Tag: cooperative

Invincible: The Card Game. Review After Full Playthrough!

So, just so you know: we are talking about Invincible: The Card Game!  This is the one that has the subtitle Guardians of the Globe (see above).  You have to be careful!  There are at least 3 or 4 other Invincible games: some of them great (see our review of Invincible: The Hero-Building Game) and some of them … less so.  What about this one?

Invincible: The Card Game was up on Kickstarter back in October 2024: see link here.  I love the Invincible universe in the comic-book world, so I went all-in and backed the full Kickstarter and probably got waaaay too much: see above.

The Kickstarter had originally promised delivery in January 2025, but it didn’t arrive until the last week of September 2025.  It was about 9 months late, but given the state of the world and shipping, and it’s a Kickstarter, I guess that’s ok.

Invincible: The Card Game is a cooperative deck-building game for 1-4 Players.  It’s very very much like Astro Knights , a cooperative deck-building game we’ve reviewed here (Astro Knights) and here (Astro Knights: Eternity).  

In fact, Invincible: The Card Game is so similar to Astro Knights, you can combine them and play them together! 

Let’s take a look!

Kickstarter Extras: How Much Do You Need?

So, before we get going too much, we should have a quick discussion on “Should I get the Kickstarter extras?”

The “bad-guy” mat (see above) is probably worth getting.  It helps organize all the cards and where they go during play.  I don’t love how “busy” the art looks; I feel like it gets in the way of gameplay a little, as the art is distracting.

The “good guy” mat I was less in love with (I got four, one for each player).  See above!! I don’t love the layout for a bunch of reasons.  For one, I want to use the bottom space for “cards in hand”, but the “invention” space takes away from that, so that the whole bottom of the mat seems like wasted space.  I would have put the “invention” to the left or somewhere out of the way!  The “invention” is a very short-lived concept in the game (usually, you buy your invention in the first few turns), so I wouldn’t devote so much space (if any, esp. at the bottom) to such a short-lived card.

A bigger problem is the discard pile: it should be turned sideways!  For one, it’s clearer the cards are discarded (remember, the “Discard Pile” notation is under all those cards!).  Secondly, the Afterburn effects are harder to read when the discard is up right!  See above!!! What does that say?

The entire purpose of the Afterburn effects is that while a card is in your discard, you can use that ability!  So, it should be easier to read! 

We saw the Afterburn idea first in Astro Knights!  See how much easier it is to read those effects when your discard is sideways? See above!  (There was no player mat for Astro Knights, so we could do the right thing and have the discard sideways).

Another problem with the mats were the Assist Zone!  You are supposed to put cards in the Assist Zone when you Assist (a really great concept in the game), but there’s one main problem with that!  More than once, you “forget” about the card being in your hand because it’s in the Assist Zone and you take your turn “forgetting” to use the card!  It would be MUCH better if you just kept your hand of cards in front of you and “nudged” the Assisted cards up an inch to show you’ve used them for assist!  That way, they stay in your hand, but you have marked that it’s Assist has been used!  See above as Eve has a card in the Assist Zone, but it looks like she only has 4 cards in hand! It’s too easy to forget that card is still in your hand.  Just nudge the card up to show it has assisted. 

The rest of the player mat worked fine, but I think it should be thinner (for more space for “cards in hands” and moving inventions), and it should have the discard space sideways.

Of course, mats are always nice because they make cards easier to pick up and handle.

Another thing that came with the Kickstarter are sleeves! My “default position” is that you should usually get sleeves when you have a deck-builder.  And I think that’s still true here.

I am VERY HAPPY that the Turn Order deck has its own sleeves!  If you ONLY sleeve a few cards in the game, you MUST sleeve the Turn Order deck!  These cards are touched all the time!  After many games of Aeon’s End and Astro Knights, trust me on this!  My original Aeon’s End Turn Order deck is a little grody!! 

The sleeves are very nice for Hero cards (see above); these are the yellow sleeves with Invincible on back!  Unfortunately, there are no sleeves for the “bad guy” cards!  If you want to sleeve them, you’ll have to use different sleeves (as the “bad guys” cards have a different card back).  So, I went all-in to get all sleeves, and I was a little disappointed I couldn’t sleeve the entire game! I love the Hero card sleeves (they are very very nice), but I can’t sleeve the bad guys cards without having to use/buy a separate set of sleeves (I think I have some leftovers from Thunderstone Quest I can use).

There’s also two expansions that came with the Kickstarter; these are just more heroes and more villains.  We’ll (probably) review those separately later.

I admit I was a little underwhelmed by the extras.  The only thing I’d say you should probably get is the “bad guy” mat, but even then, I thought it was too busy (from an art perspective).   The sleeves were nice, but realize that they ONLY sleeve the Hero cards, and you’ll have to get more sleeves for “bad guy” cards!! The player mats were the biggest disappointment: they were too tall and needed some reorganization … I’d only get the player mats if you love this game. 

The only thing you HAVE to do is make sure you sleeve the Turn Order cards (either with the given cards or some others).  These cards get handled SO MUCH as you play.

Rulebook

This is an excellent rulebook.  It’s “essentially”, in many ways, a copy of the Astro Knights: Eternity rulebook in turns of layout and progression.

The rulebook gets an A- on the Chair Test.  It opens up and lays flat on the chair next to me, making it easy to consult.  It has big fonts, lots of pictures, and is easy to read.  It’s very easy to consult on the chair next to me. I wish the font were just a little bigger.

The Components page has pictures with annotating text.  

Even after pointing this out in the Astro Knights: Eternity review (see here), they still don’t note that the Turn Order cards are in deck 1A!!!!  I think this will still confuse some people, as they expect them in hand (before opening anything … remember: all decks say STOP! At the top, so you are reluctant to open anything right when you get the game).

One huge mistake the rulebook still makes (and we had the same problem with Astro Knights: Eternity) is not addressing how to play for the first time UP FRONT!!!  See ON PAGE 28, there’s a small sentence that says: “To play our expedition, skip reading this rules section for now…” … however, in order to play the game you still kinda have to start opening decks up!    It would have been SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER if the rulebook, on page 2, said something like “To play and uncover all content in this game, you will need to play the pre-written expedition! See page 28!”  Since I had played Astro Knights: Eternity and had to suffer through this already, I knew how to do this.  New players may not. Caveat Emptor.

I like how the rulebook has summaries of the cards immediately after the Components page.  I also like how the “new rules” are emphasized in Red above … The Assist keyword is a new rule (but not if you know Astro Knights: Eternity … that was kinda/sorta/not really like the Bolster keyword … it’s still newish for some people).

It is interesting how the set-up isn’t until halfway through the book … still, I think it works.  If you have the mats, like I do, this isn’t AT ALL what my table looked like.  Oh well.

The end of the book has keywords summaries: it’s not an Index, but it’s probably as good as we can hope.  I consulted the back of the book several times during gameplay. 

Overall, this was an excellent rulebook full of good examples.  I wish they had addressed the first play issue better.  Especially since I didn’t get the First Play Sheet (see later).

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a actually a pretty thick box; see Can of Coke above for perspective.

It’s about half the width of a Ticket To Ride size box.

This is a cooperative deck-building game, so there are a lot of cards.  See above. 

The expedition book will tell you when to open the decks above.  The game has a campaign (called an Expedition) which will allow you to open up and see all the content in the game over 4 games.  This is a completely resettable campaign (as I did reset everything after playing it solo).

Each Player takes the role of a Hero from the Invincible universe.  If you don’t know the Invincible universe, you aren’t alone.  I know it from collecting comic books for years, and many people know it from the recent animated show.  None of my friends knew this universe.    Each character is kind of different (some have more slots, more hit points, faster power chart), but what distinguishes each character is their “special power”.

If, for example,  you look closely at Robot above (and yes, that’s his name in the comics), you’ll see written in blue (corresponding to the power chart) his special abilities: Stun each Enemy or Gain the top two Tech supply…

This is a deck-building game, so every player starts with a “crappy” hand of cards that they will upgrade and cull as the game goes.

Like most deck-building games, you can buy cards with Fuel to get better Fuel,  Tech, or Weapons!!  The six piles above form the market; the top two piles get you better Fuel (purple) the bottom three piles give you better Weapons (orange) and the the upper right pile gives you Tech (green).

The interesting thing about this market is that every deck is full of different cards.  If you are used to Aeon’s End or Dominion, where every deck in the market has the same cards, that’s not what you get here! Each card in a deck has a similar cost and “flavor”, but they are all different.

Every game has a “bad guy”, the first is The Flaxans (see above).

Usually, you have to bring the “bad guy” to 0 hit points to win the game; this is denoted by a health dial.

At the same time, you are protecting the city!  You are a superhero after all! If the city ever goes to 0 health, or all heroes are reduced to 0 health, players lose!  

The expedition has four chapters (each a self-contained game), each with special cards and envelopes.

Overall, this game has a lot quality components!

Where’s My First Play?

Where’s my First Game Setup sheet?  I did not get one!  I am VERY SURPRISED, because the Aeon’s End games (made by the same people) have amazing first play sheets! Am I the only one who didn’t get one?  Hopefully, if you get this game, they will have rectified this issue.

Art: Is This a Coloring Book?

So, I love the art of the original Invincible comic:  It feels clean without being too messy.  That art really complements this universe.  See some covers and inner pages above.

Unfortunately, I feel the art in this game is more … anemic.  Compare the Atom Eve and Invincible characters (above) to covers from the comic!  The player art in the game just seem … lesser.  To the point that it bothered me.

And Robot feels so anemic (above), he feels like a page from a coloring book!

From just one frame in the comic, Robot looks great! But the character in the game made me cringe. “How could I explain this to my friends?  This looks like a coloring book!! Really, though, this is a great comic!!”

I was told by my friends to mellow out, as the game art is more consistent with an animated series anyways. So, the art we are seeing is more like the animated series. I guess.

Maybe this is just me, but I would have loved this game a lot more if the art had been … more like the comic book than the animated series.  (To be clear, even though Invincible: The Hero Building Game didn’t have art that quite as good as the comic, it was still significantly better: see review with lots of pictures here).

Decide for yourself.  To be clear, I like the game, but I don’t love the art.

Solo Play (true solo)

There are two ways to play solo (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)!  

Our first play was true solo, where the solo player takes control of one character.  See above as Invincible battles the Flaxans alone.

There is a major difference in the true solo game: the Variable Turn Order deck is changed!  Instead of having 6 cards, there are only 5!  The Villain goes twice as normal, but the Hero only gets to go three times (as opposed to four turns in any normal game).  See above.

I think the idea is that the Hero gets a chance to refine his deck much more quickly, so that he has to be limited to three turns for balance.  The problem is, I think the solo mode is fundamentally more fragile.

My first true solo game was a massive bummer: I lost my being reduced to 0 hit points very quickly.  My second game was much better, and I think I just barely lost.  

The problem is,  the true solo game is very fragile.  In a 2 to 4 player game, there are multiple players with multiple hit points, so there are 20 to 40 hits points total distributed among the players!  In the solo game, the solo player has only 10 hit points (or less)! If the randomness of the game is too much, the true solo player will take that 10 hit points and die quickly!   And that’s what happened in my first solo game.   The other problem is that with multiple characters, one character can be reduced to zero hit points and still be useful as long as someone still has hit points! With one character, that will never happen.   

We saw this same problem in the app for Aeon’s End: the solo player gets fewer turns.  And frankly, I don’t play the app solo anymore because of this.  The true solo game is just too fragile and it’s too easy for the randomness inherent in the game to overwhelm you.

If you really want to try the true solo game, a simple house rule might be to allow the true solo character to double the number of hit points (have 20 hit points).   At least then it will allow the solo character to absorb more of the damage before dying (simulating multiple characters taking distributed damage).  I am surprised this isn’t built-in to Invincible: The Card Game; I know some games, like The Heroes of Terrinoth, where they balance the game by giving fewer players more hit points.

I probably won’t ever play this game true solo ever again.

Solo Play (Two-Handed)

Ah, but two-handed solo was much more fun!  The solo player alternates between two characters like a 2-Player game: this is the way this game was meant to be played!  Two characters who can assist!  Characters who can keep playing even after the other has been down to 0!  More hit points to take damage from the bad guys!  And four full turns for the heroes for every two turns of the bad guys!

This is the way I played the Expedition solo: Two-Handed Solo.   I recommend you play Two-Handed solo if you wish to play; it’s the way the game was meant to be played.  The only real downside to Two-Handed solo mode is there is more maintenance: you have to maintain two hero decks/stats as well as maintain the “bad guy” decks/stats.  There’s less maintenance in the true solo mode (as you only operate one hero), but (as you now know) that true solo game is much more fragile.

Solo Expedition

The Expedition is a series of 4 games (or more games if you lose) that you play in a row. (If you lose, you just play again with some adjustments).   New cards, new abilities, new heroes, new villains, and just new stuff comes out after every game of the Expedition and augment the next game!! By the time you get to the final game, you are playing with a lot of cool new stuff!

SPOILERS BELOW:  for the rest of this section, we’ll be discussing and showing pictures of the the chapters 1-4 of the Expedition.  Most of this won’t spoil too much, but if you want to be completely surprised, skip to the Cooperative Play section.

Chapter 1: Invincible and Atom Eve

The first Expedition game has us fight the Flaxans: it’s the only enemy you have when you first unbox your game!  I chose Invincible and Atom Eve to be partners in my first Two-Handed solo game of the Expedition!  They did great and were able to take down the Flaxans.  Atom Eve‘s special power seems very specialized, and I didn’t find myself using it at all (it’s very city based). Invincible‘s special power was more interesting and I used it at least once.  To be fair, I didn’t need to use the Special Powers too much, because the first game is simpler.

This is really just the base game with nothing special.

Chapter 2: Rexsplode and Robot

For Chapter 2, you fight the Titan!  He’s all about damage reduction!  And this Chapter also introduced something called Inventions!  Basically, Inventions are a card only you can buy, but you get to choose it at the start of the game; it allows players to strategize a little on what their characters may focus on.

Titan’s really hard to do damage to!

To change things up, I had Rexsplode and Robot fight the Titan.  Rex has a very weird power (use a weapon twice, but blow it up), and so does Robot  (he grabs tech)

And we saw exactly the situation we discussed earlier in the True Solo section!  Robot was reduced to 0 hit points, but because Rexsplode was still alive, Robot kept fighting!  Even Rexsplode was down to 3 hit points, but they emerged victorious!   I think part of the issue that they didn’t do better was that I didn’t use their powers very well.  

The Inventions were interesting, but not a real game-changer.  It’s just one more card you can buy.  It does give each hero some focus, though, and some chance for discussion/interaction when you choose, so that helps cooperation.  Note above that I put the Inventions on the LEFT of the mats (instead of under the character).  Again, the player mats could have been better.

Chapter 3: Monster Girl and Duplikate

Chapter 3 introduces Monster Girl as a new player character.  The “bad guy” now is Sinclair!

Monster Girl and Duplikate went after Sinclair!  

Something new from this chapter: The Combo Powers!  Each player gets to chose a Combo!  The Combo Powers are interesting because they allow your partner a special action whenever you do an action! For example, when player 2 activates their ability, player 1 gets to draw two cards!  And when player 1 attacks with debris, player 2 powers up!   

Monster Girl and Kate (with their Combos and Inventions) were a great pair! They handled Sinclair and all his crazy machinations!  And this was the first game when I really feel like I was very strategic and took great advantage of both the Special Powers and the Combo Powers!  Both Monster Girl and Duplikate did a great job of helping each other all the time! This was by far my favorite game of the Expedition.  It was just fun!

If Inventions were pretty good, I think The Combo Powers are a bit of game-changer (in a good way), especially if you can harmonize so that the characters combo powers really reinforce each other!

This was my favorite game of the Expedition.  The villain was still hard and interesting, but the Combo Powers stepped up the game for me!

Chapter 4: Monster Girl and Duplikate

By this point, I had tried all the heroes.  I had so much fun with Monster Girl and Duplikate, in my previous game, I took them for the final run against Omni-man!

Chapter 4 introduced the Team Attacks.  You get to choose one of six (I think).  See one of them above.  Basically, your characters can choose to do one of these three sacrifices on their turn.  If, all three sacrifices have been done, players can choose, at any time, to get the reward!  The coolest part is that you can choose WHEN to get the reward so you can make sure the sacrifices are timely and not in vein!

Omni-Man is a VERY different villain, as you basically have to stop him from destroying earth with his catastrophes!  Basically, you have to make a TON of sacrifices as you play!

This was a super cool way to end the game.  Monster Girl and Duplikate did a great job making sacrifice after sacrifice to save the world!  And they did use the Team Attack, but it wasn’t as game changing as we had hoped.

It was fun to save the world!

Putting It All Back Together

After I was done with the solo campaign, the Expedition book gave us directions on how to put the game back to its pristine state;  I reset the campaign so I could play cooperatively with my friends.  Every card has a notation about which deck it came from (see above).

Cooperative Play

Invincible: The Card Game took over my game table for a cooperative game for a game night.  

The Assist keyword was the hit of the night!  Everyone loved the idea that they could help someone else out when it wasn’t their turn!  And the Afterburn effects were also a big hit!  (I didn’t talk about Afterburn too much, because we already saw in Astro Knights: Eternity,  but Afterburn was great in our solo games).

The cooperative game worked, even though we lost.  We had fun and would play again.

What I Liked

Universe.  I really do like this universe! Retheming Astro Knights to this universe really did work.

Assist:  I think Assist was what Bolster (from Astro Knights: Eternity) wanted to be. Assist is easy to explain and easy to play: when it’s not your turn, you can offer an ability/something to another player!  Take a look at some of the cards above. This one thing really boosted my assessment of Invincible: The Card Game!  It makes the game more cooperative, more interactive (as you pay more attention to other people’s turns), and generally makes the game more fun! (Bolster was the idea that when someone else had to discard, you could get something.  It was clumsy and harder to use.  Assist is what we wanted but didn’t know it).

If there were one thing that elevates Invincible: The Card Game above all the Astro Knights or Aeon’s Ends of the world, it’s this.   (Put Assist with Friends and Foes module from Aeon’s End: Descent, and you might have a Top 10 game!)

Afterburn: The Afterburn effects are really a neat thing.  Sure, we saw them in Astro Knights: Eternity, but they work great here too! It’s just another choice you have when buying a card to help future you!  

Things I Didn’t Like

Time: I have played this game a LOT.  I don’t think I ever saw a game anywhere NEAR 60 minutes.  Except maybe that pure solo game when I lost so quickly! That 60 minutes for estimated time seems off by about 2x.  90-120 would have been better?  Maybe, maybe, after you have read all the cards and know everything in the villain and box you are playing, sure.  But a new game with new rules and a new Villains (which is what you want to keep the game fresh)?  No way for 60 minutes.  

Art.  I love Invincible and I love the art of the original comic book.  The art is in this game seems anemic and more like the coloring book version of the universe!  Maybe this is just me.  My friends told me to mellow out; it’s more like the animated version.

Player Mats:  I had so many problems with the Player Mats; I think they should be redesigned. (see our discussion in the section at the beginning). Another problem is that all mats have the be symmetric, but sometimes when I lay out cards next to my friends, I want the layouts to be mirror images!  For example, the Combo Cards should probably be NEXT to each other so that’s it’s easier to remember when to activate them! Bah, maybe I’m just grumpy and you’ll be perfectly fine with the mats.  But I think I struggled with almost every decision they made.

True solo: I think the True Solo mode is too fragile.  I think an easy fix might just be to give the solo character double the hit points. I am also reminded that Aeon’s End: Descent had a solo mode with that DIDN’T use fewer player actions, and it worked just fine (so fine that it made the #3 spot on our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024), so I really don’t think you need to only have 3 player action cards.  Ugh.  

Variable Turn Order: We’ve said it many times! There are problems with Variable Turn Order games!  See out discussion here:  A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and Ways To Mitigate Its Randomness! In all of our games, we did have to use our ad-hoc house rule of never letting the Nemesis have more than 2 turns in a row (at least twice).   (I did note that some of the Afterburn effects allow you to have some choice on the Variable Turn Order deck, so I appreciated there was some mechanisms in the game to affect that, but it’s still pretty random).

Conclusion

I’ve been grumpy a lot this review; I think that’s because I know this game and this system fairly well, so I have some experience with what seems to work.  But don’t get me wrong, this is an 8.5/10 game for me.   And the Assist keyword is probably my favorite new thing in this system!  It really facilitates cooperation!!!  (I am so glad they kind of “jettisoned” Bolster)

There are just some things that could have made this a 9/10 for me!  I just don’t think this will ever be a 10/10 for me because of Variable Turn Order issues (unless they find some way, like Fate Tokens, of mitigating it).

The Expedition is a fun way to reveal all the content of the game! And four chapters (games) seems just right as the length of a campaign! Any longer and it seems too much, any shorter and it leaves you wanting more.   

And the game says you CAN play this Astro Knights.  I guess I never got that far? I still have at least two expansions to play before I even get anywhere near that!

Probably My Favorite Game of 2025! DC Super Heroes United: Batman Hush

While we wait for the full delivery of DC Super Heroes United (which has run into multiple issues; CMON money issues, tariff issues, and staffing issues), CMON did manage to release DC Super Heroes United: Batman Hush (which we’ll just call Hush from now on, thank you). See above!

This was a “surprise” release that was available from Amazon sometime in August 2025; I ordered it instantly as soon as a I found out about it.  No one really expected this?  EDIT: Well, I missed a some memos … I didn’t expect it.  I mean, we expected DC United (it was #1 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2025 list), but Hush was not part of the original Kickstarter!

This game arrived at my house September 10th, 2025.

What is this?

Hush

This game Hush is a standalone game in the Marvel/DC United series of games.  Yes, it is standalone; you don’t need any other sets to play this.  This is a cooperative superhero game where players take the role of your favorite DC Superheroes (Batman, Robin, Superman*, etc) and work together to defeat the villain!

Hush is loosely based on the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee/Scott Williams/Alex Sinclar Batman series called Hush: see the 20th Anniversary Edition hardback above.

Surprisingly, I had never read Hush, which is weird because I love Batman and I love Jim Lee.  How have I never read this???  I texted my friends Bryan and Diana, who are huge Batman and Jim Lee fans about this!

They think Jim Lee’s Batman is the best Batman (see above).  I went ahead and devoured the story over about 3 hours (below).

Hush is a great story; I’d recommend reading it if you’ve never read it.  It gives much more depth to the Hush villain(s) in the box.

Strictly speaking, you do NOT to read the Hush graphic novel/series to play the game; it just helps flesh out the game.  So, if you are intimidated by the giant Hush graphic novel, don’t despair!  The game works fine without knowing the series, but be aware that there can be spoilers.  (Still, Hush was pretty cool; you should read it!)

Unboxing/Gameplay

See box above with can of Coke for scale.

Each player chooses a hero to operate: Batman (classic), Robin (Tim Drake), Catwoman, or Huntress.

There must be a villain to fight: Hush, Harley Quinn, The Joker, or Superman (controlled).  Superman (controlled) can also be played as a Hero.

I recommend taking a picture of how the minis fit into the insert (or use mine above).  If they all get out out-of-whack, you can’t put the plastic cover over the minis (see below).

Each Hero gets their own deck, and each Villain gets their own (Master Plan) deck and Threats deck.

There are 8 locations that come with the box; you will set 6 of them out in a circle representing the city.

Most of the characters have equipment; the equipment cards are “newish” to Marvel United: they were introduced in Spidergeddon, but we were found we loved them in Marvel United: Multiverse (see review here).   The equipment cards augment the heroes, and basically give them more choices on their turn; however, they will either be discarded or need a recharge to reuse them.  See above.

For heroes who don’t have equipment, there are also “generic” equipment cards any hero can use (see above).

The game also comes with Battle Plan cards; they are for the built-in solo mode called Commander Mode.

There is another way to play where one player can take control of the Villain and plays against all the heroes: this is a 1 vs. many mode using the Super-Hero and Super-Villain cards above.  We won’t be discussing this mode any more in this review; this is strictly a solo and cooperative mode review.

There are a tons of tokens for health, KOs, etc. See above.

Overall, this game looks consistent and great.  The artwork and minis in the game are consistent with the look-and-feel of all the previous Marvel United games (except this is DC instead of Marvel).  For previous looks at Marvel United games, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Rulebook

The rulebook is good (it had better be after so many iterations), except for the form factor.

This gets a C+ or B- on the Chair Test; it does stay open on the chair next to me, it has a good-sized and readable font, it has lots of pictures, and it’s easy to read.  Unfortunately, it hangs down just enough to be annoying.  It does work with only one chair, if you sorta fudge it diagonally.

The Components page is great: see above.

The Set-Up is across two pages, but they are in the same span, and the picture and labels work well.

Some, not all, icons are on the back.

In general, this is a good rulebook: good components, good set-up, good font, good pictures, good back. The only complaint is the form factor.

What’s New?

Most everything in Hush  we’ve seen in one of the previous Marvel Uniteds.  I have played a lot of Marvel United, but it’s hard to say you’ve played EVERYTHING across the massive amount of content in Seasons 1,2, and 3!  Here’s what was new to me:

Charged Effects: The little yellow area/flip card allows to flip a card in the Storyline once it’s up.  In the example above, you can flip Batman’s card (only if it’s in the Storyline) above to stop Robin from being KO’d!  This is kinda neat; it’s like a one-time only effect that can only be activated AFTER the card has been put into play.

Constant Effects: These cards keep an ability active always once they are in play in the storyline! See above as Superman’s Invulnerability keeps damage off him!

Mandatory Effects: These are mandatory things you MUST do on the card.  This Superman is controlled, and occasionally reverts to his controlled self … doing damage to Heroes around him.  See above.

To be fair, we did see Mandatory Effects on the Nightcrawler’s cards back when we did the Dark Phoenix Saga: see here.

Hush Deck: if you are playing Hush, the Hush Plan deck replaces the Clear Threats on the dashboard.

Generally, the DC Superheroes United: Hush Batman or Hush feels very much like  the newer Marvel Uniteds with equipment, Charged Effects, Constant Effects, and Mandatory Effects being the newer things.  Otherwise, it feels like Marvel United, but DC instead!

Solo Mode Discussion

There is a solo mode called Commander Solo Mode (thanks for following Saunders’ Law and giving us a solo mode) that spans two pages.  And it’s pretty complicated.  But it is a true solo mode; you only operate one hero.

I think we saw the Commander Solo Mode first back in Spidergeddon, and we kinda liked it better than the solo mode in the original Marvel United … but frankly it still just feels too complicated.  It’s almost two pages of exceptions, new rules, changes, and special rules!  Look closely at those two pages above!  There’s SO MANY RULES FOR COMMAND SOLO MODE!

Frankly, it’s so easy to just pull out two heroes and alternate between them and just play solo (operating two heroes); it’s the way the game was meant to be played.  This is the way we play solo, partly because it’s significantly easier, partly because it’s easier to jump in (so we concentrate on the new rules of the Villain), partly because it’s the way Marvel United was meant to be played: 2-4 Players, and partly because we have to teach the cooperative game to our friends (so it’s better to play without all the solo rules exceptions for a better learning to teaching game).

You can disagree with me if you like, but I feel very strongly about this! Every time someone tries to put a solo mode in, I find it’s usually better and easier to just play two-handed solo instead (Leviathan Wilds, Leviathan Wilds: Deepvale Expansion, Lord of the Rings Pandemic to name just a few).  Frankly, the built-in solo mode for Lord of the Rings Pandemic almost caused me to hate the game … it wasn’t until I played 2-Handed solo that I found joy in Lord of the Rings Pandemic.

Play solo operating two heroes.  You’ll thank me.

Game 1: Batman and Robin vs. The Joker and Harley Quinn

Solo game: two-handed solo (one player operating Batman and Robin independently)

Our first game was Batman and Robin vs. The Joker and Harley Quinn.  Note that Harley Quinn and The Joker are a “team” you are playing against!  You can’t win until they are BOTH down!

See Batman and Robin get ready to go!

The storyline for Joker/Harley Quinn got convoluted as many times we’d have to put Master Plans into the storyline … they can come up at a later time, or when a character gets KO’d!

In the end, Batman  and Robin prevailed.  Batman took out Harley Quinn …

… and Robin (Tim Drake) took out the Joker.

There are some neat ideas here, as the Joker kidnaps civilians (something he would SO DO in the comics),  Harley causes the Master Deck to dwindle, and “Jokes” appear in the Storyline!  This is a game about keeping the Master Plan deck under control by indirection!  Sometimes you do stuff to STOP the Master Deck from getting too small! If the Master Deck ever becomes empty … you lose!

The Joker and Harley Quinn scenario felt incredibly thematic: Joker kidnapping, Harley causing chaos, and Joker’s “jokes” in the storyline occasionally springing on the Heroes! (It also had roots back in the Hush series: see snapshot above).

Batman and Robin’s decks were also on point: they both had the ability to “be a detective” and look at the next Master Plan card coming!  This was both incredibly useful and very thematic.

Games 2, 3, and 4: Catwoman and Huntress vs. Superman (controlled)

Solo game: two-handed solo (one player operating Catwoman and Huntress independently)

So, Superman (controlled) is hard.  I guess he should be; he’s Superman!

Superman is bad guy here because Poison Ivy is controlling him! See a still from the comic above!

Superman is controlled by Poison Ivy (see above).   If Poison Ivy makes it around the board back to Kane Chemicals, the bad guys win!

Over 3 games, Huntress and Catwoman struggled! They lost three games in a row!  In this particular scenario, heroism is very important!  Unfortunately, Huntress and Catwoman seem to have more punch than heroism!

Huntress felt very thematic, as she could look at the top of the Master Plan deck (with espionage) and was very mobile and punchy.  Similarly with Catwoman, she had some disguise cards and was very punchy and mobile.  Unfortunately, they were a bad team against Superman (controlled). Honestly, this makes sense thematically: neither Catwoman or Huntress are known for their Heroism in the comic books … they tend to be more “self-interested” heroes!

Still, I thought the Superman (controlled) villain was pretty cool! It felt thematic … and you even had to have a Kryptonite ring to hurt him!

I have played SO MANY games of Sentinels of the Multiverse where you lose because you just have the wrong heroes.  And that feels very much like the comic book universes!  (Sometimes, Spidey has to go visit Doctor Strange to handle a mystic bad guy!)  In this case, Huntress and Catwoman are the wrong Heroes for Superman … or at least, it’s a LOT harder to play them.

Game 5: Batman and Robin vs Superman (controlled)

Batman and Robin did much better against Superman (controlled): they defeated him in one game.

Batman and Robin control the Master Control deck much better and have a lot more Heroism to deal with Threats and civilians.

This win felt very thematic: Batman and Robin use their detective skills and heroism to keep the bad guy (a Superman controlled by Poison Ivy) at bay.

Game 6: Batman and Robin vs Hush

Solo game: two-handed solo (one player operating Batman and Robin independently)

The Hush Villain is probably the most complicated to play.  You must complete all three Missions, but instead of Clear Threats, you have to clear six “Hush” threats (see below).

Like the comic book (very minor spoiler), the Hush Plan cards makes you “focus” on a particular Henchman on the board: you can only defeat them in a certain order.  This constrains how you have to defeat them!

The Hush villain is much more about taking down Henchmen a little at a time, while “defeating” them in a particular order.  Batman and Robin have to “balance” how they spend their resources.

Of course, lots of things (like KO’s, see above) get rid of Master Plan cards.  Do you defeat a Henchman this turn at the cost of losing a Master Plan card?  Or do you wait a turn?  Defeating Hush is all about balance for the Heroes.  Hush himself is sewing Chaos into the world and dwindling the Master Plan deck!

In the end, Robin had a good run and was able to move to Hush and take him down.

Even though it wasn’t a full saga like the comic, Hush felt like the story that unraveled in the comic.  Batman and Robin get “distracted” by Henchmen along the way as they try to uncover who Hush is … and that’s the last card of the Hush Plan deck!

Although you can play the Hush Villain without reading the story, I strongly recommend you do read it before playing!  There is a major spoiler at the end of the Hush Deck that will spoil the entire Hush comic book.  The other two Villains (Superman and Joker/Harley Quinn) you can play without reading, but I suggest you probably read Hush before playing he Hush villain.

Game 7: Superman (controlled) and Huntress vs. Joker and Harley Quinn

Don’t forget; you can play Superman (controlled) as a hero as well!

Supes deck is pretty strong.  And Huntress is great at punchy and movement.

Superman’s deck has a minor flaw that he might have to punch other Heroes (since he still has some residual control): see above.   That card kind of “balances” a very strong deck by giving him a “forced” card. Don’t you hate it when Poison Ivy asserts her control at exactly the wrong time?  That feels so comic booky!  I kind of enjoyed this!  Supes is great … except for the one time he isn’t!

And Huntress redeemed herself by helping out Superman.

Game 8: Catwoman and Huntress vs. Joker and Harley Quinn

Just to make sure Catwoman and Huntress are good decks, I took them for a run against Joker and Harley Quinn.

After losing to Superman three times, they acquitted themselves and beat Joker and Harley Quinn.

Cooperative Game

There weren’t any real surprises from the cooperative play; we’ve played this before as a team!

People discussed!  At one point, Andrew HAD to play a Controlled Superman card and he said “I suggest you all NOT be adjacent to me! I will punch you!”  So, Sara and Teresa made sure there was movement on previous cards.  Most of the discussion is “Oh! If you give me this … Oh!  What do you need?” and stuff like that.

My group had a fun time playing this cooperatively.  The new abilities and equipment made them enjoy it that much more.

Judging by my group’s responses, I think this is the best version of the Marvel/DC United system so far.

Core Game?

I am somewhat surprised that Hush is a core box!  That means this is a completely standalone game!  I loved what I saw, but this doesn’t feel like it should be a “core set”?  The heroes in this set are great for new players, but the villains are really complicated!  Superman (controlled) is probably the easiest Villain to operate, but maybe the hardest to defeat?!  And both Hush and Joker/Harley Quinn are very different than most base Marvel United villains! They are much more complicated than (say) Red Skull from Marvel United, or even Ghost Rider from the Multiverse set!

If I were to recommend someone start with a core set, I’d recommend the base Marvel United, Marvel United: X-Men, or Marvel United: Multiverse over DC SuperHeroes: Batman Hush… I think Hush is too much for a starting player.  Which is too bad, if you LOVE DC, this is the only set you can currently get! I am afraid Hush might accidentally turn off some intro players because of its extra complexity.

Plays Well With Marvel United?

Of course, I had to make sure this played well with Marvel United, so I had Batman and Robin take on Taskmaster (from the base Marvel United set)!

For funzies, I also used half of the Locations from Marvel United and half of the Locations from Hush!  See above.

I got SUCH a kick out of mixing universes! I started giggling to myself when I had Batman and Robin start the game on SHIELD Headquarters!

Then later in the game, Batman solved the Threat at Stark Labs!  I giggled even more thinking of Batman disassembling a Trap in Tony Stark’s lab!

For the record, Taskmaster posed little threat to Batman and Robin.  More like “Lamemaster”.

I will say that I think later Heroes and Villains are stronger than earlier Heroes and Villains in the Marvel United games.  This game demonstrated that a little … but I still had a grand time!

Conclusion

Currently, Hush is my game of the year for 2025!  I have played about 10 games of Hush and want to keep trying more and more!  I want to try Batman and Robin vs the Sentinels!  Will Superman do a great job against Galactus?  Can Batman and Spiderman team up?  How would Superman and Gladiator pair up as compatriots?  What about Superman vs. Gladiator?  There are SOOOO many cross universe games I want to try!

Even with all the fun things I can try combining Marvel United and DC Superheroes United, I still loved the Hush box by itself.  Each Villain presented a different puzzle to solve!  Each Hero has their own flavor and personality: Catwoman is more punchy than Robin, but Robin is more heroic!  And these differences are very flavorful!

This box also introduced me to the wonderful world of Jim Lee Batman (who is the best Batman according to Diana)! I am grateful that I got to experience Jim Lee’s Hush for the first time!

My only complaint is that the Villains in this box are all pretty complicated; I wish there had been a “simple” Villain (for newer players).  If you are an experienced Marvel United player, then this box is a no-brainer.  If you are a more introductory Marvel United player, I might recommend a different core box.

After all is said and done, Hush is a full up 10/10 for me.  I played so many games over a 2 week period and each one was a blast!  Even when I lost, it was fun to try to figure out “why I lost” and come back and revisit the game!

Even though Hush is an unexpected DC Superheroes United (this wasn’t part of the original announcements for DC United), there’s a reason DC Superheroes United  was #1 on my list of Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games For 2025!

What Eggactly Is In This Eggspansion? A Review of Birds of a Feather Eggspansion for Flock Together

Birds of a Feather is an expansion … pardon me … eggspansion for the cooperative boss-battler game Flock Together.  This eggspansion (be prepared for a lot more chicken puns) was on Kickstarter back in Novemeber 2024 and promised delivery in August 2025.  You know what?  They even delivered a little early!  I want to say  I got my copy in June 2025, so nice job!

Flock Together was pretty popular in my groups; it made the #8 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024!  Usually, extra kickstarters are like this a way to keep the flow going … if you hadn’t ordered the original Flock Together game, you could get that AND this new eggspansion!

So, what’s inside?  Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a smaller box than the original, and pretty thin too: see the Coke can above for perspective.

There’s not that much new here.  There’s 6 new Predators!

With lots of new puns!  Chew Bawka?  Sheriff of Rottingham?  Oi!

But this game is built on the bedrock of Chicken Puns!  There are 6 new Chickens you can play: J.R.R Yolkien, Broods Lee, Princess Layer, Chickira, Aracorn (Heir of Condor), Cluck Norris, … so … many … chicken … puns!

There’s only 3 new Weather cards …

And basically another player board so you can have up to 6 players.  This eggspansion also expands the game to 6 players!  (The original only played 1-5).

There’s a few new options for chicken color (see wooden … cheeples … above … yes, that’s right: cheeples are chicken meeples).

The game looks very consistent with the original, both of which have great art from Andrew Bosley!

How Is It?

I played a solo game with J.R.R. Yolkien (oi), and it’s pretty much the same game!

I used new Chickens and new Predators, and everything else (Bonus cards, board, counters, etc) comes from the original box!  See above!

The game plays the same; it’s still fun and silly.  (I did add the 3 new Weather cards in as well).  I just had a new Chicken and all new predators!

More Stuff

This expansion is pretty simple: more stuff.  6 new Predators, 6 new Chickens, more tokens so you can play 6-Players, and 3 new Weather cards.  That’s pretty much it!

The rulebook discusses how you can just mix this in with the original game and never see the expansion box ever again!

This eggspansion  just adds a little more. There’s no real game changers here.

Missed Opportunity

One of my complaints about the original game (see review of Flock Together here) was that the eggs and food were all different looking (see above and below) …

… for no reason.  I always thought that there should be some rules to take advantage of these differences!  Maybe different colored eggs have different bonuses/minuses for different seasons?  Maybe you can’t get certain food until you go to certain parts of the board?   I always thought it was weird that we have these very distinct food and eggs … and these differences means nothing in the game.

I was kind of hoping this expansion would expand the universe and give a reason these eggs and food were so different!!!  Make them mean something!!

Nope.

Conclusion

This is a fine expansion; it gives us more chicken puns and a little more life to the game.  But I think the publishers missed an opportunity to do something cool with the distinct eggs and food.

If you see the eggspansion Birds of a Feather in a store, and you like the original game Flock Together the base game, you can’t go wrong with this eggspansion; it doesn’t change the game AT ALL! It just adds a little life with new Predators, new Chickens, and a 6th player.

I am glad I got this; it’s an excuse to play Flock Together again!  But I think they could have done a little more, especially with the distinct eggs and food.

Forbidden Pandemic Island: The Card Game! A Review of The Four Doors

What do you get when you cross Pandemic with Forbidden Island and make a card game?  You get a cooperative card game named The Four Doors!

This cooperative card is designed by Matt Leacock (of Pandemic fame) and Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback (of many games, but the one I know best is Legends of Sleepy Hollow: See our review here).  The Four Doors is a light little cooperative card game for 1-4 players and takes about 30 minutes to play.  If you have played Forbidden Island (a light little cooperative tile-laying game) or Pandemic (a heavier cooperative game), you might be saying … “Heeeeeeey, this kinda feels like those games a little…” … and you’d be right!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

I ordered this directly from the Happy Camper website (the publisher) about 2 weeks ago?  It arrived fairly quickly (late August).  See above!  It looks kinda neat, but it’s relatively small!  See Can of Coke for scale.

The object of the game is, as a a group, to retrieve the sacred relics above!  Yes, they looks shiny because they are foil covered cards.  They are pretty neat! And yes, this “gather 4 items” kinda feels like Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert … you gotta collect some exactly 4 things and it’s an action point game!  (You only get 3 actions per turn!)

To win, you have to bring the 4 relics to the light house and turn it on to win!  (sarcasm mode on) This is COMPLETELY unlike Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert where you have to return to the launch pad to win (sarcasm mode off).

And you have to turn the lighthouse with a special card! It is pretty cool with that foil.

… just like you need to activate the helicopter/flying machine to fly away in the Forbidden Games…

Players each take the role of one of the characters above, each with a special power (yes, like Pandemic or the Forbidden games). But the powers are pretty cool and a little different.

To retrieve a card, you have to have and discard 4 cards of the same color at a door.  (Yes, more Pandemic and Forbidden analogies).  These are in a deck that you get 2 cards from at the end of each turn.

There’s some special cards you can use (spells) which you can play at any time (not just your turn), but then they are not discarded but put in place (the Hollow) where they (usually) can’t be brought back!

The Four Doors (that’s the name of the game, remember?) are laid out in a column: see above.  Your pawns move up and down the column and you can only retrieve a colored relic at the appropriate door.

So where’s the Bad News?  This is a cooperative game after all!  Every turn, the same cards that help you also come out and hurt you!  The same deck is used for both good cards and bad cards!  It just depends on which phase you draw them!! When drawn and played as Bad News cards, these cards “further open” the rift which may seal the door forever!    If you ever get 4 of these Bad News cards attached on one side of the door, the  doors gets half-shut … then closed forever!  If you haven’t gotten the relic out before the door closes forever, you lose!

The cards attach at the sides, depending on what’s at the bottom of the card: see above and below.

Three cards attaching to the doors should feel reminiscent of Pandemic …

Every time the good news/bad news deck recycles, the difficulty goes up: this chart (above) dictates how many of the colored cards attach to the doors in the bad news part of the turn!

If you retrieve all 4 relics and bring them to the lighthouse before the doors close forever, you win!

Solo Mode

Congratulations to having a solo mode!  (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!)

The solo game is documented on page 9 of the rulebook.  This is a true solo game; the solo player operates one character (but see below).

The only real difference is that the solo player has another action they can take: Swap Adventurer!   This allows the solo player to invest in another character whose special power may help him accomplish a short turn goal easier!

So, I kinda put the adventurers off the side so I could see all their special powers.

I started my first solo game with The Summoner! See above! She makes it easier to get cards you need to get relics!

And I started at novice, and boy I crushed this game.  I didn’t need to start so easy!  I also never used the Swap Adventurer once because The Summoner was so good!  She just gets the cards I want from the discard, so I never needed another adventurer!!  I started thinking about “optimal ways” to use the Swap Adventurers to best effect, which I think might be fun once the game gets harder!

Luckily, it’s easy to adjust the difficulty level by simply getting more cards attached to doors per turn (see card above).  Instead of starting on Novice, I should start on Standard, or Heroic, or Epic…

I felt like the solo mode worked well.  I felt NO NEED to try this 2-handed solo (although it would be easy to); the solo mode seemed to work well. This is VERY UNLIKE the solo mode from Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship from a few weeks ago (see review here);  I did NOT like the built-in solo mode there! I do like the built-in solo mode here in The Four Doors.

I kind of dig that you can switch adventurers to really try some fascinating in-game power switches.  I am worried this may be overpowered, but hey, if it’s too easy, just adjust the difficulty!  It’s easy to do that!

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game went well.  We played as 4-Players.

The game is open-handed, which means all information is shared!  See rules above.  I love that shared information in cooperative games!  It makes it really easy to coordinate and talk.  “Ah man, I need a red card! Wait! I see you have one!! Maybe we should meet!” I personally think this shared-information type game is much more cooperative and interactive as players can talk strategy much easier if they can see everything!  Full information does have the downside that it can invite the Alpha Player to join you, but Alpha Player Syndrome is not a usual problem for my groups.  I suppose it is something to be wary of here.

The opportunities for sharing and doing clever card combos came up quite a bit!  Between the character’s special powers, the spells on cards, and special powers on relics, we were able to pull off some really cool combos!  And the discussion came from everybody; someone might see a special combo others didn’t see!  “We need to get that relic before the door closes!!! Help!”  “Oh! Use my TELEPORT!!”

There was quite a bit of discussion and cooperation; that was really fun for us. 

I was also pleased to see that everyone got a relic, which meant everyone had an “extra” special power.  These relics have pretty neat powers too … and they also help contribute to the conversations of combos!!

Overall, this was a hit cooperatively.  Everyone had fun, there was a lot of interaction and discussion, and the combos we pulled off made us all feel smart! 

Good times.

Reactions

Andrew: Fun, 6/10
Sam: Fun 7.5/10
Teresa: 7/10
Richie: 7.0/10 solo, 8.0/10 cooperatively

My rating was initially a 7.5/10 for cooperative play, but the more I look back on my experience with my friends, the more fun I realized I had as we played!

Which One?

Which game should I play?  The Four Doors is very much like Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Forbidden Desert.  Where does it fit in with those?

I think it depends on what you are in the mood for.  From a complexity point of view, I think Pandemic is the most challenging and complex game, Forbidden Desert is next, The Four Doors, then finally Forbidden Island.  If you want a game that is little bit more than Forbidden Island, but not too much more, The Four Doors is a great choice.  To be fair, I think all of these games are great choices.

Conclusion

I should just called this review The Four Doors: The Forbidden Pandemic! It sounds like a forbidden dance of love! But it’s not; The Four Doors a cooperative card game that feels like Pandemic/Forbidden Island/Forbidden Desert. I do think it’s different enough from those games that you can buy it and not feel like “they are all the same game!”. I think The Four Doors is a nice cooperative game to bring out for someone who is just above Forbidden Island, but maybe not quite ready for Pandemic or Forbidden Desert.

This game is easy to learn, has a great table presence, and can be a jumping on point to learn cooperative games.  It’s a little more complex than Forbidden Island, but I think it can still be a pretty good starting point as a cooperative game.

Even though this is an “easier” cooperative game, the cooperation, interaction, and combos that emerge from the game will also appeal to more sophisticated gamers.  It’s a good cooperative game!

I’d say the solo game is good at 7.0/10, but the cooperative game is better! I’d personally give it a 8.0/10, but as a group, my friends probably average this at about a 7.5/10.  Still, that’s good!

Alibis: A Cooperative Word Game! Does it Get a Pass?

Alibis is a cooperative word game for 1-6 people: think Cooperative Codenames!

This is a game about guessing words cooperatively as a group.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing/Gameplay

This is a very smallish game: see can of Coke above for scale.

Each player gets a little white-erase board to write a single word on (two of these boards of you play 2 or 3 players).

The white-erase boards are used to write a single word; players are trying to connect two “words” together (much like So Clover, where you try connect two words with one word, or Codenames where you give a word clue to connect some words together).

Each player is given some guys to alibi: in a 2-Player or 3-Player game, you get 4 guys.

The single words are supposed to provide “alibis” for two of the guys in the line up!  See above!  For example, “magma” (the + board, upper left) is providing alibis for guy 1 (“island”) and guy 7 (“dragon”).

So, you’d mark a + on the guy 1 and guy 7 on your board! You are keeping track of everyone who has an alibi!

Basically, there is always one guy that’s “the perpetrator” and you, as the players, are trying to alibi everyone else!  It’s a word guessing game!  Can you guess the perpetrator by alibiing everyone else????

This game really isn’t very thematic; the line-up with weird villains has nothing to do with the game.  It’s just a cooperative word-guessing game.  To be 100% clear, there is no real communications among players EXCEPT for the words given.  (That part is very much like Codenames, but not So Clover).

No Solo.

There is no solo mode for this; this is nominally a party game for 2-6 players.

Two Players

My 2-Player game with Don went great.  It works well, as you get 4 guys to alibi, so you have to provide 2 words!  You actually get more options in the 2 (and 3-Player game) as you can choose how to group your 4 guys into 2 groups.  There are 9 guys on the board (see above), and you have to alibi 8 of them!

2-Player worked well, it was fun.

Three Players

In 3-Player mode, like 2-Player, in 3-Player mode, each player gets 4 guys to alibi. See above as me and Caroline and Nathan play!   The difference is that there are more guys out on the board! There is ALWAYS must be one guy out (who is the perpetrator).  In the 3-player game, the players alibi 12 guys, with the 13th guy being the perpetrator! See above.

The 3-player game worked great.

Four Players

The 4-Player game wasn’t … quite as fun.  See above as me, Sara, Teresa, and Andrew play! It’s the same game but you only get 2 guys to alibi (instead of 4), which means you only get to craft one word!  There are 9 guys out, and the 4-Players alibi 8 of them.  See above.

This means you have to come up with a single word to connect two guys.  What does “stuffed” (above) mean?  I don’t know, and I wrote it!!!  And the two words (guys) you get may suck and have nothing in common.  Sure, this happens in Codenames a lot, but at least you start with many many words to connect! You only get “stuck” with two bad words at the end.  In this scenario, you only have two words!  Hopefully they will be easy to connect!

The 4, 5, and 6 player game all play like this; the players each get 2 guys to alibi which means they only get to write/craft one word.

Scoring

The scoring is a little wonky.  Every time you guess something correctly, you remove “heat” (see heat above) from the game!  The more your remove, the better you do!  At the very end of the game, you get told you how good or how awful you are by how mush “heat” you remove.

Eh, it’s nominally a party game, so the score doesn’t matter too much.

Conclusion

If you love Codenames, you will probably love this! If you hate Codenames (Joe, I am looking at you), you will probably hate this as well.

I think Alibis is better at 2 and 3-players, as the players get choices as how to group their 4 guys, so they can come up with better groups of 2 words.  The 4-Player and higher count game “works”, but it’s just not as fun; It like the worst part of Codenames when you have exactly two words that don’t have anything in common … and you don’t know what to do.

This is a fun game, but I’d recommend So Clover over this. I think So Clover is a stronger party game, partly because you have more words and more opportunities to connect things.  Probably more important is that in So Clover players can talk amongst each other, rather than just be quiet (like in Alibis).  That interaction is so much more fun in a party game.

Still, this is light and easy to get into.  It’s fun to play: I’d give this a 6.5 or 7/10 as a 4, 5, or 6 player game and a 7.5/10 as a 2 or 3-player game.

This would probably make our Top 10 Cooperative Party Games, maybe just not near the top.

An Epic Struggle! A Review of Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship

Over the course of a few weeks, I played Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship many many many times and different ways trying to find the joy and fun. I have to admit, it was an Epic Struggle! I gave this game way more chances than I should have because of its theme and designer, but I struggled with it. Follow me in my journey to see if I keep Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship in my collection or throw it into Mount Doom along with the Ring!

My journey to play Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship began back in January 24, 2025!  The game was up for pre-order on the Asmodee web site, and I pre-ordered with an expectation that it would arrive in late May or early June (as was the original promise).

Well, things changed (Asmodee had trouble shipping) and it didn’t deliver to me until Monday August 19th.  This was frustrating because I had seen SO MANY people put up reviews on BGG, and yet, as a paying customer who ordered early, I didn’t get mine until 7 or 8 months later.

I was very excited for this: this is a game in the Pandemic System (see above)!  What that means is that it’s not quite Pandemic, but if you squint, you can see the elements of Pandemic in the game!  I generally love Pandemic and its ilk (see reviews of Pandemic: Ibera, Star Wars : The Clone Wars Pandemic, and World of Warcraft Pandemic), but I have not loved all Pandemics (see our review of Freedom Five).  Will this be a good Pandemic or a bad Pandemic? (What a strange sentence)

Let’s follow this Journey!

Rulebook

The rulebook is very good and is the first thing you see when you unpack the game.  This rulebook gets an A on the Chair Test!

The rulebook opens up and stays open on the chair next to me.  The font is big, the pictures are well-annotated, and it’s easy to read on the chair next to me!

The Component page is well-labelled with pictures and text: see above.

The Game Board Features is really nice as you try to understand this world.

Generally, this was a good rulebook with a Table of contents (yay), but no Index (boo!).  The back of the rulebook shows useful info and icons.

There is one issue with solo rules that’s not well-specified (see below).

Generally, this was a good rulebook.

Unboxing and Set-Up: Building the Dice Tower!

Total time: it took me about 2 hours to unbox and set-up for my first game

See Box above with Can of Coke for scale.

The first part of the game unboxing was building the dice tower: this consumed about 20 minutes!  The directions are pretty good, but it was annoying.  Unfortunately, this was a little foreshadowing for the game itself.

In the end, the Dice Tower looks really cool (see above), but holy cow, this was kind of annoying to build.  Once you’ve built it, it does come apart easily and go back into the box (in 3 pieces: see below).

The board is a huge 6-fold board.  It’s very busy and very daunting at first glance: see above.  It does get better once you get to know the board, but, yes, it is very busy.

I was told by my friends who LOVE Lord of the Rings that this board is very accurate and consistent with the map at the front of the books. 

If you squint, you can see the Pandemic underneath!  The Region cards feel very similar to the player cards we’ve seen from Pandemic!

Just like Pandemic, there’s Events (of course, they are flavored for this universe).

The Skies Darken cards (above) are very much like the Epidemic cards from the original Pandemic!

Like the original Pandemic, you divide the deck into fourths and put one of these “bad news” into each part of the Region cards.  That way you get one Skies Darken at about every quarter of the game!

The true Bad News deck is the called the Shadow Cards; you get two (or more) per turn.  This is just like the Infection Deck from Pandemic.   There’s a big difference though!  If the Shadow Card to the left of the card you play is a red banner (see above), you activate the TOP part of card!

If the left card is a black Banner, you activate the BOTTOM part.  The bad news you get depends on the top card of the deck!  This can have wild swings to the game!

Like Pandemic, these Shadow Cards go to the top of the Shadow Deck and will come out again and again, whenever you draw a Skies Darken!  You seed the game with “troops” (not disease cubes) very much like the disease cubes.

If you’ve played Pandemic in any form, those Skies Darken cards will feel VERY familiar.

Every player will play TWO characters! Not just one! That’s different!

The characters should be very familiar to the LOTR fans! See above!

One characters gets 4 actions (like Pandemic), and other only gets 1 Action Point. That’s a little different.

With those 4 Actions (see documented above), you do things like Pandemic.  However, there are a lot of differences here!  This is where the game starts to drift from the original game a LOT more, as you can attack (with dice), capture Havens, Prepare, Fellowship!  There’s SOME Pandemic here, but the actions you get really are very different.  For example, you can trade in a card for token for hand-management reasons, but only at a Haven!

So I decided to start my journey using the Solo Rules/Set-up! See above as I operate 5 characters (well, 4 and 1).

Winning, as you might guess, is throwing the Ring into Mount Doom: see above, top right!  But before you can do that, you must fulfill the previous three missions!  Each of these missions (see above) is very different: Attain the Blessing of the Elves, Challenge Sauron, Sauraman Your Staff Is Broken!  This is reminiscent of Pandemic, where you had to stop 4 diseases!  Here, you have to fulfill 4 very different missions!  (There are actually a number of different missions to choose from, but you always have Destroy One Ring as the final mission!)

At the end of Day 0, I was pretty exhausted!  Putting together the Dice Tower and setting up the game took a lot of work!

The Set-up actually spans 5 pages!  That’s right, 5 pages! 

At the end of Day 0, I was too tired to move forward and play my first game.

It looks cool set-up on the table though!  See that Dice Tower!  That cool LOTR board!

Playing Solo Mode Using Two Kinds of Solo Rules

The solo rules are well documented on page 22.  See above! (And thank you for following Saunders’ Law!)  These rules are generally very good and very clear. One problem I had: it’s not quite clear if you can share the tokens between all 5 characters, … but you can sort of infer that you can (because when a single players plays two characters, they can share tokens); it should have been stated more explicitly. EDIT: Yes, the rule is there! I missed it, and I could have sworn I looked like 3 times. My mistake!!!

The solo player plays 5 characters … well 4 characters and (Frodo and Sam).   You choose 4 characters to play (although the rulebook suggests characters for your first few games), but you always get Frodo and Sam (since Frodo has to throw the Ring Into Mount Doom) as the fifth character.  Yes, Frodo and Sam is considered one character.

There is only one hand of cards for the solo player, so all the cards are shared among the 5 characters.  This is both boon and bane; you don’t have to worry about sharing cards (indeed, the Fellowship action which shares cards, is disabled in the solo game), but you also are stuck with the 7-Card hand limit for all characters.  

You move the little green solo token around (above) to show which character you are activating this turn; the character you activate gets 4 actions, and then Sam and Frodo get one action.  That’s right, Sam and Frodo always get one action and the other character gets four actions.

My first game ended in a loss after about 14 turns as my Hope went to zero.  That’s right!  If your Hope track ever goes to zero, you immediately lose!  There are MANY things that cause your Hope to suffer: Search Checks, Losing a Haven, running out of cards.   In other Pandemics , the end generally comes when the player cards runs out.  Every game of Fate of the Fellowship I have lost was because the Hope went to zero very early in the game.  It’s VERY EASY to lose via Hope in this game. You have to be very careful with Hope, and it’s generally hard to get Hope back (but not impossible).

It was very weird to me that I lose before I was even barely one-fourth through the game: I had only gotten one Skies Darken!

Although I lost because I lost Hope, generally my combats were terrible; I rolled poorly.

Nonetheless, I realized I had played a LOT of rules wrong.   You have to understand that there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of little rules in this game that you have to keep track of.  As someone who has played many many many games of Pandemic, I think I expected something more akin to the original Pandemic.  Nope!  This game is very different and requires you to bend your brain a lot more.

I was grumpy how hard I lost (as I said, I have played lots of Pandemic), but I realized how many rules I got wrong and things I missed, so my first game just got me the “feel” of the game; I should expect to lose.

My next solo game was a win, but I realized I STILL got a bunch of rules wrong.  

My third game was a complete loss in 3 turns.  That’s right, 3 turns! I got two “Shift The Eye To Frodo’s Region” and the Eye was there.  I had 5 search dice to roll, twice.  I lost because I lost all hope.  In turn 3.  That’s right, 3 turns.

I was ready to throw this game into Mount Doom; this games feels so messy and random.   Sure, I’ve had games of Pandemic go bad, but never this bad. Lost. In. 3. Turns.

I played a fourth game and lost after about halfway through the deck. By losing Hope of course.

I took a break to think about this. I realized that one of my problems was that I sometimes felt like I couldn’t do anything because I ran out of cards quickly.  This is because all 5 characters share the (7-card limit) deck.  When you have turns where you maybe don’t want to move (or can’t move), then you can spend some actions turning cards into tokens at a Haven.  With all characters sharing this hand, this “sometimes” action causes your hand to go to zero cards quite a bit.

So, I decided to play the traditional solo game: play the cooperative game two-handed, alternating between two players. See above.  After playing this way, I don’t think I can go back to the solo mode as written.  With playing 2-handed solo, I felt like I had more options (“how should I activate my characters? 4 or 1 or 1 and 4? Who should move?  Do I need to share?”).  Basically, the Fellowship option is important, but you don’t use it that much in a game—it’s generally better to have more cards in the 2-Player mode.

After 7 solo games, I think that the two-handed solo game is superior way to play solo. The solo player simply feels like he has more choice in actions (to choose how to divvy actions), more cards work with (spread over two hands), more mobility around the board (to deal with bad news as it pops up). To be honest, I didn’t start having fun until I started playing 2-handed solo.

I felt like the built-in solo mode might actually do the game a disservice. I kind of hated my first five solo games; it wasn’t until I went to the two-handed solo mode that I actually started having fun. If you had caught me in my first 5 solo games, this game would be burning in Mount Doom right now. I am someone who loves Pandemic, I am someone who loves Matt Leacock designs, I am someone who has played a lot of Pandemic in his life. Yet, the built-in solo mode almost caused me to hate this game. Caveat Emptor.

I recommend the two-handed solo mode.

Two Player

One of the things that convinced me that the 2-Player solo game was superior to the built-in solo mode was playing two players!

Over one Sunday, my friend Don and I played a 2-Player game and had fun!  Now, be aware that I had played many many solo games my this point, so I had the rules down, I had the strategy down, I had the teach down.  

I think we lost, but I don’t care?  We had fun: Don definitely knows like LOTR better than me and he thought it was fun.  He also reminded me that several of his Pandemic games went south in a few turns.  

It felt like there were more options in a 2-Player game. This cemented, in my mind at least, that the 2-handed solo mode is superior.

4-Player Game

So, after teaching the 2-Player game, we went into the 4-Player game.

The game was fun, but we saw more of the randomness emerge  It was also frustrating that sometimes players couldn’t do anything.  The muster action can only be done on certain locations IF you have friendship cards.  The Prepare action can only be done on a Haven.  So, if you didn’t have friendship or weren’t on a Haven (because you were out fighting), sometimes turns felt a little anti-climactic (as you couldn’t do much).

I was reminded by friends Charlie and Allison (after they played Pandemic Legacy: Season 1), that 2-Player Pandemic is easier than 4-Player Pandemic.  Usually because 2-Players can deal with Bad News “quicker”, as you only have to alternate players.  In a 4-Player Pandemic, the only person who can deal with some “bad News” is 3 turns away.

I think we saw this in our game of Pandemic; we came close to winning, but needed just a few more turns.  We didn’t “quite” deal with the Bad News as efficiently as we should have.

Did we have fun? Yes.  Did we love it?  No?  We liked it.   We would play again, if only to wipe the shame from our faces for losing.

Randomness

There are 4 major axes of Randomness in this game.

Axis 1: The Search Dice.  These must be rolled whenever Frodo travels (if he can’t sneak), or if a Shadows card forces a Search roll.   The number of dice depend on the number of Nazguls in your region.  See above for all 6 faces.   If you roll an “evil tree” (see above), you lose Hope.  Remember, if your Hope goes to 0, you lose.  You can re-roll some dice, at the cost of some resources.  They are re-rolls, not guarantees.

Axis 2: Combat dice. See above for all 6 faces. The red faces mean the bad guys lose a troop. The white faces mean the good guys lose a troop. A particularly bad roll can wipe out all the good guy troops and completely screw you. You can re-roll if you have a character in the region, at the cost of a ring. You can use swords to eliminate bad guys if you still have anything left (if you have a character there).

Axis 3: Shadow Cards.  What bad news do you get?  Even though the Shadow cards go back to the top of the deck (like Pandemic), the bad news you suffer depends on the next card at the top of the deck.  That little difference almost adds an extra axis of randomness.

Axis 4: Cards.  Which cards do you get? In one game, I waited 10? 12? 14? turns and could not get a sword!  See above! This basically meant my mission to win Isengard was thwarted and wasted time/resources.

This 4-axes of randomness (5 axes if you count the extra randomness of Shadow cards) can be debilitating.   There are ways to mitigate this, of course, but sometimes you just get screwed.  Pandemic kind of only had the 2-axes of randomness, and it felt plenty hard.

Be aware.  This game is much more random than the original Pandemic.  It may be too random for you.

Conclusion

It’s hard to recommend Fate of the Fellowship.   The extra randomness (relative to base Pandemic) inherent in the game with the Search Dice and Combat Dice can really bring your game down.  I also think that the recommended solo mode is flawed; and I think it will do a disservice to players if they decide to start with that. If you do want to play solo, I recommend 2-handed solo: you will feel like you have more options and more choices.

The game also feels like you can’t do things sometimes; you can only muster at hubs, you may only prepare at Havens, you may not move Frodo unless you either sneak or roll search.  The game feels like there are a lot more constraints on “useful” things you can do you on your turn … because there are more constraints, I think part of this experience is just realizing how important Havens and hubs are and getting used to that.  But, it “feels like” you can do less and that can be frustrating.

It took me almost 6 plays before I started having fun and figuring out the game works.  There are a lot of complex systems, there is a lot more randomness, there are many more constraints on player actions.  It may take you a while to really get this game; it has a huge learning curve.

Having said all that, Fate of the Fellowship is incredibly thematic, with the map, the missions, the special powers, and the characters!   All of my friends who love Lord of the Rings really feel like they nailed the game.

So what’s my final recommendation?  If you love the theme, you can probably suffer through learning the rules and love this game.  If you are a Lord of the Rings fan, you will probably enjoy this world despite all the complexity and randomness.  Losing is just excuse to embrace this universe and game some more!

If you just like Lord of the Rings, be aware that this game has a huge learning curve, a lot of complexity, and a lot of randomness! Much more so than base Pandemic.  If you can get past all that and learn the game, you can come to like it, but be aware it may take quite a number of plays to get to that point.  However, if you have a good shepherd (someone who knows the game and strategies), those first few games can be much more fun: my friends all had fun playing right away because I had done all the painful prep work.

My final score is a range: 4 to 7 out of 10.  That’s a huge range because I hated the extra randomness (that’s the 4), but when it was fun, it was fun (that’s the 7).  So am I keeping it? Yes. 
Be aware this probably won’t work for you right out of the box; you may have to live with it.

Was this a good Pandemic or a bad Pandemic?  It was a Grey Pandemic.

Top 10 Cooperative Roll-and-Write/Flip-and-Write Games!

When most people think of roll-and-write games, they think of games like Yahtzee!  See above!  Players roll dice, mark things off a sheet, and try to get the best score to win!  Surprisingly, there have been a considerable number of cooperative roll-and-write games over the last few years! That’s right! Players roll dice and cooperatively mark-up sheets to solve/win together!  Now, flip-and-write games are very similar; instead of rolling dice, you flip up a card to show what you are dealing with.  It’s the same idea, it’s just the randomness is a deck of cards instead of some dice!  

Below, we list our Top 10 Cooperative Roll-and-Write Games!  We also rate each game from 1 to 5 on how cooperative it is, with 1 being “multiplayer-solitaire” and 5 being “very cooperative“!  We also note if the game works solo: surprisingly, not all play solo!  Most roll-and-write games are about getting the best score you can collectively, but some have a more precise win condition!

10. Legends of Storm City


Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 2/5
Player Count? 1-4
Print and Play? Only means available
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition? Defeat all Elite Villains or Deactivate the Main Plan

This roll-and-write has a special place in my heart, because it was the first print-and-play I have ever done!  And boy, was it a learning experience!  It also has a cool Superhero theme!

In the end, I liked the game a lot more that my friends; so that’s why this makes the bottom of our To 10 list.  

I liked the way this looked, and I loved the Superhero theme!  Take a look at our review of Legends of Storm City to see if this is something you might like!

9. Mmm!

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 2/5
Player Count? 1-6
Print and Play? No, must buy box!
Type?  roll-and-write*
Win Condition? Mark off all the food!

This is a little bit different than most roll-and-writes on our list: it’s intended for kids 5+, so it’s pretty simple.  The kids roll the dice every round and mark off food before the cat reaches them!  The cat only moves if some piece of food isn’t completely marked off, so kids have to learn when to push their luck and when to stay!

This is also a little different because the “write” part of roll-and-write is “mark-with-a-token” rather than write-on-a-piece-of-paper.  See above.  But it’s the same idea: you are just marking up a board!

It’s also interesting that the board is shared cooperatively among all players, so players will need to talk to help each other “set-up” the board for them on their turn!  This is a Renier Knizia game for kids, but it is kind of a neat little roll-and-write kind of game, even if it’s not “quite” roll-and-write … more like roll-and-mark!

8. Roll or Stand: Forbidden Adventures

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 1.5/5
Player Count? 1-100
Print and Play? Only means available
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition? Make it through all 4 puzzles on a page!

This roll-and-write has 4 puzzles per page, and has a “blackjack-like” mechanism where you push your luck to get more actions and more directions!  But if you get a number that busts, you lose an entire set of actions!  

Each player has their own sheet and uses the dice as given to them, so it’s mostly multiplayer solitaire!  There is a mechanism for sharing, but resources are so limited in this game, we found that we didn’t really use the sharing too much! That’s why it’s 1.5/5 for cooperation … this is a mechanism, but we found we didn’t really use it!

Still, there’s a really neat physical aspect to this roll-and-write as you have to use the numbers marked to move around one of the four puzzles!  See above!  All-in-all, this is a pretty neat roll-and-write game!  See our review here of Roll or Stand: Jurassic Adventures to see if this might be right for you!

7. Mission Control: Critical Orbit

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 4/5
Player Count? 2-4
Print and Play? No, must buy box!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition? Success in mission!

This is an interesting perturbation on roll-and-write games: First, there’s no solo play!  This is only a 2-4 Players game! Second, one player (Mercury) hides information behind a screen, and the other 1,2, or 3 players each operate some other boards!

This is also a polyominoes game, where the Mercury player has to fill in a grid!  It’s a weird cross-section of roll-and-write, hidden information, cooperation, and polyominoes!  But it’s really fun!

6. Escape: Roll and Write

Supports Solo?  No (but you can simulate solo my playing as-if it were a 2-Player game)
How Cooperative? 2.5/5 
Player Count? 2-4
Print and Play? No, must buy box
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Collect enough gems and all players need to be on their end space!

Those of you who know the original Escape: The Curse of the Temple game might be confused by this: “There’s a roll-and-write Escape game?”  Yes! 

It even uses the same dice as the original Escape game!  This roll-and-write is all about the active player rolling dice, using them to move around the temple, and the remaining dice are used by everyone else!  So, there’s some cooperation and discussion about which dice the active player takes!   It’s not super cooperative, as each player moves through their own board separately, but there are still some elements!

This game didn’t take the world by fire, but it’s colorful and fun!  See our review of Escape: Roll & Write to see if this is a game you might enjoy!

5. Luddite

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 1/5 
Player Count? 1-100 (1-4 in base box, but you can keep expanding)
Print and Play? Yes, but there is also a boxed version with really nice components!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Move your hack marker to the end, making sure you do enough damage along the way!

This game is probably the least cooperative and least interactive game on this list!  It’s cooperation is really to average the scores of all players and make sure that average exceeds a threshold to win!  That’s the only cooperation! 

Other than the averaging scores, this game is pretty much multiplayer solitaire!  See above! So, why did this make our list?  Firstly, some people can suspicious of cooperative games: this is a first game that’s easy for people who want to put one toe into the water of cooperative game!

Secondly, this game has quite the story, in either graphic novel or movie form (see above)!  This story really keeps everyone involved in the game!   Luddite can be a real interesting experience if you let it!  See our review of Luddite here!

4. Zombicide: Gear Up

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 3/5 
Player Count? 1-6
Print and Play? No, must buy box!
Type?  flip-and-write
Win Condition?  Take out the Big Bad!

This is a gorgeous flip-and-write in the world of Zombicide!  The components are really great with nice dry-erase boards and cards!   This game is very thematic, as it simulates zombies invading your personal space! But in a flip-and-write game!

Each player deals with zombies on “their board”, but can help out their neighbors (on adjacent boards) using ranged weapons!  This is surprisingly cooperative as you have to decide (with your group) who takes which zombies, and when to use your limited resources to help your neighbors!  

Zombicide: Gear Up went over surprisingly well with our group!  It really felt like zombies were invading … in a flip-and-write game!

3. Roll For Great Old Ones

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 2/5 
Player Count? 1-4 
Print and Play? Yes, but there is also a boxed version with really nice components!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Take out a Great Old One!

Players roll dice and must each choose one of the dice to use on their sheet!  The cooperation comes out in having players decide, collectively, who gets what dice!  After that, each player focuses on their own board to do things!

The art is a little odd, but this game is surprisingly thematic! This game made our Top 10 Solo Games of 2023!  Check out our review of Roll For Great Old Ones to see if this is something you might like!

2. Find the Source!

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 3/5 
Player Count? 1-3 
Print and Play? Yes, but there is also a boxed version with really nice components!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Find the Source! … then get the best score you can.

Find The Source was a game from Kickstarter; it was originally a print-and-play, but the Kickstarter upped the ante and delivered a very nice production with nice art and high-quality board!   See above!

The solo game is quite fun, but the cooperative has players sharing resources easily for one action point.  There’s still a lot of multiplayer solitaire on your own board, but the sharing of resources and hacking inspires a lot of cooperation and discussion!

This was really fun to play!  It even made our Top 10 Solo Games of 2023!  See our review of Find the Source to see if this is for you!

1.  Super-Skill Pinball: Ramp It Up! (Pin Pals)

Supports Solo?  Yes* 
How Cooperative? 5/5 
Player Count? 1-4 (but really only 2 or 4 players for Pin Pals)
Print and Play? No, have to buy box!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Get the best score you can collectively: it’s pinball!

This is a weird choice for #1 for many reasons!  First of all, there’s only one cooperative scenario of the four in this box!  That is the Pin Pals game! The rest of the scenarios are solo/competitive!  Second of all, the cooperative game is really only for 2 people (although you can have two groups of two playing at the same time), so it has limited playability!

Despite these limitations, this was our favorite cooperative roll-and-write game!  You mark off things to help your compatriot all the time as you are playing!  The game moves so quickly!  It feels like pinball!  This was very interactive as we both played pinball on our own boards, but talked as we tried to give each other bonuses!

The wrestling theme was goofy, but worked really well as we “tag-teamed” each other, marking off bonuses for each other as we played!  Even though there is only one cooperative scenario in the box, it was worth it!  I highly recommend the Super Skill Pinball system and the Pin Pals board as a cooperative roll-and-write!  It just moved along so quickly and cooperatively!





What Vantage Is and Isn’t: A Review of Vantage

This week we take a look at a very hot game called Vantage: this is an open world game with thousands of cards! We show pictures of the game with some cards, and although they could be classified as spoilers, all of these pictures are out of context so I don’t think they are really spoilers. If you are really worried about spoilers, just jump to the Conclusion and avoid all the pictures!

There’s already been a ton of reviews of Vantage: reviewers who got it early for free and Stonemaier Champions (members of a club who get Stonemaier games early with a discount).   I am neither of these: I am a plain Jane game player who paid full price for my copy of Vantage! I pre-ordered it from the web site like any schlub and I just got my copy about 2 weeks ago.  I am not a rabid Stonemaier fan,  nor I am not a prepaid reviewer!  I am just a guy who like cooperative games who pays for every single game he gets and never gets ANY consideration from any publisher.  So, my review may sound a little different than the others.

The funny thing is that I pre-ordered the Vantage coins about a year ago and they arrived a year ago.  Yes, they actually had the coins for the game a year ahead of the game itself!  That’s kinda funny.  The fact that I ordered these tells you, yes, I was interested in the game.

We are going to try something a little different: we are going to talk about what Vantage is and what Vantage isn’t.  Vantage doesn’t really fit directly into any mold of what other games are; it’s its own thing!  But, is it something you will want to play?  Is it something you will want to buy?  Let’s look more closely.

Unboxing

Vantage is a fairly standard sized box: see Coke Can above for scale.

Let’s be clear: I bought ALL the extras for this game!  The wooden skill tokens, the metal coins, and the 2 layer player boards (see above).  I was very excited about this!

Because I bought all the extras, I didn’t need to punchout anything.  I just left this sheet untouched.

As you look at the box, you can see it’s got a lot of cards!  It’s actually pretty heavy!

There are a LOT of books: see above.

There are two flavors of cards: giant Location cards (see above) ..

And generic “little” cards which will come out as you play. Items, animals, … just different stuff that emerges with gameplay.

Notice just how many books there are!  They are called Storybooks: we’ll revisit that nomenclature later.

There’s two kinds of dice: Challege (black) and Skill (white) dice.

And there’s a ton of tokens!

Overall, there is a LOT that comes with this box!  It looks really nice!

Rulebook

The rulebook is very good, modulo one or two issues.  The paper is a special “silky” paper that feels really nice.  Note! It has a Table of Contents!  Yay!  But no index!  Boo!

The rulebook gets a straight-up A on the Chair Test!

The rulebook fits PERFECTLY on the chair next to me, and it can lay open just right (see above).  The font is nice: it’s a good size (not too small, not too big) and it very readable.   It’s been a while since we’ve had a rulebook that gets a straight-up A on the Chair Test. Nice job!

The Components and Set-Up are great: they are all on the same page, so it’s easy to correlate what things are and where they go!  Granted, Set-Up is pretty  “easy”, but this works really well. And the Components have pictures and are labelled.  Very nice!

The rest of the rulebook is good: lots of pictures, lots of color to help distinguish things, and sidebars that help explain an issue (without being the only reference to that rule!).

My only complaint is that the back of the rulebook doesn’t have a list of all Icons.  It has friendly reminders (see above), but I feel like that should inside the rulebook.

Now a lot of these Icons are on the side of the box (see above and below)

Or on the back of the books:

However, I was very annoyed that I couldn’t find what the little circle meant:

… until I just happened to find in the rulebook!  I think that means MONEY!  See, it frustrated me that I had to go searching for this.  It should have been on the back of the rulebook with a list of Icons!  I don’t know where this is defined except for the passing reference on page 10 where you have to infer the meaning!

That’s a pretty minor quibble, but it did slow me down for long enough that I was annoyed. And it really shouldn’t have been an issue, especially when the rest of the rulebook is so good!

But overall, the rulebook was very good.

What Is This?

The game bills itself as an Open-World Adventure (see the top of the page).  What does this mean?  We are going to explore this issue via what this game is … what this game isn’t !   If we hack away at the positive space of what the game IS and the negative space of what the game ISN’T, then hopefully that will be enough information for you to figure out if this is for you!

Is This a Storybook Game?

We’ve talked about Storybook games for years here at CO-OP Gestalt; we tend to love them! See our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook Games!

Recently, we reviewed and loved Tales of Arthurian Knights!  There is no question Tales of Arthurian Knights is a Storybook game with a beautiful hardbound book and tons of text! See above!

The text in the book flows and paints a picture of Arthur’s Knights! See how flavor exudes from the text above!

Another game that’s a Storybook game is Wandering Galaxy (see our review here).  In fact, the recent Kickstarter included two ways to enjoy this Story! On way is a full text experience from the entry book (above and below)!

See more flavor exude from the text above!

However, you can also enjoy the story text is from the app: it shows the story, but also has Voice Actors read out the text!  But there’s still a lot of flavor! (And silliness)  It’s very … flavorful!

Why am I going into so much detail about Storybook games?  Because I think Vantage is both a Storybook game and NOT a Storybook game!  It depends on how you look at it! What do I mean by this?

Many, if not most entries in the Storybook, are very very terse; almost like directions.  See above for examples. There’s not of flavor or story in this text!  Sure, there are entries with more flavor and story, but it feels like most of what’s in here is more directions than story.  I struggle a little with the appellation Storybook when that’s not much story.  That’s why I think this ISN’T a Storybook.

My friends LOVE Storybooks and text (see above), and Tales of Arthurian Knights is probably their favorite game of the year!  There is so much flavor, so much story, so much … flowery text in the storybook!  My friends LOVE this type of Storybook!

Before you go off and write me hate mail, I realize that a lot of people don’t like lots of flavor or Story text!  Some people prefer to just get to the game!  You could argue that this is just a very concise Storybook, but it’s still a Storybook!   That’s a very reasonable argument!

But I wanted to point out that some people would see the lack of flavor as a reason NOT to call this a Storybook game.  

It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of Story in Vantage comes from the Location cards!  As you explore the world of Vantage, these little scenes truly paint a picture of what you see!  There’s no need for flowery text in a Storybook because you have beautiful images to tell the story!  Who needs flowery text when a picture paints a thousand words?

The Location cards are, strictly speaking, distinct from the Storybook.  You could argue that because the Location cards are technically not part of the Storybook, that makes the argument that the-Storybooks-aren’t-Storybooks even stronger!  The story is REALLY on the Location cards, not the Storybooks themselves!

That’s a silly argument because Vantage as a full game includes lots of story.  But this is why I wanted to talk about why you could consider Vantage’s  Storybook NOT a Storybook!  These distinctions helps define what this game is.  There’s still story, but arguably it’s distributed among the cards and Storybook.  The Storybook is NOT the traditional Storybook of Tales of the Arabian Nights.  Vantage’s Storybook is … different: it’s more like directions.

If you love flavor text and like reading flowery text aloud (like my friends do with Tales of Arthurian Nights or Wandering Galaxy), then Vantage maybe isn’t the game you are looking for.  But, you may still like the way the story comes out in Vantage (with the art and Storybook giving directional text).

Is This An Adventure Game?

On the surface, the obvious answer seems “Yes! Vantage is an adventure game! Players explore and go adventures and interact with the objects/stuff around them!”

This is basically the same definition we gave for Point-And-Click Adventure games in our Top 10 Cooperative Point-and-Click Adventure Games!  

“What makes a board game a point-and-click adventure game? For us, it breaks down into three fundamental elements:

  1. You move along in a story!  You are part of a story: this is interactive fiction!
  2. You explore a world!  The game is about exploration and discovery, as you “move” from location to location.  In the point-and-click video games, you could “point-and-click” to move around a map!
  3. You solve puzzles by combining objects!  You need to find objects and combine them in unique ways to solve puzzles. In the point-and-click video games, you would “point-and-click” on items/verbs to combine them!”

On the surface, it looks like Vantage meets these criteria … because it mostly does.  But let’s look deeper into the interactive fiction portion: although there are stories that emerge as you play Vantage, it’s not “quite” the same as interactive fiction where there is an overall story./puzzle you are completing.  This point can be countered by pointing out that there are many many stories in Vantage waiting to emerge!  That’s a fair point, but it’s worth pointing out that there’s not some overall story to this.  If you want a novel or plot to emerge (like The Secret of Monkey Island or Thimbleweed Park), Vantage is not the same thing.

The more crucial thing is the rule that you can’t interact with a Location more than once!  See the rule from the Vantage rulebook above!  In most point-and-click adventures, it’s fundamental that you can go back and revisit a Location and interact in a different way or multiple times or just look everywhere!   This particular restriction seems … strange.  It’s one major reason I would call this NOT an Adventure game.  Or at least not a point-and-click Adventure game?  Maybe that’s the difference?  

Maybe we should revisit our definition of point-and-click Adventure games and add something like “You can generally interact with the environment over and over“.  (And to be fair, there are places in Vantage where you do get a few extra chances to interact with a Location, so don’t go sending me hate mail).

So, this is an Adventure game, but maybe not fully a point-and-click Adventure game?

One other thing also marks this down a little from the Adventure game for me: the exploration.

Is This An Exploration Game?

To say this isn’t an exploration game is crazy!  Players wander!  Players interact with new places!  How could you claim Vantage is not an exploration game?

Consider Earthborne Rangers: a prototypical cooperative exploration game where I joke it’s a 4x game: Explore, Explore, Explore, and Explore! See review here!

In Earthborne Rangers, you can play over and over and over … and come back to where you left off!  You have a map, and you get a feel for the world!  There’s a lot of adventures in this world … just like Vantage!  Like Vantage, you can keep coming back over and over and see more of the world!

Vantage isn’t  a campaign.  You just crash land on the planet every time at a different place: see the chart above.   Every game is different, as seeded by the chart above.

So I finish a game of Vantage.  And it’s over.  My progress is essentially lost.  In Earthborne Rangers, I can continue where I left off and keep exploring.   That’s the difference; your exploration is lost in Vantage (but see below).

When I say I want to explore a topic, when I want to explore an issue, when I say I want to explore … I don’t want to lose all my progress!   Lack of progress can make the exploration feel pointless.   If I don’t have any vested interest, if I don’t have a desire to continue, it doesn’t feel like exploration, it just feels like random-stuff-happening-to-you.  And that (admittedly subtle point) is why the exploration in Vantage may not feel like exploration.

My first solo game of Vantage ended in a win… it was fine!  But it felt vaguely unsatisfying as “Well, I explored this world, but so what? I have no idea where I was or what I was going! I may never come back this way again, so who cares?”

This unease went away a little when I played my second solo game: if you just take the game for what it is, as a carpe diem game and just enjoy it for what it is, then it’s a lot more fun!  This isn’t a game about trying to explore and keeping track of this planet, you just make decisions and live with them!  

Of course you explore when you play Vantage, but it’s not the type of exploration that persists from game to game.   But see below.

Is This a Campaign?

The rules state very clearly that this is NOT a campaign game.  See rule above!

If you play this sporadically and infrequently, then this is absolutely not a campaign.  There’s no memory of previous games.

But what if you play just enough that you start to remember things?  Then is it a campaign game because you can take advantage of what’s you’ve seen before!   Stated in a more mathematical way, as the number of plays going to infinity, this becomes a campaign game!  

I don’t know if you remember Dollhouse; it was a TV show where dolls (people) were wiped of their memories and implanted with new ones weekly. Over time, some of the dolls started to remember what they did in previous runs … and that’s kind of what Vantage feels like over time.  You are a doll from Dollhouse, and some of those implanted memories … stick.  I don’t know of any other game like this;  It’s a very different way to look at a game.

Vantage isn’t a campaign game.  But over time, it can become one.  Sorta.

Starfleet Mode

After my first solo play, I was a little depressed.  I liked this world!  I liked the pictures in the game!  I liked the basic gameplay!  And yet, all the exploration I did was lost.  All that work, gone.  In a later game (I want to say it was my third game), I got to a place where I could keep exploring for a while … and that was cool!  I like being in this world!  But whenever I finish a game, I think “I’d really like to come back to where I was and continue exploring and get to know this world better!”  I get a little depressed when I did all that exploration … for no reason?  

What I want is a Starfleet Mode or Exploration Mode or … frankly, a Campaign mode.  I understand that the game is all about getting your nine cards in a grid, and once you do that, the game kind of ends.  Maybe there could be a way to “continue” the game; maybe you just lose some of your cards and continue?  

The rulebook is very “open” about how you play the game, from the Universal Rule of Thematic Fun (see above), to victory conditions even being kind of what you want!  It’s very open.  But I wanted a more systematic way to explore this world!  Every game starts fresh with you crash landing on a new place on the planet!    Sure, you can make up your own rules for a Starfleet Mode (My current set is: keep all but three cards and keep exploring, but get rid of your old destiny), but this feels like something we should more direction on (from the rulebook).

I want to continue exploring this planet in Starfleet Mode (my own term, it basically means  Campaign Mode) but it kind of bugs me off that I don’t have a systematic or defined way as defined by the rulebook.

Solo Mode

Vantage plays well solo: the rules are very well-defined at the bottom of page four.  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law)!

My first three games were solo games; I think it’s very important to play solo before you teach others.  There’s just enough rules that it’s better to have a sense of the game before you bring this out to a group.  Luckily, the solo mode is easy to get into and learn the game.

My first solo play left me a little … depressed.  I wanted more exploration, but I felt a little unsatisfied that I lost all the exploration I had done.   After thinking about this for a few days, I came back and played my second game.  This time, I was in carpe diem mode: I just played, made decisions, and took the consequences of my actions without caring too much.  I know I probably won’t come back to this part of the world anytime soon, so I just enjoyed what I was doing.  And my second game was much more enjoyable.  But I feel like I almost had to get depressed in my first game to appreciate what this is and what this isn’t.

A third solo game had get to do a little exploration.  And after my third game, I realized that every single one of solo games was VERY DIFFERENT.  I explored more Locations in some games, I interacted in others, the items I got influenced more what I did in other games.  That’s quite an accomplishment for a game! 

To teach the game: absolutely play this solo first, then bring this out to your friends.  Do I like this game enough to continue playing it solo?  Maybe?  If you enjoy the carpe diem flavor of this, where you just enjoy this game for what it is, then I think you will love the solo mode!  But, if you are like me, and wanted more persistent exploration, then you may feel a little unsatisfied.

I think a Starfleet Mode would make me want to play this again solo MUCH MORE.  Sure, I can make my own rules for that, but why aren’t these in the rulebook?  NOTE: (For all I know, the Starfleet Rules are in hidden somewhere in the Secret pouch, or the Books of Secrets, or somewhere else.  But I can only tell you that after about 5 plays, I haven’t seen anything like that).

Cooperative Mode

I invited my Escape Room buddies (Charlie and Allison) to play this with me.  

It was a hit!  We played a two-hour game and had a fun time exploring and reading to each other!  One of things you forget in Storybook games is that everyone stays involved as you read the Storybooks to each other!  

I asked Charlie and Allison what they thought? Would you play again?  Absolutely!  The vague sense of dissatisfaction I had in the solo game went away in the cooperative game, as we all stayed involved and just enjoyed the game for what it was.

The cooperation was .. interesting.    In the cooperative game, we have all crash-landed at different points on the planet, so we are “kind of” playing multiplayer solitaire.  We each have our own viewpoint or vantage (see what I did there?), and we don’t really interact with other (although you can if you end up on the same space, but that’s generally not what happens).

The cooperation comes in by either sharing skill tokens with each other (to mitigate die rolls), or sharing dice-placement locations with each other.  When you make Challenge rolls, you have to deal with the consequences;  you can mitigate the dice-rolls by doing dice-placement on appropriate spaces on characters.   See above as the Blue character can always mitigate a die for a Explore (blue) type roll.  Also, she has a “global” place for any character to mitigate Morale (the lightning bolt means “global: any character may use”).

Any dice you can’t mitigate are either Morale, Health, or Time losses.  See above as each character has their own Morale, Health, and Time.  If any of these go to zero, the game is “over”.

Thematically, it’s a little specious that we can share skill tokens and dice-placement spaces, because we aren’t on the same Locations (usually).   My own interpretation of this: I like to think that we are all in constant communication over some intercomm system, and we can share each other’s expertise!  So, the sharing skill tokens and dice-placement spaces, at least in my mind, is sharing expertise!  “Don’t eat that! Purple plants are generally dangerous!”  I kind of wish the rulebook had done more to explain this cooperation thematically.  But hopefully my explanation of sharing expertise works for you.

One more thing, I kind of think three or four is the best player count; With three, you are only “not involved” every third turn, and you can care about your friends stories … because there’s only three or four of them.  At higher player counts, I think you will “stop caring” and the game will become much more multiplayer solitaire (and you might get bored waiting for your turn).

Things We Were Unsure About

Locations: Charlie and Allison didn’t love that we couldn’t see each other’s Location pictures: but the rules are very clear about this.   I think the game would offer the explanation that it would “break immersion” if we could share pictures: you should only be experiencing your own story.  While I understand this explanation and maybe even might agree with it in theory, it’s so much more fun and cooperative to say “Look how cool this Location is!” .. and show it to everyone. It would actually make the game more cooperative, or at least more interactive.  In fact, if we go with premise that we have an intercomm system that we are communicating on, I’ve got to believe we have a camera on our phone!   🙂 Maybe the game should just allow you to share pictures every so often … the rules are a little draconian on this point, but maybe a little too much.

Bottleneck: The major bottleneck in the game was almost always waiting for Rich (me) to get the cards.  It was probably the most annoying part of the game.  The rulebook suggests that only one player should handle the cards … as it makes the game move faster …  but it feels there could be a better way to share the load on this. Me, as Rich, ALWAYS did all the work and it was annoying.  An easy easy thing would be to let one person handle the Location cards and one person handle the items.  At least then 2 people would be doing that in parallel and share the load!!   The decks can always easily be divided as well.  Maybe it’s too chaotic to split these decks, but I feel like there’s got to a better way to share the load: this is a cooperative game for goodness sakes.   

Conclusion

You might think, that after reading this, that I didn’t like this game.  But I did!  I just wanted to explore a lot of the issues so you understand what this game is and isn’t!  It’s not a campaign game, but it can be over the long haul.  It’s an exploration game, but it’s kind of not as you forget all the exploration you’ve done from game to game (usually).  It’s an adventure game, but it’s kind of isn’t as you can only interact with Locations once.  It’s a Storybook game, but it’s kind of not as the Storybook is more like directions (and the story exists in the Locations).  Vantage is just a little different, and I hope you got that from this review.

I liked the solo mode: it works well and it really teaches the game.  Be aware that you might feel vaguely dissatisfied in the solo game because you don’t get to continue your exploration from game to game.  If you go into the solo game with a carpe diem mindset, and just enjoy this for what it is, you will be much happier!   I’d probably give this a 7/10 for solo mode, but if there were a more systematic way to explore the Planet and keep the exploration going (especially in the solo mode), I’d probably bump this up to an 8 or a 9/10.  It’s a pretty neat world!

The cooperative mode was a hoot and we had a fun time playing!  The cooperation feels a little athematic unless you think of us all sharing an intercomm system!  Then the sharing of skills and dice-placement mitigation spaces is like sharing expertise amongst ourselves; that little premise really goes a long way towards making the game feel cooperative.  Of course, the Storybook reading to each other makes the game very interactive and fun too!  I’d give this 8/10 for cooperative play.  I’d probably never play with more than four players though.

If you are interested in Vantage, you should give this a try to see if you like it: It’s very different from other Storybook games like those in our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook Games!!  I freely admit I didn’t love my first play of Vantage that much; I had to play it a few times.  Maybe you want more flowery prose, maybe you want more story, then consider Wandering Galaxy or Tales of Arthurian Knights instead.   Maybe you want more persistent exploration, consider Earthborne Rangers instead.  But Vantage is such a different beast than many games out there, don’t judge it right away.  Give it  few times to see if you like it.  And it’s okay if you don’t like it.  It’s also okay if you do like it!

 

Late To The Party, But The Party’s Still Going! A Solo and Cooperative Review of Tales from Red Dragon Inn!

So, the original Tales from Red Dragon Inn was on Kickstarter way back in October 2021, and delivered to backers in 2024.  It was so popular, they had a second Kickstarter in June/July 2024, and that’s the one I backed!   This cooperative dungeon crawler for 1-4 players looked really cool!

Why didn’t I back the original? I think I was afraid of getting YET ANOTHER DUNGEON CRAWLER (YADC) campaign that I wouldn’t play!

I do love this universe … especially the Red Dragon Inn cooperative Deck-Building game called Battle for Greyport (see review here and here: It’s also in our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games!)! I love the art-style and the silly vibe of this universe!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a fairly big mama-jamba of a box: see Coke can above and below for scale.

Ah, this game comes with a first-play walkthrough!  This is a really good walkthrough!

What’s in here?

The game comes with most of the cards and minis in this little grey box.  (Grey box?  Greyport? Get it?)

And some dice.

The minis are pretty good.

Underneath all that are the map packs.

This map pack is pretty huge! See Coke can above for scale.

… and there are quite a few maps for the adventurers to go on!

Underneath the maps are TONS OF PUNCHOUTS.  And by tons, I mean tons by weight!

There are 5 individually wrapped punchout sets (with multiple punchout sheets per set!)

And a new chapter rulebook per set!  Whew!

There are … so …. many … punchouts!

But overall, this looks pretty cool!  I am just scared of how many punchouts there … (but keep reading below …)

Gameplay

This is a cooperative dungeon-crawler where each player takes the role of a different hero … the typical Dungeons and Dragons archetypes are all here: thief, fighter, barbarian, etc.  Despite the classes being fairly generic, these characters have so much … character! 

Each character has some character specific cards giving the asymmetric powers.

For example, Zot (above) has some special Actions specific to his character!  But notice the art and the feel!  This is not your typical dungeon crawler!  There’s character and a sense of humor here!  The game looks light and fun … and surprise! It is!  And pooky!

Players will set up the Chapter of their campaign; see scenario 1 of Chapter 1 above!

One of the coolest parts of this game is that the monsters are all described ON THE MAT!  So, you don’t have to go searching books or monster manuals for the monster info!

The minis are color-coded via bases, and this system works great. I was a little worried that the bases might “harm” the cardboard standees ( … Gloomhaven: I am looking at you …), but the standees stand well and the bases DO NOT harm the cardboard (NOTE: After a number of plays, there’s a little bit of wear and tear, but it doesn’t ruin the cardboard: it just indents it a little).

To keep track of hit points, each mini has a number above it, and  it also a little card associated with the number. See above.

It makes it really easy to correlate the mini with its hit point card!  This system is simple and works surprisingly well! They used colors really well here.

Players operate these heroes, explore the dungeon, and fight the baddies!

This is a fight-em-up dungeon crawler!

Combat is decided by the yellow and black dice.  You might be worried that the game is too random if dice decide a lot, but the dice are pretty consistent.  You will always get at least one success per dice, sometimes you will get exploding dice (which you can reroll over and over) and sometimes you will get some extra epic dice for FUTURE rolls!

If you roll the ! (exclamation point) symbol on the yellow dice, you get an Epic black die (modulo some rules) which you can use on a future turn! My favorite part of this is that you can CHOOSE when to use the Epic dice on a future turn!  This reminds me a little of the Hour of Need system (see review here and here) where current rolls can contribute to future successes WHEN YOU WANT/NEED THEM!  You choose when to use those Epic Dice!  That’s so cool!

This is a Variable Turn Order game: each player and each set of monsters gets a token and one players pulls the token out of a bag to decide when each one goes.  See above.  I was very worried when I saw Variable Turn Order: was I going to have to worry about all the problems and try to come up with a solution?  See a very in-depth discussion of Variable Turn Order and its problems/solutions here!

After all was said and done, the Variable Turn Order system didn’t seem to suffer from the problems we normally see!

Depending on the token you draw, you either get 2 Actions and 1 Shenanigan …

Or 1 Action or Shenanigan! (1 and 2-Player games with partial actions).

Your Actions and Shenanigans are well defined on your cards!  See above!

Note that every character has very different Actions and Shenanigans! It’s funny, that one word Shenanigans kind of implies the overall vibe in this game …

This is all about your characters moving around the maps and fighting baddies!

If you reach the final objective (killing the yellow slime above for scenario 1: see above), you win (… if you survive to the objective phase…)! If any character dies, you lose! There are other losing conditions too, as you get further into the game.

It’s a fun dungeon crawler! And you get to level-up your characters too! As the game gets further along, you can get new cards from THE VAULT which you can use to choose upgrades!

Walkthrough

By far the best part of this game is HOW GOOD the first play walkthrough is!

This Walkthrough takes you through the first 4 scenarios of Chapter 1 in great detail!  There’s no need to read the rulebook ahead of time (well, because there isn’t one) … you are just learning the rules as you play from the Walkthrough!

Coupled with the Walkthrough is also the Chapter Guide (see above).  The Walkthrough tells you when to look at the Walkthrough and when to look at the Chapter Guide for specific set-up.

I can’t tell you HOW MUCH I liked this walkthrough!  Worried about getting into the game?  Naaah … this Walkthrough is fabulous!  It slowly introduces you to all the rules as you go.  This reminds me very much a video game training mode; it works so well!

Incremental Punchout

One thing I was VERY worried about was punching out ALL THOSE TOKENS before you can play!  And guess what!  You don’t have to!  You can punchout what you need as the game flows!

Do you need some monsters?  Just punch them out now when you need them!

This Incremental Punchout philosophy worked really well with the way that the Walkthrough taught the rules; learn a little bit at a time, punchout a little bit at a time!!! So, don’t get overwhelmed by all the tokens … just take tokens as you need them.  I wish the rulebook had emphasized this point, because just LOOKING at the token sheets gave me heartburn! 

I strongly recommend you punchout as you go and do not do everything at once: you’ll get right into the game that much quicker!

What Is This?

How would I describe this game?  In one word: Lighthaven!  Tales From Red Dragon Inn has a lot of similarities to Gloomhaven: it’s a cooperative dungeon-crawler campaign!  Players explore the world, fight monsters, upgrade characters, and quest quest quest.  But the gameplay is lighter, the rules are lighter, the world is “lighter”, the art is lighter and cuter … there’s no Gloom here!  

Like Gloomhaven, Tales from Red Dragon Inn does have a lot of components, but this world just feels just so easy to jump into.  

There is some story here: about as much story as Gloomhaven.  If you are looking for more adventure games, consider games like Arydia (see review here) or storybook games like Tales of the Arthurian Knights (see review here).  If you want story story story, this probably isn’t the game for you … this is a dungeon crawler where you fight monsters!

Solo Play

So, Tales from the Red Dragon Inn does support a solo mode!   (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!)   In fact, two solo modes!

It’s a little bit of a bummer that the solo play isn’t addressed right up front … you have to go looking for the solo rules in the Glossary (a very complete book!) that comes with the game.  See above.  There are two solo modes; play normal, but alternate between some characters like a multiplayer game …  or play a solo character with a Companion.

The Companion has a special set of cards: see above.  The Companion rules also take up a full page on the Glossary with lots of exceptions to gameplay.  I usually HATE solo modes with lots of exceptions to the rules, so I opted to just alternate between two characters because there are NO RULES CHANGES.  I strongly recommend this is how you play solo; the Companion is still an “extra” thing to play and doesn’t save that much context switch overhead.  At this point, I have played the first Chapter all the way through with two characters and didn’t have any problem going back and forth between characters. In other words, the context switching between two characters didn’t seem to cause me any issues as I played solo.

My solo game was operating Deidre and Gerki.  They made a great team!  These two characters really worked well together; Deidre is better at long distance stuff, but occasionally she’ll get in there and help Gerki!  If she stands NEXT TO some monsters, Gerki gets his backstab ability (an extra die!)  The amount of cooperation between the two was quite good.  

I have spent about 15 hours playing the game solo.  I learned the game solo, set-up the game solo, upgraded, read the Walkthrough solo, and played all 4 scenarios of Chapter 1!  I had a blast!  I loved the simplicity of the system, I loved how the characters can work together well and support each other, I loved the “sense of humor” the art implies, I loved the art, I loved the vibe!

Once you know the game, your sessions can be quicker, but be prepared for your first 4 sessions to take about 15 hours or so!  But, it flies by!  You are having fun and always doing something!

I look forward to more solo sessions, but I had to reset the game (this is not a legacy game, but it is a campaign game and you can reset it) so I could play it cooperatively with my friend(s).

Cooperative Play

My first cooperative experience was a 2-Player game with Teresa.  She brought over a little red dragon as a mascot … it was quite apropos!

For a different experience from the solo game, I played Zot the wizard.  He was funny!

It’s hilarious that the little guy POOKY who helps Zot summons HIM!  (Not the other way around) See above!  That’s hilarious!  And yes, we are convinced this is the rabbit from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

Like the solo game, we saw some good cooperation as Teresa’s Fiona Character was all melee, while Zot was all distance!  A good combo!

The game also moved much more quickly since I had already played the entire Chapter 1 solo.  A lot of those “15 hours” I spent in the first 4 solo games were shortened considerably!  I think Teresa and I got through Scenario 1 is about an hour!

Playing solo ahead of time significantly increased how quickly we were able to get into this game.  

Will we play more?  Basically, Teresa wants to wait until Sara comes back and then we’ll start a 3-Player campaign!  

I think it was a success cooperatively: it’s always a good sign when your friends ask to continue the campaign!

Story vs Flavor Text

There’s not a lot of story per se, but there is a lot of flavor text that gives the game direction and charm, and helps establish the parameters of the game.   To be clear, you really don’t HAVE to read the flavor text … I didn’t read it all in my solo play, but it didn’t really detract from the game by not reading it.  Teresa LOVES flavor text, so we did read it (see above) and it did contribute to the atmosphere of the game: see above.

What I Liked

Charm: This game has so much charm!   The art style that permeates this game is just so much fun! It stays within the Red Dragon Inn universe … Dragonverse?

Unique Characters: The characters are also so unique and different! For example: the fact that Pooky (the little familiar) summons Zot is hilarious!

Walkthrough:  This first play Walkthrough is exceptional and makes it easy to jump in!

The Dice System:  I was really worried the dice system would be too random, but it’s really not.  You always get at least one success, you can get exploding dice, and you can choose to use Epic Dice if you want for “extra help”!  The Epic Dice system worked well!  You could choose when to use the Epic Dice when you really needed a win!  

Vibe:  This is a light-hearted Gloomhaven … it could have easily been called Lighthaven! Yet, it’s still a deep game with lots of play and meaningful decisions!

Level-Up:  Levelling-up is easy and interesting!  Every character levels up, but it’s not described u pages and pages of tables in a book!  You just grab the cards destined for you, or choose some! It’s really easy!

What I Didn’t Like

SO MANY PUNCHOUTS!  The sheer number of punchouts in this game is terrifying.  Word of advice, just punch out tokens as you need them.  In fact, I ended up trying to put the monsters BACK into the token sheets when I was done with them!  Partly I did this to reset the game, but the game just stores easier if you keep things in the punchout sheets as much as possible. I know, that’s not ideal. 

Part of this was a little foreshadowing too … you saw how many punchout sheets are coming, right?  Do you REALLY think you are going to be able store ALL THESE tokens in bags back in the box?  So, I put as many tokens as a I could back into the punchouts as a favor to future me.

Conclusion

Well, Tales from Red Dragon Inn should have made my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024 because the first release came out in 2024.  But I didn’t get it until the second Kickstarter, so I didn’t get it until 2025!  So, it will probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025 … but it might have to be an honorable mention, just because it wasn’t released in 2024.  Or maybe I’ll just count it as 2025 since I backed the second Kickstarer … not sure …

This is a fun and light dungeon-crawler, but still lots of depth and meaningful decisions.  You fight monsters and you have fun as a group of adventurers!  There is some story here, but it’s mostly just fun flavor text.

Tales from Red Dragon Inn is a great solo and cooperative game: 9/10. It’s so fun!

I think the only reason this didn’t get a 10/10 was because the Variable Turn Order can sometimes be … disappointing.  I wish there had been a way to mitigate/control the Variable Turn Order, but it didn’t get in the way that much. 

 

A Cooperative/Solo Print-And-Play Roll-and-Write Game! Roll or Stand: Jurassic Adventures! The Theme is EXACTLY What You Think It Is!

Roll or Stand: Jurassic Adventures is a print-and-play solo and cooperative roll-and-write game that was on Kickstarter back in March 2025, and it promised delivery in April 2025.  That’s right! One month afterwards!!  And it did it!!!  How did they do that?  Because there was no actual physical delivery; I was sent some PDFs in email after the Kickstarter fullfilled.  It’s a print-and-play!

In order to play, you need to print 3 pages per player (if you want the full campaign). You also need just one copy of the rules (4 pages of rules) and one copy of the campaign rules (1 page).  See above. For one person, you need to print 3+1+4 = 8 pages.  For 4 people, you have to print 4*3 + 1 + 4 = 17 pages.

Ever since my first print-and-play was a little more work and money than I expected (see our review of Legends of Storm City), I picked up a newer printer that was was MUCH cheaper to print stuff on.  I was able to print pages for one solo game and a 4-Player cooperative game without worrying too much about the cost.  (But see our Legends of Storm City review if you want more discussion of how much it can cost to print print-and-play games!)

In case it isn’t instantly clear (see above): this is a roll-and-write with a Jurassic Park theme! The publisher probably won’t get sued for calling it Jurassic Adventures, but you never know!

Let’s take a look!

Printing

What are the pages you need to print?

The rules: See above.  The rules are very nicely done over 4 pages.  The rules have lots of examples! The font, although is a little small, is very nice and, dare-I-say, pleasant to look at?

There were a few times when I wish the rules were a little better, but they do seem to specify everything: you might just have to look through them a little.   Luckily, you can reuse these rules over and over after you print them.

The Campaign Sheet:  See above.  This sheet gives bonuses and starting conditions for each game plus a little flavor text.  You only need one of these for each group (arguably, you can reuse this over and over if you don’t put your name at the bottom).

But the most important pages are the 3 Scenario Sheets (see them above). Each player will need their own copy of these Scenario Sheets to play: this is the one thing of which EVERYONE will have to have their own copy!

Each scenario sheet has four chapters (puzzles) at the top of the page (see above), and a shared preparation area at the bottom.  The player will marking both the top part AND and bottom part up! See below!

Gameplay

Every turn, two dice are rolled (you have to supply your own dice).   These two numbers are shared to everyone playing.

The stamina area “forces” dice to a certain regime; if there is no entry (“charge”) for one of the numbers you rolled, you must decrease that die until you find an empty charge (rolling over back to 6).  Once a stamina line is “filled”, you move to the next line … and possibilities open up again.  Let’s be clear; when the stamina line is almost filled, you have a very good idea what the next numbers will have to be!  This really helps mitigate some of the randomness of rolling dice!

After you get your two numbers, you choose to record one number on the left Preparation side and one number to the right Preparation area. See above.

If you wish to “futz” with your two numbers, you can cross off “ideas” to add or subtract one to the numbers (for you only: this doesn’t affect anyone else).

You record the number to the next empty box.  If you want, you can push-your-luck and “roll”, hoping to add more numbers to you line on the next roll of the dice.

Or, if you want to, you can “Stand” (marking off the leftmost square with a cross) and activate your actions!  You are now committed to act!

The number of actions you get is based on how far you pushed your luck: the longer you wait, the more actions you get.  See above as I get 6 actions when I activate my line!

How many actions do you get?  Your sum (4+2+6 = 12) – rightmost (6) = 6 actions!

Note that you CAN BUST if you put too many numbers on a line!  In the case above, I BUST because my numbers exceed the MAX (10) by being 2+3+1+6 = 12!!  If you do BUST, you lose all the actions of that line BUT you get a booby prize of one of the tools (the rightmost symbol: the binoculars at the right under the 6).

So this is a game about pushing your luck, and knowing when to activate a line to get your actions! The Kickstarter called this a “blackjack-like” mechanism! Basically, push-your-luck so you don’t bust!

Once you have your actions, what do you do with them?  Basically, you mark off lines on the current puzzle!  With each action, you can mark a line!

Which lines?  It depends on the numbers on the line!  On the line above, I had a 2, 4, and 6 which means I can only draw upper left, upper right, and down lines!

That’s right!  You are limited to what lines you can draw by the numbers you used to activate the line!  

This is why ideas and Tools are so important! If you really need to up/down a dice, you can use ideas or tools to draw the line you need!  Be careful!  Ideas/Tools are a limited resource!

After you achieve the current puzzle, you immediately move to the next! 

If you can get all 4 puzzles done before the stamina or preparation lines run out, you are done!

Whether or not you win depends on “how many puzzles you failed!”  If you failed NO puzzles, you get the Success story!

If you have under 1 failure per player, you get the Delayed outcome (which is usually still a success .. see above!)

Play all 3 scenario sheets for a full campaign!

Solo Play

I had my solo copy ready since April 2025, but I just had never gotten around to playing it.  It didn’t take too long to print out (3 months ago), but I was ready to go!

Over the course of one evening, I played through the entire 3-sheet campaign. I took a break after scenario 2 for dinner, but came back to it.  All in all, it probably took about 2 hours to play all the way through, with about an extra 1.5 hours of reading and deciphering the rules.  

The solo campaign is easy to get to the table; it has some interesting decisions as you have to decide when to use your limited ideas, limited tools, which dice to use in which area, when to stand and when to roll!

This is also a very spatial-oriented puzzle, as you have to make sure you have the right line segments to do what you need to on your current puzzle!  The puzzle above starts at the top (3), and you want more “downwards” line segments to help!

There’s a lot of great decisions, but the game moves along at a pretty good clip.  You can have as much analysis paralysis as you want, but generally the game moved along.  I freely admit that I stopped a few times and had some analysis paralysis …

I had a fine time playing solo.  Even though the puzzles are similar in some ways (just draw line segments), they were pretty thematic with the “Jurassic park”-like concept.  There was a good variety over 12 puzzles in the campaign—I saw a neat little story unfold.

Fun solo.

Cooperative

For my cooperative game, I readied myself for a 4-Player game.  I may have overprinted the game; I probably didn’t have to print rules sheets for everyone, but in my group, people like to have their own copy of the rules!

We ended up only playing a 3-Player cooperative game!  

This went over … okay.  The only real opportunities for cooperation are that you can share Ideas and/or Tools.  Thematically, that made some sense!  “Hey!  I got an Idea I can share with you!” Unfortunately, we didn’t end up sharing at all!  The resources are so limited in the game (you only have so many Ideas and Tools) that it never felt good to share them!  Although the opportunity was there, we never availed ourselves of the “sharing”.  

This game was mostly multi-player solitaire. But at least we weren’t getting in each others way.

Pen vs. Pencil

A pencil probably won’t work with this game.  Can you tell I circled the first 5 Ideas above?  No? Me neither!

I ended up using a red sharpie so it was VERY clear when I noted something. See above.

Ah!  Now you can tell I circled the Ideas!

Of course, sharpies may bleed, so I got a paper bag on the back side to handle any bleed through.

The only problem with the Pen is you really can’t correct any mistakes.  Remember my BUST example?  Can you tell that was a 6 on the right?  It was only a 6 after I “sorta” corrected it.  

If you find yourself wanting to play more of this, consider laminating the Scenario sheets and using dry-erase (extra-thin!!) markers; then you can correct them and re-use the sheets over and over.

Small House Rule

The rules specifically say to write the number of actions in the right most area: see above as I clumsily write a 6, and it obscures the direction wedges!

What I ended up doing is writing the number of actions off to the side!  See above as the actions are on the LEFT for the left prep area, and the actions are on the RIGHT for the right prep area!  And then it’s MUCH easier to see which wedges are available for your actions, since the action number isn’t obscuring the wedges!

Things I Liked

Theme: there’s a surprising amount of theme and story 

Choices: I generally feel like I have a lot of choices, and I know what’s coming because of the stamina concept forging the dice.   This had just enough randomness to be interesting, but not enough to infuriate me.

What I Didn’t Like

Too small: the sheets at times felt a little too small! Each scenario sheet feels like it should be two sheets; the top half should be its own sheet, and the bottom half should be its own sheet. I am surprised this wasn’t a printing option. The whole thing does fit on a page, which is nice, but I think if I wanted to laminate this and use dry-erase pens, I’d want bigger sheets. I wish a full-sized upper half and full-sized lower half had been PDFs included in my distribution.

Cooperation: There wasn’t really any cooperation.  Although the opportunities were there, we didn’t avail ourselves of them because the resources were so limited.

House Rule for More Cooperation

How can we cooperate more? One complaint is that the game really wasn’t that cooperative.

Looking back on our cooperative game, the one thing you can do is change the dice separately! The players have to take the dice as rolled, but then each player can spend Ideas “separately” to +- 1 the dice on their board. What if this were more cooperative? What if, as a group, we could decide to spend an Idea and have it change a dice for all of us? This would promote a lot of conversation and lots of interaction! “Well, I really need a 6!” “But we both need 5s!” “Hm, you can save an Idea if you change it once!”

This is just an idea for a House Rule, but it would make the game more cooperative and interactive.

Conclusion

Jurassic Adventures was a mixed bag.  I liked it solo and might play it again: the theme and gameplay was fun!  It was a 6.5/10 or maybe 7/10.  My friend Sara probably wouldn’t play it again cooperatively, (5/10) but my friend Teresa would (6/10).  Although the game bills itself as cooperative, it felt much more multiplayer solitaire … mostly because the resources were so limited that it was too hard to share!   We do propose a house rule that might make Jurassic Adventures more cooperative and more enjoyable, but you may like this “mostly” multiplayer solitaire game as it is.

If you do play this, make sure you play with a pen instead of a pencil; even though you can’t correct your pen without making a mess, you just can’t see the pencil marks!