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.

Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2025!

As we look forward, we also look back! It’s fun to look ahead at the cooperative games coming up in 2025!!! We’ve been looking ahead since 2021 (see our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2021), but it’s always interesting to see the state of games from those previous years. Believe it or not, we still are waiting some games from 2021! Let’s take a look at some backlog!

2021:

Onimaru: There have been some pictures of pallets of boxes from the Warehouse, but we still haven’t see this yet. Maybe we’ll see this, maybe we won’t. I don’t know. It’s been since 2019 when this all this started (6+ years!!). As of now, this is the only outstanding game from our 2021 list.
Freedom Five: After being the #2 entry on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2021, Freedom Five finally arrived … and it was very disappointing. Basically, we found it too random and too long, plus there were some production issues, so we ended up selling it. See our review here to see more details.

2022:

Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread: It’s been a while for this, but we did see a copy arrive at the Dice Tower, so we know that this is imminent. Based on everything from the Kickstarter, we should see this in early 2025. UPDATE: It arrived! December 30th, 2024! It’s a big mama! Look for a review coming soon!
Rat Queens To The Slaughter: There’s been some drama here as the original creator took the game back from the people who have failed to deliver! It’s unclear what happens next, but the creator wants to take charge of this himself … which is great, but it’s still really unclear when we’ll see this!
Union City Alliance: Huzzah! Union City Alliance finally arrived! And it was good! We liked it so much it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024! See our review here of Union City Alliance to see if you might like it!

2023:

Dark Quarter: Promised Oct 2023. It is frustrating we haven’t seen this yet, but there has been lots of activity on the Kickstarter threads, so we believe we will see this early 2025. This is the only game still undelivered from our 2023 list.
Hacktivity: This delivered in June 2024 this year! And it was pretty good. It didn’t make any Top 10 lists this year, but I still liked it. See our review here of Hacktivity to see if you might like this!
Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles + Doomed Run: This delivered this year in about April 2024, and we absolutely loved both the Forsaken Isles (standalone game: see our review here) and Doomed Run (campaign game: see our review here)! Forsaken Isles made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of the 2024, and Doomed Run made the #1 spot as our favorite solo game from 2024! See our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

2024:

Cyberpunk Unfolds: This arrived in late summer 2024. It was ok but it was a little disappointing. See our review here for more details.
Defenders of the Wild: This arrived August 2024, on time. There was a lot to like in this game, but it just didn’t land for me or any of my groups. Take a look at our review here!
Santorini Deluxe and Co-op expanion: Promised delivery May 2024. Still haven’t seen too much activity. Hopefully it will arrive in 2025.
Weirdwood Manor: This delivered in June 2024 and was generally very well received by my game groups! See our review here to see if this might be something you might like!
Flock Together: This delivered in July 2024. My game groups tended to like this lighter co-op game. It made the #8 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024! Check out our review here.
Luddite: Promised delivery December 2024. There has been progress, but we probably won’t see this until 2025.
Once Upon A Line: The Butterfly’s Breath: Promised delivery May 2024. They are still doing a lot of work (per the Kickstarter updates), but it’s not done yet, even from a development perspective, let alone manufacturing. We may see this at the end of 2025, but we suspect we won’t see it until 2026.
Leviathan Wilds: This arrived in April 2024 and really took my game groups by storm! We loved it (see our review here), and it made the #3 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024!
Marvel X-Men Dice Throne + Co-op Missions! This promised delivery in Aug 2024. We still don’t have it. It looks like some people might get it before the end of 2024, but most people will be getting this in early 2025.
Marvel United: Multiverse: Season 3 of Marvel United arrived in late July 2024, and it brought so much delicious content! It made our heads explode! Read about the great Expansion Absorption Explosion here! We loved the base game Marvel United: Multiverse, we enjoyed the The Galactus expansion, we really dug the Inhumans expansion, and we loved the Campaigns! We even made our own campaign for Project Pegasus! Everything that came here peppers our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024, our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024, and our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

All right! Let’s head into our 2025 games!

10. Floe + Monsters Unleased (CO-OP Expansion)

floe1

Platform: Kickstarter Floe
Promised Delivery: June 2025
Summary: FLOE is an adventure-strategy game where players embark on heroic quests across an icy landscape. You’ll discover long-lost secrets on uncharted icebergs, sail the seas to find adventure and sunken treasure and delve into perilous caves to find precious crystals and battle fearsome monsters. Despite the dangers ahead, you won’t be alone in your travels. Always at your side, your loyal familiar may help gather resources or jump into the fray to turn the tide of battle. During their travels, heroes will also gain helpful allies, powerful abilities, and rare items. In time, heroes may also build shrines across the map, ensuring their legacy will be long remembered. However, always beware of the cold. Venturing into the icy wasteland is perilous: almost everything heroes do outside the safety of the village will cost them warmth. From time to time, they will need to return to the village to warm up, improve their homestead, purchase upgrades, and prepare for their next big adventure. Will you be the boldest explorer of them all?

floe2

So, the base game looks amazing! But this game isn’t a co-op by default, which has us a little worried. But with the Monsters Unleased expansion, this will be co-op! This is #10 on our list because its unclear how good the co-op will be! Given the quality of everything else, we expect great things!

9. Fable Fury

fablefury1

Platform: Kickstarter Fable Fury
Promised Delivery: Oct 2025
Summary: As unlikely heroes, you must explore unknown lands, fight unconventional enemies, dodge silly traps, and collect monster runes hidden within ancient shrines scattered across the realms. Once you have collected the 3 runes, unlock the portal to face the monstrous threat!

Choose your heroes and set out as a team to find the runes hidden in Shrines across three realms. Grab your coins, stock up on items at the Gift Shop, and jump into your first realm.

fablefury2

The tag line of this game is Ridiculous strategic cooperative, rogue-like dungeon crawler: The art is very cute, and the game seems to have a sense of humor. We had such a good time with Slay The Spire this last year that maybe this will scratch the same itch! We are very much looking forward to this! I love the art! And the sense of humor!

8. Horror On The Orient Express

orient1

Platform: Gamefound Horror On The Orient Express
Promised Delivery: August 2025
Summary: Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game lures you into the luxurious Orient Express in the 1920s, taking you on a dangerous train ride into the realm of the Dreamlands. Everything is against you, from monsters attacking the train to murderous cults hiding among the passengers. Worst of all, an eldritch, blood-thirsty vampire hunting down everything that moves. Can you solve the dark secrets of the Orient Express before time runs out?

In this cooperative game, you and the other investigators try to survive on the doomed train. To win, you must hunt out the cultists to stop them from performing a hideous ritual and ensure the train reaches its destination. Each of you controls a character who can develop new skills, gather items, talk to the passengers, discover clues, and, ultimately, decide the train’s fate. You may even learn a spell or two!

Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game brings the award-winning Call of Cthulhu horror and mystery TTRPG into the board gaming world. Special rules, ongoing character development, and awesome play pieces provide a challenging and exciting gaming experience. Your journey on the Orient Express will be something to remember!

orient2

This games looks gorgeous and lures me back into the Horror/Cthulu mythos by being a little bit of a mystery too! Cthulu and a mystery? And a train? What more could you want!? And, let’s be honest, this looks gorgeous on the table!

7. Aetherspire

aeth1

Platform: Kickstarter Aetherspire
Promised Delivery: Jan 2025
Summary: The realm of Elementis, once a harmonious balance of earth, air, fire, and water, is now under siege. Elemental Aetherfiends have dispatched waves of invaders to drain our aethercore, the realm’s lifeblood, causing chaos to reign. You and your companions must build powerful elemental spires to lure away and defeat these invaders. As each spire grows stronger, it will unleash a devastating resurgence against the Aetherfiends. Can you restore balance before it’s too late?

Aetherspire is a cooperative 3D tile placement and tower defense game for 1-4 players. Build elemental spires and defend the realm in this stunning 3D strategy game!

aeth2

A 3-D Tile placement games and tower defense game? Sign me up! And I really like how it looks! I am excited to see how this comes to the table!

6. One-Hit Heroes

onehit1

Platform: Kickstarter One-Hit Heroes
Promised Delivery: March 2025
Summary: Pick a hero and fight for your life! One-Hit Heroes is a co-operative boss rush game where your team must defeat the boss without getting hit even once. The more bosses you defeat, the more your Armory improves as you unlock more card variety each time you play an Episode.

Each boss has a custom deck of moves to try and land hits on your team, but each of you have a unique hero deck with your own tools for blocking, dodging and damaging the boss.

Defeat bosses to be rewarded with card packs that you can tear open and draft from. Each card pack will let you power up and specialize your hero further for the rest of the Episode. But in order to defeat the final boss of each Episode, you’ll need more than just a refined deck – you’ll need to play your cards carefully and work as a team to survive long enough to win.

onehit2

This is a solo or co-op boss battler; it’s a card game about fighting, but avoid getting hit … as you only have one hit point! How do avoid all the damage but still manage to win? Rahdo really raved about this, and I too am excited for it!

5. Invincible: The Card Game

inv1

Platform: Kickstarter Invincible: The Card Game
Promised Delivery: Jan 2025
Summary: Invincible: The Card Game puts you in the role of young superheroes as they struggle to become the new Guardians of the Globe. Working together as a team, each player gets to control an iconic character from the Invincible comic universe as you battle to protect Earth from escalating encounters with the series’ many supervillains.

In each battle, you start with a character-specific deck of cards and a unique special ability, then it’s up to you to build up your deck, charge your power, and choose your strategy wisely. Your enemy won’t be taking it easy on you, unleashing hordes of minions to take you down, launching attacks to destroy the city around you, and forcing you to adapt to their unique special abilities. How hard could it be? Well, all you have to do is stay alive, protect Earth, and defeat the universe’s most powerful villains.

inv2

We loved Invincible: The Hero-Building game (see review here) and we love the Astro Knights games (see reviews here and here), so adding Invincible IP to the Astro Knights system seems like a good match! Astro Knights has the comicy feel and seems like a natural fit. It was somewhat surprising this Kickstarter didn’t do better: this only may made $111K, which seems small for a larger IP like Invincible. Still, we look forward to a cooperative deck-builder with Invincible!

4. Unstoppable

unstoppable1

Platform: Kickstarter Unstoppable
Promised Delivery: February 2025
Summary: On the city-planet of Ceres II, every alleyway invites a quick and quiet death. In the lush forests of Virenos, a single misstep could land you in the belly of a beast. The harsh wasteland of Mithras holds both grave danger and a great treasure for those who search its stacks of discarded rubbish. Amidst this chaos, you find yourself thriving, learning, and growing — a child of rank, touched by fate — but a new danger shadows the future of all three worlds. Gather your allies and sharpen your skills, for the darkest days are yet to come.

Unstoppable is a solo or co-operative roguelike, momentum deck-building game. Use card crafting and deck building wisely in the face of unlimited threats, maintaining action and card-draw momentum to become unstoppable!

This looks like such an interesting idea: a cooperative card-crafting game! It’s cooperative mode is limited to 2 people, so perhaps this will be best solo, but it looks really nice! I know some people actually backed out of the kickstarter (I am looking at you, Mike H.) because it was fairly expensive for what you got, but I was fascinated by this game and its premise, so I stayed in. Hopefully it will be good!

3. DCeased: A Zombicide Game

dceased1

Platform: Kickstarter DCeased: A Zombicide Game
Promised Delivery: April 2025
Summary: DCeased – A Zombicide Game is a cooperative game were 1 to 6 players control the last uninfected Super Heroes facing off against Zombie Heroes and the zombie hordes controlled by the game itself.

dceased2

DCeased: A Zombicide Game is the DC Universe’s answer to Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance and X-Men: Heroes’ Resistance. See our review of the Marvel version of those here and here! But basically, we really liked those games! So, we are very excited to be able play the DC Universe version of the same game! Let’s be clear: you are playing the DC Heroes fighting off the Zombie hordes! Some versions of Marvel Zombies actually have the zombified heroes fighting the good guys—that’s not what this is. Or at least, that’s not what I am looking forward to.

2. LA-1

la1

Platform: Kickstarter LA-1
Promised Delivery: Aug 2025
Summary: Most detective work done in the city of LA-1 takes place under the perpetual dark clouds that still linger from the bombs. Even so, you plan to work together to gather clues, interrogate suspects, and go on stakeouts in a world that is divided by class and dominated by status. Use your skills to solve the case before the all-consuming darkness closes in forever.

In the story-driven, co-operative adventure game LA-1, you take on the role of detectives working for Mace & Doyle Investigations who are helping one another to resolve cases in the post-apocalyptic city that was once Los Angeles. Each case can be played individually or as part of a campaign. Because of the multiple cards that can send investigations in different directions, it’s possible to play each case more than one time, having different situations and outcomes each time. But cases must be solved before the Darkness closes in on all the investigators.

la2

Here’s another Richard Lanius game that has me very excited! I love my cooperative detective games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games), and this post-apocalyptic detective game sounds really interesting! It’s story-driven and promises some really cool stuff. I also typically love Richard Lanius games (despite being so disappointed by Freedom Five), so I am super excited for this!

1. DC Super Heroes United

dcu

Platform: Gamefound DC Super Heroes United
Promised Delivery: Aug 2025
Summary: The greatest Heroes in the DC universe unite to thwart the Villains’ plans in this fast-paced, family-friendly cooperative game with amazing figures!

dcu2

This is the DC version of Marvel United that we’ve come to love so much! We already know that we love this system so much, and it will be so much fun to delve into the DC Universe! And the crazy thing will be when we play with Spider-Man and Super-Man! Batman and Daredevil! Crossovers galore! CMON has a very good track record for getting the Marvel United stuff to us, so we think it’s likely we will see this in Aug 2025!

Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Game Expansions of 2024

Welcome to the end of 2024! There were some great games that came out, but also some great expansions that really contributed to the world of cooperative games! As usual, we qualify our expansions are one of three types:

Stand-Alone Expansion: Some games you thought might be on the Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2024 might have just ended up on this list because they are stand-alone games that can be played without a base game, but at the end of the day they also expand a base game!
Makes The Game Cooperative: Some expansions take a competitive base game and make the game fully cooperative with the expansion! We saw a number of these type of expansions on the Top 10 Games That Can Be Played Fully Cooperatively!
More Content: Some expansions just add more content (more cards, etc.) to the base cooperative game!

As of last year, we also add the new characterization: Does It Require Another Expansion? We continue adding this characterization, but note that this requirement was not quite as pervasive as it was last year!

If there were some games you thought missing from this list, be sure to check out Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024 and our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024 to see if it made one of those lists instead!

Honorable Mention: Comic Hunters Cooperative Expansion

Expansion Type: Makes The Game Cooperative
Solo Mode: Comic Hunters already had a solo mode, but this can be played as a multi-handed solo mode as well
Requires Another Expansion? No

Comic Hunters is a game I adore from this last year! See our review here! There is a good solo mode included with this drafting game, but there is no cooperative mode! I like the idea of cooperative drafting games, but the only other cooperative drafting games I know of are Flourish and Sidekick Saga! Why couldn’t there be a cooperative mode for Comic Hunters?

With a little bit of perspicacity and imagination, I went ahead and developed my own cooperative rules for Comic Hunters and put them up on the web for free so others can try it! See a link here for Cooperative Rules for Comic Hunters! This is basically and free print-and-play cooperative expansion for Comic Hunters!

It’s a little bit of a cheat to put this as one of my favorite Cooperative Expansions of 2024 (since I developed it), but I spent so much time playing this solo and cooperatively with my friends (as I honed the rules), this needed to at least get an Honorable Mention. See the rules here to see if you might enjoy this.

10. Marvel United: War of Kings

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes, any of the Marvel United solo modes
Requires Another Expansion? Not really, just any base Marvel United game

Marvel United: Season 3 Multiverse has pretty much torn through all of our Top 10 lists for 2024. The War of Kings was special to me because I ended up devouring the entire expansion! I played all the characters multiple times, all the heroes multiple times, and really enjoyed a lot of the ideas here! And I think Lockjaw (see above) may be the best introductory character for when you play with a new player! Who doesn’t love a dog?

I freely admit that this expansion appealed to me because of my love of Comic Books, The Inhumans, George Perez, and John Byrne! However, even when I predisposed to like something, it still has to be good (I am looking at you Freedom Five) …

After playing through this all, I fell in love with the Inhumans all over again (and even watched the Marvel show … sigh). Overall, this was a great experience! There’s so much new and great content for Marvel United here! See our review of War of Kings: Marvel United to see if this is something you might like!

9. Thunderstone Quest: Raging Seas and Ancient Adversaries

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes (with Barricades Expansion)
Requires Another Expansion? Yes, The Barricades Mode Expansion is required to play the game solo or cooperatively

Nathan and Caroline have become my Thunderstone Quest buddies! See me and Nathan above! We ended up playing through both of these expansions this year!

The Raging Seas expansion (see above) has some great ideas with Pirates and adds the new Corsair! The idea of the Voyage has become ingrained in a neat new way!

The Ancient Adversaries adds the new Totems deck (see above) to replace most Treasure, and the game plays very differently with this new expansion and its totems!

If it weren’t for Nathan, I am not sure these would have gotten played. But, we had a great time! I think I may have gotten to the point where I have “enough” Thunderstone Quest expansions, but even still, I really did enjoy these two expansions!

8. Townsfolk Tussle: Foul Neighbors

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Two-handed
Requires Another Expansion? No

I didn’t think Townfolk Tussle needed more content, but it’s nice to have! One of the purposes of an expansion is to breathe new life into a game, and that’s what Foul Neighbors did for us! Me and friends thought this game was silly and fun! See below as Sam I and I play this ridiculous game with this ridiculous expansion!

This expansion just adds more content: 2 new Townsfolk (heroes), 8 new Ruffians, a few new rules, cards, and tiles!! Nothing brain-bending!! This silly, boss-battler game was surprisingly good when we first reviewed it here, and this new expansion reminded us just how silly and fun this is!

My favorite moment from playing Foul Neighbors was blowing up the outhouse to take down the final Ruffian! In a game full of silly cards and fun (but slightly creepy) art, it seemed an apt way to end a game! (My second favorite moment was driving the jalopy over the Ruffian!)! Foul Neighbors is a fun expansion that reminds us how much we like original game of Townsfolk Tussle! It also has some of my favorite minis! See below! They are cute and creepy and cool, all at the same time!

7. Detective: City of Angels: Saints and Sinners

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes
Requires Another Expansion? No

This is just plain up, more content for the great detective game Detective: City of Angels! And we need more content for this system, since each case is a “one-and-done”, meaning you probably can’t replay it again! So, they fact that they are still coming out with content for this system is great! And all of the new cases felt up to the same level of writing as the original!

We were even able to introduce my friend Sara to this system! And we had a great time playing! See above!

After all this time, I still feel like Detective: City of Angels is a great detective game that doesn’t get enough love! There are so many expansions for it which keep extending the life of the game for me! Take a look at our review here to see if this is something you might like!

6. Marvel Champions: Age of Apocalypse

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes
Requires Another Expansion? No

If Nathan is my Thunderstone Quest buddy, then Joe is my Marvel Champions buddy! The people at Fantasy Flight keeps plugging away and generating new content for Marvel Champions!

My friend Joe and I played a few games, and although he was skeptical of playing Bishop and his discard abilities, Joe ended up really like how he worked!

For me, the reason this expansion makes this Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 is because it finally added Magik to the Marvel Champions universe! Her character and deck are so interesting, and very thematic to her abilities.

5. Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance

Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes
Requires Another Expansion? No

The whole Marvel Zombies: Resistance games surprised me! I didn’t expect to like these zombie battling games as much as I did! I guess I shouldn’t be THAT surprise since I love my Cooperative Superhero games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero games), but I don’t necessarily love Zombie games!

But having a chance to play the X-Men on missions for killing zombies was so much more fun than I expected! My friends and I had a grand time in the X-Men universe!

See our review here to see if you an your friends want to be X-Men killing Zombies!

4. Astro Knights: Eternity

Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes
Requires Another Expansion? No

I liked Astro Knights from about a year ago (see our review here of the original Astro Knights), but I didn’t love it. One of my complaints was that it really needed some more content to keep it fresh.

Although it’s fantastic that this deck-building boss-battler now has more content, it was the story that really sold me on this expansion! I played through the whole adventure with me and friends, and we loved all the new content and the Firefly-esque story that unravelled!

For a while, I thought this would be my #1 Expansion! It made the top of my list at RichieCon 2024 (see that list here), but this year was really strong for expansions. See our review of Astro Knights: Eternity to see if this is something you might like! We really enjoyed this!

3. Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles

Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes (but you must play 4 characters: it’s not as bad as it sounds, especially once you get into it)
Requires Another Expansion? No

Like all the Set A Watch games (see our review of the original Set A Watch, and our review of Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin), this is a really fun monster battler as players play four heroes trying to get back home! Every night, they camp and one person has to watch the fire while the others go and fight the monsters in the night!

There’s a whole new set of monsters, a whole new set of heroes (with whole new powers), and a whole new set of gear! This game is easy to teach and plays pretty quickly! And you can play it either standalone or combine with other Set A Watch sets!

There’s some new mechanisms in the system (Doom), but it’s doesn’t really change the complexity of the game. Every time I play any of the Set A Watch games, I have such a fun time! This standalone expansion really just made me love Set A Watch that much more! See our review here to see if this is something you might like!

2. Marvel United: Fantastic Four: The Coming of Galactus

Expansion Type: More Content
Solo Mode: Yes, any of the Marvel United solo modes
Requires Another Expansion? No (but you might want the Fantastic Four expansion)

So, for a long time, I thought this would be my #1 Expansion of 2024! The Galactus model was so cool! The Heralds of Galactus added a new style of play! See below!

In the end, there were just a few niggling details that kept it from #1; I loved it, but my friends didn’t like it as much as me. See our review here to see more details of this.

But in the end, it was such an epic game of fighting heralds and Galactus, that this game had to make my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions this year.

See above the epic story told by the battle with Galactus!!

1. Aeon’s End: The Descent

Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion
Solo Mode: Yes, and it’s a true solo mode!
Requires Another Expansion? No

I am just as surprised as you that this expansion was so good! I like the Aeon’s End system (see our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games), but this new expansion breathed new life into this game! Playing mages cooperatively fighting big bad monsters (in a cooperative deck-builder) had so many new turns!

What really made this hit the number one spot was the addition of the Friends and Foes module! This module mitigates a problem I have with Aeon’s End Variable Turn Order (see our Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness), but also adds some really new and interesting ways to play the game! What’s even better is that you can use this module in ANY of your Aeon’s End games! It’s a module!

And what put Aeon’s End: The Descent over the top to #1 was the story in the campaign! We liked how much the story elevated Astro Knights: Eternity (back at #4), and the story here coupled with the Friends and Foes module AND coupled with all the new mages and cards made this rocket to the top of my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024! Check our our review here to see if this is something you might like! My friend Becca (who doesn’t like cooperative games that muchh) also really enjoyed it! High Praise indeed!

Top 10 Cooperative Board And Card Games of 2024!

Wow! What a great year 2024 was for cooperative games! As we put this list together, it felt like any of the games here could have been the #1 game because there were were all great!

Some of the games you might expect to see here might make it on a different list! We will have our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024, our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024, and our Top 10 Party Games of 2024! Check these lists for more great games! Let’s head into our list! This is the best of the best for 2024! It’s so great that cooperative games have really flourished! Now I can play with my friends!

Honorable Mention: Ultimatch

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 10+
Length: 20 minutes

I am so surprised this little cooperative card game didn’t do better! It’s colorful and easy to play! I don’t see many people talking about it, but my friends and I had a great time playing this!

If you are looking for a cooperative game to take out instead of UNO, this seems like a game could fit in anywhere! A light cooperative card game that anyone can play? Sign me up!

This has to make an Honorable Mention because it is such an approachable and fun little cooperative game! See our review here to see if you might like Ultimatch!!

10. Slay The Spire: The Board Game

Plays Solo: Yes (has true solo play, but it’s better cooperative)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 12+
Length: 60-90 minutes per Act

As someone who has never played the original video game, this was a huge surprise! If you like the video game, I think you’ll like this! And if you didn’t like the video game … you might still like this!! This is a surprisingly good game with surprisingly good components! It’s a cooperative adventure deck-building game as players navigate dungeons and fight bad guys … just like the video game!

This game worked so well in so many contexts! It was probably one of the most played games at RichieCon 2024 this year, as I saw it getting played so many times! See above. It also worked with my friends who have played the original video game Slay The Spire, and for my friends who HAVEN’T played Slay The Spire!

This had to make our top 10 list of the year because it was so good! It really is a great cooperative game, as it embraces Player Selected Turn Order and Simultaneous Play at the same time! The only reason it’s at number 10 is just that’s it sometimes harder to get to the table if you already have a game in progress (as cards are stored/flipped and saved in the box). See our review here of Slay The Spire: The Board Game to see if this is something you might enjoy!

9. Union City Alliance: Heroes Unite!

Plays Solo: No (but you can play two characters)
Player Count: 2 to 4
Ages: 14+
Length: 75-150 minutes

This was #1 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022, and it finally delivered this year! Of course I was excited when it came in, but I was wary! Luckily, it was very good!

This is a cooperative deck-building game (a lot of these this year) where players are Super Heroes with special powers and have special cards tailored to their deck! If you like Marvel Legendary, a cooperative deck-builder with Marvel Super Heroes, this might be right up your alley! Union City Alliance is also much more thematic than Marvel Legendary as players are actually Super Heroes moving around a map and fighting bad guys!

The only reason this is a little lower is because it doesn’t have official rules for playing solo (but it seems to work with the solo player operating two heroes), and because it is a little more complicated! This game drips with so much theme that it has to pay a little cost of complexity for that theme! Take a look at our review of Union City Alliance to see if you night enjoy this more than Marvel Legendary! I knowI did!

8. Flock Together

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 10+
Length: 25 minutes per player

This is a gorgeous and very cute game with art by Andrew Bosley. Flock Together is a cooperative Boss-Battler, as players have to battle 3 minor bosses on the way to the final confrontation with the big Boss!

This was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024, and boy was it great! This seemed to hit home for so many people! Flock Together a light cooperative game and it is so easy to get to the table! The art and chicken puns in this game just evoke such joy!

This was another one of the most played games at RichieCon 2024 (see above) as I saw it getting played multiple times! Because this game is so easy to get to the table and evokes such joy and humor, this had to make my Top Cooperative Games of 2024! See our review of Flock Together to see if this might be something you enjoy!

7. Hissy Fit!

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 8+
Length: 20 minutes

Wait, a game about taking cats to the Vet made the #7 position? That’s right! This super cute little cooperative game was a surprising hit! It’s a cooperative game you can take just about anywhere, it’s easy to teach and play, and everyone just responds so well to it!

I haven’t had a bad play of this yet! I have played with my gamer friends, my non-gamer friends, my niece, my best friend, and so many groups and it has been a hit every time! This is a great little cooperative game with a follow-like mechanism that keeps everyone involved the whole time!

In the end, the super cute art will bring in people (see above), but the simple cooperative gameplay (with the involving follow mechanism) and short games of 20 minutes will enchant just about everyone! Take a look at our review of Hissy Fit here and see if you want to take the cat to the Vet!

6. Endeavor Deep Sea

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 14+
Length: upto 30 minutes per player

So, I have never played the original Endeavor, but this follow-on (called Endeavor Deep Sea) worker placement game had both a solo and cooperative mode, so I took a chance on it, and it was very very good! A cooperative worker placement game is such a neat thing when it actually works!

Although I liked the game solo and cooperatively, the reason this is higher on the list is that this was a hit for everyone who played it cooperatively! Each player feels like they have so much choice on their turn, so agency is present and relevant, but the discussions for how to achieve the cooperative goals really do elevate the game! It’s a cooperative game where the turns are multiplayer solitaire (which gives each player agency), but still instills a sense of cooperation in the goals!

This was a very thinky and engaging solo and cooperative worker placement game that looks really great on the table! Take a look at our review of Endeavor Deep Sea to see if this is for you and your group!

5. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play two characters)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 14+
Length: 60-90 minutes

This is a fantastic year for board and card games! In many other years, this would have easily been my #1 game of the year, but there are so many good games this year! This is a cooperative boss-battler dungeon crawl campaign game where players play unique and interesting characters in this world of Tidal Blades!

This game is just gorgeous and took up my table for weeks as I played through the campaign both solo and cooperatively! The components are so good and, this sounds silly, but so easy to read and understand the icons and colors! They did such a fantastic job!

The best recommendation you can give a campaign game is that your friends want to keep playing it! I have gone through most of the campaign solo, and I am enjoying playing cooperatively with my friends when I can! See above!

The way players choose a card and then activate all the abilities in the row or column of choice is such a great mechanism! I hope we see this mechanism again in future games! Tidal Blades 2: The Rise of the Unfolders has so many great things (and fixes to Gloomhaven) that I wish I could give this the #1 position, but I liked the next few games just a little better! See our review of Tidal Blades 2: The Rise of the Unfolders here to see if you might like this and argue that it should be #1!

4. Invincible: The Hero-Building Game

Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play two characters)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 13+
Length: 45-90 minutes

Invincible: The Hero Building Game is a cooperative bag-building game set in the Invincible universe. You may have read the original comic book or seen the TV show, but even if you haven’t, you might still really enjoy this bag-building/push-your-luck game! I really enjoyed that no cube is bad on its own, but if you ever draw 5 black cubes, a hero can crash (which is still recoverable). The black cubes are actually good (they are wild) up until you get 5 of them!

There is also a campaign, where each scenario can be just played as a one-shot as well!

Cooperatively, my friends (despite never having seen/read Invincible) still had a good time playing! Sam even mentioned Invincible in his top 10 list at RichieCon 2024 ! I freely admit that the SuperHero nature of this game contributed to me really liking it, but the game is very very good! See our review of Invincible: The Hero-Building Game to see if you might enjoy it!

3. Leviathan Wilds

Plays Solo: Yes (there’s an official true solo mode, but just play two characters: it’s easier)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 10+
Length: 60 minutes

Leviathan Wilds took my gaming groups by storm! This is a game I championed, as it was #3 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024, and boy did it deliver! It seems most reviewers picked up on how good it was!

This is basically Shadow of The Colossus, the cooperative board game! But, instead of “fighting” a creature by climbing all over him, players work together to heal a creature (by getting rid of crystal growths)!

This game works so well because it’s easy to get to the table and has some really unique features! Each player gets to choose a Climber and Class (each with its own deck) and meld them to create a unique deck and personality! The cards are multi-use, and your deck represents your grip! It’s such an interesting and gorgeous game! See below!

My friend Becca (who doesn’t like cooperative games normally) said she really liked this! And most of my friends also liked it! It was hit just about everywhere I went! Take a look at our review of Leviathan Wilds to see if this is something you may like!

2. Sammu-Ramat

Plays Solo: Yes (there’s a couple of ways, either the solo player operates 2 advisors or 3)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 14+
Length: 60-90 minutes

You haven’t probably heard of this game; it had a very small Gamefound presence, but in the end, it probably should have been game of the year. This game is fantastic: it’s a cooperative war-game with euro-type resource gathering mechanisms! And it’s cooperative and solo! The theme is that players are advisors to Sammu-Ramat, a leader from 811-820 BC known for her wisdom!

In the end, though, this is a puzzle game about how to keep the kingdom prosperous, while still enduring the warlike invaders! How do you handle crisis? What resources do you collect? how do you move about the kingdom to do the most good? It’s such a great and thinky puzzle with almost no randomness to the game (from a few events)!

My friends and I had such a good time playing through this puzzle, but I think I enjoyed the campaign mode best, where you play 5 games back to back using the previous game state as set-up for the next! So interesting and thinky!

I loved this game and strongly suggest you check it out, especially if you like thinky puzzle games! See our review of Sammu-Ramat to see if this might be something you like! If this were any of other year, this would have been my #1, but one other game took almost all my time this year …

1. Marvel United Multiverse/Season 3

Plays Solo: Yes (there’s many ways, but I prefer playing two heroes)
Player Count: 1 to 4 (sometimes 5, depending on the mode)
Ages: 14+
Length: 60-90 minutes

This is kind of a cheat, as Marvel United: Multiverse standalone game comes with Season 3 of Marvel United Multiverse! See above!

Marvel United: Multiverse is the base game that includes heroes from the Multiverse (Loki) and What If? (Captain Carter) and other lesser know heroes and villains.

One of the best new things in the Marvel United: Multiverse game is the Equipment cards! Some of the heroes in the game get some really interesting and choices if equipped! I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the new equipment and its effects on gameplay. See our review here to see if Marvel United: Multiverse might be for you!

Even though Marvel United: Multiverse is out favorite of the Marvel United base games, it’s all the content from Season 3 that made this rise to the top! We spent weeks lovingly going through so much of Season 3 Multiverse!

The Stretch Goals! See the Expansion Absorption Explosion for more details!
The Campaign Decks! Play a campaign with your favorite Marvel comic!
The Inhumans! Play War of Kings with your favorite Inhumans!
Galactus! Play against Galactus or his heralds!

We liked Marvel United: Multiverse so much, we used the Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S location from that box to make our own campaign!

The Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S campaign, using “mostly” Season 3 and Multiverse components took over our lives for weeks as well! See our custom print-and-play campaign of the Project PEGASUS story!

Marvel United has become my favorite game of all time, and Season 3 pretty much cemented it i place! That’s why Marvel United: Multiverse (and Season 3) has to make the #1 spot on our cooperative games of 2024!

Over Hill Over Dale, Will Everdell: Duo Fail? A Review of the Solo and Cooperative Modes of Everdell: Duo

Everdell: Duo is a competitive or cooperative worker placement game for 1-2 players. It was up on Kickstarter in Aug/Sept. 2024. It promised delivery in March 2025, but it delivered to me on November 25th, 2024! Yes, almost 4 months early!

This is a worker placement game in the Everdell universe. Strictly speaking, I have never played any of the Everdell games, but I was excited about the cooperative mode of this worker placement game! It plays both solo and cooperatively with 2-Players! We saw another cooperative worker placement game that went over quite well this year with Endeavour: Deep Sea. Will Everdell: Duo find that same success?

Unboxing

This is a smaller box: see Coke Can above for perspective.

I was slightly grumpy at the Kickstarter because they shipped it in a padded envelope, and my box got a little banged up! See above. There are some dents, and the top is squished a little, so it feels like I got a Ding-And-Dent day special for this. So, I was already a little feisty when I opened this.

And there is really no insert to speak of. Everything just flops around all willy-nilly in the box!

Luckily, they did include a lot of plastic bags (see above and below) so you organize it.

There’s 4 punchout sheets and the art is pretty groovy on them (see above and below).

Most of the game is on the cards; there’s quite a number of them.

The game looks good: I love that Andrew Bosley art. See above.

Rulebook

This rulebook is a mixed bag.

It passes the Chair Test with flying colors! It’s an A! It’s just the right size so that it can fold over perfectly!

See above as the rulebook lays flat and fits perfectly; it’s so easy to read!

The Components list is pretty minimal (lower right of 2nd page, see above), but it works well enough. The set-up takes up all of page 3, works, pretty well, and is decently notated. So, things are starting off on a good note.

The Gameplay concentrates on the competitive mode, so the cooperative (and solo) mode take second fiddle a little bit. For example, the rulebook fully lists/describes the Season card effects for competitive mode, but the cooperative mode Season effects (which are different enough to warrant some text) doesn’t get any explanation. The game mechanisms are “generally” the same in either competitive or cooperative mode, but of course, the players have to approach the game differently depending on the mode.

This also irked me: they mislabelled the “Card Summary” as an Index! See above!! An Index is a list of sorted “important” words, with page numbers following in a list: this is NOT an index! This is a Summary! Even worse, as a Summary, it’s incomplete! You MUST print out the special sheet from the website to get all the rules. I remember looking for the the Inn in the rulebook … it’s not there?

Ah, there it is … at the top of the page! (NOT an Index). Do yourself a favor, makes sure you print out a full copy of the (what they call) the Everdell Duo Index! You need that to play or you will not be very unhappy.

The rulebook taught the game, but I was constantly looking up stuff. Also, there’s no real picture or great explanation of “town” or tableau. I think you have to have played enough of these types of games to get that your “town” was the set of cards in front of you. Again, this could have been clearer.

The rulebook taught the game. Let’s just leave it at that. Make sure you print out (what they call) the Everdell Duo Index, or you will be missing some important card descriptions!

Gameplay

This is a worker placement game for 1-2 players. You can play competitively or cooperatively (the solo mode is just the cooperative mode with one player operating both characters).

There are always two characters in play: the Hare and the Tortoise. See above as the Hare is on the left hand side, and the Tortoise on the right.

During the game players “usually” do one of two things on their turn; (1) place a worker placement token (see the 3 Tortoise tokens above) or (2) play a card from their hand into their “town” or tableau (see Farmer and Peddler as cards in their hand).

The top and bottom of the board is the worker placement zones.

The bottom part of the board are spaces that basically give resources (wood, berries, resin, or stone) to a player. See above.

At the top of the board (accented by the big tiles) are the big rewards, but they have significant prerequisites. The Bountiful Harvest (to the left) requires 4 green Production cards, but gives a whopping 5 victory points.

This is generally a victory point game, even in the cooperative mode (but see more discussion below). For the competitive games, players are competing to get the most victory points. For the cooperative mode, players (at first at least) need a certain number of victory points as a group to win.

The second most common action is playing cards from your hand (or board) to your “town” or tableau. It’s not clear from the instructions, but each character has a HAND of cards they can play on the board, and cards they HAVE played into their “town”. See above as the Harvester, Spelunker, Chip Sweep, and Fairgrounds are in the Hare’s town (with Miller and Barge Toad in hand; they haven’t come out yet).

In order to play a card into your “town” or tableau, the player must pay the resources on the upper left of the card. For the General Store (above), it’s one Wood, one Resin, and one Stone. If you don’t have the resources, you can’t play the card.

Interestingly, you can also play cards from the board (the Meadow) into your “town”! It really depends on where the Sun and the Moon are!!

The Sun and Moon are tokens that move left to right on the board. See above. Once they have both reached the last space, that season is over! There are 4 Seasons total: Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn. Once all seasons are done, the game is over! Add up point to see who won!

At the end of the season, each characters gets some special effects (draw a card from the meadow (the board), create resources from Green cards, get resources, etc). The Season tiles above also specify who goes first!

The Sun and Moon tokens add an unusual twist in the game. The Sun token advances whenever any player plays a worker. There are only 5-7 or so spaces for the sun (depending on the mode, campaign, etc), so that means that maybe a limited number of worker placement actions total; someone may likely get screwed out of a worker placement action!

The Moon token advances whenever anyone buys a card from the board or their hand. See above; if a character buys, they can instead buy any of the 4 adjacent cards to the moon! That’s kind of different and interesting!

The game is all about trying to get the right resources to get the right cards to get the right combos to get the most victory points!

Solo Play

There are two solo modes (Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law)! One of two solo mode for this game is playing the cooperative mode (2-Player only), except that the solo player plays both the Hare and the Tortoise; this is the Campaign solo mode. For 4 seasons, the solo player alternates between the Hare and Tortoise until the Sun and Moon reach the end of the track … then head to the next season!

The solo mode (really, the two-handed cooperative mode) is, at least in the beginning, a victory point game. The sum of the victory points of the Hare and the Tortoise need to exceed some threshold!

The cooperative mode is really is actually a campaign (sort of) of 15 ever harder chapters! The first game of the campaign (see above) is a simple start: get at least 85 Victory Points collectively and also get at least 4 Events (the big rewards)! Luckily, you can play any campaign chapter you want as a one-shot: this is both Boon and Bane! It’s Boon because you can play any of the 15 chapters of the campaign at any time, but it’s Bane because there’s really NO levelling up in this game. It’s not really a campaign in the sense “your character gets better”; it’s just 15 scenarios that get harder.

What’s different about the Campaign solo/co-op mode is that there are SKUNKS blocking certain locations on the board! See above as two SKUNKS blocks two spots on the Sun/Moon path (thus reducing the number of actions) and one SKUNK on the Worker Placement part of the bottom (this blocking one action). This is how the game “simulates” blocking; every turn the players roll the die and move the SKUNKS to block spaces.

I have to admit I struggled a little with the randomness of this game at first. The cards in your hand or meadow are ENTIRELY random every game, and where the SKUNKS end up is ENTIRELY random. I was very afraid I wouldn’t like the game because of this. But, I think after getting through a bunch of games and getting the flow of the game, there always seemed to be ways to mitigate that randomness. You can always top-deck a new card, you can usually play a card out of your hand if you can’t play from the Meadow, you can always choose to draw any card from the meadow, and you can always find SOME worker placement action to help you, even if it wasn’t exactly what you wanted. Basically, you have to be able to pivot. The game is more tactical than strategic, as you react to the current set-up of the game.

But, this Campaign solo/co-op mode is much more strategic; since you can work together (with yourself as the Tortoise and Hare) and plan together, your actions be more far-reaching!

Note there is a Challenge solo/co-op mode in the game where you play against an AI opponent. I feel like, with the rules as they are, the Challenge mode is a much more tactical game. I strongly prefer the Campaign solo/co-op mode, as it feels like you can mitigate the randomness of the game much more by having the Tortoise and Hare collaborate.

There are two related issues I want to discuss more below. But for now, let me say that I do like the solo 2-handed Campaign mode as it’s more strategic. The Challenge mode was less to to my liking, as it felt more tactical.

And for solo mode, I completely ignored the Limited Communication rules; It makes sense to ignore this in the solo mode (of course you can communicate with yourself). More discussion below.

Cooperative Play

Even after three solo games, I was still getting a few rules wrong. As Teresa and I headed into a cooperative game (the campaign mode, not Challenge mode), she was the Hare and I was the Tortoise playing Chapter 1 of the Campaign.

There are rules for Communications Restrictions … which we completely ignored. There are some restrictions on what you can communicate: “You may not tell your partner which cards you have in your hand, but you may tell them what color and types (Critter or Construction) you have, and what resources you want”. We generally adhered to these rules, but that’s because we respect each others space. Sometimes we would share a little more, but that made the game more engaging: “Ugh! I am struggling! I can’t do anything, how can I help you?” I understand why cooperative games like this have Communications Restrictions: they don’t want the game ruined by The Alpha Player (a player who tells everyone what to do!). If you are playing Everdell: Duo with a person you trust and respect, these rules are insulting and take away from the enjoyment of the game. I prefer to encourage working with my friends rather than hamstringing them with arbitrary Communications Limitations.

That got more preachy than I wanted, but the game still seems to work even in you ignore the Communications Limitations. And it’s more fun.

Over one night, Teresa and I played and lost our first game. Then, Teresa liked the game so much, she wanted to play again!!

And we lost the second game too. But we had fun playing!

Sharing

With the gameplay description I have given above, this game sounds very much multiplayer solitaire. And it mostly is, except for two things. First of all, there is a “share” space! At the end of every turn, each character can decide to share a single thing and put it on the tile above! That thing can be a card, a resource, or an Occupied token.

Interestingly, different Chapters of the Campaign turn on/off this sharing space, or reduce its scope (so you can only use it in the middle). I noticed that I didn’t win a solo game until I actively started using the Sharing space. It’s there for a reason, as it does encourage cooperation and strategy!

It might seem, other than the Sharing space, this game is just multiplayer solitaire. After all, each player just tries to do they best they can on their turn, right? I think, after several plays, I would say that is not true! Because of the Sun/Moon move mechanism, each Season is restricted by how many worker placement and card buys characters can do—in order to get a full robust turn, the players must discuss the best play to enact a plan to make best use of the Season! And that makes the game very cooperative!

What I Liked

The Components and Art: The art of Andrew Bosley permeates this game, and it’s very striking. The game is gorgeous and cute, and it looks nice on the table.

Cooperative Worker Placement: The cooperative worker placement works very well in this game. Everdell: Duo uses the SKUNKS to help block spaces, and with the characters collaborating, this works far better than I expected it to!

Duo: I really like playing this as a cooperative 2-Player game (in Campaign mode). It seemed to work really well. Of course, the solo mode was great too … because it is the same mode!

What I Didn’t Like

The Rulebook: There were some great things about the rulebook, and some not so great things. I think this rulebook needs one more pass by an editor. In the end, I was able to learn the game from it, but it seemed harder than it should have …maybe it’s because I never played the original Everdell? Maybe they expected me to know more about the game?

Randomness: I was worried about the randomness of the game; between the SKUNKS positions being decided by die rolls and the pure randomness of the Meadow, I was very worried the game might feel like too much. I will say, after playing a whole bunch of games solo and cooperatively, I haven’t seen this be a problem. I still worry about it.

Conclusion

Everdell: Duo worked for me as a solo game and for my friend as a 2-Player cooperative game. The Campaign mode (misnamed, because no state changes between games) offers lots of replayability for the future. Although there is a Challenge solo/co-op mode, I feel like the Campaign is the better mode, as it allows the players to be more strategic in a game that is fairly tactical overall.

The games are fairly short, but they offer a lot of interesting choices. We found that, even if we lost, we wanted play again! This was a testament to how much fun the game was.

If I were to suggest one major revision, I would eliminate the Communication Restrictions. Just let me and my friend have fun and play how we want; I play games with my friend because I want to work with them and cooperate. Restricting the Communication takes too much away from the cooperation, to the point of being less fun.

Overall, this is probably a 7.5 from both me and Teresa. It’s easy to pull out and play either solo or cooperatively, it’s gorgeous on the table, and it’s very cute.

Aeon’s End: The Descent. Review After Full Playthrough

Aeon’s End: The Descent (an expansion in the Aeon’s End universe, but also a standalone cooperative game) was on Gamefound back in Februrary 2024 and promised delivery in January 2025. Guess what? It actually got here early right before Thanksgiving 2024 (Nov 20, 2024 or so). That’s right, it’s almost 2 months early! Holy cow! That never happens in crowdfunding land!

I went all-in on the new stuff and got the two expansions* (three if you count XAXOS inside), the mat, and the box!

I freely admit I was on the fence on backing this. I do love the Aeon’s End system and its ilk (Astro Knights (see review here), Astro Knights: Eternity (see review here), Aeon’s End, Aeon’s End: War Eternal (see review here), Aeon’s End: Outcasts (see review here) etc etc etc), but I have a lot of Aeon’s End content already. I mean, this is a great cooperative deck-building game system with a mage theme, and it basically made the #1 Spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Deckbuilding Games!

In the end, I chose to back Aeon’s End: The Descent because I was excited for the new Friends and Foes module which can be used in any game. Not to bury the lede, but I think that new module makes the game that much better. We’ll discuss that in detail below.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a pretty standard sized box: see Coke can above for reference.

If you are considering getting this, I recommend the mat. Of all the mats I have, the Aeon’s End/Astro Knights mats always seem the most useful: look above at how they well they help organize the play! The mat from Conquest Princess last week was pretty good for solo, but not really useful for cooperative play. This mat, for Aeon’s End: The Descent worked so very well in both solo and cooperative contexts.

Just be wary that the mat a little big (see Coke can for scale above) and it’s a little harder to carry around (see below).

There’s a little rulebook for the Friends and Foes module; I think it’s separate so you can use it with other Aeon’s End games easier. See picture above.

There’s a narrative booklet: this is to take you through the adventure with some text. See above.

And the main rulebook: see above.

At its core though, Aeon’s End: The Descent is a card game: see SO MANY cards above and below!

Luckily, these cards are very well organized: they have stop signs cards to surround each deck.

One of my favorite features of this game (and all Aeon’s End games) is that EVERY CARD IS WELL-LABELLED: see above as the Treasure card is from ATD-4-02 (bottom left of the card). If you ever need to put everything back in original order, you can.

Spoiler Alert: I played through the entire campaign, and I was able to reset the entire campaign (sorry, they are called Expeditions here) back to its original pristine state. And you can! See above as I try to separate the cards back!

At its core, each player takes the role of a mage, and his cards become his casting deck (which he has to try to build up using deck-building). See some mages above … and some other ones come out later!

Generally, the mages are fighting a Big Bad! See some above! To win, you usually have to reduce the Big Bad to zero hit points by casting spells to do damage!

Along the way, you make some Friends and Foes, who help or hinder you just a little bit … and more come out as the Expedition unfurls …

There’s a bunch of tokens which you do need to notate moneys, power, charges, and some other stuff!

Generally, the components are pretty high quality, the art is good, and the production looks great. See above.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is .. fine.

It flops over the edges, making it harder to keep open on the chair next to me. It really needs to be a smaller form factor: it gets about a C on the Chair Test. I find myself grumpier and grumpier with rulebooks which are huge when opened up. At least it does sit flat.

The Components page is nice* (*modulo one issue we had with Astro Knights: Eternity: the Component pages STILL doesn’t label the Turn Order cards as coming from one of the 1X decks … you might find yourself searching in vain, until you open up all the 1A-1D decks).

Set-ups are nice, but if you get the Play mat, you really don’t need this section.

Generally, this was a good rulebook with good annotations, lots of pictures, and readable text. It even used color to differentiate new rules (in yellow) from older games.

This is a pretty good rulebook, but it had better be after making 5? 10? different versions of Aeon’s End. Although there is still one quirk in the solo rules … see later below.

Gameplay

I always forget HOW AMAZING the Aeon’s End games are for that first set-up! Aeons’ End: The Descent is no different! See above and below as the sheet that comes with the box helps you quickly unwrap and set-up your first game!

If I ever get an Aeon’s Box in the mail, I am never worried about my first set-up*, because it always goes so well!

I don’t want to say too much about gameplay because we’ve discussed it before in previous reviews. Also, there are a lot of great videos on the internet if you want to see how it plays. But I just want to say, there are a number of new mechanisms and somehow, they keep squeezing new ideas out of the Aeon’s End system! Every game in the Expedition has a new “angle” or “mechanism” that keeps the game fresh! A new Mage? A new weird way to defeat the Big Bad? Somehow, Aeon’s End is still fresh after all these years!

Friends and Foes

Without a doubt, my favorite new thing about Aeon’s End: The Descent is the Friends and Foes module. Basically, two new characters become embroiled in your story: a friend and a foe!

They are so embroiled, that the friend and foe each get their own turn within the turn deck! See above!

Each friend and foe slowly evolves something: the friend is building up something good for the players, and the foe is building up something bad! See above as The Corrosion can add his Draining cards! The nice thing about the friends and foes is that they aren’t too bad; you usually have to make a choice about the goodness/badness every turn they come up! I really enjoyed having that extra choice!

Do you add a few charges to the friend or foe? Do you take some damage to Gravehold to avoid that charge? The players almost always GET TO MAKE A CHOICE: what kind of good news or bad news do you want? The players decide!!

See above as the The Scavanger Foe makes players draw a card and either suffer damage to Gravehold or let the Scavenger charge up!! What do you do? What do you do??

As much as I like these choices, what I like best about the Friends and Foes is that they even-out the problems with Variable Turn Order gameplay. What do I mean by that?

Kickstarter Edition of Aeon’s End and Aeon’s End: War Eternal (with update since I was an original Kickstarter)

Those of you have been following my blog for sometime know that I am not a huge fan of Variable Turn Order: see the blog entry here for A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness. Basically, Variable Turn Order can be too random and cause pathologically bad draws which can make the game less fun. To combat the problems of Variable Turn Order in Aeon’s End (and its ilk), I allow myself a simple House Rule: the Nemesis is never allowed to go more than 2 turns in a row.

It turns out that I didn’t have to use this House Rule in any of my games in Aeon’s End: The Descent!! Why? One of the things we discovered when working with Variable Turn Order in Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze was that the bigger the deck, the less likely you are to have pathologically bad draws! See blog entry for more Discussion here.

Because the Friends and Foes “fill-out” the Variable Turn Order deck from 6 cards (original length) to 8 cards (with one Friend and one Foe), there didn’t seem to be a need to invoke the House Rule!

In the end, I love this new Friends and Foes module for multiple reasons: it mitigates the Variable Turn Order issues I have in Aeon’s End: The Descent, it allows more choice into the game, and it has some really new ideas for how to push Aeon’s End into fresh territory. Not to mention, you can use Friends and Foes with any Aeon’s End game!

I guess I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think the game still needed one slight House Rule: the rules say that the Charges “must go off” when the Charge track is filled (see above). Sure, this makes sense for the Foe, but not the Friend!!! I played several times where the Friend’s ability discharged … and it was completely useless for me!!! But, the Friend is your friend! Ask them to hold on until next round when they activate! This seems like a minor house rule, but I think it feels more thematic and more empowering as a choice-You don’t have to discharge the Friend’s ability just because it’s full.

Otherwise, Friends and Foes is a fantastic module. I probably won’t play without it from now on if I can help it.

Expedition

So, this game comes with a Campaign of 4 Sessions (4 battles): they call this an Expedition (much like in Astro Knights: Eternity … see here). The basic flow of the game is described by the Narrative Book (see above and below).

Each section starts with a TON of text. I have to admit, I was a little daunted the wall of text, until I realized that using the character sheets/mats made it more interesting and visual!

What I did: I found the character mats for each of the Mages described in the text (and the Friend), and then I put them next to the Narrative book! So, as I read, I could correlate who was speaking, who was acting, and who was who! See above! This brought me more into the story, and I recommend the same for you!

After the text sets up the story, the yellow boxes direct you how to set-up the game: see above for instructions on how to set-up Battle 3 (note, not really any spoilers in the set-up).

Most of the special context for the Expedition Battles is in one of three places: The Envelopes, the Specially Wrapped Cards, or the “unspecial wrapped cards”.

The Envelopes typically contain Friends and Foes, a new Nemesis, some dividers, and possibly some new boards. Minor Spoiler for Envelope 3: don’t look too closely at the picture above, but that’s what’s generally in an Envelope!!!

Most of the cards you need come from the special decks: For example, you open 2B at the end of Battle 2!

Or open 1A, 1B, and 1C at the start of Battle 1!

There’s a ton of other decks in the game which just “augment” your game: this allows you to have other choices for your Gems/Relics and Spells.

Although your first game will have a rigourous set of Gems/Relic/Spells (see above), you can choose other cards for these.

Although there are some instructions for reseting the game, I strongly recommend you take pictures (like I did) of all the stuff in the Envelopes: Again, minor spoilers for Envelope 4! See above!

After playing through the Expedition solo (see Solo Play section below), I went ahead and re-sorted all the decks back to their original state! I used rubber bands (I know, some people don’t like rubber bands) to keep them together.

It took about an hour or so to re-sort everything and put the box back to the original state. You can do, but it is a lot of work. I did this so I can play the Campaign with my friends all over again.

Solo Play

So, Aeon’s End: The Descent supports solo play (thanks for following Saunders’ Law). And it has choices!

You can either play true solo mode, where the solo player plays exactly one mage OR you can play solo two-handed. And for true solo, they mention the simple rules “You are your own ally!” (I would have LOVED some better solo play description like this for Freedom Five from a few weeks ago: Oh, Freedom Five, I wanted to love you so much …). In the end, I played true solo: one mage per Battle!

This true solo is interesting, because some variants of Aeon’s End only support the solo player having three turns and the Nemesis having two turns (most notably: the App for iOS! See our Discussion in Seven House Rules For Cooperative Games). This version of Aeon’s End: The Descent seems to let the true solo player have four turns (it’s unclear, because the set-up for the players has rules for 2,3, and 4 players … but not 1-Player? See page 8!). In the end, the defining text seems to be: “The turn order deck is always composed of four player turn order cards and two Nemesis turn order cards” (p. 8, Turn Order Deck).

Over the course of about 4 days, I ended up playing the entire Expedition! Although the game box says 60 minutes per game, I kind of think that’s bogus: I am an experienced Aeon’s End player, and I think I took about 2 hours per game. To be fair, when I play solo, I tend to be more thoughtful and take longer turns.

I chose to use a different Mage for each game: I started with Thraxir, went to Mezahaedron for my second Battle …

Used Raven in my 3rd Battle …

And finally ended Battle 4 with Brama .. the Leader!

Using a different Mage for each battle was absolutely the right thing to do! I got to play 4 VERY DIFFERENT Mages throughout the game! Each play style was very different, and it was fun to try to learn and discover the strategies for each Mage! I had to use Destiny tokens, Knowledge tokens, and all sorts of new stuff I had never seen before!

It was an absolute delight getting through this Expedition. I had a blast!

Although the true solo game has the solo mage advance quickly, I always worry that they may die sooner, because they only have 10 hit points total! At least playing two-handed solo, there are 20 hit points total between the two mages … Luckily, getting too low was never an issue. I don’t know if I just chose well, but my Mages never skirted death! I always worry about the true solo player dying too early because there are no hit point balancing mechanisms (i.e., solo player has 12 hit points or something), but it hasn’t seemed to be an issue.

My only complaint might have been that maybe it was too easy? I didn’t lose a single solo game along the way! And all of wins were pretty decisive! Like I said, I am a fairly experienced Aeon’s End player, so that’s part of it. Luckily, I noticed that every Nemesis does have a “advanced” mode, so if I play again, maybe I’ll do the advanced mode so it’s a little harder …

In the end, I had a great time playing the Expedition solo. I was able to learn the game to teach my friends (see Cooperative Play section below), but still enjoy a full story and campaign! If I never play Aeon’s End: The Descent again, I feel like I still feel like I got my money’s worth. The thing is, I would like to play it again! It was fun!

Cooperative Play

So, Robert, Becca, and Jeff and I played the first game of the Expedition! A 4-Player game!

We ended up winning and generally having a good time!

Becca, who doesn’t really like cooperative games that much, liked it enough that she expressed interest in ordering a copy! I showed her the little catalog (above: came with the game) of all the Aeon’s Ends …

Generally, everyone was able to feel part of the team! But, each Mage has their own personality, and I think everyone felt like they could do something interesting on their turn! Sure, there were moments when one of us “took it for the team” and had a crappy turn, but it was always a conversation! Everyone was always involved, either figuring out their turn, or talking with others!

The only “real” problem was that the game lasted a good three hours! Granted, this is a learning game for most everyone but me, but 3 hours is a lot longer than the 60 minutes on the box! Still, we were engaged the entire time and had fun.

Cooperative play went well, even with 4 people who are all very independent. And none of my friends (except Becca) are really “gamers”, but everyone took to the game pretty well! Generally, it was a smashing success and we had fun.

One final thing: the 4-Player cooperative game seemed harder than the true solo game. I think if we played through the entire Expedition as a 4-Player game, the game would have been much more challenging. The game just seems harder with more people.

“Emergency Sleeving!”

You don’t have to sleeve the game, but you really really really should sleeve the Turn Order Deck (see above). Why? You touch the Turn Order Deck every turn! I didn’t sleeve my Turn Order Deck in the original Aeon’s End, and it got a little grody.

Just as we were starting the Cooperative game, I remembered how “grody” the Turn Order cards, so we had to have an “Emergency Sleeving!!!!”

Okay, you may now resume your regularly scheduled program.

What I Liked

The Campaign, er, Expedition Story: Once I got into the Expedition, I enjoyed the story. I needed the graphic support of pictures of the characters to jumpstart me into the story, but once I got into it, it was surprisingly enjoyable. And maybe even a little moving?

The Length of the Expedition: I liked that the campaign was only 4 Battles: it seemed like just enough to be achievable. It wasn’t too long to drag on, nor too short to leave me wanting more. I said the same thing about the campaign in Astro Knights: Eternity: 4 Battles seems just right!

Friends and Foes: I adored the Friends and Foes addition. It not only fixed the Variable Turn Order problems (or at least strongly alleviated the issues), but also added some extra choices to the gameplay. Overall, this module is a major win for the Aeon’s End system, and may now be a necessary module moving forward.

Still Fresh: Everything seemed “fresh”: the new Mages, the new Nemeses, the Friends and Foes, the new Gems/Relics/Spells, the new mechanisms (Knowledge, Destiny, etc)! Somehow, even after 8 years since the original Aeon’s End, all this content still seems fresh!

New Narrative Booklets: I like that the Narrative Booklets and the Expedition mode gives you an “excuse” to play through all the content. I like this idea! An excuse! It sort of went under the radar, but this also included Narrative Booklets for both the original Aeon’s End and the Aeon’s End: War Eternal. If I need/want an excuse to playthrough those games again, I have it! I think it’s really cool that Indie boards and cards “retro-fitted” the Expedition onto the original games!

Standalone: Were you always curious abut Aeon’s End but were turned away because of something (maybe Variable Turn Order)? Maybe you found the Friends and Foe module alluring? Maybe the idea of a just-right campaign is alluring? You do NOT have to get all the other Aeon’s End content … you can just get this standalone game and be very happy for a while!

What I Didn’t Like

Wall of Text: I grew to like the story that came out, but that wall of text from the Expedition booklet is very daunting; I suspect it will actually turn some people away. I would have considered putting in some relevant pictures in with the next, or at least “suggested” that players keep out the Player Mats so they can have pictures of the characters as they interact.

Friends Ability Activation: I really think that the players should allow the Friend to activate abilities with a little more choice; right now they friend “must” discharge all their charges and activate their ability even if it’s not useful. These seems against the theme; they are our friends, why can’t we work with them so they activate their abilities at better times? This is my only real complaint in an otherwise wonderful Friends and Foes module.

Rulebook and rules: The Rulebook and Narrative books are pretty good, but have a lot of weird discrepancies! Why is one-player set-up not mentioned in the Turn Order Deck section? Why are Treasures not emphasized more? It’s one page in a floating box you will miss on your first read! The set-ups in the Narrative book seem a little … spartan? There needs to be more emphasis that we can choose Gems/Relics/Spells between Battles! And the Turn Order cards are referenced in the Components but “hidden” in the intro decks … it needs a slightly better sentence there.

These are all minor things.

Conclusion

I am not quite sure where I come down on Aeon’s End: The Descent, because I liked it so much! The Friends and Foes module, for me at least, is always necessary for any Aeon’s End game I play from now on! My friends loved this game, even the non-gamers! The cooperative experience has always been very strong in Aeon’s End: my plays with my friends accented how well it works!

My solo games during the Expedition were so much fun, they will probably make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

Aeon’s End: The Descent breathes new life into the Aeon’s End system. I loved it. I think I will give it an 8.5/10 or maybe a 9/10. I don’t know, maybe even a 9.5/10? It was such a great experience both solo and cooperatively!

My only question: should it make my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024 (because it’s a standalone game) or my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 (because it expands other Aeon’s End games)?

A Fashionable Cooperative Space Game! A Review of Conquest Princess

Hear me out; this game is better than it looks. I know, I know, I don’t love that cover either, but once you get inside, this game really does come alive.

Conquest Princess is a cooperative bag-building game with elements of boss-battling and collection. This game was on Gamefound back in June 2023. It had a fairly small pledge group of about 668 people but it did succeed in being funded. I went all in! I got the base box, plus the mat, plus the acrylic tokens, and the bags!

If I were to describe this game to you, I would describe it as The Captain is Dead (which is a cooperative space game we reviewed here, here, and here) meets a bag-builder like Invincible (a cooperative bag-builder we reviewed here).

Let’s take a look!

Extra Specials

I am very pleased I went all-in on this; I got some pretty great stuff. Normally, I worry that a game with such a small crowdfunding presence won’t have great all-in stuff, but boy was I pleasantly surprised! I am SO PLEASED with the extras!

This is a bag-building game, remember?

This upgraded “extra” bag is fantastic!

It can even stand-up on its own! See above!

And the acrylic tiles that come with it are gorgeous! Bag of Destiny: totally worth it.

Standees of Utmost Elegance? Very good! Anyone who know follows this blogs knows that I love the acrylic standees, even over miniatures! The acrylic standees from Tokyo Sidekick (see here) and from Kinfire Chronicles (see here) have convinced me that I prefer the acrylic standees!

The Standees of Utmost Elegance box comes with a bunch of standees (right), bases (middle) and some acrylic danger tokens (left): see above.

All assembled, those look pretty great! See above! The art is a little cartoony, but I think that’s why the clear acrylic standees work so well in this game; they accent that comicy nature! I am very very happy with The Standees of Utmost Elegance! I wish the art was just a touch nicer, but I still liked it.

Look at all that great acrylic standee stuff!

The third and final box is the coolest: Lights Of Opulent Extravagence!

It includes metal first player token (right: above) and 16 action coins (left). Wow!

More importantly, it includes the light-up standees. You heard me. Light-up standees!

Each character can “transform” in the game, and when they do, they get the cool light-up standee! See above!

The extra specials for this game gave me a WOW and put a giant smile on my face! This is the feeling I wanted when I opened Freedom Five from a few weeks ago. I got that WOW feeling from Conquest Princess instead!!

Totally worth getting the extras and all-in.

Upgraded components are great, but what about the game?

Unboxing and Some* Unpunching Required

The base box is fairly tall, but width and height is pretty standard. See Coke can above for perspective.

I sort of had a weird dillema when I opened everything up! A lot of the tokens are already acryclic, so which ones do I punch out?

So, I ended up punching out about half the cardboard punchouts; the other half were from the acrylic standees and metal tokens.

I mean, everything looks pretty cool, right?

Gameplay

1 to 4 Players assume the roles of the 4 characters in the game: see above and below.

This is an action point game; actions are notated on the Wrist Blaster board (bottom board in photo above). Each character gets 4 action points on their turn, denoted by the metal tokens. The player will slide the token down to indicate a move, shoot, or engage action. Occasionally, you can use energy to get an extra action (last column). The armor on the side is armor to prevent damage.

The Fashion Plate board (above and below) is where you place special cards, pets, and powers.

This game is a space game with a large dollop of fashion in the theme! You heard me, fashion!!! One of the catch phrases of the game is “Fashion is Power!!” Generally, this is a space game, where some of the equipment you’d get in a pure space game is instead accented as fashion accessories.

You can see a little of that in the gear (I mean fashion accessories) above: Carbonite Kicks, Hsi Sniper Sleeves. It’s more fashion accessories than gear, but it’s also gear.

I’ll say this: if you want to play Conquest Princess as a pure, straight-up space-theme game, you can almost ignore the fashion part and just pretend it’s a pure space-themed game. But if you really want to embrace the “Fashion is Power!” vibe, you can have a lot of fun with that. This weird cross-pollination of space and fashion may seem like a turn-off, but it’s not; you can choose to embrace either side (or both sides!) of that theme and it still works. I generally played it solo as a pure space game; whereas my cooperative games with my girl friends embraced the fashion part.

The T.I.A.R.A (above) is generally the main ship and this is where I get a lot of The Captain is Dead vibe from! Players move around the ship taking out the Minions in orange thongs (yes, you heard me right, orange thongs) and keeping the ship clear of baddies.

The ship has all sorts of different subsystems: Teleporter (above: for moving off ship), Engineering (above: for repairing subsystems), Mendenry (above: sick-bay), Comms (below: show upcoming bad news cards) and finally the Wardrobe (below: the weapons sills).

If the minions get attacks off while in the ship, they put those subsystems into disrepair. See above as the Wardrobe has been critically damaged! Keeping the ship healthy and in repair is a huge deal; it keeps your systems active. Every single one of these subsystems is useful! Healing! Better gear (I mean fashion accessories)! Looking ahead at Bad News! Teleportation!

Those of you who have played The Captain is Dead (see board above) will find this subsystem stuff very familiar!

If all you did was keep baddies off the ship, the game wouldn’t be very interesting! In the Standard Game, you have to worry about two planets where stuff is happening! On Planet 1 (standard game) is the Invasion! See above!

On Planet 2 is the Mechapede!

These Planets do change: in the Advanced game, there is the Dark Portal (see above).

So, while you are keeping baddies off your ship, you are also teleporting to the planets to achieve your mission goals! Sometimes your missions are to collect items, sometime your missions are to keep the chaos on planets under control, and sometimes your mission is to move to the Dark Portal!

What you do depends on which of 4 scenarios you are playing! See the four scenarios that come with the box above! For the record, you can play any of the scenarios, but it’s recommended you play them in order as a campaign from Tutorial, Standard Mission, Advanced Mission, to Boss Battle! The game just gets harder and harder!

So, Conquest Princess is a balancing act of keeping the ship free of baddies, the planets under control, and staying alive!

This game has a peculiar, but consistent and interesting loss mechanic: you cannot lose unless you run out of power! You only run out of power if the Power Up deck (above) is ever empty! It starts with 28 cards!

But every time something goes bad that would immediately end the game (where a character takes a third damage, or too many minions overrun the ship, etc, etc) instead you take a disruption! Your ship has a time-travel mechanism to prevent the bad thing, but the cost to stopping the badness is huge! A disruption causes players to discards Power Up cards equal to the Danger Level (most games start with a Danger Level of 2: see above), and every disruption increases the Danger Level by 1! If you ever can’t discards enough cards to handle a disruption, players immediately lose!

I like this loss mechanism, as it scales, it is simple to explain, and handles all endgame cases consistently. There is only one loss mechanism; just don’t run out of of power!!!

If players can collectively succeed in their quests before the power runs out, they win!

Comic/Tutorial/Scenario Book

There’s quite a bit of reading material.

The comic book is just flavor for the adventures; you don’t have to read it.

I found the art inconsistent with the rest of the game (see above), so I thought it actually detracted from the experience. My friends read it while I was making dinner and they said it offered some nice thematic basis; they liked it. Read it if you want, you don’t have to.

The Tutorial, on the other hand, was AMAZING! See above! It walks the players through the first 3 rounds of the game very explicitly! You ABSOLUTELY must and should read the playthrough from the Tutorial! This does what a great Tutorial does; explain what you can do, what you shouldn’t do, and make you feel like you can play without needing too much of the rulebook! The Tutorial is a shining star in this game.

Finally, the Scenario Book (not particularly well marked, above) has the directions for play and set-up for the other three scenarios in the game. It was … okay. There are a LOT of new rules in later scenarios, and it could have done a little better job explaining some stuff. I think it just needed some more edge cases explained. I think you will be going on BoardGameGeek a lot for these scenarios to look up rules. In general, this scenario book was ok.

Rulebook

This rulebook is generally okay. It has some flaws but some nice features too.

See above as it flops over the edges on the chair next: it’s not great. I’d give this a D in the Chair Test: the fonts are good, the pictures are good, but the rulebook is just too big and can’t sit on the chair next to me; it flops over the edges. See above!!

We’ve seen this “rulebook-too-large” problem a lot lately (See our Batman: Gotham City Chronicles and Tidal Blades 2 reviews): luckily, there’s a decent workaround! Put it on TWO chairs next to you (with the spine in the middle so it stays open). See above.

I wanted to like this rulebook; it has a good-sized font, lots of pictures, and even an Index! At the end of the day, I didn’t love it. I feel like there were some edge cases missing, and I didn’t like the way the certain things were expressed. But, they made a good faith effort to make a good rulebook, so I will say this was good enough.

In a Second Edition of the game, I want another pass by an editor please. And a smaller form factor, please.

Solo Play

If you get the player Mat with the game, recognize that it is two-sided. One side has the set-up for SOLO play: see above. That’s the way I played. For the record, this is THE BIGGEST player mat I have (even bigger than Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition from a few months back!!).

So there is a solo mode! (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!) Unfortunately, like Heroes’ Resistance, Set A Watch, or Cyber Pet Quest (from last week), the solo character must control all 4 characters! In fact, no matter the player count, all 4 characters must be in play.

Of course, a 4-character solo play isn’t ideal; there is context-switching overhead as you switch from character to character (you play one character at a time), there is extra maintenance as you play (as typically the maintenance scales linearly with the number of characters), and there is simple intellectual pressure to use all four characters well together.

I will say that Conquest Princess works well as a solo game if you like a longer solo game and if you embrace Player Selected Turn Order (we’ll discuss this down below). Conquest Princess is basically a puzzle to solve with spinning plates: you try to keep the bag in a good state (remember, this is a bag-building game), while keep the ship and planets under control.

Solo, I have now played the Tutorial once, the Standard Games about 4 times, and the Advanced Game once. The Tutorial was relatively quick, but the Standard and Advanced Games were pretty long games, taking about 2 to 2.5 hours each.

The extra context switching and maintenance overhead tends to elongate the solo game that much more! The box says 45-70 minutes? No way. It’s at least 2 to 2.5 hours for a solo game.

But, I feel like every step matters in this solo game: each character gets 4 actions (5 if you waste a power token), and each turn matters! What’s the best way to keep the chaos under control AND keep the bag in good shape?

I liked the solo game. A lot. It was fun trying to figure out how to keep the characters working well together. And the solo game did a really good job at teaching the game so I could teach my friends. Again, that Tutorial is phenomenal for the solo player (and the cooperative players).

Cooperative Play

The other side of the Player Mat made the weird choice to have no set-up information or templates for the cooperative: it has only flavor text and pictures. It wasn’t too bad, but I thought it was busy (from a graphic design perspective) and got in the way just a little bit. It was fine, but the Mat for the solo mode was much more helpful. See above.

Cooperative play at 2 and 4 players is ideal: in 2-Player mode, each player operates two characters. In 4-Player mode, each player gets their own character!

Unfortunately, 3-Player mode makes one player operate two characters (which is usually me, since I have played the game more than anyone).

Whereas my solo plays embraced the pure space game, my cooperative plays embraced the fashion parts! That is probably because I played with the two friends Sara and Teresa!

There’s a decent amount of discussion going on as you play, as players need to figure out how to work together and share their fashion plates.

For example, players WANT to be on the same space as the Green character because then they can do multiple ENGAGE actions (usually, a single ENGAGE ends your turn). So, sometimes players may travel in packs to reuse their Fashion Plates! But then, you can’t get enough done if you stay together, so sometimes they have to split up! What’s the best thing to do? The sharing of Fashion Plates and that discussion really does facilitate the cooperation in the game.

The Tutorial also worked fantastically in the cooperative game! Players would read the parts of the tutorial relevant to their character and then act it out! Again, this tutorial worked really well.

And the cooperative game also moved along a little faster, as there was shared maintenance, and each character had the agency of a single player! The game still feels a little longer than 45-70 minutes, but it was definitely shorter than the solo game.

Generally, my friends had fun and want to play again. One major complaint was that the rulebook wasn’t great for edge cases (a similar complaint we had initially: see as Sara tries to find a ruling and fails).

Player Order

In the rulebook and rules (page 8 above), there is an entire page discussing player order and who is Lead Agent (first player). The rules are complex and they depend on something called “LOAD” and how many players are playing. If there is any question about LOAD then players select. What is LOAD? LOAD is a messy notion about the number of MISS tokens on your board.

See above as the RED player has too much LOAD, so probably can’t go first.

We need to get real for a second. I like this game. A lot. but there is a LOT of randomness that can detract from me liking this game. There is just enough mitigation between bag maintenance and special powers and so on to keep me involved. But I am on the cusp. The rules for first player need to be completely streamlined: it’s too much intellectual effort and it feels … random. “Oh, I should go first, but I can’t because I drew poorly and got LOAD last turn??” No no no no no no no.

This game needs Player Selected Turn Order: players simply should simply decide the order they play on their turn. This will allow characters to support each other to feel like they have gigantic turns! Get the RED character to help you so you shoot better; get the GREEN character to move to you so you can ENGAGE twice! These are decisions the PLAYERS should make, not have some esoteric mechanism (Lock and Load and LOAD) deciding player order.

Blow away all the rules for player order (an entire page in the rulebook) and just let the players decide what order they want to go! This makes the game that more cooperative as players will now discuss the order they should go! It helps cooperation!! Without Player Selected Turn Order, this game becomes too random for me and I would give it a 6 or 6.5/10. With Player Selected Turn Order, I feel powerful, potent, cooperative, and engaged! And the game is much better, an 8/10 or 8.5/10. It makes THAT big a different for me.

Yes, this is a House Rule. Play with or without it, but I suspect you like the game that much more with Player Selected Turn Order. Decide for yourself.

What I Liked

Acrylic Standees: If you can get Acrylic Standees, I would recommend it. They really complement the comicy vibe of the game, and they just look great on the table.

Transformation: It’s very cool when you transform! If you have the light-up standees, that makes it even cooler, but it is such a cool moment in the game when a character transforms to their super! The character gets an immediate power, becomes more powerful, and heals up! It feels like a movie moment when a character becomes powerful just in time to save the crew!

Components: Even if you just get the retail version of the components, the components are still nice. I am very glad I got all the premium upgrades, but that’s up to you.

Bag Maintenance: This is a bag-building game, and you have to keep the bag in shape! If you have too many “MISS” tokens in the bag, you just won’t be able to do well you attack, so you have to make sure to keep as many “HIT” tokens in the bag as possible! You may to use the COMMS ENGAGE action to scoop up all the HOT tokens on the ship, or take out one line of the MECHAPEDE to put all those hit tokens in the bag! As you go around, you must keep the bag state in mind or you will lose! Even if you do draw MISS tokens (see above), you can trade them for POWER tokens in future turns! (You can use POWER tokens for future actions or to transform!). I love that!! Even if you fail, you can still do something good LATER in the game! I hated Freedom Five from a few weeks ago because all failures were independent … at least here, a Failure can bring you choice! (And putting a failure on your board keeps it out of the bag too! Maybe you keep it out of the bag just to help your friends!!)

There are just enough mechanisms in the game to help you keep the bag state under control that you feel like you have agency in how the bag is. I love that; It doesn’t feel too random.

Star Trek Vibe: There is a Star Trek vibe here in Conquest Princess. Just like The Captain is Dead. Now, I love The Captain is Dead, but it was always centered on the ship only, and Star Trek is all about beaming down to the Planet. Here, in Conquest Princess, we can beam to TWO planets! And they are very different! I feel like Conquest Princess does a pretty good job of embracing that Star Trek vibe.

Sense of Humor: This game has an sense of humor. Wardrobe Malfunction as a card name? Ha! It’s even thematic as you lose your core suit. There are little bits like this all over the game.

Play How You Want: Play this as either a pure space game or embrace the fashion aspects, or both! If you don’t like the fashion aspect, don’t let it drive you away: this is a good space game.

What I Didn’t Like

Rulebook: The rulebook and scenario book need some work; mostly edge cases need to be specified more. There were just too many times when it wasn’t “clear” what needed to done or how to deal with something. I’ll give the rulebook credit; they did a lot of things right. It’s just that each scenario has SO MANY rules, it’s hard to get everything right.

Turn Order: Jettison the entire set of rules for player order and lead player (an entire page!) and just use Player Selected Turn order. It’s simpler to explain and makes the game more cooperative. The game even makes it easy to notate as you have to move the action tokens!

Conclusion

Conquest Princess was a bit of surprise! I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did! At first it looks like just a pure space themed game, but it has a strange auxiliary fashion theme which you can choose to embrace or not! So, don’t be turned off by some of the fashion references; you can play this as a pure space game and still really enjoy it! Or you can embrace the fashion theme wholesale!

There are so many great things about this game; from the Transformations, the bag-building, keeping the ship intact, keeping the bag well-seeded, helping each other, and communicating! There are no communication limits in this game, thus players can work together well!

I can’t recommend this game unless you jettison the turn-order and first-player rules; they are complicated, messy, full of exceptions, and take up an entire page (page 8) in the rulebook. With the turn-order rules as-is, I would probably give this game a 6 or 6.5/10: those action rules are too complex and make the game too random so that players can’t support each other! If, instead, you throw away page 8 of rules and instead embrace Player Selected Turn Order, this game moves to an 8 or 8.5/10! When players support each other, the game feels more engaging! Players have more agency! Players have more powerful turns! Players communicate more! Yes, this is a house rule, but I think it’s critical if you are considering this game.

I love all the upgrades they have for this game, and maybe you will too; just be aware it’s a fair chunk of change to get all the upgrades.

Despite the 4-character solo mode, I had lots of fun playing this as a solo game. This may make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

So, there it is; I like this game and would recommend it but only if you embrace Player Selected Turn Order. I guess it’s not a surprise I liked this game: it’s basically the Captain is Dead meets Invincible, and I love both of those games.

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

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

7. Everdell: Duo

6. Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2

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

4. Marvel United: Campaign Deck. Dark Phoenix Saga

3. Aeon’s End: The Descent

2. Sammu-Ramat

1. Set A Watch: Doomed Run

Unboxing

Rulebook

Story-Telling

Worker Placement

Deck-Building

Campaign

Bag-Building

Star Trek

Pickup And Deliver

Solo Play

Cooperative Game

Sense Of Humor

Entry Book

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

2021:

2022:

2023:

2024:

10. Floe + Monsters Unleased (CO-OP Expansion)

9. Fable Fury

8. Horror On The Orient Express

7. Aetherspire

6. One-Hit Heroes

5. Invincible: The Card Game

4. Unstoppable

3. DCeased: A Zombicide Game

2. LA-1

1. DC Super Heroes United

Honorable Mention: Comic Hunters Cooperative Expansion

10. Marvel United: War of Kings

9. Thunderstone Quest: Raging Seas and Ancient Adversaries

8. Townsfolk Tussle: Foul Neighbors

7. Detective: City of Angels: Saints and Sinners

6. Marvel Champions: Age of Apocalypse

5. Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance

4. Astro Knights: Eternity

3. Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles

2. Marvel United: Fantastic Four: The Coming of Galactus

1. Aeon’s End: The Descent

Honorable Mention: Ultimatch

10. Slay The Spire: The Board Game

9. Union City Alliance: Heroes Unite!

8. Flock Together

7. Hissy Fit!