too high! Also problematic: If the Bad News (“Breaking News”) deck ever runs out, players all lose! Can your group deliver all the packages needed in time?

Solo Play

Solo Play is specified right up front on the components page! Thank you for following Saunders’ Law and having a viable solo mode!

The balance mechanism for one player or multiple players is simple: For every three actions the players take, a new package and a new Bad News card comes out! That’s it! So, it doesn’t matter how many players you have: every three actions taken by any player has the game respond the same way.

It took me a number of games to get the flow of the game. At first, the game felt impossible! I lost my first game badly, and I was afraid I could never win! It was at the point I realized you could trade delivered packages for upgrades, and then the light came on! The upgrades are essential to winning! I think I struggled with the upgrade rule because it seems so athematic: “I am going to sell some of my packages to upgrade my company!” Wait, is this legal?

I played a few more games and finally got the main flow, and I even won a game!

The game was decent solo: it allowed me to learn the game (modulo a few rules) so I could teach my friends. It felt pretty necessary to learn the same solo before playing in a group: there’s just too many rules to get down beforehand!

I don’t know if I’ll play Express Route again solo: that’s not necessarily the fault of the game, I am just not enamored with this theme.

Cooperative Play

Express Route was more fun with a group: we played our first group game with 4 people.

Because the balancing mechanism is so simple (bad news, package, 3 actions, repeat), playing multiple players didn’t seem to slow down the game too much. There was a lot of discussion about how the game worked, there was discussion about the long-term planning, there was discussion as we played. It was pretty fun.

One problem we had: there were a few places where if felt “a little” like the Alpha Player reared his ugly head (see the discussion of Alpha Player Syndrome if you don’t know what an Alpha Player is). It wasn’t a big deal, but there were some places were it felt like there was a little tension as we tried to decide the fate of our packages. This is definitely a game where you drink each other’s Kool-Aid: all players share control of the delivery vehicles, and there’s no way you can win unless you really work talk and work together!! This is not a multiplayer solitaire cooperative game by any means! That’s both good and bad, depending on what you want in a cooperative game.

My friends and I had fun playing cooperatively.

Four Way Thoughts

After we played, I reached out to my friends and asked for their reactions. It was kind of fun to watch the discussion: here’s what I saw!

“I never got a number score for (Express Route) the delivery game.  What do you think (out of 10)?  – Rich

“8?” – Becca

“You liked it that much? :)” – Rich

“I did like it and would be willing to play it again.  I haven’t played many co-op games though” – Becca

“7? definitely fun to play, fun theme, minor downside not sure I liked the dynamic of how you need to buy your way into the red part of the meter though maybe there’s a way to make sure you understand and use the card options you should buy” – Robert

“I am also a 7.  There were a few instructions that were unclear.  Flow was good.  Our game kept us strategizing the whole time.  I was concerned how quickly the meter shot into the red, but that kept us thinking the whole time.”

“Okay, yeah, 7 … all good points” – Becca

So, Express Route is a 7/10 from my friends!

I think I am just 6.5/10: I just don’t love the theme.  I also felt like only 3 actions per turn sometimes made it feel like you couldn’t do a lot on your turn. Despite those thoughts, the were some good moments, especially in the cooperative game.

Conclusion

Express Route is a good pick-up and delivery game: it’s very strategic and keeps players engaged as they play. Be aware that this game really needs everyone to stay involved to win: if you wanted a cooperative game where you do your own thing, this is not the game for you! Express Route demands everyone’s full attention if you want any chance to win … otherwise, you might be inviting the Alpha Player to your table.

My friends all liked Express Route more than I did, as they all gave it a 7/10! For me, the theme just doesn’t do a lot for me (and I wish I had more than 3 actions per turn), but I recognize the game is interesting, and I had some fun! I would give this only a 6.5/10, but realize I am in the minority: my friends liked it better. Caveat Emptor.

I will keep Express Route for my map-loving friends.

Roll For Great Old Ones is a cooperative roll-and-write game that was on Kickstarter back in February 2023 and delivered to me Oct 31, 2023: I remember that date, because I was trying to get my friends to play this for our Halloween game! (We ended up playing something else).

Roll for Great Old Ones is a cooperative roll-and-write game: if you don’t know roll-and-write games, think of Yahtzee! In Yahtzee, you roll dice (roll) and fill out a sheet with numbers (write). We’ve seen some recent examples of cooperative roll-and-write games: Find The Source (see our review here) and Escape: The Roll and Write game (see our review here). Let’s take a look at this one!

Unboxing

This game has a weird profile: see above. It’s very thin and long and kind of an awkward size.

Arguably, it doesn’t have to be too thick because all it contains are some sheets, dice, pens, and a rulebook. And that’s it! It all fits into that thin box (see above).

The game looks pretty good, if you don’t mind the crazy, maybe off-putting art.

I think the art’s supposed to be a little crazy and unhinged because Cthulu-type games typically have that insane/going-crazy aspects to them. So I think it works. But the art is weird.

Rulebook

The rulebook is okay to pretty good.

The game starts with a good description of what the game is, but there is no component break-down.

To be fair, you don’t need a component breakdown since there are so few components. The set-up page works pretty well.

The rulebook does a pretty good job of showing examples while it explains each sections, and it has cutaways of the appropriate section of the board: that was very useful to further our understanding.

I didn’t love the font here: it wasn’t visually appealing. There’s also a lot of white space all over the book, which makes me think the font could have been significantly bigger. But, font and font-size are a very specific criticism most people might not even notice: it bugged me.

I would say this rulebook taught the game decently: I had questions as I played and I was generally able to find elaborations/clarifications for rules. Having said that, I think this game really needs an index: there are a lot of concepts here for a simple roll-and-write, and I think an Index would have helped a lot.

I will give the game props for having a very useful back cover (summaries of symbols): I referred to this a fair number of times when I played.

The rulebook gets a B on the Chair Test: it does fit okay on a chair next to the table, but it does flop a little. The font is also too small to see easily on the chair.

A slightly smaller form factor, a larger font, a better font, and an Index could easily move this to a very good or excellent rulebook. The rulebook, as it is, is ok to pretty good: it will teach the game decently.

Gameplay

Each player takes one of four characters to play during the game: Each character has a specific laminated sheet with a special power!

For example, Sally Jones (see above) has her special ability where she can spend a health for a free reroll.

After choosing a character, you choose one of four scenarios that come in the game. The scenarios are documented in two places: a rulebook for each scenario (see above) ..

… and a sheet specific to that scenario (There are 2 double-sided scenario cards, so 4 total Scenarios).

Once you get into the game, the main arc is pretty simple: roll some dice (1 bad news dice: the d12) and a few d6 (one more than the number of players). Each player will choose one d6 to put on their sheet:

And with that die, they will activate “something” on their sheet!

An easy to forget rule is that you get to use the die’s value TWICE, so I put a note underneath the die!

The bottom of your sheet shows you 6 major actions you may be able to activate with your value (if it’s odd, even, ascending, descending, same, different, etc). You fill in little squares at the bottom! These squares will have cascading effects as you fill them in: some allowing you to fill in the experience track, some allowing more numbers to be filled in, some allowing other actions! There’s all sorts of things you can do you if fill enough boxes: heal sanity, cure weakness, kill some cultists, activate a special action, but the most important thing: discover clues!

In order to win, each character must find enough clues to fill in their own DARK SEAL!  See above as Sally Jones is able to find the Dark Seal and win the the game!

Another great thing this game has are institutional rerolls!  You can reroll just about any die in the game … at a cost.  The rerolls section of your board has a bunch of reroll squares: every other reroll is “free”, but the other come at a cost: summon more cultists, lose health, lose sanity, gain a weakness and some other stuff!  So, you can always reroll as many times as you want, but you will pay a cost.    It’s kind of cool that you can take a ton of rerolls if it means the difference between winning and losing!!  … It will just cost you … (evil laugh)…. but at least you can make that choice!

How do lose? If all players go to zero health (only one player has to survive to win), or if the cultist ritual finishes (see ritual track at the bottom of the board), or a few other ways.  Players only win if they can all find their DARK SEAL and survive to the end of the turn!

Solo Play

Thank you to Roll For the Great Old Ones for following Saunders’ Law: there is a viable solo mode! It’s easy: the solo player just takes control of one character and plays normally. Most of the scaling for the number of players for the game has to do with “how fast” the Cultist Ritual evolves. For a solo game, the Cultist Ritual doesn’t complete nearly as quickly. For example, at the beginning of scenario 1, the Ritual only completes one step for 1 player (2 steps for 2 players, etc 3 steps for 3 players, etc). There are some other places in the game that note the number of players, but they are usually clearly notated.

I think it was very important to play this game solo before teaching it to my friends!! For a roll-and-write game, there are a surprising number of rules! I have played a number of solo games and I still feel like I miss a rule here and there.

The Scenario sheet does a pretty good job of having the rules on the sheet, but after multiple plays, I realized I still needed to lookup the rules in the Scenario-specific book. There’s just a little too much to notate on the monster sheet, even with the tiny fonts it uses!

It took a while to read through all the rules and get a sense of the game. But, I will say that, once I got into the flow, the game moved rather quickly! Roll some dice, choose some dice for you and the monster, assign your dice, mark off stuff, handle the monster, lather-rinse-repeat! The game moved at a pretty good clip once I got it.

I was able to win my first game as Ms. Jones, but I think I cheated! Like I said, there are a lot of rules. You should probably play solo a few times to get a sense of the game before moving on to teach your friends!

It felt like the solo game took up more space than it should: I had to have the rulebook on the chair next to me, the scenario book on the table, and then part of a table for the large player and monster sheet! Whew! It takes up more space than I expected! See above.

After all is said and done, I liked the solo game. It wasn’t great, but I had fun.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play worked well. Each player takes a character and assumes the role of that character! In this case, Sara had to play Mandy Belle because of the red hair!

A few more dice are rolled to create the dice pool in cooperative game: each player needs to get a die (a d6), and the monster still gets a d12 and a d6. So, part of the cooperation at the start of the round is figuring out which player should get which dice!! “I need an even to complete the clue! “ “Okay, I’ll take the 1! I need an odd!” But, just as important, we have to work together to make sure the monster gets a bad die from the leftovers! I really like this system, where we choose not only what we get but also what the monster gets! I may choose the 6 this turn so the monster can’t summon a ton of cultists! (The d6 for the monster is the “power” of the action, so 6 is usually very good from the monster’s perspective)

There are also mechanisms in the game where your action can help a compatriot! One of the actions on your board is to heal a compatriot! This was very important in one game as Teresa healed me so I wouldn’t die!! If a character dies, everyone else continues, but the ritual still advances as if everyone were still playing! So, it’s best not to die.

So, there are some mechanisms for cooperation, but not a ton. Generally, each player does the best they can on their sheet, and every so often, especially in the endgame, players can ask for help! There are just enough mechanisms (heal a compatriot, ressurect, give a compatriot a clue) to make this feel like a cooperative game and not just multiplayer solo, especially in the endgame.

I think this game is better as a cooperative game than a solo game: there’s just enough cooperation that I enjoyed playing this while hanging with my friends. I still get to make my own choices on my own board, but I collaborate with my friends at the start and occasionally ask for help!

To be clear, it’s very very very hard to have an Alpha Player in this game: everyone is very focused on their own board!! Maybe this is the strongest argument that this a good cooperative game!

What I Liked

For a roll-and-write, this was surprisingly thematic! The weird art in the game, and the references to cultists and summoning evoked more theme than I expected! The dice were even creepy/Cthulu dice. There was even a sense of dread as the endgame approached as the Cultist Ritual looked like ot might succeed!

I liked that the rules were “mostly” on the player and monster sheets, only requiring a few lookups during play.

Even though there are a lot of rules, I was able to quickly teach this game to my friends! (You gotta learn the game solo first). Then, the game flowed well without too many questions or rule lookups.

I liked that the game was pretty quick. My solo games went pretty quickly (40 minutes?) and our cooperative games went 80 minutes or so. The box says 60-90 minutes and I would that feels very accurate!

I liked that everyone felt engaged: every one had their own board so they could make their own decisions! But there was still enough cooperation (picking die, using actions to help, etc) to keep discussion flowing!

I also like that ther are multiple scenarios which are different enough to keep the game interesting.

I also want to be clear: I am so glad the cards in this game is laminated! They worked really well when we played! The laminated cards also made it easy to clean and play another game!

What I Didn’t Like

The game might have a few too many rules. I feel like every time I played that I missed a rule somewhere! “We won! Oh, but asterisk next to that win, we forgot the Migo rule!” I’m not sure what to do about that: as I mentioned, it would have been nice if everything could have been notated on the sheets, but I think the game just ran out of space. Maybe bigger sheets? Cards with rules on them instead of a full rulebook? (I can imagine a card with the MiGo Summoning rules: that way it can be next to the board and everyone can see it/pick it up when its relevant?)

The dry-erase pens were okay (I would have preferred finer tips on the pens, but they worked ok), but the erasers on the end kinda sucked. We ended up using kleenex to clean the boards instead.

The art may be divisive. My friends loved it (and thought it thematic), I still don’t love it, but it does go with the game.

I also thought the rulebook could use a few spruce-ups (better font, bigger font, less white space, an Index), but we already covered that.

Conclusion

Roll for Great Old Ones surprised me! It was more thematic than I suspected for a roll-and-write game, and it was fun! The only real problem with the game is that there are just a few too many rules: you absolutely want to learn this game solo before you play it cooperatively. I think our cooperative games went so much better because I had soloed previously, and thus I was able to get the group into the game quickly!

The solo game is pretty good. It’s quick and easy to set-up and it flows quickly once you have the rules down. I had a nice time and will probably play solo again. The solo game is probably a 7.0/10.

The cooperative game was a little better than the solo game: everyone is engaged in their own board, but there’s still enough cooperation to keep discussion flowing! I’d give the cooperative game a 7.5/10.

The best part of this cooperative roll-and-write are that there are are two strong mitigation methods to controlling the dice: which dice you select and when you reroll! I got this because it was a cooperative roll-and-write, but I was worried about it: I need not have worried! This is a good game: solo game is 7.0/10, cooperative game is 7.5/10 (maybe even better).

Would you rather watch or play a murder mystery? I have to admit, I am a sucker for the BBC murder mysteries like Midsomer Murders, Sherlock, Death in Paradise, and so many others! As I watch, I am constantly trying to figure out the twist before the end .. sometimes it’s easy (as the show offers up clues), and sometimes it’s hard (as the show hides things until the very end)! Still, it’s always fun to try to solve the mysteries along with Sherlock, Richard, Humphrey, and your favorite Detective Investigators (DIs)!

We originally reviewed the original Suspects: Claire Harper Takes The Stage back in 2022 (see our review here), and we liked it so much it made the #4 position of our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022! So, we were very excited when “the green box” Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper was available for order! From now on, we’ll just call Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper “the green box” and the original “the orange box”!

Interestingly, “the green box” came out in 2022 (if you believe BGG): I think it was released overseas first in non-English language editions. The English version of Suspects didn’t seem to get released to the USA until very recently: my copy of Suspects “the green box” didn’t arrive until October 2023! So, it’s strictly speaking a 2022 release, but I really don’t think it was available in the USA until 2023! So, that’s why we are reviewing it now. No spoilers are given as we discuss the game, but don’t look too closely at any pictures!

Unboxing

This is pretty much just like the “orange box” in term of contents: a rulebox, some large cards, and three separate decks of cards. See the water bottle for perspective.

The rulebook is barely four pages, but it’s easy to read.

The large cardboard cards are all part of the three different cases that come in the game.

But the core of the game are the the cards for the three cases, each in their own separate deck!

Like the original “orange box” Suspects, when you solve the mysteries, you are done with them forever. It’s kind of like watching a TV show mystery: you can watch the mystery again, but you already know the solution so it maybe less fun. Luckily, you can fully reset the three mysteries and give them to someone else! I originally gave my “orange box” of Suspects to Charlie and Allison after I played all the way through.

The game looks really great! I love the art that comes with the game!

The game has a very high production and looks great.

Gameplay

The mystery is all in the cards  See above!  

As you play, more and more cards come out which give a clearer and clearer picture of the mystery! The tension here is that your score is based on how many cards you look out, so the fewer cards that are revealed, the better your score! Honestly, in all my three games, we generally ignored the score and concentrated on solving the mystery .. because that’s the fun part!

Solo Play: Shakespeare’s Tears (Mystery 1)

So, this game plays great as a solo game: Thank you following Saunders’ Law and having a viable solo mode! The solo mode works without any modifications to the game. It’s just you as the investigative team!

Over the course of an hour and a half, I lived in the world of the S. Elizabeth school and became embroiled in a murder there! I lost track of time as I became immersed in the game play!

I really felt like I had just become directly involved in one of my BBC Murder Mysteries! There was a clear arc, there was exploration, there was thought, there was deduction … there was fun! I had an absolute blast playing the first mystery by myself. It may rank as one of my favorite gaming sessions of the year, as I was so immersed in the mystery!

Fantastic time: 9.5/10 soloing this first mystery!

Cooperative Play: Dead on Arrival (Mystery 2)

Interestingly, Dead on Arrival did not go nearly as well. Was it that it didn’t work for cooperative play? No (as we’ll see below), the real problem was that everyone in the game group was actually quite tired and there is a fair amount of tedious paperwork keeping track of certain movements.

Everyone was still involved as we played, but there was a significant amount of bookkeeping that could be described as tedious.

To help with the tedious bookkeeping, we “borrowed” a clear sheet from the Star Trek: Cryptic Escape Room game: this allowed us to do the bookkeeping without messing up the original sheets in the game (using clear sheet and dry-erase markers).

I ended up getting most of the answer myself, but I couldn’t convince my friends, so they ended spending another 15 minutes trying to double-check the bookkeeping.

In the end, everyone had fun, but the conclusion was “Don’t attempt a Murder Mystery Game when you are really tired!!” I do think the tedious bookkeeping in this Mystery was more than I’ve seen in other mysteries, so that detracted a little from the game. 7.0/10.0

Cooperative Play: The Mystery of the Lady of the Lake (Mystery 3)

Cooperative play in the final mystery went over like gang-busters! As a group of 4, we had so much fun following clues, conjecturing solutions, and playing the game!

The cooperative play really emerged in this mystery: play rotated around the table as we conjectured and explored! We were all engaged the entire time! We honed in on different alibis and why they worked or failed! This was a truly engaging cooperative play!

This experience was a 9.0/10.0. My only complaint was that I think you needed a lot more cards revealed to really get the mystery than previous mysteries: I am not sure you could even hope to get the whole thing and still get a perfect score.

Thoughts

Ignore the scoring system for the most part: just enjoy the mystery. The scoring system gives you a way to keep track of how far you are, but mysteries 2 and 3 both felt like there’s no way you could get a perfect score. Don’t obsess on the score: enjoy the mystery!

One thing to note is that the mystery is constrained by the cards: you can only follow where the cards lead you. Some “purists” might think this makes the Suspects mysteries more “on rails”, as you can only follow where the rails (the cards) lead you. Those of you who want a more “open world” to solve your mystery should consider some of the games on the Top 10 Cooperative Detetctive Games like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective or Mythos Tales. These games have a more open world where you can truly explore, but that does make it easier to get off track. Both the strength and weakness of Suspects is that the mystery is constrained to a 90 – 120 minute adventure.

Conclusion

Why watch a mystery when you can play it? Suspects has the just the right amount of mystery and the right amount of constraint for a 90 minute (solo) or two hour (cooperative) mystery game! If you want an open world mystery, Suspects may not be right for you, but it gives such great mysteries in a constrained format!

We loved Suspects (the green box) both solo and cooperatively: Averaging the scores of 9.5, 7, and 9 gives about an 8.5/10 overall for Suspects (the green box), aka Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper! Fantastic game.

I have really been looking forward to Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze! It promised delivery in Aug 2023, but it arrived at my house sometime the week of October 15th: I think I was literally the last person of the Kickstarter to get it, because I already see it In Stock at places like Miniatures Market and GameNerdz. But I am not bitter. Really. I’m not!

I have been excited to get this because it adds a cooperative and solo mode to Unmatched: a very head-to-head skirmish game for 2 people (and 4 people if you squint, but the base UnMatched is really a 2-Player game).

I have been SO EXCITED for the coming of Unmatched Adventures, that I have been buying Unmatched sets so I can have a wide variety of the characters! If you look closely (above), you’ll see I have all the Marvel sets (I love Superheroes: see our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero Games) and Cobble and Fog with Sherlock Holmes (I love Detectives: see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games). Honestly, I have been prepping for this day all year!!

UnMatched: Me vs Me

So, you have to understand, neither me nor my friends like skirmish and/or head-to-head games. None of my friends play Magic (well, Mark does) or any games of that ilk. Dice Throne is the closest thing to my friends like head-to-head games, but even then we prefer to play with the Dice Throne Adventures module which makes the game cooperative! See our Review of Dice Throne Adventures base game here and Dice Throne Adventures with Marvel characters here!

I’ve had a lot of these UnMatched sets for months, and no one (including me) was really interested in play them. I finally broke down one day and opened up Hell’s Kitchen so I could be ready to play UnMatched Adventures with Daredevil!

My first UnMatched game was a me vs me game of Daredevil vs. Bullseye. I basically alternated between the two characters, switching positions as I played. I kind of “pretended” I didn’t know what the other side would do (our Changing Perspectives Idea), and got through a couple of games to learn the mechanics.

UnMatched is a quick head-to-head game where you move around a board and fight, spoiling each others turns with great moves and great cardplay! It’s a back-and-forth game that’s over quickly: each game seems to be about 20-30 minutes in my experience. Bullseye won the first round, but I think Daredevil is harder to play well. We’ll see this again later …

First Battle

Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze comes with four characters you can play: Tesla, Golden Bat, Dr. Jill Trent, and Christmas Annie. Nope. I chose to play with Daredevil for my first game!

Why? I have literally no emotional attachment to any of the characters in the base box! But Daredevil? Bullseye? Electra? I was collecting comic books when Frank Miller did his run on first run on Daredevil, then his Electra stories, and Daredevil Born Again! Then later when Mark Waid took up the writing, I fell in love with Daredevil again! Just about the the entire reason I got UnMatched Adventures was to play Daredevil in a solo or cooperative adventure! Remember, me and my friends don’t like head-to-head games!

Included with the game are two scenarios: Mothman (see map above) …

.. and Martian Invaders (other side of the map).

Daredevil is a solo hero! It makes sense that he will take on the Mothman by himself!

Solo Play

So, congratulations to UnMatched Adventures for following Saunders’ Law and having a viable solo mode! And it is a true solo mode, where the solo player plays exactly one hero! To keep the play balanced with any number of heroes, UnMatched Adventures changes the scaling for solo mode in two ways.

First: The hit points for the main Villain scales by the number of heroes. In this case, Mothman has 10 x (the number of heroes) = 10 x 1 = 10 hit points to start the game. The more heroes there are, the more hit points the Villain has! See Mothman’s hit point dial above (should be 10).

Second: the number of Minions that help the main Villain are the same as the number of Heroes.  So, see above as the Tarantula minion (just one Minion for a one player game) helps the main villain!  The more Heroes there are, the more Minions there are!

This all fits together as the players have an initiative deck with one of each Hero, Villain, and Minion. This deck will be shuffled every round to determine the player order for that round.

Each scenario has a very different objective and set-up: see above as Daredevil plays in the world of Mothman! He has to keep the bridges from being destroyed! The win condition is generally always the same: take the main Villain to 0 hit points!

My first few solo games went south very quick. I was surprised how quickly the game played and how quickly I lost! I did remember that Daredevil was a little harder to play because of the way his deck works, so I played a few games as Bullseye to gain some confidence that the game can be beaten!

After a few games with Bullseye, I was able finally to beat the Mothman. One thing to note: it was very easy to play multiple games back-to-back because the game moves so quickly! It’s typically over in about 20 minutes! I retackled Mothman with Daredevil and was finally able to beat him!

I liked that this game was hard to beat out-of-the box. I had to play 5 or 6 games before I finally figured out a winning strategy, especially with Daredevil (who’s a little harder to play).

I then launched Daredevil into a solo game with The Martian Invader (see above) and Tarantula and did much better!

In case you were worried, Daredevil did save the world. Twice! I mean, that’s the name of this story: “Daredevil saves the World!“

Cooperative Play

So, I think the time on the side of the box is not quite right: it says 20-60 minutes.  I really feel like the solo game is 20 minutes, so that’s right.  But the cooperative game, since it scales by the number of players, should be 20 minutes per player! That more jibes with what we saw in our cooperative plays: “about 20-30 minutes per player”.   Our 4-Player game (see above) took about 2 hours.

I will say that I think this game is much stronger as a cooperative game than a solo game for a bunch of reasons.  

First of all, all the randomness we saw in the solo game seemed to be “smoothed out” more in the cooperative game!  This makes sense as more cards and more players just makes the game seem less punishing: the “randomness” we saw in the solo game was distributed over multiple good guys and bad guys, so the game felt less punishing.

There was also a lot of cooperation where we had to keep the Alien Fields under control: we talked a lot about “who would take the hit” (someone typically needs to discard a card when the Martians attack), but we also collaborated as to when we take the damage so the next person can clean up!  Such a simple combat system made this easy to talk and think about our strategy!

We also seemed to just have fun playing: see Sara and Teresa smiling as we play!  This is a fun but kinda silly game with Martians invading.  The game is simple enough that we don’t get stuck in the rules, but each player has enough “unique mechanisms” that each player feels “unique” and “involved” as we play.

In one cooperative game, in the final turns in the Martian Invader game just had us barely defeating the Martian Invader!  Daredevil got to play his “smart bomb” and do 8 damage on the penultimate turn to bring the win within reach!  It was a fantastic moment! The Electra crushed the final Martian with the Hand and we won!

I think this game is much stronger as a cooperative game than a solo game: It really does keep everyone involved and feeling unique, but with simple enough rules to keep the game flowing.

Zero Emotional Attachment

This gorgeous game comes with 4 Heroes I don’t think I’ll ever play. I have literally zero emotional attachment to any of them: Tesla was kind of a jerk, and I’ve never heard of the Golden Bat, Jill Trent, or Annie Christmas. Are they made up? As of right now, all of the base hero cards of UnMatched Adventures are still in shrink wrap. I am looking forward to trying out Cloak and Dagger, Ghost Rider, Spiderman, Dr. Strange, She-Hulk, Sherlock Holmes … ! I’d literally rather play a hero from any other UnMatched set than what’s included in UnMatched Adventures. The new heroes may be fantastic, but I just don’t have any emotional attachment to them the way I do every other character in UnMatched! ( I do admit, I might try Golden Bat, but only because he’s a Superhero).

I feel bad saying this, but I wish UnMatched Adventures came with 4 solo/cooperative Scenarios and no new heroes rather than 2 solo/cooperative Scenarios and 4 new heroes. I’d rather have spent my money on new Scenarios! Hopefully, this set does well so we will get some more Scenarios on the future.

Even in the cooperative game, when I gave everyone a chance to play “whomever they want”, we ended up playing Ghost Rider, Black Widow, Electra, and Daredevil.  Given a choice, I am not convinced people will ever want to play the heroes that come in the base box.

Having said that, I have heard that other people really do like the new Heroes. Caveat Emptor.

Setting Solo Expectations

So, I was very disappointed in my first few solo games of UnMatched Adventures! They were over quickly and felt very random. I was depressed how random they were!

And then I realized: this is how the head-to-head game feels! Players parry and feint and bluff and sometimes play devastating cards that destroy the opponent! If one player draws the right card at the right time, especially in the endgame, you can get completely devastated! It doesn’t feel random where you are playing head-to-head because it looks intentional: the other player plays cards on purpose. But the game looks random in head-to-head mode if you can’t see the other player! Cards come out “at random” and mess with you! So, that experience has been captured in the solo mode very well!

I think I was a victim of my own expectations: I wanted a complex framework to play Daredevil through many of the Adventures in UnMatched Adventures! That’s not what this is! The solo mode still feels like UnMatched: it’s a quick game with quick turns, quick play, and sometimes devastating and seemingly random card play! And that’s what I saw over about many games in this universe : a quick game with seeming randomness. But it was fun once I set my expectations!

We should actually be happy that the solo and cooperative game of UnMatched Adventures retain the quick feel of UnMatched! Recall that King of Monster Island (a cooperative game in the King of Tokyo Universe) was surprisingly more complicated than its competitive brethren King of Tokyo! See our Review here for more discussion! King of Monster Island was complicated enough that I had trouble recommending it to people would just wanted “a cooperative King of Tokyo“, because it was so much more!

In our case, I can recommend UnMatched Adventures to people who just want “solo or cooperative UnMatched“. UnMatched Adventures is just a little more complicated, but it still retains the feel of the base game.

If I want a quick 20 minute solo game with one of my favorite Marvel heroes fighting Mothman or Martian Invaders, UnMatched Adventures offers a quick solo or cooperative romp!

I do want to say that I did NOT have to lower my expectations for the cooperative game: UnMatched Adventures really knocked it out of the park (for cooperative play): it was quick, fun, engaging, simple, but still strategic.

Randomness

There is a lot of randomness in this game: let’s be clear. You have no idea what cards the Villain/Minions will draw, you have no idea what order the characters will get to play (it’s a random shuffle every round), you have no idea what special tokens will be drawn, and you have no idea if your attack or defense will be cancelled! Like we said above, this is just par for the course for this UnMatched, and that’s okay.

I would normally rage against this much randomness: recall how the randomness of the Trace rolls really downwardly influenced our rating of Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend. (See our review here). The difference here is that UnMatched (and to a lesser extend, UnMatched Adventures) is a simple and quick game. If you get screwed by too much Randomness, oh well! It’s over quickly and you can play again! Tamashii was a 2-3 hour game where that extra spicy randomness could ruin a long and carefully planned game!

I will also point out that the randomness I saw in the solo game was significantly less pronounced in the cooperative game: there was just fewer opportunities to be overwhelmed by a random draw because there so many cards (bad guy cards and initiative cards).

Random Initiative Order

Just hear me out: I still hate the Random Initiative Order we see here (the Initiative Deck is reshuffled every round to re-order play), especially in the solo game. We’ve seen this same initiative mechanism in Aeon’s End and Adventure Tactics: see our discussion here in Seven House Rules for Cooperative Games. The problem is simply that the player(s) can get completely shut-out if the bad guys take all their turns at the end of a round and then start the beginning of the next round. For example, in a solo game, the solo player could have to wait 4 turns without being able to do anything … and meanwhile getting pummeled! ! It’s no fun, it feels unfair, and it can completely decimate the solo player.

One simple suggestion is to just keep the Initiative Order static so that they always come out in the same order. Another suggestion is to make it so the bad guys can never have more than 2 turns in a row: if the third turn would have the bad guys play, simply reshuffle until a player card is drawn.

Having said that, the cooperative play did not seem to have this same problem: the pathologically bad Initiative draws are much less likely to happen the more cards you have! So, as we played cooperatively, it just seemed like we never saw ourselves get completely screwed! Even if one character got beat up, there were still enough characters around to keep the game going.

Said another way, I think the solo game needs a mechanism to keep the Initiative cards from having pathologically bad draws, but I think the cooperative game has enough cards to mitigate this effect without needing anything special.

Conclusion

UnMatched Adventures is a gorgeous production with amazing minis, amazing components, good rulebooks, and a really good insert that holds everything. The production is outstanding and it is a sight to behold: see above.

Would I recommend buying UnMatched Adventures by itself if you just want the solo/cooperative game? I don’t know? For the solo game, probably not, at least without a few fixes (see our discussions above about the Initiative deck). The solo game is pretty good, but you need to set your expectations a little. On the other hand, the cooperative game was fantastic out-of-the-box and we had so much fun playing! I would strongly recommend the game for the cooperative experience!

Unfortunately, neither me nor my friends had any emotional attachment to any characters that come in the box, so I would recommend picking up an UnMatched set where you like the characters (Cobble and Fog, Hell’s Kitchen, etc) if you want to play in this universe. I really wish UnMatched Adventures had contained 4 solo/cooperative Scenarios (instead of just the 2 Scenarios and the 4 new Heroes), but I suppose it would be too hard to sell just an expansion without any Heroes (although, technically Dice Throne Adventures did and it worked just fine).

Just make sure you set your expectation to what this is: the solo game game is a quick and furious game of UnMatched, but the cooperative game really shines! This game can still be pretty random, but that’s okay for a fun-filled romp of 20-60 minutes (well, realistically 20-30 minutes per player)! Once I set my expectations, I enjoyed it much more. UnMatched Adventures: Tales To Amaze takes UnMatched and makes it solo/cooperative without giving up the spirit and feel of the game.

This wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was still fun. Objectively, this is probably a 9/10 for the cooperative game, but I may just call it a 7/10 for the solo game. But I still had fun!

Earthborne Rangers is a cooperative exploration game for 1-4 players: it uses a deck-advancement as a main mechanism (see more discussion below). I was super excited to get my copy, as Earthborne Rangers made the #7 position of my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022! This game was on Kickstarter back in August 2021 and promised delivery in July 2022. It delivered to my house in late October 2023, so that makes it a year and a few months late. Interestingly, this game has a different reason for being late than most Kickstarters …

To quote the Kickstarter page:

Earthborne Rangers: A sustainably produced customizable, cooperative card game set in the wilderness of the far future for 1 – 4 players.

You’ll notice the game has no plastic! It’s all paper! One of the loftier goals of the Kickstarter was to try to make a game locally, using sustainable components (i.e., all paper, no plastic). The Kickstarter was very good at keeping the backers up-to-date, but they struggled to find manufacturing that was both local and purely sustainable. A few compromises were made (see the Kickstarter updates), so that contributed to the lateness of delivery. This is one of the few “really late” games I think I can forgive because they encountered “unique” manufacturing problems.

As you can see by the back of the box, the game looks gorgeous! It looks like they did a pretty good job!

Before We Begin

Before we begin, we just want to say: we like this game.  We are saying that because there is a rocky road ahead!  We will have to get grumpy at a few things in the game! We will have to give warnings and helpful tips to keep you on-track, and they might even sound bad.  We are trying to help you navigate around the game so you can get the best experience!  There are just enough things that could derail you from wanting to play, but with a little forewarning, you can avoid the pitfalls.  So, be on the lookout for our warnings and helpful hints!  Remember, we like this game!

Basic Unboxing and a Warning!

The Kickstarter version comes with an extra box (more cards to make the deck-building have more choices) and a VERY IMPORTANT envelope!

The envelope contains some components that (ahem) either were missing or were printed wrong. Make sure you get this envelope if you get the game new! (I suspect this will be fixed if they do a second printing).

Basically, the cardholder from the base box (all cardboard, no plastic) is missing several sheets and the punchouts from the base box are misprinted. Really, the punchout misprint is just that they don’t have 3s on the other side: you could probably work with the base, but you might run out of counters. (You can also just punch it out to have more tokens).

A bigger problem is that you really need the cardholder: this game is all about the cards!

Base box components on the left, envelope contents on the right.

Honestly, building the little card holder was kind of fun.

But let’s look inside the main box now!!

The main box contains mostly cards (540 according to the back of the box), a Campaign Box, a Rulebook, tokens, and a Valley Map.

The Valley Guide (above) is a campaign/scenario book. There is a little bit of a “storybook” vibe going on here as the scenario book has text to read and decisions to make. See below for a snapshot of a page within the “Lure of the Valley” book.

In case you were worried there might not be enough content, the scenario book is 56 pages long! And the font is tiny, so there’s quite of bit of text.

The rulebook is a big of a monster at 48 pages. We’ll discuss both of these books more below.

The map shows the valley you are exploring! You will need this to figure out what terrains you will be traversing, what places are important, and where do you want to go! This map is quite important to the ongoing game.

But of course, the showpiece of this game are the cards. They are gorgeous! I love the art!

Overall, this game looks like it was worth the wait! Just make sure you get the envelope if you get the game new!

Uncarding and a STRONG Warning!

One of first things I do when I get a game is to find the Components page (see below: page 6) and try to correlate all of the components to their picture. In this case, it was mostly cards.

Many games aren’t labelled well (like this one *cough*), so you have kind of “immerse” yourself in the components to get a sense of the game/components/labelling. The picture that comes on page 6 seems great! … but seems is the important word!!! GIANT WARNING COMING!

I initially tried to match the cards exactly to the picture on the components page: Warning!! BE VERY CAREFUL! The Components page really doesn’t note that cards are grouped by “sets”, and as you go through trying to correlate the components picture to the cards, you may lose track of cards and what sets they belong to!

For example, notice the Traveller cards above have both Gear and Moments cards in them (see above), but if you tried to sort the cards by Moment cards and Gear cards (as implied by the Components page), you’d really mess up your decks! Keep the sets together! In this case, keep all the Traveller cards together.

Similarly, the role cards seem belong together according to the Components page. . Nope! Each role should stay in in respective Specialty deck (Explorer, Shaper, etc).

Don’t let the Components page fool you. Try to keep the decks sorted by the set (labelled on the left side of the card). I was very grumpy when I realized that although the Components page is “technically” correct in how it counts cards, but it’s NOT how you will store or play with cards.

The Card Dividers are probably a better way to help you uncard your game. Try to use those (as they are labelled in the appropriate sets), and just use Components page as a guide to what the “kinds” of cards are contained within the game. I’ve never had an uncarding make me so grumpy.

Rulebook and a Helpful Tip!

This is a good rulebook generally. I think it could have done better in a few places, but generally it was good.

The game gets an A- on The Chair Test, it flops over the edges a little, so it almost got a B+, but the font is huge! The sections are well-labelled and colorful ! I could easily see the rules next to me as I was playing, and it was easy to page through: solid A-.

I don’t normally talk too much about the Introduction, but it was pretty heartfelt. It gave me a strong sense of “Hey, these folk really like exploration” and gave me a sense of confidence that maybe they would get exploration right in the game!

This game has both a good Table of Contents (sections in order they appear) and an Index (keywords sorted in alphabetical order with a reference to a page number). Thank you! The Index saved me from searching the rulebook a number of times. See picture below.

The font is big, the sections are well-laid out, and there seem to be a lot of pictures.

There’s even a few good, BIG examples that helped me get through a couple of rules.

My biggest complaint is that Card Anatomy cards didn’t come until halfway through the rules! (Right where the staple is! When you read a lot of rulebooks, you tend to notice stupid things like where the staple is). I wish this picture had been further up, maybe right after or before the Components! This page, once I found it, helped me understand a lot more of the game! Helpful Tip! Find the Card Anatomy pages (24 and 25) to help you understand the rules!

The rulebook does a lot of stuff right, but it looks more dauntingly long (48 pages). At page 33, however, the rules end the “detailed card explanations happen” … so the rules aren’t THAT long. Well, I guess 33 pages of rules is still pretty long.

And the rules end with a nice reference on the back.

Seriously, this is a good rulebook: I would call it great except for the problems with the Components page (see previous section on Uncarding) and having the Card Anatomy later in the rulebook. But, the big font, the great layout, the clean pictures, the well-chosen colors, the decent examples, the good Table of Contents, and great Index make this is a good rulebook.

It is a big long. It might take a you a while to read it. And you need to read the rules. Really.

The Prologue: A Missed Opportunity and a Helpful Tip

Earthborne Rangers includes a Prologue for first play at the start of the Scenario Book. See above.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of problems with it. First, the prologue still requires you to read the entire rulebook … wait, what? I loved how Tamashii (see our review from a few weeks ago) stepped your through the rules as you played: you didn’t have to read the rules all at once … the Prologue sort of “guided” you through the rules. Nope, not Earthborne Ranger. You still have to read all the rules before you play the Prologue!

Secondly, the font for the Scenario book (where the Prologue resides) was way too too small! It was so hard to read and follow the directions of Prologue! And this was after the rulebook was so readable with a big font! I really struggled reading this tiny font! I don’t mind this tiny font for the Scenario book “story parts”: you read the story parts once out loud to people. But a tiny font is terrible for rules: you have to set down the rulebook pick it up, lose your place, reference the rules again. That tiny font made me very grumpy: please don’t use tiny fonts for rules!

Third, the gameplay in the Prologue was poorly described and documented. Many times, it was unclear where you were within a turn (“Wait, did I Refresh? Was I supposed to Travel?”). Because this was a an “abbreviated” version of the game, some rules weren’t there yet, other were, and the turn placement was underspecified. The main problem was that the Prologue was that there were too many “exceptions” from the basic flow of the game: “Wait, is that a rule because I am playing the Prologue and not the main game? What does the main game do?”

After two tries, I got through the Prologue, but I think newcomers should should go ahead and play through the main game normally. This is a huge missed opportunity and a potential turn-off: I think a lot of newer gamers will be completely put-off by this Prologue and not want to play again. The Prologue should have been a way to introduce people to the game! Spoiler: this is a good game! The Prologue just didn’t work. It’s unfortunate, because a Prologue should make me want to play the game! Consider Tainted Grail’s amazing introduction (see here), or Valor and Villainy: LLiudwick’s Labyrinth phenomenal introduction (see here), or even Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend’s introduction (see here) as examples of good prologues! Earthborne Rangers’ Prologue turned me off: Too many exceptions to the rules, poorly documented gameplay status, tiny font, and still required full reading of the rules.

Helpful Tip: Just read the rules and play a normal game. You’ll struggle a little, but it’s better to struggle with the real rules and real gameplay than to struggle with a Prologue and its abbreviated/incomplete rules.

Gameplay

This is generally an exploration game. You have to explore this world and “do things” in this world. But what you have to do varies from game to game! Sometimes, you’ll be trying to find stuff, sometimes you’ll want to travel, and sometimes you’ll befriend creatures, sometimes other stuff! That’s what so interesting about this game: you are exploring this world, but that means many things! Discovering new Locations! New Gear! New items! New creatures! It’s all about exploration. Earthborne Rangers has a little bit of an “open world” video game feel to it.

Now, I’ve called this game a deck-building game, but it’s really more of a deck-advancement game. We first used that term (deck-advancement) back in our review of Adventure Tactics (see here).   Basically, this means your deck is fairly static in the game: new cards only come into your deck at the end of a complete game session (“a day”), and only then available for the next distinct play session.

See above as the Quiet card comes into my hand as a reward.  I guess strictly speaking this “could” be a deck-building game because you may choose to swap some newer reward cards during the Camping phase … so, you can “deck-build”, but it’s so much slower! In a normal deck-builder game, you generally get one new card every turn. Here in Earthborne Rangers, you might some new cards every tenth turn (when you get a reward). So, it’s probably better to call this a deck-advancement game with a trickle of deck-building.

Another interesting feature is that the deck is your stamina: kind of like Gloomhaven!  As you play cards or suffer ill effects, you place cards either in discard stack (where they can’t generally come back: see left of role card) or fatigue deck (where you can soothe to bring them back, see above discard).  If you are ever instructed to remove fatigue and you can’t (because your deck is empty), then the day must end.  The deck is your stamina!

You get rewards in the game as you encounter when you succeed at missions you take in.  One of my missions in an early game was to deliver biscuits!

Most obstacles in the game (befriend, fight, climb, run, anything) are overcome by doing a test.  For the Harvest test (above), I have to spend at least 1 AWAreness, and (REASON: the triangle) and get at least two successes to succeed.  The AWAreness can come usually only come from your Aspect card.  The REASON can come from discarding any cards.

You can see the two green AWAness energy tokens on my Aspect card (above).  In my hand next to it, I have several cards, with a few (blue cards) having the REASON triangle (in the upper left corner). 

Once I choose what to commit (cards and tokens), I draw a Challenge Card (above, left).  The +1, 0, 0, -1 modify the result depending on whether on the type of test.  My AWA test would get +1, but a FOCus based test would get -1!  So, if you can equal or beat the challenge level (usually 1, but sometimes harder), you succeed!  Every point over may allow you “more success”, which may equate to more tokens/successes/traverses/harms on a card.

I like this mechanism because it’s not too random: you can still take a chance and hope to get lucky, but you always have a pretty good sense of whether or not your test will succeed or fail.  Do you want to push your luck and use fewer tokens/cards? Or do you want to go for it? Since your cards are your stamina, it is useful to preserve them …

So, you go around the board, exploring, moving around the map, doing challenges, and occasionally reading from the Story book.  

It’s an open-world video game! In card form!

Paper or Plastic?

So, the game’s production really embraces the no plastic/only paper vibe! The cards come wrapped not in plastic, but paper!

There’s no plastic on the outside of the box, only stickers (see above) to hold it together! My only problem with the stickers is that they cover “important” text (see above) … the expansion box has the same problem …(see below).

But, the game definitely stays in that vibe: there’s no plastic anywhere to be seen in the game.

But that brings up two important questions: “Do I sleeve my cards” and “How do I store my tokens?“

Let’s tackle the second question first. How do I store my tokens? I have two plastic baggies left over from a previous different game, so I used those. But, if you don’t have any plastic baggies, the tokens will flop around in the box: you really need some way to store them. I would have preferred if Earthborne Rangers had given me paper baggies for my tokens. I feel kind of guilty using plastic baggies in my game!

On the subject of guilt: It’s a deck-building game, so you have to sleeve it, right? In deck-building games (or deck-advancement games), you constantly cycle through your cards, you constantly touch your cards, and you generally handle the cards a lot. But, somehow it feels wrong to sleeve this game? There were certainly no options for plastic sleeves from the Kickstarter. But, it’s a deck-building game, so you sleeve it, right? But, it’s a game that strives for sustainability, so you can’t sleeve it, right? What do I do?

At the moment, I haven’t sleeved it. I could say that’s it because I am so enlightened, but I think it might just be just because I’m lazy: there’s 540 cards here.

What I Wished Were Different

The Location cards are not sorted Alphabetically if you use the natural order of the cards (by the card number within he Locations: see above). I suppose I could just sort my deck alphabetically. It just makes it easier to find a Location card when you are looking.

These Location cards are beautiful! See above! I adore the art: I wish they were fully double-sized or even larger cards so I could enjoy the art that much more. It feels like the art is a little under appreciated at the smaller size.

I wish the cards were better labelled. The back of the cards are not labelled so I don’t know what’s what. The Components section of the rulebook (grrr) would have been done better to show the front and the backs of the cards. Those orange backed cards? Those are Path Cards: you can see me trying to figure that out when I was sorting my cards! The rulebook refers to them as Path Cards, but the cards themselves do NOT label themselves with that! There are quite a number of examples of “unlabelled cards” in the game. After some time, you get familiar with the cards, and then you maybe don’t need the labels. But I prefer labels: if I come back to this game in 3 months, I want to be able to just jump back in!

What I Like

The art and layout and readability are just great! Let me emphasize: I love the art!

I think it does a good job making the game feel like we are exploring.

I like how you can customize your character deck by choosing Background, Specialty, and Personalities: every character deck is VERY different! Your deck is what you want it to be! That level of customization really draws you into the game: “I made this! This is my character!” It really helps immerse you in the game by giving you that sense of ownership.

I like the story that comes out as you play. The story doesn’t come out every turn, but every so often, a little bit of story comes out and enhances the gameplay that much more. I actually kind of like that the story only occasionally comes out … sometimes, I get tired of reading the entire games (sometimes I like that: Agents of SMERSH was a great Storybook game with lots of reading, but you know what you are getting into).

What I Don’t Like

The Components page. Grr.

The Prologue. Grr.

The amount of rules. There’s a lot of rules. I think they are all necessary, but there are a lot of rules. The 48 page rulebook belies the number of rules.

Solo Play

So, thank you to Earthborne Rangers for following Saunders’ Law and having a viable solo mode! The solo mode is a true solo mode: you play exactly one character (you do not have to play multiple characters). You play one Ranger and explore the world!

The balance is kept in the game by scaling most of the tests to be based on the number of Rangers (in the solo game, there’s just one Ranger: you!): This is denoted by an “R” next to the challenge. For example, to traverse away from the Ancestor’s Grove Location (see above), you need 4 traverse tokens PER Ranger to move away: Notice the 4R on the lower right of the card.

The solo game still takes up a lot of space. You’ll notice my solo game uses the right half of the table for the main play space …

.. and I have to use the left side of the table for the Storybook, tokens, and rest of the cards. It’s even worse, because I have to have the rulebook on the chair next to me … and finally the campaign sheet (more discussion below) to my right! Whew! This game takes up a lot of space!

As implied by everything on the table, there is a fair bit of maintenance per turn to get keep the game going. The biggest maintenance hits seem to be when you travel: you have to prepare a new Path Deck, sorting old cards, then shuffling and combining decks to make the new deck! Whew! There was quite a bit of maintenance, and it can be a tad overwhelming. After a 2.5 hour game, I was wiped! Luckily, you can either (a) leave the game set-up and continue later or (b) choose to end the day (choose to camp) and end the game session, putting it back in the box.

Putting the game away with your chosen cards isn’t too bad: the dividers that come with the game help keep the cards sorted pretty well.

I do like the solo game and I want to play it again. I feel a little like I am playing a solo video game, exploring a world and having adventures! The only downside is how much maintenance you do as you play. Some of this overhead goes away as you become so familiar with the game, but there’s sort of an incompressible amount of maintenance per game and it’s substantial. Just be aware that there will b a lot of maintenance to keep the game going for a solo player.

Cooperative Play

Even after investing 10 hours into the game and playing the game solo multiple times, I still found I was learning rules when I was teaching my friends!  There is a lot to unpack in the game!

My first thought was that maaayyyyybeeee we could do simultaneous play when we played cooperatively to move the game forward quicker (like we did with Tamashii: see a few weeks ago).  The game has a lot of turns that could be overlapping.  Nope!  Basically, I had to be the rules shepherd to make sure I was available to answer questions, so it was not really possible to play simultaneously, at least in our first cooperative play.  In general, we tended to play our turns solo without too much interaction, so it seemed like simultaneous play might be a useful thing here.  I think it will be in future games, once we ALL have internalized the game.

There was a mechanism to try to help foster cooperation: the Ranger tokens: see the rules above. Unfortunately, that’s the only elaboration of the rules!  And, also unfortunately, the rules seemed poorly specified: how often could you move The Ranger Token?  Just once per turn?  Does it have stay on the card you put it until the card goes away?  We chose to allow only one move per round.  It helped foster cooperation a little more, but not hugely.

We played almost three hours in our first cooperative game, and we barely scratched the surface of the game.  We ended up ending the Day early: not because we ran out of cards, but because everyone had to leave!!  The real problem is that the game seems to really drag as you wait for your turn to come around: there is a lot of thinking each player needs to do (and looking up rules), so each player’s turn took some time.  I think, as players internalize the game more, that you can do some simultaneous play to move the game forward. But, even after three hours of living in this world, my players still wanted to take turns in sequence because they still had questions for me.

The general cooperative consensus was that people liked the game, but felt it had too many rules.  Everyone was willing to play again: they liked a lot of the ideas, but it felt a little grindy.

I do want to mention that the game has an interesting way to help each other (to cooperate): you can actually do actions on other Ranger’s area!  So, if a player is really stuck on a card, other players can help!  So, if you have any cards in front of you, you have to bypass them to help you fellow Ranger … and each card will cause Fatigue.  I wanted to point this out, because I thought this was a unique way to allow cooperation!  There is a penalty if you are “dealing with your own stuff” (active cards in front of you), but you can still make the choice to help your fellow Rangers if they are really floundering!  This mechanism feels unique.

Campaign

This game is a campaign game.  As a deck-advancement game, you are always upgrading your hand at the end of each “day” (game session), and putting your newly augmented deck back in the box for your next game!

Unlike most campaign games, the goals in Earthborne Rangers aren’t dramatic or overwhelming: it seems like most missions I have encountered so far feel more like “Side Quests”.  Remember, this is an exploration game!  So, taking on a bunch of missions is okay … you just may defer them to later sessions …

In the end, I think the campaign will be “fairly easy” to come back to.  It’s pretty easy to put away your cards and come back another day.  The only hard part would be remembering the story and what you have seen … I think I wish there were more mechanisms for “noting” what cards and entries in the storybook you have seen so you can “remind” yourself what you’ve seen.   Oh wait! That’s what the campaign sheet is for!!

Writing

A quick note about the writing and the campaign.  I like the writing!  The writing seems to bring out the personalities of different people you encounter, and there are some points of humour as you play.  The world you inhabit in Earthborne Rangers feels … fleshed out.  I think this is a different kind of game, and that’s good!  It’s not a “dungeon dweller”, it’s not a “beat up all the bad guys”, it’s more of a “hey, let’s explore this world!” And part of that exploration is the people you meet along the way: these people have personality that comes through.

Conclusion

It was a bit of a rough road to get though the first few games of Earthborne Rangers: there were some stumbling blocks along the way, but hopefully we’ve pointed them out so you can deal with them appropriately in your own journey …if you wish to pursue Earthborne Rangers.

After struggling to get through a number of solo games, I do like the game!  The overhead to set-up, the maintenance while playing, and the work to tear-down is significant enough that it will dampen your enthusiasm for the solo game.  Having said that, I do like the solo game quite a bit: I like the sense of exploration and wonder of the game (highly augmented by the amazing art)! I’d give the solo game an 8 or 8.5/10.0 I think.  I think I was able to get a point where I had internalized most of the rules, so I could move forward and enjoy the world despite the huge number of rules.

The cooperative game reduces a lot of the set-up/maintenance/tear-down issues by sharing the load, and the game seems to scale well. Unfortunately, the game seems to bog down more in the cooperative mode, as you seem to be always waiting for your compatriots.   I’d give it a solid 7/10.0 for a cooperative game.  If your players can internalize the game to embrace some simultaneous play more, I think the game will open up a little more to maybe a 7.5/10 or even higher!! Unfortunately,  even after 3 hours of playing cooperatively with a rules shepherd, the game still felt a little grindy because of all the rules questions and waiting for other players.

 

Build your character, explore the world: Earthborne Rangers reminds me very much of an open-world video game with tons of exploration! This is a really fun game: Just be aware there is steep learning curve which may or may not scare you away.

Recently, I got stuck for a three-hour layover at the airport. I had brought a few games for just such and emergency! One of them was Deckscape In Wonderland!

Table Space

If you can find a decent sized table (at a cafe or in the club or just around), the Deckscape games will work fine. I had brought Deckscape in Wonderland!

I had a plant on my table that I had to put the side as I played … but I put it back when I was done.

Although I could have brought any number of Deckscape games, Deckscape in Wonderland was the one I brought that day.

As you are playing, you will end up taking over some of the table: see above.

What is Deckscape?

If you’ve never played the Deckscape games before, it’s just an (oversized) deck of cards with a little adventure of puzles contained therein. The game is one-and-done: once you’ve played the game, you’ve seen all the puzzles and exploration … and will probably just want to pass this of to a friend.

The game works by reading the top of the card, and it tells you what to do: see above. Usually, this involves solving a puzzle before you flip the card over to the other size. Once you think you have solved the presented puzzle, you flip the card and see if you are right! Either way, (if you are right or wrong), you still continue on the next card. If you are wrong, however, you get an X—these Xs accumulate and are detrimental to your final score.

There’s a neat little mirror in this game you have to use to solve puzzles!

Game Arc

The game lasts about an hour as you try to get to the end of the deck. Along the way, you will solve puzzles. The game recommends a pencil and paper to help with some of the puzzles, but I didn’t need any for my play.

When you get to the very end (the last card is 64: note the upper left corner), you’re done! Your score is then based on how many Xs you got. Honestly, I didn’t care for the score too much. But it’s nice to do better than worse.

Airport Game

In some ways, this is the worst Deckscape game to play at the airport, and some ways the best. What do I mean by that?

Of all the Deckscape games, Deckscape in Wonderland is probably the most “meta” and “outside the box” of all the Deckscape games … which makes sense when you consider the source material: Lewis Carrol is known to have many hidden puzzles and metajokes in his Alice books. Thus, when you are tired and grumpy because you are stuck in the airport for three hours, sometimes your brain doesn’t work as well. Maybe this game is best to be played when you are at full capacity?

On the other hand, the game is so inviting and colorful and fresh, it’s invigorating to play! The colors, the puzzles, the simple mechanisms are a perfect lift-me-up when you are stuck at the airport and grumpy. I found that when playing Deckscape in Wonderland, that the hour just zoomed by! I had so much fun playing!

Conclusion

I really liked the Deckscape in Wonderland game. It’s not my favorite Deckscape game, but it’s close (my favorite is probably Behind the Curtain): it may be #2? I wish I had more of a brain when I played it, because this one is slightly more challenging than previous Deckscapes.

But the thing is: I had a blast playing it, even when I was tired. The fun vibe, the colors, the interesting puzzles, the simplicity of the game was invigorating! After playing through for an hour, I was very glad I had brought this with me to the airport.

For first-timers, I probably recommend taking a different Deckscape game to the airport (maybe Time Test), but if you have played any of these, try Deckscape in Wonderland. What a wonderful way to pass an hour at the airport! The form factor was perfect: small deck of cards, easy to play, small playing surface, and easy to clean-up.

Maybe I should have brought three Deckscape game to take up the three hours at the airport?

P.S. I didn’t get any funny looks when playing this at the airport. At least, I didn’t notice if I did because I was having so much fun!