Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is a cooperative game for 1-4 Players, Ages 10+, set in the world of Lord of the Rings.

I ordered this online (from Target) in late January and it just got to my house yesterday (Feb 27th, 2023): I believe it was just released. This came from Target, and I believe this is a Target exclusive.

We’ve had some amazing luck with cooperative games from Target over the past year: Minecraft: Portal Dash, Horizons of Spirit Island, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars Pandemic! Let’s take a look and see if this game lives up to the Target hype!

Unboxing

Note: No shrink wrap on the game: the edges are all plastic sticker shut. It looks weird, but that’s the way other games from Target (Disney Sidekicks, The Princess Bride, others) have been! I suspect there’s no shrink wrap to save money.

It’s smaller than the standard Ticket TO Ride size box (see above with Coke Can for scale), but it’s the same size as the The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game we reviewed some time ago.

The rulebook on top is decent:

The Adventure Book is very cool and has thick cardboard:

And there’s not a lot in here: some cards, some minis and some tokens.

Weirdly, we don’t have to punch out any tokens: they all come prepunched! So, it’s cheaper to unpunch tokens than put shrink wrap on a box? This seems a weird tradeoff to me, but what the hey: it’s easier to unbox when everything’s unpunched already!

The game is pretty decent, although I wish the cards were linen-finished: After playing all the way the game twice, I think the cards really should be sleeved! So, my main component issue is that the cards either need to be sleeved or be better quality.

Rulebook

The rulebook is good: it’s concise.

It’s only 8 pages! It starts off with a component overview and set-up:

The font is nice, the rulebook is easy to read, and it passes the Chair Test with a A.

There’s even a FAQ per chapter that crosses to the last page. This rulebook was easy to read and easy to consult when we had questions. It was good.

Components and Unboxing

The main component of the game is the Adventure Book.  The game is a light legacy game, where players progress across 8 “chapters” in the book to try to throw the ring into Mount Doom.

The book unfolds into a 2-page spread for each chapter: see above.

Each Chapter will have a very specific set-up: See above!  Note that this is where we decide what figures to place on the board: In Chapter 1, it’s the Hobbits and Aragorn.

Surprisingly, players do NOT take the role of one of the titular Lord of the Rings characters: instead, players collectively will be manipulating all the characters that come into play.

To the right of board are the Challenges: players will need to fulfill the preconditions of each challenge, then discard some cards (see the colored symbols).

The cards to discard are the Story Cards: see above.  There are 6 main types (above).

There’s also some Special Story cards which the players earn as they move through the game: these cards have really cool special abilities (or can be used as a wild card).

The Ring cards are powerful because they can either (a) be wild or (b) be used in special “per scenario” uses (see above: the ring can move the Black Riders). But everytime you play (or discard) on the rings, you cause corruption.

Corruption is kept track of at a special board at the top of the board. If your corruption ever makes it to slot 15, the entire game is over and you lose! If you hit any of the eye symbols along the way, you cause corruption cards to come out, which have bad effects: see below.

So, to be clear: this is a legacy game on many fronts! Corruption you gain will stay for the entire game! When you start a new CHapter of the book, you retain the Corruption track from the previous game! Use too many Ring cards, and you will lose the game before you ever get to Mount Doom!

The Specials stay as well: (as long as you win the game where you gained that special).

To remind myself of where I left off, I take a picture of the cards I gained and the current state of the Corruption track: see above.

This game follows the path of many cooperative games: Player does good news, then bad news happens. Next player does good stuff, then bad stuff happens. Repeat until you win! The good news is done by playing the Story Cards: see above.

The Bad News cards (called Plot Cards) are numbered 1 to 15, and cause bad News t happen, depending on the Chapter you are in!

See above: Plot Card 10 causes 1 Black Rider to move 2 Spaces in Chapter one.

This mechanism is a simple way to vary to bad news per chapter: the Plot Cards are just an index to the Plot Chart (see below).

If you can defeat all challenges in your Chapter, you win! If you complete all 8 chapters and throw the ring into the Volcano, you win! There are many ways to lose along the way, but usually that just means resetting the last chapter and replaying. Unfortunately, if the Corruption ever makes to 15, the game is completely over: you lose.

Solo Play

For a Mass Market game from Target, the Solo Rules are surprisingly well specified (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! There’s one paragraph in the rulebook (see above). The only real change is that there is an “phantom hand” of 6 cards you can trade with.

See a set-up for a solo player above. My cards are just below the board, and the “phantom hand” of 6 is off to the side.

I had an absolute blast playing this solo. The rules are very simple, and the gameplay is very simple, but it feels like every action you take in the game matters! Without even thinking, I played through the first three chapters one night and finished it the next night!

What makes this so fun is that you are making interesting decisions: Do I use a ring, even though it will cause corruption? Who should I move to always progress? Should I discard now to defeat a challenge or wait until I have more cards? The game has an inherent timer (you lose the chapter if you reveal all 15 plot cards), so everything you do (especially in the later chapters) matters.

The other thing I started doing was keeping track of what cards have come out: I can probabilistically predict what Plot Card might come out next, and that can inform my play! See above as I have all the Plot Cards out by category!

One thing I noticed is that the “phantom hand” the solo player trades tends to fill up with Rings At least mine did: I play to avoid corruption, so I tended to pass all the Ring cards over the Phantom as I used his “other” cards. See above: the “phantom hand” has all Rings! As we’ll see in cooperative play, there is a very different dynamic with the Rings!

I had a phenomenal time playing this solo. I lost one chapter, but each chapter is short: 15-25 minutes! So, even if you need to replay a chapter, it’s quick!

Cooperative Play

Sara and I played through the entire campaign on a blustery Sunday morning (and into lunch). The game was so much fun, we wanted to keep playing! We wanted to get to the end and win! It was a ball!

Sara even brought her “Eyes of Sauron” water cup.

The main difference in our game is that Rings because more like “Wounds” in a deck-builder game: they took up space, since you can only have 6 cards in your hand! See above as I have 2 Rings taking up space in my hand. Again, we tend to play to only use ROngs when you have to, so the Rings (for us anyways) took up space. So, we ended up trading Rings back and forth as we played (I need a Sword: I’ll trade you a Ring!). This was a very different dynamic from the solo game, where the Rings just drifted into the “phantom hand”: we had to share/load-balance the Rings so we both had enough slots in our hand to do stuff!

One of things that completely saved our Bacon many, many times was Arwen’s love: that Special card (see above) was earned in the first chapter. It allows use to use Rings without their corrupting effect! This card was huge for us! It allowed us to do challenges and get rid of the “blocking Rings” from our hand! Both Sara and I wondered if we could have won the game without these.

We just barely won at Mount Doom: it could not have been closer. One fewer card, and we would have lost. As it was, we still had to play 4 Rings and take 4 Corruption to win on the last play!!! Luckily, we had kept the corruption down to pretty low in the game, so it wasn’t that bad. We won!!

What a fantastic time we had. Each Chapter was quick and very different, and we had a ball.

We do think that 2-Player is optimal: players can strategize closely to keep challenges under control. Much like Pandemic is easier with two players, but more chaotic and harder with more players, Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Games is probably best at 2 players, and not quite as good at 3 and 4 players.

Two Issues

Issue 1: In general, the components are pretty good (especially for a Mass Market game from Target),  but the cards really need to sleeved, or should be better quality.  After playing solo and cooperatively all the way through a couple of times, the card are starting to get a little grody: you touch them and shuffle them all the time.  Consider sleeving your cards before you play (if you pick this up).

Issue 2: There is an element of Luck. I lost one game (see above) horribly because I could not get a sword for like 4 turns in a row, and that just caused wasted turns. I couldn’t have done anything to mitigate it, I couldn’t skip my turn to draw extra cards or anything like that. Bad Luck as only been an issue a handful of times (and I have played it quite a bit), but it is possible you could get completely screwed on card draws. Luckily, the games are quick: a typical game is 20 minutes, and you can reset quickly. I’ve had many of game of Pandemic go bad because of bad card draws, so it can happen in any cooperative game. The good news (based on my many plays) is that Bad Luck doesn’t seem to happen very often: mostly, you just have toi make smart decisions.

Adventure Book Games

There are currently three Adventure Book games: The Princess Bride (which reviewed here), The Wizard of Oz, and Lord of the Rings (whose review you are reading now). There are all very similar: players cooperatively play cards to move characters around the board and fulfill challenges, and bad news comes with the Plot Decks and Plot Charts. It’s a fairly simple system which seems to work really well for putting on top of a Intellectual Property.

I think The Lord of The Rings Adventure Book Game is my favorite of the three: it slightly evolves the mechanisms of the original Princess Bride and has just a little more content. But, I like them both.

The Oliphant In The Room

So, if given a choice, which cooperative Lord of the Rings board game would I play? The Renier Knizia Lord of the Rings (2001) game has a lot of nostalgia, and I do enjoy playing it, but it is too hard: it would have to be the right group and circumstances to play. I thought the Fantasy Flight Lords of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth was just okay: you couldn’t just open it up and play, you had to always be in the middle of a campaign. (And I like Mansion of Madness a lot more if I want that system: you can always just jump into a game).

Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is by far the lightest and easiest to get into. You also can easily “cheat” and jump into any chapter for fun. It’s also incredibly thematic, given how simple it is. It may be too simple for some gamers: you may prefer the complexity of Journeys in Middle Earth, but I think the simplicity of Lord of the Rings: Adventure Book Game is very appealing. I think it’s my favorite?

Replayability

One question you might ask: how replayable is this?  I’ve played through the full campaign twice already (once as a solo player, and once as a 2-Player cooperative play), and I still want to play again!  Each chapter is different enough to give some variety, and there are 8 chapters: so that’s quite a bit of variety.   I am also interested in seeing how the Specials you get as you advance affect the game: Arwen’s Love made a huge difference for us: will other Specials be as useful?

At some point, of course, you might get sick of this system and the chapters.  But I think it’ll be a while before you do.

Age Range

The Age Range (according to the rulebook) is 10+. I’d say that’s accurate … at first. The game scales up in difficulty and complexity as you play. I think having an older player needs to be available to either play with younger players or just shepherd younger players through the game. Each Chapter has a lot of rule changes, and I think an older player needs to be around to helper younger players.

Conclusion

I did not expect to like Lord of The Rings: Adventure Book Game as much as I did. I’d probably give it an 8 or an 8.5/10 as would Sara. This works fantastic as a solo game: I still want to replay through the whole campaign even though I’ve already played once before! And this is easy to take out for a cooperative game. My only reservation is that the 2-Player cooperative game is probably optimal (for fun, for winning): A 3-Player game would be okay, but I worry that the 4-Player game might bog down.

This light legacy cooperative game is thematic, fun, quick, and easy to play. It’s my favorite game in the Adventure Book series of games.

Deck of Wonders was #8 on my Top 10 Cooperative Anticipated Games of 2021! It is running quite late: it was a Kickstarter that promised delivery in November 2021, but it just delivered on February 1st, 2023 (a few days ago).

This is a solo or cooperative legacy card game for 1-2 players. It doesn’t label itself as such, but Deck of Wonders is “essentially” a tower defense game where you defend your “tower” (yourself) with your “troops” (minions). It also has some cool story and legacy mechanics: as you play, a story advances and you get to upgrade your cards with little stickers! It’s very cool! Let’s take a look.

Unboxing

What’s in this huge box?

This tiny box was in the huge box!  I think they overpacked it!

But you get a sense of how big this game is!

The components are actually quite nice.

Remember how we said this was a legacy game?  Part of the legacy cone part comes from the stickers above! The sticker sheet contains little stickers you can put on your cards to upgrade them!

The vast majority of this game is cards: see all of them in the box above.

The bottom row is a bunch of little card packs. As you unlock parts of the story, you get to open some of these packs and add new cards/rules to the game!

The middle section of the box holds the 3 main Villains.

The final box at the top: it’s a box of the player cards.

The cards all look fantastic: they have two sides!  When the text is normal, it’s your side. When it’s upside down, it’s for the villain.  Every card in the game can be used, depending on whose turn it is!

The components are pretty nice for a little box!

Rulebook

The rulebook is .. okay.  I think there were three main issues:

The first complaint: the font is too thin. I understand it has to be small to fit in this size, but it was so thin I had trouble reading it!  I think this may the first time I have ever had this complaint!

You can actually see how much more readable the font is in the other sections when it’s fattened up! See above.

The second complaint: there’s no FAQ.  I think my very first round of the game I had a question (does destroy count as an attack? Do shields stop a destroy?), but there was no place to go to look it up.

Having said that, they did have an “Easy rules to miss section” at the back. That was really helpful!

The final complaint was that the start of the game was under-specified in the start game.  Normal flow is that you draw 1 card on the bad guy turn, and 1 card on the good guy turn.  But in the beginning of the game, how does that work?  The villain plays 3 cards … are they consecutively? Do we do battlelines each time? Does the first card being a minion mean he gets to attack 3 times?   This really sets the timbre of the game if you take 4 damage three times from a really bad minion who just happens to show up.  A little more help here would have gone a long way.

Oh yes, the game completely fails the Chair Test!  There’s no way I can use the chair next to me to “just look” at the rulebook! It’s much too small!  See above. It MUST go on the table!  See below.

It’s not a terrible rulebook, it mostly taught the game.  It needed fatter fonts, a FAQ (especially with some keyword elaborations), and better startup directions.  There’s also some house rules I think should be in here (see discussion later).

Solo Play

By default, this is a solo game.  (There is a cooperative mode, but it’s not really that different).

At the start of the game, you mix two decks: your hero deck and the bad guy deck: there are about 28 cards in each deck.  This is the Deck of Wonders!  All gameplay comes from this deck, both good guy (you) and bad guys (the game) plays.

Both the good guy and the bad guys have a little hit point tracker.  (The game doesn’t come with any tracker tokens: I had to get my own).  To win, you have to take the bad guy to 0 hit points.  You lose if you are ever knocked down to 0 hit points.

The good guy (you) starts with 4 cards: notice that they text is right side up on the Title!  This means we are using the cards for the good guy side.   You can play as many cards as you like on your turn, as long as you have enough cards, and can pay the costs (some cards cost other cards to play them).  You start the game with 4 cards.

The bad guy starts by playing 3 cards from the Deck of Wonders.  When you are playing the bad guy turn, you always play the card with the title text upside down!  See the Forest Troll as a bad guy minion above!

Essentially, play alternates between good guy/bad guy until one side wins!

Most cards that get played are minions that “stay in play” until they are killed.  

There are also some one-shots: See Lightning Strike above.

Before you get into the game, three legacy decks are turned up: they show “conditions” to try for to unlock the decks! For example, the first deck requires us to defeat Cullin and still have 10 health remaining!  In order to fully defeat Cullin, we have to fight him until we can open his third and final deck (see above) and defeat his final “Fated Form”.    These deck conditions inform what you are trying for in the game.

Over the course of 2 or 3 three nights, I ended up playing about 10 games.  I won 3 of them and lost 7. Every time you win, you get to add an upgrade sticker to a card!

The game really is about 15 minutes.  Even though I lost 7 games, the game moves pretty quick.  The worst part of setting up a game is all the shuffling.

The solo game moves pretty quickly.  It was fun adding upgrades to cards (but see below).   As you unlock more and more decks, it was cool to see the story.

Art

I love the art in this game: it was one of the reasons I backed it.

The cards are very readable, and the artist, Lauren A Brown, did a fantastic job.  Since the cards are the main component you look at as you play, this art is just captivating the whole game.

Story

There is an interesting story that unfolds as you play.  The game starts with a brief back story ….

… which you can have read to you by the Foreteller app!  Now, I don’t know if the story isn’t quite done, but the only narration I found in the app was for the Intro.  There are a few other places in the game that narration would make sense: perhaps I just needed to unlock it with a code, or perhaps it’s not quite done yet.  Either way, I only heard the intro narrated.  It was cool.

After that, story comes out as you unlock story packs on cards.  Below is the intro for Cullin, the first villain to fight.

As you unlock more packs, more and more story comes out!

Honestly, I really did enjoy the story that came out as I played.  The new mechanisms it introduced seemed consistent with the story.  Hopefully by the time you read this, all the story will be in the Foreteller app.

Luck and Legacy

I love the idea that this is a “little legacy” game, where you can upgrade cards and put stickers on them to make the game better.  That’s a really great idea!  You can choose “how to upgrade” your deck!  The problem is that, statistically,  your upgraded cards will almost never appear, especially at the beginning!

Let’s look at the first set of decks you are playing: you start with 56 cards (28 from bad guys, 28 from your deck), but then immediately add 4 upon advancing: let’s call it 60 cards for ease of math. 

Whenever you win, you are allowed to add exactly 1 sticker to 1 card to upgrade it!  And that’s it!  Most of of the games I’ve played only made it through about 40 cards before the game ended. So, you have about a 40/60 or 2/3 or 66.6% chance of seeing your upgrade.  That’s not bad, except you have to consider that the upgraded card may be played by the enemy upside down!  About half the cards will be played the wrong way causing you to miss your upgrade! So, that cuts your chance of seeing the upgrade in half!  Your chances are now 1/3 or 33.33%! So, a single upgrade has only a 1 in 3 chance of ever even being played.  And the upgrades are pretty minor too: +1 here, +1 there, so they aren’t THAT helpful.

It’s cool that you can upgrade cards, but I think the upgrade path is too slow.  I played three winning games, and I don’t think I ever saw any of my upgrades … well, I did, but it was played by the enemy (which was infuriating).  In the meantime, the bad guys advanced much, much faster!  Cullin (the bad guy) gets 4 cards in the first upgrade which are pretty significant! By the third upgrade, he was doing two damage to everything on his turn: me, my minions, everything!  I was lucky when I did any damage to him.  I was getting massacred.

The legacy thing is cool, but the upgrades come out way too slow.  The odds of you seeing your upgrades  were very small.

Too Much Randomness and Possible Fixes

This game is too random for me. I played ten games, and every single one was completely unbalanced … either for me or against me.  It’s great when it’s for you when you are winning (for three games), but the ones I lost (seven)  were incredibly frustrating.  I never felt like I could do anything to fix my loss.  I just watched as the cards came out, with no chance mitigation on my part.  I could tell quickly whether I would win or lose. And that was it.   I mean, at least the game is quick and over in 15 minutes.

But I think a few minor fixes might make the game much more palatable and less random.

1. Speed up the upgrade path!  When you win a game, allow the user to choose 3, 4, or even 5 upgrades! I don’t know what the right number is, but I think if you saw your upgrades actually coming out and helping you, you would find the game more engaging.
2. Card Choice: The most frustrating thing is that you only draw one card per turn.   I watched over and over as I drew useless garbage  on my turn as the villain drew amazing cards!  Give me some choice: maybe I draw two cards, and keep one and discard one? This would also give the upgrades a better chance of appearing! And then I feel like I have a choice!  It would  keep me more engaged, rather than just randomly flipping cards.
3. Battlelines: Weirdly, I am forced to arrange my minions is priority order: I get choices on ties only!  Why?  This seems to just take away choice from the game.  This might be a balancing mechanism initially, but it’s so frustrating: my only choice on BattleLines is on ties and the order the bad guys attack!  I would rather be able to arrange my Battlelines the way I want!  Thematically, it almost seems like the bad guys should use the priority to attack, not me? The Battlelines seems reversed!  The choice seems intuitively and thematically in the wrong place.  I don’t know.  I feel like this mechanism needs a revisit.

I think with some of these changes, I might like the game more.  I was just overcome by the randomness and didn’t feel like I had much agency when I played.  Maybe these fixes would alleviate that?

Conclusion

Deck of Wonders has a lot going for it: wonderful art, easy-to-read layouts, compelling story, interesting upgrades, nice components, and straightforward gameplay.  Unfortunately for me, it was far too random, as I feel I didn’t feel like I had a lot of agency when playing.  Over the course of about 10 plays, I saw a very swingy game depending on what cards were drawn.  I wanted a little more mitigation of luck: maybe some of the possible fixes I mentioned (above) would help that.

I do, however, have to remind myself that many games of “plain Solitaire” with 52 poker cards are just as random! In “plain Solitaire” (such as Klondike, above), the hands of fate may conspire against you and you can’t win.  But it’s over quickly and you can try again.  The same can be said of Deck of Wonders: even if you lose, you lose quickly and can reset again!  And the art and story of Deck of Wonders are so much more compelling than a deck of cards!  

If you are looking for a solo game with about the same randomness of “plain Solitaire”, Deck of Wonders might be what you are looking for: it’s got great components, great art, great story, and some really interesting ideas.  In the end, it’s far too random for me, but you may enjoy this.

The Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis Expansion arrived at my house Feb 12th, 2023. This was on Kickstarter back in April 2022. The Kickstarter promised delivery of the expansion in December 2022, and just delivered to me: so about a month and half late. That’s actually quite good by Kickstarter standards! This is an expansion for the card game called Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition which came out about two years ago (which we reviewed here).

This expansion adds three new modules/sets to the game:

1. Discovery: Adds  new card mechanics, Awards, and Milestones
2. Foundations: Adds enough resources for a 5th and 6th player and a slightly new mode of play
3. Crisis: Adds a solo and cooperative expansion

This review will concentrate on the solo and cooperative modes with the Crisis module, but we will take a look at the other modules as well on our way there.

Unboxing

Something weird happened on the way to my unboxing:

I got Astro Knights AND Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis all in the same box!  And yes, they were Kickstarted completely separately!  I think Stronghold games owns Indie games, so they consolidated the shipping to save some money.  I had been hearing that Astro Knights has been out for a while and I was surprised mine hadn’t arrived yet … now I know why! 

I think to appease me for making Astro Knights so late, they gave me the Sherlock Files demo deck!

Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis is bigger than the base box.

One thing about this expansion is that it’s very daunting up front.

There are three expansions is here … what goes for what?  It’s really not clear … until you look at the rulebooks for the individual modes.  Each rulebook (there are three: one for Discovery, one for Foundations, and one for Crisis) has a very clear list of annotated pictures of components describing what’s in each.  However.  You do have to spend some time sorting through this.

Discovery Mode

Discovery mode is the most “just add new stuff” expansion to the game: it adds mechanics for Awards, Milestones, wild tags, and upgraded Phase cards.

There are multiple sets of phase cards which “look upgraded”.  There are multiple versions of upgrades and you can choose.

There are mechanics for upgrading your phase cards in the new expansion.  These phase upgrades are also used in Foundations.

There are two sets of upgrades, and you can choose between them when playing.

Foundations Components

The Foundations expansion is mostly about adding a 5th and 6th player (and components) to the base game, which only takes 1-4 players.  It adds more sets of phase cards, players boards, player aids, cubes,  and a new supplemental infrastructure board.  The infrastructure board add a new resource that needs to be upgraded before Mars is considered terraformed.  From a gameplay perspective, the infrastructure board just gives the 5th and 6th player other things to concentrate on.  Otherwise, it’s essentially the same game (modulo the new upgraded phase cards).

Crisis Mode Components

The Crisis mode adds probably the most new components for a new solo and cooperative mode.

Common Components

There are some components that cross all expansions: there’s 4 new trays.  Why?  So each module can store its own components!

There’s a bunch of extra cubes, which works with all modules … although arguably they are a necessity for the Foundations module (5/6 players) so there’s enough cubes for 5 and 6 players.

There’s also some oversized boards.

 

One complaint from the base game was that the Terraforming Rating track was always too narrow, as the first column was just wide enough for one cube!  They’ve now widened the track!  See above.  This new board, with wider track, will make it easier to play Foundations and Discovery.  Crisis Mode has its own board, but it also has the wider track.

There’s a lot of stuff in this box.

Crisis Mode Rulebook.

The Crisis mode (and the others) were all very good rulebooks.  They had lots of good, annotated pictures, super nice paper (linen paper), and easy-to-read fonts.

All rulebooks gets an A on the ChairTest: it easily fits on the chair next to me.  See the nice pictures of set-up above.

My only complaint about the Crisis rulebook was that the Detriments were poorly explained.  When do they go into effect? How long is that effect?  Does the effect happen immediately when the oxygen.oceans/temp changes to a yellow/red zone?  

We think the detriments only take effect during the “check metrics” phase, but we just needed one or two more sentences to elaborate.

But overall, this was a good rulebook for this expansion.  The pictures in each rulebook were CRITICAL to unboxing this thing!!!

Crisis Mode Gameplay

Congratulations to Ares Expedition: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis for following Saunders’ Law and having a solo mode for this cooperative expansion (Crisis mode).

Solo play and Cooperative play are intrinsically linked in the Crisis expansion. The rules are about the same for both mode, which a few minor changes.

The key to the Crisis mode are the Crisis cards: see an example above. They are essentially the “bad news” cards you see in most cooperative games: they come out at the start of the turn, and (usually) cause bad things to happen. These cards will persist, with continual bad effects, unless you remove all the crisis tokens from the card. Each Crisis card describes the instant bad news, the continual effects, and what’s needed to banish the card.

The other interesting thing about Crisis mode is that the Teraforming is turned on its head: At the start of the game, Mars is already terraformed! Some meteorite has crashed into the planet and is causing the terraforming to revert! To win the game, you must keep Mars terraformed … but Crisis cards will conspire to dry out oceans, lower oxygen, lower temperature, and many other bad things.

At some point, the Dwindling Supplies Crisis card will come out, and you have just a few turns left to get Mars back to fully terraformed, or you lose!

This solo/coopeartive game still feels like Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition! Each player is still building their engine, figuring out which phases to play, and trying to get most resources to get stuff done! The core gameplay doesn’t change that much.

But now, you cooperate together. You figure out what phases to play as a group!! The victory points become a shared resource to eliminate crisis tokens!

If you like the base game play, you will like Crisis mode adds. You may prefer the competitive or the cooperative mode, but the game, at its core, still feels the same: build the best engine you can can, and choose the best phases for you.

Solo Mode

The solo mode worked well. It gave a me chance to learn the game so I could teach my friends. I generally felt like I had a lot choices, but I did feel just a little at the mercy of the cards I got (see more discussion below). My first solo game was a loss: I couldn’t keep the oxygen level up. After losing, I realized that the solo player really needs to do a little bit of everything to make sure he wins. My second solo game was much more balanced and I was able to secure a victory.

In many ways, the solo game reminded me of Agricola! Why do I say that? Because to do well in Agricola, you have to do a little bit of everything well: cattle, sheep, carrots, plots, house… everything! You can concentrate one one thing, but you will probably lose: the scoring system in Agricola is structured in a way that the best scores comes from doing a little bit of everything.

In the solo Crisis mode, the solo player must make sure to do pretty well in everything: oxygen, oceans, money, temperature. All must kept under control, or the solo player will lose. Just like Agricola. I hate to say it, but that makes the solo games a little samey: you must always played a balanced game to win.

Cooperative Play: Crisis Mode

Cooperative play went surprisingly well. Sara had never played Ares Expedition before, but she was able to jump in to the cooperative Crisis mode without any previous experience. From Sara: “The cards were well labelled, and I had very few questions as a I played. The text on the cards was easy to read and understand”.

Andrew had played the two-player only cooperative mode from the original base game Ares Expedition with me about 2 years ago: see our review here. Recall that the base Ares Expedition has a very limited/very simple 2-player only cooperative mode built-in: it kind of works on victory points but just doesn’t seem very thematic. According to Andrew: “This new cooperative mode is significantly better!”

Basically, the new cooperative mode is much more thematic: the Crisis deck really adds to that theme, as you are “dealing with things” (oxygen lowering, temperate lowering, etc) as you try to keep Mars terraformed. It feels like the things you are doing fit much more the idea of the game (as opposed to some generic victory point goal for the co-op mode of the base game).

The rules don’t change too much from the Crisis solo game to the cooperative game: instead of the Crisis solo mode dummy hand (where you get two cards per turn AND you get to choose which side you use), you get the Crisis Dummy Cards (where the number of cards you get depends on the number of players). See above.

The other thing that changes is that the Crisis decks are built differently for the number of players: see above. Basically, the more players, the harder the Crises are to dismiss. The balancing for the number of players seemed to work very well: I appreciate that the decks are very different for different player counts. It really feels like they went out of their way to make the cooperative game work well for ALL player counts!

Cooperative mode was a big hit! In the three player game, we collaborated to figure out many things: how to get the Crisis cards under wraps, how to get the most useful phases for everyone, what things we can do to help each other, and generally discuss how to move forward. At the same time, each of us had our own engine that we were building! So, we all felt engaged in our own board AND with each other! This is something we struggled with when we tried to add a cooperative mode to Arc Nova: how do you keep each person engaged with their own tableau as well as everyone else? By using the “everyone plays during the chosen phases”, Crisis mode seems to have solved that problem! Turns move quickly enough, because everyone is engaged, but at the same time we are still building our own tableau AND collaborating!

Our first 3-Player cooperative game took 2 hours and 15 minutes, but nobody cared about the length. Everyone was having fun the whole time.

Solo vs Cooperative

The Crisis solo/cooperative mode reminds me of Roll Player Adventures in one way (see our review here): hear me out.

The solo game of Roll Player Adventures doesn’t work very well: you frequently don’t get enough cards to do what you need to do. The solo play is much more at the mercy of the cards you draw for dice mitigation. The cooperative mode works better in Roll Player Adventures because more players means significantly more cards! So, someone will typically have the right cards to get something done. The number of cards in play (over all players) really changes how much you can do! The solo player just doesn’t have enough cards.

The solo player in Crisis mode has the same problem, if less pronounced. My first solo game was lost because I never got enough cards to mitigate the Oxygen issues. I was at the mercy of the cards to a greater extent, because the solo player brings out fewer cards in play (compared to a 4 player game which would have 4 times as many cards moving through the system). Now, as I said, this phenomenon is much less pronounced in Crisis mode vs Roll Player Adventures, but it still causes me to ding the game a little. I like the solo game, and I would play it again, but the game is better in cooperative mode … because there are significantly more cards in action to mitigate the randomness that comes out.

Conclusion

Ares Expedition: Crisis Mode had an astoundingly positive reception by my group. They all like the game, the theme, the choices, the cards, the components, the gameplay. Andrew and Sara are talking about buying their own copy. They would both give it a 7.5 or 8 out of 10.

I’ve played a few more games, so my score is slightly more nuanced: I’d give the solo game a 7/10 and the cooperative game an 8/10. I like the solo game and would play it again, but this game is better played cooperatively (with each player building their own tableau).

Is it worth getting the Ares Expedition Expansion: Discovery, Foundations, Crisis for just the cooperative mode in Crisis? Yes, I think it is. Is it worth starting from scratch and getting the base Ares Expedition Terraforming Mars game and then the expansion JUST for the cooperative game? I almost think so, if only because you get so much other great content at the same time.

And finally, the cooperative mode in the Crisis expansion blows away the lame 2-Player-only cooperative in the base game: Crisis mode so much more thematic. You’ll never play that lame mode again (but you might play the solo mode from the base game).

Just as we saw in last year’s list (Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Expansions of 2021), the expansions this year seem to come in three varieties:

1. Stand-Alone Expansion: Some games you thought might be on the Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2022 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!

Honorable Mention: Grand Hotel Abaddon

Expansion Type?  Stand-Alone Expansion

Plays Solo:  Yes 
Player Count: 1-4 (it’s best at 3 or 4)
Ages: 12+
Length: 90 mins per session (there are exactly 3 sessions)

We have absolutely loved the Kosmos Games Adventure Games series.  The Dungeon made our Top 10 Cooperative Games in 2019 and The Volcano made our Top 10 Cooperative Games in 2020.  The problem with The Grand Hotel Abaddon is that we aren’t “quite sure” when it was released in the USA! (Darn COVID).  It absolutely came out in Europe much earlier than 2022 (according to BoardGameGeek, it was 2020), but I don’t think we got it here in the USA until 2022.  That’s why this is an Honorable Mention: although we played it in 2022, it’s unclear when it came out in the USA. (It’s also an Honorable Mention because maybe it should be in our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022 instead of here in the expansions?)

This campaign game spans three 90 minute sessions, as players traverse an adventure together, interacting with objects and rooms like the old  point-and-click Adventure video games!  Once you have solved the adventure, you are done!

This is a great adventure game experience! Check out our of The Grand Hotel Abaddon review here and see why we love this adventure game so much!

10. Cantaloop 2: A Hack of a Plan

Expansion Type?  Stand-Alone Expansion

We absolutely adored the first Cantaloop (Breaking into Prison) (see our review here), and in fact, it made our #1 position in the Top Cooperative Games of 2021!  It turns out that Cantaloop is just the first game in a series of three games! The second one, Cantaloop 2 (A Hack of a Plan) (see our review here) came out this year (2022), and a third one is coming soon.  This expansion is a stand-alone game that can be played by itself, but you really should play the first Cantaloop first!

Cantaloop 2 is just more of the same!  It’s the equivalent of a point-and-click adventure game, but in board game form!  You explore a map, find objects, solve puzzles, all while laughing at the silly jokes hidden in the game using red acetate.

This would have been higher on our list, but some of the last few puzzles were a bit too much, and there were some printing problems (the first edition absolutely needs an errata sheet).  We still loved this game, but these problems brought the game down: that’s why it’s only #10 on this expansions list.  We are still very excited for book 3 in 2023 though!

9. Thunderstone Quest: Enemies Among Us

Expansion Type? More Content

Thunderstone Quest goes back a long way for us: We have been following it on Kickstarter for years!  The original Thunderstone Quest was NOT cooperative (see our initial positive but grumpy review here), but then AEG Kickstarted The Barricades mode making it cooperative (see our reviews here and here)!   And they keep adding more and more content to the game! 

The Enemies Among Us kickstarter gave us a new box, two new quests (Darkness Rising and Miricelle’s Return), more Prestige Class Boards and Guardian boards (for the cooperative mode), more dungeon tiles, and just more stuff!  This expansion also gave us plastic dividers, which we completely unnecessary, but very cool. 

This is a true expansion: it just adds more content to a great game.  I think one of the reasons it’s a little lower on the list is that it’s so hard to get to the table! There are three huge boxes of content to unpack to get a game going: the base Thunderstone Quest game, the Barricades Mode expansion, and the Enemies Among Us expansion!

8. Marvel Dice Throne (+ Dice Throne Adventures)

Expansion Type? More Content (+ Makes The Game Cooperative)

“Wait, wait, wait…” I can hear a bunch of you saying … “Marvel Dice Throne isn’t cooperative!”  True: but with the Dice Throne Adventures expansion, players can take the role of Dr. Strange, Loki, Thor, Spider-Man, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, or Captain Marvel and travel solo or cooperatively through the adventures of Dice Throne Adventures!

Marvel Dice Throne really re-invigorated Dice Throne Adventures for us!  Now, we can play Thor and/or Loki, travelling through dimensions and fighting together!  This is the best kind of expansion: one that reminds us how good the base game is!

Granted, the game we are reminding ourselves of is Dice Throne Adventures, an expansion you must buy to make Marvel Dice Throne cooperative!  So, Marvel Dice Throne is an expansion to the Dice Throne Adventures which is an expansion to Dice Throne Season 2 which is an expansion to Dice Throne Season 1!  Confused? Check out our review of Dice Throne Seasons 1 and 2 and Dice Throne Adventures here for some more clarity!

7. Valeria Card Kingdoms: Darksworn

Expansion Type? Makes The Game Cooperative

This is an interesting choice because the solo game of the base game (Valeria: Card Kingdoms) was worth picking up by itself!  The cooperative expansion just took the ideas of the solo game and expanded them into a full cooperative game: Valeria: Card Kingdoms Darksworn. This is a lightweight card game with beautiful art by The Miko.

Although I think the solo game of base box is better then the solo mode of the Darksworn expansion, the cooperative mode of the Darksworn is pretty fun, especially if you are looking for a campaign game! It does make the game a little heavier, partly because of complexity introduced by the campaign.

Take a look at our review of Valeria: Card Kingdoms and Darksworn to see if they are something you might be interested in!

6. Sentinels of Earth Prime

Expansion Type? Stand-Alone Expansion

Although the timing of this expansion was very off (it took 5 years from Kickstarting to delivery: 5 years!), it delivered a very thematic and colorful expansion to the Second Edition of Sentinels of The Multiverse!   It’s luckily a stand-alone version, because the art really makes it its own thing: it has new heroes, new tokens, new villains, new environments: it’s basically is a stand-alone version of Sentinels of the Multiverse in the Mutants and Masterminds universe (an RPG universe by Green Ronin games).

The art just wowed us: this is the art and graphic design that I wish the original Sentinels of the Multiverse had!

Overall, the is a fantastic expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse (Second Edition).  The unfortunate timing of this (the 5 years to production) meant that Greater Than Games has, in the meantime, released a newer version of Sentinels of the Multiverse called the Definitive Edition (see our review of Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition here), and it’s still not clear if Sentinels of Earth Prime works with the Definitive edition!   Which is why this isn’t higher on this list …

Take a look at our review of Sentinels of Earth-Prime to see if this is something you’d be interested in!

5. Horizons of Spirit Island

Expansion Type? Stand-Alone Expansion

The Horizons of Spirit Island was an unexpected surprise for Spirit Island fans!  Although the main purpose of this game is to lower the entry barrier into Spirit Island (by making an inexpensive version with great components available at Target), it also happens to be an expansion to the original game! And it’s also stand-alone!

The game has some great new spirits that expand the original game: my favorite new spirit was Eyes from the Trees, who scare the pants off the settlers like in a Horror Movie!

This was a great expansion, and also an easier way to introduce people to the wonderful world of Spirit Island!  See our review of the Horizons of Spirit Island here!

4. Marvel United: Fantastic Four

Expansion Type? More Content

As part of the X-Men: Marvel United Kickstarter, there were a lot of Expansions for Marvel United and X-Men: Marvel United:  From that Kickstarter, The Fantastic Four Expansion was one of our favorite expansions from last year! The miniatures were really unique and different, with the transparent, fire, and silver parts! 

But what really made this expansion was the Teamwork card in the game: it created a very simple mechanism to encourage cooperation (well, more cooperation, in an already cooperative game).

The Fantastic Four expansion really makes Marvel United a better game: more minis, more heroes, more villains, more teamwork!  See our review here to see if you might like it!

3. Marvel United X-Men Expansion: New Mutants, Excalibur, Mojoverse, and more!

Expansion Type? More Content

This expansion is a little bit of a cheat, because you could “mostly” only get it if you backed the X-Men: Marvel United Kickstarter! To be clear: this is NOT the X-Men: Marvel United expansion (which we reviewed here), this is an expansion to that expansion! That may be a first for us: an expansion to an expansion … but they all collapse down the being expansions to Marvel United.

There were so many new heroes and villains in this expansion! This is really what you want in a Marvel game: access to all your favorite characters.  There were so many characters, mostly from mutant-adjacent comic titles, that this expansion really makes it easier to play whomever you want from the Mutant Marvel Universe.

We were really excited to see the New Mutants (above), as well as characters (both heroes and villains) from Alpha Flight, MojoVerse, Excalibur, as well as some “lesser known” X-Men!

We talked about how much we loved this X-Men expansion in our post of Expansion Absorption here!

2. The Reckoners: Steelslayer

Expansion Type? More Content

In any other year, this expansion would have been our #1 Expansion.  This was a fantastic expansion!  It took a great game, The Reckoners, and added more content!  The one place that The Reckoners needed a little more variety was in the final battle, so this expansion added two new Boss Epics to the game: Regalia and Limelight!

What really made this expansion stand out was how modular it was!  There were essentially 4 new things you could optional add in to your game: new Reckoners, and/or new equipment, and/or new Epics, and/or new Boss Epics!

This is the best kind of expansion: one that reminds you how great the original game is.  See our original review of The Reckoners here, and the review of the Steelslayer expansion here!

1. X-Men Marvel United: Days of Future Past

Expansion Type? More Content

If Days of Future Past this were judged solely by the miniatures in the box, this expansion would probably still make the Top 10 Expansions this year!

But this expansion took the core Marvel United game and made it more strategic! It made the gameplay more interesting and different! X-Men Marvel United: Days of Future Past could have easily been my #1 game of 2021, regardless of it being an expansion! The game plays great, it has great twists and turns, it encourages so much cooperation, and it looks fantastic on the table.

This expansion is top-shelf, turning a great game (Marvel United) into a fantastic game! See our review here for more thoughts on why we enjoyed this so much!

Deep Rock Galactic is a cooperative board game (based on the video game of the same name) that was on Kickstarter back in March 2022 and promised delivery in December 2022. I just received my copy last week (January 28th or so, 2023), so it’s only about a month late! Maybe this a new trend: last week, we saw Sentinels of the Multiverse: Rook City Renegades deliver on time, and this week we are seeing delivery within a month. That”s really great!

This is a cooperative board game for 1-4 players, ages 12+, playtime 60-150 minutes. Players become dwarves mining the galactic caves! I have never played the video game that this is based on, so I have no bias for/against the game going in. I just thought it would be fun to play dwarves mining in outer space! Let’s take a look!

Components

This box is HUGE.

It’s even bigger than our Thunderstone Quest box!

Even with the Coke Can above, it’s still not clear how big it is until you put the can right next to the box!

This is a big box!  It’s a little intimidating to be honest!

The game box opens with two books:  a rulebook and a Mission Book: See above and below.

Next comes SO MUCH CARDBOARD to punch out. See above and below.

Also in that bundle of cardboard is the board.

Most of the cardboard forms the terrain that you will be putting on the board.

In that cardboard punchout pack is the Hostile Creatures sheet: this is critical because it’s the only place that describes the monsters! (Even the rulebook doesn’t describe the monsters).  You’ll be referring to this a lot.

Underneath the cardboard are the dwarf boards: there are exactly 4 dwarves in the game.  These are really nice dual-layer boards, and they show a lot of the rules ON the board:

Finally, underneath all that cardboard we get three trays.

The top tray holds the cards, dice, and minerals (I mean, you are dwarves mining for minerals).

The tray under that holds a bunch of miniatures.

The third and final tray holds some of the bigger miniatures!  Pretty cool.

When you see everything on the table, you see why this box is so big!  It’s chock full of pretty cool components.

Miniatures

This is not a miniatures game per se, it’s just a mining game with dwarves that happens to have lot of miniatures! But the minis are really nice:

Most of the miniatures are bad guys aliens the dwarves will be fighting in the caves.

The dwarves themselves have pretty nice miniatures!  See below.

Overall, the miniatures really enhanced the theme.  They look really cool: and they even match the pictures pretty well!

See the Scout above with his miniature: his picture matches his mini.

My only complaint was that the labelling of minis (which mini is which) and where they go (into the trays) was subpar. I made very sure to take a picture of all my miniature trays before I took anything out.  

The minis are pretty distinct, but I thought they could have benefitted from some colored bases or rings at the bottom to help distinguish them (like we saw for Hour of Need in our Comparison of bases for Hour of Need).

Rulebook

So, the rulebook wasn’t great.  And it seemed to get worse the more we played (as we had to look stuff up).  But it seemed to have a lot of good intentions, and it did do a number of things right.

It starts with an introduction that has a little bit of a sense of humor: that goes a long way.  But, the Index seems more like a Table of Contents (?): A Table of Contents outlines major sections and where they are, whereas an Index is typically more comprehensive and allows reference to minor points.  So, it’s weird that this first page is labelled as an Index when it should be a Table of Contents.  But, again, at least their heart is the right place: they are trying to organize!

Great!  The next two pages describe the components!  I wish they had labelled a few more things (there are a lot of tokens and bad guys), but this was pretty good.  At least they showed a picture of most components with a label!

The gameflow/overview description was great!  The set-up could have been better, but again, at least it was “mostly” labelled and its heart was absolutely in the right place. 

This rulebook has its heart in the right place: it’s showing lots of tables, it’s showing pictures of things.  I can appreciate it is really trying to do the right thing.

The rulebook just felt like it really needed another pass or another rethink.  Even though Combat initiating from the Dwarves well-documented, the combat initiating FROM the Hostile Creatures was really not specified very well (“Hey, roll the Chompy dice … where was that in the rules?“). The Hostile Creature sheet is absolutely critical to playing the monsters, but I also never got a breakdown of that chart.  See below.

This chart above, THIS CHART is critical to the game, and there was never a  breakdown of it.  You kind of have to infer that the diamond is the hit points.  R is range, M is movement. And how do you notate that per creature?  We have a similar problem we in Batman: The Animated Series Game notating hit points for the bad guys (see our review here). When you have a bunch of bad guys, how do you individually notate their health?  The game says something like”put health tokens next to the creature“, but what do you do when you have  lots of them?  And the creatures move?  

This was a 1-or-2 GRRR rulebook, but the humor and a lot of other things done right helped quell too much anger.

I didn’t love this rulebook, but I forgave it a number of problems, at least in the beginning.  It’s kind of, mostly, all there, and there is lot of good stuff (good charts, good examples), but it really needs another pass: some rules seem either left off or very poorly specified.  It got more frustrating to look stuff up the longer we played.

Gameplay

Once you get past the daunting nature of the box, the minis, and the “not-great” rules, the game actually moves pretty quickly.  It’s not a super complex game from a gameflow perspective.

The back of the rulebook gives a nice summary of play: action/event/action/event/…. until players win or lose!  Once you get going, the game does flow well.

The End of The Game can come about in many ways: see the rulebook page above. The Dwarves generally win if they complete their mission (usually mining and getting back to the start position).  If all dwarves fall unconscious, then they lose.  If the little swarm track reaches the end, dwarves lose. See the Swarm Track below.

Each player takes the role of dwarf:

The dwarves all very very different powers and different weapons for fighting in the mines!

Each dwarf also gets to choose a secondary weapon from the group above.

You can see some of the sense of humor in this game: the secondary weapon can be upgraded to “overclocked” when you turn it over (obviously a nod to the video game).

Each dwarf also gets two one-shot cards: a Throwable (usually a grenade):

… and a Rock and Stone (a fun one-shot card).

These cards form the tools and weaponry of the Dwarf.

The Set-up from the mission Book (above) shows you how to set-up the mission, and what the objectives are.

Dwarves generally get three action points to do what they want: in three words, they can Move, Mine, or Fight. 

MINE: When the dwarves mine, they get shared resources to the MULE (middle space above) or carve spaces out or grab stuff.

MOVE: When the dwarves move, they move around the board trying to get to minerals scattered about.  Stalagmites and pits block the way, but they can be mined through.

FIGHT: Finally, the dwarves can fight!  Each of their weapons has a range and a set of dice they roll.

For example, the Bulldog Heavy Revolver above has range 5, and you roll the blue die to see the effects.  Empty rolls usually mean miss, other symbols typically denote hits with other effects.

Damage persists, so it may take a few tries to take out some of the bigger hostiles.

After a dwarf goes, they flip an event card (The Event deck is the “Bad News” deck): typically the swarm track advances and other stuff happens. See above for an example Event card.

When the Swarm track lands on a creature (see the lit bug above), you must draw a Swarm card!

Typically, the Swarm card (above) adds creatures to the board.

Then the next dwarf goes!  That’s basically it! Dwarf activates, Event Card, next Dwarf activates, Event Card, … until the game ends!  

The game looks very daunting (size of the box, size of miniatures, rulebook length and grumpiness, amount of components, mission set-up), until you get to the core of the game.  At its core, it’s a very straight-forward game.

Solo Play

Luckily, Deep Rock Galactic follows Saunders’ Law and includes several variants for solo play.  The obvious variant is to take two dwarves and alternate  playing between them.  The second variant involves choosing just one dwarf, but also playing a simplified robot known as BOSCO.

BOSCO is a robot who helps you!  See above, left.  Frankly, BOSCO is almost like another dwarf, but can’t be killed (unless he revives you) and can’t run out of ammo. Basically, BOSCO is a simplified dwarf.  The rules for solo play and BOSCO were about a page a half in the rulebook.  Usually, I choose to alternate between two characters, but each dwarf is fairly complicated to operate, so I chose to use the “simplified” rules for BOSCO. 

Look at the rules for a dwarf: the Scout (above) has extra rules for Light-Footed, Grappling Hook, Flare Shot, primary weapon and secondary weapon.  Honestly, I forgot to use a lot of my special abilities until the very end, and I only had one dwarf to operate!  The simplified rules for BOSCO worked pretty well, especially for a first play.   I could have easily gotten by with alternating between two dwarves for solo rules, but I am really glad the publisher included the BOSCO rules.

My first solo play went pretty well.  It felt like it was a little story.

“Me and BOSCO beamed down to the planet.”

“Our first priority was taking out the Grunt spiders at the front.”

“A well-launched throwable (SOIL SMASHER) did what we needed and took them (and some Stalagtites) out!”

“Our next priority was to start finding the things we needed to accomplish our mission!”

“BOSCO can’t pick up stuff, he can only mine it for me so I can take care of other things.  So he went out ahead to start doing some mining while I searched for the Apoca Blooms we needed.”

“That worked well, until some really snarky creatures appeared!”

“After we had a few more firefights, we raced to the exit: we choose NOT to fight the Spitfall Infector and just ran to the exit!”

“Me and BOSCO made it out of there alive … I wonder how we would have fared if we fought the Spitball…”

The solo game was quite fun: BOSCO was easy to control, my turns were fun, and the Bad News deck was well-specified with minimal maintenance. Everything moved quickly, mostly.  The rules are terrible on a few axes, so they game did have to come to a grinding halt a few times as I tried to look up some rules.  This delay will go away (I hope) with further plays, but I also just had to make some calls a few times (“I think this means that: let’s just move forward“).  I really really wish the rulebook were better.  

It was fun playing a Galactic Dwarf.  I think I’d play again solo.  

Cooperative Game

Unfortunately, the rulebook issues became even more glaring as we played cooperatively.  Every time we did something, it would seem like clarifications were needed!  Something I had perhaps glossed over in my solo play became glaring when exposed to the light of the group!  We’d frequently say: “Pass me the rulebook while you take your turn, and I’ll try to find that rule!“

We enjoyed how each Dwarf was very different and had lots of different powers: Teresa chose the Engineer.

With three players, we fit pretty well on the table.  See above and below.  I think a fourth player might have caused us to rearrange significantly.  It may not have even fit?

 

See Sam above finding out “There’s no player reference cards!!!”  So, without any player reference cards, the rulebook got passed around A LOT.  I remember thinking “I wish I could sleeve the rulebook: it gets touched more than any card does!!!“

But Deep Rock Galactic looks pretty cool when set-up for a 3-player game.

See Sam again consulting the rulebook while Teresa waits for a rule clarification.

And that was kind of the summary of our experience with the game: play should have moved quickly, but we kept burying our noses in the rulebook looking up clarifications.

In the end, we had some fun, but it took us three hours to play Scenario 2 with three people!  Granted, it was a learning game, but I had played it before and was able to teach most of the core flow, and my friends are smart/experienced gamers.  

I asked my friends straight-up: “Would you play this again?” The answer from both was “sure, but I wouldn’t suggest it”.  Most of that hesitation was from the frustration with the rulebook.

Dwarves, Dwarves, Dwarves

So, Deep Rock Galactic is a thematic game: it’s not a complex miniatures game, although the miniatures in the game enhance the theme quite  bit.  This is a dice-chucking, thematic, “pick-up-and-deliver” game with lots of combat. The combat is based on dice: with so many dice, there are bound to be bouts of randomness that will make the game not fun.

We did review a different dwarf game a few months ago: The Siege of Runedar by Reiner Knizia.  See that review here.  One of my main complaints of the game was that there might be too much randomness from the dice there.  I think after seeing Deep Rock Galactic, I have a little more appreciation for the more controlled randomness in Siege of Runedar verus the more chaotic randomness in Deep Rock Galactic.  I still think Runedar should allow players to keep cards between rounds (to help mitigate the randomness), but Runedar seems much less random by comparison now.

Deep Rock Galactic is a thematic dice-chucker.  It’s light, fun, moves quick, and just a fun little romp. It’s supposed to be a little random!

If I want a lightweight, dice-chucking romp with dwarves, I choose Deep Rock Galactic.  If I want a more strategic game with dwarves, The Siege of Runedar is the better choice (with our one house rule of keeping cards).

What I really want is a way to use some of the very thematic miniatures and mining elements from Deep Rock Galactic in the Siege of Runedar!  I would love to see some crossover mode where you could get the best of both games!

Conclusion

I am kind of all over the place for Deep Rock Galactic: it really depends on what mood I am in.  If I want a lightweight, dice-chucking, mining, and fighting experience, Deep Rock Galactic is good game to play!  The game has such cool miniatures and components: it’s very thematic. It will be a 7/10 when I am in that mood! The game has a real nice flow once the rules are absorbed.

But when I want something more strategic with better rules, Deep Rock Galactic drops to a 6/10 … “It’s just too random and the rulebook should have been much better“. Then I’ll go play The Siege of Runedar and lament its lack of thematic elements:  “I wish Siege of Runedar had some awesomeness from Deep Rock Galactic“.

Decide for yourself: what are you in the mood for?

I’ll end my conclusion with a direct quote from Sam: he texted me after he digested his play!

Thoughts:

I’ll rate deep rock galactic a 6 – I had fun as the gunner and spraying bullets at the enemies but wish the rules were better organized and clarified. I like that everyone was unique and specialized even if we didn’t use our abilities to the fullest.

Would bump up to 7 if there was a good faq/errata/reference. Would play again if others were inclined (and might suggest it if we found a good faq/errata/reference)

(Incidentally, Teresa independently told me the same thing: “6, maybe would upgrade to 7 if rules were better”)

 

UPDATE:  Surprisingly, I’ve been able to get this game back to the table.  And you know what?  It was more fun than I remember!  We ended up playing with someone who really likes the video game, and he offered up a lot of thematic justification and nuance to the game!  We still had some trouble with the rulebook and looking up rules, but we did find a whole bunch of supporting documents of the Internet that were helpful: player aids, extra PDF rulebooks (it was very nice to have an extra rulebook around, even if on a phone), and more information.  

The rulebook still has problems, but with all the support that has cropped up since we reviewed this 4 months ago, I think my rating has up to a 7/10. Just make sure you try to use some of the resources on the Internet before you play!  We had a good time! And, if you love the video game, I think you might give it an extra point for theme … maybe up to an 8?  I fully expect Deep Rock Galactic to be played quite a bit at the next RichieCon, and I for one, am looking forward to that. 

Appendix A: Game Mat Discussion

For this Kickstarter, I got the game mat.  

It looks great on the table: see above.  You can tell it’s a mat by the rounded corners.

But the game also comes with a board.

You can tell the board by the square corners.

The board and the Game Mat are virtually identical!  See above:  the board is on top of the mat with the Mat peeking out at the top.

I like it when Game Mats do “something different”, but this Mat is just a replica of the main board. The only real difference is that you can have the board off-the-table slightly, whereas the Game Mat must fit completely on the table.

See above as the game board can “slightly” be off the table to give the players more room.  I like the Game Mat, it’s good quality, and it looks cool, but I don’t think it added a whole lot to my experience: in fact, I think forcing me to use the Mat gave me less table space.  I like Game Mats that give me something “extra”.  For example, I love the Game Mat for Aeon’s End because it really helps me organize all the cards! See Below.

I don’t think you need the Game Mat for Deep Rock Galactic. Sure, it’s cool and spongey, but it doesn’t really give you anything extra.   The board that comes with it looks exactly the same, and it can enable more table space!  This is a big game!  That little extra space you get from putting the board over the edge can make a big difference!!  I dunno.  If you like Game Mats better, it’s still nice.

Appendix B: Repacking

How do you fit everything back in?  I had a little trouble fitting everything back in, until I decided to reuse the Punchout Skeletons to hold the bigger terrain pieces! Not the small ones: just the ones with about 8 hexes or more. See above and below.  

By placing the terrain pieces BACK IN the Punchout Skeletons, all the original pieces fit back in the box in a controlled and snug manner.  

Without the Punchout Skeletons, the extra terrain pieces just flop around and do not fit in well.

In the end, I found that it was just a little bit of extra work to use the Punchout Skeletons for the terrain pieces. This also allowed me to keep the rulebook and mission book flat in the box.

Caveat Emptor. I am a proponent of keeping Punchout Skeletons: see our blog entry here. This is just another reason to keep all your Punchout Skeletons: controlled storage of larger terrain pieces.

Sentinels of the Multiverse (Definitive Edition): Rook City Renegades was on Kickstarter back in March 2022. It delivered to me in the USA about 4 days ago, January 19th 2023. It promised delivery in January 2023. It was on time!! Holy cow, that’s an event unto itself: if you follow our blog, we’re usually “happy” if a Kickstarter is only a few months late. Kudos to Greater Than Games for getting their games out on schedule!

This expansion only expands the Definitive Version of the Sentinels of The Multiverse: see our review here to make sure you understand the differences between the 1st, 2nd, and Definitive Editions before you get this. Essentially, if you have the yellow box (below left), you have the proper edition.

Let’s take a look below!

Components

This is the Kickstarter version we will be looking at: it includes the expansion itself, foil card replacements for many of the bigger cards, and sleeves: see below.

This is an expansion in the simplest sense: it just adds new cards with minimal new rules. The only “real” new rule is the Suddenly! keyword (see below): it forces cards to be played immediately when they are drawn.

The box itself is the same size as the Definitive Edition (so that’s good for consistency and storage): see the box below with a can of Coke for perspective.

There are a few tokens that will be specific to a hero/villain/environment, a few more one damage tokens (we were always running out of those, so that’s good), and a new damage tracker. Why a new damage tracker? Because The Chairman has a second supporting Villain (The Operative) that has enough hit points to merit a new damage tracker. EDIT: Correction: the new tokens are really just the Irreducible tokens (the purples). The red Vs are nemesis tokens (just more copies, they are also found in the base box), and some more one damage tokens.

They also included another wheel. Not sure why? It doesn’t seem to go to anything. It seems to just be a backup piece of cardboard. EDIT: It was to replace the large wheel from the core game (which didn’t spin as well). This was said in the rulebook and I missed it the first time.

The rest of the game is just cards: see above and below.

I spent the first night just sleeving those cards. Sigh. No fun.

Everything in Rook City Renegades is nice quality and consistent with the Sentinels of the Multiverse Definitive Edition.

Foil Cards

The first thing I opened and sleeved were the foil cards!  These are just “embossed foil” versions of all the larger cards in the expansion.  (So, you will have two copies of each of these cards: the original and the foil version).  I’ve said this many times: I love the foil Cards! Why don’t more games have foil cards? I think they are so thematic: Comics in the late 80s ad 90s used the use foil covers as a marketing gimmick to get noticed! And it worked in many cases!  (You don’t see foil covers as much anymore in comics).

I have heard some people say they are too shiny to read, but I haven’t had that problem.

The first set of foil cards are all the Heroes of Rook City Renegades! There’s at least 3 different versions of each Hero!

There’s also a few alternate version for some of the base game Heroes included: I think the Haunted Fanatic (above) may be my favorite.

Sentinels also really embraces the “first appearance” and “last appearance” ideas: there are alternate versions of the Heroes and their powers, depending on their “first appearance”! These are kind of cool because it really feels like you are embracing the Sentinels of the Multiverse universe: it feels like it adds some depth and backstory (even though there was never really a Sentinels Comics).

Each Villain also has an equivalent foil card (see the right hand side above).

I didn’t even sleeve the “original” non-foil versions of any of the cards. I will always pay with the foil versions! I love them so much!

New Heroes and Villains and Environments

Like I said, this is an expansion that just really gives you more cards!

There are six new Heroes. Interestingly, most of the other Heroes (Setback, Expatriate, Mr. Fixer, Nightmist, and Harpy) appeared in the 2nd Edition or in an expansion, but Alpha is brand new!

There are five new Environments: Rook City, Pike Industrial Complex, The Realm of Discord, and The Temple o Zhu Long, and Diamond Manor. All but one appeared somewhere in the 2nd Edition, but Diamond Manor is new!

There are ten new Villains: Ambuscade, Apex, The Chairman, TheOperative, The Fey Court, Gloomweaver, Kismet, Plague Rat, Spite, and Terrorform. Of those, The Chairman and The Operative operate as one unit, so they are one villain. All of those Villains have appeared somewhere in 2nd edition except for Apex, The Fey Court, and Terrorform.

Luckily, everything fits pretty well in the box: see above.

One problem I had with the base box was the at names of the heroes/villains/environments were hidden by the sleeves!

Luckily, they have fixed that and you can read the dividers (even when the cards are sleeved) in the Rook City Renegades expansion.

Rulebook

As an expansion, the rulebook is less important. Or is it?

I still like seeing the components with correlating pictures: we have that here. See above.

The rulebook passes The Chair Test with an A-:  it fits well on the chair next to me, but I had to break its spine and fold it back a few times to get the pages to stay open. 

What this rulebook does well is that it has a FAQ, and explanations for each Hero/Villain/Environment in great detail: this inlcudes both thematic explanations as well as rules clarifications. I think this was pretty great: I had to go looking for a few clarifications, and they were either there in the FAQ or by the Hero/Villain/Environment section of interest.

Interestingly, Greater Than Games chose to use the back cover as an ad for the next expansion. I wish they had used the back cover to replicate the Turn Sequence and Useful Terms that are on the back of the main rulebook: see below.

Since this was an expansion, I didn’t expect too much from the rulebook: but Rook City Renegades delivered! This is what I want in an expansion rulebook! FAQs and lots of discussions of new content!

EDIT: It turns out, in the large cards that I did NOT open (because I love the foil cards so much) were some player summary cards! See below. The back of the rulebook isn’t quite as necessary.

Gameplay

In all version of Sentinels of the Multiverse, most of the rules for the game are on the cards, with the Turn Sequence simply providing the main flow. The first few times through play, it will be slow as we will have to read everything closely to get a sense of the decks. But this is just how Sentinels flows. You need to play a Hero a number of times to get familiar with the deck, and then it begins to flow much quicker.

The basic gameplay with the expansion is still the game as the original game: the game does’t really really change with this expansion. If you were looking for Rook City Renegades to change up Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition significantly, then you will be disappointed. The Suddenly cards are the only real “new” rule … they add some chaos, as those cards that have to be played as soon as they are drawn.

Solo Play

My first Villain, randomly chosen, was Gloomweaver (Gloomweaver originally comes from the Infernal Relics Expansion in 2nd Edition). As I looked through the Heroes, it made sense to have some mystic Heroes fight!

Nightmist seemed the obvious first choice, as she is the spellcaster and mystical foil to Gloomweaver (and she also comes from the same  Infernal Relics Expansion from the 2nd Edition)  Which version of Nightmist should I take?  There are a bunch of versions to choose from: Base, Dark Watch, Magical Mentor (see above).  I liked that I had a choice: in the end, I went with the Dark Watch version … somehow that seemed apropos. 

And Harpy seemed a good joiner, as her abilities are sorta weird and mystical. And Expatriette, with her hardcore gun knowledge seemed a good backup for the vaguely mystical other two.

What’s a weird place for Gloomweaver to appear?  The Diamond Manner!

To me, this was all about building a story: Nightmist finds out about Gloomweaver’s incursion into our world. She recruits her friend Harpy to help her, and Harpy suggests some real world firepower in the form of Expatriette! “Just In Case“. The three form the Dark Watch and track Gloomweaver to the Diamond Mansion … and an epic battle begins!

Nightmist leads the group!

The Harpy will follow Nightmist to hell and back!

And Expatriette covers their back!

And so we set-up for our first solo game of the “Into the Dark” with the Dark Watch!

So, this game was very intense: there were a lot of rules to follow! Even though I have played all three Heroes in the 2nd Edition, you might think it would easier to play, but they weren’t! The Heroes are similar but not similar enough, so I had to read each Hero’s abilities very closely so I didn’t “accidentally” assume some rules from the 2nd Edition! …which I still ended up doing for Gloomweaver.

In fact, I had won the game earlier than I realized, as I had taken out three Chosen earlier in the game! I was remembering the rules in the 2nd Edition, where you have to take out 3 Relics (instead of 3 Chosen).

I did win my Dark Watch game, beating Gloomweaver back, but I made a few mistakes … even though I tried really hard to follow all the rules. Simply speaking, there are a lot of rules to keep track of. Those mistakes and missteps are simply part of the learning process for Sentinels of the Multiverse: it’s always been that way. It always takes a little bit to learn the decks.

These Heroes in Rook City Renegades in general seem more complicated than the Heroes from the base game: caveat emptor.

But, I had fun as a solo player: I wrote my own story in my mind, I formed my own team, I played out the battle, and I had a ball discovering how all the Heroes and Villains and Environments work! That’s part of the fun of Sentinels of the Multiverse: discovering how the decks work. If you don’t enjoy that, you will probably never enjoy this game.

Cooperative Play

Our only real constraint for cooperative play was that we must play with as much new content as possible! Everything came from the new set.

Like the solo game, we tried to tell a story as we set-up the cooperative game.

Terrorform (with his cool foil card) had appeared and taken over the Diamond Manor!  (I know, it seems like a popular place for the Bad Guys to go).

Setback, the young kid, found out about Terrorform coming while monitoring the coms!  He knew that Diamond Manor was all “magical and weird” (his words), so he went to find the mystic Nightmist!

Turns out Nightmist was having wine party for her two friends Alpha and Harpy, so they were all happy to help!

In the end, it was Setback, the young pun kid, helping out the 3 experienced heroes!

The little story we told kind of “got us into” the game a little, as we felt a little more closer to our characters and each other.  Again, like the original game, there was some downtime as we read cards and tried to figure out how all the characters worked.

In the end, we defeated Terrorform: it took a little longer than we expected (2.5 hours?), but we also had all new content for all us, so there was definitely a learning curve. We all had fun.  The characters seemed just a little more complex than the original game.

Trust Enhances Cooperation

I’ve had a good friend (none of the people here, but he’ll be reading this blog entry soon) tell me he doesn’t like Sentinels because “I don’t know what other people are doing!”  I actually kind of like that: I don’t have to know what everyone’s doing because I trust them!  This is a cooperative game!  We are all doing the best we can, and if you take your turn and feel like you did it right, I am happy!  We are working together, we are not micromanaging each other!  

Sentinels definitely needs that trust factor to move forward: each character (especially in the new set) has a lot of rules to learn.  I actually think that enhances the cooperation a little: it forces us to trust each other and have faith that we all played our turns the best we could: I trust my fellow heroes.

Standalone Expansion?

I was always annoyed that the Token box from the base game didn’t really fit into the box (yes, yes, I know there are ways to make it fit, but I didn’t like how tight it was: we discussed it on our review here).  However, it ended up being an unexpected benefit: if you have the Token box, you don’t need the base game!  All the counters and condition counters that you need are all in the Token box!  So, if you really want to, you could play with JUST Rook City Renegades and the Token box! You would get all new content with the expansion!  The only thing you need from the base game is the Token box!

I mean, that’s what we did for our first solo game: 3 new Heroes, 1 new Villain, and 1 new Environment with just the Token box from the original game.

In fact, I would argue you don’t even need the Token box! You could play Rook City Renegades without the Token box! Back in the 1st Edition, there were no tokens: you had to either supply your own tokens, or use pencil and paper. I played many a 1st Edition game with just pencil and paper … I didn’t need no stinkin’ tokens.

… but you still have to know the rules of the game. The base box has the rulebook, which might be the one thing you have to have from the base game.

If you were very enterprising, this could be a standalone expansion: You could lookup the rules online, and use your own tokens/pencil-and-paper to form Rook City Renegades into a standalone expansion.  

But why would you? The tokens and damage trackers from the base game (in the Token box) really are a step forward in making the game easier to play: don’t step back to 2011 and opt for pencil and paper like I had to! Use all the modern tools to make your game more fun!

Conclusion

Rook City Renegades is a great expansion, adding 6 new Heroes, 10 new Villains, and 5 new Environments! It expands the game in whatever direction you want: do you want new Heroes to play? New Villains to fight? New places to fight? Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition Rook City Renegades makes it easy to add new content, whatever you want that to be.

I don’t think you need this expansion right away, as the new expansion does add more complexity: each new Hero seems just a little more complicated: For Example: Nightmist, with her spell-casting, adds more rules and complexity to the game. This is a great expansion, I just don’t think you need it until you feel like you’ve exhausted the base game.

Back in 2nd Edition, Rook City was my favorite expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse: I loved the new Environments and new Villains … fun fact, I didn’t love the new Heroes as much, but I loved that I could expand my favorite game. The Definitive Edition of Rook City Renegades does the 2nd edition justice: it adds fantastic new Villains, Heroes, and Environments.

Rook City Renegades is a great expansion: When you are ready for it, it will be fantastic.

X-Men: Marvel United First Class is part of the giant box of expansions that arrived in the mail a few months ago (see here: X-Men Marvel: United and the Expansion Absorption).

This expansion requires one of the two base games to play: Marvel United (which we reviewed here and here) or X-Men: Marvel United (which we reviewed here and here); preferably the latter since it’s more X-Men themed.

Depending on how you look at it, this expansion represents either the X-Men comic book (from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) X-Men #1 from 1963 or from the 2011 Movie X-Men: First Class. Either way, this captures that moment in time when Professor X founded the X-Men when they were all “young and hopeful” mutants. They were the “first class” of Professor Xavier’s school! They are still learning to use their powers. Their costumes were even similar to show they were part of the same school (and hadn’t embraced their individuality yet).

Unboxing

First Class comes in the standard Marvel United sized box.

This is a fairly traditional expansion, in that it offers 5 new heroes and 2 new Villains (but who operate as a single unit, see below). There are some new rules, but they aren’t really any game changers (like there were with X-Men Marvel United: Days of Future Past, see here). We’ll discuss those change below. The rulebook is pretty minimal: it’s a one-sided page.

There’s some new tokens for Ice Man, 3 new Locations, and the Danger Room!

There’s 5 new Heroes and 2 New Villains (taken as a pair when playing). Even though Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are heroes later on in the comic book world, they are JUST villains in this expansion: there’s no good guy cards for them here! This seems like a missed opportunity, because I don’t see them as heroes in any of the other expansions. EDIT: See correction after the Conclusion!

The minis are, just like all Marvel United minis, really nice.

Overall, the game looks just like I’d expect: good. It’s also consistent with other expansions so this fits right in the Marvel United universe.

Training Cards

Since this expansion represents a young, naive group of X-Men, one of the new rules to make the game a little easier is the Danger Room attachment (see above). On your starting Location, players can use the Danger Room (one they’ve dealt with the threat there) to get an ALTERNATE END OF TURN effect (see above) which gives a training card.

Instead of the normal “good thing” you get at the end of the turn, you can choose to get a training card instead. See Beast’s training card above. These training cards don’t count towards other cards limits, so you can have as many of them as you want! Some (like the permanent above) are permanent attachments to give your young X-Men some extra abilities to help them out. Others are one-shots you can use later.

By my second game of First Class, I was embracing the training cards pretty heavily (see above: each mutant has at least one).

If I am playing with a new player who loves the X-Men but is a little intimidated by Marvel United, I would probably add the Danger Room/Training cards: They make the game a little easier.

Chaos

Although incredibly thematic to Scarlet Witch’s Chaos Magic, the Chaos Magic threats (above) are something to be leery of in a beginner’s game. If you end your turn on a Location with Chaos Magic, you will simply play a random card at the start of the next turn. While you can work with this/around this, be very careful to steer naive/new players away from these Locations. It is NOT FUN to just randomly play cards!

If you want to turn off new players to Marvel United, by all means, start them on a Chaos Magic space. My first game started like that and it was not fun.

A Panorama of Solo Games

I have been able to play both two hero and three hero solo games, and they worked great.

Cooperative Play

This was a pretty typical cooperative Marvel United game: it was fun using Ice-Man’s token to have an “Ice Slide” to allow us to move quickly between Locations.  We had a good time.

Conclusion

X-Men: Marvel United First Class is a fine expansion. The lack of Hero cards for Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver was a little bit of a disappointment, but the 5 New Heroes made up for that. I think, in general, this expansion (with the base game) might be a place I’d start new players! The Danger Room/Training Room attachments can give the new players a little extra oomph to enjoy the game. I would just be very careful to avoid the Chaos Magic threats on the first set-up: those can be incredibly frustrating for new players.

EDIT: Update! Careful reader John Q.T. Nguyen . pointed out that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were part of the Stretch Goals for the first Marvel United Avengers Kickstarter! See below!

It turns out I had Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver all along! This does reinforce my point about the Expansion Absorption being very difficult with so much Marvel United stuff! Anyways, special thanks to John Q.T. Nguyen!!

Sub Terra II: Inferno’s Edge is a cooperative tile-laying game (with push-your-luck elements) for 1-6 players. It’s a stand-alone game in the Sub Terra universe. The II might imply you need the original to play, but you don’t: this is a stand-alone sequel. This game was on Kickstarter back in November 2019. But I didn’t back it.

Part of the reason I didn’t back Sub Terra II was because I already have Sub Terra (the original): See above. I like the original, and it came out quite a bit in my game groups for a while, but it had fallen off the radar: the original Sub Terra was a just a teensy too random for some of my groups. I think I was worried Sub Terra II would simply be more of the same. Would it be worth buying it for “almost” the same game? In the end, I needed $40 or so to make a GameNerdz order get free shipping, so I added Sub Terra II in to my order. I am interested in the base game, I am just not interested in the $100s in expansions for the game. (The Kickstarter all-in was more than I wanted for a tile-laying game).

This just arrived a few weeks ago! (Late Dec. 2022,/Jan 2023) Let’s take a look!

Components and Gameplay

See the box with a Coke Can for scale. It’s a deepish box, but not too tall or wide: it’s about the size of a piece of paper.

In the game, each player takes on the role of one or more explorers: ideally, each player gets their own explorer, but there must always be at least 3 explorers in play, so a solo game will get 3 explorers, and a 2-player game will probably have 4 explorers (2 per player).

Each explorer has their own corresponding meeple to mark where they are on the board.

Each explorer also has their own unique powers: see some examples above.

Each player has two action points: on their turn, they can typically do 2 actions (some actions cost 2 action points). They can do any of the things above, which are pretty much what you expect (move, reveal a hidden tile, run, etc). Interestingly, players can also choose to exert themselves for one damage to get an extra action.

At the end of each player’s turn, some “bad news” happens! The player, after using two action points, gets some Bad News from one of the bad news dice! See the orange dice above.

This is a tile-laying game: the explorers need to explore the temple (laying tiles to “explore”), find 3 keys, retrieve the artifact, then finally escape with their lives! This is cooperative, and it’s best if all players survive, but if some players don’t make it out alive, everyone else still wins … to be clear: there is no incentive to subvert other players! The game is fully cooperative!!! It’s just that, sometimes, circumstances dictate that not everyone can survive, even if players try really hard, so the game recognizes this reality and allows for most people to survive. It’s really not a semi-co-op. (Except Joe might play it that way. Joe.)

The tiles (after being punched out), end up in the bag above. This bag was “okay”: I think it might have been a little small. When players “explore”, they draw a tile and put it on the board:

As the game unfolds, the template starts to take shape … (my example above is off because I took the left boundary too far .. mea culpa!).

This game has push-your-luck elements because you have to choose between revealing and/or moving as you play. If you just reveal a title, you won’t suffer the ill effects of the revealed tiles (the white Guide just REVEALED the trap tile above, so he doesn’t suffer the effects), but now he has to spend an extra action to MOVE to it. The push-your-luck comes in if you decide to MOVE and REVEAL in one move (called EXPLORE)! You get more done, but you may move to a room that hurts you! If you play too conservatively, you may never get the temple explored in time! If you play too aggressively, you may die quickly from ill effects! It’s a push-your-luck game.

The volcano tile (above) is your timer: at the end of every round, the volcano tracker moves up one (for a beginner game, you can see the tracker start on place 27). If the volcano erupts before the players have found the Artifact, they lose!

Once the volcano erupt and you have the Artifact, you can still escape … you are just racing for your life against the lava flow! Tiles starts turning to lava and follow you Get out! Get out! See above!

Luckily, the Veteran above was able to get the Artifact!

And they all made it back to the entrance! Note, that the game gets significantly harder after Artifact is obtained: you’ll be rolling two bad news dice per turn!

The components look really nice, are very readable, and fairly thematic. I suppose I would have preferred some cooler tokens other wooden meeples, but they were fine. (I suspect the Kickstarter had some really great component upgrades).

Rulebook

The rulebook was good.

The first few pages contained nice annotated Components list and Introduction: they worked fine.

The Set-up was easy to use and well annotated. See above.

The main game ideas are discussed quickly and easily after your set-up. See above.

The rulebook had great pictures and a nice easy-to-read font. Overall, a very good rulebook.

The rulebook passed the Chair Test with flying colors: an A+! It fits perfectly on the chair next to me, so I can keep it open and easily available.

This was a good rulebook, but I do have a few very minor complaints.

First, they didn’t use the back cover to convey any game info. This is a wasted opportunity in my eyes, but it’s definitely personal opinion: it’s not a flaw.

Second, the rulebook was 32 pages. I love the big font, but maybe it was a touch TOO big? I felt like there could have been a slight adjustment of whitespace, margins, and font size to make the rulebook just a smidge smaller. But I shouldn’t complain, because I’d MUCH rather rulebooks err on the size of “font too big” than the other way around! It’s just that a 32-page rulebook looks a little daunting, but it’s quite good: It’s easy to read and has lots of pictures.

Solo Play

The back of the box proclaims 1-6 explorers (see above), but the solo rules are a little hard to find.

The solo rules are in a parenthetical expression on page 4 of the set-up: I actually missed them the first few times through the rulebook. It’s just one sentence: If playing solo, you can choose three to six explorers to control.

The difficulty chart chart shows a minimum of three Explorers (and a max of six), so if you miss that single solo sentence, you might deduce “OHHHH!!! A Solo game has the solo player taking the role of three explorers!” It’s not real emphatic: part of the reason I knew this was because the original Sub Terra worked the same way!! So, you must always have at least 3 explorers for any game, and a max of 6 explorers. This game does follow Saunders’ Law.

So, the solo player must rotate through three players as he plays. The variable powers are fairly straight-forward, so there’s not too much context-switching as the solo player rotates through explorers. That’s always the question when you play multiple positions, right? “How much context-switching is there?” There’s not too much context-switching here: It’s very manageable.

In general, I liked the solo game. I would play it again. Most importantly, it gave me the chance to learn it so I could teach my friends.

Cooperative Play

My group had a good time playing this!  We liked that the powers were very different and felt “powerful!”  When we used our powers, a lot happened!  My rogue was fantastic at avoiding the traps (I enjoyed pointing out this was a Mark IV trap: don’t step here), the Marksmen kept the guardians under control, the Aristocrat kept the ruins under control (by placing her Journal tiles exactly where we needed to avoid Ruins problems), and the Veteran kept us going!  They were all arguably critical to getting the game done, and we really enjoyed that!

The game also seemed to elicit a fair amount of talk: we cooperated, but we still had our own turns and a lot of agency.  There were a few turns (especially for the Veteran) that weren’t fun because she got stuck (see Randomness and PTSO  sections down below), but in general we had a good time.

We had a winning game, and it was dramatic and fun.

Rating: In general, the group seemed to think 7s to 7.5s all around. Everyone had a good time (modulo a few issues we’ll discuss).

It’s always a good sign when the group says “I’d love to see how this game played out if we used very different characters”.  They want to play again!

Things I Liked

I liked that there was a decent amount of agency in the game: For example, I can choose to “exert” myself to get an extra action point. That allows the players some latitude to “try real hard” when its really needed! That’s very thematic that every so often I can “exert” and get myself out of an obvious bind! I am not always stuck at just 2 actions points: extra agency.

The components are pretty darn fantastic.

I like that the tiles are very easy to read, have some cool spot art on them, and the iconography is pretty easy to read.

I like that the game is simple, easy to teach, quick to set-up, quick to tear-down. The 60-minute gameplay is pretty accurate (unless you are prone to analysis paralysis). Sub Terra II has a nice “simplicity” permeating it.

I want to give a major shoutout for the new idea of “running out of the temple while the lava follows you!” That is so cool of a mechanism (lava following you), and it is just flipping over the tiles as you run out. It looks great and is very thematic. It’s so simple to do, but it’s such a nice touch.

The explorers powers were cool and very interesting: those powers seemed more useful/powerful than the original Sub Terra.

It’s a pretty nifty game.

Minor Complaints

I wish the bag to hold the tiles was just a little bigger. It felt cramped and a little small.

I wish a few more rules having to do with “knockdown” had been specified. Is the explorer above allowed to move away? He’s at 0 health, so all he can do is move, but the guardians do damage when you move away? How do you rectify that? Also, do the powers of the guide still work when he’s knocked-down? Probably? These are minor questions, but I can’t be the only one who had these questions. A FAQ might have been helpful.

You’ll notice that I messed up and went “too far to the left” with my temple: you are supposed to only go as far left and right as the leftmost and right most edges of the bottom piece. Whoops! It’s in the rulebook, but I think a simple component (a piece of paper? A cardboard edge?) would have helped me to not make this mistake. It’s really minor, but it could have been fixed.

Actually, though, I do have a solution that comes with the game!! In the future, I will use the punchout skeletons to enforce the edges! See below. (Hey, this is another reason to keep Punchout Skeletons!)

Major Complaint: Lack of PSTO

But my biggest complaint, without a doubt, is the lack of Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO). I can’t tell you how many times I had one of the explorers “do nothing” on their turn because they had to wait for someone else to do something out of sequence! Consider the case above: I’d really like the Guide to venture into the room above and do two looks around him (his special ability). But he can’t, because the room has a pit trap and he’ll likely die! Luckily, the Rogue is with us! As long as he Rogue is with us, we can avoid traps! Huzzah!

But …. because the Guide goes before the Rogue in turn order (and turn order is very specific: see above), the Guide would have to wait for an entire round to go up! So, the Guide does nothing for a turn. Not fun.

It seems very thematic to say “Rogue! Why don’t you go in that room first and I’ll follow!” It’s very thematic, and probably what we’d do in real life!! I feel like this game would be a lot more fun with Player Selected Turn Order: allow the players (per round) to choose the order of their turns! More importantly, it allows players to avoids turns where you don’t do anything.

I understand that Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO) makes a game harder to learn/deal with (see a long discussion of PSTO here), but I think it would easy to notate each taken turn with a simple token (just flip it when your turn is over).

For some reason, the lack of Player Selected Turn Order dates this game for me: it feels like more and more modern cooperative games are embracing this mechanism (The Reckoners, Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance (which we’ll see soon), CO-OP: the co-op game, to name a few) because PSTO makes the game feel more cooperative! We all decide, as a group, the best way to proceed through the temple, and can change as circumstances change! It gives us choice! Agency!

I can see it being harder to teach newer gamers PSTO: it’s not what most newer gamers are used to! So, maybe some chart like this in the book would help:

• Newer Players: Use the tradition round structure: clockwise order
• Advanced Players: use coarse-grained Player Selected Turn Order! Players choose per round the order that each explorer acts: For example:  Player 1, then Player 3, Then Player 2. 
  If you use use coarse-grained PTSO: increase the volcano tracker by 5
• Very Advanced Players: use fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order! Players choose the order of actions and may intersperse actions: For example: player 1 takes action 1, player 2 takes action 1, player 2 takes action 2, then player 1 takes action 2. 
  If you use use fine-grained PTSO: increase the volcano tracker by 10

Of course, PSTO makes the game “easier to win”, so you probably want some adjustment of the difficulty: luckily, Sub Terra II makes that easy by just adjusting the timer on the volcano.

Is It Still Too Random?

In a word, yes, but I like some of the new stuff the game does. I think the randomness of Sub Terra II is consistent with the amount of randomness in the original Sub Terra, if maybe a touch less random.

I understand that randomness can breath life into a by-the-numbers game, and I do think the amount of randomness of Sub Terra II is apropos to the game. That cave-in at “just the wrong time” is both infuriating and exciting! It’s such a thin line: too much randomness can feel crippling, too little randomness can feel predictable. This game can feel too random at times, but it generally straddles the line between too much randomness and too little randomness fairly well. Again, some of my gaming groups thought it was a shade too random.

For example: in one cooperative game, all the collapsing caverns came out right next to each other (see above). It was very scary trying to figure out how to deal with that: it was exciting and fun, but at the same time, had the randomness gone slightly awry, we would have had no chance whatsoever.

That swingy randomness is a double-edged blade: it cuts both ways! Exciting and tense but possibly unwinnable. And Sarah echoed the thoughts of my game groups from years ago, “It was fun but it feels like it could be too random“.

Needs a FAQ

Every time we play, I feel like a question comes up that we can’t answer.  For example: In one play, the final Sanctum tile could only go two places, but there two were competing concerns: put it as far as possible but keep within the boundaries.  As a two-tile final tile, you could argue it couldn’t go to the furthest away (upper right) because the artifact would actually extend over the boundaries!  We argued “maybe that was thematic” because that’s why the artifact is so hard to get to! But, if we have to keep within the boundaries, it must go in the other spot.  But what if the other spot had the same problem?  It was very close to being right on the edge too … what would we done had that happened?  (Probably just chose the furthest and moved forward, but it felt like it was underspecified).

Every game I have played, some question has come up that the rulebook didn’t quite answer. Most of them were simple, and we could always move forward with a reasonable guess, but I feel like this game needs a FAQ! Little questions seemed to crop up a lot. Minor ones, to be sure, and not enough to hold up the game, but enough that it was annoying.

Conclusion

Sub Terra II is a minor improvement over Sub Terra: the theme might be more interesting, but some of the new ideas are quite invigorating! The most interesting new idea, both mechanically and thematically, is the lava chasing you out at the end of the game! It really adds to the excitement of the end game!

Do you need both Sub Terra and Sub Terra II? Probably not: they are similar enough that you could do with just one or the other. I suppose it really just depends on which theme speaks to you more: trying to escape a cave (Sub Terra) or hunting for treasure in a temple (Sub Terra II).

I think that, for a variety of reasons, Sub Terra II (and Sub Terra) should be embracing Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO). The lack of PTSO is sometimes very glaring in the game: sometimes players can’t do anything because of the constrained player order!! I feel the lack of PSTO makes the game feel a little dated. Without PTSO, I’d probably give this is a 7.0/10. If we add PSTO into the mix, I think that jumps it up to a 7.5/10 or more! This game just feels like it needs a little more agency to counteract some of the randomness and empty turns.

We had fun. We’d play again.

Artisans of Splendant Vale was on Kickstarter back in October 2021, and just delivered last week Dec 31 2022. It had originally promised delivery in August 2022, so it was about 5 months late.

I think we’ll still count this is a 2023 release even though it got here Dec 31 2022.

Artisans of Splendent Vale is a cooperative adventure legacy game for 2-4 players. I was very interested in this game, because it was by designer Nikki Valens who had done The Initiative, one of my favorite games of 2021! The Initiative made the #2 spot on the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021 … see review here, so I was very interested in seeing what this game was.

The Elephant in the Room

Before you get any further, there are a few things you should know. If you have trouble with non-binary characters, non-traditional pronouns, gay, lesbian, or transgender characters, you probably should probably stop reading now. This game embraces those worlds fully: the four main characters are very steeped in their gender/sexuality: one character is gay, one is transgender and so on. The theme is not just pasted on: as the stories in the game progress, events further these characters in those areas.

It’s probably best to stop reading now and avoid Artsians of Splendent Dale if you have issues with any of that. This game embraces the stories and lifestyles of these characters.

Unboxing and Components

This box is surprisingly large!

But the art is very nice … it almost reminds me of a kid’s storybook.

To be clear: this is a campaign legacy game! You will put stickers on forms, write forever notes on characters, and generally mark up sheets. My version came with one recharge pack (with new sets of sheets to reset the game): see above.

The rulebook is very fanciful. We’ll discuss its contents below.

The game comes with an folded map: this is the land we will explore! See above and below.

The front of the map is the lands you will explore. On the back side of the map is the ledger of your adventure (this is one of the legacy components that will be marked up: see below).

As you explore, this map is marked up further and further, on both the front and the back.

There’s a bunch of punchouts: most of them are status/condition tokens (sick, slowed, etc) and some dials for health.

Next come the character sheets: these will be written on and change as you play through the campaign.

There are exactly four characters in the game, and they are all very different! They have different level-up/tech trees, different backstories and the like. So, the character sheets are all distinct and very different from each other.

Up next is the Action Scene Book (called storybook in other games). It’s really nice! See above and below.

The Action Scene Book is essentially a map of where you fight bad guys (like the storybook from Jaws of the Lion: see our review here). We’ll take a closer look at the map later.

Under all those components are the main character books and tuck boxes.

These character books are fantastic! I feel like I just went to the book store and got a new collection of books! There look like a series like Chronicles of Narnia or something!

These books are really nice: see below.

The rest of the tokens are in the box:

Most of these tokens in the box are the monsters meeples you’ll be fighting: see above.

The four main characters in the story (see above) have markers that almost feel like erasers … I made the joke that they were erasers because we might lose a limb! I realized that after I said it, because this is a legacy game, I might be right! Oops, I hope that’s not a spoiler.

As the story progresses, a lot of items and stickers (like I said, this is a legacy game) come from the card repository: see above. 

As a legacy/campaign game, you will have to save state between games, so there are little tuck boxes to store your cards and such.

In the end, this is a beautiful, colorful production with great components. See above.

Rulebook

I didn’t love this rulebook. I felt like it should have had a better vector into getting us into our first game (a First Play book like Tainted Grail would have been nice). The rules were all there, but a little scattered throughout.

As we played, I was the one who had to look up the rules, and many times I kind of struggled to find stuff. I generally found everything, but I didn’t love the organization.

It seemed almost like there was too much white space? I’d rather related things be clumped closer?

In the end, we were able to play the game using the rulebook, but it just seemed like the rulebook could have been better: maybe a First Play, less white space/better layout, slightly different organization?

We learned the game from the rulebook. I guess it did its job.

Solo Play

This game does NOT follow Saunders’ Law: there are no solo rules for this game! This game is strictly 2-4 players.

After opening everything up, I thought “I can just play two characters and alternate between them.” Nope! Each character has to operate their own book, backstory, relationships with other characters, … and I think it just looked like too much work to try to play multiple characters at once for the solo mode.

Is there a way to play a single character? Maybe you could read through the storybook as a single character, but when you get to combat, that won’t work: the combat part of the game has been balanced for 2-4 characters, so you need at least 2 characters there.

I think if this were my favorite game of all time, or I were on a desert island with the game, I think I could handle playing multiple positions.

In the end, however, this is a social game: the characters tell the story together, they work together, and they read their books together. The lack of a solo mode is disappointing (I couldn’t learn this for my group), but it is understandable. This is a complex game that is quite social and cooperative.

What is This Game?

This game surprised me because I was expecting a simple storybook game, but I got a pretty complex beast! it seems to be an amalgam of three major games:

1. Crusoe Crew or Sherlock Holmes: Baker Street Irregulars 
2. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion 
3. Forgotten Waters

What do we mean by that?

Shared Script Game: Like Crusoe Crew and Sherlock Holmes: Baker Street Irregulars

Crusoe Crew was a collaborative storybook or script book game from a few years ago (see our review here and here): players together read from their books at the same time (see above). These books are like scripts from a movie … everyone is following along with their own copy. These books are Choose Your Own Adventure type scripts: players would read along together and occasionally come to a decision point. At the decision point, players decide as a group where to go next! What’s interesting is that occasionally the books will slightly diverge for one character! For example, one character may be very tall, so he’ll read a slightly different entry because he can see something up on the shelf!! But the stories always converge back to the main plot. Players read cooperatively from their books. Both Crusoe Crew and Sherlock Holmes: Baker Street Irregulars (see review here and here) were fantastic experiences in this shared script game.

Artisans of Splendent Dale absolutely follows this model! Players read out out of their books together, with occasional diverging text (that always converges back), with special entries for each character.

You can see what a book looks like above: entries are labelled with numbers so you know where to go.

These storybooks are mostly text, with a few pictures (as opposed to more cartoons and maps), but it serves a shared script that everyone is reading. I love this format, and this was the main reason I got this game! See above as Andrew and Sara read together from the shared books. I loved both Crusoe Crew and Sherlock Holmes: Baker Street Irregulars, with the latter making the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2020! So, I loved the shared scripts (character books) here!

But this game is much more than just a shared script game.

Fighting Game: Like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

This game flits between “reading the shared script together” and “fighting stuff”.

When you fight stuff, Artisans of Splendent Dale feels like a simplified Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion.  When you are ready to fight, you open up the storybook and fight some bad guys! 

The storybook in Jaws of the Lion was the major advancement in Gloomhaven system: it was so easy to get set-up! Just open the book (instead of hunting for tons of cardboard in the original Gloomhaven).  See our review here.  See the Jaws of the Lion storybook below.

The fighting  for Artisans, though, is simplified in many ways: the bad guys are just little wooden meeples (see above)  [instead of tons of punchouts], and the initiative order is already set-up (below) [instead of being determined by lowest card]  …

In general, the set-up is very quick: just open the book and set-up some meeples!

This system worked well!

I was surprised how much combat there was in the game: I had expected more of the shared script game. About a half of the game is combat, and the other half is reading and advancing your characters.

Advancement: Like Forgotten Waters

I expected this to be a game with character advancement … it is a legacy campaign game after all! What surprised me is how much that advancement lifts from Forgotten Waters it was! See our review here.

In Forgotten Waters, you fill in little dots in a “constellation” as you advance.  When you get to major points on your grid (the ! above), stuff happens. This is the only game I’ve seen this with  this “constellation system”.

… until I got to Artisans of Splendent Dale! As you get more more experience points, you fill in the dots in your “constellations” and fill in towards certain items/abilities you want … very much like Forgotten Waters. Except every character is very very different. Maybe that’s why they chose the “constellation” system: it works well for disparate characters.

Dice For Actions

Artisans of Splendent Dale uses the “roll dice to get actions” mechanism. One your turn, you roll a number of dice, and add them to the pool. On the storybook pages, you get two actions per turn, using the dice for attack, movement, boosting, “wild”, and defending (depending on what’s showing). Once you use a dice for its action, it leaves the pool.

Generally, I don’t like this mechanism: we discussed this heavily in our Batman: Shadow of the Bat review as well as our King of Monster Island review. It always feel like you have do what the dice tell you to do, not what you want to do.

This mechanism didn’t seem too bad when we played Artisans: it seemed like we were generally able to do what we needed. I still don’t love this mechanism: Batman: Shadow of the Bat should have been in my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022, but it didn’t make the list solely because of this mechanism.

Overall, Artisans of Splendent Dale worked okay with the “roll dice to get actions” mechanism. I still just don’t love that mechanism.

Cooperative Play

The cooperative play worked well in this game! The game suggests you have “one reader”, but we chose to rotate the reader (from the script books) so that everyone had a chance to read frequently. I would have probably made that the default rule: “rotate the reader every turn”: this promotes more involvement from everyone.

Also, even though I didn’t love the dice combat (“role for your actions”) with the shared pool, the shared pool did seem to elicit more cooperation: “You need to leave me an attack symbol so I can take out that guy!” Just having the shared pool seemed to encourage a little more togetherness.

Generally, the game did elicit a lot of cooperation: it really worked well on that front.

What I Didn’t Like

I didn’t like the “roll dice for actions” mechanism, but it wasn’t terrible. It worked.

One thing that I really didn’t like was the enemy actions weren’t well specified. The rulebook (see page 19 above) literally says “Instead, just go with the most obvious best choices you can see”. We spent an entire blog entry talking about how we didn’t like this in the Resolving Ambiguity in Cooperative Games. We made it work, it wasn’t a big deal to the group, but it did rub me the wrong way. If we compare the enemy actions rule to something like Gloomhaven, where they are incredible well-specified, Artisans looks very poor. However, that specificity in Gloomhaven has a cost: much more complex rules. I know why Artisans of Splendent Vale chose to let the characters run the bad guys in a more free-form way: in a word, simplicity. But it still rubs me the wrong way: it always feel like a cop out.

But the game worked: my group as a whole didn’t have a problem with the free-form enemy rules.

What I Liked

The components are pretty darn amazing.

The script books are fantastic: easy to read, well-written, and nicely laid-out. They work well.

The combat story book (Action Scene books) works well.

The Characters

The game can be played with fewer than 4 characters, but to get the most of out of the story, you should probably play with the full character count: each character seems to have an interesting story that unfolds and helps reveal plot points.  We saw early on that we would have missed certain entries in the character books if we didn’t have all the characters.

Also, the characters in the story are well-defined: they seem to all have very strong personalities which will influence how you play them!  When you play Javi, you will tend to be more stoic.  When you play Ramani, you will need to be very inquisitive and ask lots of questions, almost to the point of annoying (if you believe Soraya’s POV).  You will have to play that character’s personality to get the most out of the game.  If you were hoping to just lightly engage, the characters don’t really allow that: that that for what you will.

Conclusion: The Story Progresses

There is a lot here! The script books are pretty huge, and the overall story looks like a fairly long campaign. And the components are phenomenal.

My group really liked this game: they want to keep playing! The general feeling was that Artisans of Splendent Vale feels a lot like a simplified Gloomhaven with a cuter theme, but with a much better story (as guided by the script books like Crusoe Crew).

But be careful: that theme is a little misleading: it is still very cute, but the game still has mature elements. One of the things that came up was “my sex life”: it wasn’t explicit or anything, but apparently we will see discussions of our sex lives in the game? That makes me think some people might have problems with the 14+ age range? I guess it depends on what you think is an appropriate age to discuss your sex life (of your character). Be aware if it might be an issue for you or your group?

Interestingly, none of my game group is transgender, gay, or lesbian, so we weren’t necessarily the target audience (or arguably, we were). We just enjoyed this for the game it was: it was a good game. I suspect the theme will be what entices many people to the game, but luckily the game is good. Just be aware that this game is much more complex than it looks: this isn’t a game for newer players without much experience in the world of modern games. (Seriously, it felt a lot like Gloomhaven is lots of ways).

Overall, my group liked this game better than I did: they have entreated me to keep playing! My problem is mostly I don’t love the “roll dice for actions” mechanism, but I do love the script books, streamlined combat, and the quality components. I think my group would give this a 7.5/10.0 and I’d probably give it a 7/10. I suspect some people will adore this game and give it an 8 or better! Hopefully this review will help you decide if you would like this game.

Appendix

The joke was that I didn’t like the game as much as the group because I was the one who had to handle the condition tokens! Our second combat had so many conditions to keep track of! Oof! This is another way that Artisans is like Gloomhaven: there are lots of conditions in the game that change up combat. Tip: Maybe consider sharing the responsibility of the conditions when you play so one person doesn’t get stuck with all the tiny condition tokens …

As we close down 2022, we saw some great cooperative games and expansions: see our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022 and Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2023! But what’s coming next year?

From last year’s list (Top 10 Anticipated Board and Cards Games of 2022), many didn’t even arrive for us to examine. Of the 10 (+1 Honorable Mention) we anticipated last year, six of them still haven’t arrived (The Stuff of Legend, Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth, Earthborne Rangers, Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread, Rat Queens: To The Slaughter, and Union City Alliance). Here are the ones that did arrive and we have been looking at:

• Legends of Sleepy Hollow: We liked this one enough that made out Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022! See our full review here to see if you might like it.
• Tokyo Sidekick:  Not only did we like Tokyo Sidekick, it made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022! See our full review here.
• Sentinels of Earth Prime: After a 5-year delay (yes, 5 years!) we finally got this and reviewed it here. It also made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2022!
• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: Although primarily a solo game, this game had us thinking about things like Resolving Ambiguity in Cooperative Games.  See our review here, This one just squeaked onto our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022.
• Jurrasic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar.  We received this, we have been playing it, but don’t have enough information for a review yet.

Below are our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2023!  Like years before, we will provide a link the the project (either Kickstarter, Gamefound, or BacketKit), the promised delivery date, and a quick summary from BoardGameGeek!

10. Gathering Gloom: A Killer Co-op Game for 1 to 5 monsters

Platform: Kickstarter Gathering Gloom: A Killer Co-op Game for 1 to 5 monsters
Promised Delivery: September 2023
Summary: The Charming family is an eclectic family that lives in a manor on top of the hill in the town of Banebridge somewhere in New England circa 1932. They own the local mortuary as well as a mining company. All they want to do is live in peace, take care of their ancestral home, run their businesses, and get along with the townsfolk. The villagers of Banebridge, however, see it differently. Many of them are firm of the opinion that at least some if not all of the “Charming” family are up to nefarious deeds and are, in fact, “monsters” of various sorts. To that end, they are constantly turning up evidence that implicates members of the family in foul play. Some villagers even start stalking individual members. Sometimes (well, a lot of the time really), the family members are forced to take action to deal with especially difficult villagers or incriminating evidence. Actions include Murder, Terrify, Beguile, Deceive, Extort, Bribe, Coerce, and many more. Of course, the family would NEVER take such actions if the villagers weren’t constantly interfering.

We literally backed this on Kickstarter 3 times: it failed to fund the first two times, but their tenacity paid off and they finally funded!  This game looks really interesting … although the art may be divisive … but I am really looking forward to this “Adams Family” co-op game!

9. Tamashii: Chronicle of Ascend

Platform: Gamefound https://gamefound.com/projects/awaken-realms-lite/tamashii-chronicle-of-ascend
Promised Delivery: 2023???? 
Summary:  Tamashii is a cyberpunk adventure board game with a post-apocalyptic vibe. Players will struggle to survive and pursue their agendas in two worlds at the same time – the physical one, filled with deadly machines and merciless human survivors, and the virtual one, prowled by tracking software and vicious viruses.

Players will try to achieve their goals on a modular city map. They will find new locations, fight against strong enemies and search for important information and files needed to win the game.

The second part of the game takes action on a virtual map. Here you will try to hack your opponents, unlock special bonuses or get one-time bonuses for completing the sequences.

The game may be played in different scenarios. You might have to cooperate with other players, play against them or even make an alliances with your enemies. But watch every step you take; every conflict, cooperation or alliance might be a double-edged sword.

Another cyberpunk inspired game on this list!  We know that Awaken Realms make gorgeous and high-quality games, so hopefully this will be a great game as well!  We don’t really know a delivery date, but we hope it delivers in 2023.

8. Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall

Platform: Kickstarter Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall
Promised Delivery: August 2023
Summary: In Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall, a 1-4 player co-operative, quest-based RPG board game, players take on the role of seekers, adventurers who are fighting to push back the darkness threatening to change and destroy the world of Atios. The game plays as a campaign of 15+ quests, and each quest takes an average of 45-60 minutes to complete. Within each quest, players can expect to make choices related to adventures, battles, NPCs to speak to, and more. These choices create a branching story in the game, allowing the entire campaign to be replayable.

What makes this very interesting for us is that Kevin Wilson is on the team of designers: we love most everything he does!  The acrylic standees look great, and this looks like a lighter fun dungeon crawl campaign!

7. Daybreak 

Platform: BackerKit https://www.backerkit.com/c/alex-hague/daybreak
Promised Delivery: May 2023
Summary: Daybreak is a co-operative game about climate action. Each player controls a world power, deploying policies and technologies to both dismantle the engine of global heating and to build resilient societies that protect people from life-threatening crises.  If the global temperature gets too high, or if too many people from any world power are in crisis, everyone loses. But if you work together to draw down global emissions to net-zero, you all win!

Daybreak is a new cooperative game by Matt Leacock, the designer of Pandemic!  That fact itself is exciting, but the game looks really interesting romp like CO2, but perhaps a little easier!

6. Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor

Platform: Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/curiouscorres/doomensions-pop-up-mystery-manor
Promised Delivery: February 2023
Summary:  Investigators wanted they said… Safety guaranteed they said…

As a newly commissioned paranormal investigator gather your thick scrapbook of evidence and pay a visit to the fully assembled, 8 room, 3D popup Mystery Manor — no assembly required! Secrets lie hidden in every dark corner, behind every closed door. Making repeated exploration of the manor crucial to your investigation.

Packed with clippings, foldouts, and other curious ephemera, your case file will guide you through your time at the Manor. At key investigative milestones, your answer wheel will allow you to confirm your deductions before you return to the manor for more clues.

When did Pop-Up adventures become a thing?  We saw The Shivers deliver at the end of 2022: it’s an RPG lite adventure with pop-up rooms!  See our review here!  Now, we see a more “serious” mystery in Doomensions with more pop-up pieces!  This kind of reminds of The Cursed Dollhouse game … that’s great! We loved that game  See our review of thre Cursed Dollhouse here!

5. The Dark Quarter

Platform: Kickstarter The Dark Quarter
Promised Delivery: October 2023
Summary: In The Dark Quarter, a co-operative app-driven adventure game set in a dark, fantastical vision of 1980s New Orleans, players each take control of a Beaumont agent and work alongside one another to solve the worst crimes that New Orleans has to offer. It’s a world full of magic, where hexing curses are sold on every street, where voodoo priestesses and creatures of the night are lurking around every corner, and where even the most mundane crimes have a tinge of the supernatural to them.

Lucky Duck has done some pretty amazing app-driven games; They’ve also done a great job on mystery games like
Chronicles of Crime!  This looks like a more thematic supernatural Mystery deep in the lore of New Orleans!  We love our Mystery Games here at Co-op Gestalt, and we we are looking forward to this!  See our Top 10 Cooperative Mystery Games!

4. HACKTIVITY – A Highly Interactive Cooperative Board Game

Platform: Kickstarter link  HACKTIVITY – A Highly Interactive Cooperative Board Game
Promised Delivery: February 2023
Summary: A new virus has been detected in cyberspace. According to your investigation, the virus’ origin is linked to the activation of quantum generators, a new source of infinite energy. You and your team will dive into the depths of cyberspace and attempt to break through the generators’ defenses to short-circuit them once and for all. 
Hacktivity is a cooperative story-driven campaign card game for 1 to 4 players. Immerse yourself as one of the four unique characters.

There’s a lot of cyberpunk activity on the list this year!   This is another hacking game that looks cool as players play unique characters working together.  The component looks pretty cool too.

3. Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles + Doomed Run

Platform: Kickstarter (not up yet, here’s a link to the manufacturer’s site).  This should be up on Kickstarter in Feb 2022.
Promised Delivery: ???
Summary: A continuation of the Set A Watch series, Forsaken Isles features a new band of adventurers sailing to islands and other tropical locations to face new monsters and challenges.

Defend your campfire from a horde of creatures and unhallowed bosses using each hero’s unique abilities to survive the night. One hero stays in camp to rest and maintain the fire while the others battle. Each round, you draw a new location to setup camp in. Survive all 8 nights (rounds) to win the game.

This sounds very interesting, not only because they are adding more content to the Set A Watch system (which we love: we’ve reviewed it here and here, and it’s made our Top 10 Cooperative Dice Games as well as Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2021  as well as Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2019), but it’s also adding a campaign called Doomed Run! We are really looking forward to this! Hopefully we get it this year!

2. Legends of StormCity

Platform: Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printandfun/legends-of-stormcity
Promised Delivery: January 2023
Summary: Legends of StormCity is a roll & write game, in which each player takes the role of one of the heroes of StormCity who will fight against villainous leaders and their henchmen who intend to carry out their evil plans to conquer the city.

Each player will control a hero sheet in which they will write down the damage they receive and the powers they can use. Villains and minions have their own game sheets.

Given the ubiquity of Roll and Write games, it’s surprising how few cooperative Roll and Write games there are!  (One was the Escape Roll and Write which we reviewed here).  Legends of Storm City has the distinction of being a cooperative Superhero Roll and Write and a Print and Play from Kickstarter!  This looks really neat and we will probably review this ASAP!

1. Tesseract – A Cooperative Dice Manipulation Game

Platform: Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smirkanddagger/tesseract-a-cooperative-dice-manipulation-game/
Promised Delivery: July 2023
Summary: Tesseract is a compelling, cooperative dice-manipulation game for 1 to 4 players. The focal point of the game is a block of 64 dice, the Tesseract, which sits at the center of the board on a raised platform. Players will remove cubes to place in their individual labs, transfer them as needed to others, adjust the cube’s values and, importantly, isolate the cubes into the containment matrix, neutralizing them

Although the metal dice gives this Kickstarter some “wow factor”, the game also looks interesting: cooperative play rolling dice from the cube looks really interesting and different.  But, it’s probably #1 because of the metal dice.