Wait, didn’t we do this already?  Oh ya, here: Review of Thunderstone Quest – Part I. The Unboxing and First Impressions

Oh, that’s right!  No, this unboxing is for The Barricades Expansion.  This expansion adds a bunch of cards and a cooperative mode.  As you might recall from the last unboxing, I didn’t want to finish a full review until we got the co-op expansion in (after all, this is a cooperative board and card games site).  I was even a little grumpy because the original Kickstarter implied there would be a cooperative mode built in, but there wasn’t.  This is the second Kickstarter for Thunderstone Quest … adding the cooperative mode.

Expansion  or Stand-Alone?

If you look at the box, it’s HUGGE!  Well, at least the Kickstarter version is!  It’s as big as the original game!

And the original game is HUGGE!   Almost as big as the Sentinels box and Gloomhaven!  This is NOT a small expansion!  For purposes of this review, we’re going to call the expansion “Barricades”.

If you just look at the outside box, NOWHERE does it say that it’s an EXPANSION!  Really! You might think you can buy this and play it standalone.  Nope!  You need a some things from the original box (honestly, not that much: the gear tokens, the board, and some treasure).  If you ordered the Kickstarter version, you get a few overall “Thunderstone Quest” expansions:  “What Lies Beneath” and “Frozen in Time”.

With those, you get lots of new monsters, items, spells, weapons, heroes, ALMOST enough to play standalone.  Without those expansions, you do need a lot from the original box.

It’s a bit surprising how big the Barricades box is!  It holds the base Barricades mode and the two expansions that came with the Kickstarter, and there’s still plenty of room to spare!

Adds 5th and 6th Player

The Barricades expansion also adds two more boards and starting decks so you can play 5th and 6th player.  Honestly, we’ve wanted a 5th player the last few times we played, so this is definitely a good thing.

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good.  The graphic design is quite good, and it reads well.  It also describes all the changes needed for the co-op mode.  But here’s the thing: I had both rulebooks open the entire time, and these are BIG rulebooks!  So, sometimes I’d be thumbing through the main rulebook, and sometimes I’d be thumbing through the Barricades rulebook.

Since the barricades mode is quite different, or at least different enough, I wanted something that “integrated” the two rulebooks.  The back of the Barricades rulebook had a summary of this, which helped, but I really wanted a summary card!

Given all the amazing production in this game, a game summary card for (a) competitive mode and (b) cooperative mode would have gone a LOOONG way.

Components

Ya.  The components are awesome.

These are the Barricades!! (Can’t you tell from the labels?? Oh wait, they aren’t labelled!)

Prestige Class Boards

I had to add stickers to the Gameboard to update it: apparently, the second edition fixed this, but the original Kickstarter had problems.  So I had to a “legacy” change and add two stickers to the Marketplace and the Guilds.

No pressure!  I added the two new Stickers …

Gameplay

Thunderstone Quest (the competitive version) is a deck-builder: as soon as I tell you that, you know a lot about the game.  Then it adds some village visiting and dungeon delving to round out the experience and make it feel much more like a Dungeon Crawl adventure.

The cooperative version adds a bunch of rules to this.  It’s a lot more complicated than I expected: this is both boon and bane.  It’s complex enough to have rich gameplay, but it’s complicated enough to be confounding and confusing sometimes.  There are a lot of new rules.

New Rules: Guardian Dice

For a new added element of randomness, some dice (Guardian Dice) are rolled at the beginning of a turn.  The further into the game you get, the more dice you rule.   There are bunch of things these do, but usually, they set “how many monsters attack the town” (there’s much more to it, but that’s basically the idea).

Your job: Beat the big bad and protect the town!  If too many monsters attack the town, they destroy it and you lose!  Basically you lose if the town is destroyed.

New Rules: Barricades and Destruction Chits

The reason the name of the expansion is called “Barricades”: there are 5 barricades, one at each Village Location on the board.  If you want, players can spend 10 Gold to erect a barricade on a Location.  This is a way of “preventing” monster attacks.  The green side means the barricade is active (and can withstand one monster attack).  The red side means the barricade is down (inactive).  Here’s the set-up, showing the default barricades in inactive mode:

This basic idea (protect the Village) reminds me a lot of Battle for Greyport, another really good cooperative game.   Which do I like better?  Check back later … I don’t know yet …

Oh, when a Location is hit by a Monster, you put a destruction chit on the board.  Here’s my first solo game, near the end of the game: only two Locations of the village are active! the Bazaar (1 space!) and The Temple (1 space).   The rest of village has been destroyed by Monsters!

How do you prevent Monsters from destroying the village?  Basically, you head to the dungeon and hunt some monsters before they can get to town!

Village: “The scouts tell us that three Monsters are coming to the village to ruin us this day!”

Adventurers: “Well, we’ll go the dungeon and head them off … if we let some through, we’re sorry …”

New Rule: Guardians and their Lairs!

To win, you need to defeat the Big Bad, er .. the Guardian … a number of times.  Thematically, he keeps coming back even after you defeat him.  In the game above, a solo game, you need to defeat the Guardian 3 times to actually win.  How many times really depends on the number of players and the Guardian.

The Guardian’s Lair is new: it’s at the bottom of the dungeon, and the Guardian has a whole bunch of rules.  Remember those  Guardian Dice we rolled earlier?  They trigger some special abilities on the Guardian, which basically beat you up. The number of dice you roll is notated the upper right corner of the board (7 after turn 12+).

Although it looks like I am about to win … I lose on the next turn, because the Monsters destroy the Village!

New Rule: Prestige Class Boards

This is probably my favorite new set-of-rules in the cooperative version.   Each player chooses a prestige class board and puts it to the right side of their player board.  As you “level up” in the game, you gain new abilities.  And there are a lot of new abilities!  It’s fun to try to level-up your character!  The XP, which were essentially victory points in the original competitive version, are now used to power your level-ups.    The main choice you make in the coop mode: do you use XP to level-up you class board or to upgrade a hero?

The class boards are still available in the competitive version, but it’s a much harder decision!  Your hard-earned XP are victory points needed to win!  But, do you want to use them for your class?  Or upgrading a Hero?  What to do?

In only one game, I found these boards added a LOT of flavor, and since there’s 12 (!) of them, there’s a lot of variety.

Conclusion

After one solo play (and congratulations for adhering to Saunders’ Law),  I liked it!  The major downpoint: It was a lot of work to get through one play! I basically spent all day sleeving, getting through the rules, and playing my first solo game.  And I lost.  But I liked the game.  A lot!

I am looking forward to getting it to the table (hopefully at RichieCon 2019, coming next weekend!) and trying it as a full co-op game!  Stay Tuned!

Here’s a couple of cooperative games that have struck my fancy for May 2019.

1.VENOM Assault Reprint, plus expansion: Villains & Valor

Up again for a second try, this expansion for Venom Assault (a cooperative deck builder with a GI Joe theme) adds more cards and gives you the opportunity to get the base game as well as the expansion.  It didn’t quite fund the first time, so I am hopeful it funds this time: this game made my honorable mention of Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2017!  Give this one a try, I think you’ll really like it!

Check it out here!

2. Raid Boss: A Dangerous Cooperative Battle for 1-4 Heroes

The art in this game really captured my attention, and you all know I am a sucker for a co-op, especially with variable player powers!

Raid Boss: Incarnate is a 4-player cooperative boss battle designed to feel like an MMORPG dungeon encounter with all of the teamwork, strategy, and collaboration, but none of the endless grinding!

It looks like it has a comic-booky vibe and looks to be fun.

Check it out here!

The Crusoe Crew!

After feeling lackluster about a solo play from Part I of the review, what do we think now that we’ve played it with more people?

Components

One of the things we were worried about, happened: the binding isn’t great.

After a single play, one of the pages fell out of one of the books!  It’s not a deal-breaker: you can still play the game.  It’s just sort of frustrating.

Icons

After reading through the rules again with a big group, I understand the icons on the edges of the panels a little better now.  Sometimes, to make sure you have “solved” a puzzle, the Icon on one panel corresponds to the Icon on the “solved” panel.  So, that made more sense after playing some more.   The down arrow in the picture below is an example of that … the “K” .. is something else!

What didn’t make sense it why the instructions didn’t include just a few more Icons? For example, in the instructions below, the rules say:

…If a player sees a panel with their character’s initials in the corner of the panel …

So, there are at least 4 things wrong with these instructions!

1. Why not show the 4 initials?  They are actually very stylized in the game, and don’t “quite” just look like initials (see picture above with the “K”).  This is an opportunity to just show 4 Icons in the instructions.  When I go looking for Icons in the Instructions, my eye would catch those 4 Icons, and I would know what they are.  Instead, I am scratching my head.
2. They say “initials”, but they are really more “stylized” Icons, so it wouldn’t catch me the first time (or second) that they are initials … I would just think they were some random Icon!
3. Where are the Icons?  It should say “in the upper right corner”!
4. What are my initials?  I know each character is playing a different character, but the name is NOT actually on the front cover!.  It’s on the back, but kinda tiny.  As we played, I don’t think any of us ever “knew” our characters name.  I feel like it should have been more “prevalent”: In bold on the cover?  On each page at the bottom?  Something to emphasize or more!  Or maybe just the Icon on the bottom of each page?  The Icon that we don’t know???

Score

Holy cow was the scoring complicated!  There were several math majors/minors, engineers, computer scientists at our table and we had to re-read the scoring a few times to get it!  And it’s a tiny font!

I like that the scoring tries to adjust for age, number of players, etc.  At the end of the day, though, I think this game just probably just be played for “fun” and just compare how many gems you got for last time.

Interaction

Okay, this is where the game shines: multiple players!  When we played, we all interacted, made decisions together, congratulated each other when we solved puzzles, and had fun!   This is really the best part of the game, exploring as a team, being excited by finding stuff.  It really worked well for that.  We felt like we were exploring an island and solving puzzles.  And the time flew by! It was a blast!

Set-Up

One of Sarah’s favorite things about this game: there was almost no set-up: you pulled out the books and the maps and you started.  That’s it!   A few minutes the first time to read the instructions, but then it’s just “jump right in” after that!

Replayability

Even though the books are “smallish” (not giant tomes), we still don’t feel like we saw too much.  I was worried, because the books weren’t huge, that the replayability would be diminished.  Nope!   After playing through for an hour, there was still a TON of stuff to see!

Conclusion

My group really had fun!  We lost track of time for that 1 hour, playing and having fun! Everyone said they would play it again!   The cons (lackluster binding, small margins, wonky Icons, weird scoring) brought the group’s rating of this down, but we all ended up between 6 and 7 (on the BoardGameGeek rating).  I think in the end, it gets about a 6.8.

The Crusoe Crew was a Kickstarter from Van Ryder games  back in late 2018 (Nov. 12 2018 to Dec. 3).  It just delivered this last Friday (April 19th, 2019) when it was supposed to deliver in March 2019.  A month late?  That’s great by Kickstarter standards!

The Crusoe Crew is a cooperative adventure game for 1-4 players.  It’s a story telling game!  Each player takes one of 4 roles and works through an adventure together.  Let’s take a look at it!

Unboxing

Spoiler Alert if you are Junkerman or the Chamberlin family!  I got three copies of the game!

1. For me
2. For Junkerman, who’s an English teacher and finds games like this great for his classroom
3. For the Chamberlins: A family of 4 who loves games!

I had a good experience with Van Ryder’s previous work and wanted to share the love.

What’s going on with the box?

The box has one of the magnetic clasps and a little ribbon that you use to “pull” stuff out of the box.  It’s very nice quality.   The back of the box shows 4 players reading the 4 books together in unison: that’s the nature of this game!

Notice the 7+: this is perhaps aimed at younger players.

What’s in the Box?

The game’s main components are the books.   There is a map, which underscores the explorative nature of the game, which has has the instructions on the back.

The instructions are a little sparse, (and the font a little small for my taste), but I got going pretty quickly.

You probably want to make a copy of the instructions, or print out another copy (the Van Ryder web site has more) so you can mark it up and note things (days, inventory, rubies, etc).

Play

To play the game, 1-4 players each take of the booklets and assume the role of that character!  The players then read the books “together!”

In my first play, I played a solo game (yes, this game adheres to Saunders’ Law) and played the Grey Guy.  Each character has a special ability.  The Grey Guy is strong and can kick down/smash some things.  Other characters are taller, can climb, and solve puzzles.    This special ability gives each player an advantage and allows them different options in the game.

The game works by each player looking at their storybooks in tandem.  They all “basically” see the same frame on the same caption: note the numbers in the upper left of each picture.  So, players all turn (generally) to the same number and “see something”.  There are typically numbers on the picture which give you options: do you go to 55 or 77?  The players decide together and all turn to that caption.

What makes this different is that each player sees something “slightly” different. The Grey character is strong, so he might something that can be smashed, so he might see a different number hidden in the picture (43 is hidden in a wall).  That means he can do something the other characters can’t!  So, you decide as a team, do you want to do there? Does just one person go there?

You move through the story, picking up items and rubies.  You try to get the best score picking up as many gems as you can.

Solo Play Thoughts

This game reminded me a lot of Robit Riddle: I reviewed it about a year ago here and here.  It’s a story telling game which is much more text based.  It’s aimed at a younger audience.  The main difference was Crusoe Crew had more puzzles and much less reading: Crusoe Crew is a graphic novel!

I had the same problem with  Robit Riddle that I had with Crusoe Crew: I don’t think it works well with 1 player.   I am just flipping through pages by myself, just going through the motions.  I am looking forward to trying this with a group, because I think it will work much better!  Which is where Robit Riddle shined.

Inner Margins

I have a lot of Dungeons and Dragons Books.  My group just recently moved to D&D 5th Edition, but I was reminded of an issue that D&D 3.5 had that  Pathfinder fixed.

Look closely at the inner margins on the two books: Pathfinder has plenty of space, but the D&D 3.5 book has text smashed into the inner margins, so it’s hard to read!

Unfortunately, Crusoe Crew has the same problem: it’s kind of hard to look at the pictures who are smashed into the inner margins of the book:

It wasn’t a deal breaker by any means: I could see stuff I wanted, but I had to “force” the book open a little.  I am very worried this will cause the spine to crack and pages to fall out.  I am worried for the longevity of the books because to see things (“wait, is that caption 46?”) you have to kind of jam open the book.

The game still works, it’s just worrisome.  It’s also a little annoying and a surprising problem.

Thoughts For Now

So, this game has really great art.   Except for the margin issues, it’s easy to read the text in the book.  I wish the instructions had a little more info (What are those Icons in the picture above?  Nothing in the directions tells you that!  I supposed more plays will help me figure them out, but why have Icons if you explain them NO WHERE??), but in general it’s easy to jump right in.

I admit I am a little disappointed in a few aspects (margins, quality of binding, solo play, lacking instructions), but the art is really great and does really bring you into the game.  This game feels like Robit Riddle: I think it will shine at 2-4 players.  Stay Tuned for more plays.

There seems to be a flurry of interesting cooperative board and card games on  Kickstarter this Month!

1. Venom Assault Expansion: Villains and Valor

Venom Assault is a cooperative Deckbuilder set in the world of something legally distinct, but highly reminiscent of GI Joe!  Venom Assault made my 2017 list of Top 10 Cooperative Games (well, Honorable Mention, if only because it wasn’t clear if the release was late late 2016 or early 2017, depending on when you got your Kickstarter).

Now up on Kickstarter is an expansion: Villains and Valor!  Check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermouse/venom-assault-villains-and-valor?ref=762179&token=06e5a637

You can get the expansion and/or the original game!   The expansion adds the new idea of medals, for adding something else to be working towards on your turn!  Check it out!

2. Endangered

This dice driven cooperative game has the players working together to save a species from extinction!  The art by Beth Sobel and Ben Flores looks fantastic.  It looks a little different than most cooperative games (not just a Pandemic reskin), so check it out here!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/697528475/endangered-0

At the time of this writing, the game is very close to being funded!  Don’t let this “Endangered” game fall away!

3. Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time

This cooperative game is blowing up right now! See here!   I am not 100% sold on it, but it might be worth getting simply because there are so many stretch goals unlocked!  And there’s a lot of buzz, so I admit to being a pawn to Kickstarter hype and have backed it myself!   Check it out here and see if it’s something you are interested in!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/372651021/kingdom-rush-rift-in-time?ref=bggforums

I had some trouble with balance in Sidekick Saga.  In a couple of ways:

1. Issue 2 was too easy.  At a playtest in Las Cruces, the players just walked through it.
2. The more players there are, the easier the game

After tweaking the game a little, I had a playtest the other night.  And it went AWESOME.  I am so happy with the game right now.

Issue 2 Balance Issues

Issue 2 was too easy, so I stepped up the difficulty by replacing as card or two, and added another “Ice-a-cane” (Thanks to Cristina Mamar for the art!)

The interesting thing about this card: it can’t be hacked, attacked, put into disarray or anything.  The only thing you can do is (a) wait it out or (b) suck it up and barrel in.  With two of these on the board, the players were able to wait out one of them, but someone had to make the supreme sacrifice for the second one!  (If you don’t, you have no way to attack the main Villain and you will lose).

IT WAS AWESOME!  The players “argued” about who should make the supreme sacrifice!  And then in the end, one player did it before the other!  It totally reminded me of a “Teen Titans” comic where Cyborg and Raven argue about who’s going to make the sacrifice for the team … and then Robin does it while they arguing!

This is EXACTLY what I want in a comic book game!  Players arguing over WHO will make the sacrifice!   This is great. The only thing that would have made this better was popcorn. 🙂

Balance Overall

Early playtests led me to believe the game was much easier when 3 or 4 players played. Why?  It seemed in like a 2 player game, the characters are much closer to death, whereas in a 4 player game, the characters were all very healthy.  The game gets the same number of actions (total), Bad News cards (total) and actions, regardless of the number of players. So why the difference?

Because I didn’t vary the Hit Points.  With 2 Players at 12 Hit Points each, there are a “total” of 2*12=24 Hit Points for the Bad Guys to inflict to win.  At 3 Players, that’s 3*12=36 Hit Points. At 4 Players, that’s 4*12=48!

I learned one great lesson on balance from the “Warhammer Quest Adventure Card Game”: the number of hit points a character has diminishes as the number of players goes up.  My original playtests showed that making this exactly 24 Hit Points each time was TOO restrictive.  (4 Players would just DIE quickly as 6 HIT POINTS each was no where near enough).  Why?  Because of imperfect communications, sharing of cards is less direct, and you usually don’t do “perfect” strategy when you have more players.

So, this seemed like a good compromise.

At 2 Players: Each Player gets 12 Hit Points

At 3 Players, Each Player gets 10 Hit Points

At 4 Players, Each Player gets 8 Hit Points

That seems to keep the game balanced a little better.  Thanks Warhammer Quest!

Final Thoughts

I feel like Sidekick Saga is ready. I saw the closest game of Sidekick Saga I have ever seen the other night: Only 1 player was alive and she went in and just barely defeated the main Villain.  The Sidekicks won in the very last Act, even though the other 3 players were defeated.  It was Epic, Tense, Fun, Cooperative!  (And we got some new art … see above!  Each City Location has its own art now!)

Be on the lookout on Kickstarter March 5th!

Oh yes, we have a Board Game Geek entry as well.

It’s already been another year! 2017 was a great year (with a good top 10 cooperative games).  RICHIECon 2018 came and went …

2018 was an interesting year: it felt like most of the new cooperative games I played came out near the end of the year!  So, there are a few I didn’t play that are still on my pile!  (Notably, Detective, Direwild, Metal Dawn and a few others)  But, this was still a pretty awesome year!  There were a lot of Superhero games (which isn’t surprising if you know me).

As usual, we will invoke Saunders’ Law: (Does the cooperative game have a viable solo mode?) when we discuss this year’s top 10 cooperative games!

Honorable Mention: The 7th Continent

Playable Solo? Yes, you can play solo easily.

Strictly speaking, The 7th Continent came out LAST year.  But it never hit retail.  It was ONLY available on Kickstarter!  So, I missed out on the first printing.  Well, it turns out they had a 2nd Kickstarter in 2018, which is “arguably” a 2018 release?  Strictly speaking, it’s not a 2018 release, which is why it is an Honorable Mention for 2018.

This is a great adventure game with a lot of content: very choose your own adventure as you explore an evolving landscape.  Very fun!  This would have ended up in the top 3 if I were allowed to put it in this year’s list …

10. Batman: The Animated Series – Gotham City Under Siege

Playable Solo? Yes, it plays solo, but you have to play two characters.

This game has a lot going for it: it’s a Richard Lanius game, it has Batman, and you get to play SuperHeroes!  Batman, Robin, the Commissioner, and CatWoman!  I must admit, I was very nervous when I first played this game!  It looked a LOT like my own game Sidekick Saga,  but it turns it was very different.   This is a dice game, where you all work together to keep the City of Gotham from being destroyed by all the Villains in the Batman’s Rogue’s Gallery!  Each Superhero has his own way of mitigating/enhancing the dice roles, so each character plays very differently.  It’s not super deep (no pun intended), as you role dice and do the best you can to stop the Villains.  It’s a fun, medium filler!  (The rulebook could have used a little more work, but it was good enough).  Check it out!

9. Forbidden Sky

Playable Solo?  No! There’s no mention you can play it solo, although if you take 2 characters, you can play it solo.  It works well enough that way.

Forbidden Sky is the third in the “Forbidden” series, with Forbidden Island being the first (a good entry cooperative, especially for kids), and  Forbidden Desert being the second (an excellent medium-weight cooperative game).  In this game, the players collectively build a skyramp (see picture on box), trying to collect the lightning so they can launch their spaceship!  The players have to avoid high winds, the self-same lightning, all while trying to build this circuit to launch their spaceship.  Now, here’s the cool part: you actually build a real-life circuit where real electricity flows!  When you complete the physical circuit (which is on the game board), the rocket “launches”!  Well, it makes real-life noises pretending to launch!  It’s cheesy, but pretty cool.

I think Forbidden Desert is still my favorite of the series, but Forbidden Sky has high “coolness” factor building a real circuit, and it’s a fun game!

8.Robit Riddle: Storybook Adventures

Playable Solo? Yes, but the game doesn’t work well until about 3 players.

See my full review here: This was a Kickstarter that delivered in 2018.  It’s a fairly fun reading/storytelling game, aimed at a younger audience, but I find that I enjoyed it.   It has a lot of educational value (I know, usually the kiss of death), but it was fun.

7. 5-Minute Marvel

Playable Solo? No, not really.  You could kinda fake it with 2 characters, but this game is all about the interaction with multiple players.

So, my friend Sean brought this game over to one of our game nights.  We played it all the way through AND HAD A BLAST!  I picked it up myself soon after that! It’s a very lightweight filler game, but you can make it last as long you want!   Each session last 5 minutes, as all the players collectively and simultaneously play cards to defeat the bad guys.   If you continue to play, the bad guys get harder and harder!  It is a realtime cooperative card game, which I usually hate, but this one was fun!  Thanks Sean!   I think the Superhero nature of the game pumped my enjoyment a little …

6.  Renegade

Playable Solo?  Absolutely: A great solo mode where you play just one character!

This one was a surprise to me!  I almost backed the Kickstarter, but didn’t.  I got it later from a friendly retailer.   If I am in a bad mood, I was describe this as “fiddly Pandemic meets Hacker”.  BUT, I think a better description is “Dynamic Pandemic meets Hacker!”

Hacker is a old Steve Jackson game where you build a network of computers and work competitively to take over the most machines.    Renegade takes this premise and makes it cooperative as you all fight against the SMC!  (A Big Bad!)  It has a Pandemic-like mechanism as sparks collect, and three sparks cause a Guardian.  And sparks and guardians “collect” on your servers and partitions (instead of cities and countries of Pandemic), and if too many come out, you lose!

There’s a lot of rules to this game!  It’s very thematic, with neural nets and viruses for battling sparks, but there are a lot of rules!  I almost gave up on this game because the game seems sooo fiddly.  It could really use a player summary card.  BUT once I got into it, it was fun, challenging and very interesting!  Give it a whirl if you are looking for a more “complicated” Pandemic!

5.Sentinels of the Multiverse: OblivAeon

Playable Solo?  Inasmuch as Sentinels of the Multiverse plays solo.  See my post here on how to play Sentinels solo. You can apply that here.

It took quite a while (2+ years?) to go from Kickstarter to delivery.  But the game finally arrived in 2018!  This is more than just an expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse, this is a very different way to play the game!  See my reviews here and here!  This is a VERY fun Superhero romp!  It’s EPIC!   It’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS … I mean multiverse, as you are trying to stop THANOS … I mean OblivAeon from destroying the multiverse!!!

It’s a very long and fiddly game.  3+ hours and lots of rules to wade through.  BUT, it is the most EPIC SuperHero game you will ever play!   But, whatever you do, DO NOT play this until you have mastered the base Sentinels of the Multiverse game!  There’s just too much until you know the game.

It’s a fun game, as your heroes die (!), you move back and forth between realities and fight SO MANY BAD GUYS!  Fun.

4. Unlock! The Adventurers of Oz

Playable Solo?  Strictly speaking yes, but these games go SO MUCH better with a few people!

One of my favorite experiences of 2018 was playing this Unlock adventure with Delia and Sam at RICHIECon!  It’s one of the more intricate Unlock games, as you play all the 4 characters from the Wizard of OZ.  And without giving away too much, it has a really cool little cardboard device you use throughout the game.

Probably not a good Unlock game to start with, but once you kind of know how the Unlock games work, this one is fantastic.  Yes, I would play it again.

3.Heroes of Terrinoth

Playable Solo? Yes, but you have to play 2 characters at once (alternating)!  The game is balanced so that the Heroes always get 4 actions per turn, regardless of player count.

So, this game is a reskin of Warhammer Quest: the Adventure card game!

Unfortunately, Fantasy Flight and the Warhammer people (Games Workshop) “broke up” about a year ago, which meant Fantasy Flight couldn’t use the Warhammer IP anymore.

Which means NO MORE expansions and NO MORE game!  (The Warhammer game had two very minor expansions by adding two new characters, but that’s it).

2. Chronicles of Crime

1. The Reckoners

If you are wondering why we haven’t finished a few reviews for this site, it’s because we have been busy working hard on Sidekick Saga!  I’ve been working  a lot on the art and graphic design with some great people! (Well, I have getting art from some great artists and great people to help me with graphic design).  And getting ready for the Kickstarter! So we’ve just been busy!

Dice Tower Con West

I am excited that we will be previewing Sidekick Saga at Dice Tower West this March 2019!  We will have a booth there … come by and get a demo of Sidekick Saga!

Here’s a picture of Scenario Book Cover!

Here’s a sample card (it will be spruced up some more, but this is pretty much what it will look like):

Fewer and Fewer Games!

As this Sidekick Saga Kickstarter gets closer and closer, I am actually playing fewer and fewer games!  (So that’s why we have had fewer reviews  …) I have at least 6 cooperative games that I really want played, but I am spending all my time getting Sidekick Saga ready to Kickstart in March 2019!

Here’s a quick look at some cooperative games that have gotten little-to-no play!

1.  Forbidden Sky: We’ve actually had 3-5 plays of this, and its decent!  Some people like it better, but Forbidden Desert is still my favorite.
2. The Batman Animated Series Game!  Dang! I wanna play this!  Richard Lanius and a CO-OP.  Maybe this weekend.
3. 7th Continent: Spent at least 2-3 hours sleeving the darn thing.  Still haven’t played it!
4. Detective: Still sitting there …
5. Heroes of Terrinoth: Just came in the mail the other day.  I am a huge fan of the Warhammer Quest Adventure Card Game (which was basically unsupported after Fantasy FLight lost the Warhammer license), so this is supposed to the be the same game in the Terrinoth universe!
6. Exit games … so many exit games …

About the only game that’s gotten consistent play: Pandemic Legacy Season 1!  We have actually been playing 1 session a month where we play 1 or 2 games (if you lose, you have to play a second game to try to catch up).  Next month, we will finish everything!  One way or another!

Soon!

Our apologies … we hope to get some of the games played over the Turkeyday break, and give your you our thoughts!  Have a great Thanksgiving and PLAY GAMES!

So, last night I got home (Friday, October 5th, 2018), and “some big package” was in the living room.  The Reckoners?  I think?  I checked my Kickstarter page: they promised to deliver in October 2018.  “That can’t be right.  A kickstarter delivering on time?”

Ah well, I know what I am doing tonight!

A Month of SuperHeroes!

Sidekick Saga Cover

The Rulebook for The Reckoners

So, adding in The Reckoners, this month I have been playing almost exlusively cooperative SuperHero games!  What a great age we live in!  Legendary, Sidekick Saga, Oblivaeon, The Reckoners! All cooperative SuperHero games.  They are all very different.  I remember 10 (?) years ago, I was clamoring for ANY SuperHero game, let alone a cooperative one.  (And Batman: The Animated Series cooperative game is coming out any day too!  Watch this space for a review!).  Let’s take a look at The Reckoners.

The Reckoners by Brandon Sanderson

Apparently, this game is based on a novel/series of novels by Brandon Sanderson (see novel names above).  The theme of these novels is that some humans seem to get Super Powers, but everyone who gets Super Powers becomes evil!   These bad guys have taken over cities! And SteelHeart is the worst of the lot!  The humans have banded together to “defeat” (cough, cough) all the evil, powered, bad guys.  They have technology, smarts, and are working together to take out the bad guys.

I consider myself a comic-book collector (having collected for roughly 40 years), and I knew nothing of this IP before I got the game.  I knew this was a cooperative SuperHero game with the backstory described above.  That’s it!  So, I had no emotional baggage going in!  Let”s see what it looks like!

Unboxing

I ordered the “Epic Version” (see green sticker),  which has metal (!) bit replacing a lot of plastic bits.   This is a pretty big box!

The game comes with both a rulebook (on the right) and a “What’s their weakness” book (on the left).  One of the key elements of the game is doing “research” on a bad guy (called Epics) to find his/her weakness.   I believe Brandon Sanderson wrote the text for the “Untold Epics” book (i.e., find-their-weakness book).

At once, I was struck by how amazing the components are.  Wow! Look at those trays!  The tray on the left will end up holding the equipment market, noting some stats (population  and money and hideouts) for the Reckoners.   The tray on the right: that’s SteelHeart’s tracker.  The big bad.  Ooh!  And I got some miniatures!

Prepainted miniatures. Really nice.  There’s 6 Reckoners (heroes) total in the game.  Usually, each player will play one of them.

Dice

At the end of the day, this is a dice game.  Each Reckoner will get 3 normal dice (the lemonade colored dice), and 3 of this own special dice.  The special dice seem to have one side that gives an “extra boost” on some resource/stat if you roll it.

If I were to boil the game down to its very very core, it is Yahtzee with special abilities.  You roll your dice, select up to three, reroll the rest, select up to another  three, then roll one last time.    BUT: that makes it sound boring.  It’s not! There’s so much more to it!  We’ll talk more below.

But the dice are AMAZING.  I don’t typically like dice games and the dice were so cool I wanted to roll them!  They are big, colorful, easy to read, fun to roll!  These dice are just amazing!

Cards

The cards in here are very nice.  There are three types: Epics (the bad guys OTHER than SteelHeart, on the right) and Equipment (stuff the Reckoners can buy) and Player Summary Cards (see further below).

One of the stretch goals of the Kickstarter was that we get sleeves for the cards! Hurray! The good news is that you get more than enough sleeves and that the card fit back in their little holders even when sleeved!  See picture below.

I love it when games include a Player Reference Card!  We get one here! (It’s the same size as the Epics).

A bunch of extra cards were included as “Kickstarter Exclusives”.  Here they are below for completeness.

Metal Bits

The tokens in this game are pretty amazing.  The metal resources markers are limited to the Epic edition(left and middle) , but the metal brackets (far right) were a stretch goal, so I think everyone gets those?

I know I splurged on the Epic version of the game, but WOW.  I love these metal tokens!  The metal plan token (far left) are AMAZING.  I feel completely spoiled ordering those.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is quite good.  I got up and going “fairly quickly”.  Caveat Emptor: there’s a lot of stuff in the box, so I really feel good that they have a components page.  Some people don’t even look at a component page, but I always do, just so I can learn the names.

The Set-up was fairly involved, but the Rulebook did a great job showing a picture:

And the rest of the rulebook is quite good: it shows example of how to play, big text, lots of pictures, and a lot of explanations of Icons.

Ya, there’s a lot of Iconography in this game.

When a game centers on Dice Rolling as its main mechanic, I guess there has to be lot of Icons.  Having said that, the rulebook does seem to explain just about everything (but NOT the Kickstarter exclusive cards .. grumble ..)

First Play

So, after following the Set-up from the rulebook, I got set-up.  For the record, this game takes a lot of space.  The city Locations are at the top, the Reckoners board is at the left, SteelHeart is at the right, and the characters are at the bottom.  A LOT of trays!

I played a 1 player game, which means playing 2 characters (pretty typical).  I was happy that they just had 1 little sentence telling us the simple way to play solo: take two characters (yay, they followed Saunders’ Law).  So, there is an approved solo mode built in.

Gameplay

Gameplay is pretty quick.  You roll your dice IN ANY ORDER THE PLAYERS CHOOSE and select what you want.  Your dice will “typically” only affect the things in your city Location (above, you can see everyone is on the Museum Campus).  So, this is crucial: you are working together to get the best dice you can to handle the problems!

As we said earlier, this is a very Yahtzee type mechanic: you roll all your dice, keep up to three (see “Roll #1” slot below).  Reroll what you have left, keep up to three (in slot “Roll #2”) then finally keep the rest of your dice.  Yahtzee!

But, NOW IT GETS MORE INTERESTING!  You get to play (activate) one die at a time, and the players can activate these dice in player-selected turn order!  Yep, The Prof can activate a dice (by putting it in one of the 6 slots on the top of the card) , then Abraham can activate two dice, more, or zero!  Back and forth in any order!  This is very cool! (As some of you might know, I adore player-selected turn order in my cooperative games.  I feel like this gives us the best chance to win!)

Throughout the game, you use dice to:

• Eliminate the Enforcement guys (these are “the police” that are more annoying than painful, but they make Epics more powerful): little red stars is the symbol.
• Do research on an Epic or Steelheart (you have to do research on SteelHeart or you can’t even fight him): a little clue
• Contain: move the little metal markers above to the left.  The further to the right, the more “powers”/”bad stuff” happens when you activate an Epic or SteelHeart
• Damage an Epic: a little skull
• Money: gain money to buy some equipment ($)
• Plan: take an action now to have more in the future

And those are the 6 main things you can do (6: 6-sided dice) with each die.  Some of Reckoner specific dice have multiple symbols, which means that action can be taken multiple times.

This Game is Hard!

So, I “sorta” won my first game.  How do you win?  Do enough damage to SteelHeart to bring him to zero Hit Points! Only after you do enough research (little clue tokens) on SteelHeart specifically, can you damage him! It’s really hard!

You lose if the population is reduced to zero!  (When the Epics activate, they typically kill some of the general population).  Your job is to mitigate this enough  so you can take out SteelHeart.

This is a hard game.  I started on “easy” mode, and still got trounced!  Well, I cheated twice so I could make it to the endgame and see how it goes.  On the very last turn, I had to do 18 Damage total in one turn, and I just barely did!  (See game above)

You have to use every die to its maximum effect, take advantage of doubles of dice faces, buy gear early, and kill Epics as soon as possible (killing lower level Epics usually gives you rewards and stop them from doing bad stuff)!  Seriously, this game is HARD!

Potential Issues and Pet Peeve

So, this game is HARD.  You will feel very overwhelmed very quickly.  If you don’t like games that trounce you (like Ghost Stories), this may scare you away.  Even on Easy mode, it was overwhelming!  A simple way (not found in the Rulebook) to mitigate some of the difficulty is to simply give yourself some more money at the start of the game so you can buy tons of equipment.  Seriously, you can’t win the game without equipment that augment your dice rolls.

I love Player-Selected Turn Order, but it can quickly lead to Analysis Paralysis.   Even with just two Reckoners, the order their dice should be played can be a bit much.  The thing is, the game is so overwhelmingly hard, that you feel like you want to do the absolute best you can!  So you will over-analyze and take forever.  Depending on the context, I don’t mind it too much, because I like solving puzzles, but it can be very distracting for some players.  Caveat Emptor.

Finally, I have a beef against art in Comic Book games: I feel like “no game really gets it right”.  Don’t get me wrong, I LIKE the art in this game!  It’s great!  But it feels more like BOOK COVER  ART than COMIC BOOK ART.  For instance:

The art of the book covers looks a LOT like the art in the game!  Kind of like a painting …  I guess for fans of The Reckoners books, that’s what you want!  But, I don’t feel like that is comic-booky! What I want is something more like this!

I like the bright colors!  The sharp lines!  The action! The Heroic poses!  Seriously, I love the clean, striking art (especially of George Perez and John Byrne), and I feel like most comic book games don’t strive for this aesthetic.   This is a Pet Peeve of mine.  What I think it really means: “I really wish somebody would hire John Byrne or George Perez (or someone like them) to do the art of as Comic Book board game”.  This is just me.

Conclusion

I have no prior knowledge of the IP.  And I typically don’t like dice games.  But I like this game!  It’s a cooperative SuperHero game with AMAZING components!  The gameplay is fast and quick (although you can get caught in a bit of analysis paralysis), but still quite deep!  I am surprised how deep my analyses had to be to do well.  It’s hard, and potentially overwhelming, but I think it’s easy to teach and easy to play.  The solo mode works great.

If you don’t know the IP, this game is still very accessible!  I suspect if you like those books, this game will hit a lot better for you.  But I liked it a lot not knowing anything about the books.  (And, I don’t even like Dice games usually!)

Right now, this is hovering between a 7-8/10 for me (on the BoardGameGeek chart).  I will get it to the table a few more times.  I am guessing it will fall at 7.7 or something like that.

I played my first game!  And I lost! Sorry I destroyed the Multiverse guys!

Oblievaeon: The Sleevening!

I meant to play my first game about two weeks ago.  After I got it out, I told myself: “I should really sleeve these!”  So, about 700 card sleeves and 2 hours later, it was all sleeved!  At that point, I was exhausted and couldn’t play.  But at least everything from the Kickstarter fits into the Oblivaeon box with sleeves …

Oblivaeon: The Rulebook-Readening!

So, the rulebook is okay.  It’s concise, seems to describe everything.  The font is big enough to read, and I ended up referring to it a lot during play, and it worked fine for that.  I have two smallish problems with the rulebook:

1. I don’t think the Comic Book font is right for the Rulebook proper.  This looks something like VTC-Letterer-Pro, which is all upper-case, comic book font.  And this font looks great on the cards, as it evokes the feeling of reading a panel in a comic book.  It’s very thematic! But I think it is the wrong choice for the rulebook!  The font isn’t very expressive (not really an italics), I feel like other fonts would be better on the eyes.  For a rulebook of any substance, I think it’s too much.  I had to read the rulebook from scratch, and I think the font detracted from it.  (Partly because things that should have been italicized or bolded weren’t).  Your mileage may vary.
2. I really wanted a list/pictures of Components!  This new expansion in SOTM has a lot of new concepts and cards!  So, when the rulebook refers to a Scion or Battle Zone or Shield or Aeon Men or Devastation or Objective or Reward … what is it talking about?  Granted, I was able to “search” the cards, but even after they were sorted in the box, there was still some hunting.  It’s not the end of the world, I figured it out, but that very first set-up was daunting and cumbersome.

In general, the rules were good enough.   I was able to read them, set-up, and play the game without having to go the Internet or BoardGameGeek.

Oblivaeon: The Choosening!

The first thing the rules ask you to do is to choose your starting Heroes.  Since I didn’t know ANYTHING about how the game would work, I went ahead and chose my goto team: Legacy, Tempest, and Wraith (aka, Superman, Aquaman, and Batman).  I’ve been able to beat just about every Villain in every environment with these three: I know their decks really well.  So, since I had SO MUCH NEW STUFF to learn (see below), I wanted something familiar.  I strongly encourage others to choose Heroes they know for their first game … there’s just too much otherwise.

And yes, my first game would be a solo game playing 3 characters.  See here for my description of solo modes for Sentintels of the Multiverse!

Oblivaeon: The Set-Upening!

So, the rules have a nice abstract set-up page, showing what the game looks like set-up:

This is what my set-up look like on a table:

There’s a LOT of stuff here!  Here’s the basic layout:

The bottom has the player area for the three Heroes.

The upper left has the two Battle Zones with two different environments and two different Scions.

The middle area is for Oblivaeon, his booklet (!), his Villain Cards, and his Shield.

The upper right is for the Devastation card and Devastation tokens.

The middle left is the Scion deck and the Scion rules, with Scion cards.

Finally, the middle right is for Aeon Men and Objectives.

Whew, a lot of components!

Battle Zones! (Not the Atari Tank Game!)

Thematically, Oblivaeon (the main bad guy) is destroying the Multiverse.    If he succeeds, the players lose!  (And I guess everyone else does too).  So, in the game, the players (and all the bad guys) bounce between two dimensions (“Battle Zones”) to fight.

Each Zone is self-contained: there’s an environment and a Scion (really awesome Henchman of Oblivean) in each.   When the Heroes are in one Battle Zone, all of their powers and effects are limited in scope to JUST THAT BATTLE ZONE.   And Oblivaeon glides back and forth between them.

You can see Hero 1 (Legacy) in Battle Zone 1 and Heroes 2 and 3 (Tempest and Wraith) in Battle Zone 2.  This means that Legacy’s core power (to strengthen everyone’s attack by 1) wouldn’t do anything, because the other Heroes are in the other Zone!

Obliveon’s Area!

Oblivaeon is pretty complex.  He has his own little rulebook describing how he works.  Basically, he goes through 3 phases in the game:  10,000 Hit Points, 180 Hit Points, and 120 Hit Points.  You really can’t do much to him until he’s in the third phase (at 120 Hit Points) anyways.  You mostly just have to survive until then.

To make matters worse, there’s a Shield card (lower left)!  Basically, Oblivaeon is invulnerable until you get rid of his shield! Getting rid of his Shield is messy: you have to all be in the same zone as Oblivaeon and take damage at the same time.  Then, as the shield flips, he incapacitates Heroes!  Once he has done that, then the shield finally goes away!

Incapacitate!

So, when Oblivaeon incapacitates a Hero, that Hero Card is taken out of the game, and the player can just become a new hero!  As long as there are Hero Cards, the players can do this all day.  You reclaim all cards, shuffle them up, and then start with 4 cards in hand.  To be clear, you can use the original deck again, but you have to use a variant variant Hero Card (see below) to play the same deck again!

So, when Oblivaeon incapacitated my base Legacy, I chose this variant so I keep keep playing his deck!

In all the time I have played SOTM, I didn’t use the variants AT ALL.  I kind of like this rule!  It forced me to use my variant cards for the first time!  And it’s also very thematic!  Besides the “Oblivaeon is Thanos” motif of the game, there’s also a “Crisis on Infinite Earths!” motif in the game.

In “Crisis on Infinite Earths!”, there were multiple Supermans, Flashes, etc.  And so it’s cool to see multiple cards for Legacy, Tempest, etc..  Very thematic!

Devastation!

This card handles two things:

1. The Countdown!  Everytime the counter goes to zero, Oblivaeon flips to his next phase (from 10,000 HP to 180 HP to 120 HP).  Of course, if he flips once too often, the players lose another environment! Closer to Game over!    The Countdown counts down the phases of Oblivaeon.
2. The Devastation Tokens! As the game plays, the Multiverse is slowly being eroded away.  Every Devastation Token added to the pool represents this erosion.  When there are 12 in the pool, you must destroy an environment!  There are a total of 5 environments in the game.  If the last one is destroyed, GAME OVER! The Players lose!

The Devastation Tokens are particularly thematic to my mind: just a little bit of erosion every turn, but if you don’t keep it under control, the Multiverse just dies!

Objectives! (Well, Missions)

You might have noticed that there are a LOT of ways to die!  Well, to balance this a little, there is now the notion of an Objective! Well, they call it a Mission in the rules, but it’s labeled Objective on the cards! On a Hero’s turn, he can choose to take, swap, shuffle objectives.  He can then work towards that objective.  Every objective card has the same feel:  take a bit of damage/lose resources to “flip this card”.  In the case above, you have to destroy some equipment cards to get  a Reward!

They are potentially useful, but I never got any Objectives completed in my first game!  Maybe that’s why I lost?

Tokens

You need a lot of tokens to keep track of stuff!  There’s the standard SOTM tokens (effects, energy types, hit points), but now there’s even more things!  So, grab some extra token types as well.  I went ahead and used the Stonemaier Money tokens for the Hit Points.  And you know what?  They worked great as hit points.  And were very satisfying.

Gameplay

My first game: I spent 30 minutes setting up, 3 hours playing, and I lost.  I didn’t really have much of a chance at the end, but I might have been able to win with 2 more turns. I fudged a few times in the game, just to see how it played out.  I probably should have died much earlier.

There are two things that really keep the game going: the rulebook and some Hero summary Cards.  I kept the rulebook out non-stop, as it shows the summary of turns, and so does the Scion top card.  In other words, the summary sheets worked fairly well.

But, there are a lot of rules. And I mean a LOT.  I love Sentinels of the Multiverse (it’s one of my favorite games of all time)!  BUT, even I have to admit, it’s a little fiddly.  If you don’t like fiddly, you would hate this game!   There are a lot of effects and rules to keep track of as you play: Multiple Environments, Aeon’s Men, Scion effects, Oblivaeon Effects, Objectives, and all the normal SOTM effects.

At one point, I actually just didn’t care about the environment.  I just drew the card and didn’t read it.  There was SO MUCH going on, I didn’t want to have to try to sort “just one more thing” going on.  I was exasperated!

Final Thoughts

In the end, I lost.  I lost because all 5 environments were destroyed, and thus the Multiverse was destroyed!  I felt like I couldn’t do a lot, if anything, to stop the devastation.  The only way I could have won was to kill Oblivaeon.  I just ran out of time.

I feel like I should have done more with Objectives and been smarter with incapacitating Heroes.  The Objectives give some nice rewards, probably for a smallish cost.  The incapacitate is actually quite useful, as you essentially heal all your hit points!  (And let me tell you, your Heroes take a LOT of damage!)

I’m sure I played wrong dozens of times as there were so many rule and effects to follow.  It was a little debilitating.  A few times, I just didn’t follow some effects because it was just too much to handle.  Now that I’ve played through a whole game, I think I could do better at it.

Oblivaeon:  The Conclusioning!

So, I got to use my 20 point money markers.  That made it all worthwhile!

Seriously, though, I think I liked it.  I think.  There’s a lot stuff going on, and this definitely is not a game for newbies, anyone who hates fiddliness, or anyone who’s only played SOTM a few times.  You need to be very comfortable with SOTM before you give this a try.

It’s a fun game, but it is definitely “an event” where you need to set aside at least 3 hours to play.  We’ll see what I think of it after a few more plays.  Let’s hope I can convince my friends to play …