Top 10 Cooperative Cat Games (Board and Card Games)

Yes, yes. We are really doing this: we are doing a a Top 10 Cooperative Cat Games! To be clear, these are cooperative board or card games that have an upfront and distinct cat theme to them! Some games have cats in them (like Cyber Pet Quest from a few weeks ago), but those games aren’t “cat-centric”. The 10 games below are all cooperative games where the cats are the main focus … and that’s just how the cats like it!

10. Max

Players: 1-8
Ages: 4 to 7 Years old
Time: 10 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes
Type: Cooperative Roll-And-Move

It’s kind of hard to recommend this, as it’s a game meant for very very young players: the recommended age range for Max is 4-7 years old.

And the production isn’t great: see above.

But, this may be just what you are looking for to give your younger cat lover! It’s a cooperative game for young kids, and that right there makes it worth mentioning! (even if it’s not the most beautiful game in the world)

Trying to save the creatures from Max is a fun little theme that is surprisingly charming. Be aware: this is a roll-and-move game, the production isn’t great, it’s meant for young kids, and the game is very light. But, it’s kind of charming as a cooperative cat game, so it makes our list.

9. Endangered

Players: 1-5
Ages: 10+ Years old
Time: 60 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes
Type: Cooperative Dice Placement Game

This is a cooperative dice placement where players play in together in multiple realms: diplomacy in the UN, conservation in the jungles, and gaining resources in the real world!

This only made out #9 because just a few scenarios are about cats (Tigers in the base game and Jaguars in the expansion), but they are constantly making more and more expansions all the time! And during those scenarios, the cats take center stage!

This has some really interesting ideas; the cooperative dice-placement mechanic is very well implemented!

Take a look at our review of Endangered to see if this might be for you.

8. Magical Kitties Save The Day!

Players: 2-7
Ages: 6+ Years old
Time: 60-120 Minutes
Supports Solo? Sort of, there’s a solo Adventure that comes with the game to teach it
Type: Cooperative Role Playing Game (RPG)

So, I am in the camp that views RPGs as cooperative games; I view the Dungeon Master/Game Master (DM/GM) as a shepherd for herding cats through an adventure (analogy chosen on purpose). The players are cooperating to get the best outcome for the group, and the GM is just trying to help the players. I know this GM view isn’t shared by everyone, but the vibe of this particular RPG is certainly very cooperative.

magickittiesback

Players plays as cats going on adventures to save the day … that sounds like a cooperative game to me! This is a fun and goofy cooperative game that will require a GM to run it.

The solo comic book that comes with for teaching the game is pretty awesome!

7. Cat Crimes

Players: 1+
Ages: 8 to Adult
Time: 15-30 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes, solo first! Cooperative by group
Type: Cooperative Logic Puzzles

Cat Crimes is more of a solo logic puzzle than a game per se, but you can play it cooperatively by having all players work together as a group to solve the puzzles!

Player(s) take a challenge card (from Beginner to Expert: see above) and try to solve the puzzle! Who Ruined The Shoes?

Players use the hints on the card to deduce, via logic only, the order of the cats around the table!

Once the cats are placed around the table correctly, that pinpoints the culprit! See above as Duchess ruined the shoes!!

This is a fun little logic game where the cats are cute: the theme helps keep it from taking itself too seriously. But the puzzles are whatever challenge your group is up for!

6. Space Cats Fight Fascism

Players: 2-4
Ages: 13+
Time: 45-60 Minutes
Supports Solo? No (although you can play solo via 2-handed solo)
Type: Cooperative Dice and Card Management Game

This little cat game came out of nowhere for us: it’s from a very small publisher (TESA) and it really doesn’t have a lot of buzz around it.

The components are a little wonky and the art is a little wonky. It’s a pretty small game.

But this little game is surprisingly fun! It has a Pandemic feel as cats fly around the galaxy trying to stop facism (removing cubes like Pandemic). Space Cats Fight Fascism isn’t really political (despite the name); it’s really just a surprisingly cute cooperative game with its own “vibe”. The cat theme works surprisingly well, considering this game could be just an abstract, but somehow the cats in this game give it its own flavor, its own soul, and its own sense of humor.

5. Cat Rescue

Players: 1-4
Ages: 8+
Time: 15 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes
Type: Cooperative Tile Placement/Tableau Management Game

Cat Rescue is a very cute game that was on Kickstarter, but it’s actually incredibly hard to find now. I ended up finding the original blister pack version (see above).

Players put some very cute cats in a 4×4 grid (see above and below).

The main mechanic is that you “push” cats along a row or column, trying to push a cat that’s “ready for adoption” (flipped) out of the grid. You continue until you run out of cards and then score how many you saved!

It’s very cute, simple to explain, and easy to play. Cat Rescue is sort of a cross between a tile placement game and a tableau building game. It is hard to find, but there is hope for a reprint.

UPDATE: As of right now, March 30th, 2025, there is a Kickstarter coming in Spring 2025! See information here! Thanks to Lon for pointing this out!

4. Run Run Run!

Players: 1-4
Ages: 8+
Time: 30 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes, minimal rule changes
Type: Cooperative Tile-Laying Game

This cute game about cats invading an Egyptian tomb is quite fun!

The components in this cooperative tile-laying game are gorgeous! The tiles are thick and easy to read!

The game is easy to teach, easy to play, and plays rather quickly in about 30 minutes! Take a look at our review of Run Run Run! here to see if it might be something you might like!

This game could easily make our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying Games! But that list came out before we played this game …

3. Nekojima

Players: 1-5
Ages: 8+
Time: 15-30 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes, minimal rule changes
Type: Cooperative Abstract Dexterity Game

Nejokima is a very cute cooperative dexterity game for 1-4 players; this can probably best be described as cooperative Reverse-Jenga! In Nekojima, players work together adding wood blocks on a platform, hoping not to knock anything over! (whereas Jenga has players removing wood blocks from a tower, hoping not to knock anything over)! In both cases, players try not to knock the structure over! See below!

At the end of the day, this is almost an abstract game, but the game leans so heavily into the cat theme (with a cat placemat, the cat tokens, and the “cat always lands on its feet” in the rules), that I think you can call it a cat game.

Take a look at our review of Nekojima to see if this is something you think you might like.

2. Hissy Fit!

Players: 1-4
Ages: 8+
Time: 20 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes, minimal rule changes
Type: Cooperative Hand Management game

Hissy Fit! is a light little cooperative cat card game (20+ minutes) about trying to get your cat into its carrier! Players move the kitty (above) along (using cards) until it reach the carrier!

Players cooperatively play Human cards (purple) to try to keep the Cat Cards (orange) under control! This is a light, quick game that really encourages cooperation with a simple follow mechanic (allowing other players to play cards even when it’s not their turn)!

The art is absolutely adorable and is quite thematic! The Towel Wrap keeps the cat from scratching you and from moving away! The Robot Vaccuum moves the cat closer to the carrier!

This game is light and adorable and quick and easy to teach: there is a very good chance this will make our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024! UPDATE! It did! See here!

Take a look at our review of Hissy Fit! to see if this is something you might enjoy!

1. Race To The Raft

Players: 1-4
Ages: 8+
Time: 40-60 Minutes
Supports Solo? Yes, with some changes to base game
Type: Cooperative Tile Placement Game

Players need to work together to save the cats (see above) from the burning island (see below)! They need to move the cats to the raft before the fire consumes the island!

This cooperative tile-placement game has players making all sorts of choices cooperatively or solo: which cats to move, which tile stack to draw from, where you place a tile, where to place burning trees, when to move cats! There so many great decisions in this game! This was such a great surprise it made the #3 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023! Honestly, it should have been #1, but 2023 was such a strong year for cooperative games!

See our review here of Race To The Raft to see if this cooperative tile-playing game is something you would enjoy! It’s probably the most complex game on this list, but it also has the most choice!

A Cooperative Traitor Game? Wait, What? A Review of Infiltraitors

If you are like me, when you first heard the description of Infiltraitors, you thought, “Wait, What? Is this a cooperative traitor game?”

Look at the back of the box above! “Enemy Spies have infiltrated the Organization! It’s up to you to work together to expose and eliminate all the traitors before it’s too late…” That sounds like a cooperative traitor game, but the next line tells the real story: “Infiltrators is a cooperative deduction game for 2 to 5 players”.

Ah, it’s a deduction game! But it really has a feel of a traitor game like Avalon! Players are going on missions, deducing things about traitors … that sounds like the traitor game, Avalon, right?

I think the game’s title misspelled Infiltraitor on purpose to imply there are traitors in this game. The real spelling should be Infiltrator. I really think they did that on purpose to imply this is a cooperative traitor game … I think they mean it to replace something like Coup or Avalon. Does it?

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

For a mostly card game, this has a surprising number of cardboard components! It’s also a pretty small box (about the size of Avalon or Coup maybe?) See Coke Can above for perspective.

The bullets are a limited resource for how many “guesses” you have to find the traitors! The gun is just a silly gimmick!

When you are ready to Eliminate a Traitor, you must physically pick up the Gun and a Bullet and “make a guess” what the traitor is (I used what instead of who … you’ll see why)! I think the idea is that you must be very clear that you are making a guess, and picking up that gun makes it very clear to everyone! If you are right, you eliminate that traitor and you are closer to winning! If you are wrong, … well, you have wasted a bullet … hopefully you have enough bullets left to take out the remaining traitors!

As clues come out to identify the traitors, players mark off the Clue Boards: see above. There will be one clue board per suspect.

The rest of the game is in the cards. There are (up to) 5 different suits, each with numbers 1-15.

There are a number of Suspects (face-down cards), depending on the Mission and number of players. The player’s job: use clues to find the identity of all the Suspects before you run out of bullets! If it isn’t clear, you are “eliminating” the infiltrators with bullets!

There are 20 missions described in the rulebook; they get harder and harder. (No state is saved between Missions; each Mission is a brand new game). The first mission, a tutorial, describes how the game works: see above!

Some number of cards are taken from the deck and turned FACE DOWN: these are the Suspects the players must cooperatively identify. (The first Mission has only 2 Suspects: see above).

One player becomes “responsible” for a suspect and will reveal information about the suspect as the game goes on.

Each player will have a hand of cards and use those to help reveal information about a Suspect.

To Eliminate a suspect, the players must guess the color and rank of the face-down Suspect!

How do you guess the Suspect’s color and rank? A player will place a card down; if the color matches OR the rank matches the number or factors or multiples, then it’s considered a match! All matches are turned up-and-down! The lack of a match turns the card sideways. See above as the guess yellow 10 is turned up-and-down! It’s a match! But does it match the color? Or maybe it matches the rank exactly? Or it’s a multiple of 2 or 5 or 10? This is where the deduction kicks in! You have to use the cards you have to try to slowly deduce what the Suspect is!

It takes a little getting used to matching the multiples and factors, but luckily every card in the game lists ALL the factors and multiples it uses! So, it seems harder than it is; once you get used to it, it flows quickly!

To be clear, one player knows who the suspect is, and all the other players are giving clues (placing cards) to help deduce! Nominally, each player tends to take responsibility for one or more Suspects, but it’s dynamic! Players can choose when to take a Suspect and become “responsible” for it as the game flows.

If you eliminate all Suspects, you win! If you run out of bullets, you lose! The Infiltraitors win!

Solo Game

There is no solo game! See above: this is only for 2-5 Players! However, this would be an interesting game to apply The Changing Perspectives idea to! See a link here for The Changing Perspectives Idea! Since all information is public (the clues are all public: there’s no implications or subtle innuendo), you can make deductions solely based on the information presented.

I leave this an exercise to the reader: I think you can play this solo if you want to! Much like Shipwreck Arcana (see review here), this is a deduction game where you can pretend to play both sides, using only public information for deduction. If you get to a point where you have to randomly choose something (you are out of cards, and only one one bullet left), you can always roll a dice to decide the outcome.

Cooperative Game

As a cooperative game, this went over pretty well. The first time we played, we played through the first three missions and had a blast!

It’s sort of ridiculous how much fun the gun and bullets were! It sort of drew us into the game!

The first few missions are pretty straight forward, just getting a little harder each time. You use more suits (which makes the color harder to guess) and more ranks (making the rank harder to guess).

This game came out two weeks in a row! For a little card game, it was surprisingly popular in my game groups! See above and below!

The cooperation worked really well; people would say “I know how to get that suspect! You work on the other one!” The fact that there are multiple suspects in play really also worked well—players could choose where to spend effort, both individually and cooperatively.

The Sticking Point

The game doesn’t quite explain matching rank very well … and it’s the most important part of the game! There are two basic interpretations, which the example (in the rulebook) DOES clarify. Consider the following example: Do these two cards below “match”? (Obviously, they don’t match in color, but what about rank?)

Interpretation 1: If the lists of numbers on both cards has some number in common, they match! Under that interpretation, the two cards above match! (6 has 2,3,6,12; 9 has 3,9: Both have a 3! They match!). (((TO BE CLEAR, this is the WRONG interpretation!!!!)))
Interpretation 2: If the hidden card (on the right, say the 9) LISTS the other card, it’s a match! In this case, it’s NOT a match, as 6 is NOT in the list of number on 9: (3, 9). They DO NOT match!

If you go in with Interpretation 2, that seems to be the rule as clarified by the rulebook (see above). It took us a few games to “get” this rule. This is possibly the biggest bugaboo that may make people dislike the game … if you can’t get this rule about matching!! I think the best way to “explain” the match rule is via Interpretation 2 of the rules above:

“The Suspect card will list all the cards that it matches“.

With that simple explanation, the match rule goes from baroque to simple. And I think it will open it up to players who might be “scared away” by discussion of factors/multiples and math!!

Traitor Experience

After bringing this out at a second game night and playing through the game with a new group, we were able to solidify our thoughts: This feels like a traitor/social deduction game like Coup or Avalon because you are trying to deduce the identity of the traitor! That feeling of trying to deduce “Who is the Traitor?” is really captured by this game … without being a traitor game!

I don’t really like traitor games. They have the Disparity of Experience problem (see here) where people who have played more than you will have a distinct advantage. And I don’t want to lie, yell, scream, accuse with my friends. I just want to work with them and have fun! If you like the process of trying to find the traitor, that deduction process, I think Infiltraitors really captures that feeling! Granted, Infiltraitors replaces social deduction (which has its own flavor of play) with plain deduction, but I think Infiltraitors does a pretty good job of replicating that social deduction feeling in a purely cooperative game.

Conclusion

Does Infiltraitors (a fully cooperative game that’s nominally about traitors) replace Coup or Avalon (games with traitors?) Infiltraitors does a pretty job replicating the experience of finding traitors! It may not quite your cup of tea, as it replaces social deduction with plain deduction, but if you like the idea of finding traitors but don’t like all the social baggage of traitor games, Infiltraitors might be right for you!

I think me and my groups would give this an 8.5/10! We enjoyed it! It was easy to get out, easy to play a few games, and it was a fun experience working together!

BUT, if you pull this out, be very very clear explaining the match rule to new players or you might scare them away! The talk of factors and multiples may scare them away! Don’t explain it that way, and don’t even bring it up! Just explain the Suspect card lists all the numbers it matches; easy-peasy.

If you are looking for a game to replace Coup or Avalon, this might a really good possibility. It still feels like you are hunting traitors, but replaces the social deduction framework with a deduction framework, and it does so in a fully cooperative game.

A Comparison of Three Methods For Flattening Your Board Games

What do the three games above have in common?

If you said “They are all cooperative games“, well, you are mostly correct! (Comic Hunters isn’t cooperative by default, but there is an expansion that makes it cooperative! See here). This is a place where we talk about cooperative games, so that’s a good guess. But there’s something else they all have in common: none of their boards sit flat! See above and below!

You can really see it on Comic Hunters (above): that board just does NOT want to lay flat!

It’s weird, we never thought too much about boards not being flat enough, but we encountered this problem a number of times in the last few years: Comic Hunters, Plum Island Horror, and Dice Throne: Missions! These games really emphasized that sometimes a game board needs some flattening.

We’ll take a look at three different (cooperative) games and three different solutions to this problem! The games of interest all have boards that don’t lay flat! And they are all different sizes! See above!

Plum Island Horror: Very large 8-fold board
Dice Throne: Missions: Medium size 3-fold laminated sheets
Comic Hunters: smaller 3-fold board

Solution 1: Board Butler

The Board Butler is a product specifically designed for the problem of boards-that-don’t-lay-flat. I have seen advertisements on BGG, so I knew this existed. I ordered it from their web site and it arrived within a week. It was like $19.99 + taxes and some shipping (but for some reason I got free shipping).

These are basically little plastic piece you put at the edges to force the board flat.

See Comic Hunters with The Board Butler above. It only needs 4 of the 6 pieces.

It works pretty well and it was easy to put on: no issues on Comic Hunters.

The Board Butler pieces are small enough that I need 4 pieces for the Dice Throne:Missions board: one at each edge.

See above. The clear nature makes them relatively uninvasive.

They work well and keep the board flat. Arguably they could obscure the text at the very bottom, but they don’t seem to.

Finally, let’s look at Plum Island Horror!

For Plum Island Horror, we have to use all 6 of the pieces, which means I can’t put them on the long ends. This doesn’t strictly need another 2 pieces, but it might have been nice.

The Board Butler pieces work well: they hold the board down, and they don’t get in the way.

Basically, The Board Butler worked pretty well on all three games. The weakest was Dice Throne: Missions because the Missions boards are thin laminated boards, so they didn’t fit as tight. They fit securely (but not too tight) on Comic Hunters and Plum Island Horror.

Solution 2: Report Binding Bar

These Report Binding Bars are those little plastic sliders you put onto plastic report sheets. See above and below.

I found a thread on BoardGameGeek that recommended these: see thread here. You can order them here: I got 30 of them for $13.99 plus taxes and shipping. See above.

On Comic Hunters, they work great! They are actually being long enough to cover both edges!

The only real complaint is that they are tight. I was “worried” that by sliding them on, that they would TEAR the board! They did not, but I was also very careful! If you go with this solution, you may want to use your finger to “force” the bar open so it’s less tight:

See above as I jam my finger in there to “loosen” it up.

On Dice Throne: Missions, these are the best by far! They hold the board tight, and they even cover both edges with one piece! See above! I only needed 2 of the 30 pieces to hold this board together!

These just slip on easily (no chance of tearing since the boards are laminated) and hold the boards stiff and flat.

Finally, we use these for Plum Island Horror. We need 4 of them to hold the board down: see above. Again, like Comic Hunters, these were a little scary to use because it “felt like” they might tear the board as I put them on. So, I was very careful.

In all three cases, these held the board down and flat very tightly. They were the cheapest by far, at 30 for $13.99, so you could easily share the cost with friends. You probably only need to 6 each! Even with with Plum Island Horror, you could get by with only 4!!

UPDATE: After sliding these on again and again and again on the Dice Throne: Missions boards, they started to show “slide marks”. That is worrisome.

Solution 3: Giant Plastic Overlay

From the same thread on BGG where we got the Report Binding Bar, we also found a link for these giant pieces of plastic you can just “plop” on the board and force it down! See Amazon link here! You get TWO pieces, but it’s $37.99 plus shipping and tax.

You just put it over your board game and “smoosh” it flat!

It turns out it also has a pocket, so if your game fits, you can just put the board inside! See above as Comic Hunters fits!

It works, it keeps Comic Hunters flat, but the plastic overlay is a bit distracting. It’s especially shiny.

The Dice Throne: Missions boards fit in almost perfectly and look good and flat. See above.

Plum Island Horror is WAAAY to big for a single overlay. Luckily, when you order this, you get TWO sheets. Two sheets work:

The problem is you CANNOT fit this board inside the envelope (see above) , so they simply have to lay two of them on top. Since the Plum Island Horror board is so “hefty”, even this solution had trouble keeping the board flat.

In general, this was the worst solution. It was the hardest to see, because it was so reflective, and it was by far the most expensive. And, for the largest board, it required TWO Sheets.

The only advantage of this solution is that you can WRITE ON THE PLASTIC with a dry-erase marker!! See above. If you want to “annotate” your boards, at least you can do that with the overlays.

Conclusion

Which solution you gravitate towards depends on what you want! The cheapest by far was the Report Binding Bar: it worked on all three boards well, except that it was tight on the thicker boards. You could order 30 of them and split them between your friends for $13.99! The best overall solution was The Board Butler; it worked on all boards well, even if it wasn’t “quite as tight” for the Dice Throne Missions board. The Board Butler was high-quality and I never felt like it was too tight. The Overlay was probably the weakest solution: it was the most expensive (as you needed two overlays for larger boards like Plum Island Horror), it was very reflective, and it is harder to store! The Overlay, however, did had the unique advantage that you could write on it if you needed to!

If I were only getting something to fix the Dice Throne: Missions boards, I might get the Report Binding Bars. If I wanted something more general, I would get the Board Butler. If I wanted to annotate my board with dry-erase markers or keep water off it, I might consider the overlay to help keep my board flat. It’s up to you.

UPDATE: After seeing the Report Binding Bars starts to leave skid marks on the Dice Throne: Missions board, I think I strongly prefer the Board Butler over the binding bar, even for Missions.

Santorini: Pantheon Collector’s Edition and Riddle Of The Sphinx Review, Mostly the Solo and Cooperative Experiences

Santorini: Pantheon Collector’s Edition and Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx both arrived at my door February 28th, just in time for weekend!

These were originally on Kickstarter back in April 2023, and promised delivery May 2024: so it’s not quite a year late, but it is pretty late. At least it finally made up! I have been waiting a while for this game: it was #8 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!

I was very excited for Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx (which we’ll just call Riddle of the Sphinx from now on), as it promised to take the base game Santorini and make it into a solo and cooperative experience!

However, Riddle of the Sphinx is an expansion: you must have one of the Santorini base games to play it (for some of the components). This particular Kickstarter offered up the “deluxe” Santorini: Pantheon Collector’s Edition, so that’s the one I backed.

I ended up playing pretty much all weekend, so let’s see how that unraveled! Was this worth the wait?

Day 1: The Game Arrives and Santorini Gets Played!

February 28th, 2025: The package arrives with both games!

The acrylic tokens bag opened up and spread them everywhere … make sure you pick up all yours!

You can’t play Riddle of the Sphinx until you know how to play the base game of Santorini. So, that’s where we started.

This edition has quite a bit of extra stuff.

The white blocks and domes are the key components to the game: these are what gets built on the main board. Those little white blocks have quite the toy feeling!

These blocks are the main pieces that will be shared with Riddle of the Sphinx.

There’s some neat bags with lots of components. A lot of these aren’t necessary for the main game.

But the workers (in the blue bag) are important; they are what moves around the map.

The purple bag has a lot of stuff … that I don’t think you will need until you play a LOT of Santorini and want more content.

The most important piece for the main game is the board (packed upside down).

It looks gorgeous!

There’s even a lazy susan for it to rotate on!

There are some God Cards here (God Cards give each player special powers). We need these cards for the base game, but we will NOT need them for Riddle of the Sphinx.

This is a really nice production. It just looks gorgeous. I probably spent too much money to get the deluxe Pantheon Collector’s Edition, but it looks nice.

The rules are hidden on the bottom of the box!

Normally, I would give rules that take up the whole box an F on the Chair Test, but since the rules are ALL ON ONE SIDE, I am going to give this an A! The rules lay out and are easy to consult!!

These rules are succinct and terse, but still pretty darn clear. The game can be described in one page!

There’s a really nice little “first game set-up” which takes you through your first step or two of Santorini with Demeter vs. Artemis!

As you play your first game (I played Me vs Me), you get a sense how everything works. And the buildings that pop-up look really cool! See above!

At the end of my first game, I felt like I understood the mechanisms! This was a simple abstract strategy game that looks really cool! I see why Santorini has survived in the board game zeitgeist for so long! It’s easy to play, easy to describe, easy to learn, but has tons of interesting and strategic decisions. This is a neat game.

For the record, I do want to mention that it’s not too hard to pack everything back into the box … there’s a little graphic on the side that shows how to do that!

So, I was able to play and learn the base game! I look forward to learning Riddle of the Sphinx tomorrow!

Day 2: Unboxing and First Games of Riddle of the Sphinx

First thing Saturday morning, March 1st, I woke up and was excited to get to Riddle of the Sphinx!

It turns the competitive base game of Santorini into a co-op and solo game!

Riddle of the Sphinx has a weird form factor: see above.

It’s a very wide box that opens like a book: see above (with Coke can for perspective).

The Acrylic tokens replace the cardboard tokens.

Off to the left are the bridges, figures, dice, and cards. I am glad I took a picture of this, because when I went back to repack the game, I had to consult my pictures!

The rulebook … is huge. Not from a length perspective, but huge as in “the form factor of this book is very wide and very tall!“

This rulebook completely fails the Chair Test as it droops over the edge and makes it very hard to consult on the chair next to me. See above.

The standard workaround for rulebooks this big is to put them across TWO CHAIRS, with the spine in the middle. (We first discovered this “workaround” when we looked at Batman: Gotham City Chronicles: see here). This makes it so can consult the rulebook on the chairs next to you. Sigh: this rulebook has a terrible form factor! It’s far too engulfing!

The weird thing is, you almost don’t need the rulebook???? The Book of Riddles (which we’ll discuss below) has an EXCELLENT tutorial built in!

The Book of Riddles (see above) is the main component of this expansion. There are 22 “riddles” in here which the player(s) must solve!

The Book of Riddles throws you into the first game with some pretty pictures and flavor text …

A quick note: we’ll be playing solo, which means we have some weird special rules. We have to have a figure called the “Wanderer” whose sole purpose is to make sure we never do the same action twice in a row!

The Wanderer is the middle guy (we’ll see the Sphinx and other dude later).

Using the Wanderer, the solo player selects an action each turn (one of the four above), but can never choose the same action twice in a row.

The first Scenario is Sunshine and Seashores: see above!

The opposite side of the page has a painfully precise (in a good way) description of how to play the first riddle! This is a complete, step-by-step run-through of a winning game so you can see how all the rules work together! This tutorial is a fantastic way to learn how Riddles work!

The only thing you “really” need from the original Santorini box are the blocks and the workers. That’s it! See above! All that other stuff you saw as I unboxed Santorini: Pantheon Collector’s Edition? Completely useless here!

In fact, I made the mistake of thinking we needed the original board (above right) when I played my first game! Nope!

Riddle of the Sphinx has its own God Cards: see Base Gods above and Friendly Gods below!

There’s even a notion of Blessings that comes out in later games!

The Gods are a little different here; you kind of use them up and throw them away!!

The Gods give you powers, but if you complete their quest (at the bottom of the card), you (usually) get a new piece you can build. Why is that so important?

Riddle of the Sphinx is a game about scarcity. You don’t have all the pieces you need to build your towers and edifices, so you have to earn them as you play. By having Gods complete their quests, you get new pieces so you can build as you need to.

The coins on the map describe what you need to build: see above as I need to build a level 1 building underneath the coin to get it!

And then I do!

The coin goes to the top (or bottom) of the page to denote you have “finished” that subgoal. Usually, you need to get all Gold coins to complete the Riddle, and all the Silver coins give you extra help/bonuses.

See above as we build everything, as we try to understand how to solve a Riddle! It’s all about building towers when pieces are scarce! You have to earn the pieces to build what you need!

I need to be clear here; this tutorial is great! I jumped right in and was able to start playing right away! The tutorial held my hand for the first game, and then threw me into my second game. And I was felt so comfortable jumping in after that!

See above for an example of how good that Tutorial is!

After the Tutorial is Riddle 1! As I jumped into Riddle 1, they added some new rules: The Sphinx’s game!

The Sphinx’s Game allows you to roll the dice and “hopefully” get one of the gems! If you get a gem, you get free piece to build! If you fail (because the gem is gone), you lose a worker!

Just like our Tutorial, the game board does a real good job describing set-up on the same page as the Riddle itself. It’s interesting, I don’t think I ever looked in the rulebook for any rules in the first few games: almost everything I needed was presented in the set-ups of the various riddles.

Look how great this looks: see above.

At the end of Day 1, I unboxed Riddle of the Sphinx and played through two scenarios solo; this gave me the sense of how everything worked.

This is a puzzle; you have to figure out when to build, when to recruit god powers, when to finish a god quest (so you can get more pieces), and when to finish the Riddle (which usually means building a tower on a gold piece place!).

Day 2: Campaign and More Play

So, Riddle of the Sphinx is kind of a campaign game. Included in the rulebook are two pages per campaign: The Adventure Map and the Constellation Tree.

The Adventure Map has you “mark” off bubbles on how well you did when you finished a puzzle. (There are multiple conditions you can satisfy, see below).

See above as there are Silver, Gold, and Heroic (above) conditions you can satisfy. Godlike not pictured.

The bubbles you mark off in the Adventure Map corresponds to how many bubbles you can mark off in the Constellation Tree! See above! Basically, the Constellation Tree unlocks what are called Friendly Gods! The more Friendly Gods you have, the more control you have when you attempt a puzzle (remember, God powers are pivotal to doing the riddles, especially if the powers are useful).

Rather than sully my pristine books, I went to make a copy of the two pages … well, it’s too big for my copier, but you CAN just print them directly from Roxley’s web site. So, to play a campaign, you need both pages (see above). After every Riddle, you mark off how many achievements you did! And then you can “maybe” unlock a Friendly God or two!

I used a pencil (see above): Warning! You should probably use a red marker or something VERY distinct. It’s REALLY HARD to tell what you marked with a pencil. Can you tell above? Even zoomed in, I can barely read it! Learn my mistake, use a more “colorful” writing implement so you can see the marks.

So, the first part of my Sunday was getting the Campaign maps marked up for my first few games, when I headed into more puzzles!

At one point, the Sphinx even made an appearance!

By the end of Day 3, I had played 6 Riddles and started my way into a solo campaign.

This is a puzzle; make no mistake about it. It’s more puzzle than game. I loved it. You may not.

Cooperative Play

So, this is different week: I am at Dice Tower West and not with my normal gaming group. I brought Riddle of the Sphinx with me to play it cooperatively with “some people”. My core game group and I have a base level of trust and respect, so cooperative games are easy for us to jump into. Sometimes, it’s a little harder to jump into a cooperative game with people you don’t know. How did that go for us with Riddle of the Sphinx?

I met a real nice fellow named Charles. He and I had a very frank discussion about the Alpha Player problem before we started the game. I worry, since this is more of a puzzle than a game, that Riddle of the Sphinx might drift towards having Alpha Players take over.

From our very frank discussion, we made it clear that we would be supporting each other but still occasionally having suggestions: no Alpha Playering. I admit, I had never thought of this solution to the Alpha Player problem: just talk about it and agree to not do Alpha Player each other. And you know what? That worked fine!

Charles and I started from scratch and played the first 4 riddles (plus tutorial) in about 2 hours. We had a good time and got some riddles done. (Since I had played solo previously, I was able to shepherd the game and make it much faster to teach and learn).

Two observations came up during co-op play:
1) Even though this is a puzzle (which tends to attract the Alpha Player more), because we have God Powers (i.e., assymetric powers: Charles had Asklepios, see above, and he was pivotal!), it’s harder to Alpha the other players because all the God Powers are very different. It’s not impossible, but it does make it harder to keep track if each player is cycling through God Powers fairly quickly.

2) You can solve the game without burning your brain(s). In a convention environment, you just want to have fun and play. If you “ignore” the silver goals and just concentrate on “winning” a game, you can just do the gold goals, and the game isn’t too hard. It becomes a lot harder if you want to do ALL the silver goals! You can adjust the level of difficulty of the game as you are playing! You can choose to just go for the win, OR you can choose to get as many objectives as you want! The former is a more “light-and-fun” mode, whereas the latter is a more “brain-burny” mode.

So yes, because this is more of a puzzle, it could have easily turned into an Alpha Player experience. But, between diverting the Alpha Player with a frank discussion, and having the asymmetric God Powers, the Alpha Player Problem wasn’t a problem.

The puzzle was fun cooperatively.

Curse and Blessing

One of things that blew me away was how easily I was able to learn the game as I wen by reading the little blurbs on the board: see above as a Riddle 3 game introduces “Blessings” and “Friendly Gods” to the base game. I mean, this was absolutely a fantastic way to learn the rules. New rules are explained AS THEY COME out, and it makes sense.

… until I turned the page and started working on the next puzzle. “Wait, what were the rules for Blessings again?” Once I had set-up the next puzzle, I couldn’t go back and re-read that rule. Frustratingly, the rulebook sometimes didn’t have this same text. How do I look up that rule again? I did go to BoardGameGeek a few times, and I did Google some things.

This way of learning is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it’s so easy to jump right in, and the rules are on the page themselves! It’s a curse because you can’t go back and re-read those rules once you’ve set-up the next puzzle.

The rulebook probably should have replicated the on-page instructions from the Adventure book in the rulebook (or somewhere). The same text I used the learn the rule would help me solidify the rules in my head. If you feel like you CAN’T go back, it’s frustrating. Imagine in a classroom:

“Teacher, could you explain the Blessings rule again? I didn’t quite get it.”
“No, that’s on a blackboard in another classroom.”

I found the rulebook, especially for the Riddle of the Sphinx to not be great at helping me find rules and disambiguations. See next section for another example!

Occupied/Unoccupied

One rule that particularly seemed frustrating was the occupied rule. You can’t build a piece on a space that’s occupied. Or move onto a space that’s occupied. In the base game, the only things that can occupy spaces are workers/figures or blocks/domes. Is a coin or a blessing on a space considered occupied? Physically, yes!! That coin or blessing coin is physically occupying the space, so it prevents me from moving there, right? Intellectually, I think the idea is that the coins/blessings are just goal markers, so they are NOT occupying, just notating!!

It wasn’t until 100% clear until Riddle 5, when one of the workers actually started on a space with the Coin (bottom left, blue worker), that coins don’t block you. It’s pretty clear you can move through coins, I think, if you can start on a coin.

The rules for Riddle of the Sphinx, and especially Santorini, are brief and succinct. But I think they omit some clarity. A few more sentences here and there would have helped. This particularly issue seemed vexing, and I felt like I was “cheating” if I moved through/onto a Coin. “It’s physically blocking me … should be it a game blocker too?” I think that it is NOT a blocker but a notation … it could have been clearer.

Things to Watch Out For

Magnetic Clasp Not Secure: The binding holding the Riddle of the Sphinx box closed is a magnetic clasp. It did’t feel very secure; I would recommend a rubber band or something to hold it more secure. See above for my rubber band solution.

Use Bright Marker: When you mark bubbles on the Constellation Tree or the Adventure Map, don’t use a pencil like I did (see above). Use a sharpie or red marker or something that really stands out.

Print out: Rather than sully your Adventure book, just print out a copy of the Adventure Map and Constellation Tree from your printer. See above. Not only do you keep your original books pristine, the copies from your printer will be on paper that you can actually write on (the paper from the original is very slick).

Conclusion

Riddle of the Sphinx is clearly more puzzle than game. There are elements of randomness that make it more gamey (which base gods do you get, do you risk rolling a die, etc), but in general: this a puzzle. You need to know that before going in; you may love the idea of a solo or cooperative puzzle using the base rules of Santorini! You may hear that it’s a puzzle to solve and run screaming. Do what you will.

The solo game worked really well; it’s easy to come back to because the rules are pretty straight forward, and it’s easy to save in campaign mode. You can play as much or as little of the campaign as you want.

The cooperative game can succumb to the Alpha Player problem if you aren’t a little careful; Riddle of the Sphinx is a puzzle after all is said and done, and puzzles tend to bring out that Alpha Player. We suggest having a frank discussion about the Alpha Player problem (it worked for us), or just play with a group you already trust and respect. The rapid cycling of asymmetric God Powers did help alleviate the Alpha Player problem a little.

I would absolutely play Riddle of the Sphinx again as a solo game; it’s like an 8.5 or 9 out of 10 for me. It was really fun, and the components were great. The cooperative game, I would play again, because you can adjust the difficulty as you play. I would, however, be very cautious of the Alpha Player issues before I suggested Riddle of the Sphinx to a group, just because, as a puzzle, it’s too easy to fall into the Alpha Player trap. That trap make it a little harder to get out as a cooperative game, so maybe it’s a 7.5 or 8/10 for a cooperative game. It’s fun, it’s adjustable, but you have to be a little careful.

Good game.

Dice Throne Missions and Dice Throne X-Men! A Solo and Cooperative Review!

Follow me, dear reader, as I invest three days of my life into unboxing, sleevening, tokening, and playing the new X-Men Dice Throne and Missions! Watch as I play solo (me vs. me solo and true solo) and cooperatively (with a group of 4), but encounter some unexpected things along the way! Hopefully my journey will inform you if this is something that would be for you!

Dice Throne: X-Men and Marvel Dice Throne: Missions (and a whole bunch of stuff) arrived at my house at 12:30 pm on Monday, February 20th, 2025. I was very excited to get this Kickstarter, so I happened to note the time when it arrived! This was #2 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! And it was “only” 7 months late! (promising arrival in August 2024)! But what is this giant thingee?

The first big box in here is the Dice Throne: X-Men box; you each play a member of the X-Men! This is a dice-chucking game with a Yahtzee-type re-roll mechanic: you roll dice, trying to roll a straight or full house or 5-of-a-kind (stuff like that) to activate your super powers! These powers, when activated, nominally do damage or other crazy things to your opponents. This is a fully competitive game where the heroes beat each other up: think of the X-Men Danger Room! You are training in the Danger Room! (That’s why heroes fight heroes, ya, that’s it: don’t ask too many questions about why heroes are fighting heroes….just enjoy the game)

But why are we talking about a competitive game on this solo and cooperative blog? Because the second big thing that came with this was Marvel Dice Throne Missions! Marvel Dice Throne Missions (we’ll call it Missions from now on) is an expansion that takes the competitive Dice Throne system and makes the game both solo and cooperative!

The next three days of my life were consumed by the Dice Throne stuff above. The Dice Throne: X-Men box and Missions box are very closely tied together, as you need a set of heroes to play the Missions! Although you can use any of the Dice Throne heroes (including the original Season 1, Season 2 (see review here) , and Marvel heroes (see review here)), we are going to look at Dice Throne: X-Men and Missions together!!! … because that’s how we played it …

Let’s go back in time and see how three days unfolded ….

Day 1: Unboxings and First Plays

Day 1 was a long day: I got the box at 12:30pm and pretty much unboxed, sleevended, tokened (yes, that’s a word … now), and played non-stop until 8 at night! There was so more unboxing and sleevening and tokening than I expected …

What arrived at my house was a giant box! See Coke Can above for perspective.

The crazy thing was that this was a box in a box in a box in a box situation! See above!

On top of the Dice Throne: X-Men box (above) were all the acrylic tokens and some of the figures (right).

Day 1: The Figurines Unboxing

You don’t need the figurines for plain Dice Throne.

The figures are only for the cooperative expansions Dice Throne Adventures or Missions, as figures for the board … you don’t need these figures at all to play competitive plain Dice Throne! See all eight figures above in the package … and below on a Missions board.

Because the original Marvel Dice Throne did NOT have an option for figures, they included that option here in this Kickstarter! See above for the Marvel Dice Throne figures and below for their standee equivalents!

To be clear; the X-Men Dice Throne (and Marvel Dice Throne) come with cardboard standees so you don’t need to buy the figures (see below for X-Men Dice Throne punchouts, including the standees).

If you are on the fence for buying the figures, remember: they aren’t strictly needed! You can just use the standees and “probably” buy the figures at a later date if you are so inclined.

Day 1: Acrylics and Sleevening

Another upgrade I got were the Acrylic tokens; again these aren’t necessary.

The acrylic token upgrades packs are for Marvel Dice Throne, X-Men Marvel Dice Throne, and Missions—These just replace the cardboard tokens.

Again, the games include all the tokens you need, so these acrylic tokens aren’t necessary. I really thought they made the game pop a little more, so I liked them.

I also picked up the premium sleeves: see below.

Again, strictly not necessary. But very nice!

After ooggling the figures, basically, I spent the next 2 or so hours putting the acrylic tokens and sleeves into the X-Men Dice Throne character boxes!

Whew! Look at all those tokens above!! See below for all 6 characters sleeved and … tokened? (yes, it is a word now: I’ve used it twice).

Yes, this was a long and tedious 2 hours. But the characters looks great!

Oh yes, and Deadpool wants you to know he is an expansion! He is a character you can play (he also came with this Kickstarter, but he is a separate expansion you have to pay extra for). I went ahead and unboxed, sleeved, and tokened him too. See above.

Day 1: First Play

As a reminder, you “probably” don’t want to jump into Missions (cooperative) if you haven’t played the base Dice Throne (competitive)! See the warning above from the Missions rulebook.

I love Dice Throne, but it has been a while since I played. So I decided to do a Me vs. Me solo game, and play against myself! This was mostly to remind myself of the rules and see the new characters! Those of you out there are thinking that I will “pander” and play Wolverine vs. Deadpool. Nope!

I ended up playing Wolverine vs Cyclops. Me vs Me!

Basically, I’d literally switch seats when I had to play the other character: I always like this swapping because it really feels like you are playing both sides well!

It was an interesting match: Wolverine won, but just barely. Cyclops looks like he will do best in a cooperative game, as his abilities have some emphasis on helping other players! He has leadership cards and support tokens/abilities that help others! Wolverine just heals and does damage … as you’d expect.

This game was reasonably quick, maybe a hour? It went by pretty quickly and I got to learn about Wolverine and Cyclops.

Day 1: Missions Unboxing

Yes, we are still in Day 1. I told you this was a long day! But a good day! I finally got to unpack Missions!

The most AMAZING thing is all the little mission books that come with the game!! Holy cow!! See how many there are? I put a Coke can next to them for perspective!

My only real complaint with the missions is that they are hard to keep open! We’ll see that more later.

There’s some Momentum dials (this is a new mechanism in the game: each character gets a dial), Allies (another new mechanism: these must be bought with Momentum), and some other tokens.

The Momentum is a major new mechanism in the game; you can actually level-up your Momentum card (as you play more games)!

I mean, this looks great! See above!

At the top is a tray for tokens: see above.

There are a lot cardboard tokens in Missions … but I ended up replacing them with the acrylic tokens. This took about the next hour of my life.

At first, putting tokens in the token tray looks VERY DAUNTING. And it is. Until you notice the side of the box!!! See above!! The side of the box shows you how to put the token into the tray!

Sounds like an easy job? Oof. This was the most tedious thing I did on Day 1.

I basically had to separate out the tokens into piles and start putting them into the box, all while trying to match the picture on the side of the box!!

I mean, it does look cool when you are done … see above.

Finally, I sleeved the Alllies: these sleeves were extra (I had to pay for them).

But they look pretty cool.

Day 1: The rulebook

There are a few things I have to say about the rulebook.

It completely fails the Chair Test: it droops over the edge of the chair and almost falls off!

I ended up using the workaround I discovered in my review of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles! You need two chairs to hold the rulebook, with the spine in the middle!

The rulebook was generally good otherwise: it had a good components page (see above).

It had a good two-page spread for set-up: I got going right away.

The rulebook had a big, readable font, useful pictures, and even little parenthetical text to emphasize issues.

The best part was that the back cover had a list of all the statuses on the back. This was generally a good list of statuses and their effects, but we did have some questions as we played… some of the status descriptions needed more clarification.

This was generally a good rulebook, but I hated the form factor. It seems like the worst form factor I have seen in a while. I actually had to change chairs in my cooperative game so I could sit somewhere where I could set-up the the two chairs to see the rulebook! The rulebook is huge and there is no almost no way it’ll fit on the table.

Day 1: Set-up for Solo play

I know, it’s hard to believe we are still in Day 1. I had just finished dinner, and I am still setting up my first Mission!

Missions have two sides; the front side is generally fighting some henchmen … (see above) …

… and the back side is Boss Fight (Scarlet Witch in this case.. see above)!

To win the mission, you need to complete both sides! See above as I start setting up side one of the mission … and get grumpy that it won’t stay flat …

I chose Wolverine to go on the solo mission: see above! Note that the rulebook suggests the mission above to start on … so that’s the one I am playing!! This is true solo play; I will be playing one character as I take on the Henchmen … on side 1 of the mission.

Day 1: Side One of the Mission

I was approaching the end of my Dice Throne Day (yes, I am still in Day 1!!!), as I got a chance to try out solo play with Missions on side 1 of my first mission.

Momentum is a huge new mechanism in the game: you are rewarded with Momentum when you take out a henchman or something in the game! It’s kind of like experience points, but it’s a little more dynamic in that you can spend it anytime! You can spend Momentum to give you range (typically, you can only attack things next to you) or to buy Allies.

The Allies give you extra abilities/powers that make the game more interesting. They typically can be used for a “minor” ability without discarding, or for a “major” ability if you discard it (see Nick Fury above).

What I liked was that when you “cleared” a bad guy, you put down a clear token (see above) to note that he was dispatched! And the token reminds you of the 2 Momentum you get for killing … I mean clearing him!

Another major mechanism is the Crisis Clock: at the end of each round, the hands of the clock move 1 per player and may invoke some harsh penalties (depending on the mission).

There’s other things going on, but that’s generally most of it! See above as I cleared the board and made my way towards fighting Doc Ock! …. but that would have to wait for tomorrow … it’s been a long day!

Day 2: More Missions

I had to work most of Tuesday, but after I got home, I was consumed with playing more Missions!
Note! When you flip the mission to the other side, you keep you character’s Hit Points, Momentum, and everything the way it was! While you reset BETWEEN missions, you DO NOT reset when you FLIP the mission!

The Boss Fight side of the Mission 1 basically just has you straight up fight the big boss! And the Crisis Clock is much more damaging!

You are in harms way as you actively are right next to the Boss! See above! No moving away!

One interesting note; there are tokens that, if you end your turn there, you get a bonus. So, you can get the +2 token if you go to space 3 above. But if the space has the red tokens underneath, you always get those … but only AFTER The bad guys attacks you! And there is a cost for moving to a space with red tokens … the boss typically does more damage (crit) to you!

In the end, I defeated Doc Ock pretty handily; I think my Ally made this much easier.

I went into the Boss Fight with 15 Momentum and basically kept the crisis track completely under control using Nick Fury.

After you defeat a Mission, the player gets “Perk Points”! These are another thing that are kind of like experience points! You use them to make your character better. You may spend some Perk Points to start the next mission with a little more momentum, or have a focus fire, or other things!

There are 6 levels of difficulty in the game; they are marked on top of the mission sheet you choose. See below.

You reallllly don’t want to try harder missions until you have some Perk Points from previous missions! So, while this isn’t a campaign “per se”, the game encourages you to keep playing and get Perk Points so you can handle more difficult missions!

You could always cheat and just give yourself a bunch of Perk Points to level up yourself ….

I moved on to a harder mission: level 2!

You can really see the Mission board problem above …

Sauron’s Hunger was my second mission … and I had a blast!

Wolverine went after the tree so he could get the Perfect Reward (see above) and more Perk Points at the end of the game!

The second side of the Mission was another Boss Fight: see above!

This one was a little harder, but I expected it to be for a level 2!

In the end, I was able to win and finish another Mission! It was definitely a little harder. I had two missions under my belt, and I looked forward to another!

Day 3: Cooperative Play

With two days of solo play and set-up experience, I felt ready to teach my friends! We ended with a 2-hour Mission fighting Doc Ock again!

This was a 4-Player cooperative game.

I took Cyclops because I wanted to test his Leadership abilities. Sara and Teresa took their favorite characters: Ororo and Rogue (respectively). Sam doesn’t know the X-Men as well, but he knows Wolverine.

Although we beat the first side of the mission, we lost to Doc Ock as he killed two of my players.

Solo Play

The solo play was a hoot to me! I kept wanting to do more Missions and get more Perk Points!! What are some of the other missions that lay ahead?? Wolverine is probably a better character to play solo; he is good at damage and he can heal himself. I worry that Cyclops or other heroes might struggle with hit points a little.

I had fun, I was engaged, and I felt like all my rolls mattered!

I was able to push my luck (and I usually hate dice games), but usually there is a good roll or card that can help you get “something good” on your turn. With Wolverine especially, even if you didn’t have a good roll, the lesser abilities typically healed him, so something good always happened.

Over the course of two days, I had fun. I was engaged, and I saw how important Allies are (especially their Exhaust ability) and how Momentum worked. These are both new things to the Missions mode and they really made me feel like I always had more options.

I would give the Missions solo mode an 8.5/10. It was great. It may be that you have to choose a hero that works well with solo; I am not sure Cyclops would have done as well.

Even the me vs me solo mode was fun! Not quite an 8.5/10, maybe 7.5/10, but that was a fun way to play solo too!

Cooperative Mode

This was a surprise for me: my friends didn’t enjoy cooperative Missions very much. And they (mostly) love the X-Men!!!

Although there is simultaneous play keeping everyone involved (you only serialize your turns when you do damage; all other times, every one is rolling and re-rolling and playing cards simulaneously), no one felt like there was a lot of cooperation. As Sara said, “it feels like Dice Throne is not a cooperative mode and this feels a little forced.”

I even played Cyclops to try to elicit more cooperation: I’d always say “Hey! I’ve got some support tokens! Use me! I can help you reroll or get CP if you need it!” … and I think my players used me once. And I tried really hard to get them to use me!!

You might think that “Well, your players don’t like co-ops, or they just don’t like to co-operate” and that is patently untrue! I play co-ops all the time with this group!! And they cooperate very well together! For some reason, this just didn’t work. And Sara even said, “Eh, you can cooperate, but there are many other co-ops I’d rather play.”

I actually have a theory about this! When we played King of Monster Island a while ago (see review here), we liked the King of Monster Island game, but it also seemed to not promote cooperation as much!! Why? It also has the familiar Yahtzee re-roll mechanism (roll 3 times, keep the ones you want) just like Dice Throne Missions!! And while that mechanism is very engaging, people seem to become TOO engaged in that to the point they don’t cooperate! It’s a weird thing to say, but too much engagement on your own stuff lessens the cooperation! And I think that’s what happened here: we all got so caught up in our own characters, we forgot to cooperate!

Maybe this problem would go away after repeated plays, but you have to want to continue playing! And I am sad to say my group mostly doesn’t really want to play this again.

Having said that, maybe if you have a group that really likes cooperative multiplayer solitaire games (no Alpha Player), maybe this is something your group might enjoy! There doesn’t seem to be a lot of cooperation, just a bunch of heroes beating up stuff and rolling dice! Maybe that would appeal to your group!

Reactions

Rich: I liked the game solo a lot! 8.5/10: I was engaged and I liked my decisions. Cooperative was probably a 7/10? I still liked it but there wasn’t much cooperation.

Teresa: I got to play Rogue! And I had fun! 7/10

Sara: I don’t know, I just didn’t think it was great. There wasn’t much cooperation, and even though I love Storm, it wasn’t that interesting to play her. There are a lot of other cooperative games I’d rather play. The cooperative mode just feels tacked on. It was okay. 6/10

Sam: It was okay. 6/10.
Sam actually had a very full write-up on his cooperative experience, which he emailed to me! I will reproduce that at the end of this review, after the Conclusion. Read that for another perspective!

Conclusion

I expected X-Men Dice Throne and Missions to go over like gang-busters! And while it did for me (for the solo mode especially), my group wasn’t that impressed with it.

The game has gorgeous components, even if you choose not to upgrade everything. My only real complaint was the Mission mats frequently has trouble staying flat. This looks like a comic book world on the table, with its colorful villains, colorful heroes, and gorgeous dice and cards.

I think the cooperative mode didn’t go as well because people tended to be too focused on their own mat and their own rerolls … and this self-focus seemed to actually discourage cooperation! I thought that my group, who love the X-Men, would adore this! And they did not.

As a solo game, I am very comfortable giving this an 8.5/10. I will play again, and I look forward to getting more Perk Points to try harder and harder missions!

As a cooperative game, it feels like the game lands at a 6.5/10. Although Teresa and I would play it again as a co-op, I don’t think Sam and really Sara would. For more details, see Sam’s Perspective below.

So, that’s my journey: Three Days of Dice Throne! I loved it! My friends … not so much. Your group may still love the cooperative Missions especially if they love co-ops that are more multiplayer solitaire.

Sam’s Perspective

Overall score: 6 – would play again if everybody else wanted to but X-Men as Wolverine combined with the Missions mode isn’t something I’d necessarily request or suggest (I could see it being 7-7.5 with avengers)

TLDR version:

I feel like this is turning into a scathing review and that’s not my intended tone. This particular combination of theming (X-Men aren’t really my thing) and components (flat printed enemies against hero minis didn’t really feel like we were fighting bad guys) just didn’t land for me.

The essay:

Because I’m an uncultured swine :), I’m not familiar with X-Men or their lore or anything other than the Deadpool movies (1 and 2) and being able to pick wolverine out of a lineup. Therefore, the characters didn’t really speak to me and I was unable to appreciate the references/accents/etc. Because of the movies, Doc Oc is also linked as a spiderman villain in my mind.

I feel like I could have used a “sparring match” or two of the competitive version to get used to my character before taking him against the villains cooperatively.

The components felt a bit jarring – minis for us vs enemies printed on the map just felt like I was standing around and taking swings at air. I feel like I would have felt more immersed if the bad guys were also minis (even though they didn’t move) or if we were flat tokens in the same plane as our opponents.

I can’t quite put my finger on it but the movement and momentum mechanics also felt a little bit off to me.

I remember enjoying the original dice throne (though I missed out on the adventures and the original marvel set) probably because it was a set of generic archetypes I could get into – the rogue, paladin, gunslinger, monk, pirate, etc.

I think I would also have enjoyed this more with the “original”marvel characters (avengers) even without having as much time to get into how my character works. Wolverine might also have been too simple – basically 9 variations on “get angry, hit hard, heal” depending on what you rolled. It didn’t really feel like I had much to set up and pull off, just wander around and try to roll good combinations so I could swing really hard at the air where an enemy was.

Top 10 Cooperative Light/Party Games of 2024!

What’s a party game? A party game is usually a casual game you can pull out with a fairly large group of friends and jump right into! Many, if not most, of the cooperative party games we see are Cooperative Guessing games, where the players collectively guess something based on clues from a clue-giver!

Surprisingly, the year of 2024 produced quite a number of cooperative party games! That’s right; cooperative party games! And most are Cooperative Guessing games! We saw some really good party games on the Top 10 Cooperative Party Games list … and here’s 10 more below just from 2024!

10. Word Traveller

Player Count: 2-5
Ages: 10+
Time: 30-45 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

Like many of the games on this year’s list, this is a Cooperative Guessing game! In this game, a clue-giver will give word clues to “guide” the others around the board, trying to get to a destination on the board!

This feels a lot like the cooperative word guessing games Mystic Paths or Landmarks (see below), as you use words to imply directions to travel. What makes this a little different is that the words you choose refer to tourist spots in the maps! There are 4 maps in the game for London, Paris, New York City, and Tokyo! See below for the map of London!

This is a real unique game and has some really neat idea in the crowded cooperative word guessing genre!

9. Landmarks

Player Count: 2-10
Ages: 10+
Time: 20 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

Landmarks is a cooperative word guessing game where one player gives word clues, trying to guide the rest of the playing (cooperatively guessing) to water, treasure, and finally the exit! This game is very similar to a game called Mystic Paths where players are moving across a map of hexes.

There’s also elements of Codenames in here, as the clue-giver has a hidden map as he tries to guide the players around the map!

We have played this game with several groups, and it seemed to go over pretty well! It takes a few plays to get the sense and spirit of the game, but once you do, it is fun. Some people didn’t love this (because sometimes it was just too vague or the map is wonky), which is why it’s lower on this list. The components are quite nice (with the cloth map and dry-erase hexes), and it was generally fun!

8. Adventure Party

Player Count: 3-8
Ages: 10+
Time: 20-60 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

This looks like a role-playing adventure game (see picture above), but it’s actually a role-playing game PARTY game! It even says that on the cover!

It’s quite silly as a game; a player will have to do an activity and then roll a 20-sided die (secretly) behind their character shield (see above). The Berserker has to open the door; what does a “19” mean? The player then roll-plays what they do (based on the number they roll) and the other player have to “guess” what the roll was on based on what they roll played! It’s a silly game that just gets sillier as you play it!

In fact, it’s so simple to play this that the directions for how to play are summarized very well on the back of the box! See above. My friends and I had fun playing, pardon me, ROLL-PLAYING this silly adventure party game.

7. Message From The Stars

Player Count: 2-8+
Ages: 11+
Time: 45 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

So, this is another cooperative word guessing game, but it has elements of math and it is quite thinky. I love this game because it’s so unique and interesting, but some people just bounced off it because of its weird blend of math and wordplay.

Players plays as two teams; a team of aliens trying to communicate with a team of humans! Teams communicate single words to each other to establish some ideas! What letters you use in your words matters, as well as what concepts/words you are trying to communicate! It’s great fun with lots of deduction … if you grok the game.

This is a great game that can play 2-8+ people, and you can pull it out casually … once everyone knows how to play. The biggest problem is that it takes some brainwork and time to figure out this game. This is probably the most thinky game on this list, and why some people might not classify this as a party game .. which is why this is only #7 on this list, despite how good a game it is. See our review of Message From The Stars here to see if you might enjoy this! (Remember, Codenames is classified as a party game, and it’s quite thinky too!)

6. Expressions

Player Count: 2-5
Ages: 14+
Time: 15 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

Many of the games on this list as cooperative word guessing games; this is a number guessing game! This has a lot of deduction as players can either guess a card a player might be holding (like cooperative go-fish) or give a clue (which feels a little like The Crew).

This is basically a cooperative go-fish game with elements of deduction/clue-giving (ala The Crew). It’s probably the second most thinky game on this list (after Message From The Stars). But this is easy to pull out, quick to explain, and quick to play at only 15 minutes! It does take a few times to get the hang of it, but people seem to want to play again!

5. Da Da Da

Player Count: 2+
Ages: 8+
Time: 15-30 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Classification/Guessing

This is an odd duck of a game. Players take a bunch of black and white pictures and collectively classify them using only a few words, like “DA” and “BLUMP”. Basically, the group is coming up with a language for describing shared traits using a few very simple words. These few words are the ONLY communication that players are allowed!

In the first part of the game, the players collectively classify all the pictures together using only those few words (like “DA” and “BLUMP”) as they point and move pictures. In the second part of the game, new pictures are introduced and the players have to try and figure out, using only the new language of those few words, the new thing. As long as you have a group that doesn’t annoyingly repeat the weird little words ad naseum, this is a fun game … it’s almost a linguistics experiment!

It sounds like it can’t work, but my group really enjoyed it! This is one you might want to try before you pick it up; some people will be annoyed by it, some people won’t get it, but some people will love it! Our groups loved it! Maybe yours will too!

4. Link City

Player Count: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Time: 30 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing/Classification

This is a game that I didn’t like as much as everyone else, but it was such a hit for everyone else, I had to put this on the list! One player (the Mayor) puts city Locations out, and the other players have to guess where he would place them based on the locality to other Locations in the game!

The Mayor rotates every turn, so a new player has to decide what Locations go where! It’s all about building the municipality, but with some real silly decisions!

My friend Kurt loves this game and we’ve played it a number of times when he has come to visit! If this sounds like fun, I suggest you give it a try! A bunch of people I know and like really like this game!

3. Spotlight

Player Count: 1-5
Ages: 6+
Time: 15 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Searching

This is such a neat game! It’s a very simply premise as players search a shaded picture for certain figures, counting them up! Each player needs to find them independently on their own sheet! If they find “enough” together, they can stay ahead and win!

The sheer fun of this game is the clever sheets that are have darkened plastic. When you place a white surface underneath, the picture comes apparent! See the “fully darkened” picture above … and the picture with a white spotlight below!

There is no batteries or magic technology here; it’s just a white surface underneath making the plastic easily viewable!

This game has worked really well in so many situations! I have played with little kids (like 5 years old) and older adults, and big kids, and even though this “looks like a kid’s game”, people really love the Spotlight mechanism! It’s just so cool!

2. Wilmot’s Warehouse

Player Count: 2-6+
Ages: 8+
Time: 30 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Memory/Cooperative Guessing

Wait, this is a cooperative memory match game? Yes, and it works surprisingly well! This is probably Sara’s favorite game of all the games on this list!

Players draw tiles from a bag and cooperatively “come up with a story” for the shape and place it in the warehouse.

After placing a bunch of tiles down, players must try to cooperatively remember what tile was what by trying to match other tiles to it! It’s wacky and the stories people come up are really funny! It’s surprisingly goofy, but it’s really easy to explain and jump into! See our review here to see see why Wilmot’s Warehouse is much better than you expect!

1. That Escalated Quickly

Player Count: 2-8
Ages: 10+
Time: 15 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

This was a bit of surprise as our #1 choice for the best cooperative party games of 2024, but it just kept coming to the table all this year! And we all loved it! Players get asked a silly question like: “What do you tell a vampire to get him to turn you?” (See back cover above for more questions) And then everyone gets 1 (or 2) cards from 1-10, and everyone has to answer that question so that 1 is least likely to get turned, and 10 is most likely! But without revealing their number! (Much like Adventure Party from earlier)

The guesser has to take all the answers and sort them from lowest to highest .. if they get them all in order, it counts as a point! (You can have upto one mistake)

Like all good party games, the points don’t matter, and you just keep playing, not really caring if you win or not! This is a mass market party game from The Exploding Kittens people; I picked it up at Target, so it’s really easy to find! Check it out! Hopefully you will enjoy it as much as we did!

Fellowship of the Crew! A Review of Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game

This is a mouthful of a title: The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. See the full title above! BoardGameGeek lists it as The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. Whew! We’ll stay with the “shorter” title.

I ordered my copy directly from Asmodee, and it arrived mid January 2025. I tried VERY hard to get the game as soon as it came out! I was very excited for it!! I saw a TON of reviewers get it earlier in 2024, but as a plain-old boring paying customer, the earliest I could get my copy was straight from Asmodee’s web site in January 2025 (after pre-ordering it back in November (?) 2024).

So, what is this game? It’s a small-box game for 1-4 players, Ages 10+ with a “listed” playing time of 20 minutes. That time is reasonable accurate for describing a single game, but this is, at its heart, a campaign game! So, it’s a campaign of 18 chapters, and each chapter can have multiple games. So, a chapter is “not necessarily” one game, but many times is. (After you complete the campaign, there is a standalone mode so you can continue playing).

This game (you’ll notice I am staying away from saying the full name) is a cooperative trick-taking game! Players work together to take tricks, but under certain conditions! One of the biggest parts of the game is that it is a Limited Communication game: players are not allowed (in any way) to discuss the cards in their hands as they play. All they can do is deduce what other people have by what cards they played.

Those of you paying attention might say “Hey! That sounds like the Crew! That’s a cooperative trick-taking game too, right?” Yup! We liked The Crew quite a bit, as it made the #2 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Space Games! There’s a lot of similarities between the two: they both have ongoing campaigns that start easy and get harder, they both are smaller box games, and they both are Limited Communication games. The best description of Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game is Lord of the Rings meets The Crew. But there are some interesting differences, which we will discuss!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is almost exclusively a card game. There are 3 decks in the game: the intro deck (far left), Part I deck (first 12 chapters) and Part II deck (last 6 chapters).

So many cards. See above.

There are some tokens; the purple tokens are used to notate “required” characters: when you play, ever player must take a character, and certain characters are required for certain chapter. The big Ring card is used to denote when Rings have been played, and thus allow leading with them (see more discussion below).

This a trick-taking game, so there are suits. Rather than “boring” hearts, spades, diamonds, etc, the suits are thematic Shadows, Hills, Mountains, Rings, and Forest. See above.

Each player will assume the role of a Lord of the Rings character (you may assume multiple characters depending on the player count).

Each character has a win condition: in order to win a game, you (usually) hav to satisfy all characters’ winning conditions!!! Notice Frodo’s “win” condition: he must win 4 or more of the Rings cards in the tricks he wins.

Pippin’s win condition is to win the fewest tricks: see above. You’ll also note that at the start of the game, some characters are allowed to “exchange” cards with other characters. You can’t still talk about your cards in hand, but you can give away obvious cards. For example: you really don’t want Pippin to have too many high cards (since he has to lose most tricks), so you may give away an 8 of Hills.

An interesting rule of the game is that a player can’t lead with a Ring card unless a Ring has already been played into a previously won trick (by being sloughed off when a player couldn’t match the lead suit). The Ring token is on the black-and-white to show: “Nope: you can’t lead a trick with a Ring suit“.

Once at least one Ring has come out, then Ring cards may be lead! See the colorful side of the Ring above! It now means “Yep! You can lead tricks with Ring cards now!“.

There are lots of little special rules in the game. For example, after dealing out all the cards, one card is always “lost” (to make the math work, there is always one extra card). But Gandalf has a special rule that he can take the lost card into his hand!

Each character is dealt a hand of cards and uses those to play a trick-taking game! The holder of the 1 Ring always starts the game. Frodo is almost always in play, and he always starts with the 1 Ring: see above.

Players continue playing until all their win conditions are satisfied … and they win! If, at any point, the win conditions can’t be satisified, the game is lost. In the campaign, losing means you just play the same game again until you win (usually).

A winning game moves to the next … game. In the beginning of the campaign, that usually means the next Chapter: these are called “Short games” (see below).

Later in the campaign, you may have to play multiple games to advance to the next chapter. These are called “Long” games (see below).

If you can get through all 18 chapters of the campaign, you win!

Solo Play

There is a solo mode for the game! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) Given that The Crew (the game that this will be compared to over and over) DID NOT have a solo mode, this is huge!

The solo mode has very different rules than the main cooperative game! During the main cooperative game, all cards are dealt out, and the players (cooperatively) make decisions about what to play based on what they see in their entire hand! See above as a cooperative player has a whole bunch of cards!

In the solo game, the solo player assumes the role of 4 of the characters, and only gets “part” of each hand (4 cards each to start)! See above as Chapter 1 has the solo player playing 4 characters with 4 cards each!

Each character gets 4 cards (see above) and will get a new cards after a trick is taken! So, the solo player has to decide how to play cards based on seeing ALL Characters cards, but not all cards per hand!

So, this is a solo mode which requires the solo player to operate 4 characters! Normally, I worry about the intellectual overload, the context-switching between characters, and general maintenance. But it’s really not an issue here! Each character is very simple to operate: they don’t have special powers, they simply have a special winning condition. It’s really easy to look at the board (see above) and get a sense what each character should play!!

The solo mode requires you to look at all the cards in all the hands of all the characters and make decisions to achieve their win goals. That sounds daunting, but it really isn’t. You know EXACTLY what each character will play; what you don’t know (for sure) is what card each character will get next. The randomness in the solo game is based on what card each player gets next round. I never found this randomness too debilitating. I had a few games where the cards went against me, but it was easy to replay that game … remember, this is a 20-minute game, so any randomness in the deals (even if it completely sucks), will be over soon and you can play another game.

Said another way, I didn’t think there was too much randomness in this game to make me dislike it.

To emphasize the point that this is an easy game to get into, let me tell you that I played through the entire 18-Chapter solo game when I was sick! I wasn’t at my best, but the LOTR trick-taking game is really easy to get into! Each game is “only” 20 minutes or so, so when I got tired when I was sick, I could go take a nap, and come back again!

Let’s be clear, even though the solo game is easy to pick-up, easy to play, and easy to keep coming back to, there’s still a lot of engaging decisions! Part of the reason I liked the solo game so much was that it was engaging and “distracted” me from being sick!

The amount of manintenance as you play the game is pretty minimal; it’s real easy to play solo. But there is a lot of maintenance between games: Honestly, the worst part of the game is the constant shuffling. You need to make sure you do a really good job shuffling the cards, because a bad shuffle may cause you to lose the game! So, I ended up doing a pile shuffle after every game just to make sure thing were shuffled!

As a solo game, this game is a huge win! It’s easy to learn, easy to play, and engaging enough to keep coming back to! Like I said, I played the entire 18-Chapter campaign solo when I was sick, and it was great! It’s easy enough to play when you are “distracted”, but fun enough to keep you engaged!

Major win for having a solo mode: What’s the score?
The Crew: 0, Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 1.

I liked the solo game, and even though I have defeated the entire game, I will keep it in my collection to play again solo.

Cooperative Mode

So, there are actually several cooperative modes based on the number of players. It “feels like” the best way to play the game is 4-Players (or 3-Player). (The 2-Player game is really very different; I can’t comment on that as I never got a chance to play it. I have to admit the 2-Player mode looks very daunting).

My 4-Player group sat down and played though 12 games (8 chapters) in one night over 3 hours! They won most games pretty handily, but it kept getting harder and harder! By game 8, they had to replay it 3 times! Game 8 features Tom Bombadil pretty prominently, and the joke was that game 8 was just as annoying as Tom Bombadil!

The major differences between the solo and 4-Player cooperative game:
1) The solo player sees all hands, but only a limited number of cards
2) The cooperative player sees all cards in their hand, but only can see their hand

The Limited Communication rules are VERY Clear from the rulebook: you pretty much can’t talk about anything except public information, such as player’s winning conditions and special rules. Anything in your hand can’t be discussed AT ALL!

After playing through 8 Chapters, my friends basically said they liked this better than The Crew and it was more thematic! They liked the art, the cards, the character win goals.

The Crew: 0; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (theme, art)

I like to point out that the Crew has the “very limited communication” with the communication tokens. I actually prefer that part of the Crew: I don’t love that there is NO communication really in this game (but see below). Recall, in the Crew, every player “can communicate” once at a critical juncture with “highest card” or “lowest card” or “only card. There is no such mechanism in Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: the rules for limited communication are pretty brutal.

The Crew: 1 (has some critical communication); Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2

One Ring To House Rule Them All

Let me tell you what happened in the 4-Player cooperative game: when choosing characters to play, my friends ended up talking a little about which characters to choose. “Oh, I should probably be Pippin, my hand sucks.” “Ya, I can be Tom Bombadil I guess”. Here’s the thing: the rules are VERY CLEAR that they can’t do that!

I read the rulebook aloud to my friends: this explicitly say they can’t do this …
“During setup, players should not discuss character preferences, as this may reveal information”

My friends hated this rule! This is the one and only chance to really communicate on the game, and they felt like it made the game more fun! “Give us SOME choice! This is a house rule for us!”

I didn’t mention this, but I ended just watching and shepherding my friends through 8 chapters (I was the fifth wheel and didn’t play). And watching my friends “discuss” which characters to play seemed to engage them and made them talk! They REALLY had fun picking characters! I think it also gave them more “skin” in the game, as they weren’t just “saddled” with a character, they had a choice in the pick!

It’s very explicit in the rules that players can’t reveal any intent on characters, but I think that’s a mistake. I think the game is more engaging and more fun if players have some choice there! Honestly, this helps combat the problem I have with this game: there’s no “special communication” allowed (like The Crew!). Watching the game, it was VERY clear that allowing the players to help choose their characters was more fun, so we made it a house rule:
“Players can communicate preferences for choosing characters, but just can’t reveal what’s in their hands”.

With the house rule:
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 3 (house rule)
Without the house rule:
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (no house rule)

The Campaign

The Campaign is … just the game getting harder and harder. The campaign follows the story in the book really well; one of my players is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and they noted how well the Chapters followed the book. But, at the end of the day, each game is pretty much independent of the previous game. There is no “levelling-up”, there are no major penalties for losing—each game just gets “harder”. Certain characters are “revealed” as you play, but generally the campaign is just harder and harder games. It’s a linear campaign.

If you were looking for a more operatic campaign with levelling-up, branching narrative, satisfying punishments, debilitating punishments, and state changing, this isn’t the game for you. But, if you want a bunch of games in a row that nominally follow the plot of the book The Fellowship of the Ring (without too much maintenance in between), this is a good game for you.

What Do You Do When The Campaign Is Over?

There are rules for playing the game after you finish the campaign: see rulebook above. Honestly, I would just rather play the campaign again; the campaign is easy to reset, and setting up games “post campaign” looks messy.

What I Liked

The art: This stained-glass art for the characters was very thematic and very appealing. The art on the Mountains, Rings, Shadows, etc. suits was also very thematic. The art and theme is much more appealing in this game than the Crew:
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 4(with house rule and art)

The Characters: The character art and win conditions were all very interesting. One of my players pointed out they liked that the win Conditions changed every time, but they followed the characters! The Crew is a little different in that the win conditions just a condition. I think it’s a win for the Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game that there are characters. Having characters makes the game a little more engaging! For my group at least.

The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 5(with house rule and art and characters)

Solo mode: The solo mode is good. It’s easy to get into, and it’s easy to start/stop it at any time. We’ve already noted that the Crew does NOT have a solo mode, whereas this does.

What I Didn’t Like

Communications too limited: I think the Crew has the major advantage by giving players “chances” to do communication at critical times: There is no such mechanism in this game. I don’t want to undersell this point: this is one of the major reasons I adore the Crew! The whole idea of communicating a critical piece of information at JUST THE RIGHT TIME is such an engaging and interesting mechanism in the Crew. There is nothing like that here.

I will say that the House Rule we proposed (allow characters to more interactively choose characters) goes a long way towards alleviating this issue.

So much shuffling! Just be aware how much shuffling there is … you may want to sleeve your cards. Since each game is only 20 minutes, these cards get touched and shuffled a lot. I currently don’t have my cards sleeved, but maybe I should.

Conclusion

The Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a fantastic game that I think people will adore. I watched as my group just jumped in and played 3 hours, and they had a ball! I watched as I played solo over the entire campaign, and I had a ball!

The best description I have of this game is The Crew meets Lord of the Rings! It’s a very thematic co-op, at least moreso than The Crew. My friends all preferred this over the Crew … but only if they had the House Rule that they could talk more about character selection. Watching them play cooperatively, I would strongly recommend this House Rule: it really seemed to make the game more engaging for my friends!

The solo game was very engaging and I would play it again.

This is a very easy game to jump into, either cooperatively or solo, and it’s easy to play (with lots of fun decisions). I personally prefer The Crew over this (because of the critical communication rule), but my friends all preferred this game. If I want to play solo, I can’t play The Crew, but I can play this.

Great game. I will keep both The Crew and Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game in my collection, but it appears my friends all prefer Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game.

You might want to sleeve your game if you pick it up. My cards have started getting a little grody.

Unstoppable: A Solo and Two-Player Cooperative Deck-building/Crafting Game. A Review.

Unstoppable is a cooperative deck-building/card-crafting game! This was #4 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2025! This was on Kickstarter back in June 2024, and delivered to me Saturday January 17th, 2025! I backed it, expecting it to arrive later in 2025, but it actually delivered early! (It originally promised February 2025). Amazing!

This delivered with three playmats, the Tyrant’s End expansion, and the base game: see above.

So what is Unstoppable? The game describes itself as a Roguelike Momentum Deckbuilder … meh, that’s an okay description, but I’d prefer to call it a deck-building/card-crafting boss-battler instead (I think it’s just “hot” to call games “roguelike” at the moment).

Be clear that this game ONLY supports 1 to 2 players before you get too excited; this game reminds me of a more tightly-coupled Astro Knights (see our review of Astro Knights here and here): Unstoppable still has that sci-fi feel, that deck-building feel, and that boss-battling feel … just like Astro Knights, but it also has some really different ideas. What do I mean by that? Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing

The Unstoppable base box is actually not that big; see Coke can for perspective above.

This is a deck-building game (and card-crafting: we’ll touch on that in a second) , so there are a ton of cards: See above.

There’s also some money tokens (credits, far right: I mean, this is a deck-building game, so you have to buy SOMETHING to upgrade your deck), hit point tokens (middle: you gotta do damage to take out minions on the way to the big bad boss), and some action point tokens (far left: yes, this game has action points too!).

There’s not THAT much in the base box; mostly cards and tokens and a few larger mats.

Playmats

I can hear some of you asking … “So Rich, why are there three playmats?” An excellent question.

The playmats are double-sided.

One side of the playmat is a single player mat. This is where one player’s cards, play board, threat, tokens, etc. goes. See above.

The other side of the playmat is where the main upgrades (this is a deck-building game, remember?), the core cards, and the big bad boss you battle lives. See above.

The reason there are three playmats is because the game is either 1-player or 2-players! Each player gets a mat (2 mats) and the big bad boss gets a mat (for up to 3 mats). See below for a 2-Player set-up:player 1 on left, player 2 on right, upgrades/boss on top.

So, to be clear, the playmats cost extra money; they don’t come with the game. Were they worth the extra money? So, I paid $100 for the base game, 3 mats, and one expansion. I like how they mats organize the game, but strictly speaking you don’t need them!

The rulebook DOES show how the game sets-up without the mats, so you don’t need them. But I liked them; much like the Aeon’s End: The Descent playmat was so useful, so too was the playmat for Unstoppable. But maybe you should see if you like the base game before you go investing all the $$$ for the playmats and expansion … keep reading …

Rulebook

I am a little grumbly with this rulebook. There are about 3 or 4 things that it could have EASILY done to make it SIGNIFICANTLY better.

The good news is that it gets an A- on the Chair Test.

It opens up and sits perfectly well on the chair next to me, making it easy to consult. So, they definitely did that right: see above.

The Components page (on the left above) is “okay”. The first real problem is … how do you set this up? There is a discussion (right side of the page) about “how you set-up and sleeve” the game, but THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PICTURE describing it! I was able to figure it out, but people who have no idea what card-crafting is or even deck-building will be completely lost with these directions (far right side of the page). A single picture might take this game from unplayable to playable for certain people. And a little picture would have made me happy; show me how the decks fit together. Please? I feel like the description above wasn’t quite enough.

The set-up was pretty good: see above.

The next place I had problems was the card anatomy. Here, the Defense and Bonus areas on the Threat Cards were poorly described. The problem is that most Threat Cards use the SKULL symbol, and it’s not clear what that means (the skull on the Threat Cards is a different color and/or outline than the reference card: we discuss more below). A simple example describing one combat would have helped that.

The rest of the rulebook is pretty good.

I also really wanted a game summary on the back; I ended up paging through the gameplay pages over and over as I played; it would have been nice had those been summarized on the back.

This rulebook was … ok. I just wanted a few more examples, a few more discriminators, and a few more pictures in the rulebook to help me get into the game. After a little trek onto BGG (see thread here), I feel like I got my questions answered, but the rulebook could have been better.

It worked. Mostly. Except for set-up. It could have been significantly better with a few extra pictures.

Storybook

There is a storybook for the game. You don’t need it to play the game. It’s just flavor text. I never read it, and I feel bad for not reading it?

Sleevening

Like I mentioned in the rulebook section, it was more work than I expected to get this game into playable shape. It took me about an hour or so? Basically, you have to “sleeven” the game and put a bunch of cards into sleeves.

Let’s be clear: the sleeves come with the game! Although this is “mostly” a deck-building game (you can build a deck, add better cards, and cull lesser cards: See our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games for more discussion of deck-building games), it is also a card-crafting game; this is a term that came into parlance with another of John D Clair’s Games: Mystic Vale (although this is a slightly different flavor of that idea). This game is built for you to put cards inside the sleeves, and have multiple cards together at the same time.

Once the cards get going, they will have two sides: a core side (above right: the GOOD side) and a Threat side (above left: the BAD side). There we actually two cards inside the sleeve! This basically allows the GOOD side and BAD side to vary independently.

The GOOD sides are what the characters can do in the game: deal damage, shield themselves, etc. See above.

The GOOD cards tell you which BAD cards they pair with; see the backs above (well, the intro cards do, once you start playing, you get random BAD cards).

The Threat cards (the other side) will be the bad guys that the players fight during the game. These cards, when defeated, will turn over and flow into the GOOD guys hand on the good side!

You might ask “Why do we have these weird rules and weird backs/fronts?” It’s to support UPGRADES (and allow the fronts and backs to vary independently, but that’s a complex discussion).

Probably the coolest part of Unstoppable is that you can UPGRADE a card: it stays attached to the card … in the sleeve! The reason these cards are so WEIRD-shaped is that the upgrades go into the right part of the card and basically stay attached/stay in the card sleeve so that card is better for the rest of the game!

See above as we try to choose between two UPGRADES: Do I want to making it Repeating or add a 2000w Arc Capacitor? The repeater gives me three separate shots, but the capacitor gives me one big shot!! Which do I want?

I choose the capacitor! See as I slide it in …

… and see as it augments my card! Pretty cool!

This is the core crafting mechanic of the game; this is the cool gimmick.

Gameplay

Each player chooses one character to play: see above.

The back of your card indicates which specialized cards you start with (and a little flavor text).

The player sets-up with their starting deck: three special cards and 7 standard “starting” cards. They set-up on the player side.

Your deck goes on the character mat, with Armor and Hit points being tracked.

You also set-up three Threats you must deal with in your personal space. You start with three cards in hand, three action points, and three Threats to deal with.

To play a card, you need to be able to pay the Action point cost (in the upper right corner). Playing Strike gives you a simple 1 hit point of damage.

You do damage to one of the three Threats: see above (more of them if they are FAST); if any of these Threats survive to the next round, they will do Damage to you!

If you take out a Threat, the card FLIPS to the GOOD side and comes into your hand! That’s right, you don’t really draw from your deck: the main way to get new cards in your hand is to take out Threats! That’s very interesting!

Of course, this is a deck-building game, so you have to get new cards somehow. Basically, every turn, you get to choose one of three (you draft) the three cards where the BLUE LEVEL marker is (see above). There are 6 levels of core cards, with higher levels being obviously better!

Every time you empty your deck, you level up and move the level marker up. (There are also ways to move the level marker up quicker, but only temporarily). Leveling-up is a fun time; you get to CULL a card, move the level marker up, and anticipate some new “better” cards!

This is a boss-battler, so you have to take out the BIG BAD BOSS; depending on which one you choose. See above. Interestingly, you can only do “boss damage” (see it blurred below) when you kill certain threats from your deck. These special threats get added every time you level up (and you usually start with 2 of these “boss threats”: see Below.)

There’s actually quite a bit more to the game, but that’s the basics.

Build a better deck and craft better cards! Take out local Threats on the way to taking out the Big Bad!

Solo Play

So, this game is definitely built for solo (thanks for following Saunders’ Law), with 2-Player being the secondary mode. See above: even the font hints at that disparity (SOLO is all big)!

I ended up playing about 10 games of the solo game in the first few days after I got this game! There are three bosses that come with the game, and I was able to defeat each one … after I lost a few times. (There are ways to up the difficulty, and there are 4 characters to play with to give the game more replayability)

It takes a little while to get into the “flow” of the game. There are a lot of rules, there are a lot sections, but there are a lot of decisions (in a good way) to make too.

For example, there are 4 factions in the game that all play VERY differently! If you have multiple cards of a faction, they can “support” the other cards and make them more powerful! I tended to get the Silver faction (the little diagonal raven) in my first few games. But there is also worth in getting multiple factions, especially with the UNITE keyword which gives you special on how many different factions you have in play/in hand!

My favorite decisions in the game came when I was stuck; it was pretty clear that I was going to die and lose, but if I could upgrade my cards JUST RIGHT before I went into battle, I could stay alive! The UPGRADES, and the fact that you can do them anytime on your turn, really make it so you can pivot and be smart! I really appreciated that I could feel clever. Deck-building games tend to have some randomness in them, but the UPGRADE mechanism is what kept me from being too grumpy with that randomness.

I will say that the solo player doesn’t have to do too much work once the game is going, but the set-up and ESPECIALLY the tear-down is a lot of work! Going through your entire deck and separating the core cards and threat cards is so much work. Besides the “unsleevening” (which was a sub-optimal experience), the tear-down is one of the biggest “oofs: that’s a lot of work” in the game. See above as I tear apart the decks!

There are a lot of rules, a lot of Icons, a lot of factions. I appreciated that, by playing this solo, I could learn the game and take whatever time I wanted. I could then teach my friend. Not friends, because the cooperative mode is ONLY 2-Players.

Cooperative Mode

Yes! Thank you! Unstoppable has a cooperative mode with NO Communications Restrictions! I get so tired of having some obscure rules to obscure the communication when playing cooperatively with my friends! I said this in Everdell Duo (see review from a few weeks ago) and I’ll say it now: let me and my friend(s) talk! We play games to play, laugh, talk, strategize, and have fun together! I am so glad we don’t have to worry about any Communications Restrictions as we work together! Thank you Unstoppable for allowing full communication!

The rules for 2-Player are in 1.5 pages (pages 13 and 14: see above); the idea is pretty straight-forward: each player is playing multi-player solitaire for the most part. The BIG BAD BOSS has twice as many hit points (for scaling to 2 players), so both players still have to do “about” the same amount of damage and play “about” the same amount of game.

Most of the 2-Player cooperative game proceeds simultaneously, as both players play out their turns at the same time. (This helps keep the game flowing quickly). The only times where the two players must worry about the order they play is (1) when drafting the new card (players are allowed to choose who drafts first), and then (2) in the Main Phase, the game uses Player Selected Turn Order (one of our favorite mechanisms), where players can intersperse their plays however they want! This is fantastic! Me and my friend can decide the best way to take out Threats together! The only prerequisite is that the entire action must “finish” before the next one. (We found we could even do the Main Phase simulataneously many times as well!)

Although the players can talk through how to play together, the only way they can help each other is to eliminate Threats (by attacking their battlefield) for each other … and that’s it! There’s no sharing of any resources (credits, cards, armor) or anything else. So, this is very much multi-player solitaire.

In my first two-player game, I lost because my friend has a bad draw and couldn’t recover … if I just could have given him a few credits, he would have survived! So, although you can talk and strategize together, you can’t help each other out THAT much. The game is balanced pretty well for the solo player, so it’s rare you can actually “eliminate a threat” from your friend without screwing yourself, at least in my experience.

I liked the 2-Player cooperative mode, but I wish there was a little more cooperation: this is generally a multiplayer solitaire experience. Even sharing credits might have made this feel just a touch more cooperative without changing the gameplay too much … it’s even thematic! “I’ll wire you some credits!” This is a minor house rule that would I suggest to make the game just a little more cooperative.

Things To Look Out For

As I played a bunch of games, I ran into some issues that I feel I should point out; maybe I can make your experience better.

What does the Skull mean? When you see the SKULL on the Threat (MONSTER) card (see above), that means “use the current level number on the BIG BAD Boss card“. You might miss this the first time through because the Reference cards have the SKULL as a black on white, but every single Threat card has the SKULL as white on grey like the example above (or white on orange) … so you don’t correlate that they are the same symbol because the colors don’t match!

…Even more confusing, the marker on the BIG BAD BOSS map is red. So, these symbols don’t color-coordinate at all! When the RED token is on the 1, it means “1” (for the Defense of the Monster above). There was never a clear example of this in the Rulebook, and the lack of color-coordination can can be confusing, so just be aware of the issue. Once you know this, it’s easy.

Boss Cards Shuffle Weirdly: Because the Boss Damage cards (see above) don’t ever have a Core (GOOD card) inserted in with it, they shuffle weirdly. I tended to get all the BIG BAD BOSS cards at the front or back of the deck because they are just “lighter” and shuffle differently in your deck. Go out of your way to make sure you shuffle your deck well (maybe a pile-shuffle) so that you don’t have all these cards clump together. (You DO NOT want these cards to clump together)

You can put the cards in backwards! See above as the Viren card is in the sleeve upside down. You know this because the card next to it is correct with the Core card extruding out the top. If you put a core card in here, it won’t line-up correctly.

…Have the opening on the Threat cards on the TOP so the Core cards can just slide in; see above.

Multiple Attacks vs. Adding: It’s still not clear if each Orange Swirl is considered a separate attack or just additive. If I add the Repeating, does each attack get the addition of the card it augments? Probably not? Also, since there is (currently) no notion of damage reduction in the game, 3 single attacks of 1 and 1 single attack of 3 will be the same against one opponent, but the Repeating will obviously be better IF if it really is 3 separate attacks (which is probably why it’s more expensive). I am using deduction (based on what I know about the game) to figure this out, rather than having the rules tell me. That frustrated me a little.

When Defeated: What does it mean when the “When Defeated” shows the Attack icon for the Boss Threat cards? See above! Does the Boss Threat have a Death Curse and do 4 Damage to you as it dies? Or do you get to do 4 Damage to another threat? It’s not clear. After playing about 10 games, I am pretty confident it’s a true bonus for the player: because the Boss Threats don’t come back into your hand (they do Boss Damage), they don’t help you with other threats, so you need the Bonus damage to be a HELPER! So, it’s a true bonus; you can do 4 damage to something else! If it were the other way around (with the Threat doing 4 damage to you), this game would be called Unbeatable instead of Unstoppable because it would be so hard!

What I Liked

Factions: The factions in this game really added a lot of flavor to the game. I mean, this is a deck-building game, which we’ve seen tons of. The four different factions really added some new flavor to this genre.

Threat and Core: The fact that the core cards and the Threat cards are tightly coupled was really interesting! Granted, this is the core gimmick (pun not intended) that makes this stand out (with the card-crafting), but it does work.

UPGRADES: At the end of the day, the UPGRADE system worked so well; this is the fundamental reason this game stands out. You can upgrade your cards independently, and that’s a really interesting decision! Adding the UPGRADES on an ad-hoc basis saved me many times, and it really makes you feel clever when you upgrade and turn a 3-Action Point card into 1-Action Point card!

Looks: The game looks good. And the playmats really do help.

What I Didn’t Like

The Introductory Experience: The introduction to this game and the “sleevening” weren’t great experiences. I am very worried they would turn off a less-experienced player to the point of abandoning the game. It reminded me a little of my first experience with Marvel Legendary many years ago … if a friend hadn’t helped me with my first game, I may have given up on it! Just a few more pictures and explanations, please? (Another game I really liked from last year, Union City Alliance (a co-op deck-builder) had this same problem: see here).

Tear-down: The game moves quickly as you play, but tear-down in this game is a lot of work: you have to separate many many cards from their sleeves.

Ambiguities: There were just enough ambiguities in the game that I was frustrated a few times. Again, I wish the rulebook had a few more examples, a few more pictures, a few more discussions, maybe even an index. In this review, I tried to point out problem areas so hopefully they won’t trip you up.

Theme and Comparison to Astro Knights

How much theme is here? There’s about as much theme here as in the base Astro Knights game; although I think I would give it to Astro Knights for feeling just slightly more thematic.

Although, If we were comparing it to Astro Knights: Eternity, I would definitely say Eternity is more thematic … mostly.

Although the thematic element depends on which BIG BAD BOSS you fight! In your first few Unstoppable games, you should fight The Harbinger then The Triumvirate (in that order). Those games teach you the technical mechanisms of the game. The final boss (Duomo’s Menace: see above) actually has a little story and some choices! See below!!

There is a deck of 21 cards (see above) and you make decisions (like a Choose Your Own Adventure story) as it takes you through different parts of the deck!

Minor spoiler above (that’s why it’s sideways), but it’s the first decision you would come to … see above. These decisions take you through different parts of different stories!

There’s a bunch of different endings (don’t look too closely above) for that adventure! The final boss Duomo’s Menace has quite a bit of theme and feels like a little adventure!

Would I recommend Astro Knights or Unstoppable? They are both great sci-fi cooperative deck-builders, but it depends on what you want! Astro Knights is a little simpler and plays more people (at 1-4 players). Unstoppable is more difficult and plays fewer people (1-2 players). Astro Knights, especially if you are playing the Eternity expansion, feels more thematic, but, Unstoppable has slightly better gameplay with its card-crafting mechanic …and it does have a thematic adventure for the final boss!! As a cooperative experience, I would give the edge to Astro Knights because it feels more interactive. In the end, I have both and like both!

Conclusion

Yes, I liked Unstoppable! Quite a bit! It’s definitely staying in my collection for the solo game, but I can see it being ideal for playing 2-Player with my friend Joe!

The deck-building and card-crafting aspects of this game are unique and this brings some new ideas to that genre: upgrades, defeating cards to draw them, special boss damage … to name a few! To be clear, the main gimmick of this game (the card-crafting) DOES WORK and it works well.

I really did like the playmats and would recommend them, but they do make the game more expensive; strictly speaking, you don’t need them.

Overall, I’d have to give this a 8.5/10. I want to give it more, but the “unsleevening” experience and the rulebook could have been a little better.

Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2024

What makes a good solo game? I find them when I typically start playing solo games to learn that game cooperatively for my friends. If a game starts to enchant me and I can’t stop playing it solo … there’s something to it! All the games on this list were games I played solo to teach my friends … but then I kept playing! Some of these games will end up on either my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024, some but of them will end up on my Top Cooperative Expansions of 2024, but one things for sure … they are all great solo!

For more great solo games, see last year’s list: Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023!

Honorable Mention: Solo Project PEGASUS Campaign for Marvel United

After getting Marvel United Multiverse Season 3 with all of its content, I was very taken with the Campaign Decks (see below and see review here), but I was saddened to learn there was no campaign for the Project PEGASUS saga (see above)!

So I spent many many weeks developing my own campaign using all of the Marvel United content! This is a print-and-play campaign for Marvel United! I played this campaign solo over and over and over again (multi-handed with 2, 3, and 4 characters) as I playtested all the the different combinations of characters! There is no game I played more solo this year than the Marvel United: Project PEGASUS campaign!

It’s awkward to put this on our list since I developed it, but I had so much fun playtesting it solo over and over for weeks and weeks, I had to acknowledge how much time and how much fun I had with this! If you liked the Marvel United Campaign Decks and wanted more, check out the free Project PEGASUS Campaign here!

10. Skytear Horde: Monoliths

Now, Skytear Horde: Monoliths is a standalone expansion in the Skytear Horde universe! This is a great little solo and cooperative tower defense game! But you might ask: “Why isn’t this on the Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 instead of this solo list?” That’s a very good question! It’s because, although this is a really good expansion with great components and cards, the game really works best as a solo game.

We tried it cooperatively (see our review here), and it was just okay. It’s significantly better as a solo game! It feels like most of the balance and playtesting was done as a solo game, so it can’t really go on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 list … because it really is best as a solo game.

It’s got some great components and some really great art! Take a look at our review here to see if this is something you might like!

9. Batman: Gotham City Chronicles + Solo/Cooperative Expansion

So, you can’t play Batman: Gotham City Chronicles solo without both the base game (which came out years ago) and the Solo/Cooperative Expansion (which came out this year)! In order to get to the cooperative game, I had to wade through learning the original base one vs. many game, then learn the solo game, to finally learn the cooperative game! Whew!

Now the cover of the Solo/Cooperative Expansion looks great! See above!

But there were some major production issues with the expansions as: 1) The English translation still had some scenarios in French! And 2) The binding on the solo/cooperative rulebook is terrible! It’s impossible to hold open! See above as I came up with a kludgy workaround for that! Objectively, I feel like I had to give this game a 5.5/10 since the production had issues!

Yet, even after all those issues (and the sheer complexity of the game), I still enjoyed being Batman in this solo romp around Gotham City! Subjectively, I gave it a 7/10 because I felt like I was Batman! Because of the production issues, this has to fall close to the bottom of the solo list, but I still enjoyed this overall! See our review of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles Solo/Cooperative Mode to see if this might be something you enjoy!

8. NYC: Emergency Room

This might strike you as an odd pick: A Medical Mystery game! I picked this up at Target and really enjoyed playing through the mysteries of the game! Instead of solving a boring old murder mystery (sarcasm here: I loved my murder mysteries), you are doing research, asking questions, running tests, and trying correctly to diagnose a patient!

There’s only a limited number of mysteries per box (see the envelopes above), but if you ever wanted to play a medical mystery and diagnose like Gregory House, this is the game for you!

I love my murder mysteries (remember: Suspects made the #1 spot on my Top 10 Solo Games of 2023), and this was a great spin on that genre! See our review here to see if it’s something you may like!

7. Everdell: Duo

I wasn’t expecting to like Everdell: Duo as much as a I did! My first playthroughs were a bit “clunky”, as the game has some fiddly bits and documentation issues you have to get through. But once you “get” how the game works, it’s quite fun! (I also never played the original Everdell)

To play solo, you have to man both the tortoise and the hare as they build their respective cities! See above! There’s a lot of thought about when you share, when you place workers, when you buy, and when you draw cards! You are looking for the combos to help both the tortoise and the hare! It might “seem” like both the hare and tortoise are playing multiplayer solitaire games, but as the game opens up to you, there’s more collaboration between the two than you might think!

That delicious (solo) collaboration plus the beautiful components and the cute vibe of the game put this on my solo list! I am just as surprised as you are that this made my solo list! My only concern (which is why it’s at #7) is that can be at the whim of the card draws, but most of the time there are so many ways to pivot around that! See our review here to see if this might be something you like!

6. Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2

I didn’t know a lot about the original Tidal Blades when I backed this, but Tidal Blades 2 looked like a fun little cooperative dungeon crawler. Holy Cow! I was blown away about how good the gameplay were and how great the components were!

As silly as it sounds, they did such a great correlating the colors, giving bases for the monsters, and generally making the cards very readable!

But the coup de grace was the card system where you could choose a card, a row or a column, activating everything there! This was such a unique and different combat system, it really made this game stand out. The game is better with more people, but I had such fun playing through (most) of the campaign solo!

See our review of Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2 to see if this game might be of interest to you!

5. Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition (primer)

This is an odd duck of an entry; the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe arrived this years (3 years late, which made a lot of people angry) and had some amazing minis and components … for a worker placement game that probably doesn’t need them!

See above for one of the Sundrop worker placement tokens!! Did I really need this? Nah! But did I love it? Ya!

In the end, the reason this made the list (besides how stupidly nice it looks) was because of the Introductory Campaign Scenario Book! I love Robinson Crusoe, but I hadn’t played it in 5 years! The Introductory Campaign gave me an excuse to enjoy a nice 5-Game campaign in the world of Robinson Crusoe! Over about a month, I’d play a scenario on a weekend and just have a good old time in this world. Good times! It reminded why I like Robinson Crusoe so much!

Check out our review of the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe to see if this might be something you might like!

4. Marvel United: Campaign Deck. Dark Phoenix Saga

The Campaign Decks (see above) came with Season 3 of Marvel United: Multiverse. These decks takes all your Marvel United content (and I mean ALL of it) and gives you some “stories” or campaigns to run through.

The Dark Phoenix Saga is a campaign centered on the X-Men from issues #131-137 back in the Byrne/Austin/Claremont days. This campaign takes you through a story, lasting 5 battles (or more) as the X-Men fight the Hellfire club, others, and (spoiler!) deal with Jean Grey turning into Dark Phoenix.

This was a heart-breaking, soul-wrenching campaign as I played through one of my favorite Marvel X-Men stories! I can’t share too much, but it was a great solo experience over a number of days.

xmen132
See our review of the Campaign Decks to see if this might be something you might like! Some spoilers included, but they should be well marked!

3. Aeon’s End: The Descent

This one was a late comer and almost didn’t make our list! It came in late late November, just before Thanksgiving! I ended up playing cooperatively with my friends and had a grand old time, but the solo experience was truly phenomenal!

First of all, Aeon’s End: The Descent has true solo play (which makes it a lot easier to jump into)! And all the new Mages and ideas it adds to the system were … surprisingly fresh! Even after 8 years, this standalone expansion breathed new life into the Aeon’s End system!

But, at the end of the day, it was the new module called Friends and Foes that made this stand out so much! This new module adds new ways of winning and losing with some interesting ideas, but what it does best for me was mitigate the problems with Variable Turn Order!

Playing through the four Chapters of this narrative campaign was a thrill! The story was pretty good (once you got into it), and the new ideas generated throughout were fantastic. I played a different mage in every chapter and just had a ball figuring out how to play each new mage! Sure, you can play this campaign with many people, but I really enjoyed unravelling this story as a solo play. See our review here of Aeon’s End: The Descent to see if this might be something you enjoy!

2. Sammu-Ramat

Any other year, this probably would have been my #1 game of the year! I went back and forth a number of times, so this could easily be my #1! Sammu-Ramat is basically a cooperative euro-puzzle game; it immerses the players into Queen Sammu-ramat’s rule of Assyria in 9th century BC, as guided by her advisors.

It’s kind of a war game, as you fend off invaders, but it’s also a euro game gathering-resources games, but it’s also a logistics puzzle as you try to balance keeping the kingdom defended and fed!

You can play either a one-shot (which is a great way to jump in), but it really shines as a 5-game campaign where you leave the game state as set-up for the next game! This game was such a great surprise! I adored playing it solo, especially through a campaign (although it needs a little house-ruling). I really wish it could have made my #1 spot because it was so good. See out review of Sammu-Ramat here to see if this is something you might like!

1. Set A Watch: Doomed Run

This game has no right to be the #1 spot; this is a giant campaign game in the Set A Watch Universe. First of all, of the Full 7 Game Campaign games I played, I ended up playing two of them cooperatively! So, that means I only played 5 of the games solo!

And to play the campaign, you must have ALL The Set A Watch Content! And I mean all!! (Including the Outriders deck)! This means: Set A Watch, Set A Watch: Swords of the Coins, and Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles!!! See how it takes up one half of my table just to separate the different games above?

And Set A Watch also has the solo problem that “you must play 4 characters”, so that’s not ideal either: see above as I try to operate 4 characters!

Despite all that, this game spent 11 days taking over my table, and I had a ball playing through it mostly solo! Once you know Set A Watch, especially solo, it’s such a fun game! I know, this really has no right even being my favorite solo game of 2024, but I had so much fun playing it (mostly) solo, it has to be #1. See our review here to see if Set A Watch: Doomed Run might be something you enjoy!

Wandering Galaxy Review: Who’s Wandering Here?

To be clear: you are wandering the Galaxy, but it turns out the Galaxy itself is wandering (if you believe the intro text)! Wandering Galaxy is a cooperative adventure game for 1-6+ players and it is set in spaaaaaaaaaace! This is a silly cooperative game that kind of feels like Firefly if it were a comedy (with just a little bit of Star Trek thrown in). (I mean, Firefly is already kind-of a comedy, but I digress). (But this may be too many parenthesis).

Wandering Galaxy was on Kickstarter back in July 2024, and promised delivery in December 2024. And you know what? They made it! My copy arrived about December 20th, 2024! With some qualifiers … see below …

See above: So, the game wasn’t QUITE done, but the only thing left unfinished was the App. My physical copy arrived but the app still needed some work. To be fair, I was able to play some of the game before the end of December, so it’s enough to say “Eh, close enough”. I’ll call it on time.

Let’s be clear! Wandering Galaxy requires an App (or the Entry Book … more discussion later if you are violently opposed to an App).

They say “App”, but it’s really more of a web portal situation: point your web browser at WanderingGalaxy.com and go! It reads the text to you!!

So, what is this? Wandering Galaxy is a cooperative campaign game with many different mechanisms: story-telling, worker placement, bag-building, deck-building, pickup-and-deliver, and even a little bit of a real-time! It is both paradoxically a lighter game and a heavier game! The gameplay is light and fluffy and moves along quickly, but there’s a lot of stuff underneath the hood that keeps this from being “just” a dumb little game!

What do I mean by this? Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing

So, this is a pretty standard sized game box, about Ticket To Ride sized. See above with Coke can for perspective.

There’s a decent amount of stuff in here! See above! Lots to punch out!

There’s a lot of tokens to punch out! Whew! Luckily the game includes some bags!

There’s also a fair number of cards in the game: remember how I said this was a deck-building game? There are the cards for your decks!

I got the sleeves for this: 9 times out of 10, if a game says it’s a deck-building game, you should probably sleeve it. (This might be the 10th game).

I spent WAY TOO Much time sleeving all the cards. See above!!! This card-sleeving was one of the first things I did when I got the game. I will say, after a few plays, I am not entirely convinced that this game needs sleeves. If you didn’t get the sleeves, meh, don’t stress: I don’t think you needed them. (I am addressing this to my friend Kurt who didn’t get the sleeves).

But there is a nice box for holding all the cards, with little dividers that clearly mark sections. And it looks like it would fit WITH or WITHOUT sleeves just fine. Little tip: it may look like some cards are missing (because of missing numbers), but probably not! Some are missing for “future expansion”: Check this BoardGameGeek thread for more details: Anyone missing cards?

There’s a lot of other punch outs for the stations … see below.

There’s a lot here, but it is very cool looking!

Rulebook

This rulebook … isn’t great.

It flops over on the edges, probably get it a D on the Chair Test.

In the end, I had to use the standard workaround of putting out two chairs with the spine in the middle.

There’s a lot of stuff in here, but I also found there was a lot of stuff missing. For example: The travel section discussions were unclear: Do you spend 3 power on each section? Do you have to stop in each section on your way to your destination? The answer to both questions, according to this BoardGameGeek thread, is yes!!! I think you will find yourself on BoardGameGeek a lot when you have questions! Apparently the designer is very responsive on BoardGameGeek if you have questions, he answers quickly … so that’s good. There is also a Discord channel (mentioned when you bring up the app).

What I found is that the App is very good at helping you set everything up! I tended to use the App for all my set-ups and only use the rulebook to look up a few rules. In general, the App taught “most” stuff. A lot of things were in the rulebook (and there’s even an index)! But there was still a lot of stuff missing that you will have to look at BoardGameGeek for … Another example: What does a damage token do? It’s unclear unless you read this BoardGameGeek thread!!

So, quick summary: use the App when you can, use the rulebook with the index if you have to, then use BoardGameGeek if things are still unclear. You might go to BoardGameGeek more than you like.

Story-Telling

Everyone gets to play a different character in this game! The art and style of the minis sets the tone for the game: see above!! It’s very nice art, but with just a hint of silliness.

Each player chooses a character to play: there are quite a number of characters, and they each have their own special sheet. See Muze above … that was my first character!!! I ended up making a copy of the character sheets (using my crappy home copier; it was good enough) so I didn’t mess up the original sheets that came with the game. (There are a number of these sheets included with the game, but you can either print them yourself or just order more sheets from the web site if you don’t want to sully the sheets).

These character sheets are two-sided; the back has your “back-story” (no pun intended). You fill out the little questionnaire on the left, and that informs your Story So Far… (on right side of the sheet). This gives you some items and sets the tone for your hero! This is part of the Story Telling aspect of the game.

There’s also a sheet for the spaceship (I also made a copy as to not mess that up either).

Of course, the App itself has most of the story! It’s pretty cool; it’s narrated with different voices and is pretty funny.

I would say, first and foremost, this is a Story-Telling game. All the other mechanisms in the game support that central tenet. You are all characters being swept up in this space opera!

Worker Placement

I’d say the next mechanism that you feel is the Worker Placement part of the game. The Location book (above) has the location on the left and the Worker Placement spots on the right.

Players look closely at the Icons on the worker placements places and place their dudes there. This is cooperative worker placement, as you are all trying to work together to get certain things done. To avoid too much “analysis paralysis” or “Alpha Playering” here, the players have 45 seconds to place their dudes! (That’s the extent of the “real-time” part of this game. if you were worried about me saying real-time, relax! You can almost even ignore the real-time part … it’s really just to keep people from taking TOO LONG to play their dudes …)

Once the dudes are placed, the right hand side of the page shows in detail what each action does.

Sometimes your action triggers some text in the App; it gives a number (like 133, see below) and you lookup that entry in the App!

You spend a decent amount of time here on the Worker Placement pages. It wasn’t until my third game that I realized that the Combat also happens using the Worker Placement system …. what? Yep! You head to a special page where you are in “Combat!” Your actions move the ship (so enemies are in view), fire guns (port, starboard, ahead), or even work the ship to repair damage!

This Worker Placement system seemed to work pretty well, and it’s cooperative.

Deck-Building

A lot of the game revolves around Skill checks … using your deck! (I told you there was deck-building in here!) When you need to make a Skill check (say Muze needs to SNEAK), you draw cards and add up the symbols that match that check! SNEAK needs blue stars and red hands, so Muse has 3 above. To be clear, the more symbols, the better! (You can also use PERK tokens, the little Saturn token, for extra plusses, but you do have to discard those)

There’s also Items you can “hold” between hands, which you can choose to “help” in your Skill check. That’s kind of a neat gizmo in the deck-building mechanism.

At certain times during the game, you have a chance to add cards (or cull) you deck based on the actions you take! There’s a nice set of 4 improvement card (above the the book, see above and below) that you can choose from! I mean, it’s deck-building: you have to be able to improve your deck!

Campaign

This is a campaign that can last … as long as you want it to! There is also deck-advancement, as your deck build survives between games of the campaign (luckily, you lose things like Injuries that can clog your deck).

So, when you finish your current game, you can just be done, or save off the game to play again later! Nominally, your first full adventure (spanning many games) will be paying off the loan for your ship!

Bag-Building

Even though there is deck-building in here (a deck for each character), there is also a bag-building portion! See the bag in the bottom right corner above!

When you travel through space, you typically pull tokens from the bag to see “what happened” as you travel through space!!! (See the tokens you can pull above). Generally, travelling through space is tough on your ship as you take little bits of damage as you travel.

You can take time at Space Ports and other places to “Work the Ship” to help fix it back up (putting tokens back in the bag). It’s not a huge mechanism in the game, but it is important to be aware of what’s in the “travel bag” and try to keep it cleanish so that you don’t take too much damage as you travel. The bag also controls threat, which is how the game can end … poorly.

Star Trek

I said there was some Star Trek vibe in here as well … there is! There are 6 “positions” of the ship that must be manned by the characters! One player is the Engineer, one player handle Logistics, … Operations, Science, Navigation and Security! In a game with fewer players, some players will have to man multiple stations!

This reminds me of the characters sitting around the bridge of the Enterprise, with Spock manning the Science station, Worf manning the Security station, and Paris manning the Navigation station! (Look, I didn’t say WHICH Star Trek …)

We’ve already seen this “station” idea in Forgotten Waters (see our review here) and Freelancers (see our review here)! Thematically, it worked great in Forgotten Waters (as pirates worked together to man the “stations” of a ship), and less so in Freelancers.

Thematically, it works really well here too. Basically, the stations help keep everyone involved in running the ship and contribute to the theme: we are flying a space ship together!

Pickup And Deliver

One of the main activities in this game is pickup-and-deliver: you are a space-faring crew wandering the stars, looking for adventure, but usually you are delivering stuff to make ends meet!

The Jobs you get (above) inform where you go on the star map (see below) by marking them with little waypoint markers.

The yellow waypoint marker is the yellow job (Escort Shipping Barge). This pickup-and-deliver mechanism sort of guides were you go in the game. If you don’t like pickup-and-deliver, you might still like this game, as there are so many other mechanisms in the game. If you do like pickup-and-deliver, then you will be happy.

Solo Play

So, Wandering Galaxy embraces the solo player! (Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law!). I am surprised a little because the previous games in this series (Forgotten Waters and Freelancers) supported solo mode, but they were bastard step-children solo modes that were only supported by consulting the some arcane rules on the web site! Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little when I say that, but Wandering Galaxy really does embrace solo play.

The rules and the App support solo play as a first-class mechanism! The app asks you how many people are playing and helps you set-up the solo game in the normal flow!

The solo player still operates one the main characters: see above as I operate Muze … (notice I made a copy of the sheet…)

…. but the solo player gets to control two Sidekicks (see Bugs and Tress above). These Sidekicks aren’t “full characters”, but they are much much easier to operate. Normally, I don’t like solo rules that go too much outside the normal flow (I usually prefer to play multi-handed solo), but the app was so helpful in setting this up and getting to solo play that I didn’t mind!

So, when the solo players does Worker Placement actions, the solo player plays his player, and the two Sidekicks as well.

This means the solo player is also controlling all six stations! Interestingly, you still have to assign one station for each of Bugs and Tress. See above as Bugs and Tress each have a station (to their left).

See above as I have the 6 stations, my character Muze, Bugs and Tress, the Worker Placement book, the map of the Galaxy and the App open! Whew!

And then the solo player still has to manage the cards (see chair on the left with the card box) and the ship (see the table on the right with the ship)! And, occasionally the solo player must still consult the rulebook! See as the Rulebook sprawls across two chairs …Whew!

… and it’s actually not that bad. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff to manage, but the App takes you through the game pretty darn well. I played my first few games solo, and I had a good time. I never felt like the ongoing maintenance (to keep the game moving forward) was too much work.

Setting up is a bit of work, as is tearing down (see above), but again, the App helps guide you through it. I’ll be honest, the Rulebook for this game looks daunting (with set-up and rules), but let the App guide you and just use the rulebook when you “have to”!

I thought the solo game worked well, even better than Forgottten Waters or Freelancers. I jumped right on and had a grand time. I would definitely play this again solo. I honestly think the App made the solo play that much better.

What about the Sidekicks Bugs and Tress in the solo game? They really are easy to operate: you just use your deck but get slightly different bonuses (depending on which character: Bugs is good at Piloting for example). They kind of remind me of characters on Star Trek you see in the background all the time, but don’t get much development. They aren’t full “main” characters who get their own story arcs … like “unnamed Corporal 2”. For example, when Bugs or Tress would get REPUTATION (a fun way to move a character story forward), they just get a PERK token instead. Poor Bugs and Tress. Maybe they’ll get higher billing in the next Star Trek show. (We only have 13 shows, we need a 14th Star Trek show starring Bugs and Tress!!!) (And yes, I added extra exclamation points there, because that’s how strongly I feel about poor undeveloped Bugs and Tress!!!!)

Cooperative Game

My crew showed up, ready to take the Galaxy by storm! The crew was originally supposed to be a full complement of six, but space sickness and space madness and space baby-sitting caused us to winnow down to just three. But what a great crew they were!! Too bad the spaceship exploded on the pad. But I digress …

Cooperative play worked really well. Luckily, I had played the game solo enough to smooth out some of the rules (even still, there were ambiguities as we played which were frustrating). Part of why this game works very well for a cooperative game is that each player owns their own station, which keeps them in involved as they play! And each player has their own character with their own worker placement token! So, players are always involved (via the station and worker placement) as well as connecting (as they “bond”) with their character, and making shared decisions about the fate of the ship and crew!!! (More exclamation mark for you!!!)

My friend Teresa liked her character so much that she took it home as a souvenir!

We ended up playing a one-off, but once my group regroups, I suspect we will settle in for a fuller campaign. It is nice that you can play this as a full campaign or just a one off.

Sense Of Humor

Just so you know: this game is kind of silly. The story is silly, the voices are kind of silly, and even the first player token (I chose the Christmas Tree) is silly. If you were looking for a grim-dark Star Trek game, that’s not this.

The game has a sense of humor, but it’s not just ALL silliness. You still have to build your deck, make smart decisions, deal with damage on your ship, pickup and deliver stuff, place workers, and generally make a lot of decisions. But the undercurrents of the game … are a little silly.

Even though Wandering Galaxy is silly, it’s still not quite as silly as Freelancers or Forgotten Waters: those games just seem to have sillier stories and sillier resolutions. So, if you were just slightly annoyed by the silliness of Freelancers or Forgotten Waters, maybe Wandering Galaxy is a better choice for you … but it’s still silly. Just not as silly.

You know a game is silly when it brings out the silliness in you! When we performed the Skill checks, we started singing the Lucky Charms cereal theme songs! “Blue Stars, Yellow Eyes, Purple Brains! Frosted Lucky Charms, they are magically delicious!”

Entry Book

Some of you might have been very non-plussed by the necessity of the App in this game. Well, if you like reading text from books, there are Entry Books available! The Entry Book isn’t QUITE done at the time I received my copy, but it will be. In the meantime, I did pickup the the Forgotten Waters and Freelancers Entry Books (those were part of the Kickstarter).

Basically, all the reading and entries that the App does is encapsulated in the Entry Book. There’s something kind of nice about having a “backup” for this: I have had some games where the App goes dark (Rising 5, I am looking at you); with this Entry book, you can always still play the game if the App goes dark.

My friend Joe actually prefers the Entry Books: he uses these games for his English classes, as it encourages reading out loud!

What I Liked

Supports Multiple Players Well: the game really works well with many player counts. The station system helps keep everyone involved, even at higher player counts. I am glad to see the Solo mode as a first class object.

Story: Really, this game is all about the story. How do you want your adventure in space to proceed? Life is what happens when you are making plans, especially in space! Every player is involved as they explore, but generally the story just unfolds and everyone is along for the ride. If you want to play a space opera rather than watch one, this is a good choice.

The App: Despite the app not being quite done (some of entries didn’t have full voice acting, and some entries were incomplete), the App worked quite well. I think it’s really evolved and easy to use, especially for set-up and first play! (I mean, they have had 2 iterations to get this right). It’s also good to know there is a backup Entry book in case the App ever goes dark …

Sense of Humor: I really like the silliness in this game. It’s not quite as funny as Freelancers (which was much sillier) or Forgotten Waters, but it was funny. Caveat Emptor: you may not like the silliness.

What I Didn’t Like

Ambiguity: By far the biggest complaint is the ambiguity in the Rulebook. There’s just too many places where things are NOT well specified. We’ve mentioned at least three things in this article alone where we had to go to BoardGameGeek to find the resolution! The game still works, but it’s very unsettling to have just a few too many places where the rules are poorly specified. Some of this is because maybe the game came out early; the App still needs some work, and maybe they will fix-up the ambiguity in the App. Unfortunately, the Rulebook can’t be amended (unless they put up a version 2.0). Just prepare yourself to look stuff up on BoardGameGeek.

Conclusion

I liked Wandering Galaxy and so did my friends! It’s the next great game in the Crossroads games series (after Forgotten Waters and Freelancers). It’s probably the most complicated of the three games, but it’s possibly the most thematic of the three. Be aware that that there are a lot of mechanisms: deck-building, campaign, bag-building, pickup-and-deliver! … but the game feels paradoxically both heavy and light! The game glides along as you enjoy the story, with some heavier mechanisms behind the scenes.

An App is required to play … unless you have the Entry book (at the time of this writing, the Entry Book for Wandering Galaxy is not out, but should be soon (the Forgotten Waters and Freelancers books are already out). Despite the App not “quite” done at the time of this writing, it did a marvelous job bringing us into this world. It even embraced the solo player well!

This is a great light-hearted cooperative adventure for you and your friends! It’s not “quite” as silly as Forgotten Waters and Freelancers, but it’s still pretty silly.

This is probably an 8/10. The only real problem with the game was the ambiguities that kept coming up: If you are pick-up in this game, I suspect you will be looking up a lot of stuff on BoardGameGeek. But, since the App is a dynamic entity, hopefully they can address a lot of those issues within the App itself. Hopefully, by the time you read this, the App will have fixed all those problems and this will rise to a 8.5/10. It’s a really fun game.

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

10. Max

9. Endangered

8. Magical Kitties Save The Day!

7. Cat Crimes

6. Space Cats Fight Fascism

5. Cat Rescue

4. Run Run Run!

3. Nekojima

2. Hissy Fit!

1. Race To The Raft

Unboxing and Gameplay

Solo Game

Cooperative Game

The Sticking Point

Traitor Experience

Conclusion

Solution 1: Board Butler

Solution 2: Report Binding Bar

Solution 3: Giant Plastic Overlay

Conclusion

Day 1: The Game Arrives and Santorini Gets Played!

Day 2: Unboxing and First Games of Riddle of the Sphinx

Day 2: Campaign and More Play

Cooperative Play

Curse and Blessing

Occupied/Unoccupied

Things to Watch Out For

Conclusion

Day 1: Unboxings and First Plays

Day 1: The Figurines Unboxing

Day 1: Acrylics and Sleevening

Day 1: First Play

Day 1: Missions Unboxing

Day 1: The rulebook

Day 1: Set-up for Solo play

Day 1: Side One of the Mission

Day 2: More Missions

Day 3: Cooperative Play

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

Reactions

Conclusion

Sam’s Perspective

10. Word Traveller

9. Landmarks

8. Adventure Party

7. Message From The Stars

6. Expressions

5. Da Da Da

4. Link City

3. Spotlight

2. Wilmot’s Warehouse

1. That Escalated Quickly

Unboxing and Gameplay

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

One Ring To House Rule Them All

The Campaign

What Do You Do When The Campaign Is Over?

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Unboxing

Playmats

Rulebook

Storybook

Sleevening

Gameplay

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

Things To Look Out For

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Theme and Comparison to Astro Knights

Conclusion

Honorable Mention: Solo Project PEGASUS Campaign for Marvel United

10. Skytear Horde: Monoliths

9. Batman: Gotham City Chronicles + Solo/Cooperative Expansion

8. NYC: Emergency Room