Magic And Murder Mysteries! A Review of Murders at Karlov Manor: The Case of the Three Blade Knife

So, this is a murder mystery in the world of Magic: The Gathering? Yup, that’s what this is! Although its official title is Murders At Karlov Manor: The Case of the Three Blade Knife! See the BoardGameGeek listing here.

My friends and I really enjoy our murder mysteries (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games), so we were excited to try this out!

Let’s Take a Look!

Unboxing

Part of the problem with reviewing Murder Mysteries is that part of the fun of the game is exploring the system! What’s new in the box? How do things work? How does this do stuff differently?

To that end, we’ll give some very generic thoughts up front which shouldn’t reveal too much of the mystery. Feel free to stop reading after that if you want to just try it yourself! After that, we’ll have some minor spoilers, followed by possibly some major spoilers. Read as far as you want!

High-Level Thoughts: No Spoilers!

This was a mystery set in the world of Magic: The Gathering. I know nothing of this world, and my friends know just a little. Not knowing the world didn’t affect whether or not we could play the murder mystery. I am sure there there were plenty of “A-HA!” moments for Magic: The Gathering players, but it didn’t stop us from enjoying the game.

There are a LOT of materials to get through: our game took place in one night for 2.5 hours. We were able to get to the end of the crime and solve it in one night. This is a little bit of a slog to get through: there are a lot of materials to read out loud and share!

In the end, we didn’t love this.

Rich: Has specific complaints, which he will address in the spoilers section below.
Teresa: Liked it the best, as she got to “perform” and she really enjoys reading stuff out loud.
Andrew: thought it was a little bit of a slog, as there was so much paperwork to get through! He still thought it was better than Detective (the Portal Games). It kinda felt like work.
Sara: It was pretty good.

The general consensus was that it was okay. Rich liked it the least (probably with a 4/10) and Teresa liked it the most (with a 7/10). The biggest complaint from everybody was that, even though this was set on the world of magic, specifically Magic: The Gathering, it felt like it could have been in any world: Noir, Cthulu, Voodoo Pirate, something else? We still dusted for fingerprints, but it felt like someone searched and replaced “dusted for fingerprints” with “used fingerprint ooze“. Sara pointed out (I think correctly) that this would have been a better mystery set in the 1920s world of Cthulu.

Overall, it was ok. There were some nice highlights in the experience, but it was a lot of paperwork to slog through, and the mystery itself had its issues. The 4/10 from Rich was because he really disagreed with how the mystery was handled, Andrew was probably a 5/10, Sara a 6/10, and Teresa a 7/10.

Maybe you just like living in this world, and just like doing the paperwork of a mystery, and reading the materials: then you, like Teresa may really enjoy this. The story presented overall was interesting.

If you want to read more specific complaints, read on.

…. space left intentionally blank …

… space left intentionally blank …

Minor Spoilers: Some Issues

The game comes with a very cool metal pendant! It serves as your RAMI badge for the game!

You download an app, and put your phone above it to get “some augmented reality options!” See above!

One complaint is that The Case of the Three Blade Knife looked like it would be a cool immersive augmented reality adventure! Look at the cool app above! But it really wasn’t!!

We loved The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City (see review here) and it even made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023! We were blown away by the augmented reality here!

This wasn’t really much of an augmented reality experience. We used the phone just a few times? We could have replaced the phone with a piece of red acetate for some of it. The best part of the phone app was in the finale, where THE GAME WAS ON RAILS! At the end of the game, the phone was cool in that it presented the finale really well (cool voice acting), but during the adventure when it mattered, we used it like once.

How much money was spent on the metal RAMI badge? How much money was spent on making the app? If we used the phone more during the adventure, this would have been cooler. But we didn’t. The ending was cool, but by that point, the adventure was over and this was just a “presentation”, not an interactive murder mystery with cool augmented reality.

I am not sure it was worth the extra money for the metal RAMI badge and the money to make the app.

I will say that the finale was very cool.

… space intentionally left blank …

…. space intentionally left blank …

… space intentionally left blank …

Major Spoilers: Mystery Progression

There was a lot of reading: This was work. The materials were well-organized, but getting through them was almost like homework. Still, the materials were very cool: see some above and below.

There were two major problems with the mystery:

1) Ignore motive. The game literally said something like “don’t worry about the motive, just choose someone“. So, we are looking for means and opportunity only?

2) What are The rules of Magic? We live in a world of magic, literally Magic: The Gathering!! What the rules of magic? Magic can make means and opportunity that much more opaque (teleportation, scrying, Bigby’s giant hands!). We have NO IDEA what the rules of magic are going into this adventure, so that completely obscures means and opportunity.

I feel like, unless the rules of Magic are somehow explained in some way, it makes it too easy to make a murder mystery unsolvable. “The murder weapon could have been handled remotely, the murdered could have teleported in and away, the murdered could stop time to leave no trace, etc.., etc., etc., etc.”.

So, hints, evidence, don’t seem to matter as much. Because magic can do anything. This really soured some of us on the mystery after it was revealed: we had spent 2.5 hours combing through evidence only to have a Deus Ex Machina explanation. I hated it.

… the space left intentionally blank …

… this space left intentionally blank …

Giant Spoiler!! Read At Your Own Peril!!

In the end, the only major use of magic was to possess someone and frame them for the murders. We had no clue this was happening, we had no books to read, we had no idea. We just “guessed” the murderer based on location, and then went to the endgame. By the time you are in endgame, the game is on rails and it’s easy to solve.

This game pissed me off because it didn’t feel like a mystery. You just guessed at someone based on location, but all the while “magic” (whose rules were unexplained) was the driving cause.

This was more of a “explore this world, make some guesses, and enjoy the story”. If I had known that going in, I may have enjoyed it more. But I was so busy trying to put a good solid well-crafted mystery story on top, I was pissed off when I learned what actually happened.

My friends, who enjoyed the story for what it was, had more fun that I did.

… this space intentionally left blank …

Conclusion

If you look at Murder At Karlov Manor: The Case of the Three Bladed Knife as a story that unwraps, then maybe you’ll enjoy it for what it us. Given how much work there is to go through all the paperwork, I was very frustrated with the lack of clues, lack of evidence, lack of explanations of rules of Magic, and the Deux Ex Machina final solution.

But I was definitely the outlier here: my friends enjoyed the story and had fun. I didn’t.

The Dark Quarter: Into the Muck

It arrived! No, not the physical copy of The Dark Quarter! That arrived like early 2025!

But the APP finally arrived at the iOS store! See above! Late May 2025! This game is completely unplayable without the app, so my physical copy of The Dark Quarter sat silently in the corner for months, waiting for the APP to be available! And it finally arrived! I think I downloaded it May 25, 2025. I have been really looking forward to this, as it was my #4 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2023 … it’s years late at this point!

So, in any other year, this might be considered weird to get the physical game before the APP is ready, but with the Tariff situation changing daily, I think Lucky Duck/Van Ryder games did the right thing getting to us ASAP!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a pretty standard sized box; see Coke can above for persepective.

The game comes with a lot of cardboard tokens (see above), but I had gone all-in on the Kickstarter and got the nice plastic tokens as well.

I also got the metal coins (see above).

Even though I got the miniatures expansion as well, you will still need some of the little hexes with people on them.

You could play this game just fine with the cardboard, but the upgraded components make you feel…. like you’ve spent more money. 🙂 No, they are nice.

The little plastic cubes denote your ability scores.

And each player will get their own dice (see above, as the dice as color-coded for the 4 players).

There’s some nice Location cards that will come out (see above) as you explore.

And there’s both objects (see above) and story cards (see below).

What’s that? Yes! A QR code! These cards will be scanned when you play!

The minis are pretty good, but not great.

But the minis are notated with a number on the bottom so you can put them back where they belong (see above and below).

I mean, this game looks pretty good, ya?

Rulebook

The rulebook is fine.

It fits pretty well on the chair next to me open flat, and the font is pretty big. This is venturing into A territory (although it maybe could have used a few more pictures) for The Chair Test.

The Components page is well-labelled.

The set-up is pretty good, although there is always confusion in an APP based game: usually the APP sets you up, so do you need this? You kind of need both the rulebook and the APP for set-up.

The last page has an ICON summary, which is great! … but I don’t think I ever used it once in all my solo or cooperative gameplays.

The rulebook is pretty good, but you don’t spend a lot of time there; you are always in the APP.

Warning! 18+!

You may miss it, even though it is clearly on the box (see above) but this is clearly an 18+ game! Between language, grisly murders, some sexual references, and just dark imagery, you probably don’t want to play this unless you are ready for a dark, grimy, and morally ambiguous world.

Teresa, who started out censoring the bad language from the APP, was swearing like a sailor by the time we finished our first session! She really embraced this world! Be aware, this game will corrupt … something?

Gamplay

Each player takes the role of an “investigator/consultant” for the Beaumont Detective Agency. Each character is flawed in some way, but they are generally seeking redemption (but that’s your choice to make).

Players use the APP to guide the game. The APP shows how to set up places of interest (see above):

And you reflect that on your game board.

The boss lady tells you what to do in the APP, and you explore a 1980s New Orleans investigating a murder!

Each characters gets some items they can use, and has some level in 4 different skills/abilities (see above). These abilities are rolled against, and however many you surpass is how many successes you get.

This is absolutely a dice game! Almost every turn, you will roll the dice to do “some skill check”. You always get your two base dice (color coded for the characters: see above), and some extra effort dice.

These effort dice are enabled as you play. You always get one effort die at the start of your turn, but sometimes you will get more through other actions.

Players explore the city, trying to investigate a murder! The APP controls the narrative, with the players making choices, and the dice determining success or failure.

You’ll notice a lot of items have a QR code (see above): you will be scanning your items to interact with them. This may remind you of Chronicles of Crime (that made our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games), and it should! Lucky Duck (who teamed up with Van Ryder Games to make The Dark Quarter) also made Chronicles of Crime!

Honestly, playing this game reminds me of playing out a Detective series on HBO or Apple+ mini-series. Story happens, characters develop (or regress!), and a lot of swearing and adult situations occur.

Solo Play

So, you can play solo (thank you for following Saunders’ Law).

However, solo play has you take control of two characters: there is no true solo play. See above as I chose to operate both Constance Moreau and Winter Mullins.

The rules do cover the case where the solo player has to play two characters (see above), and justifies needing at least two characters as “the stories are intertwined; you need at least two characters to get the best out of this!” And that makes sense; these characters destinies are all tightly coupled!

So, I started a game. And went back and forth between the two characters. And I didn’t enjoy it.

The back and forth between the two characters as a solo gamer just didn’t work for me. It felt like I couldn’t get any thing done, as just as I did one thing at a Location, I’d have to immediately go to the next character. I remember loving Detective: City of Angels (A Van Ryder game also in our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) because you had four precious actions on your turn and how you spent those actions mattered! It felt like you could concentrate on a Location and get stuff done! In The Dark Quarter, I frequently felt like I got to do just “one” thing, and then it was the next character’s turn.

I played out the first two sessions as a solo player, but … I kinda stopped caring. I felt like I couldn’t get anything done as a solo player, I was so busy “advancing the story”, I felt like I wasn’t playing the characters or solving the mystery. I felt like the game was playing me.

The story was interesting, but I felt like I couldn’t focus. Some of that lack of focus was the context switching between two characters, and some of that was going back and forth between the game and the APP, some of that was all the dice-rolling, and part of it was just how “little” I felt like I could do on my turn. I just had to swap between too many things, and it took me out of the game.

I hoped a lot of these issues would go away when I played cooperatively. I was expecting to love and adore this game straight out of the box. I didn’t, and my solo experience wasn’t great.

Cooperative Play

Whew. Luckily, the cooperative experience was much better! The fact that the focus moves around quickly between characters is actually good in the cooperative game, as most people feel like they get their chance to play; quickly and regularly.

You can see as the board and locations expand out! The world definitely envelops you as you play!

This game feels “tuned” to work best as a cooperative experience. The 3-Player game we played was fun! We ended up playing about 3 hours and still didn’t finish the first play! But, we still wanted to play more, so we kept playing …

The game, in the rulebook, does a really good job of emphasizing “READ EVERYTHING OUT LOUD!” See excerpt above. This really encourages everyone to stay involved with the story and all the decisions in the game. Even if some decisions are only character-based, everyone stays involved. I am glad to see that emphasis in the rulebook (see above), and I think that is the best way to play the game.

Good times. The cooperative play has been a success. Currently, we have played two weeks in a row, having invested about 6 hours into the game … and wanting to play more!

Solo Vs. Cooperative

It’s really interesting to me that the solo experience fell flat for me, and the cooperative experience worked so well! It makes sense; the game seems “tuned” to keep stories and plot points coming out, as to keep the players all involved!

Like a car “tuned” for Sports mode instead Eco mode, The Dark Quarter seems “tuned” to cooperative mode. The solo mode will work, but the game operates (in my opinion) at a lesser gait. At least, that was my experience. (And you have to understand, I love mystery games!)

Length of Game

The game is long. Longer than you might expect. We played for three hours straight the first session! And three hours the second session! And we still had a lot to see! And we still have more to go!

Luckily, the APP can help you save the game between sessions. There are several points where you can save the game; these intermissions happen about every 45 minutes or so. So, if you really wanted to, you could just take up about 45 minutes. But given how much set-up and tear-down there is, you probably want to play at least two sessions. We ended up playing three on our first playthrough.

The App

The APP is pretty good. We didn’t encounter any real glitches or problems in solo or cooperative play. Although it took them a while, the publishers did get the APP out and stable.

One problem: the font is probably too small. We had trouble reading all that text (to be clear; the players read the text out, not the APP), and we wished we had a control to resize the font.

Another gripe about the APP; there was no UNDO! This is one of my biggest pet peeves in cooperative APPS; the lack of UNDO makes me me grumpy! If this were a completely physical board game, UNDOs are easy: “Oops! I meant to go to the Graveyard! Back me up!”. Nope. There is no UNDO in this app. I think this actually slows down gameplay a little: “Are you SURE you want to do that? We can’t back up!”

In general, the APP seemed to work fine for us in both solo or cooperative play. It was pretty good. Be aware, the players still have to read all the text out loud!! The APP does NOT read the text for you!

Dice and Murder

I said this earlier, almost everything in this game is a skill check with dice. The game seems pretty balanced. For instance, if you fail, the game typically gives you an “extra” effort die for your next die roll (which I appreciated).

But in the end, The Dark Quarter is still kind of a dice game. Which I don’t love! I feel like a detective game should be about following the evidence, making best use of your resources, and generally trying to be smart/clever.

Detective: City of Angels, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, are detective games where you have to be smart. Although The Dark Quarter is a nominally a detective game, it has more drama in it than I expected. The dice contribute to that drama, because they make the game more random and unexpected!

When I play Detective: City of Angels or Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, I feel like I am playing a detective show like Death in Paradise, or Midsomer Murders where the mystery is front and center. When I play The Dark Quarter, I feel more like I am playing a police drama where the mystery is less pronounced. It’s not bad, it’s just not quite what I was expecting.

If you want to jump into a police drama in New Orleans in the 1980s with lots of magic and character development and story, this is the right game for you! If you want more of a mystery, well this isn’t quite that. But there’s still more than enough mystery to keep you going!

Conclusion

The Dark Quarter is a really interesting game, but you have to know where it fits best. I don’t think it works great solo, it’s more random than most mystery games, it’s very dependent on the APP, and the 18+ age requirements are pretty stringent.

But, if you find a group that wants to jump in to a 1980’s drama/mystery with lots of adult twists and turns, The Dark Quarter is the game for you! It’s got great story, interesting interactions, and plenty of character development/regression! Instead of watching an adult mystery/drama on HBO or Apple+ tonight, consider playing The Dark Quarter instead!

Solo play: 6/10. Cooperative Play: 8/10. I think most people would probably give this a 9/10, but I think I wanted just a little more mystery and a little less dice-rolling. It’s still really good though.

Bloomchasers: Add Some Coziness To Your Solo and Cooperative Life

Bloomchasers is a solo, cooperative, and competitive game that was on Kickstarter back in April 2024 . I backed it (see above) and it delivered May 20th, 2025 to my house! It originally promised delivery in January 2025, so it was about 5 months late (which is not bad in Kickstarter terms).

This is a hard game to describe; you build branches, buds, and flowers on a 3D tree! It looks really cool! You can see what it looks like on the back of the box, but we’ll see some real pictures in our runthrough below.

Although there is a competitive mode, we are just focusing on the solo and cooperative modes. Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This particular edition has both the base game and expansion built in! It’s a pretty big box! See the Coke can for perspective above.

It has a lot of little plastic pieces for the trees.

The green pieces (they kinda like of look like broccoli) are the main branches the players put on the tree.

The tree is a giant piece you put the branches into and some flowers!

I mean, the game is unique looking and interesting!

Gameplay

Every turn, players take on branch (“brocolli”) and put it on the tree.

The branches go on the tree in any empty space (or in a space with your bud).

You put buds on the tree, (little circles), trying to certain layouts of your buds.

Before you place a bud, you have to use one of the weather cards which “defines” how you can put a bud on the tree.

During a “bloom” card, you can place flowers on your tree where blooms are!

Your goal is place as many flowers as possible, and you get points based on “the frequency” of the weather cards. The frequency of weather cards matters because it’s easier and easier to place certain flowers if there are more weather cards.

You’ll notice at the bottom of the weather cards, that if you have flowers already played, you get to play MORE BUDS!

The game looks really great as you try to get as many flowers as you can!

This is really a game about scoring and trying to do better than last time! (Although, we found the scoring wonky in the solo and co-op)

Rulebook

The rulebook is okay. The form factor isn’t great; see above as it gets a B- (?) on the Chair Test.

The rules are described adequately, but it does miss several points that are quite important to play.

What is considered adjacent? It turns out adjacency is also a 3D concept!
What is considered a bud? Even after you place a flower on a bud, it is still considered a bud!
How do the 3D flowers works? It is described in the rulebook, but it needed a better pictures. Everyone I played with always played this wrong the first time

All of these issues are addressed in this BoardGameGeek thread, and later in a thread with a FAQ: I encourage you to follow up on this thread if you want to play! Apparently the designer made several rulings on some of these issues during the kickstarter …

It’s a little frustrating that these fundamental issues were not addressed in the rulebook. But at least there is an avenue (BGG) to address the issues.

Dexterity Game

I played the game with two sets of friends; my first set of friends are “less dextrous” then myself, and they called this a dexterity game! Many times, when trying to place buds, they would nudge the tree and cause buds to fall off. It happened enough times that they declared, partly in jest, but partly in truth, that there is a little bit of dexterity element to the game!

The table we played on “may” have had something to do with that. It was a little soft, and the table was quite large, which means we had to lean across a little more.

On the other hand, my other set of friends and I played on a harder CostCo table (see above) which was more stable and we were all “closer” together. Although we didn’t struggle with the dexterity aspect as much, looking back on the games, we still had a few “knocking buds off” incidents.

I think the moral of the story; play on a harder table, try to keep your group close, and recognize there is a dexterity element to the game which may or may not affect your enjoyment of the game.

Randomness and Strategy

The game has some strategy, as your choices matter about how you place your buds. But, when the Blight cards come out (which are the “bad news” branches) and when the Bloom cards come out (“good news”) are a little random; even after two Bloom cards come out, they get shuffled back in! So you may get Blooms or Blights at the wrong time!

I personally think this extra randomness takes the pressure off the game. If this game has far less randomness (if you could see which weather cards were coming, if you could see which branches were coming, if you have more foreknowledge when the blooms happened), I think the game would take on a different character as people would try very hard to plan things out. But because there really is quite a bit of randomness, the game is more chill: “Eh, you get what you get and don’t have a fit”. It’s weird to say this, but I think the randomness (which I usually don’t love) coupled with the theme, makes this a more enjoyable game.

The Joy

The Joy in this game is building a tree with flowers. There are choices, which make you feel involved (which Weather card do you use? Where do you place a branch? Where do you place a bud? What am I hoping for?), but because the Blooms and Blights and Weather cards are “fairly” random, you don’t feel like you “have” to optimize this game within an inch of its life.

Conclusion

My niece has a saying that she frequently quotes to her sister: “You get what you get, and don’t have a fit.” And I think that encapsulates my feelings of this game. It’s a cozy game where the joy is in building a beautiful tree with flowers. Do you have choices and feel like they make a difference? Yes, you can help your friends with your choices, you can set up your flowers, you can place buds strategically. But because you know there is some randomness to the game, you don’t stress about your choices as much; “You get what you get, and don’t have a fit”. I freely admit that the fun of building the 3D tree and the flower theme help that cozy feel.

Be aware that there may be a little bit of a dexterity element to this game, and that you should really consult BoardGameGeek to make sure you get rules clarified. But otherwise, I liked this game and will keep it! 7/10.

Skytear Horde: Campaigns. Does it put the Pain in Campaign?

I have to be honest: Skytear Horde: Campaigns does put a little pain into the campaign. But, knowing what the issues are before you get this game make it so you can work around them and enjoy this game as-is. Although this is mostly a “review” of the Skytear Horde: Campaigns, it’s also of a guide of how to get the most enjoyment out of this if do you end up getting it. At the risk of spoiling my review, I did like it and am keeping my copy but ONLY after making a few major notes.

Skytear Horde: Campaigns is a standalone expansion in the Skytear Horde series; this series of games are solo and 2-Player cooperative tower defense games. (There is nominally a 3-Player competitive game that we won’t be discussing; in our experience, it seems to be the least likely way to play)

The original base game of Skytear Horde was on Kickstarter waaaay back in January 2022, and delivered to me and other Kickstarter backers in February 2023. See our original review here. We did like it: it made the #5 spot on our Top 10 Solo Games of 2023!

The first expansion, a standalone expansion (meaning you can play it without the original game) was on Gamefound back in May 2023 and delivered in about a year. See our review of Skytear Horde: Monoliths here. It also made our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

This second and newest expansion is the Skytear Horde: Campaigns box above. It’s also a standalone expansion from Gamefound. It delivered in April 2025 after promising delivery in June 2025 (it delivered early!). My box is a little lack-luster because I backed at the Returning Players Deluxe pledge, which “expects” me to merge this in with the other two.

Let’s take a closer look!

Generic Unboxing

See above for scale with a Coke can: my Returning Players Deluxe box isn’t the best box. Again, I think it’s expected for me to merge all my cards into the original game.

This is a game all about cards. There’s a little unboxing video you might consider watching (see above). I watched a little bit of it.

There are just a ton of cards, some token sheets, and two booklets: A rulebook and a campaign book.

The cards look pretty great and they are consistent with the cards from the previous releases.

The Rulebook

This rulebook is both blessing and curse.

This rulebook does great on The Chair Test, opening up easily across two pages, laying flat, being readable, and no real overhang over the edges. This gets about an A- on the The Chair Test! It’s not an A because the font could be a little bigger, especially considering how much whitespace there is. Still, great!

These Component pages are fantastic! I forgoed (forewent?) the card video because I wanted to handle and open all the cards myself. These two pages where GREAT for describing how to open up and sort all the cards. The card deck (types) even had little annotations, along with a little summary! Very useful!

The set-up was good: it is on exactly two pages without needing going to cross to another page. See above.

The rest of the rulebook was pretty good; and it had better be. This is the third Skytear Horde: they should know how to explain it by now! They even note “new rules” with a sideline bar: great job! To be fair, there’s not “that many” new rules in this set. Note the bottom right of page 11 (above) has a new rule.

It doesn’t have an Index (boooo), but I’ll forgive it because it has a very good Glossary of keywords in the back.

It also ends with a bang and has some other common keywords on the back.

Seriously, for the base game, this is the best rulebook so far for this series. Great Components, good Set-Up, good rules, good Glossary, good back cover. This is why it’s a blessing.

But why is this rulebook a curse as well? Be patient; we’ll get there.

Cards

I want to talk a little about the cards. They do a really nice job in general.

The cards are labelled with what set they come from, even if it’s a little hard to read: see above! The Campaigns cards are marked with CAM. I suppose I appreciate that the labels are pretty well out of the way (so they don’t interfere with gameplay), but I really struggled to read that text! I ended up getting my phone out and zooming in on these! When I needed to sort the cards back into their respective decks, it was a challenge! Here’s another blessing and curse: the labels being out of the way mean they don’t interfere with play! That’s a blessing! But sorting them is a curse because it’s a little hard to read.

Maybe those teeny labels doesn’t bother you because you like to put everything in the main box and you don’t really care which set it came from. I like to keep my sets separated, so it did bother me. I suspect I am in the minority.

I mean, these cards look great. The art on them is amazing: see above.

Gameplay

This is a solo, 2-Player cooperative (or 3-Player competitive) tower defense/lane battling game. Players play cards to the lane to fight the bad guys and protect their castle!

There is a very nice description of win/lose conditions at front of the rulebook: see above.

There’s a lot more discussion about gameplay in many other sources, including our previous reviews. If you know what Skytear Horde is, the expansion part of this game should feel very familiar to you.

Solo Play: No Campaign (yet)

First and foremost, the Skytear Horde games are solo games. There are some annotations in the rules (like one paragraph) describing how to play 2-Player cooperative. Everything else about this game screams “I am a solo game!”

This is a true solo game: the solo player takes control of a single Alliance faction (Two players would each take a different faction and play them separately). See above as I take control of the Blue Order faction.

The rules suggest you DO NOT jump into this as a campaign! The rules “recommend playing only after you have played a few one-off games”. So, using only the content from this standalone expansion, I ended up playing about 4 one-off games to get back into the flow. I am embarrassed how much I had to relearn to play again!

As a straight-up standalone expansion you can play, Skytear Horde: Campaigns did a great job. Even if you never use the campaigns material, there are 4 new Alliance decks, 3 new Hordes (bad-guy decks), 6 new castles and some new Portals. If you like Skytear Horde, this is just more stuff and you will like it. If you didn’t like Skytear Horde, this probably won’t change your mind (but see below). The game still feels fun and I still had fun playing the new Alliance and Horde decks.

As always, this game works great solo. I fully expect this to make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2025!

The Campaign: The Curse

The campaign has many problems to work through. To start off, there are two glaring errors that undermine the confidence of the campaign section right away.

The first is that the page numbers are just wrong. The Renegade campaign is supposed to be on page 6, but it’s on page 4. Granted, this isn’t a big thing, but it really undermines the confidence if they can’t even get the page numbers right.

The second issue is the mislabelling of the new Blue Alliance cards.

The rulebook calls the new Blue Alliance cards “Liothan Zealots” …

… but the Campaign page labels them as Order? I went spare trying to find the Order group, but then I think they just meant all the new Blue Alliance cards from Skytear Horde: Campaigns? I think?

It’s a little confusing because a lot of the new Alliance cards (see above) have different subtype: see above. Some have Order, some don’t? If I JUST go back and look at the directions for building your first campaign deck, I am supposed to have 18 cards, and that includes the 4 different subtypes above. After putting this all together, I *think* that these are supposed to be the Liothan Zealots (as labelled in the rulebook), and the Order indicated by the campaign book is wrong: I think that’s supposed to Zealots. I think.

These two mistakes really undermined my confidence in the campaigns as I started into them. I wasted too much time just trying to understand what Alliance deck I was supposed to use.

Understanding the Campaign Differences

I am going to tell you this right away because it took a while for me to figure out: there are TWO types of campaigns in this game, and they are not well distinguished.

The first is what I’ll call Generic Campaign Mode: this is the type of campaign described on pages 20 and 21 of the main rulebook: see above.

The second type of campaign is the Thematic Campaign, as described on page 2 of the Campaign book (see above).

The rules as described by the Generic Campaign are different from the Thematic Campaign, and it’s very confusing. But the Thematic Campaign still follows most of the rules of the Generic Campaign. Confused? I was!

The Generic Campaign has you play 4 games, using 4 different Scenario cards. See rules above … can you tell that all those scenario cards are different?

The Thematic Campaign has you use two Scenario cards twice! It’s really hard to tell this difference! Even though the pictures DO SHOW this difference (see above), they are so small it’s hard to tell unless you are looking at them with your phone (see below)!

See me noticing! “Oh! We use the same 2 Scenario cards twice in the Thematic Campaign!”

See the Two Scenario cards I used for my first Thematic Campaign!

I really didn’t feel like this distinction was clear! I think you probably want your first game to be one of the simpler and more flavorful Thematic Campaigns!

Another thing that’s very confusing .. “What’s the text in the campaign book for the Thematic Campaigns?” Is this a choose-your-own-adventure? Is this a branching campaign? Nope! Everything in the campaign book for Thematic Campaign is JUST flavor text! The text nodes are referenced by the campaign cards: see above. Honestly, you actually never have to even LOOK at the two pages of your campaign … it’s just flavor! I was actually a little dejected by this … I was hoping for something more from the two pages! And I usually like flavor text!

Be aware that the rulebook describes the Generic Campaign, but the campaign book is for the Thematic Campaign, and it has slightly different rules! Most importantly, you only use 2 Scenario cards!

Sure, it’s all there, but I lost at least an hour of my life trying to rectify the rules of the Generic Campaign vs the rules of the Thematic Campaign. The rules of page 20 and 21 describe the rules of the Generic Campaign, and the rules from the Campaign book describe some of the differences for the Thematic Campaign.

If I had done this rulebook, I would have done things differently: I would have described the rules for the Thematic Campaign first as the main type (pages 20 and 21), then added rules for the Generic Campaign afterwards:

THIS IS WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE:
“Play the Thematic Campaigns first! There are tons in the Campaign book! They have tons of flavor text, if you like that!!! And even when you are all done, you can still keep playing! The rules for the Generic Campaign are described on the next page!”

But that’s not what they did.

Hopefully, this helps you get over the Campaign hump easier. This is why I think the rulebook is also a curse: the campaigns are not described well. It’s all there, but you gotta work for it. Maybe now it will be easier for you being forewarned?

Solo Thematic Campaign

I want to be clear, once I got over the hump of understanding the campaign rules, I had fun! Basically the campaign is 4 games: the first game is a simple game with only the introductory 20 Alliance cards (a simple deck) where you ONLY have to destroy the portal! Your first game in a campaign is pretty quick and simple.

Between games of campaigns, you can spend gold to buy more cards! Well, there’s a little more to it than that (as you spend/lose gold based on the campaign cards) ..

Basically, you perform the actions on the Scenario card you are on (see above), including spending/getting gold: see above for two Scenario cards.

Games 2 and 3 of the Campaign, you fight the bad guys on the back of the Scenario cards! See above as the Devotee wins game 3 of the Campaign!

In Game 4, you fight the Outsider to win! By the time you make it to Game 4, you have bought “pretty much” a full deck (mostly the same 40 cards as the normal one-shot games). The difference is, you feel like you “earned” your deck! You also feel like you know your deck that much better! You’ve had to make choices of which cards to buy, and you just feel more invested in the campaign!

The Thematic Campaign might be my favorite way to play Skytear Horde! Granted a Thematic Campaign game is about 4x longer than a normal … you’d think it’d be shorter, but the time you gain from the shorter games of 1, 2, and 3, you lose in set-up and between rounds doing card-buying. So, why do I like this way? You feel like you get to know your deck better, it’s fun to make choices about which cards you buy for the next game, and it’s neat to have some thematic text between games!

I actually liked the Thematic Campaigns mode so much, I wanted to try an experiment: what if I TAUGHT my friends the game using the Campaign?

An Experiment: Teaching the Game Using The Campaign

So, even though the game suggests you only play the campaign AFTER you’ve played the one-shot game, I conducted an experiment: I taught the my friends the 2-Player cooperative game using the campaign; The Thematic Campaign!

Short answer: this worked fabulously. I stayed out of the game, being “the rules guy” and just explained the game to them. I set everything up (which is quite a bit of work for the Thematic Campaign), and explained the rules.

Why do I think this method worked so well as an intro game? Well, the first game is over quickly (you just have to destroy a portal), but the players get a taste of the system: they feel they understand just enough, as there are only 20 cards to learn. Compare that to the full one-shot game of 40 cards you-don’t-know, and it’s a bit of a slog for newbies! That first campaign game is quick and easy and gets you into the system!

THEN, after your first game, you get to buy some new cards for you deck! The players have to make choices, so they have to read “a few of their cards”. … but not all of them! Just a few to buy for their next game! So, this works great as it incrementally teaches the cards! And players feel invested in their deck a little because THEY HAVE MADE THE BUY CHOICES.

And then the games get slower harder, building the confidence of the players, but still having deck advancement at the end of each game!

By the time the players have gotten to game 4 against “the big bad”, they are all in! They have seen the game mechanisms in simplified form, they have built confidence in themselves and their deck, they have made choices about how their deck is built, and they have invested in the game! THIS is the way to teach Skytear Horde!

But the method ONLY works because my friends had a “rules guy” (me) explain the game and mechanisms to them, and set it up (the set-up is not trivial). I do NOT think the campaign would be a good way to teach someone coming in with no mentor; this method only works (currently) with a shepherd to guide the players.

Did this method work? My friend Sara told me afterwords: “I don’t think I would liked this game if you just threw me into the one-shot game! Slowly building my confidence really helped me enjoy the game!”

A Missed Opportunity

My experience with the teaching campaign has me thinking: this is a missed opportunity. If the Skytear Horde: Campaigns had included a “First Play” book which CLEARLY guided the player(s) through a campaign with CLEAR instructions, this would be the Skytear Horde I would recommend to beginners! (I emphasize CLEAR because it would be imperative for someone who really knows how to write and teach to do that “First Play” book: my confidence in the designers wavers after all my problems in the campaigns sections) . For all the reasons I outlined in the section above, I think this should be the way to learn the game!

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the Campaigns mode for the self-teachers until you get over the hump of learning the game and slogging though the terrible Campaigns documentation. Which is sad, because the Campaigns mode SHOULD be the way to teach newbies the game.

Cooperative Mode

And, after all is said and done, teaching the game with the The Thematic Campaign had the side effect of helping us enjoy the 2-Player cooperative mode that much more (which we didn’t as much in the last iteration with Skytear Horde: Monoliths: see review here). Yes, it’s still fairly multiplayer solo, but my friends seems to enjoy the co-operation they did have (deciding which lanes to inhabit, which monsters to fight, etc).

What Have We Learned?

One) If you like Skytear Horde, you’ll like this. As an expansion, it’s more of the same, in a good way. See above.

Two) The rulebook for the base game in Skytear Horde: Campaigns is the best iteration of the rulebook so far and it’s pretty darn good. See above. Well, it’s good before we get to pages 20 and 21…

Three) The rule section for campaigns is terrible and you will struggle with it until you figure out there are two modes: Thematic Campaigns and Generic Campaigns. See above.

Four) The text in the Campaign book is only for Thematic Campaigns, and it’s really only flavor text; there’s no branching narrative or anything. You almost don’t need the campaign Book except for pages 2 and 3. See above for some flavor text for the first campaign.

Five) The Thematic Campaigns can be the best way to teach Skytear Horde, but only if you have a good shepherd who understands everything already. There really should be a well-written and clear First Play Guide to teach newbies Skytear Horde using the Thematic Campaigns mode. This is a huge missed opportunity.

Six) I recommend putting a note in your Fight Phase page to remind yourself that you draw Alliance cards if you kill a non-token monster: see above as I did!! The rule is documented on page 9, but you can easily miss it (because it’s not in the main flow: it’s in a parenthetical box: see below). And it’s such an important rule (and one I embarrassingly forgot in my first game), I think you need to re-emphasize it on the Fight Phase!

Conclusion

I liked Skytear Horde: Campaigns, and it’s staying in my collection. As a straight-up expansion to the Skytear Horde system, this is a fine expansion giving you more stuff. The Campaigns mode has terrible documentation, but once you get through it, The Thematic Campaigns are my favorite way to play Skytear Horde now.

Just be aware of all the issues we discovered while playing; hopefully that will be enough to help you enjoy this more if you decide to get it.

Review of Secrets of Zorro: Or “Where Do You Think YOU’RE Going, Señor Beaver?”

I freely admit that The Secrets of Zorro board game kinda sat around my house unplayed for a while. I got it from Kickstarter, about 3 or so months ago … but it didn’t look great. I mean, I did back it and I did pay real money for it (as I always do)! So, I uncovered it one game day, and said, “Hey, let’s try this: I hope it doesn’t suck.”

The Secrets of Zorro is a cooperative worker placement and boss-battler game for 1-4 players. It obviously lives smack dab in the middle in the Zorro universe … the Zorroverse? That’s right! Cooperative worker placement? Boss-battler? Zorroverse?

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Each player assumes the role of one of the children of Zorro! The “real” Zorro has died, and it’s up to his children to assume the mantle of their father! They will fight for justice together! (There are no special asymmetric powers, you are just kids of Zorro!)

To fight for justice, you must defeat the evil Governor who is destroying the town! This is a Boss-Battler after all! See above! We tended to refer to bad guy as the Governator (with thick Arnold accent), because this village is in California after all….

As part of the worker placement system, each player gets 3 worker placement tokens (only 2 at certain player counts).

The tokens are placed around the village, doing different things at each Location! See above as the tokens go on the black spots!

The function of each Location in the village is outlined in the rulebook (see above), but basically you can go to the Tavern to see “what’s going on” with the soldiers in town, you can go buy some cool new gear, you can heal yourself at the doctor, you can work the fields to get some money, and you can bribe some guards at the Citadel to get more info about the solider’s movement!

And last but not least, you can explore your father’s Secret cave to find some of his old stuff! See above! (Dad has some GREAT STUFF!)

As a cooperative worker placement game, the group decides “together” the order in which to play and activate the locations! That’s right! Player Selected Turn Order permeates this game! (See here for more discussion of Player Selected Turn Order). Players work together to figure out the best locations to populate as a group!

It’s important to go to the Market, The Tavern and other places around town because you NEED to reveal the Green cards (above)! These cards contains “soldier movements” in the night, and will indicate how the soldiers will be doing bad stuff!

In the night phase, the Soldiers will go to the “outskirts of town” doing dastardly deeds for the Governator! See above! Players, as the kids of Zorro, need to keep the soldiers in check! If you don’t “deal” (ie., fight) with the Small Gold Convoy above (on the West side of town), they will cause the Governor’s plan to advance by 2! (The red +2). If you defeat the soldiers, you get 2 gold (the green +2) instead.

Players must choose where to go at night! Sure, you are fighting cooperatively, but you only have limited resources, so the more you know about the soldiers movements (see above: we have three soldier groups going to the north), the better you can spread out to combat the governor’s forces! In the day, you have to balance upgrading your kid of Zorro (buying new stuff, adding advantages, looting your Dad’s cave) with tracking the soldier movements (by bribing soldiers, drinking with some locals, or hanging out with the merchant!) It’s actually quite thematic: you gotta hang out in town to get intelligence!

The fighting system is simple but interesting! The players, as a group, get to choose how to attack, and in what order! (Again, more Player Selected Turn Order!) Each kid of Zorro has 5 such combat cards, 1 of each above. There are whip attacks (which can hit multiple soldiers), horse tramples, and some sword attacks! They all feel very thematic! See above!

As you play, you can get more stuff to help you: Tornado (by far the best card in the game, coming from your Dad’s Secret cave) augments your Horse Charge AND allows you to be in two places at once during the night! You can also buy gear like the Black Costume above (for 3 gold) from the Merchant!!

Once you decide to fight, you dedicate some of your fighting cards (in whatever order you please) to fighting the soldiers! The Small Gold Convoy got two Strong Soldiers! Gulp!

Luckily, Tornado and the Horse Charge can take one of them down in a single hit! See above! You do have to fight the soldiers left to right …

Basically, you alternate day (worker placement) and night (battle soldiers) until you exhaust all the soldiers in the citadel and force the Governator into a final fight! The better you do at keeping the soldiers (in the night phase) in check, the fewer the Governator will have in the final battle!

If you can beat the line of solider protecting the Governator and take him out (see above), you win! If you take too long or lose too many battles with solider at night, you lose!

It’s worth noting the wound mechanism is simple and clever; if you ever lose a fight, you have to place one of your fight cards in the wound section of your character, and you can’t get it back until you heal or see a doctor (normally, you get all your fight cards back every night).

Rulebook

I didn’t love this rulebook. It was missing some rules, and it could have been better in a few sections. But because this is a very thematic game, some of the missing rules you can easily extrapolate. For example: Where do the soldiers go if players lose a combat? I had trouble finding the rule, but it seems thematic that they go back to the Garrison. The lack of clarity in some rules wasn’t a deal-breaker (like it was in Corps of Discovery from a few weeks ago) because this game is pretty darn thematic!

The rulebook gets about a B- on the Chair Test. It can work on the chair next to me, as it stays open, but it could be slightly smaller and have a slightly bigger font. B- is still pretty good.

The Components list made me grumpy (see top of page) because there were no pictures! In fact, I had to count cards to make sure I understood what each type of card was! That’s not ideal.

The Set-Up (above) did help answer a lot of questions, and it even had a nice picture with the correlating instructions on the opposite page! So, that helped alleviate some of the component issues.

The rules were okay. A few might have been clearer, but it taught the game. See more pictures above.

The picture (above) with list of actions at each Location was pivotal to playing the game!

Except for one major rule omission, the rule book was good enough. We moved forward with only a little bit of grumbling. It taught the game well enough. Let’s move on.

Solo Play

So, congratulations to The Secrets of Zorro for following Saunders’ Law and having solo rules!

The solo mode is a true solo mode where the solo player inhabits a single kid of Zorro.

Theres not too many changes for solo play: For balance purposes, the solo character gets 10 combat cards (see above) instead of the 5 or so.

The solo player actually gets 6 worker placement tokens (see above for 3 of blue and 3 of green).

And when going out of town during the night phase, the solo player can go to TWO outskirts places by himself.

Other than that, the game pretty is the same as the cooperative game. In this case, the solo player is just operating a lot of workers and combats by himself!

The solo game works pretty well to teach the game: after one game, I felt like I had most of the rules down. It was also pretty fun. I could see playing solo again. It was also pretty quick: the game box says the game takes 45-60 minutes and that is pretty accurate! The game’s mechanism are straight forward, and as the solo player, I had lots of choices! It’s easy to learn.

Cooperative Play

Even though the solo mode was fun enough, the game really shines as a cooperative game! Over two weeks, the game came out numerous times! By request! Once as a 3-Player game with me, Teresa, and Andrew (see above) …

… and once as a 4-Player game with me, Sara, Teresa, and Andrew!

The Player Selected Turn Order really keeps everyone involved all the time! During the day phase, players have to decide when and where to place their tokens! Then during the night phase (when you fight the soldiers), that same Player Selected Turn Order is still in force as players decide the order in which they attack! It made everyone feel involved and active!

In fact, as the Kids of Zorro working together, a little bit of role-play even emerged!

“Hey Sis, can you help me fight to the North?
“Okay, Bro, but you owe me! Dad always liked you best!”

It was actually a little surprising that the role-play emerged! I wasn’t expecting it! But, as Kids of Zorro, we all felt kinda connected! That role-play was a major benefit I did not see when playing solo! That extra little silliness really ratcheted-up the cooperation!

This is not a heavy, plodding game: it has a light air to it, and was much more fun than I expected!

“Where Do You Think YOU’RE Going, Señor Beaver?”

A very very long time ago, when I was a kid in the 1980s, the same 10 or so movies showed on HBO all the time. There was one such Zorro movie that me and my friends watched and quoted quite a bit! My friend’s CC and John watched the movie a lot more than I did, but one of the lines from the movie still gets quoted today: “Where do you think YOU’RE going, Señor Beaver?”

I had to ask my friend CC: “Um what was that movie you and John always quoted?” It was Zorro: The Gay Blade starring George Hamilton. It was a silly movie according to CC! It was a fun romp … it was funny and a little silly, but still had lots of action and great sword play! Just like you want from a Zorro movie!! I bring up that movie because, somehow, the spirit of that movie seems to shine through this game! This is a light game, but still enough interesting decisions and cool combat with swordplay, whips, and horses! You fight bad soldiers to take out the Governator! But it’s fun! Not too heavy!

And no, I’m not going to tell you the context of the quote. You have to watch the movie to find out for yourself.

House Rules

This game is really fun, but it needs some house rules. The thing is, they are all thematic and make the game more cooperative and more fun!

1) First of all, there is no trading! See rules blurb above. I get that it might be for balance, but it makes the game feel like “you just get what you get, you have no choice“: And that’s not fun. It really came home to us how ANTI-THEMATIC this “no-trading” rule was when I was wounded and needed a gold to heal myself.

“Hey Sis, can I have a gold? I really need to go to the doctor!”
“NO! I cant give you one!”
“But we all live in Dad’s house at the end of the day and come home to each other … you can’t give your wounded brother a single gold to help him heal?”
“NO! Go work in the fields and get your own gold!”

We assume (maybe wrongly) that we all go back to Dad’s house at the end of the day. It seems like we should be able to share at least gold and equipment at the end of the day (I get that Advantage cards can’t be shared) because we all sleep in the same house? Like I said, add some trading at the end of the day makes the game feel more fun and more engaging and more strategic (as you feel like you don’t get STUCK with something).

2) Ride to other Outskirts! The Horse Charge is the best base attack in the game! But it seems very thematic that if you discard the Horse Charge during the night phase, you can ride to another “outskirts” Location and help your brothers and sisters!!! The fact that Tornado already allows something like this speaks to this rule. It’s not too damaging to balance, as it’s the best base attack in the game!

It was our experience that both of these house rules made the game more fun, more thematic, and more cooperative!

Things I Liked

The Secrets of Zorro was: Easy to learn. Easy to teach. It had reasonably quick games. The art on the cards was really nice. I loved how the Player Selected Turn Order permeated the game in both worker placement and combat. I was surprised and delighted by how much role-play emerged in the cooperative game! The game was very cooperative and engaging at all times!

Things I Didn’t Like

I love the art in the game, but I don’t love this cover. There’s some great art in here and I feel like the “attract mode” of the cover might cause some people to pass it over. Don’t! It’s a fun little game!

The rulebook could use a little sprucing up (better back cover, a few rules need to be clarified or elaborated, components description page needs to be much better).

Overall Reactions

We all liked this game enough to play it two weeks in a row!

Andrew: solid gameplay, 6.5 or 7. Probably 7 with house rules.
Sara: 7?
Teresa: 7? 7.5?
Rich: 6.5 or 7 for solo game. 7.5 for cooperative game, 8 with house rules.

I think the only reason it didn’t get a higher score was that it is still pretty light and doesn’t have tons of replayability (they do, however, have an expansion which helps with some of that). This was a keeper for my group: Probably 7.5/10 overall.

Conclusion

I didn’t expect to really like The Secrets of Zorro, but I really did, as did my group! The cooperative experience was really engaging because of the Player Selected Turn Order and the role-play that emerged from being the kids of Zorro!

We have a few house rules to suggest that make the game more fun (making it about a 7.5/10), but even the base game was still a 7/10! The Secrets of Zorro was fun, quick to teach, quick to play, and a fun experience fighting for Justice!

Just don’t accidentally pronounce Zorro like Tsuro with your friends!! For a few minutes, Andrew was confused why we were fighting bad guys in the Tsuro game???

Top 10 Solo/Cooperative Trick-Taking Games

Trick-taking games are a genre that’s been around for ages: Bridge, Hearts, and a more gamery games like Rage! We’ve now reached a point where there are a lot of solo and cooperative trick-taking games as well! To be cooperative, every single one of these games has a pretty severe notion of Limited Communication … if you could just communicate anything, most of these games would become trivial! So, most games on this list have very constrained notions of communication! Interestingly, most of these games also have a very constrictive player count, so we take note of that as well! Let’s take a look below!

(We also note that two of these are in German, which required me getting a translation, and a third was mostly German but luckily included English rules!)

10. Park Life

Player Count: 1-4

This cooperative Trick-Taking game is a little misleading because, depending on the version of Park Life you get, there’s a very different trick-taking game!

The Deluxe Hedgehog version (above) has a different version of a trick-taking game …

.. than The Deluxe People Edition (above)!

Both games have a solo game, but the game is a little better with more people. These games are at the bottom of this list because they seem the least developed: they are very cute and have some interesting ideas for trick-taking games, but feels like they could use a little bit of either explanation or work.

Still, you may play these and fall in love with them because of the cute art!

9. Lindyhop

Player Count: 2-Player Only

This game presents is an interesting theme, as a trick-taking game recreating a dance from 1928 (from the African American communities of New York City). Two players “dance” with each other, with trick-taking simulating the back-and-forth/give-and-take as players try to “groove” together.

Players traverse a path together, picking up tokens if they land on exact spaces. See above.

Players play cards and the difference in card value is how far they move! The art is gorgeous (see above) and very thematic: there are even special powers on some of the cards!

The only reason this is a little lower on the list is because there is really only one opportunity to strategize: at the beginning of the game! But it’s a fun little romp that’s easy to bring out.

8. Claim with the Expansion Claim: Alliances

Player Count: 2-Player Only

Claim by itself is a 2-Player only competitive trick-taking game.

But, with the Claim: Alliances expansion (see above) this becomes a cooperative trick-taking experience!

This is one of the games that was originally in German, luckily I was able to find English rules online!

Since the way to play cooperatively is to use the Alliances expansion, you first have to learn the base game! The game proceeds in two phases, both powered by trick-taking! In the first phase, you play tricks to try and recruit cards for the next phase. The winner of each trick gets the named recruit, and the loser gets the “random” top-deck recruit! The second phase has the players trying to win factions (using trick-taking): whomever wins the most factions, wins!

In the cooperative game, some Alliance cards are added to the mix. During the recruit phase, the winner has to take an Alliance card, which includes bad guys and commanders, and at some point, both sides must have a commander whose factions they MUST win!

This is a little lower on the list because you have to get the base game under your belt before you can play the expansion. But there are some cool ideas in here, including the two phase system and some special powers on some factions!

7. The Fox in the Forest Duet

Player Count: 2-Player Only

This is a 2-Player trick-taking game where players play tricks to move around a forest map collecting gems.

The art is cute and the game is pretty light. The Communication Limitations are fairly draconian once you have your cards (you can’t even discuss strategy), but you can discuss strategy between rounds. We had fun playing it; it’s a lighter game that isn’t crazy rule heavy.

6. Trick ‘n Trouble (Fangt Doc Crazy!)

Player Count: 3-Player Only

What???? A 3-Player only game???

This is a bit of a surprise as a 3-Player only cooperative game! It has kind of a spooky (silly spooky) theme!

Players try to fulfill tasks based on the cards from “won tricks”: The players have a tableau of tasks to fulfill (see above).

The “trick” in this game is that some of the cards are double-colored, and you can use them as you wish.

This was a surprisingly fun little game, even if the 3-Player only count is a little different. Like most cooperative trick-taking games, the limited communication permeates and you can’t really talk about the cards in your hand.

5. Sail

Player Count: 2-Player Only

I’ve been able to get Sail to the table a number of times with Sam and Kurt over the past year! It’s a fun theme as you use trick-taking to help move a ship towards its final destination!

Winning a trick means “usually” moving the boat in your direction (towards you), but there are many different things that happen along the way!

Can you avoid the Kraken? Can you move forward when you really need to?

Using trick-taking as a means to move the ship forward is real interesting mechanism! If you like Sail, be aware that Sail Legacy is coming to Kickstarter soon!

4. For Northwood

Player Count: 1-Player Only

Yes, that’s right, this is a solo trick-taking game! It sounds like this can’t work, but it works really well! The tricks are “conversations” with fiefs, and you try to make fiefs “friendly” to you by winning them over with conversation! It’s a pretty thin theme, but it works pretty well as a trick-taking schema.

This is a tiny little game with super cute art!

There are special powers you can activate!

Winning is a victory point threshold, as you count how many friendly fiefs you obtain (and count the stars)! Because this is a solo-only game, there is no notion of Limited Communication! This is a really unique little game that I had to scour all the gameshops to find! I think there were reprints, so I believe this is back in stock!

3. Jeckyl and Hyde vs. Scotland Yard

Player Count: 2-Player Only

The two players cooperatively play the two sides of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, vying for control!

This is a fascinating idea, using trick-taking as a way to take control of the personality! To keep ahead of Scotland Yard, the two players must win tricks in such a way as to keep Scotland Yard off their tail!

The two players each play a different side of the personality!

I, unfortunately, was unable to get the English version for some time, so I ended up using Google translate to translate the German text to English! But this game was so cool, the art was so neat, and it had such neat ideas, I really liked it! That’s why, despite only having a German copy, this made it all the way to #3! (And I did finally get the English version: it is available more widespread now!)

2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game

Player Count: 1-4 Players

This game has taken my game groups my storm: everyone loves it!

I played it solo when I was sick, and had a wonderful time going through the whole campaign solo!

My friends in Las Cruces have played through the entire campaign as a 3-Player game and love it! See our review here! I played a bunch 3 and 4-Player games at Dice Tower West with my friends Becca and Tricia and had a ball!

The reason this game is so high on the list is that everyone seems to really enjoy it! The fact that it can play at so many player counts speaks volumes to the design team! The solo game is very different from the 2-Player game, which is very different from the 3 and 4-Player game, and yet all the different modes seem to work, and work well! The theme seems to come through fairly well! My friend Andrew was surprised this was #2 and NOT #1 on my list!

1. The Crew: Either The Quest For Planet Nine or Mission Deep Sea

Player Count: 3-5 Players (sorta 2-Player)

There are two different versions of this game, but they are essentially the same kind of game. Like Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game, the game players differently depending on the player count. There is a 2-Player mode, but it’s very clumsy and probably not the way you should play.

Players play tricks, but have to fulfill missions in order to win the game! The missions give the game focus, and change every game!

Honestly, even though I have the physical copy of both games (which are arguably the same game), I have played this game SO MUCH on BoardGameArena! During the Pandemic, this was the goto game for me and my friends! It was so easy to just bring this out and play for hours. Something called The Crew brought us together; there is probably some deeper meaning there.

What makes this #1 on the list for me is the brilliant rule that you can communicate WHEN IT REALLY MATTERS! You have a token that allow you to communicate once during your turn, by sharing the lowest, highest, ot “only one” of your hand. This is so unique: all the other trick-taking game have very restricted communication, but essentially there’s none or high-level “strategy” communications. With this one mechanism, The Crew makes it feel like your CHOICES MATTER: It matters when you choose to communicate, it matters when you choose to hold off, it matters!

This is the #1 on my list because I have played it so much more than every other game, and it’s so easy to play online or in person, and you feel like your limited communiques matter.

Corps of Discovery: A Cooperative and Solo Game

Corps of Discovery is a cooperative game that was on Kickstarter back in May 2024. This promised delivery in Jan 2025, and it was about 3 month late, arriving in late April 2025.

This looks like a thematic adventure/exploration game set the in era of Manifest Destiny and Lewis and Clark! And it is NOT! This is a deduction game, with bare hints of theme. The text on the back of the box even hints at this being a thematic game:

“Take command of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery and lead them on a cross-country mission to explore the land … and kill demonic monsters.”

Sounds like a thematic exploration adventure, huh? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope! Corps of Discovery is a deduction game! A cooperative deduction game, but a deduction game nonetheless! You need to know that going in or you will be severely disappointed by that description.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

Corps of Discovery is a pretty standard sized Ticket To Ride style box.

Now, we are showing the Ultimate edition of the game, which has slightly nicer components and a few expansions (see above).

The unboxing starts poorly, as you have to “fix” some maps in the game.

See above: as I have to X (or notate) which maps are bad. Now, they aren’t full maps, there are just partial maps, so one side of the maps is good and the other side is bad!! So, you still have to keep your “bad” maps, because one side is ok. This started me off a little grumpy, but at least they fixed the problem.

The main part of the game, the key part of the game is the map holder above: in the Ultimate Edition, this is a beautiful wooden map.

There are some resource tokens (and a holder, which got very badly shaken up in delivery).

Underneath all that are BUNCHES and BUNCHES of maps!

There are different “themes” of folders with different maps: see the training mission folder above.

See the Flora map pack above.

See the Insecta map pack above.

See Vameter map pack above.

Coupled with these folders of maps are missions and the goals. See above.

Underneath all the maps are holders for the tokens for each Map pack. Note that mine got shaken up a little, so the components are a little wonky. I wish there had been a discussion somewhere of what all these things were, but you will figure it out … it could have been easier.

Basically, under each hard card are some components for the necessary map pack.

See above for some core components under the Core Game hard card.

The components are pretty nice, but you have to like the comic-book art style of the game. I do, but others may not.

The quality of these maps is a little flimsy, which isn’t a big deal if you are careful.

I was a little underwhelmed by the quality of the components, especially because of the errors on the maps! I did like the variety of maps, the comic-booky art, the wooden resources, and the wooden map holder. My friend Lon texted me after he got his copy: he was less than thrilled with the quality:

“I saw you posting about Corps of Discovery. I will say, I am not super happy with detail and packing quality. The manuals and the backs of the expansion tiles have different numbers of items (that is just bad), so I don’t know which is right. Also, I’m missing 8 tokens…at least I think so. Since I don’t have an actual list of the number of individual resources, but it looks like I’m missing several of those, plus I know I’m missing two water, and 1 Tipi. On top of that they had the errored maps and tokens, with I’ll say substandard ways to fix them (proxy the tokens, and to save a few pennies, we’ll have you “x” out the bad maps, so we can print 2 sheets instead of 4).”

Lon is also talking about the components page: it doesn’t give an accurate count of the resource tokens, so we don’t know if we got them all!!

You saw how messed up they were. So, are we missing some? I don’t know! They aren’t clearly enumerated the rulebook!

The component quality left a little to be desired, but I think Lon was grumpier about the components than I was. The rulebook, however, left me MUCH grumpier than Lon.

Rulebook

I have not been this frustrated with a rulebook in a very long time. The rulebook looks like it might be okay (it actually gets an A- on the Chair Test), but for a deduction game where every word matters, this rulebook struggles to specify the rules well.

A few weeks ago, I didn’t love Soul Raiders, but I even reprimanded the rulebook for too many examples. Oh, if only that were the case this week!

There was essentially ONE example on page 9; and it didn’t do a great job: the example crossed page boundaries, so it made it it harder to correlate the rule with the example. It also was too small! I struggled to read the page because it was a little too small in the rulebook! Also, some of the rules we so small because they were hidden in the text of the box!

See Coke can above for scale: it’s too small!

This is a game where a single resource can make the difference between winning and losing. Yet, there are so many places where things are poorly specified. Some examples:

What happens when you discard a Challenge? (see Bait and Trap card above) Are there rules about which one? Can you discard one in progress? Do you keep the path tokens for the next challenge that replaces it? This makes a HUGE difference! The summary icon page at the back of the rulebook DOES NOT show this and offers no explanation in the rulebook.

What happens when you add a Challenge? (see Pass/Fail on Sweltering Challenge above). Can you specify where the challenge goes in the day? Before? After? Can you put it to the front? Can you choose NOT to add a challenge? (Usually, you want to, but sometimes you want to move to the end of the day to reset all your Gear). Again, there’s no specification anywhere and these rules make all the difference in the world.

What does the ?/Water notation mean? See above on the bottom of the Landslide card. I went spare looking for it!

It’s not on the back page with the summary of icons!! See above!! I figured it could maybe mean three things:
1) discard a water or some other token (I think this is the actual interpretation)
2) make it so the minotaur lines don’t require lossage
3) lose a water ONLY IF it’s on the ? side, or off the board (or remove a ? water from the board)
This is one place where the token iconography failed: the ? side is useful for the players to “mark” what they think resources are. Corps of Discovery conflates the meaning of ? to be “any single resource” and also “notate where a resource might be”. Which is it?

The final meaning is not where you expect it on the rulebook: I expected an explanation on the last page with the icons: NOPE! It’s hidden next to the path rules and Monster Threat Effect on page 10???? It’s not even clear if it’s supposed to be a token? It sure looks like it from the picture, but I have none of these tokens in my game!!

Another problem: this page 9, which is arguably most important page in the rulebook, does not specify all the rules that appear in the Training Scenario! It alludes to some of the rules, but isn’t clear. See this posting over on BGG: With a little help from the internet, I figured out what was going on here. But I feel like this page needs to explain a few more rules.

In a thematic game, I don’t mind making a few snap judgements for rules, but deduction is all about precision. This game needs an Index, more examples, more clarifications, and some rules need to be actually specified.

Gameplay

If I said this played like Minesweeper, would you get mad at me? Players uncover spots of the board grid using deductive rules (board sideways to maybe not give any spoilers; each map is unique). What’s revealed leads to more clues about what’s around you!

These spots have resources which you use to overcome challenges and monsters.

It’s Minesweeper, with resources and a lot more deduction rules.

10 Plays

I gave myself 10 plays to play the game: I played two of the Training Scenario, six of the Fauna Scenario, and two of the Flora Scenario. This took place over two weekends with pretty much my the last weekend being consumed by this game.

I was able to beat the Minotaurs reliably in the Fauna scenarios after about 5 plays.

The Flora Scenarios kicked me around. I lost. Hard. And I didn’t have fun.

By the end, I was tired of looking for the fun in this game. After my 10th game, I was done.

Randomness

Like I said, I was able to defeat the Minotaurs reliably after 5 games. But I noticed that my score ranged from 3 to almost a perfect score (27)! I got “lucky” and just happened to have the right cards come out and the right resources emerge so I was just able to trounce the minotaurs! This was right after a game where I barely won, and I got 3 points. The score was more of a representation of “how lucky” I was; one game, I got lucky and obtained almost a perfect score! One game, where I got trounced by my Misfortunes, I won … but barely. The score meant nothing: It just noted how lucky I was. To be clear, I didn’t play THAT differently between games.

In the Fauna games, the game felt VERY lucky; how far you could advance, and when you get the Flora Terrain tokens, just felt very lucky. (Uncovering Flora tokens means you don’t get the resource, and you have NO IDEA if you will uncover a plain resource or a Flora resource).

In a game where Deduction is such an important part of the strategy, there seemed to be too much luck for me to want to come back to this.

Conclusion

I wanted to like this game so much. I was initially a little disappointed that it wasn’t particularly thematic, but I still really like Deduction Games, so I was still so happy to move forward with what it was. A deduction game needs tight, well-written, and well-documented rules; sadly, that was not the case with this game! The rulebook was one of the most frustrating rulebooks I have encountered in sometime. To add insult to injury, I felt like a lot of scenario-specific rule were also under-specified. Even powering through the rules and making the “best I can” with the rules as given, I found the game just too random for a game that just leans so heavily on hard deduction.

I gave Corps of Discovery so many chances; I forced my way through ten games, hoping to “finally” overcome the hump of rules. But I rarely had fun playing: I was always just so angry at the randomness and poorly specified rules. I am selling my copy.

Maybe you’ll like it if you can power through it; maybe being forewarned about the pitfalls will help you like it. Corps of Discovery has a really original premise, and it has some great ideas, but it just never came together for me. Maybe it will for you.

EDIT: My copy has been sold.

More Solitaire than Sherlock: A Review of Sherlock Solitaire (the Solo and Cooperative Game)

This review has been sitting in my hopper for over a year now; not sure why I didn’t get it out earlier!

Sherlock Solitaire is a very small cooperative card game for 1-2 players. This released early in 2024: I had heard about it from my friend Sam and so I quickly ordered it from Wise Wizard website about a month ago (early March 2024). It delivered pretty quickly! I got it to the table solo, but I didn’t want to finish my review until I tried it two-player cooperative .. Sam really wanted to play, but he was busy most of March.

This is a very small and thin package. It plays 1-2 players, is about 20 minutes, and plays ages 12+.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

Sherlock Solitaire is a teeny tiny box and very thin: see the Coke can above for perspective.

Except for the instruction pamphlet, it’s all cards .. just 55 cards.

The cards are pretty gorgeous.

The game is very pretty on the table: see above.

Rulesheet Not a Rulebook

The rulebook is not a rulebook but a rulesheet: see above. Sigh. It’s a pamphlet.

Considering it’s a pamphlet, it actually does ok on the Chair Test! It fits on the chair next to me and I can read it! The font is a little small (because it’s a folded pamphlet), but it worked on the chair next to me, as I consulted it during gameplay.

The set-up was pretty good: see the picture above.

The rules are a little sparse, but they does work.

It even does a decent job at showing examples and counter-examples of “what is a set”! I appreciated that set of pictures!

Given the constraints of a pamphlet, this rulesheet worked pretty well. The pictures were all informative. There were a number of places where some clarifications could have been provided, but the ruleset was simple enough and consistent enough that we were able to extrapolate rules when needed.

This was a decent to pretty good rulesheet.

Gameplay

Choose a starting scenario: The Intro Case (The Valley of Fear) is just to get you into the game, so it has simpler win conditions. The Final Problem has a much harder win condition.

Each player (works for 1-2 players) takes either the Watson card or the Sherlock Holmes card. See above. The bottom of the card shows the special abilities of each player!

Basically, each character gets 4 cards on their turn to play to one of two areas: the Crime Scene or the Office. There are two types of cards: Investigator cards (labelled 1-4: see above) and Threat Cards (labelled A-D, see below).

Over the course of the game, the player(s) must play two cards to the Crime Scene and two cards to the Office each turn.

In the Office, you are trying to make sets of cards: you have to alternate investigator and threat cards (numbers and letters … see above). All investigators (numbers) must be in the same column, and all letters must be distinct in a column: these are the “sets” the players are making. If you get 3 full sets (4 investigators), you win!

However, you still have to play two cards to the Crime Scene as well: see above. If you ever get 2 of any type of card, you immediately discard those two cards and “do something!”

Two threat cards? You take a wound! See two threats above …

The wound card is a “timer” of sorts: if you ever get 3 wounds, you lose!

If you get two investigators on the Crime Scene, you invoke your special powers!

The rulesheet does a nice job of summarizing of how to use your special powers … see above.

If you get enough sets, you win! If you get 3 wounds, you lose! It all happens in about 20 minutes.

Solo Play

A game called Sherlock Solitaire had better have a solo mode! It does (thank you for following Saunders’ Law): it’s the main way to play!

Once I got past my first few games (after I had to decipher the rulesheet), the game moved pretty quickly.

The best part of the game was when I could be clever and play my special abilities in a clever way to move cards to/from the Crime Scene/Office. The worst part was when I just played cards and didn’t feel like I had a lot of choice. The game was a fairly engaging way to spend 20 minutes. It really did feel like a game of Solitaire as I moved cards around.

More Solitaire Than Sherlock

With a name like Sherlock Solitaire, you might be expecting something more like a mystery. No, this is a lot more Solitaire than Sherlock: you are just playing cards like a game of Solitaire.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the art! The art that comes with this game is gorgeous and very evocative of the Sherlock Holmes stories!

In the end, though, there is no mystery to solve. There isn’t really a lot of theme: this could have been a Cthulu game, a Zombie game, or a Smurf game. Or anything. Nothing about the gameplay really has to be in a Victorian Sherlock Universe.

The art is really the only thing that makes you think of Sherlock Holmes: and it is phenomenal art!

Two Player Game

I had to wait almost a whole month to play with Sam!! He was interested in the game, but was busy with family and work all March.

There are two ways to play Sherlock Solitaire 2-Player:

Play as the solo game, but both players together make all the decisions
Each player takes Sherlock and Watson, and alternates turns

We chose to alternate turns. The solo game with 2 players making all the decisions seemed less fun … and at that point, it’s just the solo game anyways.

What we found was that … the second player got a little bored. There is no strategy in a 2-Player game, as you have no idea what cards you get until your turn. What that means is that if you are waiting for you turn, you can do nothing useful!! You just sit there waiting for your turn.

The two-player game was much less interesting, as someone was always “waiting” with nothing to do.

… until we tried a little house rule.

House Rule for Two Players

When it’s not your turn, draw some cards! Instead of sitting there “doing nothing” during your friend’s turn, you can then “be thinking” about what you want to do when it’s your turn! To keep this from being too overpowering (from the game balance perspective), we choose to just draw two cards at the end of the turn and two at the beginning of the turn.

That way, we were still playing four cards per turn, but had a hint of what we could on our turn.

Weirdly, me and Sam didn’t feel like this changed the game balance too much, and in fact didn’t change our turn too much, but it felt like it mattered! With this simple rule, we both felt more engaged, even if it didn’t change the game too much! We felt like we mattered more, even if it was just a small amount! And that made a big difference.

Conclusion

If you were expecting something with a mystery of some sort, then Sherlock Solitaire may be a big disappointment. There’s a lot more Solitaire than Sherlock in this game: it’s basically just a card game about making sets and moving cards.

The special powers of the Sherlock and Watson characters make the game interesting, as you can make many moves in the game that make you feel clever.

And despite the lack of theme to this all card game, the art is still very nice and evocative.

As a solo game, I’d probably give a 5.5 or 6/10. I might play it again: it’s pretty straight forward and quick … and there are moments where I feel clever. I freely admit that the art brings it up the score a little bit: the fantastic look makes this game stand out on the table.

As a two-player game, I would give the unaltered game a 5/10: there was just too much downtime between turns. If, however, we played with our house rule (always having two cards in your hand), then I would bump this up to a 6.5/10! We felt much more engaged even if it was just our preception! My favorite way of playing Sherlock Solitaire was 2-Player with our house rule: that’s probably how I’d play it again.

Soul Raiders: A Solo and Cooperative Review

Soul Raiders is a cooperative fantasy adventure game that was on Kickstarter back in July 2021 and promised delivery in December 2022. I backed the deluxe Grimoire Edition (above). Well, it finally arrived last month (March 2025), so it’s about 2.3 years late. This wasn’t on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022, but it probably was my #11 or #12!

This sat unplayed in the box longer than it should have; I think I was scared of how big it was! Look how big it is!!! Did I have the cycles to even try it?

Well, I finally got around to getting out and trying it … was it worth it?

Unboxing

Although this unboxing here is to show you what’s in the box, it’s also here to remind me how to put the box together! So, it’s for me and you!

This is a BIG box. This is the Grimoire Edition.

It’s got a lot of stuff packed in: see the character boxes above (this is a cooperative fantasy adventure game).

This game is so grandiose, it has it’s own lore book!

If you really want to get into a fantasy universe, this might be the right game for you!

This dual-layered board (above) keeps track of a lot of shared attributes and state of the game.

There’s lot of little boxes to store your game between sessions.

There’s some fabulous minis.

The campaign notebook allows to save the game between chapters.

There’s a bunch of cardboard tokens.

And boards for the characters.

Underneath all that, are the three main chapters of the game.

The cards of the game are in two boxes: see above.

Each of the chapter boxes has huge Location cards and little cards.

This game is GORGEOUS. The production is GORGEOUS.

Consult the pictures above for when you need to repack your box!

Rulebook

The rulebook is good. Well, ish.

It gets about a B+ on the Chair Test: it overhangs on the chair next to me just a little (see above), but it lays flat and open, it has a big readable fonts, and it has lot of pictures.

The components page is well-labelled and notated (see above). It even breaks up the cards by chapters.

The set-up works pretty well, although it doesn’t show how the story cards will be laid out (which we need to discuss more).

This is a gorgeous rulebook that’s written pretty well, it has lots of examples and lots of pictures.

It even ends with a very useful summary of icons on the back!

Although I liked this rulebook a lot, it made the mistake of putting too much content into the examples. I like it when rules have clear definitions, then maybe use the examples to help explain and/or clarify. Unfortunately, I think this leaned a little too much into using the examples AS the rules a few times. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad the examples are there, but I wanted clear succinct rules as well. (I think the last time we noticed this “rules in examples” phenomena was back Sleeping Gods rules: see link here).

The rulebook was generally good, and it frankly looks gorgeous (like the rest of the game).

Gameplay

The best way to describe this game? It feels like it a video game: a Point-And-Click (fantasy) Adventure game with lots of monster fighting.

Each player takes the role of one of six characters: see the character boxes above.

Each character has his own set of cards: there’s basic Action cards (above top) and Heroic Action cards (above bottom). Notice the Heroic Action cards have a special foil on them so you can tell them apart!

These Heroic Action cards are earned (in order) by spending Heroism tokens (3 to earn a new Heroic Action card). Cool fact; you can spend 3 Heroism tokens at ANY time to immediately earn a new card! Very useful when you need a card immediately!

You get Heroism tokens are various plot points in the story, but the most reliable way to getting Heroism Tokens is by defeating BIG BAD MONSTERS! Defeating the one above opens Story Card 14, but also earns the player 2 Heroism tokens!

By the end of Chapter 1, I had been able to earn 6 new Heroic Actions cards! (Heroic Action Cards must be earned in order: note the numbers on far right).

The cards are you primary currency for “getting things done”. Some cards are more attuned to movement (as you must explore) … see above …

… and some cards are more attuned to fighting! See above. Basically, you can always use the value on the card for whatever you want, but the card will have “bonuses” if you use it for the specific specialization!

For example, Heroic Action card #6 (the top one) has a basic value of 5, but if you use it for fighting, you get an extra +3!

Example above: Even though the cards I drew were all movement-centric, I can use the values on the cards for fighting: 4+4 = 8 takes out the first shield on the bad guy, and 4+2 = 6 takes out the second shield! I used all my cards, and I didn’t get any advantages, but I was able to do what I needed!

Basically, your character explores the world, moves around, interacts with the world, and fights monsters! All actions are based on the values on your cards!

Basically, you character(s) move around on the Location sheets and explore!

The Locations have arrows which tell you how much its cost to move between Locations: see above and below.

For example, to move to Location 2, I need to spend 4 points from my cards.

This is kind of a choose-your-own adventure tale! You decide which paths to take, which monsters to fight, which puzzles to interact with! It feels very much like a choose-your-own adventure!

What’s cool is that each Location has pretty great art (a little comic-booky, but I like it) which describes all the things you can do at that Location … kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure book does in each section.

See above as the character starts on the maps!

An interesting thing that happens is that there is a “clock” pushing the game forward. At the end of every “turn” after you’ve played all your cards, the Vitae track moves down. Basically, every time it “wraps around” back to 30, you drop the Action token one space (upper right). If your threat or the action space ever get to the end, the game is over!

To win, you need to find the Red Stars on the story cards. If you don’t find appropriate story cards, you lose!

Explore, fight monsters, interact with your world: this is an adventure game! The way the movement works, it feels very much like a choose-your-adventure game (as the Locations could just be pages numbers in a book!) This game also feels like a Point-And-Click Adventure game too! See our Top 10 Point-And-Click Adventure Board Games for more discussion of this genre!

Solo Play

So, this game supports the solo player (thank you for following Saunders’ Law). This is a true solo game: the solo player operates one character.

The only real change for solo play is on the Game board:

On the Game Board, the final space has a “3” marker on it (instead of 2). This is the number of cards you draw every turn, so the solo player has that extra advantage that (on the last set of rounds) they get three Action cards instead of two. And that’s the only change!

The solo player explores, fights, and interacts … but just by himself! There’s no real balancing anywhere else. It seems a little weird that there are no other balancing mechanisms, but basically what tends to happen is that more enemies come out as more people play, so that tends to balance the game. We’ll address that a little more in the cooperative section.

Cooperative

The cooperative game brought up a lot of rules I didn’t have to deal with in the solo game! When you explore new Locations, whether or not someone is already there “changes” how the Location works!

Unfortunately, the Icons were very confusing about this. A slight change of color AND whether its on side A or B makes a big difference. It actually took us almost half the game sessions to get this right!

Although the cooperative game has a sense of Player Selected Turn Order, there really is no turn order! Players just play when they want and support each other if it made sense. Although I love this idea, as it should make the game go faster, the game tended to serialize as each player waited to see what happened to see if they needed help. “Let’s wait to see what Sam gets!” I love this from a cooperative point of view, as it lets us support each other!! Unfortunately, what really happened more often than not is that the game really just slowed down behind one (the current active player). To be fair, there were also plenty of times when concurrent play kept the game moving forward. This system worked pretty well from a cooperative point of view. From a length of game point of view, this was not optimal.

Although this game is a 1-4 Player game, I was the fifth player and “the rules guy”. I just read the rules and taught the game and looked up clarifications. Sadly, this was a very busy position for most of the game! I would constantly be looking up rules clarifications, icon clarifications, and other things. I had played the solo game for about 8 hours, and I was still struggling to find some rules!

There are good moments of cooperation as the players supported each other. Me being the “rule guy” actually worked pretty well, although it was sort of depressing that I had to fill this role.

Urgency

This game has, essentially, a built-in clock. Every time you have finished playing all your cards, you have to take “Vitae” damage (basically, a shared hit point pool) based on the the current. The threat will go up occasionally as monsters or other things happen. And you can’t “usually” just rest on a Location: almost all Locations force you to fight new monsters if you stay there.

So the game is just always pushing forward: This is both good and bad. If you are looking for a contemplative adventure/exploration game, this isn’t really it. If you want an adventure game that doesn’t stand still, but presents a sense of “you have to keep moving“, this is the adventure game for you. Here’s a very bad analogy; some sharks have to keep moving in water or they die. That’s kind of what you feel like here: players always have to keep moving (exploring) or you die.

Whether you like that urgency or not is up to you.

Kind of a Big Mess

When you take out the Location cards, there’s no real rhyme or reason to them. They don’t form a map (like Arydia Locations did: see that review here), they are more like “pages of a book”. See my big mess after finishing chapter 1!

The problem is that you WANT to see the connections from previous Locations you visited! So you try to keep a lot of Locations out as you play so you can see how you came here. And you can see my big mess above as I try to keep some Locations out. To be clear: the Locations DO NOT form a map! (The rulebook even emphasizes this point).

So, the Locations that come out are kind of a mess. Shrug. It feels like there should be a better way to deal with it?

Portals

There are some very cool minis for portals! See above!

You can see above as I have built at least one early in the game! I was hoping to make this spot an easy one to come back since there are no “monster spawners” there!

And yet, I don’t think I took full advantage of the portals. At all. I don’t think I used them once. Which is a real shame, because they are so nice!

This is where I feel like this is even more like a Video game … where you replay the level to get the highest score and use the portals to their best advantage. I played Chapter One and got a few extras, but not enough. I feel like what I would do in a video game is replay it until I got the perfect score for that level! I think to do that, I think you’d almost have to use the portals.

Maybe the portals will become more useful later on. I was … disappointed with them. Given how you never really get to just “think” (see Urgency section above), the only time it feels like you might be able to take full advantage of them is to replay the level. Remember how I said this feels like a video game? That min-max feeling emphasizes that point even more …

Save Game

This is a campaign. You will need to save you game between chapters. Unless you can leave the game set-up (and it is a table hog), you will have to save your game.

You can either use the campaign book (above) …

Or just take a picture of your game and extras at the end (see above). The cards are pretty well marked.

Let’s be clear: this is a campaign you can reset! I have a solo game going, but we are also playing a cooperative game at the same time. Sure, I’ll have to “pick” the cards out I want, but it’s fairly easy to reset the campaign to replay it from scratch. This is not a legacy game.

Too Many Rules?

For such a lavish game, it’s both really simple and really complicated. The basic card play is really straight forward, but all the little rules for combat and especially movement feel very complicated. If you enter a Location with someone else, it has a different effect depending on the Icon in there, which has subtle difference between other Icons.

The fact that my role as “The Rules Guy” (as the 5th player and NOT playing the game) was pretty active the entire game might be an indicator that maybe there’s a few too many rules.

Reactions

Oof, Soul Raiders did not go over well with my group. My friends compared this to Tainted Grail (see part I and part II here) where it was just a grind to explore. Andrew even commented: “This doesn’t feel like an exploration game, even though it kind of looks like one! I have no mental model for how the map lays out because it’s so clumsy!” Sara commented that the “.. Exploration feels like Tainted Grail because you just keep getting monsters! You don’t really feel like you advance!”

Andrew pointed out, “It’s not even really choose-your-own Adventure, because you don’t really have a lot of choices! You left, right, or forward most of the time! And it feels randoms!”

The reactions were ok to not great.

Sara and Andrew: 5/10. “Don’t really want to play it again. It didn’t feel like exploration. It felt too grindy like Tainted Grail.”

Sam: 5.5/10 “I’d play it again, but I really didn’t love it. I thought Luddite from last week was more thematic than Soul Raiders!”

Teresa: 6.5/10 “I had okay fun and would play again.”

Rich: As a cooperative game, I definitely saw what my friends saw with the grindiness, and I could see why my friends didn’t love it. As a solo game, I’m right on the fence of recommending it: I’ll give it a 7/10 for the solo game, and maybe I could see it working as an intimate 2-Player game. I think as a solo player, I became more invested in the story, but I still had some of the problems that my friends had. I love the art, and I really like the simplicity of the card system. I also really like the upgrade system (where you can IMMEDIATELY grab a card with 3 Heroism). I think there is some interesting stuff happening in the story, but the game does fall to the grind sometimes.

Conclusion

Soul Riders is a gorgeous cooperative adventure with a sense of urgency. That urgency adds to it’s video game feel: it’s kind of a Point-And-Click Adventure in a board game, with exploring and interacting, but also lots of fighting!

Unfortunately, this game didn’t go over very well with my friends as a cooperative game, with scores ranging between 5/10 and 6.5/10. Soul Raiders reminded my friends too much of the grindiness of the original Tainted Grail in both its exploration and fighting. And that grindiness was a big turn off. Having said that, the system worked well from a cooperative perspective, because my friends seemed to cooperate well!

As a solo player, I become fairly invested in the story and I enjoyed it a little more. I think the solo player can reflect a little more than a cooperative team, so maybe that urgency in the game is less intrusive for the solo player? I do think that an intimate 2-Player game could go over well as the solo game.

Hopefully this review can tell you whether or not that Soul Raiders is right for you.

Luddite Can Be An Experience, If You Let It. A Review

Luddite arrived at my house about a month or more ago, but I have been afraid to open it. Why? I mean Luddite was the #5 entry on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! I paid money and Kickstarted it!! Why was I worried?

Luddite “looks” big because it has a graphic novel associated with it; there’s a lot of story here. I was afraid I’d mentally have to prepare myself to embrace it.

I don’t know why I worried! At the end of the day, this is “just” a roll-and-write game! You roll 3 dice, mark off spaces on your sheet above (See above) and try to score points (aka damage)! The base game is pretty straight-forward!

The object is to do enough damage to move to the next level! You need 60 at easy difficulty; see above as I miss by 1! Heart-breaking!

In order to inflict the damage, you have to “move” the metal token (left side above; from the START to the END): if you don’t move that token, you can’t do any damage at all! So, while trying to get “points” (aka, damage), you also have to make sure the token above moves!

The game plays solo, cooperatively, and competitively. The solo game is all about doing enough damage, and the competitive game is “who can do the most damage to win”. The cooperative game is really just multiplayer solitaire: take the scores of all players and average them to get a score; if that score is high enough, players collectively win!

To be clear, there is NO cooperation in the cooperative game; each player just takes their own book and plays completely independently. Players can’t help each other, they can’t share anything, they can’t use a dice on another players board … nothing. This is as multiplayer solitaire as you can get. If you want an experience where you are working with your friends, chatting, strategizing, working together, … this isn’t the game for you. BUT if you have friends who are “suspicious” of cooperative games, or people who don’t like the cooperative games, this can still work for you!

No one will tell you what to do, as everyone’s head is down and looking at their own board! See above! And no one gets in anyone else’s board in any way!

I made the mistake of getting 3 more “Additional Player Packs” (see above), but what this means is that 3 more people can play! Basically, Luddite can scale to as many people as you want because there is no interaction between players!! I am thinking of trying a 7-Player game of Luddite at RichieCon this year! (I have 4 packs in the base game and 3 packs from additional buys = 7 player boards!)

So, you can view this complete lack of player interaction as a good thing or bad thing, depending on the group you are playing with.

Solo Experience

If this was all there was to Luddite, there’s not much making it stand out, is there? It’s a pretty good roll-and-write game for the solo player, and it’s a pretty good cooperative roll-and-write that scales to any number of players … even if there is no player interaction.

However, if you let it … this game can be an experience! The Graphic Novel that comes with the game tells the story of some people who have been “made redundant” by AI and how they are fighting back!

The Graphic Novel gives you a back-story, then at certain places, tells you what chapter/pages to turn to! See above!

This was more immersive than I expected. If you let it, this game can feel very immersive. For my solo experience, I read the graphic novel that came with the game …

… and each new game is a progression of the story, even if the boards look very similar. See above as I win (solo) chapter 3!

Somehow, it seems for a game named Luddite (Luddite: someone who eschews technology) … that you HAVE to read the physical graphic novel, right?

Cooperative Experience

It turns out, the comic book is also online … in a video! It has voice-acting, and shows the comic progressing! See above!

For the cooperative game, it’s “harder” to enjoy the graphic novel in its physical form … you have to pass it around, or wait for others to read it, or read over people’s shoulders. But, if you go to the Cotswold Group website, they have the entire graphic novel online! (And even a little tutorial)

So, even though it’s seem against the spirit of a gamed named Luddite, the cooperative experience is made so much better by watching the comics-turned-to-videos! Arguably, that experience engulfs you and all your friends into the game! It’s a shared story you are all experiencing!

To be fair, it helps the experience if you can show the video on a big screen or TV: see above. It feels more immersive that way.

House Rule/Hack (Get it? Hack? In a game about Hacking?)

The dice are a shared resource everyone shares in the cooperative game: they are rolled and placed in the middle for everyone to see! But sometimes, in the heat of playing, you may forget which dice you used for which activity. Surprisingly, there’s no place on the sheet to “notate” which dice we used !!

Since you don’t compute your damage until the very end of the game, you can use the Damage section!

This little house rule/hack made it easier to play the game cooperatively, as you could all independently note the dice rolled and how/when/where you used them.

Conclusion

If you let Luddite be an experience that carries you along in its story (either as a graphic novel or comic-turned-video), I think this can be a really fun and immersive experience.

A reductionist might say “Luddite just a roll-and-write” … but at least it’s a good one. I really enjoyed all my plays of this. The base game is pretty straightforward and quick, and it has lots of meaningful decisions.

The cooperative game has literally no interaction between players, which can be a curse or a blessing, depending on the group you are playing with. But, because of that lack of interaction, this game can scale to pretty much any number … as long as you have the boards!

This is a good solo roll-and-write (7/10), and a pretty good cooperative roll-and-write (6.5/10 or 7/10, depending on what you want), but it’s the story and experience that elevates this just enough that I would recommend you try this: 7.5/10.

I still think it’s hilarious that a game called Luddite has such a great online presence. I mean, a game called Luddite should ONLY have the physical version, right?

Appendix: Binding

I normally despise this kind of binding, especially on something you need to hold open! See my review of War Story, Freedom Five, and Forests of Admiron if you don’t believe me! For a graphic novel, it’s “okay” since you are just reading it and holding it open. See below.

Where this binding fails is when you have to read the directions in the back of the book! See below as I try to wedge the book into the edge so it’ll stay open! I hate this kind of binding for rulebooks!

See above as I attempt to hold it open!!! Honestly, the rules should have been in a second standalone book that could be lain flat and open. As a graphic novel, this kind of binding is “fine”. But the rules portion of the graphic novel (in the same book, this really made me grumpy.

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Unboxing

High-Level Thoughts: No Spoilers!

Minor Spoilers: Some Issues

Major Spoilers: Mystery Progression

Giant Spoiler!! Read At Your Own Peril!!

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook

Warning! 18+!

Gamplay

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

Solo Vs. Cooperative

Length of Game

The App

Dice and Murder

Conclusion

Unboxing

Gameplay

Rulebook

Dexterity Game

Randomness and Strategy

The Joy

Conclusion

Generic Unboxing

The Rulebook

Cards

Gameplay

Solo Play: No Campaign (yet)

The Campaign: The Curse

Understanding the Campaign Differences

Solo Thematic Campaign

An Experiment: Teaching the Game Using The Campaign

A Missed Opportunity

Cooperative Mode

What Have We Learned?

Conclusion

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

“Where Do You Think YOU’RE Going, Señor Beaver?”

House Rules

Things I Liked

Things I Didn’t Like

Overall Reactions

Conclusion

10. Park Life

9. Lindyhop

8. Claim with the Expansion Claim: Alliances

7. The Fox in the Forest Duet

6. Trick ‘n Trouble (Fangt Doc Crazy!)

5. Sail

4. For Northwood

3. Jeckyl and Hyde vs. Scotland Yard

2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game

1. The Crew: Either The Quest For Planet Nine or Mission Deep Sea

Unboxing

Rulebook

Gameplay

10 Plays

Randomness

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulesheet Not a Rulebook

Gameplay

Solo Play

More Solitaire Than Sherlock

Two Player Game

House Rule for Two Players

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook

Gameplay

Solo Play

Cooperative

Urgency

Kind of a Big Mess

Portals