Endeavor Deep Sea: A Review of the Solo and Cooperative Modes

Endeavor Deep Sea is a worker placement game from Kickstarter: it was originally up for funding back in May 2023 and promised delivery in May 2024.

My Kickstarter copy arrived October 1st, 2024 (see above) making it about 5 months late. Meh, that’s not too late in the grand scheme of Kickstarters.

I backed this because it is a worker placement game promising both solo and cooperative modes! That’s right! Cooperative worker placement games are a rare creature, so I was excited to see what this would bring! (How many can you think of? Exactly!)

Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing and Gameplay

So, my version is the deluxe version (see above: I had to pay extra for that). Anything you see here will be from the deluxe version: mostly, the deluxe version has nicer components and adds a 5th player.

This is a pretty big mamba-jamba! Look how the Coke can is dwarfed by the box!

There is a LOT of stuff in this box! See above! The easiest way to take a look at it is to talk about gameplay and show the pieces as we do, so you can see how everything (so much stuff!) interacts!

There’s 5 “teams” in the game: each player chooses one of them to operate. (They are all the same except for the color: there’s no special powers or anything). Each team has a whole bunch of tokens in their little trays.

The circular tokens are the worker player disks: these go out to “do actions”. The hexagonal tokens are special tokens that go on the Impact Board (we’ll discuss more below). Each team also has a Specialist called the Team Leader … they are a Jack-Of-All-Trades: they can do any of the actions in the game!

As the game progresses, you acquire more and more Specialists: see above. Basically, you place a circular “worker placement” token (see above) on a Specialist to activate their ability! Notice that each of the Specialists can only do certain things! The Skipper can only MOVE! The Underwater Photographer can either DIVE or JOURNAL! So, your choice of Specialists is important, as it shapes what you can do!

The Specialists come from a special tray (no pun intended). It’s nice, because at the start of every turn, each player gets a Specialist, no matter what! So, as the game progresses, players get more and more Specialists to activate with the “worker placement” tokens.

There’s some real interesting things going on with worker placement in this game! For example, the “worker placement” tokens tend to placed out in pairs! Also, you can only do an operation (like DIVE or JOURNAL) if your sub is on a Deep Sea Zone with that action on that board!

For example: Let’s say you want to JOURNAL! See configuration above!
1) Your sub has to be on a zone with a JOURNAL action (it is: the sub is in the upper portion)
2) One of your Specialists would have to have the JOURNAL action as something they can do (the Team Leader can do anything, so he can JOURNAL!)
3) You place one token on the Specialist AND one token on the JOURNAL action on the board! (We have enough tokens: one to activate the Specialist and one to put in the JOURNAL action on the board)

This is a little different than most worker placement games … it took me a game a few rounds to get the gist: some of your worker placement tokens go onto the board and never come back! The idea is that your tokens on the sea boards score you victory points/achieve some goal.

For example, in the cooperative solo game, you might need to get 5 JOURNALS on the board! See GOAL 2 above! So, that’s why one of your worker placement tokens stays on the board: to denote progress for those Goals!

Now, lest you think you run out of these tokens quickly, never fear!!! These worker placement tokens are both created (from your supply) and reclaimed (from your Specialists) every turn! But it’s your player board determines the rate you get more tokens!

Each player gets a board like above (all boards are the same except for color; there are no special abilities). The 5 tracks above help determined the rate of many things!! The higher the track the better!

Orange Bubble: How good a Specialist can you recruit? (Reputation track)
Green Light Bulb: How many worker placement tokens do you create this round? (Inspiration Track)
Yellow Arrow: How many worker placement tokens can you reclaim for specialists this round? (Coordination Track)
Blue Puzzle Piece: How fast can your sub move/How many Subs do you have? (Ingenuity Track)
Black DNA: Research Track … How much Research do you have so you can JOURNAL?

At the start of every turn, you will gain a Specialist, create some worker placement tokens, and reclaim some of them from your Specialists.

Once you have all tokens for this round, you put all your tokens in your Staging Area … and you are ready to go for your turn! Players play an action one at a time, and play until they want to, are out of tokens, or out of Specialists! Many times, you will find you have more tokens that Specialists that can use them …

And that is the worker placement part of the game! Using worker placement, New Zones come out, players explore, players journal, they dive, they conserve, they explore the deep sea! See above for what a completed game might look like, both with new Zones explored, worker placement tokens everywhere, and a bunch of journals!

There’s significantly more to this game, but it’s got such a different worker placement feel, I wanted to go over that part a little! I really do like the components!

When the seascape is all explored, it looks really cool!

Everything is very readable and the trays make it so easy to jump into a game!

Rulebook

The rulebook has good points and bad points: generally, it’s pretty good.

It’s does well enough on The Chair Test: it opens up without drooping too much, it stays open, the fonts are big enough, and there are plenty of pictures. It’s about a solid B+ on The Chair Test.

The front page jumps right into the overall game: it does a nice job “introducing” you to concepts that will permeate the game! I also like how it mentions there are several ways to play the game! (Play Against your friends, or With them, or without them!)

The Components pages are pretty great: they show all the components and show the fronts and backs of cards and Specialists. This is well done. See above.

The Set-Up is good. See above: It shows pictures of everything and has easy-to-read annotations. I had no trouble getting set-up!

Generally, this rulebook is very concise. This is both boon and bane: it keeps the rulebook shorter (which makes it easier to peruse and get through) and generally clear, but there are several places where a few sentences would go a long way. My friend Sam actually knocked a full half-point of of the score because it was too concise in a few rules!

One such example of this is the cooperative rules (the last page), where it’s not clear that little blue bubble is considered an optional one of the 7 goals you can achieve! It clearly looks you must achieve it as well as the other goals … but the more you stare at the components, the rules, and the game, you have to conclude that it has to be optional, or the game is too hard. A sentence saying “The Impact Mission Goal is one of the optional 7 goals” would have done wonders for my first few solo games.

This is a pretty good rulebook overall, it just needs a few more edge cases defined and few more sentences for clarification. Honestly, I really like this game, but this is one of my major complaints. Concision and precision are worthwhile goals, but not at the cost of clarity.

There is also no index. Or Table of Contents. You pretty much have to go searching linearly for rules when you need to find them. This is a big enough game that I think a Glossary or Index would have helped a lot.

This is a generally pretty good rulebook, so I don’t want you to think I didn’t like it…. I did like it!! It has lots of good examples, lots of good pictures, and it teaches the game pretty well. But the lack of index and lack of some extra clarity were frustrating. It was pretty good, but it could have easily been a great rulebook.

Solo Play

Endeavor Deep Sea does support solo play! Congratulations for following Saunders’ Law!

All of the solo rules (and cooperative rules) are found on the last page of the rulebook. The rules SAY there’s only one real change between Solo and Co-operative rules: The Solo player plays 7 rounds instead of 6 rounds… that’s it!! That’s great! … well, that’s what the rules SAY … but the solo and cooperative rules really do change the game more! Instead of victory points, players are trying collectively complete some goals, (and must choose from 7 goals to complete). The basic rules stay the same, but the victory conditions are VASTLY different! The game feels very different in solo/cooperative mode, so I don’t 100% buy “only 1 change”. But generally, that’s true.

Nominally, this is a competitive worker placement game FIRST (as the competitive rules come first), but there’s not too many changes to make the game solo/cooperative.

The competitive game is all about victory points on the goal cards (see above)! But, the cooperative game (and solo) is all about working together to achieve (collectively) a certain number of Goals … 4-7 Goals, depending on your difficulty. For example, for GOAL 2 (above) JOURNALing, the 1P needs to do 5+ JOURNALS to “achieve” the goal, but 2P need (collectively) 8+ JOURNALS!

Each scenario you choose will have 3 unchanging goals (as per the scenario) …

… and then bonus goals you draw (4 in the solo game) …

.. and finally the Impact Sheet goal!! (This was the goal we complained about in the rulebook section, which was unclear that it was one of the OPTIONAL goals!)

You get to choose which of the Goals you want to try to achieve, but you can change you mind mid-game as the game evolves!

I have currently played about 4+ solo games! I played two with the starting Scenario, and a few others to get a sense of what other Scenarios do! I had to play one full game to “get” the game, but after that, the game flows pretty quickly!

I like this game! There are about 10 Scenarios, so there is a lot of variability to extend the life of the game. And the game plays fairly quickly: with only 7 rounds, you find yourself running out of time quickly! So, your turns are fairly thinky as you try to take the best advantage of the Specialists you have, how to advance your tracks, when to explore, when to move, when to JOURNAL, when to dive, and what regions to explore!

This game has a really neat “explore” feel as you SONAR to find new regions of the sea to explore! But, even cooler, you get to choose which of 2 regions to bring forth! And each region has different bonuses when discovered! And different special abilities! And different new Locations! Remember, Locations get “filled” as you play, so you absolutely have the explore to open up new regions and new Worker Placement Locations!!! So, you have to balance “Well, I like the bonus I get if I discover this region, but we need these spaces to win! Which do I choose?” Every thing you do involves some kind of choice which affects your game!

I had a really nice time playing this solo. The plays pretty well once you’ve played it solo. And you can absolutely teach your friends the game quickly once you know it.

I would absolutely play this again solo.

Two Players

Sam and I had a good time playing 2-Player. Because of my solo experiences, I was able to teach the game quickly, and we jumped right in!

There was a good balance of cooperation and solo agency in the game: every one did what they wanted on their turn, but there was discussion about what Zones to bring out, what Journals to do, what Specialists to focus on. I don’t think there would be a lot of Alpha Player problems in this game, as each player still has agency.

Generally, the 2-Player game went … swimmingly (pun intended).

The only real problems were more with the rules: both Sam and I felt like the edge cases and some of the cooperative Goals needed more explanation. Since this is a competitive game first, the co-op explanations get the lesser explanation.

3-4 Player Games

The three and four player cooperative games went over quite well.

The only real problems of the 3 and 4-Player game was the downtime between turns. In the solo and 2-Player games, the game moves much more quickly as the turns bounce back and forth quickly. In the 4-Player game especially, sometimes it felt you did have to wait a long time for your turn to come around. There is some analysis paralysis in this game, as you try to find the right Specialists, right actions, and so on, so they gets multiplied out. This isn’t as bad as you might think because the game is still cooperative—while your friends are thinking, you can be talking about strategies with others, plans on your turn, and generally communicate. Luckily, there are no communication limitations in this game! So, even when someone might be taking a longer turn, players can still talk!

Another possible negative was that the game was pretty multiplayer solitaire. Sure, players could talk freely, but none of the actions of the game “really” help others … (some of the Journals help all the other players, but those are few and far-between); mostly, each player is trying to do the best they can on their turn, while trying to keep the cooperative goals in mind. I am not sure that’s too big of a negative, because the multi-player solitaire keeps everyone involved on their own turn. Even when someone is taking a longer turn, there are still cooperativ things the other players can talk about.

Generally, the balance of the multiplayer solitaire and the longer turns seemed to balance out: players were either thinking about their own turns or talking to each other about the cooperative goals. There did seem to be less cooperation and more multiplayer solitaire in the 3 and 4-Player game than the 2-Player game. Nevertheless, it still seemed to work fine. Everyone had a good time.

What I Liked

Exploration: I liked exploring the seas! It’s a real interesting phenomena in a worker placement game that you have to explore to bring out more location because you keep using them up! The exploration worked really well because you got to CHOOSE which of 2 tiles comes out! That choice kept me more involved and interested in the game.

Components: The components are generally very high quality and easy-to-read. I liked that the tokens were in a token box … it was so easy to set-up! I don’t think this game will win best components of the year or anything like that, but I liked what I saw and everything was easy to read.

Seas: I did like the look of the seas once you had explored a lot.

Worker Placement Mechanism: The fact that the worker placement is so different in this game really elevated the play (you have to be in a Location with an open spot, and you have to have a Specialist that can do that action, and tokens are typically placed in pairs). But it also felt very thematic to the game, with the Specialists!!! Also the fact that worker placement worked so well in a solo, and more impressively, in a cooperative game really made this stand out.

Variability: There’s quite a bit of gameplay to be had between the variability of the Scenarios, the Zones, the expansions (which were included with our copy), the many Goals, and all the little touches in the game! That really extends the life of the game.

Continue reading “Endeavor Deep Sea: A Review of the Solo and Cooperative Modes” →

YANG: Yet Another Nature Game. A Review of the Cooperative Nature Deck-Building Game Ecosfera

Ecosfera (Eco sfera as implied by the cover) was a game on Kickstarter in April 2023: See here.

This is a cooperative deck-builder with a few push-your-luck elements. This is also a nature themed game! Nature is a very hot theme for games right right, so I call this Yet Another Nature Game (YANG). Many nature games are competitive, so this stands out as a cooperative YANG.

This is a game intended for 1-4 players, ages 8+. The intended time is 45-60 minutes, which is about right, but see more discussion below.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Ecosfera is a smaller box game: see Coke Can above for scale.

Ecosfera is mostly a card game, but it also has a lot of punch out tokens: see above.

This is a deck-builder with three different “currencies” of buying. Elements buy plants, plants buy animals, and animals buy biomes. See the offering of elements, plants, and animals above!

The base currency is the elements: the multi-colored cards above are also multi-labelled cards to avoid color-blind issues. These elements can only buy plants.

See two plants above: notice the element symbols on the BOTTOM of the cards. You can only buy a plant if you have the elements (we need two winds to buy the Papever radictum). You can be missing one element and still buy a plant … if so, you get that extra missing element for free into your hand. You’ll also notice the symbols at the TOP of the cards: these are the currency for buying the next level: animals.

Animals can ONLY be bought if you have two plants with matching symbols on that animal! Again, the cost to buy animals is on the BOTTOM of the card. Using the two plants from above, we can buy a Penguin, because we have two of the Tundrus symbol!

Finally, the animals buy biomes. If you have two animals sharing some biomes, you can immediately spend them to buy the overlapping biomes! Using the penguin and the lizard above, we can acquire the Aquaticus biome since the animals share that!

If you make all biomes, you win!

Along the way, many things can go wrong: you can get the Disaster cards (see above: the different symbols mean nothing)! These cards clog your deck, preventing you from buying things along the way!

If you can’t buy anything on your turn (either a plant or animal or biome), you get a Disaster card in your deck. By itself, the Disaster card doesn’t do anything: it clogs your deck mostly.

But, if you ever get 3 Disasters in your hand (see above) …

… your turn immediately ends and you get an Extinction Tile! (If you get 4 Disasters, you immediately get 3 Extinction Tiles!)

If you ever get 7 Extinction Tiles, you lose!

Along the way, each Player gets some tokens to help them. The Plus (+) can be spent to pull an extra card, the Star (*) can be spent to refresh a line of cards (to get better buy options), and the Arrow is the most important symbol in the entire game: you can use it to move cards to other players OR to cull cards (ya, but you can’t EVER cull Disaster card).

These are one-time usage, however, you do refresh them every time you have an animal pair that matches a biome in your hand. (So even if you can’t buy a new biome, you can still refresh your tokens).

You’ll notice that some of the cards ALSO have these symbols: you can choose to use these symbols from your hand as well! (Only one OR the other)

To help remind you which cards have been used, the game provides some leaf reminders: see above as we use to remind ourselves that we used the + and can’t use that card again.

This game is quite lovely to look at: the art and tokens are easy to read, and cards are a very nice linen-finish. In all my game groups and plays, the players commented on how nice the art on the cards is. This is a beautiful production.

Rulebook

The rulebook was okay. It looks a bit daunting because it’s very thick, but it also have 4 translations in it. It only take about 9 pages to get the rules across.

Although the rulebook works fairly well on the chair next to me, and the font is a decent sized, I was slightly annoyed that I had to hold the rulebook open many times! I want my rulebook to lay open on the chair next to: this ventures into C territory for The Chair Test, but since I can “break the spine” to get the rulebook to stay open, I’ll give this a B- on The Chair Test.

The set-up and components were fairly well-notated on the first two pages. This allowed me to jump in fairly quickly, which was nice.

The rules had some nice pictures showing how the game flows and plays (see above).

I felt like some of the organization was a little off: they spent precious space showing simple rules, but then failed to elaborate more complex rules in a few places.

The rulebook was fine: it taught the game, but sometimes you will have to go hunting for a rule.

I won’t ding this for the lack of an index because it is a pretty simple game overall; it doesn’t need one.

Player Count

More than any other game I have played in some time, the Player Count matters for this game. It’s either a slog of playing of cards that play themselves, or a dynamic event!

Solo Game

This game does support solo play (see top of page 10): Thank you for following Saunders’ Law and giving us a solo mode. The only real difference is that the Arrow symbol means that you can’t share cards with anyone else (you can still cull), you can only share with yourself and give yourself an extra card.

See above as I have a solo game set-up! The solo mode does allow you to learn the game: I have played this game quite a bit solo.

My first solo game was a slog and I hated the game. What am I missing? I found this thread on BoardGameGeek where someone else had the same experience: What Am I Missing? Armed with that information, I tried again and did a little better.

The most important thing you learn from a few games is that the Arrow symbol is critical.

The major problem with solo mode is that your deck just builds and builds (see how huge my solo deck is) and many times you feel you have no agency! You just draw cards and hope you get the cards you need. You can either do something or not. That’s it. The game feels like it plays itself!!! If you have used all your tokens, well, it’s even less fun. Right now, the solo game hovers at a 4/10 for me. (I will revisit this below)

I had enough information to teach my friends AND emphasize the Arrow. Maybe the game works better with more people?

Two Player

Sam came over and we gave it a a try: I made sure to emphasize the Arrow symbol and that we needed to talk.

The game went a little better as we tried to be intelligent about the use our symbols. Again, the most important feature is to use Arrow to share cards at the right times.

The decks still got pretty big (see above), and many turns had nothing happen as we acquired Disaster after Disaster. See below.

We started to see a little more strategy: maybe it made sense to move a card to my compatriot, maybe it made sense to cull this card. There was more sharing as we tried to help each other.

In the end, we won, and there was some sharing. And there was some discussion. And there was some strategizing. But there were a whole lot of turns where nothing happened and we just acquired a Disaster. During those turns, it just felts like the game was playing itself.

In the end, Sam gave the 2-Player game about a 6/10. I was a little more down on the game after my solo play and I gave it a 5.5/10. The decks got huge, and there were still a lot of turns where nothing happened, but we saw a glimmer of the sharing and strategy.

3- Player and 4-Player

We saw, in the first 3-Player game that this game CAN be fun! As long as you use all the symbols on the cards, and try to use the Arrows to move and cull cards, and communicate and cooperate, the game feels like you have agency!

The difference between a solo/duo game and a 3 to 4-Player game is the number of opportunities! More players means more opportunities to share resources smartly!

“I can share this card, but Sara doesn’t have any animals. AH! But Andrew does! I’ll share this with him so we can get the last biome!”

All of a sudden, people are looking around the table for opportunities to share! People are talking, people are communicating, people are cooperating!

The 3 and 4-Player game is fun! As long as you exploit the shared opportunities, this game can be quite fun! My friends all had fun and wanted to play again.

I mentioned the problems with solo and duo play, and my friends said “There’s just more opportunities to be smart with more players!”

Be aware, if you are looking for a game that is good as a multiplayer solo game, this isn’t the game for you! If you play Ecosfera like multiplayer solitaire (no one really works together and everyone just plays by themselves), Ecosfera will have all the problems of the solo game … and it won’t be fun. In order to truly enjoy this game, you need 3 or 4 players with a group that will engage with each other!

You need to have opportunities to share. You also need to strategize to use those opportunities well. There’s a lot more of this in the 3 and 4-player game.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a solo game, I can’t recommend this game: although the solo game is good enough to teach the game, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth that this game plays itself. It’s about 4.5/10 at a solo play because it just barely works.

Even a 2-Player game isn’t quite right: there’s not enough quite opportunities for intelligent sharing; the game still feels like it’s playing itself too much of the time. It’s better at 2-Player than solo (maybe a 5.5 or 6/10), but I still can’t recommend it.

It’s not until you get to 3 or 4 players together that this game opens up and becomes fun! There are so many more opportunities to work together and strategize together as a group when you have 3 or 4 players!!! In that configuration, I can recommend this game, as can my friends: they have suggested we play again! This is a 6.5 or 7.0/10 for 3 to 4 players. Just make sure you play with a dynamic group!

I don’t think we’ve ever had a game that is so player count dependent! If you want a solo game or something to play with your partner, I can’t recommend this game. If you want a game that plays multiplayer solitaire with little interaction, again, I can’t recommend this game. I think this game only works with 3 to 4 players with a dynamic group … and then it’s fun.

The Nature theme is fairly thematic, the art is pretty, and the game is gorgeous …. but that will only get you so far: Be aware of when this game works and when it doesn’t before you pick it up.

Project PEGASUS: A Campaign for Marvel United

The Project PEGASUS series was one of my favorite comic series when I was a kid. It took place in Marvel Two-In-One Issues 42, 43, and 53-58 back in 1978 and 1979. There are several reasons I liked this story: it featured the Thing and a really interesting cast of characters, including Quasar and Man-Thing! Plus, it’s one of the few times you see the art of John Byrne and George Perez together.

Once Season 3 of Marvel United arrived, I saw that Project PEGASUS was indeed a Location from the Multiverse base set: see above (we reviewed the base Multiverse set here)!

We also got a chance to play some of the campaigns that came from the Marvel United Campaign Decks! See last week as we reviewed some of these experiences!

See all the great series of Marvel Comics! But where’s the campaign for Project PEGASUS?

Never mind, I’ll do it myself.

The Road To Development

Over the past month, I have read and re-read the Project PEGASUS series (a burden of joy) to get a sense of what its campaign might look like. See above as I have taken out most of the content I need!

After coming up with a general outline of what the Villains, Heroes, and Games should be, I started to put something together! See above for written notes on the first draft of this campaign.

I’ve have also had some play testing from my friends, as well as many many many solo games (with 2, 3, and 4 Heroes).

In the end, I am very proud of the Campaign I came up with: it follows the story of Project PEGASUS pretty well and adds some new ideas to Marvel United.

Over the last few weeks, the campaign has evolved quite a bit: I have some added some new Villains and Heroes for the final cut.

Some of the ideas in the Project PEGASUS campaign are a little outside the box, because even though Season 3 made this all possible, I will still missing some pieces (Heroes/Villains/etc) to make the campaign complete. So, I had to improvise using what I had.

I am very proud of what I did for Games 1 and 5, and especially Game 2. But be aware that those games are a little different.

What Do I Need?

Like all of the campaigns, The Project PEGASUS campaign needs a lot of pieces stolen from all parts of Marvel United. See the complete list below.

• Base Marvel United
• Spider-Geddon Marvel United
• Multiverse Marvel United
• Season 1 Stretch Goals
• Season 3 Stretch Goals
• Fantastic Four
• World War Hulk
• Annihilation
• Civil War
• Enter The Spider-Verse
• War of Kings

Current State

The current draft of the campaign is at version 1.0.1. I fully expect there to be revisions made as me and others playtest it.
UPDATE: We are now at 1.1.0: we had some explanation clean-up and a few balance adjustments to Game 1!
Oct 20th, 2024 UPDATE: Updated to 1.2.0: Added explanation of how to play solo, updated Game 2 with better descriptions and a rules fix/clarification.

Feel free to download the PDF below and give it a try!!! If there is interest, I can try making the form factor more like cards (with Rules cards and Event cards), but right now the Events are presented alongside the Games of interest in the PDF document below.

If you have any feedback (too easy, too hard, spelling problems, unclear rules), please email us at returnfromsubroutine @ gmail.com

We’d love to hear from you! How did it go?

ProjectPegasus_1.2.0 Download

Run Run Run! See Cats Run! Run Cats Run! A Review of Run Run Run!

Run Run Run! is a cooperative game from Kickstarter: it was up on Kickstarter in February 2024 (with several other games) promising delivery in May 2024. It actually delivered in late August 2024, so it was about 3 months late. Eh, that’s pretty good for Kickstarters.

With a name like Run Run Run!, this sounds like it should be a real-time cooperative game, but it’s mostly cooperative tile-laying game. See our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying Games for more discussion of the tile-laying genre. Run Run Run! is also a little bit of a boss-battler game.

This is a light-weight cooperative game for 1-4 players taking about 30 minutes: the game time listed on the box seems accurate enough.

So, this game was part of an “import Kickstarter” where they found games from around the world and imported them to the USA. Apparently, this is an older game by Bruno Cathala and Antony Perone. BoardGameGeek lists the game as a 2021 game, although for some of us here in USA, this is a brand new game (including me). This is the 2nd Edition of the game, so I guess it’s new in that respect.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a game with a LOT of tiles: more than half the box was filled with punch outs. The first 30 minutes of my unboxing was just punching out all the tiles and other components! We did say this was a cooperative tile-laying game!

Players assume the roles of one of four explorer cats (Catventurers to use the nomenclature of the game)! See above! Each explorer cat has a special power that is invoked when they roll a ‘?’ on the dice …

This is also a cooperative boss-battler game: you will face one of the three Final Boss Mummy’s above! To win, you have to take out the Final Boss before it makes it back to the Relic room!

Along the way, lesser Mummies will be summoned to slow you down. If any of the Mummies ever make it to the room with the Relics of the Pharaoh, all players instantly lose! You need to keep all Mummies OUT of the that room!!

Players lay out tiles, one at a time, trying to build a maze out.

To unlock the Final Boss, you have to build three tiles adjacent to each other with different symbols! And you have to do this three times (or more)!! See above! This is the only way to unlock the Final Boss, but every time you do that build, you invoke a “trap”! See above as the Mummy summon triggers a “trap” that gives the Final Boss 5 more hit points!

Torches are an important part of the game: you need to put torches in rooms to see! You start with 5 collective torches, and if you can’t place a torch, you get closer to summoning a Mummy!

At the start of the Mummies’ turn, you roll a die (or more…)! If you roll the monster symbol (see above), you have to move all Mummies closer to the Relic Room AND you also come closer to summoning a new Mummy!

Every time you roll a monster, you have to put a heart on the current top Mummy tomb!

If a mummy get 5 hearts, it has been summoned the Mummy and that Mummy goes on the board! Where on the board? Player’s decide!

Usually you put the mummy as far away from the Relic Room as possible (see above), or right next to a Catventurer so they can fight it!

Mummies are defeated by rolling dice! See the attack dice above! Some symbols give you a successful Attack: note above we do 4 damage to a Mummy with 7 hit points! But since we have have the x2 token, we do all 8 damage and take it out in one shot!

How do we get dice?

Every exit on a tile you discard give you an attack die! For example, to get all 6 attack die above, we can discard the one tile with all 6 exits to get all 6 dice (6 is the max).

How did we get the x2 token? Whenever we explore a Sarcophagus room (with the little golden coffin, see above), we get a Sarcophagus token … one of which may be a 2x! See above!

Oh yes, if we ever run out of torches, we can get new ones in a couple of ways. One: if we build three rooms adjacent (see above) the same symbol, we immediately get 5 torches!

There’s also a cooperate action which can give more torches (or tiles if needed). See above.

If we can take out the Final Boss before he reaches the Relic Room, we win! See above as we LOSE as the Mummy enters the Relic Room!

The production for this game is pretty great with tons of thick cardboard tokens! The art is super cute and the game looks like a high quality, but cute, production!

Oh, and this is a cooperative cat game! It may not be clear at first, but we are all cats working together!

Rulebook

The rulebook is good.

The rulebook gets an almost perfect score on the Chair Test with an A! See above as it fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it stays open, it has readable fonts, and it has good pictures! This would probably get an A+ on the Chair Test if the fonts were just a little bit bigger.

The Components page is great: it shows all the components with annotations. See above.

The set-up pages are perfect: the entire set-up is pictured and each step is labelled with a relevant number! I can leave this open, and set-up the entire game from these two pages!

The rest of the rulebook is pretty good.

My only real complaint is that they didn’t show/explain all the possible Trap tokens that can come out. I had to “guess” what they meant. It was mostly intuitive, but not always.

The last page of the rulebook is useful: this is where I wish they would listed all the trap and Sarcophagus tokens with more description. Still, at least the back of the rules was useful.

There’s no index, but this is a 30 minute game, so I don’t think it needs it.

In general, this is a good rulebook.

Solo Play

This has a solo mode! (Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law!). So, there’s a very small section describing the Solo Mode on the very last page of the rulebook. See above. The solo game basically plays true solo: you play one Catventurer (the Cat Explorer) and play the game as-is! The only rule that needs some “slight” expansion is the COOPERATE action: you can still play the COOPERATE action, but only the solo cat gets the rewards! This is great! No real changes: just play the game as-is!

My first game was a win, as I killed the final Mummy on his way to the end! See above!

My initial tile selection wasn’t great (as only one room has more than one exit), but I soon got a lot more branching rooms. I also had a lot of Sarcophagus rooms …

Those Sarcophagus rooms enabled me to get some great tokens at the start of the game! I saved those 2x tokens for the end game, because I knew how hard the final Mummy would be!

I played my first game very well: I kept the Mummy’s under control and I had plenty of tiles going into the final battle, and I was able to build enough space so that the Mummies were far enough back that I could take them out!

My second game was a close loss: I made the mistake of not having enough of the temple built!

I was able to knock the Mummy down to 5 hit points, but he just moved too fast! He made it to the Relic Room and I lost! See above!

I admit my final loss was depressing because I rolled so poorly; not on the Attack dice but on the Mummy movement! It’s basically a 50% chance that the Mummy will move every turn, and he moved EVERY TURN after he came out! The Mummy screamed to the exit and I lost!

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play went pretty well.

There was shared workload setting up and playing. There are enough components in the game (torches, tiles, 5x torch, sarcophagus tokens, mummies, player tokens, etc) that it was nice to share the workload of taking care of the tokens.

We were able to take out the final mummy!

Basically, after he came out, were were able to all pounce on him and do as much damage as we could!

The cooperation in this game was interesting. We didn’t “love” that you couldn’t talk about the tiles you have, but you were allowed to “point” to to where you were going to build, and that seemed enough to allow us to all move forward. There was never any “fine-grained” cooperation (“I’ll build this tile, you build this tile”) as we played … because there can’t be! The cooperation was more “coarse-grained” in that each cat did their own thing on the way to helping the party: “I’ll take out the light mummy if you can just build! Oh! I need help with this!” The game was kind-of multiplayer solitaire with many moments of high-level cooperation.

If you don’t like cooperative games because of Alpha Player Syndrome (because the Alpha Player tells everyone what to do), then Run Run Run! is game that keeps the Alpha Player at bay pretty well. Because you can’t do any fine-grain cooperation with tiles, the group decides more of the high-level actions together! Everyone stays involved on their turn by choosing the tile to play, but everyone stays involved with the group as they makes high-level decisions together.

With some retrospective, I liked the amount of cooperation the game elicited, even if we did have some communication restrictions.

Communications Restrictions

My groups don’t tend to like communications restrictions because we get together to play, talk, and strategize together! We are friends and we want to talk to each other! Some games with communications restrictions work, and some don’t! And it’s a razor’s edge of difference.

Run Run Run! works mainly because it doesn’t stop all communications: you can’t really show your tiles and talk about them precisely. The rule is (from page 2):

“Also, even though you may openly discuss your intentions, you may not show the tiles from your hand to the other players, nor describe them precisely. You may, however, point a finger to a specific Room, without saying anything…”

The rule is still imprecise (“What does it mean I can’t describe them precisely? Can I tell you it’s a symbol?“), but I think the intent seems to be don’t tell/show others your hand. Other than that, talk as much as you want! That seems to work!

Compare this against the Communications Restrictions in Defenders of the Wild (see our review here):

“At the start of each round, all players must cease communication and maintain silence while choosing a defender card from their hand to play…”

The restriction is much more draconian, and squanders an opportunity to make a multi-player solitaire game even more cooperative!

What’s the difference? In Run Run Run!, you simply can’t share your tiles, but in Defenders of the Wild, you can’t talk at all (for that phase)!! I think this very minor difference makes a world of difference: I liked playing and talking and cooperating in Run Run Run!, and I am annoyed in Defenders of the Wild by the restriction. (I still don’t think the communications restriction rules work at all in Defenders of the Wild, but maybe the rule should have been simply been “You can’t show/discuss your Defenders“).

It’s a fine line, but the Communications Restriction works in Run Run Run!, but not in Defenders of the Wild.

Try It Out

Since this game has communication restrictions, one of the things you are NOT allowed to do it show your tiles to any other person. The problem is, sometimes you want to “try stuff out!” See above as we have a bunch of tiles we want to play with and see what we can do!

In our review of Race To The Raft (another cooperative cat game with tile-laying), we saw the same problem! You aren’t allowed to share what you have in your hand in Race To The Raft either, and many times you want to “try” stuff out!

In Race To The Raft, we developed the house rule “look away while I try stuff” so we didn’t break the spirit of the game! That way, you can still try stuff out, while preserving the confidentiality of the tiles. We ended up doing something like this in Run Run Run!

It’s a shame: neither Run Run Run! nor Race To The Raft nor many of the cooperative tile games games on our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement Games have any acknowledgement of this very human phenomenon: People want to try stuff out! Please, if you make a cooperative tile-laying game, please have some sort of rule for addressing this issue:

“If you wish to try out some tile layout ideas on your turn, please ask others to look away so you don’t overshare your tiles!”

Otherwise, you make people dislike your game because no one feels like they can “play with” and/or “try stuff”! Or people come up with a house rule like the one above anyways.

Acrylic Standees

I am a huge fan of acrylic standees! I loved them in Tokyo Sidekick (see review here) and Kinfire Chronicles (see review here) and Weirdwood Manor (see review here)! So, when this Kickstarter offered a deluxe side of Acrylic Standees, I was in!

This is a small box full of replacements for the wood standees that come with the game.

It’s a small box (it turns out, you can fit that box into the final game box with some creative packing).

See above the the standees!

They are pretty nice! See above!

Unfortunately, I had two that were broken. I think they can be fixed with a little glue, but it was still a bummer. (They had fallen out if their standees, and they really didn’t fit back in).

My friends and I did a comparison of the Acrylic Standees to the wood meeples: see above and below.

Which do you prefer?

In the end … both me and friends preferred the COLORED wooden meeples. Whaaaattttt???? It’s not that the acrylic standees weren’t gorgeous, but the wooden ones were (1) more HEFTY and (2) we could distinguish the colors easily from the wooden standees! The wooden meeples made the game easier to play.

In our review of Weirdwood Manor, we also loved the Acrylic Standees! See above! One of the major differences here as that Weirdwood Manor standees are color-coded ON THE BASE! See above! This color-coded base makes it that much easier to distinguish the standees across the table! I think if Run Run Run! had added color to bases, that would have made them that much better!

In the end, my friends preferred the wooden meeples. And I think I do too.

A good compromise might be to mix them: use the wooden meeples for the characters (so you can see each player’s color very easily) and then use the acrylic standees for the mummies! That way, you get a nice differentiation on the board between the good guys and the bad guys!

But, you really don’t have to get the Acrylic Standees; the wooden meeples that come the game are very very very good.

What I Liked

One: This Is A Little game! This is a fun little cooperative game that’s only 30 minutes.

Two: Wooden Standees: The wooden standees that come with the game are much better than you think; it is nice that you have the option for Acrylic standees, but you don’t need them.

Three: High Quality: The components are pretty high-quality, from thick cardboard tiles, wooden standees, and thick readable tokens.

Four: Limitations Okay: I generally don’t like Communications Limitations in my cooperative games, as they tend to suppress the reason I get together with my friends: to talk! In this game, the restriction on NOT sharing your tiles didn’t seem to get in the way of us still communicating: we still made plans as a group and had a good time.

What I Didn’t Like

One: Acrylic Standees: I am slightly annoyed that the Acrylic Standees weren’t better: some of mine were broken, and they really needed colored bases to help distinguish them on the board. They are still gorgeous, but not as “mind-blowing” as I had hoped.

Two: Random. The game is pretty random; it all depends on what you roll on the monster dice and what tiles you draw!!!

Maybe you get terrible starting tiles!! I think there needs to be a Mulligan House Rule at the start of the game where you can redraw your tiles).

Also, the monster dice gets rolled every turn and there’s a 50-50 chance (greater with more dice) that something bad will happen. I lost my last solo game because the monster moved EVERY SINGLE TURN when I rolled badly 5 turns in a row! I simply couldn’t stop him and there’s no dice mitigation for that!

Reactions

Rich: “I generally liked it. As I look reflect back on it, I liked it a little better cooperatively than solo. Even though I generally don’t like communications limits, we still strategized as a group and were able to get stuff done, while still having agency on our own turns. The randomness of the game is a little much (as dice and tile draws control the fate of the party), but since it’s only 30 minute game, it’s not a big deal if you get wrecked. It’s probably a 6.5/10 for solo, 7/10 for cooperative”

Andrew: “5.5 or 6? It was pretty good. I like cat games.”

Teresa: “6 or 7, it was pretty fun.”

Conclusion

Run Run Run! is a light cooperative tile-playing game which just so happens to be a boss battler. The game seems to unfold as multi-player solitaire, as each player cannot share what tiles they have. But, a higher level cooperation seems to emerge as players take on high-level roles as they play (“You kill the mummy, I’ll build out!“) If you are looking for a game with mechanisms that tend to suppress Alpha Player Syndrome without losing too much cooperation, Run Run Run! seems to strike a good balance of being cooperative but still giving each player some agency.

There is some randomness in the game, as it really depends what you roll and draw! Luckily, this is only a 30 minute game, so even if you get wrecked, it’s a short game.

I would recommend Run Run Run! if you like the theme and are looking for a light cooperative tile-laying game … with cats!! I am very sad that I can’t recommend the Arcylic Standees: all of my friends (and myself) preferred the wooden meeples that come with the game.

Run Run Run! would probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement Games, just not near the top of the list.

Coop: The Co-op Game! A Review of Flock Together

As we head into RichieCon soon, I wanted to highlight some games that I think a lot of people will want to play during RichieCon: Flock Together is one of them. Spoiler Alert! We liked this game! I think a lot of my friends will really enjoy this game!

Flock Together is a light cooperative boss-battler game for 1-5 player; this was #6 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!

This is game all about chickens with asymmetric powers! (There’s a sentence you never thought you’d hear!) It’s all about chickens leveling up and working together to fight off the invading predators! My friends and I joke that this is Coop: the co-op game as players cooperatively defend the chicken coop!

Flock Together plays 1-5 players, ages 10+ (but I think younger players could handle this), and lasts about 25 minutes per player. This is what the box says, and that feels fairly accurate.

This was on Kickstarter back in Sept 2023 and it promised deliver in June 2024. It arrived at my house in early July 2024, so it’s a few weeks late. In the grand scheme of Kickstarters, a few weeks late is on time!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing And Gameplay

This is standard size board game box: see Coke can for perspective above.

The components are first class! There was only one level backing this Kickstarter, so I think everyone will be getting this amazing production when it comes to retail!

Each player plays a chicken! Bock! Each players chooses 1 of 11 chicken books! See two above!

Each chicken has kind of punny name: see General Tso above. My friends and I found these puns funny and not too annoying. It also sets the mood: this is a lightish, fun game.

Each player then takes a player board (see the dual-layered board above) …

I want to point this out because it’s really nice: the spine of the chicken book fits into an indent on the player board! See the indent above!

And that little book fits nicely into the board! See above!

As your chicken plays, she levels up the more she eats!

You start as a chick (level 1: see above) with only the power highlighted at the bottom.

If Annie eats 5 food (the little basket tells you how much food you need to eat), you turn the page to get to level 2: A Pullet! Now, Annie Yokley has two powers and 1 more hit point! See above!

And finally at 11 food, Annie is a Hen! With 6 full hit points and 3 full powers!

Each player takes a colored chicken (see above) to move around the board (see below)!

The board is a beautiful scene with the chicken coop in the middle (“inside”) and the world surrounding it (“outside”)! Chickens move around in this world to do stuff!

The actions that a player take on her turn are all listed at the bottom of the board! See above. Note that there are “outside” actions (little grass symbol) and “inside” actions (with a coop symbol).

The player has two action points on her turn and can do any two of these actions (and can repeat). It makes the game feel a little like worker placement, because you have to move your chicken either “inside” or “outside” to perform certain actions, but I can’t really call this worker placement (as players can share spaces).

Although this doesn’t look like it, this is really a boss-battler game! You have to fight 3 predators, and then you can fight the final boss to win! The predators use the same book system as the players: they can level up just like the players!

Basically, at the end of a “season” (see Spring, Summer, Fall above), the predators level up! Each season has its own set of “bad news” cards.

This is co-op game, so you have to have “bad news” season cards! These don’t come out every turn, they come out between the 1, 3, and 6th turn of the season. It’s fairly well notated on the board: see above. A season ends on the 7th space and a new one starts!

If you go through all 3 seasons without defeating all 4 bosses, you lose!

This is a game about needing resources: food (above) …

…and eggs. The food is used to power most actions in the game (attacking, levelling up), but they are slightly more volatile. The eggs can become food, if you choose to convert during them between rounds. The eggs are more resilient to weather (“bad news”) than the food, but they must be converted to food to be useful.

If the players can defeat the three easy predators (see two above) …

They uncover the big boss who is immediately revealed at level 3! If the players can defeat the big boss before the last season runs out, they win!

Oh, to gain confidence and a few special abilities, players can also fight grubs (yellow cards above) or get a power up card (brown).

Rulebook

This is a great rulebook. And I am not just saying that because it’s linen-finished and feels really nice.

This rulebook gets an A- on the Chair Test: it lays flat, doesn’t flop too much, and has a big readable font. It’s easy to consult on the chair next to me when I need to look up rules. This game has an excellent form factor.

The Components page (above) is well-notated and easy to consult. I always like to correlate components with their names: this components list even spans the same two opposite pages so it’s very easy to consult on the chair next to me.

The set-up has a great picture: it is well-notated, well-labelled, easy to read, and spans two opposite pages easily so you can correlate the picture with the directions! Fantastic! What an easy set-up!

The rest of the rulebook is the same caliber: it’s easy to read and get into. In general, it dos a great job of teaching the game.

It even ends with useful notes on the back.

This is one of the better rulebooks we have seen in a while. And the linen-finish just takes the cake.

There is one complaint, which I will discuss below. Otherwise, this is a fantastic rulebook.

Solo Play

This game has only one real note for how to do solo play: it’s in the set-up for describing solo play! See above! Fantastic! This game follows Saunders’ Law! And it’s a great solo game: all the rules stay the same except for one: you are your own teammate! There’s no long list of rules exceptions: this is such an easy game to get to the table solo.

For balance, the hit points of each of the bosses is a multiplier of the number of players! This is how the game scales the difficulty for the number of players! So, Professor Moltiarity (above) has 2 *1 + 3*1 = 5 hit points for a solo game (and would have 2*2 + 3*2=10 hit points for a 2-Player game, etc).

My first solo game was playing Annie Yokley (see above) and my final boss was Professor Moltiarity!

The game sets-up quickly and easily. See above as I have the rulebook open on the chair next to me and the game set-up (with Annie) on the table! It really pops!

The game is light and plays quickly: you take your two actions per turn, leveling up while you eat, attack grubs, attack predators, and forage for food! You can always go back to the coop to heal if you need to.

My first game ended in about 20 minutes with a win! I don’t feel like I got any rules wrong (I tend to get a few rules wrong in many of my first plays), as the rules are easy and well-described in the rulebook!

At the end of my game, I felt confident I could teach my friends this game; it was fun and breezy. I enjoyed the puns and flavor text on the cards. It was only a 20 minute game and I had fun. I could see Flock Together getting slightly repetitive if the game lasted any longer, but the solo game felt just the right length! And there was always something interesting to do on your turn, even if you only had two actions! The game moved quickly and I had a good time.

I am not sure how often I would get the game out just to play solo though. But the solo game teaches the game well.

Cooperative Play

My first cooperative play went pretty well. My friend Teresa loved this world! She loved the art, the cute game, the flavor text, and she loved the chickens! And of course, we made tons of chicken jokes as we played: we were poultry in motion!

The game doesn’t take itself too seriously and that flavor (chicken flavor) seems to come out as you play! It really kind of elevates our spirits!

Early in the game, turns are a little more “multiplayer solitaire”, and each player needs to level up. Your actions will be just trying to get your chick into something that can fight!

But to win, you will almost certainaly have to cooperate in the end game! See above as Teresa and I fight the Big Bad together.

The amount of cooperation kind of depends on the chickens you choose and the powers (and one-shots) you get: cooperation isn’t baked-in to the main actions (pun not intended … well, maybe it was intended)! You can’t share resources or actions or do anything necessarily cooperative with your base actions: it seemed like most cooperative endeavors were from specials. It worked fine for us, but it’s possible your game won’t be particularly cooperative if you don’t get the cards/powers that enable that cooperation. It’s not a dig against the game: it’s just not quite as cooperative as you might hope, especially early on. We do have a suggestion that would make it more cooperative (see below).

Teresa and I had fun playing cooperatively. Teresa says she really wants to play this with her sister! A good sign!

My second cooperative game wasn’t quite as successful: Sam and I ran out of time and couldn’t defeat the final boss.

Honestly, it was the weather cards that destroyed us: the weather had us doing 1 less damage to a predator. We did look back on the game and realized we made a few strategic mistakes, but the bad news weather cards screwed us more than we cared to admit.

Sam didn’t love Flock Together.

Play Order

The first player token in this game is a gorgeous metal token! See above! It indicates who the first player is!

And the rules specify that the game proceeds clockwise (see above, from page 9).

The first question was: does the play order token move or does the first player always the first player? The rules, as great as they are, do not specify this! Most “modern” board games have the player order token move clockwise so that each player gets a chance to go first. So, do we do that? Or does it always stay at the same player? Not clear?

As we played, we actually got annoyed at this first player marker: we kept passing the player token back and forth, but since none of the rules say anything about when to do this, we forget a few times and lost track of who the first player was!

In the end, we just reverted to Player Selected Turn Order (coarse-grained). We would decide cooperatively, per turn, who would go first (if it made a difference)! Then we’d just take our turns in that order that we chose. In fact, since we didn’t even have turn order, we could take our turns simultaneously sometimes (if we didn’t interfere with each other) … and the game would move along that much quicker!

This is totally a house rule: it’s not in the rulebook. However, I recommend Player Selected Turn Order in your game of Flock Together: it will make the game move faster and the game will be more cooperative. I love that first player marker, but it wasn’t working for us (especially since the rules seems silent on it).

What I Liked

This production is magnificent.

The cards are beautiful and linen-finished with Andrew Bosley art! Just so nice!

Even the rulebook is linen-finished! And it’s a very good rulebook (modulo the First Player issue).

I didn’t mention the Power cards too much in the overview, but if you ever have a turn where you might have a “wasted” action (“I need to move to the coop, but what else can I do?“), you can always use an action to get a Power card: see above. You never feel like you have a wasted action (which you could sometimes get in other games with Action Points, like Pandemic), as you can always take a Power card!

The comedy in this game, although silly, seemed to land for us. See Cleopoultra (oof, what a pun) above!!

What I Didn’t Like

All the eggs (above) and food (below) are different colors … and that difference means nothing.

I thought different colored eggs would have different powers or something! Nope! All eggs are the same! I actually found that distracting and thought “Oh did I miss a rule? Why are they all different?” Maybe an expansion down the road will make that mean something? Sure, it’s pretty, but I actually think it’s distracting.

This one is related to the different colors: how are you supposed to sort the eggs and food? We have 6 (really cool) trays to hold the resources, but because there are 6 kinds of food and 6 different kinds of eggs, which ones do you put in trays? This sounds dumb, but the instructions don’t tell you how to use the trays (well, they sorta do on page 6, bullet 8, but it doesn’t tell you how to distribute them). I mean this sounds like a dumb complaint, especially since the trays are so nice, but it does make you pause during the (otherwise great) set-up instructions.

The Player Turn Order rules don’t work great: this games needs a house rule: use Player Selected Turn Order. It makes the game more cooperative, more fun, and even moves it along quicker!

The Weather cards can be a little random and really mess with the dynamic of the game. It can be frustrating. But since the game is short, it’s not too big a deal.

Although you have all your actions on your player board, a turn summary/outline would have been nice: if we had one of these, we could have addressed the first player issue! It also would have reminded us of our actions at the end of each turn. It seems silly, given that this game is pretty easy, but a little turn order card would have been useful.

Reactions

Teresa gives this a 7 or 8 out of 10. “I want to play this with my sister! It’s on a list of games I want to play at RichieCon again!”

Richie gives it the same? It’s very light (7/10), but it trends up (7.5? 8? /10) because the game is so uplifting with its amazing art, breath-taking components, silly puns, and light gameplay! The only real complaint “might be” that it can get random, but since the game is so short, that really hasn’t been too big of a deal.

Sam didn’t like it quite as much as us:
“Flock 6.5/10: I liked the silliness of the theme but felt like we didn’t have enough actions and the turns were too short to keep track of the round upkeep tasks“

Conclusion

Me and (most of) my friends recommend Flock Together! The components and art are just stunning, the game has a silly vibe which puts you in a good mood, and the gameplay moves quickly!

If you find yourself interested in this game, we recommend playing with the house rule of Player Selected Turn Order to make the game feel a little more cooperative and engaging. The game is cooperative, but it may feel less so, depending on the power cards that emerge or characters you choose; The Player Selected Turn Order helps elevate the game’s cooperation factor.

Averaging me and my friends scores, this is probably something like a 7/10 or 7.5/10. The cuteness and simplicity of the game may elevate that score for you.

A Review of Weirdwood Manor: Putting a Weird Manner into a Cooperative Game!

Weirdwood Manor was #7 on our Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! This is a bit of a weird entry into the cooperative games space: it’s a cooperative boss-battler worker placement euro game with elements of Pandemic! Whew!

I backed Weirdwood Manor when it was on Kickstarter in April 2023, and it promised delivery in April 2024. My copy of the game arrived in June 2024, so it’s about 2 months late … which is actually quite good in Kickstarter terms.

This is a cooperative game for 1-5 Players, Ages 13+. I think the 90-120 minutes (as reported by the box above) is too short: It’s been more like 2 hours + 20 minutes per player in my plays. All of my 4-Player games have been 3.5 hours or more!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a pretty big boy, but it still seems about standard box sizes: see above with Can of Coke for reference.

This is gorgeous production! See above!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good overall, but has two major flaws.

First problem: Weirdwood Manor makes the fatal mistake of making the rulebook the same width and height as the box! It’s a giant square! It gets like a C+ on The Chair Test, as I can’t really lay it on the chair next to me! It flops over the edges and is harder to read.

The second major problem: there is no index. In many games, that’s not a huge deal, but Weirdwood Manor is a very complicated game with many, many, many, many rules: it is in dire need of an Index!

Other than those two flaws, this rulebook is pretty good.

The Components page is great, even differentiating between the deluxe and retail versions!

The Set-Up was mostly really good.

In general, this rulebook is pretty good: it’s just long! This is a very very very very complicated game with lots of moving parts (both literally and figuratively)! The rulebook does a pretty job of explaining most of the pieces and showing nice pictures/examples! See above!

I always feel like the rulebook is doing something right if the back cover contains a summary of rules/flow/icons, which Weirdwood Manor does. See above.

This rulebook is pretty good, besides the square form factor and lack of index. It taught the game pretty well. Just be aware: it’s a long rulebook because it’s a pretty complicated game.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Each player takes the role of one of 6 characters (see above) in the game: these characters are all magically oriented. These are the good guys! They have magic powers and spells! Note how nice those dual-layer boards are!

Each player takes the corresponding standee: I have the deluxe version which has the acrylic standees (they are just cardboard standees in the normal version of the game). See above.

Each player gets their own very specific deck of cards. Every turn, each player must play exactly one of their cards to “do something”! See the decks above!

As a cooperative boss-battler game, players choose one of three bosses (see above) to fight. Each one is very different!

As a cooperative boss battler, there will be a lot of dice rolled when attacks and defenses happen! See above!

The monsters (and Lady Weirdwood, off to the left above) are also acrylic standees!

The good guys characters and the bad guy monsters are all very different! The good guys each have a different deck of cards with different emphases! See some above!

Each character also has a different experience track! When you “do stuff” in the game, you get experience which you can immediately spend to upgrade your character! With experience points, you choose which track to advance, and each character has different annotations (see above) on their three experience tracks!

Other things make the characters asymmetric:

when the character rolls a STAR, a special ability (for that character) only activates
each players has different start resources
each character has VERY different spells they can activate
each character has a different progression to get dice

In general, these characters are VERY different and will play very differently!

The Manor: Worker Placement Rooms!

The core play of the game is in the Manor (mansion) above. It’s a bit of chore to build!

You place tiles in concentric rings: the outer ring (above)…

The middle ring … (see above) …

And the inner ring! See above!

Players place their standees on the entrance to begin: see above.

This game almost has a worker placement feel as well: when you end your turn in a room (see above), you activate the special ability of the room. See above for two rooms! The top one will allow you to get resources and the bottom one will allow you to rewind time! Each room has a very different ability to activate in the game!

When the Manor is all built (see above), it has a very daunting table presence! See above!

Resources

There are a number of different resources in the game you get (usually from activating a room): Power (pink), Scarabs (yellow), flame (blue), or books (green). See above! These resources are spent for many different things in the game: activating spells, buying dice, buying Companions, and many more things!

The small twist here is that the Scarabs, even though they are resources you need (yellow, see above) are also the “Bad News” tokens and they spread “kind of like” the disease cubes of Pandemic!

Scarabs in a room make it so you CANNOT activate the special ability there! You would have to go into the room and specifically fight them to get rid of them … and if you kill all the Scarabs on your room, you may still activate that room at the end of your turn.

Scarabs advance from the inner rings to the outer rings when “The Scarab Phase” happens. It reminds me of Pandemic for two reasons: 1) the Scarabs will “blight” a room if there are ever two or more in them (not unlike losing a city in Pandemic Legacy). This blight causes you to lose the room as a worker placement spot! (Don’t despair, you can always repair a blighted room) 2) The progression as Scarabs are always coming out and spreading … just like the disease cubes in Pandemic are always coming out and spreading!

Generally, flames and books are easy to get from rooms, Scarabs have to be obtained from fighting, but power is harder to get!

There are limited rooms with power tokens, but most power tokens comes from advancing the Power track on your character (the pink track above).

There’s a reason we call this a cooperative boss-battler worker placement euro (with elements of Pandemic)! The worker placement and resource management aspects feel very euro.

Time

Many cooperative games have some flavor of timer on it: you must win in so many turns, you must win before the Bad News deck runs out, and so on. Time is handled very interestingly in this game! In between the concentric circles of the rooms are two rotating rings that tell time! The first ring (above) is like the hour clock: as you play, time advances from sunrise to morning, to afternoon, to night, and back around! See above!

The outer ring is like a day clock: it has numbers from 1-12 on it (see above)! Every time the inner ring advances from night to sunrise, the outer ring spins! If the outer ring ever moves from 12 to 1, players lose! They have run out of time!

How does time advance? In two ways! First, the Monster “bad news” card moves the inner hour circle; see above as the monster card will cause hour time to advance 4 spaces!

The second way is that a player’s card is to be placed in one of the 4 positions above his character sheet: see above. Each position is labelled with a time of day: The Lore Master Meditation card (above, far right) has been played above the Night symbol, which means the player MUST SPIN the inner circle to the next night phase symbol! Every turn, the player MUST play a card to one of the spaces above. Part of the choices are trying to advance time as little as possible.

This time advancement mechanism must be balanced against matching symbols on the top of the card: see above as Prepare Defenses shield matches the Touch the Fae card! (Wild) If these symbols match, the player gets that symbol’s effect (a shield gives one more defense in combat). Sometimes you may choose to waste more time to get a better symbol match!

This is just one of the many choices players make when playing a card: Which card? How does time advance? How do symbols match?

Doors and Connectivity

These spinning concentric circles of time also controls the connectivity between rooms! See above as the characters in the room with the Chaos Ogre can’t get out to the middle rings! There’s NO DOOR between the middle ring and outer ring! When the day counter spins, the doors will spin and an exit will emerge!

These “moving” doors take a few turns for players to get: “Wait, playing my card will move the rings before I move my character?” Most of the time, we would “pretend” to advance the ring to see what connections would open up and then if the connections looked right, … then we would commit. I do admit, this is very daunting the first few times until you get a handle on it.

Spells

Each player has three spells on their character board: see above (Upper right of the board). These spells vary tremendously between characters! Some characters are more help-focused, some are more defense-focused, some are more combat-focused Each character’s spells are very different.

The spells are activated by spending resources … with Power usually being one component. See above! This is why Power is such an important resource in the game component! The spells are incredibly powerful, many times making the difference between a winning and losing combat!

Companions

Players can also recruit Companions to help them! Companions cost resources (of course), but give two main abilities! First, they usually give a nice little power you can use once (before you recharge).

Possibly more important, the Companions give another position to play cards, so you reset time less often! (Every reset causes a Scarab phase!) See above as Oliver has two companions, so he can play two cards without resetting!

Solo Game: True Solo With One Character

The game has rules for a solo variant (congratulations on following Saunders’ Law)! Basically, you can play as many characters as you want! The game recommends playing two characters, to get some synergies between characters going!

You might notice, I spent quite a bit of time describing the components and mechanisms of this game! I don’t know about you, but playing two characters seemed a little much for my first solo game! I ended up choosing to play my first solo game as a true solo game: one character. See above.

The game really needs no changes to play solo with one character: the main balancing mechanism of the game is advancing time for each play, so the total number of plays of the characters remains about the same. Very approximately, a game is “about” 2 * 12 = 24 turns total. Each character moves up the hour wheel by 1 or 2 spaces per turn, but the monster moves the hour wheel by 2-5 spaces per turn. On average, it takes about 2 player turns to advance one day, so at 12 days, the games lasts about 24 turns. So a true solo player will have about 24 turns, a 2-Player game would have each player take 12 turns, and so on.

The point of all that is — Sure! You can play this game true solo without any real rule changes! I always love it when the solo game follows the main rules: it’s usually so much work to apply solo rule exceptions to a game!

After playing a true solo game, let me say three things:

This is a pretty fun game solo.
It is a bit long. I think it took about 2 hours 30 minutes?
I absolutely would suggest your first game be a true solo game! This game has SO MANY RULES! And SO MANY INTERACTIONS! Your first game will struggle with rules, discrepancies, and just getting the game. The last thing you want to do is to context switch between two characters! Remember, every character is very different and plays very differently! Context Switching between two characters (as we’ll see below) is rough.

The true solo game works, and it works pretty well.

Solo Play: Alternating Between Two Characters

So, because the rulebook “suggests” that two character solo is the preferred way to play, I ended up playing a two character game that way by myself. At this point, I had at least one true solo game under my belt, so I at least felt ready with a decent understanding of the rules.

You can see above as the game table became even busier! And I remember this solo mode working, but I felt like I just had to “get through” it. There was so much work context switching between characters that it was overwhelming. I’ve emphasized this point quite a bit: the characters in this game are very distinct and very complicated to play! Each character requires a lot of focus to play it well.

Maybe this is your favorite game of all time! Maybe you want to explore all the characters and how they work together! I remember in Set A Watch (a cooperative dice placement game we reviewed most recently here), the 4-Character solo seemed daunting! Over time, I came to love that 4-Character solo mode after I had totally absorbed the game! Maybe the same thing will happen here?

But, I think focusing on a single character is a lot more fun. The 2-character solo play felt a little like a slog; don’t get me wrong, it worked, but I just felt like I was going through the motions. But, maybe after I absorbed this game some more, maybe I will come back to the 2 character solo mode? Maybe?

Right now, I can only recommend the true solo game, especially if it’s your first game!

Cooperative Play

I was able to get two big cooperative games together: both of 4 players.

These game groups are very different, but two things seemed to remain the same between the groups.

One: This game is very long: both 4-Player games took more than 3.5 hours. Some of this time will go away since it’s a learning game, but all my friends are seasoned gamers and jumped right in (with my help: I taught the games knowing the rules pretty well by this point). It feels like Weirdwood Manor is going to last at least 3 hours no matter what. See above as we all go away to dinner, leaving the game set-up to finish later!!!

Two: All the games I have played had the players “multi-player solo” in the beginning of the game, but engendered cooperation more in the later game. Well, we strictly speaking, didn’t have to cooperate, but we would have lost if we hadn’t! Many times, we had to figure out cooperatively how to engage the boss, but someone would have correct the topology (remember the rotating rings?), or defeat Scarabs protecting the boss, or any other issues … someone had to “blaze a path” for the next player! Or the next player had no chance!

Early in my first 4-Player game, I had to “clean-up”the Scarabs in the middle of the board (to protect Lady Weirdwood), but it meant I had to “take one for the team” to do this! It meant I had to lose a lot of resources and be behind the ball for leveling up my character! But we ABSOLUTELY had to do this, or we would have lost! (If Lady Weirdwood dies, we lose!) So, I took one for the team … enabling my compatriots to continue!

Generally, the game starts out very “multi-player solo” because everyone is in dire need of resources! To get anything going in this game, players have to concentrate on themselves … then, as the game gets further along, it’s clear players HAVE to cooperate, or they will lose!

Some characters had more abilities or spells that enticed cooperation, so the choice of characters also can affect how much cooperation there is!

What I saw in my game groups was that the Alpha Player was kept at bay because (as we saw in the solo section) there’s just too much to keep track for a single character! It’s much much harder to Alpha Player when you are busy concentrating on running your own complex character. The cooperation happened more organically by people asking for help!

“Hey, can you get rid of those Scarabs? I need to attack the boss!”

“Hey can you make sure time doesn’t advance too far? I need to make sure the boss isn’t angry yet!”

In general, there was a decent amount of cooperation, it just happened more in the later game.

Things I Liked

The production is amazing. The game pops on the table!

The Bad News cards (the Monster cards) are labelled on the back with a “hint” of the basic operation of the card! The Monster Card (see above) tells us that the Monster will “move somehow”! You flip the card and find the monster moves! This is a fantastic mechanism! It allows players to try to play cards with some general knowledge of what the bad guy will do! I remember seeing a variant of this mechanism in the cooperative game Paleo (see our review here) where the back of the wilderness cards was labelled with a generic icon as to what was coming! (We think a mechanism like this could have helped my friends like Hacktivity, from a few weeks ago, more).

I adore the acrylic standees. These alone made the Deluxe version worth getting! They are beautiful, well-labelled, and just pop on the table. They even emphasize the color on the bottom!

Playing cards into a slot to control the time advancement is really neat and interesting.

The rotating rings being used for both TIME and TOPOLOGY is very different and interesting! It took a little getting used, but it was cool.

The experience point tracks work really well: you get to make choices and advance your character at the same time! I think this one mechanism engages players more than might have expected: you become attached to your character as you care how he levels up! And your character just gets better and better as the game goes on, so you feel like you are doing something!

What I Didn’t Like

Probably the biggest detriment is the length of the game: several of my friends complained how long the game was. There’s that table (above) left set-up while we went to dinner because the game was so long …

As cool as the rotating rings are, sometimes we struggled to rotate them: this is a physical issue! We had to readjust the board on the table to avoid the crack in the middle! Even when it lay flat on another table, sometimes it didn’t advance great? It usually worked, but it just needs a slight tweak to make it easier to rotate the rings.

Speaking of the rings, why does time advance COUNTER-CLOCKWISE in the game???? When time advances in the game, you spin the rings COUNTER-CLOCKWISE!! In real life, when a clock advances forwards, it’s CLOCKWISE … thus the name CLOCKWISE! The rulebook even used the terms clockwise and counter-clockwise in descriptions! It knows the terms! This seems very counterintuitive to me!! It really seems like time moving forward should have been CLOCKWISE (like clocks). I dealt with it, but this little thing really bothered me!!

Complexity: this is a very complicated game with lots of moving parts and a long rulebook. It will take a while to absorb this, and some people may bounce off of it hard because of the complexity.

Even though this game has a lot of euro elements (worker placement, resource acquisition) and a lot of predictable elements, there’s still enough randomness to that it might just frustrate you. The game is, at its core, a boss-battler with lots of dice! You will be rolling dice and you might roll great and you might roll poorly! My friend CC got completely screwed early in one game, and had trouble recovering: he got completely smashed by the boss, and spent the rest of the game trying to recover … meanwhile watching while the rest of us were doing really well!

That element of randomness … might make one of your friends have a bad game.

Reactions

The reactions to this game from my friends was generally positive, well, except for CC who got trounced. CC’s reaction was probably the most nuanced:

I think I might have liked Weirdwood Manor more if I had gotten to play to the end. Sounds like my character got to be useful later on, which was a feeling the game had lacked for me in the turns I got to play. I liked the theme of that one and some of the mechanics were fun, but I got pretty frustrated when I kept getting shut down while watching other players advance. Nice table presence, though, and it felt like it was telling a story in a cool environment which I liked.

Kurt: He started at a 7.5, but upped his bid to 8 or 8.5/10. He really liked it!
Joe: 7.5/10
Teresa: 7/10
Sara: 6-7/10, but want to play it again for more precision
Andrew: 6 -7/10, but wants to play it again for more precision
Me: Solo (true solo), 7.5/10, Solo (two character) 6.5/10, (Cooperative) 8.5/10

Conclusion

Weirdwood Manor is a beautiful cooperative game with a beautiful production! But you have to know what you are getting into! This is a very long and complicated game with euro worker placement elements. The game always seems to start “multiplayer-solo”, but evolves into more cooperation as the gameplay advances … if you don’t cooperate in the endgame, you will lose!

I could easily see Weirdwood Manor being someone’s favorite game of 2024! It has so many unique and quirky mechanisms, satisfying advancement, and engaging play! Just be aware how complicated this game is! The extra complexity does have the advantage of keeping the Alpha Player at bay!

I recommend staying with true solo (take control of one character) to learn the game, and only tackle solo with multiple characters if you want more challenge.

My groups all like the game, with ratings between 6 and 8.5, with most people giving it at least a 7.

Hopefully this review helps you decide if Weirdwood Manor is for you!

More Cooperative Cats? A Review of Nekojima: A Cooperative Cat Dexterity Game

This week we take a look at a cooperative cat dexterity game: Nekojima! It can also be played competitively, but we focus on solo and cooperative play here.

There’s been a trend recently towards more cooperative cat games: just a few months ago, we saw and liked the cooperative cat game Hissy Fit! See our review here.

Going back a year to July 2023, we saw and loved the cooperative cat game Race To The Raft! See our review here! We liked it so much it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!

Will Nekojima fare as well as Hissy Fit and Race To The Raft? Let’s take a look!

Unboxing And Gameplay

We got the deluxe wooden Collector’s Edition: see above (it comes with some extras). We’ll talk about what’s there, but we will focus on what comes in the base game.

This is a cooperative dexterity game where players place poles and cats! See above! If the poles ever fall over, players lose! It’s kind of like cooperative Jenga …

The poles must be placed on the platform above: notice how there are 4 different colored regions!

Each turn, a player will roll two dice (see above), and the dice will indicate where the two regions to place the poles in!

There are three different variety of poles: blue, red, and white. See above.

The pole color you draw each turn is chosen by drawing a cube from a bag! See above as the white cube is drawn, and the two poles have to go between the red and green districts on the platform!

If players draw a black cube (see above), they must also place a cat (see below) to hang from the poles!

The goal of the game is to build your poles as long as you can without toppling them! Like I said, kind of like Jenga! (Well, reverse-Jenga because you add wood blocks here, whereas you takeaway wood blocks in Jenga).

Every cube you draw is placed in a Level score chart: this shows you what your “score” is at the current stage!

If a single pole falls over, it’s game over! Your score is the last level you achieved! Actually, when one pole falls … generally all of them fall! See above!

That’s the basics of Nekojima! See the components above!

Rulebook

The rulebook describes the basic rules pretty well: see above. The set-up and components are described above on page 1 in one fell swoop.

The rules are like 4 pages! You’ll notice (if you look closely above), there are some restrictions on how the poles are placed (you can never touch the wire, you can never wrap the cord, etc).

You’ll also notice how the rulebook commits the cardinal sin as being the same size as the square box: it gets a B- or C+ on The Chair Test as the rulebook flops around and hangs over the edges,

The rulebook is short: the game is easy to describe! The only difference (really) between cooperative and competitive is in the focus: play still keep building poles and adding cats until everything falls down. In the cooperative game, all players worked together to get the best score and win/lose together! In the competitive game, the person who knocked the poles over is the loser … only one loser and everyone else wins! The mode changes the unfolding of the game a little, as the cooperative players will try to set-up their compatriots for easier moves, but the competitive players will try to set-up their foes for harder moves!

Solo Mode

The solo mode is described on the last page of the rulebook: see above. Thank you for following Saunders’ Law and having a solo mode for this cooperative game!

Basically, the solo player just keeps adding blocks and cats as long as possible …

… until the poles fall over. Whatever the highest level is (see above) is the solo player’s score!

Solo mode worked great for learning the game: it was basically the same set of rules as the cooperative game! The solo player does the best he can to set-up the next player (who just happens to be himself) for easier placements!

I mean, from scratch, I learned the game and played the game in 15 minutes. It was very easy to get this to the table.

Cooperative Mode

Cooperative mode works great.

The first game ended quickly in heartbreak as the poles fell over.

Undeterred, my friends wanted to play again to do better! THIS time, we stood up! We stood away from the table so as not to shake it! We did everything we could to prevent any “accidental mishaps!”

We made it much farther in the second playthrough! See above. But alas, the poles will always fall!

The great thing about the cooperative play is that people seemed to want to play again!

Too Many Expansions?

There are waaaaaaay too many ways to play this game! See 4 variants above!

There’s another two variants that comes with the Collector’s Edition as well!

But in the end, my friends and I were happy with just the base game. I am not convinced we will ever play anything beyond the base game. It’s nice that all these expansions are in the box, but the extra expansions seem to “muddy up” the experience.

Abstract or Thematic?

This is a fun cooperative dexterity game, but it’s probably more an abstract game … that just happens to have cats. Nekojima seems to really lean try to lean into the cat theme! See the cat placemat that came with the game! The cat tokens are nice!

But, at the end of the day, this is probably an abstract cooperative game. Just don’t tell the cat lovers.

Some Issues

The Collector’s Edition BARELY fits in the box: in fact, it strains the clasp on the wooden box. And the stuff that came with it?

The extra dice tray is problematic as the dice bounce right out! And the extra game mode with the arches (see above) … ??? I will probably never play that mode, as cool as it looks.

If you find yourself interested in this game, I don’t think it’s worth getting the Collector’s Edition: just pick up the base game. You’ll be happier for it and have saved a little more money.

Conclusion

I got Nekojima delivered from Kickstarter sometime in 2023. Unfortunately, because I get so many games, this one just kinda slipped through the cracks.

Nekojima is a fun, cooperative dexterity game that leans pretty heavily into the cat theme … but it’s still pretty much an abstract game. The cats do make it cuter though.

Nekojima would probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Dexterity Games if I ever redo that list. This is probably a solid 7 out of 10 overall, with the cooperative game being more fun than the solo game.

I suspect Nekojima will be played quite a bit at RichieCon 2024 this year: there are a number of people who love their cat games and this game just looks so great set-up on the table.

Appendix: Furoshiki

One of the things that “seems” to be in the base box is a cat placemat.

I thought it was just a placemat for the game. Nope!

Nope! Apparently, it’s for Furoshiki! See the back of the pamphlet above! It’s about the art of folding and carrying things.

I thought it looked nice as a cat placemat.

A Review of Slay The Spire (The Board Game) From Someone Who Doesn’t Like Rogue-like Games And Has Never Played The Video Game!

Rogue

When I was an undergrad at college, a lot of my friends played a game called Rogue on the vt100 computer terminals.

vt100rogue

It was a little dungeon crawler that my friends spent HOURS and HOURS playing.

“It’s a Dungeon Crawler? Fun! Do you save you characters very often?“
“Uh, … no. You just play until you die. You don’t save characters.”
“I’m out!”

And that was pretty much where I learned to dislike Rogue-like games. If I play a dungeon crawler spending hours leveling up my character, I want to save it! Part of the fun, for me at least, is returning to my character that I’ve invested in. I have no desire to play a formless character that just dies.

To be fair, my opinion has not aged well. I have been informed by many people that Rogue-like games have some saving capability. Still, my malformed opinion has persisted through the years.

Slay The Spire

Because of my prejudice against Rogue-like games, I have never played the original Video game Splay The Spire. I must admit, though, that I was intrigued by Slay The Spire (a cooperative deck-building game) when it appeared on Kickstarter back in November 2022. The original Slay The Spire video game was really only a solo game … maybe the transition to cooperative board game would make it something more up my alley?

This arrived at my house in May 2023 (see above); it had promised delivery in Dec 2023, so it’s about 5 months late. In the world of Kickstarter, 5 months late is not bad.

This is a cooperative board game for 1-4 players, Ages 12+, with only 60-90 minutes per Act! I was intrigued! To be fair, a lot of my friends seemed “excited” to play this game, so I freely admit that their enthusiasm was contagious.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a pretty tall box (see Coke can above for perspective), but it’s about the same form factor (in length and width) as a Ticket To Ride size box.

The top of the box has the rulebook and Upgrades and Items guide.

Don’t be too impressed by this Upgrades and Items guide: all it does is show all the cards! It has no disambiguating text!

There is a very nice boxing/unboxing guide for putting this together and taking this apart. See above.

Are you like me as one of the few people and didn’t know that Slay The Spire Video Game was a deck-building game? Well, the board game is also a deck-building game! As a deck-building game, this game comes with SO MANY cards! See above and below. And its own sleeves! For more discussion of Cooperative deck-builders like this, check out our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games!

I have been informed that the cards and art look exactly like the Video Game.

And there are a ton of cards and boards! See above! This game looks really fantastic! See above!

And it looks like the Video Game.

I want to be 100% clear about this: this production is amazing! It’s a deck-building game that comes with sleeves! The tokens come in an easy-to-use tray! The cards can all be stored very easily in the box! The box is easy to repack! They really knocked it out of the park on the production of this game!

Gameplay

Each player chooses one of 4 characters to play: see the characters above. I have been informed by players of the Slay The Spire Video Game that these are straight out of the Video Game!

Each player also takes the corresponding figurine: these will be used to notate which “row” you will be fighting in; we’ll describe that more below.

Each player has their own deck of cards to start with: each deck is a little different and really represents a different play style. Simplifying a little too much: the blue deck is defensive, the red deck is offensive, and the green deck is all about poison.

Players together choose a “path” to take to get to the final Bad Guy (at the top of the board above). These decisions can have you fight a monster, summon the merchant, build a fire (“smith” or heal: I learned the word “smith” from one of the Slay The Spire Video Game friends), fight Epic monsters, or take events. I was informed these choices were very reminiscent of things that happen in the Video Game.

When you fight a monster, each row next to a character gets some monster(s) from the Encounter Deck! See above as “the red guy” fights a Shelled Parasite. (I don’t know “the red guy’s” name because it is not notated on his board). Note that the monster has some hit points (left and right of card), and some icons: those icons tell you what the monster does when it attacks you.

As a card game, you play cards to attack your monster and/or defend yourself!! Shields up your defense (blue icons above), and swords up your attack (red swords above). You only have a limited amount of energy per turn to spend to play a card (usually 3 energy worth), so that limits which cards you can play (the energy cost is in the upper left corner).

You draw up to 5 cards every turn, and discard all when you are done. That feels very much like a deck-builder.

Typically after you win a battle with a monster, you can add an upgraded card to your deck: you deal 3 and choose 1 (apparently, just like the Video Game). See an example draw above.

See above as some of my cards have a GREEN text for the title? This means that I was able upgrade the card BY FLIPPING IT OVER! Each card has two sides, a normal side and an upgraded side: you can “Smith” to turn the card over and therefore improve it!! This is a really neat mechanic in a deck-building … and rare! I can’t think of another deck-builder that does this!

You can also occasionally get new additions from a rare deck (see yellow outline): these are much better cards!

To be clear, each character has their OWN upgrade deck to draw from and their OWN rares deck to draw from! See above: the red guy has a starter cards (grey outline), upgrade deck (black outline), and rares deck (yellow outline). This makes each character very distinct as they are built to upgrade a specific way. Like we said earlier, the red guy’s decks concentrate on attacks, blue guy’s deck concentrate on defense, and green guy’s decks concentrate on poison.

You occasionally can buy stuff from the passing merchant, including potions or treasures and even random cards. This even includes a way to cull cards: we call this The Andrew rule: A deck-building game MUST have a fairly systematic way to cull cards. Luckily, Andrew would (and does) like this game because he can cull cards.

Along the way, there are all sorts of other cards that come out: Events, Monsters, Potions, Treasures, Epic Treasures, and deck-cloggers (Daze and fire). I have been told this is just like the video game!

But of course, the purpose of all this is to take down the Big Bad Monster at the top! See above as I fight the Big Bad Bronze Automaton and a Bronze Orb!

Like many cooperative games, all players win together when they defeat the Big Bad, or they lose if any of them dies! So, it’s in everyone’s best interest to cooperate and keep each other alive!

The Rulebook

I need to talk about the rulebook. It’s okay, but not great. It really should have been better given how great the production of the rest of this game.

IMG_4689 (1)

It does well on The Chair Test: it only droops over the edges a little, the font is big and readable, and the book stays open on the chair next to me so I can see the rules without taking up precious table space. This rulebook gets an A- on The Chair Test!!

The game starts off great with a Table of Contents, a link for a Companion App, a link for a How to Play video, and a list of all components (most) with correlating pictures!! Very very nice! I felt very happy to see this! My only fix might be that I had wished they had labelled the tokens better … there are a lot of tokens and I didn’t know what any of them were!!

The set-up is pretty good, but this where the cracks start to develop. This is my first example of this rulebook being too minimal: I accidentally shuffled the Summon deck, but it doesn’t say WHY you shouldn’t it! I didn’t know how to recover?!?!??! It turns out the Summon deck should “probably” just be alphabetically sorted so you can find cards easily … that’s the only reason to not shuffle it, you just make your life harder when you have to find a card. Really, I could have used a sentence:

“Don’t shuffle the Summon Deck because you will be searching for cards (alphabetically) in it later in the game. Just sort the deck alphabetically if you accidentally shuffle it!

But other than that, the set-up went fairly well.

This rulebook is pretty well annotated with lots of pictures and examples. See above. In general, the rules are fairly clearly set out. But the real problem with this rulebook is that it seems to assume that you have played the video game. There are a lot of places where a rulebook for a normal game would be chastised. I can’t tell you how many times I played with Jon and Keala (who have played the Video Game A LOT), and when I went to lookup a rule, they told me “it’s just like that in the video game! So it probably means that!” So many times, they clarified a rule by saying “it’s like that in the video game!” … which is not good for those of us who haven’t played the video game or other Rogue-Lites.

My canonical example of this was the Regret curse. I actually got two curses one one turn, Regret and Injury (see above)! My reading of these was that Injury was a worse curse because it keeps clogging my deck as I draw it and shuffle it back in. I though Regret was a better curse because you just got once and it was out of your deck. Nope! It clogs your hand so you draw fewer cards! You draw up to 5 cards, so if Regret is in your hand, you can only draw 4 cards. I didn’t think the rule was well-specified in the rulebook, but when I asked Keala and Jon they said “Oh it’s just like the Video Game, you can only draw 4 cards!”. I really wish the rules had made this clearer! This is just one of SO MANY examples where Jon and Keala said “Oh it’s like that in the video game!”. This rulebook should have been vetted by someone who has NOT played the video game so as to clarify a lot of finer points.

Even though this game doesn’t have an Index (and it really should), the back of the rulebook had an invaluable list of Abilities and Keywords.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff in the rulebook, but it was too minimal in a few places (For example: a few more sentences about the Retain keyword or why Summon deck shouldn’t be shuffled). I was able to learn the game and playthrough solo … and I had fun. I was able to play cooperatively with a bunch of friends (who hadn’t played the Video Game) … and we all had fun. It wasn’t until I played with seasoned Video Gamers that knew the game that I realized this rulebook needed some more clarifications: it depended a little too much of knowledge of the video game.

Solo Game

Like the Video Game, you can play this solo (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! See above as I set-up the red guy for a solo game. There’s not really a lot of special rules or exceptions for the solo game, you just play! The main balancing mechanisms are really in combat:

In plain combat, a monster comes out per row (i.e. per player). Thus, the solo player will be fighting just one row of monster(s).
In Big Bad combat, the number of hit points is scaled to the number of players.

So, in general, you can just jump in and play the solo game without any real special rules! Thank you Slay The Spire! It was SO EASY to jump in solo!

I had so much fun playing solo that I played through the first three Acts of the game! I had a blast! There are so many places where you upgrade or get new cards, that you always feel like you are making progress! You always feel like you are getting better!

Really, solo was fun. I had a blast. I played wrong on a few points (one to discuss below), but even without knowing the Video Game, I had a good time.

Cooperative Play with Players Who DO NOT Know the Video Game

I ended up playing a full 4-Player game of Slay The Spire with three of my friends who have never played the Video Game! We ended up playing through Act I in one night in about 90 minutes (with a little extra time for set-up and tear-down). So, I just had to teach the game as-is … no one (including myself) had ever played Slay The Spire the Video Game!

The biggest conceptually difference, of course, is that this is a fully cooperative game! Slay The Spire is always thought of as a solo game! But the board game is fully cooperative!

The biggest change is that every character gets his/her own row of monsters to fight! See above! While you nominally tend to fight the monster in your row (it sort of becomes “your responsibility” as it does damage to you only), you can target any monster in any row! So, if a monster has a particularly bad effect for everyone (certain monsters can attack everyone), or if a comrade just needs a little help, players may choose to work together to take out particularly vexing monsters!

My favorite rule in this game is that it allows fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order (see more discussion of PSTO here). The rulebook calls this out on page 12:

“Players can play cards, use potions, and activate abilities in any order they choose.”

What this means, is that we (as players) can intersperse our actions to accomplish things! If we need Sara to play a Potion, then Andrew attacks to add a Vulnerable, to which then Sara can play another card and attack (for double damage), we can do that! Players can work together to find the best combination of their interspersed actions to take down the baddies!

In fact, in some ways, Slay The Spire gets the best of both worlds! Since you “generally” need to fight the monster in your row, players can do Simultaneous Actions to fight their own monster, but defer to fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order if they really need to! The Simultaneous Actions helps keep everyone involved … rather than waiting for “your turn”, you can all fight the monsters at once … this means there is much less downtime.

I think this is where Slay The Spire shines the brightest as a cooperative game: the players can choose the best way to play to either help each other (with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order) or move the game along quickly (with an easy way to Simultaneous Actions fighting your monsters!) It’s the player’s choice, and I noticed we shifted between these modes pretty seamlessly when we played! It was something I didn’t notice until I looked back on our plays.

The cooperative game worked fantastically, probably better than the solo game because I got to talk and strategize and have fun with my friends!

Cooperative Play With People WHO HAVE PLAYED The Video Game

So, I wanted to make sure I played this game cooperatively with some friends who have played the video game: I wanted to see what they thought. Jon and Keala (above) are both fans and have played (and like) Slay The Spire the video game.

What happened sort of surprised me: we fell into a rhythm fairly quickly. Every time there was any rules question, Jon or Keala spoke up and said “Well, it’s like this in the video game”, so we didn’t spend very much time pouring over the rulebook. The Video Game became the reference implementation of the game! This was both cool and annoying. It was cool that the game seemed to fall inline with the Video Game, but it was annoying that the rulebook didn’t do better at explaining a lot of things.

We had so much fun playing, we ended up playing Act I and Act II in one night! The game just seemed fun to everyone.

Jon saved our bacon a number of times: he had the ability to shield other players (as the blue guy), which worked out very well! I would be able to attack something (as the red guy) and Jon (as the blue guy) would shield me or Keala (the green guy) so that we wouldn’t die! This cooperation seemed seamless! It just happened that way!

The game really clicked for everyone that night: I feel like I know the game better (with all my friends’ comments on how the Video Game works), and I was able to bring my friends into the card game quickly from reading the rules. We had a great time and plan to play again!

A While

It’s taken a while for me to get to this point. I initially had some misgivings about the game.

At first, I was grumpy at the rulebook for how minimal is was: it really needs a lot more elaborations on the rules. There was one rule in particular I was enchanted with, until I realized I was playing wrong. The “Draw 5 Cards: there is no maximum hand size” (p. 12) lead me to believe that maybe I had more choice of which cards I could discard. Maybe I could keep cards between hands? Why else would you emphasize this rule of no maximum hand size? Jon and Keala had to tell me this, but you always discard all your cards!! All of them! … just like in the video game. (to be fair, it is in the rulebook but it is one sentence). I think that rule is there to show that during your turn you can draw as many cards as you want.

Another thing that threw me off for a while was the art. I had just gotten a new deck-building expansion for Thunderstone Quest (see art above), and the art and graphic design for Thunderstone Quest (above) is significantly better than the art for Slay The Spire (below).

Comparatively, the art for Slay The Spire is a little anemic after looking at Thunderstone Quest. But I seem to be the only one who doesn’t love the art. I will admit, the art for Slay The Spire has grown on me a little: it’s very simple and not too busy. It’s also very readable. But since I have never played the original video game, I was not as “enchanted” with this art as others.

Flaws

This is a funny flaw in the game: you can’t (easily) have multiple games going on! You can save your game fairly easily (putting the appropriate cards in the appropriate slots), so you know you can come back and do another session. The problem is, if you want to play another game, you can to reset ALL THE CARDS for each deck!! We worked around it by taking pictures of our decks: if worse comes to worse, we can always use the picture of all our cards (see above) to recreate our save game. I suspect many people will want to try this game, and we won’t be able to easily have many games going on. In some ways, this is a product of its own success: it’s so much fun, people want to try it! But, be aware that a single game is easy to save, multiple games will require taking pictures of all your cards. And also the Unlocks sheet (see below) .. which presents more issues.

Another problem with this game is it’s really unclear how you move on once you play through Acts I, II, and III. The Ascension decks (see above) add some variety and keep the game interesting, but it’s kind of unclear how this fits in. Do you start a new game at Act I with the changes? Do you start a new deck? To play Act IV, you have to unlock it, but are you playing Act III again and again and again? Like everything I have seen in this rulebook, I wanted more elaboration! This rulebook frustrates me! Give me an example, give me a few more sentences, give me a page! I have played a solo game all the way through Act III. What do I do now? Add Ascension cards? Start over at Act I? This is very unclear!!! This is probably my biggest ding against the game: I don’t know exactly how to move forward. Sure, I suspect I will post to BoardGameGeek and someone will respond, and I will be able to move forward. But this rulebook does not make it clear how to move forward after Act III. UPDATE: I had lunch with my friend who has played the Video Game. He told me that in the Video Game, you just reset everything (including you deck) back to ACT I, but make a few cards (like the uncoloreds) available. I really DID NOT get that sense from the rulebook … another instant where knowledge of the Video Game helped and the rulebook didn’t.

Conclusion

Honestly, this Slay The Spire board and card game has really grown on me: I have played it solo numerous times, and I have shown it to many diverse game groups. The more I play it, the more I seem to like it! The upgrade paths makes this game great: there are so many opportunities to augment and upgrade your deck as you are playing! The fact that each players is so distinct in both powers and upgrades really contributes to how great this game is!

The production is fantastic, and the art is … thematic to the game. I have grown to appreciate the simple art and graphic design, but I still think the art and graphic design is a little anemic.

The solo game is great: it’s about an 8.5/10. It’s easy to play, and there’s really no exceptional rule changes needed to get the solo game to the table.

The cooperative game is about a 9/10: the base game is all there, with all the upgrade and augment paths, but the cooperation really shines brightly! Players can choose so many ways to help each other with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order, with Simultaneous Play keeping everyone engaged at all times! And even though these play modes seem mutually exclusive, players seem to weave in and out of Simultaneous Play and PSTO without even noticing!

Players who know Slay The Spire the video game might find this to be a 10/10 for them: the game is great and also evokes so much atmosphere from the Video Game!

Over the course of many play sessions (both solo and cooperative), I ended up liking the game more and more. There are some issues with the rulebook, as it seems to assume players know Slay The Spire Video Game pretty well! Other than my issues with the rulebook, the game is great. Putting everything together, this feels like a 9.5/10 as an overall production! This game surprised me how much I liked, especially given my anti-Rogue-lite tendencies.

Cooperative Hacking: A Review of Hacktivity

Hacktivity was a game on Kickstarter back in June 2022: see link here. This is a cooperative hand management game for 1-4 players. It originally promised delivery in February 2023, but didn’t deliver to my house until late April 2024: this makes it over a year late!

I was originally a little concerned about this game because at some point there was a Kickstarter update saying they lost their manufacturer! I was worried that this meant we might never see the game, but the Hacktivity people persevered and did deliver final copy! I was actually quite impressed with their positive attitude and communication during the Kickstarter! I’ve had a number of Kickstarters recently with poor communication and it was nice to see someone owning every step of the process!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a fairly standard sized box (“about” the size of a Ticket to Ride sized box): see Coke can above for perspective.

In this game, each player takes on the role of a special hacker. See the four decks above.

Each hacker has their own board as well: see the boards above.

Each hacker’s deck is different and has a different emphasis or/and special powers. See two such decks above.

The players are interacting with a board (see above) with three separate regions. Notice how nice the plastic components of each region are!

This is a game about managing cards. The purple cards are the virus cards that have bad effects … we’ll dub these the “bad news” cards. The blue cards are the player cards that keep the bad news (the viruses) under control. We’ll call the blue cards the “good news” cards. See above.

The leftmost board (yellow) keeps track of activity: you move the leftmost yellow cube up as a “bad news” as the games plays. If all yellow cubes make it to the top (see above), players lose!

The middle board (blue) is a place where you can “isolate” viruses that come out. This isolation defers their effects and makes you deal with them later.

The right-most red board keeps track of “the strange bug”: this is usually what you are trying to keep under control. In the first game, you need to keep the “strange bug” in the white area to win.

In order to win, players (usually) need to make it through all of the bad news cards (purple cards) and all of their own cards (blue) without losing! See above, a winning game! All bad news (purple cards) are in the discard! And “the strange bug” was kept under control in the white zone!

What’s interesting about this game is that every turn presents a lot of choices! The first choice: how many bad news (purple) cards do you take and how many good news (your character cards) do you take? See above as we choose two good news (ArTeMis) and one bad news (A1). You have to work your way all the way through both decks eventually, so you can’t always take more good than bad! You have to balance that out!

Once everyone chooses their cards, everybody flips and has to deal with their cards!

Every card offers one of two choices. For the bad news card above, you can choose the top or bottom: either isolate the virus on the blue board (notice the blue circle on the TOP CHOICE) with hope to destroy it later OR you can destroy it immediately, but pay the full cost on the bottom of the card.

But it’s a choice.

The good news cards (your player cards) are also a choice: the top choice is usually a lesser choice, but with no side effects. The bottom choice is usually more powerful, but with a bad side effect! On the card above, the upper choice is an attack of 2 on an isolated virus … but no side effect. The bottom choice is a more powerful attack of 3, but having the side effect of raising the activity (the yellow board).

Players continue to play until they meet the winning conditions! Usually, this means playing though all decks (bad news and good news decks) and keeping “the strange bug” under control!

Given that the Kickstarter had to switch manufacturers halfway through, the game has really nice components! My only major complaint is that I wish the cards were linen-finished: you do handle the cards a lot as you play. But I liked the art and three-part board works well.

Rulebook

The rulebook is two-sided: one part is in French and the other in English! It’s much less daunting when you know it’s only 12 pages (with the other 12 pages being the French rules).

The game does pretty well on The Chair Test: The rulebook fits on the chair next to me pretty well. The rulebook is a little bigger than I wanted, but it still stays open. The font is a little thin and a little small, so it’s a little harder to read than it should, but it still works: this is about a B+ on The Chair Test.

The components are well-labelled. See above.

The Set-up (above) is pretty well documented: this set-up spans two opposite pages, so it’s easy to set-up by just leaving the rulebook open.

The rules are generally pretty good and well notated.

The biggest flaw is that there is no index (boo), but the last page of the book has a nice list of symbols.

I was happy with this rulebook. This rulebook was obviously a translation, but there were only a few places where that was readily apparent.

Solo Play

So, the game does have a nice solo mode (thanks for following Saunders’ Law)!

The solo game is NOT playing two characters: basically, you combine the decks of two characters (see above as I play BLASSST!!! and ArTeMis!) and just play that one deck (setting up the rest of the game as if it were a 2-Player game). I was worried about this solo mode at first … “Is this really different from the cooperative mode?” And it’s really not. You just have more cards to play through. I am surprised I like this solo mode: I usually prefer playing two separate characters with two positions (see Leviathan Wilds from a few weeks ago), but this combined-deck solo-mode worked for me.

So, the solo game combines two decks and has the solo player become a “cyborg” of those characters (I am taking artistic license here). See above.

Interestingly, I played my first solo game when I got the game a while ago, but it took a while to interest my friends! So I had to remind myself how to play with a few more solo games right before I taught them how to play. I am happy to say that I enjoyed the solo mode more the more I played it. It’s only a 40-60 minute game! It moves quickly! And it was easy to remember how to set-up and play.

I liked Hacktivity solo and I liked the solo mode that came with it.

Cooperative Mode

The cooperative mode was easy to teach. The basic flow of the game is pretty simple once you get the idea.

I think the least favorite aspect of the cooperative game were the limits on communication. Strictly speaking, you can’t say much about your hand: you can sort of hint about how much damage you can inflict, and you can hint at stuff. As we played, we kind of ended-up slowly moving around this restriction … because it wasn’t fun! We play cooperative game because we want to talk and interact with our friends: we usually dislike cooperative games with limits on communication.

There are a lot of little icons in this game as well: that took a little to get our heads around, and the rulebook had to be passed around a little (see above). After a while, the icons took hold and we could just play: it didn’t take too long (and the little player aid cards helped a lot).

In general, the cooperative game went pretty well, but not great. The real issue was the limit on communication. And we get it: sometimes you need that restriction to keep the Alpha Player in check … but we ended up just going around the communication restrictions.

What I Liked

The color-coding scheme worked very well. The blue section of the board … gets affected by the blue markers. The yellow part of the board … is affected by the yellow icons. This was very clear and very well done. This color coordination really helped move the game forwards, as it appealed to your intuition (“this color goes here”).

The order in which you resolve your good news and bad news cards is players’ choice: You can even intersperse your card resolutions between players! You can do good news first, then bad news, or all at once! It’s players’ choice!! This is fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order at its finest!! This is where the cooperation shined (shone?) most in this game! As a group, we had to figure out the order to resolve cards, and we felt clever when we could avoid certain bad news effects by playing these certain orders! I really really liked how they used Player Selected Turn Order in Hacktivity! It really made the game feel that much more cooperative.

Every card is a choice! This is great! Every single cards has to be resolved, and you have a choice of whether to take the top or bottom option!

The game is easy to teach and play quickly. And it’s a pretty quick game at 40-60 minutes.

We didn’t get into it too much, but there is a campaign here if you want to pursue it.

What I Didn’t Like

This is more of a missed opportunity than a dislke: the backs of the bad news card don’t mean anything (unless it’s a yellow activity card, which happens just a few times). See the A1 and A2 above? They mean nothing useful for gameplay: they only denote which player count decks you are using. Paleo did the wonderful thing (see our review here) of having the back of the cards be a “hint” as to what’s on the front of the card. The A1 and A2 on the backs of the cards above …. don’t really mean anything. They SHOULD give you a hint to “how hard” the bad news is, but they really don’t.

Since you are drawing bad news cards without knowing anything, it makes the game feel a little more random. How many Bad News cards should I draw? I don’t know … I don’t hav a sense of how hard each one is!!! I think a “hint” of some kind would make the game feel less random.

The limited communication rules felt too constraining; they hampered our enjoyment of the game. The best combinations we played in the game where when we could keep the bad news cards from having any effect … and we could only do this if we were more sharing. This game needs an Open Hand rule:

“If you and your friends are comfortable with Open Hand, go ahead and play with all cards showing. Realize that Open Handed may make the game easier, invite analysis paralysis, and/or cause Alpha Players to take over the game.”

Really, this communication limit drop probably dropped by friend’s rating of the game: see below.

Conclusion

I liked Hacktivity! I enjoyed all the choices in the game: choosing how many good news/bad news cards to choose, the order to resolve the cards (fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order), and the choices per card! All of this really made me feel like I was making choices that mattered as I played.

I was be remiss if I didn’t include my friend’s opinions: I liked this more than them. I would give this a 7/10, and suggest we play Open Hand. My friend Teresa liked it ok (no rating), but Sara said “I would give it a 4/10: I liked it okay, but there’s a lot better games to play!” I don’t necessarily agree with her, but you may feel as she does. The main issues for Sara were the lack of Hints on the back of the bad new cards and the stifling of cooperation. The limited communication can be counteracted by playing Open Hand, but the lack of hints can make the bad news feel too random and I am not sure what we can do about that.

I would be happy to teach this to you: I think Hacktivity is a quick and easy game to teach/learn and it promotes a lot of choice. The solo game was fun and the cooperative game was fun once we added Open Hand.

Union City Alliance: Heroes Unite! Like Marvel Legendary, but Now With More Theme! A Review

Union City Alliance is a cooperative super-hero deck-building games that was originally on Kickstarter back in March 2021. The game looked great and promised delivery in October 2021! I was so excited for this game that Union City Alliance made the #1 spot on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!

Unfortunately, the game is about 2.5 years late: The game arrived at my house April 30th, 2024! It’s basically been 3 long years since I backed the Kickstarter.

Interestingly enough, I was never worried that this wouldn’t finally arrive. The designer would do a pretty decent job of keeping us updated (with Kickstarter updates): he would offer full timelines of delivery and discussions of progress. I was grumpy that Union City Alliance was 2.5 years late, but at the end of the day, the Kickstarter was well-run … and they delivered!

Let’s see what we got!

Unboxing

The base game is about the size of a Ticket to Ride sized box: see above with a Coke can for perspective.

The rulebook is the full-size of the box on top!

There’s a lot of punchouts; these are just handy tokens to keep track of Heroism and other resources (Valor, Speed, Might). Interestingly, the Heroism and Damage tokens, which persist between rounds, are circular tokens. The Valor, Speed, and Might tokens, which evaporate between rounds, are square tokens. Even though the game never calls this out, that subtle consistency (persistent vs. ephemeral) was a nice touch.

Also included is a source book; It has both set-up for various scenarios and tons of flavor text and back story for the heroes and villains: see below.

There are a TON of pre-punched standees that are both the Villain and Hero markers. See above.

There’s also a GIANT (see can of Coke per perspective above) pile of Locations! These Locations come out slowly as the Heroes explore the city!

But, this is cooperative deck-building game. So, at its core, this game is all about the cards. When you first open the box, it’s a little daunting to see so many cards!

From an initial Unboxing perspective, this game looks great!

Uncardening

I feel like this needs to be a new phrase: uncardening. It’s the event when you have take a lot of cards out of a new game box and sort them appropriately. But it’s not just sorting: it’s about collecting together “like” cards, figuring out where the cards go in the box, and making sure they are ready to go for play!

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Basically, we had to do the same thing in Earthborne Rangers: go through the cards, sort them, put like cards together (for some notion of “like”), and figure out where they go in the box. See above. Earthborne Rangers had a fairly grumpy uncardening (see our review of Earthborne Rangers here): the components page was misleading, and we spent far too much time trying to uncard the game.

I almost think that the word uncardening (which is a word we coined for Earthborne Rangers) has a negative connotation: it implies you have to spend an extraordinary amount of time putting cards in order.

I remember when I first got Legendary: A Marvel Deck-Building game some 10 or so years ago. It has the worst box opening experience I have ever had! I just have tons of cards and no idea how to put cards together! The rulebook is completely silent on how to sort! As a gaming nubie at the time, I asked my friend John N. to help me (because he had Legendary), and with his help, I was able to put things together. The phrase uncardening applied to Legendary, it applied to Earthborne Rangers, and unfortunately, it now applies now to Union City Alliance.

If you think all deck-building games need a negative uncardening, I suggest you look at the Aeon’s End series of games! They do an amazing job of making the uncardening (in a good sense) easy. See our review of Aeon’s End and Aeon’s End: War Eternal here, and Aeons’ End: Outcasts here!

The first two pages of the rulebook … DO NOT address how to take the cards apart, sort them, put like cards together, and fit them back into the box. I am actually annoyed by this: The Union City Alliance rulebook wasted two very large pages (see above) with huge fonts for credits and an introduction. I am all for getting credit, but I was very annoyed at these designers because it was so hard to uncard their game! They SHOULD HAVE used those two pages for something useful: how to uncard the game!

A simple question: why is there a Playable Hero and a Team-up Hero for Wrangler? See above. Which cards for Wrangler go where? This is an easy concept (once you know it) that should have been presented on those first two pages.

And it takes some knowledge of board games (and perception) to know to look in the lower right corner of the card: the Wrangler cards are the W! See above!

Once you start looking around some more, you’ll notice there is a manifest on the back of the dividers! Yay! They list both the number and the card title (good job!).

I am SO GLAD they have both the title and the card number on the manifest! The card number on the cards are SO SMALL as to be almost unreadable!! I had to zoom in pretty heavily with my phone in the picture above to see the #2 Captain Jupiter card! But having the titles on the manifests helped.

There’s just a lot of cards. I probably spent about an hour and half, maybe two hours uncardening this game. It really shouldn’t have been this much work, and it really shouldn’t have been so cumbersome. The cards are well-labelled, but throwing someone at the game without any directions is a misstep. I am an experienced gamer (now), so I was able to get through this, but I worry a newbie will just give up in disgust trying to uncard this.

But, everything is labelled (once you know where to look: bottom right, and the divider manifests) so you can get there. And once everything is back in the box, it’s very satisfying. See above. This lack of uncardening direction may be the biggest misstep in the entire game: the uncardening just needed a little bit of discussion in the manual.

Rulebook, Er, Play Guide

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This rulebook is gigantic, being the same size as the box.

How does this rulebook do on The Chair Test? Unfortunately, it gets a D on the Chair Test.

It is almost impossible to have this on the chair next to you spread open because it was so big! It does have lots of good pictures and good font, but it was almost unusable on the chair next to me.

However, this game has spawned a new test: The Two-Chair Test. If you put two chairs together (see picture above), you can have the rulebook open and readable without taking up valuable table space! So, the rulebook gets a A in the Two-Chair Test (a second tier test) So, the rulebook lays flat, the fonts are big and readable, and I can read it easily from my chair. In the end, The Chair Tests are all about keeping the rulebook(s) off to the side so I can look stuff easily and not take up valuable table space!

I have to admit, I was a little non-plussed to learn that this wasn’t the full rulebook! It was only the Play Guide! See above: “… but it is only a quick reference...”. You have to go to the website for a full rulebook. It’s cool they have all this on the website (FAQ, full rulebook, etc), but at the time I went there, the web site wasn’t up yet! See below.

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At the time of this writing, however, the web site is up. But, I had to play using only the Play Guide!

Once you get past how HUGE this rulebook, pardon me … Play Guide … is, it’s pretty good at getting you into the game. I don’t usually like thematic fonts for rules (see our review of Hour of Need here and Obliveaon here), but it works here. I think I like it because it’s a very big font, and it’s peppered with a lot of supporting pictures and colors: see above.

There’s no Index to the Play Guide (boo), but there is a Glossary (yay)! See above, In fact, the Glossary seems very complete; it covered just about everything that came up when I played.

Once we got going with the two chairs and through the uncardening, the Play Guide was pretty good at getting me set-up: there were lots of pictures, lots of flavorful text, lots of helpful annotations.

I am still annoyed I didn’t get the full rulebook. I look at computers all day; the last thing I want to do is look online for full rulebook for a board game. The Play Guide has been “good enough”, so I have been just pushing forward with that. I haven’t needed the web site … yet.

Gameplay

Union City Alliance is a cooperative super-hero deck-building game. That tells you a lot about this game already! See our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games for more discussion of deck-building games!

Each player chooses a hero to operate: that player gets the Playable Hero deck for that character: see above as Player One chooses Captain Jupiter.

An interesting thing that Union City Alliance does is the cards are divided into two groups: your initial deck (with the 0 in the upper right corner) and the Power deck (with the green in the upper right corner). See above. Power cards are separated out, and only that player can buy those Power cards later in the game, using the (green) resource Heroism. It’s a real neat way of keeping each character very distinct, as each character has their own set of Power cards!

So, when you set up, you have your normal intro deck and your Power deck “tempting” you with some cards you can buy! See above as Captain Jupiter sets-up with two Power Cards available to buy, with her initial 5 card hand at the bottom.

Each card can be played for Resources! The three main resources are Valor (blue), Speed (yellow) and Might (red). See the Plucky Interns above giving 1 Valor! Valor is generally the resource used for buying Hero Upgrade cards!

You need at 2-4 characters to play: see above as Doctor Tomorrow and Captain Jupiter are set-up!

One of the curious things this does as a deck-builder: you don’t usually get upgrade cards you can buy unless you go exploring! As you explore the city, more Hero cards come out that you can buy! This is different from other deck-building games like Legendary and Dominion and Aeon’s End where there’s just “9 types of cards to buy!”. See an example from Aeon’s End below.

As you explore Union City, new cards come out: see below.

Every time you explore a new Location, two new Hero cards come out! (And a City Card, which is typically Bad Newsish).

This is interesting, as it forces the player to explore and look around to get upgrades. There’s no “set set” of upgrades: you get what you get as you explore! And you can only buy (generally) Hero Cards from the Location you are on! This is a nice and thematic twist on the deck-building genre.

To win, players must take out the baddies! See above which represents “the bad guys!’ The bad guys in Union City Alliance are pretty complicated to run: there’s a Peril deck, a Plot deck, issues #1-4 of the Plot Deck, and specialized baddies (Mobsters and Gangsters in this case). To win with Pterano-Don and the Dino-Mafia, players must defeat all the Mobsters!

It’s quite hard to take out the Mobsters!

The city has to be big enough for the Mobsters to come out (a rule requires that), so that also forces the exploration aspect! See above as the city is pretty huge with one of the Mobsters looming!

To win, take out all the Mobsters! As I took them out, I put them in “jail” on top of the box! See above!

Solo Play

Unfortunately, there is no provided solo mode in the game! See above, as the game is only listed for 2-4 Players.

It’s very discouraging that they didn’t follow Saunders’ Law here: no solo mode! So, I went ahead and played my first game two-handed solo. That’s right, I operated Doctor Tomorrow and Captain Jupiter and just played this as if it were a 2 Player game, alternating between the two.

I think I know why they didn’t include the two-handed solo mode in the game: it’s pretty complicated. I ended up playing my first game (granted, a learning game) in about three hours. Each character in the game is very distinct with a very different play-style! There is a lot of context switching between the characters, as each character has their own specific cards and Power deck that players need to be thinking about! And the game can get pretty overwhelming as you play: see the picture above near the end of my solo game! There are a lot of distinct Hero cards and distinct challenges and distinct Locations!

And the Villains are complicated to play too! Plot card, Peril Cards, issues, distinct baddies! So, the solo player has to run two characters AND the Villain deck!

See above at the end of my first solo game! The board is a bit of a mess between two characters, the villains, the Locations, and all the cards!

I can see why the Union City Alliance people chose to avoid the two-handed solo mode: this game is very overwhelming in solo mode! My first solo game took about three hours to play! It probably wasn’t the best way to learn the game, but I believe in trial-by-fire for learning games: the only way to learn is to jump in! So, I think, if you are determined, the two-handed solo mode will work. And once you learn the game, the basic flow is pretty straight-forward.

Cooperative Mode

My second game was a two-player, two character game! I learned quite a bit in my solo game: things to do and NOT to do!

First, I learned to allocate signficantly more space for the Locations! See above as I leave half the table for that!

I also learned to be more methodical when placing Locations: each Location (when explored) adds Two Hero cards and one City Deck card. Since space is at a premium, we tried to make sure the two City Cards are on the bottom half, and the City Card (whether a challange or a Bad guy) is on the top of the Location. Since each Location also has a unique ability, we made sure that text was readable! So, there are four things you need to see on a Location: let’s make sure they are consistent and readable as we place! That makes the game … less messy … as the city gets explored!

See above as the city is a little less daunting as we have more space and the layout is a little more consistent.

Even though each player runs their own character, which tends to make the players more isolated turns, Union City Alliance still encourages cooperation. Players have to work together figure out how to take out certain monsters and challenges to clear the way to take out the Mobsters! The game ramps up in difficult pretty quickly, and some coordination between the heroes is necessary to keep the badness under control.

I liked the solo game, but the game is better at two or more: there’s more people to share the responsibility! Union City Alliance can be very overwhelming (there’s quite a bit of maintenance per round) as solo gamer, but the sharing of responsibilities made this much easier to get through. Teresa was in charge of The Green Death (that was here hero) and the Locations, and I was responsible for Captain Jupiter (that was my hero) and the Villain decks. Off-loading some of the maintenance to other players made the game much more fun! I could play without worrying about keeping the game up!

Solo was fun, but the game is just more fun with more players. I see why they chose NOT to put 1-4 Players on the box.

Theme

This game is dripping with theme!

Each hero is very distinct and plays very differently, representing the sum of their powers!

There’s a ton of flavor text on the cards, which you can ignore if you like, but it really does draw you into your character.

The Source Book just digs even deeper into each character! You want back story? You got it!

The Power Decks, which are unique to each character, also contribute to making each character just feel so different and flavorful!

The Villain deck is quite complicated to run, but is very thematic! The “harder” cards come out in later issues of the game! There’s quite a it happening per round with the Villain deck, but it is all unique to the Villain .. again contributing to the theme.

The larger than normal standees (especially for the dino-mob) makes the game feel thematic! They are so cool looking!

If you haven’t noticed, just about every card has unique art on it! It’s all the consistent from the same artist and just draws you into the game!

This game has so much theme to it: I’d give it a 10/10 for theme. The events, the characters, the Locations, the heroes, the art, the standees, the vibe of the game: 10/10.

You do pay a price for this theme, though: from minor costs like flavor text (“Oh man, there’s flavor text on the card I should read“), to annoying costs (“set up the next city Location“), intrinsic costs like understanding you Power cards, to major costs (like running the very distinct Villain decks). My games of Union City Alliance have run about 2.5 to 3 hours. Some of that time is just the sheer maintenance of immersing yourself into this universe.

The Art

I love the art in this game. It’s pretty clear the art is mostly the product of one artist (Antonio Garica), and I think he just knocked it out of the park! The art feels very comic-booky and super-heroey. It’s so thematic and so good.

My only complaint, and this is not even really a complaint … is that his style might be thought of as too cartoony! I don’t have any problem with that, but if you saw the game cover in a store, you might this this is a game for younger audiences. While Union City Alliance is generally family friendly, this is a deep complex game that might be too much for younger audiences.

The age limits of 14+ should absolutely be adhered to (see back of the box), as I think someone who’s just starting in games might think “Oh that game looks cartoony and kinda cute! Let’s get it!” Union City Alliance is much heavier than the art belies. Caveat Emptor.

Conclusion

If you want theme, you have to pay for it! If you want a lighter super-hero deck-building game, you should bring out Marvel Legendary: It has your Marvel heroes and is pretty straight-forward to teach. But honestly, I always thought the theme was lacking in Marvel Legendary: “Wait, you are buying a team of heroes? What?”

Union City Alliance is a deck-building super-hero game that has the theme I always wanted in Marvel Legendary. In Union City Alliance, characters have unique powers, Villains are distinct, exploration/upgrading is both natural and encouraged, upgrades are tailored to your hero, and the art is very consistent and thematic.

If you want theme, you have to pay for it: Union City Alliance takes longer than many games (2.5-3 hours), has more upkeep per turn, and has more complicated set-up and interactions. You pay for this incredibly thematic game by having a game that’s more complex.

I want that theme! Union City Alliance would easily make my Top 10 Cooperative SuperHero Games with a 9/10 and it will probably be near the top spot of my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024. It took about 3 years to get Union City Alliance, but I was totally right to make this my #1 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Play

Two Players

3-4 Player Games

What I Liked

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Player Count

Solo Game

Two Player

3- Player and 4-Player

Conclusion

The Road To Development

What Do I Need?

Current State

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

Communications Restrictions

Try It Out

Acrylic Standees

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Reactions

Conclusion

Unboxing And Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

Play Order

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Reactions

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook

Good Guys and Bad Guys

The Manor: Worker Placement Rooms!

Resources

Time

Doors and Connectivity

Spells

Companions

Solo Game: True Solo With One Character

Solo Play: Alternating Between Two Characters

Cooperative Play

Things I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Reactions

Conclusion

Unboxing And Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Mode

Cooperative Mode

Too Many Expansions?

Abstract or Thematic?

Some Issues

Conclusion

Appendix: Furoshiki

Rogue

Slay The Spire

Unboxing

Gameplay

The Rulebook

Solo Game

Cooperative Play with Players Who DO NOT Know the Video Game

Cooperative Play With People WHO HAVE PLAYED The Video Game

A While

Flaws

Conclusion

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion