What’s a party game? A party game is usually a casual game you can pull out with a fairly large group of friends and jump right into! Many, if not most, of the cooperative party games we see are Cooperative Guessing games, where the players collectively guess something based on clues from a clue-giver!
Surprisingly, the year of 2024 produced quite a number of cooperative party games! That’s right; cooperative party games! And most are Cooperative Guessing games! We saw some really good party games on the Top 10 Cooperative Party Games list … and here’s 10 more below just from 2024!
Like many of the games on this year’s list, this is a Cooperative Guessing game! In this game, a clue-giver will give word clues to “guide” the others around the board, trying to get to a destination on the board!
This feels a lot like the cooperative word guessing games Mystic Paths or Landmarks (see below), as you use words to imply directions to travel. What makes this a little different is that the words you choose refer to tourist spots in the maps! There are 4 maps in the game for London, Paris, New York City, and Tokyo! See below for the map of London!
This is a real unique game and has some really neat idea in the crowded cooperative word guessing genre!
Landmarks is a cooperative word guessing game where one player gives word clues, trying to guide the rest of the playing (cooperatively guessing) to water, treasure, and finally the exit! This game is very similar to a game called Mystic Paths where players are moving across a map of hexes.
There’s also elements of Codenames in here, as the clue-giver has a hidden map as he tries to guide the players around the map!
We have played this game with several groups, and it seemed to go over pretty well! It takes a few plays to get the sense and spirit of the game, but once you do, it is fun. Some people didn’t love this (because sometimes it was just too vague or the map is wonky), which is why it’s lower on this list. The components are quite nice (with the cloth map and dry-erase hexes), and it was generally fun!
This looks like a role-playing adventure game (see picture above), but it’s actually a role-playing game PARTY game! It even says that on the cover!
It’s quite silly as a game; a player will have to do an activity and then roll a 20-sided die (secretly) behind their character shield (see above). The Berserker has to open the door; what does a “19” mean? The player then roll-plays what they do (based on the number they roll) and the other player have to “guess” what the roll was on based on what they roll played! It’s a silly game that just gets sillier as you play it!
In fact, it’s so simple to play this that the directions for how to play are summarized very well on the back of the box! See above. My friends and I had fun playing, pardon me, ROLL-PLAYING this silly adventure party game.
So, this is another cooperative word guessing game, but it has elements of math and it is quite thinky. I love this game because it’s so unique and interesting, but some people just bounced off it because of its weird blend of math and wordplay.
Players plays as two teams; a team of aliens trying to communicate with a team of humans! Teams communicate single words to each other to establish some ideas! What letters you use in your words matters, as well as what concepts/words you are trying to communicate! It’s great fun with lots of deduction … if you grok the game.
This is a great game that can play 2-8+ people, and you can pull it out casually … once everyone knows how to play. The biggest problem is that it takes some brainwork and time to figure out this game. This is probably the most thinky game on this list, and why some people might not classify this as a party game .. which is why this is only #7 on this list, despite how good a game it is. See our review of Message From The Stars here to see if you might enjoy this! (Remember, Codenames is classified as a party game, and it’s quite thinky too!)
Many of the games on this list as cooperative word guessing games; this is a number guessing game! This has a lot of deduction as players can either guess a card a player might be holding (like cooperative go-fish) or give a clue (which feels a little like The Crew).
This is basically a cooperative go-fish game with elements of deduction/clue-giving (ala The Crew). It’s probably the second most thinky game on this list (after Message From The Stars). But this is easy to pull out, quick to explain, and quick to play at only 15 minutes! It does take a few times to get the hang of it, but people seem to want to play again!
This is an odd duck of a game. Players take a bunch of black and white pictures and collectively classify them using only a few words, like “DA” and “BLUMP”. Basically, the group is coming up with a language for describing shared traits using a few very simple words. These few words are the ONLY communication that players are allowed!
In the first part of the game, the players collectively classify all the pictures together using only those few words (like “DA” and “BLUMP”) as they point and move pictures. In the second part of the game, new pictures are introduced and the players have to try and figure out, using only the new language of those few words, the new thing. As long as you have a group that doesn’t annoyingly repeat the weird little words ad naseum, this is a fun game … it’s almost a linguistics experiment!
It sounds like it can’t work, but my group really enjoyed it! This is one you might want to try before you pick it up; some people will be annoyed by it, some people won’t get it, but some people will love it! Our groups loved it! Maybe yours will too!
This is a game that I didn’t like as much as everyone else, but it was such a hit for everyone else, I had to put this on the list! One player (the Mayor) puts city Locations out, and the other players have to guess where he would place them based on the locality to other Locations in the game!
The Mayor rotates every turn, so a new player has to decide what Locations go where! It’s all about building the municipality, but with some real silly decisions!
My friend Kurt loves this game and we’ve played it a number of times when he has come to visit! If this sounds like fun, I suggest you give it a try! A bunch of people I know and like really like this game!
This is such a neat game! It’s a very simply premise as players search a shaded picture for certain figures, counting them up! Each player needs to find them independently on their own sheet! If they find “enough” together, they can stay ahead and win!
The sheer fun of this game is the clever sheets that are have darkened plastic. When you place a white surface underneath, the picture comes apparent! See the “fully darkened” picture above … and the picture with a white spotlight below!
There is no batteries or magic technology here; it’s just a white surface underneath making the plastic easily viewable!
This game has worked really well in so many situations! I have played with little kids (like 5 years old) and older adults, and big kids, and even though this “looks like a kid’s game”, people really love the Spotlight mechanism! It’s just so cool!
Wait, this is a cooperative memory match game? Yes, and it works surprisingly well! This is probably Sara’s favorite game of all the games on this list!
Players draw tiles from a bag and cooperatively “come up with a story” for the shape and place it in the warehouse.
After placing a bunch of tiles down, players must try to cooperatively remember what tile was what by trying to match other tiles to it! It’s wacky and the stories people come up are really funny! It’s surprisingly goofy, but it’s really easy to explain and jump into! See our review here to see see why Wilmot’s Warehouse is much better than you expect!
This was a bit of surprise as our #1 choice for the best cooperative party games of 2024, but it just kept coming to the table all this year! And we all loved it! Players get asked a silly question like: “What do you tell a vampire to get him to turn you?” (See back cover above for more questions) And then everyone gets 1 (or 2) cards from 1-10, and everyone has to answer that question so that 1 is least likely to get turned, and 10 is most likely! But without revealing their number! (Much like Adventure Party from earlier)
The guesser has to take all the answers and sort them from lowest to highest .. if they get them all in order, it counts as a point! (You can have upto one mistake)
Like all good party games, the points don’t matter, and you just keep playing, not really caring if you win or not! This is a mass market party game from The Exploding Kittens people; I picked it up at Target, so it’s really easy to find! Check it out! Hopefully you will enjoy it as much as we did!
This is a mouthful of a title: The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. See the full title above! BoardGameGeek lists it as The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. Whew! We’ll stay with the “shorter” title.
I ordered my copy directly from Asmodee, and it arrived mid January 2025. I tried VERY hard to get the game as soon as it came out! I was very excited for it!! I saw a TON of reviewers get it earlier in 2024, but as a plain-old boring paying customer, the earliest I could get my copy was straight from Asmodee’s web site in January 2025 (after pre-ordering it back in November (?) 2024).
So, what is this game? It’s a small-box game for 1-4 players, Ages 10+ with a “listed” playing time of 20 minutes. That time is reasonable accurate for describing a single game, but this is, at its heart, a campaign game! So, it’s a campaign of 18 chapters, and each chapter can have multiple games. So, a chapter is “not necessarily” one game, but many times is. (After you complete the campaign, there is a standalone mode so you can continue playing).
This game (you’ll notice I am staying away from saying the full name) is a cooperative trick-taking game! Players work together to take tricks, but under certain conditions! One of the biggest parts of the game is that it is a Limited Communication game: players are not allowed (in any way) to discuss the cards in their hands as they play. All they can do is deduce what other people have by what cards they played.
Those of you paying attention might say “Hey! That sounds like the Crew! That’s a cooperative trick-taking game too, right?” Yup! We liked The Crew quite a bit, as it made the #2 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Space Games! There’s a lot of similarities between the two: they both have ongoing campaigns that start easy and get harder, they both are smaller box games, and they both are Limited Communication games. The best description of Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game is Lord of the Rings meets The Crew. But there are some interesting differences, which we will discuss!
Unboxing and Gameplay
This is almost exclusively a card game. There are 3 decks in the game: the intro deck (far left), Part I deck (first 12 chapters) and Part II deck (last 6 chapters).
So many cards. See above.
There are some tokens; the purple tokens are used to notate “required” characters: when you play, ever player must take a character, and certain characters are required for certain chapter. The big Ring card is used to denote when Rings have been played, and thus allow leading with them (see more discussion below).
This a trick-taking game, so there are suits. Rather than “boring” hearts, spades, diamonds, etc, the suits are thematic Shadows, Hills, Mountains, Rings, and Forest. See above.
Each player will assume the role of a Lord of the Rings character (you may assume multiple characters depending on the player count).
Each character has a win condition: in order to win a game, you (usually) hav to satisfy all characters’ winning conditions!!! Notice Frodo’s “win” condition: he must win 4 or more of the Rings cards in the tricks he wins.
Pippin’s win condition is to win the fewest tricks: see above. You’ll also note that at the start of the game, some characters are allowed to “exchange” cards with other characters. You can’t still talk about your cards in hand, but you can give away obvious cards. For example: you really don’t want Pippin to have too many high cards (since he has to lose most tricks), so you may give away an 8 of Hills.
An interesting rule of the game is that a player can’t lead with a Ring card unless a Ring has already been played into a previously won trick (by being sloughed off when a player couldn’t match the lead suit). The Ring token is on the black-and-white to show: “Nope: you can’t lead a trick with a Ring suit“.
Once at least one Ring has come out, then Ring cards may be lead! See the colorful side of the Ring above! It now means “Yep! You can lead tricks with Ring cards now!“.
There are lots of little special rules in the game. For example, after dealing out all the cards, one card is always “lost” (to make the math work, there is always one extra card). But Gandalf has a special rule that he can take the lost card into his hand!
Each character is dealt a hand of cards and uses those to play a trick-taking game! The holder of the 1 Ring always starts the game. Frodo is almost always in play, and he always starts with the 1 Ring: see above.
Players continue playing until all their win conditions are satisfied … and they win! If, at any point, the win conditions can’t be satisified, the game is lost. In the campaign, losing means you just play the same game again until you win (usually).
A winning game moves to the next … game. In the beginning of the campaign, that usually means the next Chapter: these are called “Short games” (see below).
Later in the campaign, you may have to play multiple games to advance to the next chapter. These are called “Long” games (see below).
If you can get through all 18 chapters of the campaign, you win!
Solo Play
There is a solo mode for the game! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) Given that The Crew (the game that this will be compared to over and over) DID NOT have a solo mode, this is huge!
The solo mode has very different rules than the main cooperative game! During the main cooperative game, all cards are dealt out, and the players (cooperatively) make decisions about what to play based on what they see in their entire hand! See above as a cooperative player has a whole bunch of cards!
In the solo game, the solo player assumes the role of 4 of the characters, and only gets “part” of each hand (4 cards each to start)! See above as Chapter 1 has the solo player playing 4 characters with 4 cards each!
Each character gets 4 cards (see above) and will get a new cards after a trick is taken! So, the solo player has to decide how to play cards based on seeing ALL Characters cards, but not all cards per hand!
So, this is a solo mode which requires the solo player to operate 4 characters! Normally, I worry about the intellectual overload, the context-switching between characters, and general maintenance. But it’s really not an issue here! Each character is very simple to operate: they don’t have special powers, they simply have a special winning condition. It’s really easy to look at the board (see above) and get a sense what each character should play!!
The solo mode requires you to look at all the cards in all the hands of all the characters and make decisions to achieve their win goals. That sounds daunting, but it really isn’t. You know EXACTLY what each character will play; what you don’t know (for sure) is what card each character will get next. The randomness in the solo game is based on what card each player gets next round. I never found this randomness too debilitating. I had a few games where the cards went against me, but it was easy to replay that game … remember, this is a 20-minute game, so any randomness in the deals (even if it completely sucks), will be over soon and you can play another game.
Said another way, I didn’t think there was too much randomness in this game to make me dislike it.
To emphasize the point that this is an easy game to get into, let me tell you that I played through the entire 18-Chapter solo game when I was sick! I wasn’t at my best, but the LOTR trick-taking game is really easy to get into! Each game is “only” 20 minutes or so, so when I got tired when I was sick, I could go take a nap, and come back again!
Let’s be clear, even though the solo game is easy to pick-up, easy to play, and easy to keep coming back to, there’s still a lot of engaging decisions! Part of the reason I liked the solo game so much was that it was engaging and “distracted” me from being sick!
The amount of manintenance as you play the game is pretty minimal; it’s real easy to play solo. But there is a lot of maintenance between games: Honestly, the worst part of the game is the constant shuffling. You need to make sure you do a really good job shuffling the cards, because a bad shuffle may cause you to lose the game! So, I ended up doing a pile shuffle after every game just to make sure thing were shuffled!
As a solo game, this game is a huge win! It’s easy to learn, easy to play, and engaging enough to keep coming back to! Like I said, I played the entire 18-Chapter campaign solo when I was sick, and it was great! It’s easy enough to play when you are “distracted”, but fun enough to keep you engaged!
Major win for having a solo mode: What’s the score? The Crew: 0, Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 1.
I liked the solo game, and even though I have defeated the entire game, I will keep it in my collection to play again solo.
Cooperative Mode
So, there are actually several cooperative modes based on the number of players. It “feels like” the best way to play the game is 4-Players (or 3-Player). (The 2-Player game is really very different; I can’t comment on that as I never got a chance to play it. I have to admit the 2-Player mode looks very daunting).
My 4-Player group sat down and played though 12 games (8 chapters) in one night over 3 hours! They won most games pretty handily, but it kept getting harder and harder! By game 8, they had to replay it 3 times! Game 8 features Tom Bombadil pretty prominently, and the joke was that game 8 was just as annoying as Tom Bombadil!
The major differences between the solo and 4-Player cooperative game: 1) The solo player sees all hands, but only a limited number of cards 2) The cooperative player sees all cards in their hand, but only can see their hand
The Limited Communication rules are VERY Clear from the rulebook: you pretty much can’t talk about anything except public information, such as player’s winning conditions and special rules. Anything in your hand can’t be discussed AT ALL!
After playing through 8 Chapters, my friends basically said they liked this better than The Crewand it was more thematic! They liked the art, the cards, the character win goals.
The Crew: 0; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (theme, art)
I like to point out that the Crew has the “very limited communication” with the communication tokens. I actually prefer that part of the Crew: I don’t love that there is NO communication really in this game (but see below). Recall, in the Crew, every player “can communicate” once at a critical juncture with “highest card” or “lowest card” or “only card. There is no such mechanism in Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: the rules for limited communication are pretty brutal.
The Crew: 1 (has some critical communication); Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2
One Ring To House Rule Them All
Let me tell you what happened in the 4-Player cooperative game: when choosing characters to play, my friends ended up talking a little about which characters to choose. “Oh, I should probably be Pippin, my hand sucks.” “Ya, I can be Tom Bombadil I guess”. Here’s the thing: the rules are VERY CLEAR that they can’t do that!
I read the rulebook aloud to my friends: this explicitly say they can’t do this … “During setup, players should not discuss character preferences, as this may reveal information”
My friends hated this rule! This is the one and only chance to really communicate on the game, and they felt like it made the game more fun! “Give us SOME choice! This is a house rule for us!”
I didn’t mention this, but I ended just watching and shepherding my friends through 8 chapters (I was the fifth wheel and didn’t play). And watching my friends “discuss” which characters to play seemed to engage them and made them talk! They REALLY had fun picking characters! I think it also gave them more “skin” in the game, as they weren’t just “saddled” with a character, they had a choice in the pick!
It’s very explicit in the rules that players can’t reveal any intent on characters, but I think that’s a mistake. I think the game is more engaging and more fun if players have some choice there! Honestly, this helps combat the problem I have with this game: there’s no “special communication” allowed (like The Crew!). Watching the game, it was VERY clear that allowing the players to help choose their characters was more fun, so we made it a house rule: “Players can communicate preferences for choosing characters, but just can’t reveal what’s in their hands”.
With the house rule: The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 3 (house rule) Without the house rule: The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (no house rule)
The Campaign
The Campaign is … just the game getting harder and harder. The campaign follows the story in the book really well; one of my players is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and they noted how well the Chapters followed the book. But, at the end of the day, each game is pretty much independent of the previous game. There is no “levelling-up”, there are no major penalties for losing—each game just gets “harder”. Certain characters are “revealed” as you play, but generally the campaign is just harder and harder games. It’s a linear campaign.
If you were looking for a more operatic campaign with levelling-up, branching narrative, satisfying punishments, debilitating punishments, and state changing, this isn’t the game for you. But, if you want a bunch of games in a row that nominally follow the plot of the book The Fellowship of the Ring (without too much maintenance in between), this is a good game for you.
What Do You Do When The Campaign Is Over?
There are rules for playing the game after you finish the campaign: see rulebook above. Honestly, I would just rather play the campaign again; the campaign is easy to reset, and setting up games “post campaign” looks messy.
What I Liked
The art: This stained-glass art for the characters was very thematic and very appealing. The art on the Mountains, Rings, Shadows, etc. suits was also very thematic. The art and theme is much more appealing in this game than the Crew: The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 4(with house rule and art)
The Characters: The character art and win conditions were all very interesting. One of my players pointed out they liked that the win Conditions changed every time, but they followed the characters! The Crew is a little different in that the win conditions just a condition. I think it’s a win for the Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game that there are characters. Having characters makes the game a little more engaging! For my group at least.
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 5(with house rule and art and characters)
Solo mode: The solo mode is good. It’s easy to get into, and it’s easy to start/stop it at any time. We’ve already noted that the Crew does NOT have a solo mode, whereas this does.
What I Didn’t Like
Communications too limited: I think the Crew has the major advantage by giving players “chances” to do communication at critical times: There is no such mechanism in this game. I don’t want to undersell this point: this is one of the major reasons I adore the Crew! The whole idea of communicating a critical piece of information at JUST THE RIGHT TIME is such an engaging and interesting mechanism in the Crew. There is nothing like that here.
I will say that the House Rule we proposed (allow characters to more interactively choose characters) goes a long way towards alleviating this issue.
So much shuffling! Just be aware how much shuffling there is … you may want to sleeve your cards. Since each game is only 20 minutes, these cards get touched and shuffled a lot. I currently don’t have my cards sleeved, but maybe I should.
Conclusion
The Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a fantastic game that I think people will adore. I watched as my group just jumped in and played 3 hours, and they had a ball! I watched as I played solo over the entire campaign, and I had a ball!
The best description I have of this game is The Crew meets Lord of the Rings! It’s a very thematic co-op, at least moreso than The Crew. My friends all preferred this over the Crew … but only if they had the House Rule that they could talk more about character selection. Watching them play cooperatively, I would strongly recommend this House Rule: it really seemed to make the game more engaging for my friends!
The solo game was very engaging and I would play it again.
This is a very easy game to jump into, either cooperatively or solo, and it’s easy to play (with lots of fun decisions). I personally prefer The Crew over this (because of the critical communication rule), but my friends all preferred this game. If I want to play solo, I can’t play The Crew, but I can play this.
Great game. I will keep both The Crew and Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game in my collection, but it appears my friends all prefer Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game.
You might want to sleeve your game if you pick it up. My cards have started getting a little grody.
Unstoppable is a cooperative deck-building/card-crafting game! This was #4 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2025! This was on Kickstarter back in June 2024, and delivered to me Saturday January 17th, 2025! I backed it, expecting it to arrive later in 2025, but it actually delivered early! (It originally promised February 2025). Amazing!
This delivered with three playmats, the Tyrant’s End expansion, and the base game: see above.
So what is Unstoppable? The game describes itself as a Roguelike Momentum Deckbuilder … meh, that’s an okay description, but I’d prefer to call it a deck-building/card-crafting boss-battler instead (I think it’s just “hot” to call games “roguelike” at the moment).
Be clear that this game ONLY supports 1 to 2 players before you get too excited; this game reminds me of a more tightly-coupled Astro Knights (see our review of Astro Knightshere and here): Unstoppable still has that sci-fi feel, that deck-building feel, and that boss-battling feel … just like Astro Knights, but it also has some really different ideas. What do I mean by that? Let’s take a look below!
Unboxing
The Unstoppable base box is actually not that big; see Coke can for perspective above.
This is a deck-building game (and card-crafting: we’ll touch on that in a second) , so there are a ton of cards: See above.
There’s also some money tokens (credits, far right: I mean, this is a deck-building game, so you have to buy SOMETHING to upgrade your deck), hit point tokens (middle: you gotta do damage to take out minions on the way to the big bad boss), and some action point tokens (far left: yes, this game has action points too!).
There’s not THAT much in the base box; mostly cards and tokens and a few larger mats.
Playmats
I can hear some of you asking … “So Rich, why are there three playmats?” An excellent question.
The playmats are double-sided.
One side of the playmat is a single player mat. This is where one player’s cards, play board, threat, tokens, etc. goes. See above.
The other side of the playmat is where the main upgrades (this is a deck-building game, remember?), the core cards, and the big bad boss you battle lives. See above.
The reason there are three playmats is because the game is either 1-player or 2-players! Each player gets a mat (2 mats) and the big bad boss gets a mat (for up to 3 mats). See below for a 2-Player set-up:player 1 on left, player 2 on right, upgrades/boss on top.
So, to be clear, the playmats cost extra money; they don’t come with the game. Were they worth the extra money? So, I paid $100 for the base game, 3 mats, and one expansion. I like how they mats organize the game, but strictly speaking you don’t need them!
The rulebook DOES show how the game sets-up without the mats, so you don’t need them. But I liked them; much like the Aeon’s End: The Descent playmat was so useful, so too was the playmat for Unstoppable. But maybe you should see if you like the base game before you go investing all the $$$ for the playmats and expansion … keep reading …
Rulebook
I am a little grumbly with this rulebook. There are about 3 or 4 things that it could have EASILY done to make it SIGNIFICANTLY better.
The good news is that it gets an A- on the Chair Test.
It opens up and sits perfectly well on the chair next to me, making it easy to consult. So, they definitely did that right: see above.
The Components page (on the left above) is “okay”. The first real problem is … how do you set this up? There is a discussion (right side of the page) about “how you set-up and sleeve” the game, but THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PICTURE describing it! I was able to figure it out, but people who have no idea what card-crafting is or even deck-building will be completely lost with these directions (far right side of the page). A single picture might take this game from unplayable to playable for certain people. And a little picture would have made me happy; show me how the decks fit together. Please? I feel like the description above wasn’t quite enough.
The set-up was pretty good: see above.
The next place I had problems was the card anatomy. Here, the Defense and Bonus areas on the Threat Cards were poorly described. The problem is that most Threat Cards use the SKULL symbol, and it’s not clear what that means (the skull on the Threat Cards is a different color and/or outline than the reference card: we discuss more below). A simple example describing one combat would have helped that.
The rest of the rulebook is pretty good.
I also really wanted a game summary on the back; I ended up paging through the gameplay pages over and over as I played; it would have been nice had those been summarized on the back.
This rulebook was … ok. I just wanted a few more examples, a few more discriminators, and a few more pictures in the rulebook to help me get into the game. After a little trek onto BGG (see thread here), I feel like I got my questions answered, but the rulebook could have been better.
It worked. Mostly. Except for set-up. It could have been significantly better with a few extra pictures.
Storybook
There is a storybook for the game. You don’t need it to play the game. It’s just flavor text. I never read it, and I feel bad for not reading it?
Sleevening
Like I mentioned in the rulebook section, it was more work than I expected to get this game into playable shape. It took me about an hour or so? Basically, you have to “sleeven” the game and put a bunch of cards into sleeves.
Let’s be clear: the sleeves come with the game! Although this is “mostly” a deck-building game (you can build a deck, add better cards, and cull lesser cards: See our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games for more discussion of deck-building games), it is also a card-crafting game; this is a term that came into parlance with another of John D Clair’s Games: Mystic Vale (although this is a slightly different flavor of that idea). This game is built for you to put cards inside the sleeves, and have multiple cards together at the same time.
Once the cards get going, they will have two sides: a core side (above right: the GOOD side) and a Threat side (above left: the BAD side). There we actually two cards inside the sleeve! This basically allows the GOOD side and BAD side to vary independently.
The GOOD sides are what the characters can do in the game: deal damage, shield themselves, etc. See above.
The GOOD cards tell you which BAD cards they pair with; see the backs above (well, the intro cards do, once you start playing, you get random BAD cards).
The Threat cards (the other side) will be the bad guys that the players fight during the game. These cards, when defeated, will turn over and flow into the GOOD guys hand on the good side!
You might ask “Why do we have these weird rules and weird backs/fronts?” It’s to support UPGRADES (and allow the fronts and backs to vary independently, but that’s a complex discussion).
Probably the coolest part of Unstoppable is that you can UPGRADE a card: it stays attached to the card … in the sleeve! The reason these cards are so WEIRD-shaped is that the upgrades go into the right part of the card and basically stay attached/stay in the card sleeve so that card is better for the rest of the game!
See above as we try to choose between two UPGRADES: Do I want to making it Repeating or add a 2000w Arc Capacitor? The repeater gives me three separate shots, but the capacitor gives me one big shot!! Which do I want?
I choose the capacitor! See as I slide it in …
… and see as it augments my card! Pretty cool!
This is the core crafting mechanic of the game; this is the cool gimmick.
Gameplay
Each player chooses one character to play: see above.
The back of your card indicates which specialized cards you start with (and a little flavor text).
The player sets-up with their starting deck: three special cards and 7 standard “starting” cards. They set-up on the player side.
Your deck goes on the character mat, with Armor and Hit points being tracked.
You also set-up three Threats you must deal with in your personal space. You start with three cards in hand, three action points, and three Threats to deal with.
To play a card, you need to be able to pay the Action point cost (in the upper right corner). Playing Strike gives you a simple 1 hit point of damage.
You do damage to one of the three Threats: see above (more of them if they are FAST); if any of these Threats survive to the next round, they will do Damage to you!
If you take out a Threat, the card FLIPS to the GOOD side and comes into your hand! That’s right, you don’t really draw from your deck: the main way to get new cards in your hand is to take out Threats! That’s very interesting!
Of course, this is a deck-building game, so you have to get new cards somehow. Basically, every turn, you get to choose one of three (you draft) the three cards where the BLUE LEVEL marker is (see above). There are 6 levels of core cards, with higher levels being obviously better!
Every time you empty your deck, you level up and move the level marker up. (There are also ways to move the level marker up quicker, but only temporarily). Leveling-up is a fun time; you get to CULL a card, move the level marker up, and anticipate some new “better” cards!
This is a boss-battler, so you have to take out the BIG BAD BOSS; depending on which one you choose. See above. Interestingly, you can only do “boss damage” (see it blurred below) when you kill certain threats from your deck. These special threats get added every time you level up (and you usually start with 2 of these “boss threats”: see Below.)
There’s actually quite a bit more to the game, but that’s the basics.
Build a better deck and craft better cards! Take out local Threats on the way to taking out the Big Bad!
Solo Play
So, this game is definitely built for solo (thanks for following Saunders’ Law), with 2-Player being the secondary mode. See above: even the font hints at that disparity (SOLO is all big)!
I ended up playing about 10 games of the solo game in the first few days after I got this game! There are three bosses that come with the game, and I was able to defeat each one … after I lost a few times. (There are ways to up the difficulty, and there are 4 characters to play with to give the game more replayability)
It takes a little while to get into the “flow” of the game. There are a lot of rules, there are a lot sections, but there are a lot of decisions (in a good way) to make too.
For example, there are 4 factions in the game that all play VERY differently! If you have multiple cards of a faction, they can “support” the other cards and make them more powerful! I tended to get the Silver faction (the little diagonal raven) in my first few games. But there is also worth in getting multiple factions, especially with the UNITE keyword which gives you special on how many different factions you have in play/in hand!
My favorite decisions in the game came when I was stuck; it was pretty clear that I was going to die and lose, but if I could upgrade my cards JUST RIGHT before I went into battle, I could stay alive! The UPGRADES, and the fact that you can do them anytime on your turn, really make it so you can pivot and be smart! I really appreciated that I could feel clever. Deck-building games tend to have some randomness in them, but the UPGRADE mechanism is what kept me from being too grumpy with that randomness.
I will say that the solo player doesn’t have to do too much work once the game is going, but the set-up and ESPECIALLY the tear-down is a lot of work! Going through your entire deck and separating the core cards and threat cards is so much work. Besides the “unsleevening” (which was a sub-optimal experience), the tear-down is one of the biggest “oofs: that’s a lot of work” in the game. See above as I tear apart the decks!
There are a lot of rules, a lot of Icons, a lot of factions. I appreciated that, by playing this solo, I could learn the game and take whatever time I wanted. I could then teach my friend. Not friends, because the cooperative mode is ONLY 2-Players.
Cooperative Mode
Yes! Thank you! Unstoppable has a cooperative mode with NO Communications Restrictions! I get so tired of having some obscure rules to obscure the communication when playing cooperatively with my friends! I said this in Everdell Duo (see review from a few weeks ago) and I’ll say it now: let me and my friend(s) talk! We play games to play, laugh, talk, strategize, and have fun together! I am so glad we don’t have to worry about any Communications Restrictions as we work together! Thank you Unstoppable for allowing full communication!
The rules for 2-Player are in 1.5 pages (pages 13 and 14: see above); the idea is pretty straight-forward: each player is playing multi-player solitaire for the most part. The BIG BAD BOSS has twice as many hit points (for scaling to 2 players), so both players still have to do “about” the same amount of damage and play “about” the same amount of game.
Most of the 2-Player cooperative game proceeds simultaneously, as both players play out their turns at the same time. (This helps keep the game flowing quickly). The only times where the two players must worry about the order they play is (1) when drafting the new card (players are allowed to choose who drafts first), and then (2) in the Main Phase, the game uses Player Selected Turn Order (one of our favorite mechanisms), where players can intersperse their plays however they want! This is fantastic! Me and my friend can decide the best way to take out Threats together! The only prerequisite is that the entire action must “finish” before the next one. (We found we could even do the Main Phase simulataneously many times as well!)
Although the players can talk through how to play together, the only way they can help each other is to eliminate Threats (by attacking their battlefield) for each other … and that’s it! There’s no sharing of any resources (credits, cards, armor) or anything else. So, this is very much multi-player solitaire.
In my first two-player game, I lost because my friend has a bad draw and couldn’t recover … if I just could have given him a few credits, he would have survived! So, although you can talk and strategize together, you can’t help each other out THAT much. The game is balanced pretty well for the solo player, so it’s rare you can actually “eliminate a threat” from your friend without screwing yourself, at least in my experience.
I liked the 2-Player cooperative mode, but I wish there was a little more cooperation: this is generally a multiplayer solitaire experience. Even sharing credits might have made this feel just a touch more cooperative without changing the gameplay too much … it’s even thematic! “I’ll wire you some credits!” This is a minor house rule that would I suggest to make the game just a little more cooperative.
Things To Look Out For
As I played a bunch of games, I ran into some issues that I feel I should point out; maybe I can make your experience better.
What does the Skull mean? When you see the SKULL on the Threat (MONSTER) card (see above), that means “use the current level number on the BIG BAD Boss card“. You might miss this the first time through because the Reference cards have the SKULL as a black on white, but every single Threat card has the SKULL as white on grey like the example above (or white on orange) … so you don’t correlate that they are the same symbol because the colors don’t match!
…Even more confusing, the marker on the BIG BAD BOSS map is red. So, these symbols don’t color-coordinate at all! When the RED token is on the 1, it means “1” (for the Defense of the Monster above). There was never a clear example of this in the Rulebook, and the lack of color-coordination can can be confusing, so just be aware of the issue. Once you know this, it’s easy.
Boss Cards Shuffle Weirdly: Because the Boss Damage cards (see above) don’t ever have a Core (GOOD card) inserted in with it, they shuffle weirdly. I tended to get all the BIG BAD BOSS cards at the front or back of the deck because they are just “lighter” and shuffle differently in your deck. Go out of your way to make sure you shuffle your deck well (maybe a pile-shuffle) so that you don’t have all these cards clump together. (You DO NOT want these cards to clump together)
You can put the cards in backwards! See above as the Viren card is in the sleeve upside down. You know this because the card next to it is correct with the Core card extruding out the top. If you put a core card in here, it won’t line-up correctly.
…Have the opening on the Threat cards on the TOP so the Core cards can just slide in; see above.
Multiple Attacks vs. Adding: It’s still not clear if each Orange Swirl is considered a separate attack or just additive. If I add the Repeating, does each attack get the addition of the card it augments? Probably not? Also, since there is (currently) no notion of damage reduction in the game, 3 single attacks of 1 and 1 single attack of 3 will be the same against one opponent, but the Repeating will obviously be better IF if it really is 3 separate attacks (which is probably why it’s more expensive). I am using deduction (based on what I know about the game) to figure this out, rather than having the rules tell me. That frustrated me a little.
When Defeated: What does it mean when the “When Defeated” shows the Attack icon for the Boss Threat cards? See above! Does the Boss Threat have a Death Curse and do 4 Damage to you as it dies? Or do you get to do 4 Damage to another threat? It’s not clear. After playing about 10 games, I am pretty confident it’s a true bonus for the player: because the Boss Threats don’t come back into your hand (they do Boss Damage), they don’t help you with other threats, so you need the Bonus damage to be a HELPER! So, it’s a true bonus; you can do 4 damage to something else! If it were the other way around (with the Threat doing 4 damage to you), this game would be called Unbeatable instead of Unstoppable because it would be so hard!
What I Liked
Factions: The factions in this game really added a lot of flavor to the game. I mean, this is a deck-building game, which we’ve seen tons of. The four different factions really added some new flavor to this genre.
Threat and Core: The fact that the core cards and the Threat cards are tightly coupled was really interesting! Granted, this is the core gimmick (pun not intended) that makes this stand out (with the card-crafting), but it does work.
UPGRADES: At the end of the day, the UPGRADE system worked so well; this is the fundamental reason this game stands out. You can upgrade your cards independently, and that’s a really interesting decision! Adding the UPGRADES on an ad-hoc basis saved me many times, and it really makes you feel clever when you upgrade and turn a 3-Action Point card into 1-Action Point card!
Looks: The game looks good. And the playmats really do help.
What I Didn’t Like
The Introductory Experience: The introduction to this game and the “sleevening” weren’t great experiences. I am very worried they would turn off a less-experienced player to the point of abandoning the game. It reminded me a little of my first experience with Marvel Legendary many years ago … if a friend hadn’t helped me with my first game, I may have given up on it! Just a few more pictures and explanations, please? (Another game I really liked from last year, Union City Alliance (a co-op deck-builder) had this same problem: see here).
Tear-down: The game moves quickly as you play, but tear-down in this game is a lot of work: you have to separate many many cards from their sleeves.
Ambiguities: There were just enough ambiguities in the game that I was frustrated a few times. Again, I wish the rulebook had a few more examples, a few more pictures, a few more discussions, maybe even an index. In this review, I tried to point out problem areas so hopefully they won’t trip you up.
Theme and Comparison to Astro Knights
How much theme is here? There’s about as much theme here as in the base Astro Knights game; although I think I would give it to Astro Knights for feeling just slightly more thematic.
Although, If we were comparing it to Astro Knights: Eternity, I would definitely say Eternity is more thematic … mostly.
Although the thematic element depends on which BIG BAD BOSS you fight! In your first few Unstoppable games, you should fight The Harbinger then The Triumvirate (in that order). Those games teach you the technical mechanisms of the game. The final boss (Duomo’s Menace: see above) actually has a little story and some choices! See below!!
There is a deck of 21 cards (see above) and you make decisions (like a Choose Your Own Adventure story) as it takes you through different parts of the deck!
Minor spoiler above (that’s why it’s sideways), but it’s the first decision you would come to … see above. These decisions take you through different parts of different stories!
There’s a bunch of different endings (don’t look too closely above) for that adventure! The final boss Duomo’s Menace has quite a bit of theme and feels like a little adventure!
Would I recommend Astro Knights or Unstoppable? They are both great sci-fi cooperative deck-builders, but it depends on what you want! Astro Knights is a little simpler and plays more people (at 1-4 players). Unstoppable is more difficult and plays fewer people (1-2 players). Astro Knights, especially if you are playing the Eternity expansion, feels more thematic, but, Unstoppable has slightly better gameplay with its card-crafting mechanic …and it does have a thematic adventure for the final boss!! As a cooperative experience, I would give the edge to Astro Knights because it feels more interactive. In the end, I have both and like both!
Conclusion
Yes, I liked Unstoppable! Quite a bit! It’s definitely staying in my collection for the solo game, but I can see it being ideal for playing 2-Player with my friend Joe!
The deck-building and card-crafting aspects of this game are unique and this brings some new ideas to that genre: upgrades, defeating cards to draw them, special boss damage … to name a few! To be clear, the main gimmick of this game (the card-crafting) DOES WORK and it works well.
I really did like the playmats and would recommend them, but they do make the game more expensive; strictly speaking, you don’t need them.
Overall, I’d have to give this a 8.5/10. I want to give it more, but the “unsleevening” experience and the rulebook could have been a little better.
What makes a good solo game? I find them when I typically start playing solo games to learn that game cooperatively for my friends. If a game starts to enchant me and I can’t stop playing it solo … there’s something to it! All the games on this list were games I played solo to teach my friends … but then I kept playing! Some of these games will end up on either my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024, some but of them will end up on my Top Cooperative Expansions of 2024, but one things for sure … they are all great solo!
Honorable Mention: Solo Project PEGASUS Campaign for Marvel United
After getting Marvel United MultiverseSeason 3 with all of its content, I was very taken with the Campaign Decks (see below and see review here), but I was saddened to learn there was no campaign for the Project PEGASUS saga (see above)!
So I spent many many weeks developing my own campaign using all of the Marvel United content! This is a print-and-play campaign for Marvel United! I played this campaign solo over and over and over again (multi-handed with 2, 3, and 4 characters) as I playtested all the the different combinations of characters! There is no game I played more solo this year than the Marvel United: Project PEGASUS campaign!
It’s awkward to put this on our list since I developed it, but I had so much fun playtesting it solo over and over for weeks and weeks, I had to acknowledge how much time and how much fun I had with this! If you liked the Marvel United Campaign Decks and wanted more, check out the free Project PEGASUS Campaign here!
10. Skytear Horde: Monoliths
Now, Skytear Horde: Monoliths is a standalone expansion in the Skytear Horde universe! This is a great little solo and cooperative tower defense game! But you might ask: “Why isn’t this on the Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024instead of this solo list?” That’s a very good question! It’s because, although this is a really good expansion with great components and cards, the game really works best as a solo game.
We tried it cooperatively (see our review here), and it was just okay. It’s significantly better as a solo game! It feels like most of the balance and playtesting was done as a solo game, so it can’t really go on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 list … because it really is best as a solo game.
It’s got some great components and some really great art! Take a look at our review here to see if this is something you might like!
9. Batman: Gotham City Chronicles + Solo/Cooperative Expansion
So, you can’t play Batman: Gotham City Chronicles solo without both the base game (which came out years ago) and the Solo/Cooperative Expansion (which came out this year)! In order to get to the cooperative game, I had to wade through learning the original base one vs. many game, then learn the solo game, to finally learn the cooperative game! Whew!
Now the cover of the Solo/Cooperative Expansion looks great! See above!
But there were some major production issues with the expansions as: 1) The English translation still had some scenarios in French! And 2) The binding on the solo/cooperative rulebook is terrible! It’s impossible to hold open! See above as I came up with a kludgy workaround for that! Objectively, I feel like I had to give this game a 5.5/10 since the production had issues!
This might strike you as an odd pick: A Medical Mystery game! I picked this up at Target and really enjoyed playing through the mysteries of the game! Instead of solving a boring old murder mystery (sarcasm here: I loved my murder mysteries), you are doing research, asking questions, running tests, and trying correctly to diagnose a patient!
There’s only a limited number of mysteries per box (see the envelopes above), but if you ever wanted to play a medical mystery and diagnose like Gregory House, this is the game for you!
I love my murder mysteries (remember: Suspects made the #1 spot on my Top 10 Solo Games of 2023), and this was a great spin on that genre! See our review here to see if it’s something you may like!
7. Everdell: Duo
I wasn’t expecting to like Everdell: Duo as much as a I did! My first playthroughs were a bit “clunky”, as the game has some fiddly bits and documentation issues you have to get through. But once you “get” how the game works, it’s quite fun! (I also never played the original Everdell)
To play solo, you have to man both the tortoise and the hare as they build their respective cities! See above! There’s a lot of thought about when you share, when you place workers, when you buy, and when you draw cards! You are looking for the combos to help both the tortoise and the hare! It might “seem” like both the hare and tortoise are playing multiplayer solitaire games, but as the game opens up to you, there’s more collaboration between the two than you might think!
That delicious (solo) collaboration plus the beautiful components and the cute vibe of the game put this on my solo list! I am just as surprised as you are that this made my solo list! My only concern (which is why it’s at #7) is that can be at the whim of the card draws, but most of the time there are so many ways to pivot around that! See our review here to see if this might be something you like!
6. Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2
I didn’t know a lot about the original Tidal Blades when I backed this, but Tidal Blades 2 looked like a fun little cooperative dungeon crawler. Holy Cow! I was blown away about how good the gameplay were and how great the components were!
As silly as it sounds, they did such a great correlating the colors, giving bases for the monsters, and generally making the cards very readable!
But the coup de grace was the card system where you could choose a card, a row or a column, activating everything there! This was such a unique and different combat system, it really made this game stand out. The game is better with more people, but I had such fun playing through (most) of the campaign solo!
This is an odd duck of an entry; the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe arrived this years (3 years late, which made a lot of people angry) and had some amazing minis and components … for a worker placement game that probably doesn’t need them!
See above for one of the Sundrop worker placement tokens!! Did I really need this? Nah! But did I love it? Ya!
In the end, the reason this made the list (besides how stupidly nice it looks) was because of the Introductory Campaign Scenario Book! I love Robinson Crusoe, but I hadn’t played it in 5 years! The Introductory Campaign gave me an excuse to enjoy a nice 5-Game campaign in the world of Robinson Crusoe! Over about a month, I’d play a scenario on a weekend and just have a good old time in this world. Good times! It reminded why I like Robinson Crusoe so much! Check out our review of the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe to see if this might be something you might like!
4. Marvel United: Campaign Deck. Dark Phoenix Saga
The Campaign Decks (see above) came with Season 3 of Marvel United: Multiverse. These decks takes all your Marvel United content (and I mean ALL of it) and gives you some “stories” or campaigns to run through.
The Dark Phoenix Saga is a campaign centered on the X-Men from issues #131-137 back in the Byrne/Austin/Claremont days. This campaign takes you through a story, lasting 5 battles (or more) as the X-Men fight the Hellfire club, others, and (spoiler!) deal with Jean Grey turning into Dark Phoenix.
This was a heart-breaking, soul-wrenching campaign as I played through one of my favorite Marvel X-Men stories! I can’t share too much, but it was a great solo experience over a number of days.
This one was a late comer and almost didn’t make our list! It came in late late November, just before Thanksgiving! I ended up playing cooperatively with my friends and had a grand old time, but the solo experience was truly phenomenal!
First of all, Aeon’s End: The Descent has true solo play (which makes it a lot easier to jump into)! And all the new Mages and ideas it adds to the system were … surprisingly fresh! Even after 8 years, this standalone expansion breathed new life into the Aeon’s End system!
But, at the end of the day, it was the new module called Friends and Foes that made this stand out so much! This new module adds new ways of winning and losing with some interesting ideas, but what it does best for me was mitigate the problems with Variable Turn Order!
Playing through the four Chapters of this narrative campaign was a thrill! The story was pretty good (once you got into it), and the new ideas generated throughout were fantastic. I played a different mage in every chapter and just had a ball figuring out how to play each new mage! Sure, you can play this campaign with many people, but I really enjoyed unravelling this story as a solo play. See our review here ofAeon’s End: The Descent to see if this might be something you enjoy!
2. Sammu-Ramat
Any other year, this probably would have been my #1 game of the year! I went back and forth a number of times, so this could easily be my #1! Sammu-Ramat is basically a cooperative euro-puzzle game; it immerses the players into Queen Sammu-ramat’s rule of Assyria in 9th century BC, as guided by her advisors.
It’s kind of a war game, as you fend off invaders, but it’s also a euro game gathering-resources games, but it’s also a logistics puzzle as you try to balance keeping the kingdom defended and fed!
You can play either a one-shot (which is a great way to jump in), but it really shines as a 5-game campaign where you leave the game state as set-up for the next game! This game was such a great surprise! I adored playing it solo, especially through a campaign (although it needs a little house-ruling). I really wish it could have made my #1 spot because it was so good. See out review ofSammu-Ramat here to see if this is something you might like!
1. Set A Watch: Doomed Run
This game has no right to be the #1 spot; this is a giant campaign game in the Set A Watch Universe. First of all, of the Full 7 Game Campaign games I played, I ended up playing two of them cooperatively! So, that means I only played 5 of the games solo!
And to play the campaign, you must have ALL The Set A Watch Content! And I mean all!! (Including the Outriders deck)! This means: Set A Watch, Set A Watch: Swords of the Coins, and Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles!!! See how it takes up one half of my table just to separate the different games above?
And Set A Watch also has the solo problem that “you must play 4 characters”, so that’s not ideal either: see above as I try to operate 4 characters!
Despite all that, this game spent 11 days taking over my table, and I had a ball playing through it mostly solo! Once you know Set A Watch, especially solo, it’s such a fun game! I know, this really has no right even being my favorite solo game of 2024, but I had so much fun playing it (mostly) solo, it has to be #1. See our review here to see if Set A Watch: Doomed Run might be something you enjoy!
As we look forward, we also look back! It’s fun to look ahead at the cooperative games coming up in 2025!!! We’ve been looking ahead since 2021 (see our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2021), but it’s always interesting to see the state of games from those previous years. Believe it or not, we still are waiting some games from 2021! Let’s take a look at some backlog!
2021:
Onimaru: There have been some pictures of pallets of boxes from the Warehouse, but we still haven’t see this yet. Maybe we’ll see this, maybe we won’t. I don’t know. It’s been since 2019 when this all this started (6+ years!!). As of now, this is the only outstanding game from our 2021 list.
Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread: It’s been a while for this, but we did see a copy arrive at the Dice Tower, so we know that this is imminent. Based on everything from the Kickstarter, we should see this in early 2025. UPDATE: It arrived! December 30th, 2024! It’s a big mama! Look for a review coming soon!
Rat Queens To The Slaughter: There’s been some drama here as the original creator took the game back from the people who have failed to deliver! It’s unclear what happens next, but the creator wants to take charge of this himself … which is great, but it’s still really unclear when we’ll see this!
Union City Alliance: Huzzah! Union City Alliance finally arrived! And it was good! We liked it so much it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024! See our review here of Union City Alliance to see if you might like it!
2023:
Dark Quarter: Promised Oct 2023. It is frustrating we haven’t seen this yet, but there has been lots of activity on the Kickstarter threads, so we believe we will see this early 2025. This is the only game still undelivered from our 2023 list.
Hacktivity: This delivered in June 2024 this year! And it was pretty good. It didn’t make any Top 10 lists this year, but I still liked it. See our review here of Hacktivity to see if you might like this!
Defenders of the Wild: This arrived August 2024, on time. There was a lot to like in this game, but it just didn’t land for me or any of my groups. Take a look at our review here!
Santorini Deluxe and Co-op expanion: Promised delivery May 2024. Still haven’t seen too much activity. Hopefully it will arrive in 2025.
Weirdwood Manor: This delivered in June 2024 and was generally very well received by my game groups! See our review here to see if this might be something you might like!
Luddite: Promised delivery December 2024. There has been progress, but we probably won’t see this until 2025.
Once Upon A Line: The Butterfly’s Breath: Promised delivery May 2024. They are still doing a lot of work (per the Kickstarter updates), but it’s not done yet, even from a development perspective, let alone manufacturing. We may see this at the end of 2025, but we suspect we won’t see it until 2026.
Marvel X-Men Dice Throne + Co-op Missions! This promised delivery in Aug 2024. We still don’t have it. It looks like some people might get it before the end of 2024, but most people will be getting this in early 2025.
Platform: Kickstarter Floe Promised Delivery: June 2025 Summary: FLOE is an adventure-strategy game where players embark on heroic quests across an icy landscape. You’ll discover long-lost secrets on uncharted icebergs, sail the seas to find adventure and sunken treasure and delve into perilous caves to find precious crystals and battle fearsome monsters. Despite the dangers ahead, you won’t be alone in your travels. Always at your side, your loyal familiar may help gather resources or jump into the fray to turn the tide of battle. During their travels, heroes will also gain helpful allies, powerful abilities, and rare items. In time, heroes may also build shrines across the map, ensuring their legacy will be long remembered. However, always beware of the cold. Venturing into the icy wasteland is perilous: almost everything heroes do outside the safety of the village will cost them warmth. From time to time, they will need to return to the village to warm up, improve their homestead, purchase upgrades, and prepare for their next big adventure. Will you be the boldest explorer of them all?
So, the base game looks amazing! But this game isn’t a co-op by default, which has us a little worried. But with the Monsters Unleased expansion, this will be co-op! This is #10 on our list because its unclear how good the co-op will be! Given the quality of everything else, we expect great things!
9. Fable Fury
Platform: Kickstarter Fable Fury Promised Delivery: Oct 2025 Summary: As unlikely heroes, you must explore unknown lands, fight unconventional enemies, dodge silly traps, and collect monster runes hidden within ancient shrines scattered across the realms. Once you have collected the 3 runes, unlock the portal to face the monstrous threat!
Choose your heroes and set out as a team to find the runes hidden in Shrines across three realms. Grab your coins, stock up on items at the Gift Shop, and jump into your first realm.
The tag line of this game is Ridiculous strategic cooperative, rogue-like dungeon crawler: The art is very cute, and the game seems to have a sense of humor. We had such a good time with Slay The Spirethis last year that maybe this will scratch the same itch! We are very much looking forward to this! I love the art! And the sense of humor!
8. Horror On The Orient Express
Platform: Gamefound Horror On The Orient Express Promised Delivery: August 2025 Summary: Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game lures you into the luxurious Orient Express in the 1920s, taking you on a dangerous train ride into the realm of the Dreamlands. Everything is against you, from monsters attacking the train to murderous cults hiding among the passengers. Worst of all, an eldritch, blood-thirsty vampire hunting down everything that moves. Can you solve the dark secrets of the Orient Express before time runs out?
In this cooperative game, you and the other investigators try to survive on the doomed train. To win, you must hunt out the cultists to stop them from performing a hideous ritual and ensure the train reaches its destination. Each of you controls a character who can develop new skills, gather items, talk to the passengers, discover clues, and, ultimately, decide the train’s fate. You may even learn a spell or two!
Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game brings the award-winning Call of Cthulhu horror and mystery TTRPG into the board gaming world. Special rules, ongoing character development, and awesome play pieces provide a challenging and exciting gaming experience. Your journey on the Orient Express will be something to remember!
This games looks gorgeous and lures me back into the Horror/Cthulu mythos by being a little bit of a mystery too! Cthulu and a mystery? And a train? What more could you want!? And, let’s be honest, this looks gorgeous on the table!
7. Aetherspire
Platform: Kickstarter Aetherspire Promised Delivery: Jan 2025 Summary: The realm of Elementis, once a harmonious balance of earth, air, fire, and water, is now under siege. Elemental Aetherfiends have dispatched waves of invaders to drain our aethercore, the realm’s lifeblood, causing chaos to reign. You and your companions must build powerful elemental spires to lure away and defeat these invaders. As each spire grows stronger, it will unleash a devastating resurgence against the Aetherfiends. Can you restore balance before it’s too late?
Aetherspire is a cooperative 3D tile placement and tower defense game for 1-4 players. Build elemental spires and defend the realm in this stunning 3D strategy game!
A 3-D Tile placement games and tower defense game? Sign me up! And I really like how it looks! I am excited to see how this comes to the table!
6. One-Hit Heroes
Platform: Kickstarter One-Hit Heroes Promised Delivery: March 2025 Summary: Pick a hero and fight for your life! One-Hit Heroes is a co-operative boss rush game where your team must defeat the boss without getting hit even once. The more bosses you defeat, the more your Armory improves as you unlock more card variety each time you play an Episode.
Each boss has a custom deck of moves to try and land hits on your team, but each of you have a unique hero deck with your own tools for blocking, dodging and damaging the boss.
Defeat bosses to be rewarded with card packs that you can tear open and draft from. Each card pack will let you power up and specialize your hero further for the rest of the Episode. But in order to defeat the final boss of each Episode, you’ll need more than just a refined deck – you’ll need to play your cards carefully and work as a team to survive long enough to win.
This is a solo or co-op boss battler; it’s a card game about fighting, but avoid getting hit … as you only have one hit point! How do avoid all the damage but still manage to win? Rahdo really raved about this, and I too am excited for it!
5. Invincible: The Card Game
Platform: Kickstarter Invincible: The Card Game Promised Delivery: Jan 2025 Summary: Invincible: The Card Game puts you in the role of young superheroes as they struggle to become the new Guardians of the Globe. Working together as a team, each player gets to control an iconic character from the Invincible comic universe as you battle to protect Earth from escalating encounters with the series’ many supervillains.
In each battle, you start with a character-specific deck of cards and a unique special ability, then it’s up to you to build up your deck, charge your power, and choose your strategy wisely. Your enemy won’t be taking it easy on you, unleashing hordes of minions to take you down, launching attacks to destroy the city around you, and forcing you to adapt to their unique special abilities. How hard could it be? Well, all you have to do is stay alive, protect Earth, and defeat the universe’s most powerful villains.
We loved Invincible: The Hero-Building game (see review here) and we love the Astro Knights games (see reviews here and here), so adding Invincible IP to the Astro Knights system seems like a good match! Astro Knights has the comicy feel and seems like a natural fit. It was somewhat surprising this Kickstarter didn’t do better: this only may made $111K, which seems small for a larger IP like Invincible. Still, we look forward to a cooperative deck-builder with Invincible!
4. Unstoppable
Platform: Kickstarter Unstoppable Promised Delivery: February 2025 Summary: On the city-planet of Ceres II, every alleyway invites a quick and quiet death. In the lush forests of Virenos, a single misstep could land you in the belly of a beast. The harsh wasteland of Mithras holds both grave danger and a great treasure for those who search its stacks of discarded rubbish. Amidst this chaos, you find yourself thriving, learning, and growing — a child of rank, touched by fate — but a new danger shadows the future of all three worlds. Gather your allies and sharpen your skills, for the darkest days are yet to come.
Unstoppable is a solo or co-operative roguelike, momentum deck-building game. Use card crafting and deck building wisely in the face of unlimited threats, maintaining action and card-draw momentum to become unstoppable!
This looks like such an interesting idea: a cooperative card-crafting game! It’s cooperative mode is limited to 2 people, so perhaps this will be best solo, but it looks really nice! I know some people actually backed out of the kickstarter (I am looking at you, Mike H.) because it was fairly expensive for what you got, but I was fascinated by this game and its premise, so I stayed in. Hopefully it will be good!
3. DCeased: A Zombicide Game
Platform: Kickstarter DCeased: A Zombicide Game Promised Delivery: April 2025 Summary: DCeased – A Zombicide Game is a cooperative game were 1 to 6 players control the last uninfected Super Heroes facing off against Zombie Heroes and the zombie hordes controlled by the game itself.
DCeased: A Zombicide Game is the DC Universe’s answer to Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance and X-Men: Heroes’ Resistance. See our review of the Marvel version of those here and here! But basically, we really liked those games! So, we are very excited to be able play the DC Universe version of the same game! Let’s be clear: you are playing the DC Heroes fighting off the Zombie hordes! Some versions of Marvel Zombies actually have the zombified heroes fighting the good guys—that’s not what this is. Or at least, that’s not what I am looking forward to.
2. LA-1
Platform: Kickstarter LA-1 Promised Delivery: Aug 2025 Summary: Most detective work done in the city of LA-1 takes place under the perpetual dark clouds that still linger from the bombs. Even so, you plan to work together to gather clues, interrogate suspects, and go on stakeouts in a world that is divided by class and dominated by status. Use your skills to solve the case before the all-consuming darkness closes in forever.
In the story-driven, co-operative adventure game LA-1, you take on the role of detectives working for Mace & Doyle Investigations who are helping one another to resolve cases in the post-apocalyptic city that was once Los Angeles. Each case can be played individually or as part of a campaign. Because of the multiple cards that can send investigations in different directions, it’s possible to play each case more than one time, having different situations and outcomes each time. But cases must be solved before the Darkness closes in on all the investigators.
Here’s another Richard Lanius game that has me very excited! I love my cooperative detective games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games), and this post-apocalyptic detective game sounds really interesting! It’s story-driven and promises some really cool stuff. I also typically love Richard Lanius games (despite being so disappointed by Freedom Five), so I am super excited for this!
1. DC Super Heroes United
Platform: Gamefound DC Super Heroes United Promised Delivery: Aug 2025 Summary: The greatest Heroes in the DC universe unite to thwart the Villains’ plans in this fast-paced, family-friendly cooperative game with amazing figures!
This is the DC version of Marvel United that we’ve come to love so much! We already know that we love this system so much, and it will be so much fun to delve into the DC Universe! And the crazy thing will be when we play with Spider-Man and Super-Man! Batman and Daredevil! Crossovers galore! CMON has a very good track record for getting the Marvel United stuff to us, so we think it’s likely we will see this in Aug 2025!
Welcome to the end of 2024! There were some great games that came out, but also some great expansions that really contributed to the world of cooperative games! As usual, we qualify our expansions are one of three types:
Stand-Alone Expansion: Some games you thought might be on the Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2024 might have just ended up on this list because they are stand-alone games that can be played without a base game, but at the end of the day they also expand a base game!
Makes The Game Cooperative: Some expansions take a competitive base game and make the game fully cooperative with the expansion! We saw a number of these type of expansions on the Top 10 Games That Can Be Played Fully Cooperatively!
More Content: Some expansions just add more content (more cards, etc.) to the base cooperative game!
As of last year, we also add the new characterization: Does It Require Another Expansion? We continue adding this characterization, but note that this requirement was not quite as pervasive as it was last year!
Expansion Type: Makes The Game Cooperative Solo Mode: Comic Hunters already had a solo mode, but this can be played as a multi-handed solo mode as well Requires Another Expansion? No
Comic Hunters is a game I adore from this last year! See our review here! There is a good solo mode included with this drafting game, but there is no cooperative mode! I like the idea of cooperative drafting games, but the only other cooperative drafting games I know of are Flourish and Sidekick Saga! Why couldn’t there be a cooperative mode for Comic Hunters?
With a little bit of perspicacity and imagination, I went ahead and developed my own cooperative rules for Comic Hunters and put them up on the web for free so others can try it! See a link here for Cooperative Rules for Comic Hunters! This is basically and free print-and-play cooperative expansion for Comic Hunters!
It’s a little bit of a cheat to put this as one of my favorite Cooperative Expansions of 2024 (since I developed it), but I spent so much time playing this solo and cooperatively with my friends (as I honed the rules), this needed to at least get an Honorable Mention. See the rules here to see if you might enjoy this.
10. Marvel United: War of Kings
Expansion Type: More Content Solo Mode: Yes, any of the Marvel United solo modes Requires Another Expansion? Not really, just any base Marvel United game
Marvel United: Season 3 Multiverse has pretty much torn through all of our Top 10 lists for 2024. The War of Kings was special to me because I ended up devouring the entire expansion! I played all the characters multiple times, all the heroes multiple times, and really enjoyed a lot of the ideas here! And I think Lockjaw (see above) may be the best introductory character for when you play with a new player! Who doesn’t love a dog?
I freely admit that this expansion appealed to me because of my love of Comic Books, The Inhumans, George Perez, and John Byrne! However, even when I predisposed to like something, it still has to be good (I am looking at you Freedom Five) …
9. Thunderstone Quest: Raging Seas and Ancient Adversaries
Expansion Type: More Content Solo Mode: Yes (with Barricades Expansion) Requires Another Expansion? Yes, The Barricades Mode Expansion is required to play the game solo or cooperatively
Nathan and Caroline have become my Thunderstone Quest buddies! See me and Nathan above! We ended up playing through both of these expansions this year!
The Raging Seas expansion (see above) has some great ideas with Pirates and adds the new Corsair! The idea of the Voyage has become ingrained in a neat new way!
The Ancient Adversaries adds the new Totems deck (see above) to replace most Treasure, and the game plays very differently with this new expansion and its totems!
If it weren’t for Nathan, I am not sure these would have gotten played. But, we had a great time! I think I may have gotten to the point where I have “enough” Thunderstone Quest expansions, but even still, I really did enjoy these two expansions!
8. Townsfolk Tussle: Foul Neighbors
Expansion Type: More Content Solo Mode: Two-handed Requires Another Expansion? No
I didn’t think Townfolk Tussle needed more content, but it’s nice to have! One of the purposes of an expansion is to breathe new life into a game, and that’s what Foul Neighbors did for us! Me and friends thought this game was silly and fun! See below as Sam I and I play this ridiculous game with this ridiculous expansion!
This expansion just adds more content: 2 new Townsfolk (heroes), 8 new Ruffians, a few new rules, cards, and tiles!! Nothing brain-bending!! This silly, boss-battler game was surprisingly good when we first reviewed it here, and this new expansion reminded us just how silly and fun this is!
My favorite moment from playing Foul Neighbors was blowing up the outhouse to take down the final Ruffian! In a game full of silly cards and fun (but slightly creepy) art, it seemed an apt way to end a game! (My second favorite moment was driving the jalopy over the Ruffian!)! Foul Neighbors is a fun expansion that reminds us how much we like original game of Townsfolk Tussle! It also has some of my favorite minis! See below! They are cute and creepy and cool, all at the same time!
7. Detective: City of Angels: Saints and Sinners
Expansion Type: More Content Solo Mode: Yes Requires Another Expansion? No
This is just plain up, more content for the great detective game Detective: City of Angels! And we need more content for this system, since each case is a “one-and-done”, meaning you probably can’t replay it again! So, they fact that they are still coming out with content for this system is great! And all of the new cases felt up to the same level of writing as the original!
We were even able to introduce my friend Sara to this system! And we had a great time playing! See above!
After all this time, I still feel like Detective: City of Angels is a great detective game that doesn’t get enough love! There are so many expansions for it which keep extending the life of the game for me! Take a look at our review here to see if this is something you might like!
6. Marvel Champions: Age of Apocalypse
Expansion Type: More Content Solo Mode: Yes Requires Another Expansion? No
If Nathan is my Thunderstone Quest buddy, then Joe is my Marvel Champions buddy! The people at Fantasy Flight keeps plugging away and generating new content for Marvel Champions!
My friend Joe and I played a few games, and although he was skeptical of playing Bishop and his discard abilities, Joe ended up really like how he worked!
For me, the reason this expansion makes this Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 is because it finally added Magik to the Marvel Champions universe! Her character and deck are so interesting, and very thematic to her abilities.
5. Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance
Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion Solo Mode: Yes Requires Another Expansion? No
The whole Marvel Zombies: Resistance games surprised me! I didn’t expect to like these zombie battling games as much as I did! I guess I shouldn’t be THAT surprise since I love my Cooperative Superhero games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero games), but I don’t necessarily love Zombie games!
But having a chance to play the X-Men on missions for killing zombies was so much more fun than I expected! My friends and I had a grand time in the X-Men universe!
See our review here to see if you an your friends want to be X-Men killing Zombies!
4. Astro Knights: Eternity
Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion Solo Mode: Yes Requires Another Expansion? No
I liked Astro Knights from about a year ago (see our review here of the original Astro Knights), but I didn’t love it. One of my complaints was that it really needed some more content to keep it fresh.
Although it’s fantastic that this deck-building boss-battler now has more content, it was the story that really sold me on this expansion! I played through the whole adventure with me and friends, and we loved all the new content and the Firefly-esque story that unravelled!
For a while, I thought this would be my #1 Expansion! It made the top of my list at RichieCon 2024 (see that list here), but this year was really strong for expansions. See our review ofAstro Knights: Eternity to see if this is something you might like! We really enjoyed this!
3. Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles
Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion Solo Mode: Yes (but you must play 4 characters: it’s not as bad as it sounds, especially once you get into it) Requires Another Expansion? No
Like all the Set A Watch games (see our review of the originalSet A Watch, and our review ofSet A Watch: Swords of the Coin), this is a really fun monster battler as players play four heroes trying to get back home! Every night, they camp and one person has to watch the fire while the others go and fight the monsters in the night!
There’s a whole new set of monsters, a whole new set of heroes (with whole new powers), and a whole new set of gear! This game is easy to teach and plays pretty quickly! And you can play it either standalone or combine with other Set A Watch sets!
There’s some new mechanisms in the system (Doom), but it’s doesn’t really change the complexity of the game. Every time I play any of the Set A Watch games, I have such a fun time! This standalone expansion really just made me love Set A Watch that much more! See our review here to see if this is something you might like!
2. Marvel United: Fantastic Four: The Coming of Galactus
Expansion Type: More Content Solo Mode: Yes, any of the Marvel United solo modes Requires Another Expansion? No (but you might want the Fantastic Four expansion)
So, for a long time, I thought this would be my #1 Expansion of 2024! The Galactus model was so cool! The Heralds of Galactus added a new style of play! See below!
But in the end, it was such an epic game of fighting heralds and Galactus, that this game had to make my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions this year.
See above the epic story told by the battle with Galactus!!
1. Aeon’s End: The Descent
Expansion Type: Stand-Alone Expansion Solo Mode: Yes, and it’s a true solo mode! Requires Another Expansion? No
I am just as surprised as you that this expansion was so good! I like the Aeon’s End system (see our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games), but this new expansion breathed new life into this game! Playing mages cooperatively fighting big bad monsters (in a cooperative deck-builder) had so many new turns!
What really made this hit the number one spot was the addition of the Friends and Foes module! This module mitigates a problem I have with Aeon’s EndVariable Turn Order (see our Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness), but also adds some really new and interesting ways to play the game! What’s even better is that you can use this module in ANY of your Aeon’s End games! It’s a module!
And what put Aeon’s End: The Descent over the top to #1 was the story in the campaign! We liked how much the story elevated Astro Knights: Eternity (back at #4), and the story here coupled with the Friends and Foes module AND coupled with all the new mages and cards made this rocket to the top of my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024! Check our our review here to see if this is something you might like! My friend Becca (who doesn’t like cooperative games that muchh) also really enjoyed it! High Praise indeed!
Wow! What a great year 2024 was for cooperative games! As we put this list together, it felt like any of the games here could have been the #1 game because there were were all great!
Some of the games you might expect to see here might make it on a different list! We will have our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024, our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024, and our Top 10 Party Games of 2024! Check these lists for more great games! Let’s head into our list! This is the best of the best for 2024! It’s so great that cooperative games have really flourished! Now I can play with my friends!
Honorable Mention: Ultimatch
Plays Solo: Yes (true solo) Player Count: 1 to 5 Ages: 10+ Length: 20 minutes
I am so surprised this little cooperative card game didn’t do better! It’s colorful and easy to play! I don’t see many people talking about it, but my friends and I had a great time playing this!
If you are looking for a cooperative game to take out instead of UNO, this seems like a game could fit in anywhere! A light cooperative card game that anyone can play? Sign me up!
Plays Solo: Yes (has true solo play, but it’s better cooperative) Player Count: 1 to 4 Ages: 12+ Length: 60-90 minutes per Act
As someone who has never played the original video game, this was a huge surprise! If you like the video game, I think you’ll like this! And if you didn’t like the video game … you might still like this!! This is a surprisingly good game with surprisingly good components! It’s a cooperative adventure deck-building game as players navigate dungeons and fight bad guys … just like the video game!
This game worked so well in so many contexts! It was probably one of the most played games at RichieCon 2024 this year, as I saw it getting played so many times! See above. It also worked with my friends who have played the original video game Slay The Spire, and for my friends who HAVEN’T played Slay The Spire!
This had to make our top 10 list of the year because it was so good! It really is a great cooperative game, as it embracesPlayer Selected Turn Order and Simultaneous Play at the same time! The only reason it’s at number 10 is just that’s it sometimes harder to get to the table if you already have a game in progress (as cards are stored/flipped and saved in the box). See our review here of Slay The Spire: The Board Game to see if this is something you might enjoy!
9. Union City Alliance: Heroes Unite!
Plays Solo: No (but you can play two characters) Player Count: 2 to 4 Ages: 14+ Length: 75-150 minutes
This was #1 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022, and it finally delivered this year! Of course I was excited when it came in, but I was wary! Luckily, it was very good!
This is a cooperative deck-building game (a lot of these this year) where players are Super Heroes with special powers and have special cards tailored to their deck! If you like Marvel Legendary, a cooperative deck-builder with Marvel Super Heroes, this might be right up your alley! Union City Alliance is also much more thematic than Marvel Legendary as players are actually Super Heroes moving around a map and fighting bad guys!
The only reason this is a little lower is because it doesn’t have official rules for playing solo (but it seems to work with the solo player operating two heroes), and because it is a little more complicated! This game drips with so much theme that it has to pay a little cost of complexity for that theme! Take a look at our review of Union City Alliance to see if you night enjoy this more than Marvel Legendary! I knowI did!
8. Flock Together
Plays Solo: Yes (true solo) Player Count: 1 to 5 Ages: 10+ Length: 25 minutes per player
This is a gorgeous and very cute game with art by Andrew Bosley. Flock Together is a cooperative Boss-Battler, as players have to battle 3 minor bosses on the way to the final confrontation with the big Boss!
This was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024, and boy was it great! This seemed to hit home for so many people! Flock Together a light cooperative game and it is so easy to get to the table! The art and chicken puns in this game just evoke such joy!
Plays Solo: Yes (true solo) Player Count: 1 to 4 Ages: 8+ Length: 20 minutes
Wait, a game about taking cats to the Vet made the #7 position? That’s right! This super cute little cooperative game was a surprising hit! It’s a cooperative game you can take just about anywhere, it’s easy to teach and play, and everyone just responds so well to it!
I haven’t had a bad play of this yet! I have played with my gamer friends, my non-gamer friends, my niece, my best friend, and so many groups and it has been a hit every time! This is a great little cooperative game with a follow-like mechanism that keeps everyone involved the whole time!
In the end, the super cute art will bring in people (see above), but the simple cooperative gameplay (with the involving follow mechanism) and short games of 20 minutes will enchant just about everyone! Take a look at our review of Hissy Fit here and see if you want to take the cat to the Vet!
6. Endeavor Deep Sea
Plays Solo: Yes (true solo) Player Count: 1 to 5 Ages: 14+ Length: upto 30 minutes per player
So, I have never played the original Endeavor, but this follow-on (called Endeavor Deep Sea) worker placement game had both a solo and cooperative mode, so I took a chance on it, and it was very very good! A cooperative worker placement game is such a neat thing when it actually works!
Although I liked the game solo and cooperatively, the reason this is higher on the list is that this was a hit for everyone who played it cooperatively! Each player feels like they have so much choice on their turn, so agency is present and relevant, but the discussions for how to achieve the cooperative goals really do elevate the game! It’s a cooperative game where the turns are multiplayer solitaire (which gives each player agency), but still instills a sense of cooperation in the goals!
This was a very thinky and engaging solo and cooperative worker placement game that looks really great on the table! Take a look at our review of Endeavor Deep Sea to see if this is for you and your group!
5. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders
Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play two characters) Player Count: 1 to 4 Ages: 14+ Length: 60-90 minutes
This is a fantastic year for board and card games! In many other years, this would have easily been my #1 game of the year, but there are so many good games this year! This is a cooperative boss-battler dungeon crawl campaign game where players play unique and interesting characters in this world of Tidal Blades!
This game is just gorgeous and took up my table for weeks as I played through the campaign both solo and cooperatively! The components are so good and, this sounds silly, but so easy to read and understand the icons and colors! They did such a fantastic job!
The best recommendation you can give a campaign game is that your friends want to keep playing it! I have gone through most of the campaign solo, and I am enjoying playing cooperatively with my friends when I can! See above!
The way players choose a card and then activate all the abilities in the row or column of choice is such a great mechanism! I hope we see this mechanism again in future games! Tidal Blades 2: The Rise of the Unfolders has so many great things (and fixes to Gloomhaven) that I wish I could give this the #1 position, but I liked the next few games just a little better! See our review of Tidal Blades 2: The Rise of the Unfolders here to see if you might like this and argue that it should be #1!
4. Invincible: The Hero-Building Game
Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play two characters) Player Count: 1 to 4 Ages: 13+ Length: 45-90 minutes
Invincible: The Hero Building Game is a cooperative bag-building game set in the Invincible universe. You may have read the original comic book or seen the TV show, but even if you haven’t, you might still really enjoy this bag-building/push-your-luck game! I really enjoyed that no cube is bad on its own, but if you ever draw 5 black cubes, a hero can crash (which is still recoverable). The black cubes are actually good (they are wild) up until you get 5 of them!
There is also a campaign, where each scenario can be just played as a one-shot as well!
Cooperatively, my friends (despite never having seen/read Invincible) still had a good time playing! Sam even mentioned Invincible in his top 10 list at RichieCon 2024 ! I freely admit that the SuperHero nature of this game contributed to me really liking it, but the game is very very good! See our review of Invincible: The Hero-Building Game to see if you might enjoy it!
3. Leviathan Wilds
Plays Solo: Yes (there’s an official true solo mode, but just play two characters: it’s easier) Player Count: 1 to 4 Ages: 10+ Length: 60 minutes
Leviathan Wilds took my gaming groups by storm! This is a game I championed, as it was #3 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024, and boy did it deliver! It seems most reviewers picked up on how good it was!
This is basically Shadow of The Colossus, the cooperative board game! But, instead of “fighting” a creature by climbing all over him, players work together to heal a creature (by getting rid of crystal growths)!
This game works so well because it’s easy to get to the table and has some really unique features! Each player gets to choose a Climber and Class (each with its own deck) and meld them to create a unique deck and personality! The cards are multi-use, and your deck represents your grip! It’s such an interesting and gorgeous game! See below!
My friend Becca (who doesn’t like cooperative games normally) said she really liked this! And most of my friends also liked it! It was hit just about everywhere I went! Take a look at our review of Leviathan Wilds to see if this is something you may like!
2. Sammu-Ramat
Plays Solo: Yes (there’s a couple of ways, either the solo player operates 2 advisors or 3) Player Count: 1 to 5 Ages: 14+ Length: 60-90 minutes
You haven’t probably heard of this game; it had a very small Gamefound presence, but in the end, it probably should have been game of the year. This game is fantastic: it’s a cooperative war-game with euro-type resource gathering mechanisms! And it’s cooperative and solo! The theme is that players are advisors to Sammu-Ramat, a leader from 811-820 BC known for her wisdom!
In the end, though, this is a puzzle game about how to keep the kingdom prosperous, while still enduring the warlike invaders! How do you handle crisis? What resources do you collect? how do you move about the kingdom to do the most good? It’s such a great and thinky puzzle with almost no randomness to the game (from a few events)!
My friends and I had such a good time playing through this puzzle, but I think I enjoyed the campaign mode best, where you play 5 games back to back using the previous game state as set-up for the next! So interesting and thinky!
I loved this game and strongly suggest you check it out, especially if you like thinky puzzle games! See our review of Sammu-Ramat to see if this might be something you like! If this were any of other year, this would have been my #1, but one other game took almost all my time this year …
1. Marvel United Multiverse/Season 3
Plays Solo: Yes (there’s many ways, but I prefer playing two heroes) Player Count: 1 to 4 (sometimes 5, depending on the mode) Ages: 14+ Length: 60-90 minutes
This is kind of a cheat, as Marvel United: Multiverse standalone game comes with Season 3 of Marvel United Multiverse! See above!
Marvel United: Multiverse is the base game that includes heroes from the Multiverse (Loki) and What If? (Captain Carter) and other lesser know heroes and villains.
One of the best new things in the Marvel United: Multiverse game is the Equipment cards! Some of the heroes in the game get some really interesting and choices if equipped! I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the new equipment and its effects on gameplay. See our review here to see if Marvel United: Multiverse might be for you!
Even though Marvel United: Multiverse is out favorite of the Marvel United base games, it’s all the content from Season 3 that made this rise to the top! We spent weeks lovingly going through so much of Season 3 Multiverse!
Marvel United has become my favorite game of all time, and Season 3 pretty much cemented it i place! That’s why Marvel United: Multiverse (and Season 3) has to make the #1 spot on our cooperative games of 2024!
Aeon’s End: The Descent (an expansion in the Aeon’s End universe, but also a standalone cooperative game) was on Gamefound back in Februrary 2024 and promised delivery in January 2025. Guess what? It actually got here early right before Thanksgiving 2024 (Nov 20, 2024 or so). That’s right, it’s almost 2 months early! Holy cow! That never happens in crowdfunding land!
I went all-in on the new stuff and got the two expansions* (three if you count XAXOS inside), the mat, and the box!
I freely admit I was on the fence on backing this. I do love the Aeon’s End system and its ilk (Astro Knights (see review here), Astro Knights: Eternity (see review here), Aeon’s End, Aeon’s End: War Eternal (see review here), Aeon’s End: Outcasts (see review here) etc etc etc), but I have a lot of Aeon’s End content already. I mean, this is a great cooperative deck-building game system with a mage theme, and it basically made the #1 Spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Deckbuilding Games!
In the end, I chose to back Aeon’s End: The Descent because I was excited for the new Friends and Foes module which can be used in any game. Not to bury the lede, but I think that new module makes the game that much better. We’ll discuss that in detail below.
Let’s take a look!
Unboxing
This is a pretty standard sized box: see Coke can above for reference.
If you are considering getting this, I recommend the mat. Of all the mats I have, the Aeon’s End/Astro Knights mats always seem the most useful: look above at how they well they help organize the play! The mat from Conquest Princesslast week was pretty good for solo, but not really useful for cooperative play. This mat, for Aeon’s End: The Descent worked so very well in both solo and cooperative contexts.
Just be wary that the mat a little big (see Coke can for scale above) and it’s a little harder to carry around (see below).
There’s a little rulebook for the Friends and Foes module; I think it’s separate so you can use it with other Aeon’s End games easier. See picture above.
There’s a narrative booklet: this is to take you through the adventure with some text. See above.
And the main rulebook: see above.
At its core though, Aeon’s End: The Descent is a card game: see SO MANY cards above and below!
Luckily, these cards are very well organized: they have stop signs cards to surround each deck.
One of my favorite features of this game (and all Aeon’s End games) is that EVERY CARD IS WELL-LABELLED: see above as the Treasure card is from ATD-4-02 (bottom left of the card). If you ever need to put everything back in original order, you can.
Spoiler Alert: I played through the entire campaign, and I was able to reset the entire campaign (sorry, they are called Expeditions here) back to its original pristine state. And you can! See above as I try to separate the cards back!
At its core, each player takes the role of a mage, and his cards become his casting deck (which he has to try to build up using deck-building). See some mages above … and some other ones come out later!
Generally, the mages are fighting a Big Bad! See some above! To win, you usually have to reduce the Big Bad to zero hit points by casting spells to do damage!
Along the way, you make some Friends and Foes, who help or hinder you just a little bit … and more come out as the Expedition unfurls …
There’s a bunch of tokens which you do need to notate moneys, power, charges, and some other stuff!
Generally, the components are pretty high quality, the art is good, and the production looks great. See above.
The Rulebook
The rulebook is .. fine.
It flops over the edges, making it harder to keep open on the chair next to me. It really needs to be a smaller form factor: it gets about a C on the Chair Test. I find myself grumpier and grumpier with rulebooks which are huge when opened up. At least it does sit flat.
The Components page is nice* (*modulo one issue we had with Astro Knights: Eternity: the Component pages STILL doesn’t label the Turn Order cards as coming from one of the 1X decks … you might find yourself searching in vain, until you open up all the 1A-1D decks).
Set-ups are nice, but if you get the Play mat, you really don’t need this section.
Generally, this was a good rulebook with good annotations, lots of pictures, and readable text. It even used color to differentiate new rules (in yellow) from older games.
This is a pretty good rulebook, but it had better be after making 5? 10? different versions of Aeon’s End. Although there is still one quirk in the solo rules … see later below.
Gameplay
I always forget HOW AMAZING the Aeon’s End games are for that first set-up! Aeons’ End: The Descent is no different! See above and below as the sheet that comes with the box helps you quickly unwrap and set-up your first game!
If I ever get an Aeon’s Box in the mail, I am never worried about my first set-up*, because it always goes so well!
I don’t want to say too much about gameplay because we’ve discussed it before in previous reviews. Also, there are a lot of great videos on the internet if you want to see how it plays. But I just want to say, there are a number of new mechanisms and somehow, they keep squeezing new ideas out of the Aeon’s End system! Every game in the Expedition has a new “angle” or “mechanism” that keeps the game fresh! A new Mage? A new weird way to defeat the Big Bad? Somehow, Aeon’s End is still fresh after all these years!
Friends and Foes
Without a doubt, my favorite new thing about Aeon’s End: The Descent is the Friends and Foes module. Basically, two new characters become embroiled in your story: a friend and a foe!
They are so embroiled, that the friend and foe each get their own turn within the turn deck! See above!
Each friend and foe slowly evolves something: the friend is building up something good for the players, and the foe is building up something bad! See above as The Corrosion can add his Draining cards! The nice thing about the friends and foes is that they aren’t too bad; you usually have to make a choice about the goodness/badness every turn they come up! I really enjoyed having that extra choice!
Do you add a few charges to the friend or foe? Do you take some damage to Gravehold to avoid that charge? The players almost always GET TO MAKE A CHOICE: what kind of good news or bad news do you want? The players decide!!
See above as the The Scavanger Foe makes players draw a card and either suffer damage to Gravehold or let the Scavenger charge up!! What do you do? What do you do??
As much as I like these choices, what I like best about the Friends and Foes is that they even-out the problems with Variable Turn Order gameplay. What do I mean by that?
Kickstarter Edition of Aeon’s End and Aeon’s End: War Eternal (with update since I was an original Kickstarter)
Those of you have been following my blog for sometime know that I am not a huge fan of Variable Turn Order: see the blog entry here for A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness. Basically, Variable Turn Order can be too random and cause pathologically bad draws which can make the game less fun. To combat the problems of Variable Turn Order in Aeon’s End (and its ilk), I allow myself a simple House Rule: the Nemesis is never allowed to go more than 2 turns in a row.
It turns out that I didn’t have to use this House Rule in any of my games in Aeon’s End: The Descent!! Why? One of the things we discovered when working with Variable Turn Order in Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze was that the bigger the deck, the less likely you are to have pathologically bad draws! See blog entry for more Discussion here.
Because the Friends and Foes “fill-out” the Variable Turn Order deck from 6 cards (original length) to 8 cards (with one Friend and one Foe), there didn’t seem to be a need to invoke the House Rule!
In the end, I love this new Friends and Foes module for multiple reasons: it mitigates the Variable Turn Order issues I have in Aeon’s End: The Descent, it allows more choice into the game, and it has some really new ideas for how to push Aeon’s End into fresh territory. Not to mention, you can use Friends and Foes with any Aeon’s End game!
I guess I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think the game still needed one slight House Rule: the rules say that the Charges “must go off” when the Charge track is filled (see above). Sure, this makes sense for the Foe, but not the Friend!!! I played several times where the Friend’s ability discharged … and it was completely useless for me!!! But, the Friend is your friend! Ask them to hold on until next round when they activate! This seems like a minor house rule, but I think it feels more thematic and more empowering as a choice-You don’t have to discharge the Friend’s ability just because it’s full.
Otherwise, Friends and Foes is a fantastic module. I probably won’t play without it from now on if I can help it.
Expedition
So, this game comes with a Campaign of 4 Sessions (4 battles): they call this an Expedition (much like in Astro Knights: Eternity … see here). The basic flow of the game is described by the Narrative Book (see above and below).
Each section starts with a TON of text. I have to admit, I was a little daunted the wall of text, until I realized that using the character sheets/mats made it more interesting and visual!
What I did: I found the character mats for each of the Mages described in the text (and the Friend), and then I put them next to the Narrative book! So, as I read, I could correlate who was speaking, who was acting, and who was who! See above! This brought me more into the story, and I recommend the same for you!
After the text sets up the story, the yellow boxes direct you how to set-up the game: see above for instructions on how to set-up Battle 3 (note, not really any spoilers in the set-up).
Most of the special context for the Expedition Battles is in one of three places: The Envelopes, the Specially Wrapped Cards, or the “unspecial wrapped cards”.
The Envelopes typically contain Friends and Foes, a new Nemesis, some dividers, and possibly some new boards. Minor Spoiler for Envelope 3: don’t look too closely at the picture above, but that’s what’s generally in an Envelope!!!
Most of the cards you need come from the special decks: For example, you open 2B at the end of Battle 2!
Or open 1A, 1B, and 1C at the start of Battle 1!
There’s a ton of other decks in the game which just “augment” your game: this allows you to have other choices for your Gems/Relics and Spells.
Although your first game will have a rigourous set of Gems/Relic/Spells (see above), you can choose other cards for these.
Although there are some instructions for reseting the game, I strongly recommend you take pictures (like I did) of all the stuff in the Envelopes: Again, minor spoilers for Envelope 4! See above!
After playing through the Expedition solo (see Solo Play section below), I went ahead and re-sorted all the decks back to their original state! I used rubber bands (I know, some people don’t like rubber bands) to keep them together.
It took about an hour or so to re-sort everything and put the box back to the original state. You can do, but it is a lot of work. I did this so I can play the Campaign with my friends all over again.
Solo Play
So, Aeon’s End: The Descent supports solo play (thanks for following Saunders’ Law). And it has choices!
You can either play true solo mode, where the solo player plays exactly one mage OR you can play solo two-handed. And for true solo, they mention the simple rules “You are your own ally!” (I would have LOVED some better solo play description like this for Freedom Fivefrom a few weeks ago: Oh, Freedom Five, I wanted to love you so much …). In the end, I played true solo: one mage per Battle!
This true solo is interesting, because some variants of Aeon’s End only support the solo player having three turns and the Nemesis having two turns (most notably: the App for iOS! See our Discussion in Seven House Rules For Cooperative Games). This version of Aeon’s End: The Descent seems to let the true solo player have four turns (it’s unclear, because the set-up for the players has rules for 2,3, and 4 players … but not 1-Player? See page 8!). In the end, the defining text seems to be: “The turn order deck is always composed of four player turn order cards and two Nemesis turn order cards” (p. 8, Turn Order Deck).
Over the course of about 4 days, I ended up playing the entire Expedition! Although the game box says 60 minutes per game, I kind of think that’s bogus: I am an experienced Aeon’s End player, and I think I took about 2 hours per game. To be fair, when I play solo, I tend to be more thoughtful and take longer turns.
I chose to use a different Mage for each game: I started with Thraxir, went to Mezahaedron for my second Battle …
Used Raven in my 3rd Battle …
And finally ended Battle 4 with Brama .. the Leader!
Using a different Mage for each battle was absolutely the right thing to do! I got to play 4 VERY DIFFERENT Mages throughout the game! Each play style was very different, and it was fun to try to learn and discover the strategies for each Mage! I had to use Destiny tokens, Knowledge tokens, and all sorts of new stuff I had never seen before!
It was an absolute delight getting through this Expedition. I had a blast!
Although the true solo game has the solo mage advance quickly, I always worry that they may die sooner, because they only have 10 hit points total! At least playing two-handed solo, there are 20 hit points total between the two mages … Luckily, getting too low was never an issue. I don’t know if I just chose well, but my Mages never skirted death! I always worry about the true solo player dying too early because there are no hit point balancing mechanisms (i.e., solo player has 12 hit points or something), but it hasn’t seemed to be an issue.
My only complaint might have been that maybe it was too easy? I didn’t lose a single solo game along the way! And all of wins were pretty decisive! Like I said, I am a fairly experienced Aeon’s End player, so that’s part of it. Luckily, I noticed that every Nemesis does have a “advanced” mode, so if I play again, maybe I’ll do the advanced mode so it’s a little harder …
In the end, I had a great time playing the Expedition solo. I was able to learn the game to teach my friends (see Cooperative Play section below), but still enjoy a full story and campaign! If I never play Aeon’s End: The Descent again, I feel like I still feel like I got my money’s worth. The thing is, I would like to play it again! It was fun!
Cooperative Play
So, Robert, Becca, and Jeff and I played the first game of the Expedition! A 4-Player game!
We ended up winning and generally having a good time!
Becca, who doesn’t really like cooperative games that much, liked it enough that she expressed interest in ordering a copy! I showed her the little catalog (above: came with the game) of all the Aeon’s Ends …
Generally, everyone was able to feel part of the team! But, each Mage has their own personality, and I think everyone felt like they could do something interesting on their turn! Sure, there were moments when one of us “took it for the team” and had a crappy turn, but it was always a conversation! Everyone was always involved, either figuring out their turn, or talking with others!
The only “real” problem was that the game lasted a good three hours! Granted, this is a learning game for most everyone but me, but 3 hours is a lot longer than the 60 minutes on the box! Still, we were engaged the entire time and had fun.
Cooperative play went well, even with 4 people who are all very independent. And none of my friends (except Becca) are really “gamers”, but everyone took to the game pretty well! Generally, it was a smashing success and we had fun.
One final thing: the 4-Player cooperative game seemed harder than the true solo game. I think if we played through the entire Expedition as a 4-Player game, the game would have been much more challenging. The game just seems harder with more people.
“Emergency Sleeving!”
You don’t have to sleeve the game, but you really really really should sleeve the Turn Order Deck (see above). Why? You touch the Turn Order Deck every turn! I didn’t sleeve my Turn Order Deck in the original Aeon’s End, and it got a little grody.
Just as we were starting the Cooperative game, I remembered how “grody” the Turn Order cards, so we had to have an “Emergency Sleeving!!!!”
Okay, you may now resume your regularly scheduled program.
What I Liked
The Campaign, er, Expedition Story: Once I got into the Expedition, I enjoyed the story. I needed the graphic support of pictures of the characters to jumpstart me into the story, but once I got into it, it was surprisingly enjoyable. And maybe even a little moving?
The Length of the Expedition: I liked that the campaign was only 4 Battles: it seemed like just enough to be achievable. It wasn’t too long to drag on, nor too short to leave me wanting more. I said the same thing about the campaign in Astro Knights: Eternity: 4 Battles seems just right!
Friends and Foes: I adored the Friends and Foes addition. It not only fixed the Variable Turn Order problems (or at least strongly alleviated the issues), but also added some extra choices to the gameplay. Overall, this module is a major win for the Aeon’s End system, and may now be a necessary module moving forward.
Still Fresh: Everything seemed “fresh”: the new Mages, the new Nemeses, the Friends and Foes, the new Gems/Relics/Spells, the new mechanisms (Knowledge, Destiny, etc)! Somehow, even after 8 years since the original Aeon’s End, all this content still seems fresh!
New Narrative Booklets: I like that the Narrative Booklets and the Expedition mode gives you an “excuse” to play through all the content. I like this idea! An excuse! It sort of went under the radar, but this also included Narrative Booklets for both the original Aeon’s End and the Aeon’s End: War Eternal. If I need/want an excuse to playthrough those games again, I have it! I think it’s really cool that Indie boards and cards “retro-fitted” the Expedition onto the original games!
Standalone: Were you always curious abut Aeon’s End but were turned away because of something (maybe Variable Turn Order)? Maybe you found the Friends and Foe module alluring? Maybe the idea of a just-right campaign is alluring? You do NOT have to get all the other Aeon’s End content … you can just get this standalone game and be very happy for a while!
What I Didn’t Like
Wall of Text: I grew to like the story that came out, but that wall of text from the Expedition booklet is very daunting; I suspect it will actually turn some people away. I would have considered putting in some relevant pictures in with the next, or at least “suggested” that players keep out the Player Mats so they can have pictures of the characters as they interact.
Friends Ability Activation: I really think that the players should allow the Friend to activate abilities with a little more choice; right now they friend “must” discharge all their charges and activate their ability even if it’s not useful. These seems against the theme; they are our friends, why can’t we work with them so they activate their abilities at better times? This is my only real complaint in an otherwise wonderful Friends and Foes module.
Rulebook and rules: The Rulebook and Narrative books are pretty good, but have a lot of weird discrepancies! Why is one-player set-up not mentioned in the Turn Order Deck section? Why are Treasures not emphasized more? It’s one page in a floating box you will miss on your first read! The set-ups in the Narrative book seem a little … spartan? There needs to be more emphasis that we can choose Gems/Relics/Spells between Battles! And the Turn Order cards are referenced in the Components but “hidden” in the intro decks … it needs a slightly better sentence there.
These are all minor things.
Conclusion
I am not quite sure where I come down on Aeon’s End: The Descent, because I liked it so much! The Friends and Foes module, for me at least, is always necessary for any Aeon’s End game I play from now on! My friends loved this game, even the non-gamers! The cooperative experience has always been very strong in Aeon’s End: my plays with my friends accented how well it works!
My solo games during the Expedition were so much fun, they will probably make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!
Aeon’s End: The Descent breathes new life into the Aeon’s End system. I loved it. I think I will give it an 8.5/10 or maybe a 9/10. I don’t know, maybe even a 9.5/10? It was such a great experience both solo and cooperatively!
My only question: should it make my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024 (because it’s a standalone game) or my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 (because it expands other Aeon’s End games)?
Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is a cooperative campaign that was on Kickstarter back in April 2022. This was the follow on to the original Tidal Blades game (which is really more of a head-to-head skirmish game). I knew nothing about the original Tidal Blades when I backed this: only that the components looked really cool. I backed it because it looked like it had a cool solo and co-op campaign.
I went all-in and got the base game (lower right), the stretch goals (upper), and the miniatures (lower left): See above. This is the deluxe version with awesome miniatures!
The most important thing to realize is that this is a standalone solo or cooperative campaign game! I.e., you don’t need the previous game at all!!!
It’s a little confusing because the side of the box says “Part 2” (see above), but this is really just the next game in the same universe! Tidal Blades 2 continues with the ideas of the original Tidal Blades (which was NOT cooperative) but in a solo and cooperative game!
So, in some sense, this is still a skirmish game, as players play cooperatively against monsters in the game. Honestly, this game really gives me a Gloomhaven (see review of Jaws of The Lion here) or Batman: Gotham City Chronicles (solo or cooperative mode: see our review here) vibe! Players move around on a map in a book and fight monsters! You’ll see what I mean more below.
Let’s take a closer look!
Unboxing the Miniatures
As much as you really want to see what’s in the main box, I gotta show you the miniatures first. They are fantastic!
The minis are washed, they are tri-color, and they have 2 sets of bases! These are some of the nicest miniatures I have seen!
The top part of the box comes with the monsters you fight: they are all notated on a sheet (and, eben better, are labelled where they are in the box!!!) at the top of the box.
Wow! The monsters are all bluish and really great! See above! Let’s take a look at a few!
These are pretty awesome! Below the tray with the monsters are the Heroes and Boss Monsters!
The Heroes are light brownish, and the monsters are very purple: see below.
Let’s take a closer look at some Heroes (below):
The Boss Monsters are very purple! See below.
These miniatures are just awesome!
The game also comes with plastic bases for the minis so you can tell them apart. The normal bases denote the normal monsters, and the sparkly bases denote the “mutant” monster (like the Elite monsters in Gloomhaven). The “mutants” are just the tougher version of the monsters!
We also have really nice plastic Fruit and shells (replacing the cardboard from the base game).
See above as the colored hit point tracks match the colors of the base? And the “sparkly” yellow one is the mutant!
These bases really make it easier to tell monsters apart so you can track the hit points.
Overall, the colors and bases are well-thought out and make each entity stand out on the table. See above with some monsters, characters, and a boss monster all in the same frame!
These minis are just fantastic.
Rulebook
The rulebook is quite good. But it has two major flaws.
The rulebook completely fails the Chair Test! See above as it flops over both edges being almost unusable! This rulebook made a fundamental error by being the same size as the box!
Much like Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, the solution is to use TWO chairs, and have the spine of the rulebook sit in between! See above as we can keep the rulebook open and useful! I do like that the fonts are big! And the rulebook is full of good pictures! It is easy to see the rules on the chair next to me … once there are TWO chairs!
The rulebook has a Table of Contents that make it easy to look stuff up! Nice!
The components pages are great, with every component having a picture and being well-labelled!
The set-up is nice (it’s over three pages), but some of the set-up is deferred to the campaign book. See above.
In general, I thought this rulebook was great. There’s a nice glossary in the back (ya), but no index. I’ll forgive the lack of index because the glossary and Table of Contents were great.
My other major complaint (besides the form factor) was that the combat wasn’t quite as well specified as I want. We’ll discuss that below.
Otherwise, great rulebook!
Unboxing the Base Game
This base box (and the minis box) and both pretty big! My friends lifted the main box and were surprised how heavy it was! What’s in this gargantuan box?
See how tall the box is too (relative to a can of Coke)!
If you want, you can use the Foreteller app to read the “plot” as you go: this is a campaign game where a story unfolds and you may want to get some professionals reading it aloud. I didn’t get the Forteller narration … and it was just fine without it (but it does have the option: sold separately).
There’s a LOT of stuff when you unbox (see above); we’ll go through the components as we discuss gameplay.
Gameplay
Each player (1-4 players) chooses a Tidal Blade warrior to play. See the six options above and below.
Each player gets a sheet with their character: see the six above and one (closer, below).
Each character sheet is for recording stuff as your character levels up during the campaign. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is campaign game! Characters will be leveling up; you will be making decisions about how to do that! This sheet will become incredibly marked up as you play…
See above as Caiman has experienced a lot and marked up his character sheet!
On the back of your character sheet are “tracks” where you will make choices about how you use experience points and other forms of up-levelling. To be clear: each character is different! They have a different sheet with different cards and powers that can be activated!
But, what really distinguishes the characters are the combat decks: see above!!! Each player has a different Persistent Power (see above) when they start, as well as a different deck!!! (Well, some cards are in common, but generally the decks are different!!) These decks will be augmented, culled, and clogged as you play! To be clear, Tidal Blades 2 is not a deck-building game per se (as that implies you are dynamically changing the deck as you play), it’s what we called a deck-advancement game. We made this distinction back in our review of Adventure Tactics: See that review here for more discussion of the difference. Suffice to say, your combat deck only changes/updates at the end/beginning of each chapter of the campaign.
What’s even cooler is that when you use of the cards during play, you activate either a row or a column on your board! What this means, of course, is that you piggy-back on our previous turn! For example, if we just played Careful Strike to the board (top middle), we are allowed to activate ALL the actions in either the middle column or the top row! Some actions give you shells (armor), some actions allow melee strike (swords), some actions give you resources (yellow/pink), some actions give you movement, and so one!
As your character takes excessive damage throughout the game, you can take WOUNDS (see bottom right) which clog your board! Now, if activate the last row or column, you can’t use anything from that last space!
This mechanism of playing a card to a row is central to the game! What card you choose dictates your initiative (Stand Fast! gives me +1 initiative), your current turn, and what actions you might want to play on future turns! And it’s really fun, because you feel like you have a lot of choices:
1) Which card do I play? It affects my current turn and initiative! 2) Where do I place my card? It affects which “core” symbols I block! 3) Which row or column do I activate? What previous cards do I want to leverage? 4) Do I want to finish a row with 3 cards? I may clear it, but I get a very powerful one turn! Each turn is just rife of choice!
Each character also has spirit, focus, and some “shells” which can serve as armor or activate other abilities! Armor in the game is handled by putting shells from your uncharged area into your blocking area! So, if you want to play defensive for a round, you can choose the shells action! Yet another type of choice: defensive or offensive!
Players move around a map of hexes, fighting creatures! (Sound familiar? Gloomhaven, I am looking at you…) See above.
The map books remind me a little of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, as you just set-up the board from a book of maps and go! This map book was the key innovation in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. What’s cool, is that Tidal Blades 2 furthers that innovation!
The storybook is the play area! Set-up is easy! Just turn to that page!
Players move around the map, but the stupid spiral binding gets in the way of the map in Jaws of the Lion! See above.
What Tidal Blades 2 does is very clever! Rather than just one map book, Tidal Blades 2 has two map books (actually 3), but each book is rotated so that the spiral bindings are on the outside! Instead, the middles just touch and make a contiguous surface! See above! The middle of the board, where a lot of action is, in untainted by the spiral bindings! It looks more like a contiguous surface!
It’s really easy to set-up each chapter of the campaign! Just turn the book to the proper pages!
Combats are decided by dice: every SWORD you generate from your cards gives you a die! Red symbols are a straight-up hit, blue CAN be a hit if you have advantage (if your compatriots are flanking), and yellow focus CAN be a hit … if you spend a focus point! And that decides how much damage you do!
Monster combats are similar: all monsters perform the actions of their current card: see above as the mudcrabs move 2 (to the closest character) and then just do 2 straight damage! (This is modified a little by a damage die).
There’s all sorts of monsters with all sorts of abilities! Some poison you! (See above)
Each monster is tracked by a hit point track (see above) with the bases differentiating them. The purple die (lower left) modifies every monster attack!
There’s a lot more to this game, but that’s the “flavor” of the game!
Campaign
Let’s be 100% clear: this is a campaign game! It last about 18 chapters, and each game is about 2 to 2.5 hours (including set-up and tear-down: a lot of your time will be set-up and tear-down).
Each chapter describes in great detail which maps you need, which monsters you fight, and what the set-up is! See the first chapter above! (Minor spoilers above).
There is a story unfolding (pun not intended) about the folds of time. Each chapter begins with some text describing the story (picture blurred on purpose above).
After a few chapters, there will be Interludes which give you a chance to level up. To be clear, there is SOME levelling-up after most chapters, but the Interludes offer significant levelling-up!
At these Interludes, Players choose where to go to “spend” their resources: the market? The floating gardens? It depends how you want to level-up your character. Cull cards? Add Items? Add skills? Whatever you want!
Although this is a campaign, the Stretch Goals pack (see above) comes with 5 one-shot scenarios.
Since this is a campaign, and you have to mark up your sheet, I went ahead and made a copy of all the character sheets so I don’t have to sully the originals. There are enough sheets in there that you “probably” don’t have to do this, but I prefer not to mark up the originals if possible.
Solo Play
So, Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders has two solo modes! (Congratulations for following Saunders’ Law!) The simpler of the two solo modes is to just play two-handed: choose two characters and operate them as-if it were a 2-Player game. This is the route I chose. And so should you!!
If you REALLY REALLY REALLY want a solo mode where you only play 1 character (but then still kinda have to operate some other pets/creatures anyways) with complicated exceptions, there is a second solo mode. I usually eschew complicated solo modes because the exceptional rules are always SO HARD to keep track of! Play two-handed: you’ll thank me for embracing the simpler mode … the simpler two-handed solo mode has NO exceptions to rules; you just play the game they way it was meant to be played.
At the time of this writing, I am eight chapters into the campaign! I have seen boss battles, several maps, several different ideas (jumping, running water, flying, etc), and some really great miniatures! Every new chapter introduces new monsters and new ideas and keeps the game fresh!
Playing two characters is juuuust about the right level of complexity. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, since each character has their own deck with their own unique cards, but since the system is well-described and well-notated (seriously! The icons are VERY intuitive), it doesn’t make it too hard to context switch back and forth between the characters.
One drawback is that there is a lot of maintenance for the solo player: set-up, run character 1, run character 2, operate the initiative track, operate the villains, lather-rinse-repeat, tear-down. This is really where the vibe felt like Batman: Gotham City Chronicles: there’s just a lot of work to keep the game going! But, it’s kinda fun! Everything is so bright and well-notated! The monsters are well-tracked (with the bases and colored hit point tracks), and the rules are pretty solid (so there’s not much second guessing, modulo one issue).
I really like this solo mode: I hope to finish this campaign at some point during the year. I am currently playing two campaigns: my solo campaign with 2 characters and a cooperative campaign with the other 4 characters (with my friends).
I fully expect this to make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024: it’s that good! There are just so many good choices! Where do I go? What cards do I play? How do I level-up my character? The choices keep me involved the whole time, even if there is quite a bit of maintenance per turn.
The solo game took longer to play than perhaps it should: the box says 60-90 minutes but I frequently was at 2 hours; I also tend to like a little analysis paralysis when I play by myself. There’s no one around, so I can try lots of things without fear of wasting someone else’s time.
Cooperative Play
The cooperative experience is just in its infancy as we are only two games in, but my friends still keep wanting to play it! “Let’s keep playing it!” They really like it!
Every player has agency on their turn; the game is just too complicated for an Alpha Player to come in and ruin a player’s experience … there are just too many choices for a single player: the Alpha Player will be too busy figuring out his own turn!! At the same time, there’s plenty of cooperation and players plan when to flank (see below), which enemies to engage, which actions to take, when to defend vs. attack! This has a good blend of agency and cooperation.
One of the things we DIDN’T like about the cooperative game Endeavor Deep Sea (from two weeks ago: see review here) was that the game didn’t “really” have any mechanisms for helping each other too much; players had a lot of multiplayer solitaire going on in Endeavor Deep Sea. That’s not the case here! Even you though you can choose to play multiplayer solitaire, you can also do quite a few things to directly help your compatriots! You can spend shells to allow your friends to re-roll dice (if they run out of re-rolls)! You can set-up flanking opportunities! You can use skills that help everyone within 2 spaces! There’s a number of mechanisms where the sole purpose is to help your compatriots! And that does increase the level of cooperation! Even choosing the initiative order can be an act of cooperation! And THANK GOODNESS there are no Communications Limitations in this game! Just last week, we saw how the Communications Limitations ruined that cooperative game! Luckily, you can talk all you want and work together in Tidal Blades 2!!
The only real negative for the game is that sometimes it can take a while to get back around to your turn (as there is no simultaneous play): players must play in initiative order. Like any game with lots o choices, sometimes a little Analysis Paralysis can slip in and slow down the game. It’s still not too bad, because you can always be talking with your friends or figuring your own turn out while waiting for others.
It’s easier to overlap turns in a cooperative game (like Tidal Blades 2) because you can ask your friends to leave the board “in a certain state” so you can preplan your turn! In a competitive game, you always have to wait until the previous turns are over to re-assess the board every turn! With a little cooperation, there can be much more overlap! And we saw some of that overlap here in Tidal Blades 2! It’s a minor point, but that overlap can make cooperative games (without simultaneous actions) move a little faster.
Overall, this game was a lot of fun cooperatively. It’s a good blend of agency and cooperation, and there are many ways players can help each other. It’s fun to talk and plan with your friends!
Flanking and Advantage
So, this is, at its core, a miniatures fighting game! Which means you have rules for flanking and advantage! If you flank (players surround an enemy adjacently from opposite sides), you can get advantage (which allows you to turn the blue wave symbols on dice into hits)! This is very cool, because it is a mechanism that encourages the players to cooperate and coordinate their attacks! The best results come if you cooperate, flank an enemy and maybe get 50% more hits because you can gain advantage!
If you saw “Flanking and Advantage” and thought “What is this … 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons?” You are not the only one who thought that!!! But, these ideas in this game really do help improve the cooperation: they encourage an easy way to increase the odds of hits!
What I Liked
The minis! You can get the game and just use cardboard standees, but I would strongly recommend getting the miniatures! See above!! They are so well done, with the different bases, the beautiful sculpts, the different colors to highlight the different types! I feel like they really made the game feel more thematic. The minis add to the cost of the game (as you buy them separately), but I think in this case, they were worth it.
Combat Mechanism! The combat mechanism of choosing a card, then choosing where to put it, then choosing a row or column to activate is so cool! Your choices affect your current turn as well as future turns!! This mechanism is at the core of the game, and it makes you feel like you have choices at all times!
Well-done Monsters! The monsters are pretty easy to run (modulo one problem, see below)! The cards clearly specify what to do, the bases clearly denote which monster is which, and it’s pretty quick to set-up a game! Heck, I spent more time putting plastic bases on monster minis than I did setting up the cards! It really is easy and quick to SET-UP and RUN the monsters!
Not too much Randomness! I was very worried that there would be too much randomness with dice deciding combat … but here’s the thing, there’s not that much randomness! There is usually at least one hit per die and sometimes your focus shows (which means you may have to spend focus if you want extra hits). See the dice above! If you roll XXX dice, you will probably get about XXX hits! If you have extra focus to spend, or some special abilities, or flanking (see below), you may need much better! It’s like having a baseline of hits, and you choose (by having focus, or flanking) if you need to do better! I really like this system! I usually dislike the randomness of dice, but how it’s done here works for me!
Easy-to-Read! The components are well-labelled, bright, and have very easy-to-discern icons! This game is very intuitive and easy to read!
The Components! The components (even if you don’t get the miniatures ) are fantastic!! The dual-book system solves the spiral middle problem, the cards are linen finished, the dice are clear and beautiful, and the cardboard components are well-done … just overall the components are a joy!
Cooperation and Agency! The game has many many ways to encourage cooperation, but still allow each character to have their own agency. The card choice mechanism is very intense and full of choice; players are allowed to coordinate if they like (there are no silly communication limits)!! Players must decide who goes after what! Players must decide if it makes sense to flank! But, you can’t really Alpha Player the game because each deck is so different, and frankly, each character is so involved (in a good way) to run! Players will have intense agency on their turn to operate their character, while still having to work together to come up with a plan! And that flanking mechanism I think really encourages finer cooperation: it’s so good to gain advantage, you just need to!
Loot 2.0! In some ways, Tidal Blades 2 feels like it should be called Gloomhaven 2.0. One of the things we house ruled in Gloomhaven was the Loot Rule (see discussion here: Top Seven House Rule for Cooperative Games). Basically, stopping to pick up loot takes you out of the flow as you have to stop and use actual resources to do that. The nice thing in Tidal Blades 2 is that you can a free action every turn to “interact” with one item! So, maybe you can’t pick up three pieces of fruit or five rewards, but you can move by something and pick it up without needing to spend one of your precious actions. Granted, you may still have to spend movement, but usually a reward (when you kill an enemy) comes out right next to you, and you just pick it up! We enjoyed this free interaction SO MUCH more than Loot in Gloomhaven!
What I Didn’t Like
Wait, What Am I Unfolding? I love story in my games (it’s why I like Astro Knights: Eternity better than the original … it has a compelling story!!), but the story and the writing here feels … forced and a little turgid. And I like story! But it felt like Tidal Blades 2 were trying to hard to have their own “surfer-techno” lingo, and it just didn’t work for me. I tended to just skim over the exposition and head straight into the scenarios.
Enemy Movement: As easy as the monsters are to set-up and operate, the AI for the monsters movement is a little weak. There’s some nonsense about “clockwise heading north” in the case of ties, but the description in the text and the picture don’t match (for me anyways). In the end, the final rule for specifying things is done using “Fastest Initiative”: the character with the fastest initiative is the tie-breaker … that tended to be my goto rule! Many times, that was the tie-breaker (when it was really unclear) for us because it just make things easier. Otherwise, the enemy movement phase becomes an overwrought “look at all possibilities”, which isn’t fun. Gloomhaven did a better job at specifying the enemy AI, but at the cost of more rules.
The AI basically works, but if you focus too much on it, the game can become overwrought. I worry that zealots for rules will make playing this less fun as you spend the entire game getting the AI rules “just right”. And that’s fine if that’s what you want, but I think most people won’t love that. Just play the game; it’s good!
Bases didn’t Work? Some of the mutant bases didn’t quite work: the miniature just kind of “slipped” out the base: see the video above. It wasn’t all the mutant bases, and most of them worked, but it was weird that some of them didn’t work!
Reactions
Rich: This is probably a Top Ten Game of the year, both solo and cooperatively! I am keeping my solo campaign alive as I still venture cooperatively with my friends! There is just so much to like! This feels like the next evolution of Gloomhaven! This is a 9.5/10 for me. I just wish the AI was better and the story was better: that’s what keeps it from a 10/10. Sara: I really liked it! Let’s keep on playing it! It’s probably a 7 for me! Andrew: Ya! Let’s keep playing it! A 6.5 or 7 for me! Teresa: I loved the minis and how the game worked, 7 or 8 for me! It was like a better Gloomhaven, and not nearly as dark!
Conclusion
Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is a fantastic game! I still am not quite sure what we are unfolding (I think we are unfolding space and time), but there are so many things to love in this campaign miniatures skirmish game! The components are first-class, the miniatures are stellar, the cards are easy-to-read and intuitive, the combat system has so many great choices, the leveling up is fun, and the campaign is really interesting! In some ways, Tidal Blades 2 is the next evolution of Gloomhaven as Tidal Blades 2 evolves the map book ideas, the Loot rules, and the combat with the row/column mechanism!
The card “activate column/row” mechanism works so well, that I think it elevates the game significantly. It’s such a unique mechanism and makes the player feel like they can do so much! I expect to see this mechanism in upcoming games because it just works so well.
This is a 9.5/10 for me, with my group rating in highly with 7s and 8s as well. This will make our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024 and the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024!
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.
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.
I freely admit that this expansion appealed to me because of my love of Comic Books, The Inhumans, George Perez, and John Byrne! However, even when I predisposed to like something, it still has to be good (
coopgestalt 