Dice Throne Missions and Dice Throne X-Men! A Solo and Cooperative Review!

Follow me, dear reader, as I invest three days of my life into unboxing, sleevening, tokening, and playing the new X-Men Dice Throne and Missions! Watch as I play solo (me vs. me solo and true solo) and cooperatively (with a group of 4), but encounter some unexpected things along the way! Hopefully my journey will inform you if this is something that would be for you!

Dice Throne: X-Men and Marvel Dice Throne: Missions (and a whole bunch of stuff) arrived at my house at 12:30 pm on Monday, February 20th, 2025. I was very excited to get this Kickstarter, so I happened to note the time when it arrived! This was #2 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! And it was “only” 7 months late! (promising arrival in August 2024)! But what is this giant thingee?

The first big box in here is the Dice Throne: X-Men box; you each play a member of the X-Men! This is a dice-chucking game with a Yahtzee-type re-roll mechanic: you roll dice, trying to roll a straight or full house or 5-of-a-kind (stuff like that) to activate your super powers! These powers, when activated, nominally do damage or other crazy things to your opponents. This is a fully competitive game where the heroes beat each other up: think of the X-Men Danger Room! You are training in the Danger Room! (That’s why heroes fight heroes, ya, that’s it: don’t ask too many questions about why heroes are fighting heroes….just enjoy the game)

But why are we talking about a competitive game on this solo and cooperative blog? Because the second big thing that came with this was Marvel Dice Throne Missions! Marvel Dice Throne Missions (we’ll call it Missions from now on) is an expansion that takes the competitive Dice Throne system and makes the game both solo and cooperative!

The next three days of my life were consumed by the Dice Throne stuff above. The Dice Throne: X-Men box and Missions box are very closely tied together, as you need a set of heroes to play the Missions! Although you can use any of the Dice Throne heroes (including the original Season 1, Season 2 (see review here) , and Marvel heroes (see review here)), we are going to look at Dice Throne: X-Men and Missions together!!! … because that’s how we played it …

Let’s go back in time and see how three days unfolded ….

Day 1: Unboxings and First Plays

Day 1 was a long day: I got the box at 12:30pm and pretty much unboxed, sleevended, tokened (yes, that’s a word … now), and played non-stop until 8 at night! There was so more unboxing and sleevening and tokening than I expected …

What arrived at my house was a giant box! See Coke Can above for perspective.

The crazy thing was that this was a box in a box in a box in a box situation! See above!

On top of the Dice Throne: X-Men box (above) were all the acrylic tokens and some of the figures (right).

Day 1: The Figurines Unboxing

You don’t need the figurines for plain Dice Throne.

The figures are only for the cooperative expansions Dice Throne Adventures or Missions, as figures for the board … you don’t need these figures at all to play competitive plain Dice Throne! See all eight figures above in the package … and below on a Missions board.

Because the original Marvel Dice Throne did NOT have an option for figures, they included that option here in this Kickstarter! See above for the Marvel Dice Throne figures and below for their standee equivalents!

To be clear; the X-Men Dice Throne (and Marvel Dice Throne) come with cardboard standees so you don’t need to buy the figures (see below for X-Men Dice Throne punchouts, including the standees).

If you are on the fence for buying the figures, remember: they aren’t strictly needed! You can just use the standees and “probably” buy the figures at a later date if you are so inclined.

Day 1: Acrylics and Sleevening

Another upgrade I got were the Acrylic tokens; again these aren’t necessary.

The acrylic token upgrades packs are for Marvel Dice Throne, X-Men Marvel Dice Throne, and Missions—These just replace the cardboard tokens.

Again, the games include all the tokens you need, so these acrylic tokens aren’t necessary. I really thought they made the game pop a little more, so I liked them.

I also picked up the premium sleeves: see below.

Again, strictly not necessary. But very nice!

After ooggling the figures, basically, I spent the next 2 or so hours putting the acrylic tokens and sleeves into the X-Men Dice Throne character boxes!

Whew! Look at all those tokens above!! See below for all 6 characters sleeved and … tokened? (yes, it is a word now: I’ve used it twice).

Yes, this was a long and tedious 2 hours. But the characters looks great!

Oh yes, and Deadpool wants you to know he is an expansion! He is a character you can play (he also came with this Kickstarter, but he is a separate expansion you have to pay extra for). I went ahead and unboxed, sleeved, and tokened him too. See above.

Day 1: First Play

As a reminder, you “probably” don’t want to jump into Missions (cooperative) if you haven’t played the base Dice Throne (competitive)! See the warning above from the Missions rulebook.

I love Dice Throne, but it has been a while since I played. So I decided to do a Me vs. Me solo game, and play against myself! This was mostly to remind myself of the rules and see the new characters! Those of you out there are thinking that I will “pander” and play Wolverine vs. Deadpool. Nope!

I ended up playing Wolverine vs Cyclops. Me vs Me!

Basically, I’d literally switch seats when I had to play the other character: I always like this swapping because it really feels like you are playing both sides well!

It was an interesting match: Wolverine won, but just barely. Cyclops looks like he will do best in a cooperative game, as his abilities have some emphasis on helping other players! He has leadership cards and support tokens/abilities that help others! Wolverine just heals and does damage … as you’d expect.

This game was reasonably quick, maybe a hour? It went by pretty quickly and I got to learn about Wolverine and Cyclops.

Day 1: Missions Unboxing

Yes, we are still in Day 1. I told you this was a long day! But a good day! I finally got to unpack Missions!

The most AMAZING thing is all the little mission books that come with the game!! Holy cow!! See how many there are? I put a Coke can next to them for perspective!

My only real complaint with the missions is that they are hard to keep open! We’ll see that more later.

There’s some Momentum dials (this is a new mechanism in the game: each character gets a dial), Allies (another new mechanism: these must be bought with Momentum), and some other tokens.

The Momentum is a major new mechanism in the game; you can actually level-up your Momentum card (as you play more games)!

I mean, this looks great! See above!

At the top is a tray for tokens: see above.

There are a lot cardboard tokens in Missions … but I ended up replacing them with the acrylic tokens. This took about the next hour of my life.

At first, putting tokens in the token tray looks VERY DAUNTING. And it is. Until you notice the side of the box!!! See above!! The side of the box shows you how to put the token into the tray!

Sounds like an easy job? Oof. This was the most tedious thing I did on Day 1.

I basically had to separate out the tokens into piles and start putting them into the box, all while trying to match the picture on the side of the box!!

I mean, it does look cool when you are done … see above.

Finally, I sleeved the Alllies: these sleeves were extra (I had to pay for them).

But they look pretty cool.

Day 1: The rulebook

There are a few things I have to say about the rulebook.

It completely fails the Chair Test: it droops over the edge of the chair and almost falls off!

I ended up using the workaround I discovered in my review of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles! You need two chairs to hold the rulebook, with the spine in the middle!

The rulebook was generally good otherwise: it had a good components page (see above).

It had a good two-page spread for set-up: I got going right away.

The rulebook had a big, readable font, useful pictures, and even little parenthetical text to emphasize issues.

The best part was that the back cover had a list of all the statuses on the back. This was generally a good list of statuses and their effects, but we did have some questions as we played… some of the status descriptions needed more clarification.

This was generally a good rulebook, but I hated the form factor. It seems like the worst form factor I have seen in a while. I actually had to change chairs in my cooperative game so I could sit somewhere where I could set-up the the two chairs to see the rulebook! The rulebook is huge and there is no almost no way it’ll fit on the table.

Day 1: Set-up for Solo play

I know, it’s hard to believe we are still in Day 1. I had just finished dinner, and I am still setting up my first Mission!

Missions have two sides; the front side is generally fighting some henchmen … (see above) …

… and the back side is Boss Fight (Scarlet Witch in this case.. see above)!

To win the mission, you need to complete both sides! See above as I start setting up side one of the mission … and get grumpy that it won’t stay flat …

I chose Wolverine to go on the solo mission: see above! Note that the rulebook suggests the mission above to start on … so that’s the one I am playing!! This is true solo play; I will be playing one character as I take on the Henchmen … on side 1 of the mission.

Day 1: Side One of the Mission

I was approaching the end of my Dice Throne Day (yes, I am still in Day 1!!!), as I got a chance to try out solo play with Missions on side 1 of my first mission.

Momentum is a huge new mechanism in the game: you are rewarded with Momentum when you take out a henchman or something in the game! It’s kind of like experience points, but it’s a little more dynamic in that you can spend it anytime! You can spend Momentum to give you range (typically, you can only attack things next to you) or to buy Allies.

The Allies give you extra abilities/powers that make the game more interesting. They typically can be used for a “minor” ability without discarding, or for a “major” ability if you discard it (see Nick Fury above).

What I liked was that when you “cleared” a bad guy, you put down a clear token (see above) to note that he was dispatched! And the token reminds you of the 2 Momentum you get for killing … I mean clearing him!

Another major mechanism is the Crisis Clock: at the end of each round, the hands of the clock move 1 per player and may invoke some harsh penalties (depending on the mission).

There’s other things going on, but that’s generally most of it! See above as I cleared the board and made my way towards fighting Doc Ock! …. but that would have to wait for tomorrow … it’s been a long day!

Day 2: More Missions

I had to work most of Tuesday, but after I got home, I was consumed with playing more Missions!
Note! When you flip the mission to the other side, you keep you character’s Hit Points, Momentum, and everything the way it was! While you reset BETWEEN missions, you DO NOT reset when you FLIP the mission!

The Boss Fight side of the Mission 1 basically just has you straight up fight the big boss! And the Crisis Clock is much more damaging!

You are in harms way as you actively are right next to the Boss! See above! No moving away!

One interesting note; there are tokens that, if you end your turn there, you get a bonus. So, you can get the +2 token if you go to space 3 above. But if the space has the red tokens underneath, you always get those … but only AFTER The bad guys attacks you! And there is a cost for moving to a space with red tokens … the boss typically does more damage (crit) to you!

In the end, I defeated Doc Ock pretty handily; I think my Ally made this much easier.

I went into the Boss Fight with 15 Momentum and basically kept the crisis track completely under control using Nick Fury.

After you defeat a Mission, the player gets “Perk Points”! These are another thing that are kind of like experience points! You use them to make your character better. You may spend some Perk Points to start the next mission with a little more momentum, or have a focus fire, or other things!

There are 6 levels of difficulty in the game; they are marked on top of the mission sheet you choose. See below.

You reallllly don’t want to try harder missions until you have some Perk Points from previous missions! So, while this isn’t a campaign “per se”, the game encourages you to keep playing and get Perk Points so you can handle more difficult missions!

You could always cheat and just give yourself a bunch of Perk Points to level up yourself ….

I moved on to a harder mission: level 2!

You can really see the Mission board problem above …

Sauron’s Hunger was my second mission … and I had a blast!

Wolverine went after the tree so he could get the Perfect Reward (see above) and more Perk Points at the end of the game!

The second side of the Mission was another Boss Fight: see above!

This one was a little harder, but I expected it to be for a level 2!

In the end, I was able to win and finish another Mission! It was definitely a little harder. I had two missions under my belt, and I looked forward to another!

Day 3: Cooperative Play

With two days of solo play and set-up experience, I felt ready to teach my friends! We ended with a 2-hour Mission fighting Doc Ock again!

This was a 4-Player cooperative game.

I took Cyclops because I wanted to test his Leadership abilities. Sara and Teresa took their favorite characters: Ororo and Rogue (respectively). Sam doesn’t know the X-Men as well, but he knows Wolverine.

Although we beat the first side of the mission, we lost to Doc Ock as he killed two of my players.

Solo Play

The solo play was a hoot to me! I kept wanting to do more Missions and get more Perk Points!! What are some of the other missions that lay ahead?? Wolverine is probably a better character to play solo; he is good at damage and he can heal himself. I worry that Cyclops or other heroes might struggle with hit points a little.

I had fun, I was engaged, and I felt like all my rolls mattered!

I was able to push my luck (and I usually hate dice games), but usually there is a good roll or card that can help you get “something good” on your turn. With Wolverine especially, even if you didn’t have a good roll, the lesser abilities typically healed him, so something good always happened.

Over the course of two days, I had fun. I was engaged, and I saw how important Allies are (especially their Exhaust ability) and how Momentum worked. These are both new things to the Missions mode and they really made me feel like I always had more options.

I would give the Missions solo mode an 8.5/10. It was great. It may be that you have to choose a hero that works well with solo; I am not sure Cyclops would have done as well.

Even the me vs me solo mode was fun! Not quite an 8.5/10, maybe 7.5/10, but that was a fun way to play solo too!

Cooperative Mode

This was a surprise for me: my friends didn’t enjoy cooperative Missions very much. And they (mostly) love the X-Men!!!

Although there is simultaneous play keeping everyone involved (you only serialize your turns when you do damage; all other times, every one is rolling and re-rolling and playing cards simulaneously), no one felt like there was a lot of cooperation. As Sara said, “it feels like Dice Throne is not a cooperative mode and this feels a little forced.”

I even played Cyclops to try to elicit more cooperation: I’d always say “Hey! I’ve got some support tokens! Use me! I can help you reroll or get CP if you need it!” … and I think my players used me once. And I tried really hard to get them to use me!!

You might think that “Well, your players don’t like co-ops, or they just don’t like to co-operate” and that is patently untrue! I play co-ops all the time with this group!! And they cooperate very well together! For some reason, this just didn’t work. And Sara even said, “Eh, you can cooperate, but there are many other co-ops I’d rather play.”

I actually have a theory about this! When we played King of Monster Island a while ago (see review here), we liked the King of Monster Island game, but it also seemed to not promote cooperation as much!! Why? It also has the familiar Yahtzee re-roll mechanism (roll 3 times, keep the ones you want) just like Dice Throne Missions!! And while that mechanism is very engaging, people seem to become TOO engaged in that to the point they don’t cooperate! It’s a weird thing to say, but too much engagement on your own stuff lessens the cooperation! And I think that’s what happened here: we all got so caught up in our own characters, we forgot to cooperate!

Maybe this problem would go away after repeated plays, but you have to want to continue playing! And I am sad to say my group mostly doesn’t really want to play this again.

Having said that, maybe if you have a group that really likes cooperative multiplayer solitaire games (no Alpha Player), maybe this is something your group might enjoy! There doesn’t seem to be a lot of cooperation, just a bunch of heroes beating up stuff and rolling dice! Maybe that would appeal to your group!

Reactions

Rich: I liked the game solo a lot! 8.5/10: I was engaged and I liked my decisions. Cooperative was probably a 7/10? I still liked it but there wasn’t much cooperation.

Teresa: I got to play Rogue! And I had fun! 7/10

Sara: I don’t know, I just didn’t think it was great. There wasn’t much cooperation, and even though I love Storm, it wasn’t that interesting to play her. There are a lot of other cooperative games I’d rather play. The cooperative mode just feels tacked on. It was okay. 6/10

Sam: It was okay. 6/10.
Sam actually had a very full write-up on his cooperative experience, which he emailed to me! I will reproduce that at the end of this review, after the Conclusion. Read that for another perspective!

Conclusion

I expected X-Men Dice Throne and Missions to go over like gang-busters! And while it did for me (for the solo mode especially), my group wasn’t that impressed with it.

The game has gorgeous components, even if you choose not to upgrade everything. My only real complaint was the Mission mats frequently has trouble staying flat. This looks like a comic book world on the table, with its colorful villains, colorful heroes, and gorgeous dice and cards.

I think the cooperative mode didn’t go as well because people tended to be too focused on their own mat and their own rerolls … and this self-focus seemed to actually discourage cooperation! I thought that my group, who love the X-Men, would adore this! And they did not.

As a solo game, I am very comfortable giving this an 8.5/10. I will play again, and I look forward to getting more Perk Points to try harder and harder missions!

As a cooperative game, it feels like the game lands at a 6.5/10. Although Teresa and I would play it again as a co-op, I don’t think Sam and really Sara would. For more details, see Sam’s Perspective below.

So, that’s my journey: Three Days of Dice Throne! I loved it! My friends … not so much. Your group may still love the cooperative Missions especially if they love co-ops that are more multiplayer solitaire.

Sam’s Perspective

Overall score: 6 – would play again if everybody else wanted to but X-Men as Wolverine combined with the Missions mode isn’t something I’d necessarily request or suggest (I could see it being 7-7.5 with avengers)

TLDR version:

I feel like this is turning into a scathing review and that’s not my intended tone. This particular combination of theming (X-Men aren’t really my thing) and components (flat printed enemies against hero minis didn’t really feel like we were fighting bad guys) just didn’t land for me.

The essay:

Because I’m an uncultured swine :), I’m not familiar with X-Men or their lore or anything other than the Deadpool movies (1 and 2) and being able to pick wolverine out of a lineup. Therefore, the characters didn’t really speak to me and I was unable to appreciate the references/accents/etc. Because of the movies, Doc Oc is also linked as a spiderman villain in my mind.

I feel like I could have used a “sparring match” or two of the competitive version to get used to my character before taking him against the villains cooperatively.

The components felt a bit jarring – minis for us vs enemies printed on the map just felt like I was standing around and taking swings at air. I feel like I would have felt more immersed if the bad guys were also minis (even though they didn’t move) or if we were flat tokens in the same plane as our opponents.

I can’t quite put my finger on it but the movement and momentum mechanics also felt a little bit off to me.

I remember enjoying the original dice throne (though I missed out on the adventures and the original marvel set) probably because it was a set of generic archetypes I could get into – the rogue, paladin, gunslinger, monk, pirate, etc.

I think I would also have enjoyed this more with the “original”marvel characters (avengers) even without having as much time to get into how my character works. Wolverine might also have been too simple – basically 9 variations on “get angry, hit hard, heal” depending on what you rolled. It didn’t really feel like I had much to set up and pull off, just wander around and try to roll good combinations so I could swing really hard at the air where an enemy was.

Top 10 Cooperative Light/Party Games of 2024!

What’s a party game? A party game is usually a casual game you can pull out with a fairly large group of friends and jump right into! Many, if not most, of the cooperative party games we see are Cooperative Guessing games, where the players collectively guess something based on clues from a clue-giver!

Surprisingly, the year of 2024 produced quite a number of cooperative party games! That’s right; cooperative party games! And most are Cooperative Guessing games! We saw some really good party games on the Top 10 Cooperative Party Games list … and here’s 10 more below just from 2024!

10. Word Traveller

Player Count: 2-5
Ages: 10+
Time: 30-45 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

Like many of the games on this year’s list, this is a Cooperative Guessing game! In this game, a clue-giver will give word clues to “guide” the others around the board, trying to get to a destination on the board!

This feels a lot like the cooperative word guessing games Mystic Paths or Landmarks (see below), as you use words to imply directions to travel. What makes this a little different is that the words you choose refer to tourist spots in the maps! There are 4 maps in the game for London, Paris, New York City, and Tokyo! See below for the map of London!

This is a real unique game and has some really neat idea in the crowded cooperative word guessing genre!

9. Landmarks

Player Count: 2-10
Ages: 10+
Time: 20 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

Landmarks is a cooperative word guessing game where one player gives word clues, trying to guide the rest of the playing (cooperatively guessing) to water, treasure, and finally the exit! This game is very similar to a game called Mystic Paths where players are moving across a map of hexes.

There’s also elements of Codenames in here, as the clue-giver has a hidden map as he tries to guide the players around the map!

We have played this game with several groups, and it seemed to go over pretty well! It takes a few plays to get the sense and spirit of the game, but once you do, it is fun. Some people didn’t love this (because sometimes it was just too vague or the map is wonky), which is why it’s lower on this list. The components are quite nice (with the cloth map and dry-erase hexes), and it was generally fun!

8. Adventure Party

Player Count: 3-8
Ages: 10+
Time: 20-60 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

This looks like a role-playing adventure game (see picture above), but it’s actually a role-playing game PARTY game! It even says that on the cover!

It’s quite silly as a game; a player will have to do an activity and then roll a 20-sided die (secretly) behind their character shield (see above). The Berserker has to open the door; what does a “19” mean? The player then roll-plays what they do (based on the number they roll) and the other player have to “guess” what the roll was on based on what they roll played! It’s a silly game that just gets sillier as you play it!

In fact, it’s so simple to play this that the directions for how to play are summarized very well on the back of the box! See above. My friends and I had fun playing, pardon me, ROLL-PLAYING this silly adventure party game.

7. Message From The Stars

Player Count: 2-8+
Ages: 11+
Time: 45 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

So, this is another cooperative word guessing game, but it has elements of math and it is quite thinky. I love this game because it’s so unique and interesting, but some people just bounced off it because of its weird blend of math and wordplay.

Players plays as two teams; a team of aliens trying to communicate with a team of humans! Teams communicate single words to each other to establish some ideas! What letters you use in your words matters, as well as what concepts/words you are trying to communicate! It’s great fun with lots of deduction … if you grok the game.

This is a great game that can play 2-8+ people, and you can pull it out casually … once everyone knows how to play. The biggest problem is that it takes some brainwork and time to figure out this game. This is probably the most thinky game on this list, and why some people might not classify this as a party game .. which is why this is only #7 on this list, despite how good a game it is. See our review of Message From The Stars here to see if you might enjoy this! (Remember, Codenames is classified as a party game, and it’s quite thinky too!)

6. Expressions

Player Count: 2-5
Ages: 14+
Time: 15 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

Many of the games on this list as cooperative word guessing games; this is a number guessing game! This has a lot of deduction as players can either guess a card a player might be holding (like cooperative go-fish) or give a clue (which feels a little like The Crew).

This is basically a cooperative go-fish game with elements of deduction/clue-giving (ala The Crew). It’s probably the second most thinky game on this list (after Message From The Stars). But this is easy to pull out, quick to explain, and quick to play at only 15 minutes! It does take a few times to get the hang of it, but people seem to want to play again!

5. Da Da Da

Player Count: 2+
Ages: 8+
Time: 15-30 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Classification/Guessing

This is an odd duck of a game. Players take a bunch of black and white pictures and collectively classify them using only a few words, like “DA” and “BLUMP”. Basically, the group is coming up with a language for describing shared traits using a few very simple words. These few words are the ONLY communication that players are allowed!

In the first part of the game, the players collectively classify all the pictures together using only those few words (like “DA” and “BLUMP”) as they point and move pictures. In the second part of the game, new pictures are introduced and the players have to try and figure out, using only the new language of those few words, the new thing. As long as you have a group that doesn’t annoyingly repeat the weird little words ad naseum, this is a fun game … it’s almost a linguistics experiment!

It sounds like it can’t work, but my group really enjoyed it! This is one you might want to try before you pick it up; some people will be annoyed by it, some people won’t get it, but some people will love it! Our groups loved it! Maybe yours will too!

4. Link City

Player Count: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Time: 30 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing/Classification

This is a game that I didn’t like as much as everyone else, but it was such a hit for everyone else, I had to put this on the list! One player (the Mayor) puts city Locations out, and the other players have to guess where he would place them based on the locality to other Locations in the game!

The Mayor rotates every turn, so a new player has to decide what Locations go where! It’s all about building the municipality, but with some real silly decisions!

My friend Kurt loves this game and we’ve played it a number of times when he has come to visit! If this sounds like fun, I suggest you give it a try! A bunch of people I know and like really like this game!

3. Spotlight

Player Count: 1-5
Ages: 6+
Time: 15 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Searching

This is such a neat game! It’s a very simply premise as players search a shaded picture for certain figures, counting them up! Each player needs to find them independently on their own sheet! If they find “enough” together, they can stay ahead and win!

The sheer fun of this game is the clever sheets that are have darkened plastic. When you place a white surface underneath, the picture comes apparent! See the “fully darkened” picture above … and the picture with a white spotlight below!

There is no batteries or magic technology here; it’s just a white surface underneath making the plastic easily viewable!

This game has worked really well in so many situations! I have played with little kids (like 5 years old) and older adults, and big kids, and even though this “looks like a kid’s game”, people really love the Spotlight mechanism! It’s just so cool!

2. Wilmot’s Warehouse

Player Count: 2-6+
Ages: 8+
Time: 30 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Memory/Cooperative Guessing

Wait, this is a cooperative memory match game? Yes, and it works surprisingly well! This is probably Sara’s favorite game of all the games on this list!

Players draw tiles from a bag and cooperatively “come up with a story” for the shape and place it in the warehouse.

After placing a bunch of tiles down, players must try to cooperatively remember what tile was what by trying to match other tiles to it! It’s wacky and the stories people come up are really funny! It’s surprisingly goofy, but it’s really easy to explain and jump into! See our review here to see see why Wilmot’s Warehouse is much better than you expect!

1. That Escalated Quickly

Player Count: 2-8
Ages: 10+
Time: 15 Minutes
Type: Cooperative Guessing

This was a bit of surprise as our #1 choice for the best cooperative party games of 2024, but it just kept coming to the table all this year! And we all loved it! Players get asked a silly question like: “What do you tell a vampire to get him to turn you?” (See back cover above for more questions) And then everyone gets 1 (or 2) cards from 1-10, and everyone has to answer that question so that 1 is least likely to get turned, and 10 is most likely! But without revealing their number! (Much like Adventure Party from earlier)

The guesser has to take all the answers and sort them from lowest to highest .. if they get them all in order, it counts as a point! (You can have upto one mistake)

Like all good party games, the points don’t matter, and you just keep playing, not really caring if you win or not! This is a mass market party game from The Exploding Kittens people; I picked it up at Target, so it’s really easy to find! Check it out! Hopefully you will enjoy it as much as we did!

A Story Unfolds: Review of Tales of the Arthurian Knights (Solo and Cooperative Modes)

Tales of the Arthurian Knights is a cooperative and solo storybook game. What’s a cooperative storytelling/storybook game you might ask? Take a look at our Top 10 Cooperative Storytelling/Storybook Games for more discussion of this genre!

Tales of Arthurian Knights is a follow-up to the hugely popular storybook game Tales of the Arabian Nights, (another massive storybook game) … but the original is not cooperative!

What makes this “Tales of …” series of these games so impressive is the size of the book(s) that come with the game! Players basically make skill checks and have adventures from this book! See the book from Tales of the Arabian Nights above!

Now, the original game Tales of the Arabian Nights was a competitive game (although my friend Greg always argued that it was kinda a co-op), but Tales of Arthurian Knights has added a true solo mode and a true cooperative mode! Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

The size of this box feels pretty standard, except that it is a pretty tall box! It’s also quite heavy! See the Coke can and #2 pencil for perspective on the size.

There are a TON of cardboard sheets to punch out! A ton I tells ya! See above as I use the Coke can to demonstrate how tall the pile of cardboard is!

But what makes this game heavy and a storybook game … is the storybook.

This is a hardcover storybook! And it is very thick! See the Coke can again measuring its height!

Underneath the storybook are a bunch of cards.

That’s what’s in the box … let’s take a closer look at some of the components!

The Rulebook

The rulebook was pretty darn good.

The components page shows just about everything, but here’s a little warning: you should be careful about how you punch some stuff out (we’ll discuss this more below).

The set-up is across two pages and has a picture and correlating notations; it works great.

There’s even a Bibliography (!) and A Pronunciation guide! That’s right! You can tell the people who made this game really care about the Arthurian Mythos! This care shines through from the very beginning, and manifests in the writing!

In general, this was a good rulebook: the fonts are big, the pictures help understanding, and it seems well organized. And the game gets an A- on the Chair Test: I can keep the rulebook open on the chair next to me, and it stays open and flat so it is easy to consult!

And the rulebook even ends with a QuickStart guide on the back: see above.

This was a good rulebook. The only major fault with this rulebook was that it didn’t have an Index (which is weird for a game that has a Bibliography and Pronunciation Guide), but it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Storybook

The storybook is GORGEOUS! It’s a hardcover! The entire game centers on the stories that come out of this book!

Even the paper is nice (it’s not cheap paper by any means), and it has a built-in bookmark … what?? See above!

The binding on the book is very high quality! I still do that thing you do with new textbooks; slowly open the book and let pages fall left-and-right to ensure I don’t break the binding. (Am I the only one who does that?) See above.

The font is easy to read and it’s high quality: and no, the above isn’t a big spoiler: it’s the VERY FIRST ENTRY every game reads (but it shows what the font looks like).

Most entries in the book have you read some text to the current player (or yourself if you are playing solo), and presents you with a choice … something like … Do you want to use HONOR to solve this issue or PIETY? You make a skill check against that Skill and read the appropriate SUCCESS or FAILURE.

See above for an example for a reward (from the rulebook). Getting a SUCCESS usually gives you extra Skills, extra Ranks in Divinity/Villainy/Romance, or Statuses.

This storybook is just gorgeous (you said that Rich … I know, I know, it’s just so awesome).

Punchouts

There are a LOT of punchouts for this game (see above): BE WARNED!! I don’t think you need to punch them all out at first. Each player takes the role of a Knight of the Round Table (see above: there are 8 possible Knights).

You really only need to punchout the components for THAT KNIGHT! Most of the tokens I need to play Sir Palomides (see above) are just on HIS SHEET; so there’s no reason to punchout EVERYTHING.

I played Sir Lancelot in my first solo game.

I only punched out the components for Sir Lancelot … I didn’t have to punch out everything!

I hate to say it, but I wish this game came with baggies. I stole baggies from some other games I have, and used those. Basically, I give each character THEIR OWN BAG for tokens (and the other shared components go into other bags).

You will to punchout the Skill tokens: every Knight gets 12 (which only some become active as you play). I made separate bags for each set of 12 tokens.

In fact, there are 8 sets of Skill tokens (even though the game only plays 1-4 players): Why? Because you can be ACCOMPANIED and have a companion who has skills … like I said, I just punched out the Skill tokens and put each 12 into separate bags (for a total of 8 separate bags of Skill Tokens, and 8 different bags for the 8 characters).

This game really needs baggies I think.

So, be wary: if you punchout everything right when you open the game, you might want to have a bag per character to store their stuff. And 1 bag per 12 Skills. And a few more baggies for other components.

The SKILLS give you bonuses to certain SKILL checks: See above as Lancelot gets +2 on Peity, Shield and Sword, and Honor SKILL checks.

Status Cards

As you play the game, stuff happens to you. And this is represented by the STATUS cards! Each player gets a stack of STATUS cards which may become activated as you play.

The nice thing is that STATUS cards can expire! See above as I am IMPRISONED! As the start of every turn, if I can’t escape my prison, the STATUS token (red dot) moves down, and if it ever moves to the last space, the STATUS goes away naturally! I have to say, after some games of Tales of Arabian Nights, I got stuck in prison and couldn’t get out! At least with this “expiration” mechanism, I won’t get completely stuck!

Quests

What generally “directs” you in the game is the QUEST! Every player starts with a STARTING QUEST (see above) and that directs you to places on the map to “do stuff”! You don’t HAVE to do these quests, but usually the rewards for QUESTS are worth it!

There are many places where you can get more QUESTs as you explore, but if you never have one, you just draw from the QUEST pile!

Your QUESTS have a very pick-up and deliver feel; you usually have to visit 1 or 2 Locations on the map (see above), and do “something” (SKILL check, standard encounter) to finish the QUEST.

The QUEST locations are notated with your little markers (see above).

Destiny

To win the game, you (solo/cooperative group) need to get enough DESTINY POINTS: see above.

How much DESTINY you need depends on the number of players and the difficulty you choose. For example: The solo game at SQUIRE level requires 35 (see above), and a 4-Player cooperative game requires 126 DESTINY!

You mostly get DESTINY from two sources; completing a QUEST (see above) or succeeding on a SKILL check. There are also other ways that come up in the game, but those are the most likely sources.

The Map and Encounters

This is a big game where you explore the world, hunting down QUESTS as you move around the map! Just about everything you do has someone read “something” from the storybook!

The most common encounters (standard encounters) are in the game are made up from two decks: a FEATURE deck (which has an adjective and the last two digits of a 4 digit number) …

And the ENCOUNTER deck, which is frequently a traveller. The LOST KNIGHT will be entry 1215 in the storybook! See above! And that will be the encounter for that Location!

Every encounter in the storybook is a 4-digit number (see above).

And that’s the basics of the game; explore the world, go on QUESTS, read from the Storybook, make skill checks, and try to get enough DESTINY to win!

Solo Play

So, there is a solo mode in this game (thank you for following Saunders’ Law), and it is “generally” well-thought out; but there are some issues.

Let’s be clear; even though Tales of Arthurian Knights has a solo and cooperative mode, it is a competitive game first. Most STATUSES and QUEST cards have “another player” make a choice for you! See above as ENSORCELLED STATUS has another player, who is your competitor, make choices for you!

So, when another player is supposed to make a choice for you, you instead draw a card from the SOLO/CO-OP deck (see above) and that makes the choice for you!

For example, if another player were to choose a REGION, the card above instead specifies what to do. Same with City, Terrain, or the STATUSes LOST, ENSORCELLED, or MAD. Don’t know what to do? Draw a card!

The problem is that there are still ambiguities that come up. Which Forest space? Which sea space? There’s a whole page discussing how to place things from those cards, and it’s still not 100% clear sometimes; Honestly, it’s a little bit of a wart on this system. Rather than get bogged-down in some detail, I’d get “about” where I was supposed and just pick one. It’s better to move forward than get obsessed. (Because this game can very random, it feels very silly to obsess on some of these rules).

Besides that one issue, the solo game worked pretty well. See above as I had the board set-up!

This is a true solo player game: the solo player plays one character! See above as I played Sir Lancelot. Player proceeds pretty much as the main game; just get enough DESTINY to win!

What this means, of course, is that the solo player has to read all the text to themselves. You have to be a little careful not to read too far ahead, as you can see what the “difficulties” are when you really shouldn’t: “Choose PIETY or HONOR” (oops, I accidentally saw that HONOR needs a 4 check, but PIETY is a 6 … I’ll just go with HONOR”): you aren’t really supposed to know the difficulty of your checks. You are supposed to choose the check based SOLELY on the type of check, nothing else! So, it’s easy to “accidentally” cheat and see what the SKILL checks are.

But, if you can survive 12 rounds (you have to play a full 12 rounds) and get enough DESTINY (see above as I do!), you win!

The solo experience is fairly sedate; you read to yourself, you roll the dice, you make choices. It was fun, and I really enjoyed the text, but it’s a quiet experience with a lot of reading.

The solo mode is a great way to learn the game, but I didn’t love it because it was so sedate. It was a good way to learn most of the systems of the game, and I might play it again solo. The solo mode is a 6.5 or 7/10? It works, and it teaches the game, but I didn’t love it (especially with some of the ambiguity).

Cooperative Mode

Cooperative mode, on the other hand, was a rolicking good time!

It’s hard to believe, especially since the players are reading from this tome all the time, but the game was such a HOOT! What happened was that we read the book with silly voices! We quoted Monty Python and the Holy Grail all night long!

Some of the best things that happen in the game are when you FAIL and the story just gets crazy! Sara’s story was so wacky as she had three lovers, including Morgana! We laughed as Dame Enid’s Villany track escalated as she kept three lovers! In the meantime, Sir Galahad struggled to keep his Villainy down! Sure, you make choices as the game proceeds, but you may or may not make it … it’s all the crazy things that happen!

Let’s be clear, this is not a “silly” storybook game like Wandering Galaxy (see review here), Freelancers (see review here), or Forgotten Waters (see review here)! Those game are built as silly from the ground up! But Tales of Arthuran Knights is nominally a serious game (I mean, it’s got a Bibliography for goodness sake), but the moments that happen, the plot twists, the fails, the wins, are all kind are electrifying! The mood of the game is light as Monty Python quotes fall from the tongue (“Bad, naughty Zoot!”) and players giggle at your wins and losses! “Wait, Dame Edid has THREE lovers now??? Save some for everyone else, Sara!!”

My players loved this game! They gave it an 8/10, which is especially high for Sara!

The only thing that would have made this more fun is if it were more cooperative! We certainly enjoyed reading to each other, but at the end of the day, the game was pretty much multiplayer solitaire as we each had our own adventures! Had there been mechanisms for “questing together” or “moving together”, maybe that would have elevated the game to a 9/10 or 10/10? Don’t get me wrong, we LOVED this game, but we just wish there were a little more cooperation …to be clear, there’s plenty of interaction among the players, as they read to each other and choose entries, so there is definitely full engagement, but that’s sort of outside the game (in the running of it). The actual cooperation in-game is pretty much non-existent. Again, this game is great, but it’s not a cooperative touchstone by any means.

Overall, my friends loved this game. It was so fun!

House Rules

One possible set of house rule to encourage cooperation might be the following:
1) If two (or more players) are on the space or move through each other, they can “pick-up” and “drop-off” other characters during movement. This might allow some sharing of movement points and encourage players to move together and move quicker around the map. They have to talk and discuss strategy!
2) If another character is with you on an encounter, that other player can spend his DESTINY (we would assume players get their own DESTINY even if needs to be shared) to up SKILL roles: discard DESTINY on a one-for-one basis to increase the check!!! BUT you could only do that if someone ELSE did it, not the person in the encounter! (I think this means each player would still get their own encounter though … it’s just travelling together allows players to influence each other)
These two House rules might help engender a little more cooperation. They would obviously need more some balancing (I think it might make the game slightly easier), but it’s easy to just up the difficulty level by one and see how you do!

What I Liked

Failure is still good! We didn’t mention this when we discussed SKILLS, but even a failure is good! First of all, sometimes a failure is interesting or even funny from a story perspective, so that good! More importantly, a failure on a SKILL roll almost invariably leads to “gain experience” in that SKILL and up it by 1! For example, If I fail a DIPLOMACY SKILL check, I will learn from it! “Oooooohhh, that’s a good example of what NOT to do when negotiating! Lesson learned!” .. and my DIPLOMACY goes up +1!

The Game Is Electifying Cooperatively! If you have the right group who is just a little silly, will quote Monty Python, and read the text with silly accents, this game is just electrifying and a fun romp! I think to enjoy this game to the fullest, you have to “lighten up” a little and just enjoy the ride!

Cooperative mode: The original Tales of the Arabian Nights was fantastic, but it was a competitive game! By Tales of Arthurian Knights being cooperative, it seems to “lighten” the atmosphere a little. In general, this new version just seems more approachable.

What I Didn’t Like

Time is wrong: After many solo and cooperative plays, I think the playing time is off. I’d say it’s more like 1 hour per player (plus set-up and tear-down). It’s not a big difference, but it may keep you from playing the 4-Player game!! The 3-Player game at 3 hours is just about the right time.

Ambiguity/Extra Complexity: In the solo and cooperative mode, you depend on the solo/coop cards to resolve ambiguity when placing Locations and other things. Unfortunately, sometimes the rules are just ambiguous or at the very least contorted for placement! See above as we place on Sea spaces, which require looking up the rules for placing Quest Markers which span almost an entire page! In the end, you still just “Place the Marker on the location closest to the indicated City that matches the correct terrain type (including Sea space, if required)“. I think, if you study page 17, you can resolve most things, but it’s much more complex than it should be. This can really take a light-hearted game and bring it down: “Please give me a few minutes to look up this rule!“. In the end, we just kept the game moving and made the best choice on the card to keep the game moving.

Reboxing: I think you will struggle with the reboxing. Even with little baggies (which don’t come with the game: make sure you get some), you may struggle to fit everything in the box.

Randomness

Let’s be clear about one thing: this is a story you (hopefully) get swept up in! Although you do “level-up” as you play (your SKILLS get better and better, and your Renown goes up, etc), it’s still kind of a random game.

I get the LOST KNIGHT encounter randomly (see above) which might be great for my SKILLS, or it might be sucky! Stuff happens to you, and you roll dice. This is a game with a lot of randomness! The dice make the SKILL checks more random! The encounters you get are random! The QUESTS you get are random! I normally hate all that randomness, but it works here! Why?

Because this is a story that you get swept up into! Maybe, like Dame Enid, you’ll have 3 lovers! Maybe, like Sir Lancelot, you’ll have no love in your life, but get the plague and save others from the plague! It’s all about what happens to you as you play! It’s all about the well-written story, the shared experience, the aloud reading, and the silly fun with your friends! It’s random, but it’s fun.

To be clear, Tales of the Arabian Nights was even MORE random (and that could be a bit much); at least Tales of the Arthurian Nights has backed off on some of the randomness and improved upon the original (with expiring statuses, upgrading skills, and upping reknown). If you didn’t like Tales of the Arabian Nights, this may still appeal to you. If you like Tales of the Arabian Nights, you may find this even more enjoyable! It’s a slightly less random experience.

Conclusion

What a great time! I think that Tales of the Arthurian Knights might be my friends’ favorite game we have played in some time! They both give it an 8 or 8.5/10: it would actually be higher, but the game is mostly multiplayer solitaire! The game is very interactive, but just not particularly cooperative. We did suggest some House Rules to encourage a little more cooperation; see previous section.

The solo game works, but it’s just a little less fun because you are just reading to yourself as random things happen to you. What makes this game great are the crazy things that happen to you when you are with your friends! That shared experience of failing and being swept up in the story is so much more satisfying when you are with your friends! So, I didn’t love the solo game: The solo game is still respectable and will teach the game: 6.5 or 7/10.

In the end, this is best as a shared experience where players get swept up in the story and don’t care too much about “winning”; it’s all about the experience! It’s all about the story!

If you are willing to quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail, be open to the story that unfolds around you, read lots of text, and enjoy this with a light heart, I think you might really enjoy Tales of the Arthurian Knights! Be aware that there is a lot of reading, so if that doesn’t sound like fun to you, you may want to stay away from this game.

Fellowship of the Crew! A Review of Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game

This is a mouthful of a title: The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. See the full title above! BoardGameGeek lists it as The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. Whew! We’ll stay with the “shorter” title.

I ordered my copy directly from Asmodee, and it arrived mid January 2025. I tried VERY hard to get the game as soon as it came out! I was very excited for it!! I saw a TON of reviewers get it earlier in 2024, but as a plain-old boring paying customer, the earliest I could get my copy was straight from Asmodee’s web site in January 2025 (after pre-ordering it back in November (?) 2024).

So, what is this game? It’s a small-box game for 1-4 players, Ages 10+ with a “listed” playing time of 20 minutes. That time is reasonable accurate for describing a single game, but this is, at its heart, a campaign game! So, it’s a campaign of 18 chapters, and each chapter can have multiple games. So, a chapter is “not necessarily” one game, but many times is. (After you complete the campaign, there is a standalone mode so you can continue playing).

This game (you’ll notice I am staying away from saying the full name) is a cooperative trick-taking game! Players work together to take tricks, but under certain conditions! One of the biggest parts of the game is that it is a Limited Communication game: players are not allowed (in any way) to discuss the cards in their hands as they play. All they can do is deduce what other people have by what cards they played.

Those of you paying attention might say “Hey! That sounds like the Crew! That’s a cooperative trick-taking game too, right?” Yup! We liked The Crew quite a bit, as it made the #2 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Space Games! There’s a lot of similarities between the two: they both have ongoing campaigns that start easy and get harder, they both are smaller box games, and they both are Limited Communication games. The best description of Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game is Lord of the Rings meets The Crew. But there are some interesting differences, which we will discuss!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is almost exclusively a card game. There are 3 decks in the game: the intro deck (far left), Part I deck (first 12 chapters) and Part II deck (last 6 chapters).

So many cards. See above.

There are some tokens; the purple tokens are used to notate “required” characters: when you play, ever player must take a character, and certain characters are required for certain chapter. The big Ring card is used to denote when Rings have been played, and thus allow leading with them (see more discussion below).

This a trick-taking game, so there are suits. Rather than “boring” hearts, spades, diamonds, etc, the suits are thematic Shadows, Hills, Mountains, Rings, and Forest. See above.

Each player will assume the role of a Lord of the Rings character (you may assume multiple characters depending on the player count).

Each character has a win condition: in order to win a game, you (usually) hav to satisfy all characters’ winning conditions!!! Notice Frodo’s “win” condition: he must win 4 or more of the Rings cards in the tricks he wins.

Pippin’s win condition is to win the fewest tricks: see above. You’ll also note that at the start of the game, some characters are allowed to “exchange” cards with other characters. You can’t still talk about your cards in hand, but you can give away obvious cards. For example: you really don’t want Pippin to have too many high cards (since he has to lose most tricks), so you may give away an 8 of Hills.

An interesting rule of the game is that a player can’t lead with a Ring card unless a Ring has already been played into a previously won trick (by being sloughed off when a player couldn’t match the lead suit). The Ring token is on the black-and-white to show: “Nope: you can’t lead a trick with a Ring suit“.

Once at least one Ring has come out, then Ring cards may be lead! See the colorful side of the Ring above! It now means “Yep! You can lead tricks with Ring cards now!“.

There are lots of little special rules in the game. For example, after dealing out all the cards, one card is always “lost” (to make the math work, there is always one extra card). But Gandalf has a special rule that he can take the lost card into his hand!

Each character is dealt a hand of cards and uses those to play a trick-taking game! The holder of the 1 Ring always starts the game. Frodo is almost always in play, and he always starts with the 1 Ring: see above.

Players continue playing until all their win conditions are satisfied … and they win! If, at any point, the win conditions can’t be satisified, the game is lost. In the campaign, losing means you just play the same game again until you win (usually).

A winning game moves to the next … game. In the beginning of the campaign, that usually means the next Chapter: these are called “Short games” (see below).

Later in the campaign, you may have to play multiple games to advance to the next chapter. These are called “Long” games (see below).

If you can get through all 18 chapters of the campaign, you win!

Solo Play

There is a solo mode for the game! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) Given that The Crew (the game that this will be compared to over and over) DID NOT have a solo mode, this is huge!

The solo mode has very different rules than the main cooperative game! During the main cooperative game, all cards are dealt out, and the players (cooperatively) make decisions about what to play based on what they see in their entire hand! See above as a cooperative player has a whole bunch of cards!

In the solo game, the solo player assumes the role of 4 of the characters, and only gets “part” of each hand (4 cards each to start)! See above as Chapter 1 has the solo player playing 4 characters with 4 cards each!

Each character gets 4 cards (see above) and will get a new cards after a trick is taken! So, the solo player has to decide how to play cards based on seeing ALL Characters cards, but not all cards per hand!

So, this is a solo mode which requires the solo player to operate 4 characters! Normally, I worry about the intellectual overload, the context-switching between characters, and general maintenance. But it’s really not an issue here! Each character is very simple to operate: they don’t have special powers, they simply have a special winning condition. It’s really easy to look at the board (see above) and get a sense what each character should play!!

The solo mode requires you to look at all the cards in all the hands of all the characters and make decisions to achieve their win goals. That sounds daunting, but it really isn’t. You know EXACTLY what each character will play; what you don’t know (for sure) is what card each character will get next. The randomness in the solo game is based on what card each player gets next round. I never found this randomness too debilitating. I had a few games where the cards went against me, but it was easy to replay that game … remember, this is a 20-minute game, so any randomness in the deals (even if it completely sucks), will be over soon and you can play another game.

Said another way, I didn’t think there was too much randomness in this game to make me dislike it.

To emphasize the point that this is an easy game to get into, let me tell you that I played through the entire 18-Chapter solo game when I was sick! I wasn’t at my best, but the LOTR trick-taking game is really easy to get into! Each game is “only” 20 minutes or so, so when I got tired when I was sick, I could go take a nap, and come back again!

Let’s be clear, even though the solo game is easy to pick-up, easy to play, and easy to keep coming back to, there’s still a lot of engaging decisions! Part of the reason I liked the solo game so much was that it was engaging and “distracted” me from being sick!

The amount of manintenance as you play the game is pretty minimal; it’s real easy to play solo. But there is a lot of maintenance between games: Honestly, the worst part of the game is the constant shuffling. You need to make sure you do a really good job shuffling the cards, because a bad shuffle may cause you to lose the game! So, I ended up doing a pile shuffle after every game just to make sure thing were shuffled!

As a solo game, this game is a huge win! It’s easy to learn, easy to play, and engaging enough to keep coming back to! Like I said, I played the entire 18-Chapter campaign solo when I was sick, and it was great! It’s easy enough to play when you are “distracted”, but fun enough to keep you engaged!

Major win for having a solo mode: What’s the score?
The Crew: 0, Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 1.

I liked the solo game, and even though I have defeated the entire game, I will keep it in my collection to play again solo.

Cooperative Mode

So, there are actually several cooperative modes based on the number of players. It “feels like” the best way to play the game is 4-Players (or 3-Player). (The 2-Player game is really very different; I can’t comment on that as I never got a chance to play it. I have to admit the 2-Player mode looks very daunting).

My 4-Player group sat down and played though 12 games (8 chapters) in one night over 3 hours! They won most games pretty handily, but it kept getting harder and harder! By game 8, they had to replay it 3 times! Game 8 features Tom Bombadil pretty prominently, and the joke was that game 8 was just as annoying as Tom Bombadil!

The major differences between the solo and 4-Player cooperative game:
1) The solo player sees all hands, but only a limited number of cards
2) The cooperative player sees all cards in their hand, but only can see their hand

The Limited Communication rules are VERY Clear from the rulebook: you pretty much can’t talk about anything except public information, such as player’s winning conditions and special rules. Anything in your hand can’t be discussed AT ALL!

After playing through 8 Chapters, my friends basically said they liked this better than The Crew and it was more thematic! They liked the art, the cards, the character win goals.

The Crew: 0; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (theme, art)

I like to point out that the Crew has the “very limited communication” with the communication tokens. I actually prefer that part of the Crew: I don’t love that there is NO communication really in this game (but see below). Recall, in the Crew, every player “can communicate” once at a critical juncture with “highest card” or “lowest card” or “only card. There is no such mechanism in Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: the rules for limited communication are pretty brutal.

The Crew: 1 (has some critical communication); Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2

One Ring To House Rule Them All

Let me tell you what happened in the 4-Player cooperative game: when choosing characters to play, my friends ended up talking a little about which characters to choose. “Oh, I should probably be Pippin, my hand sucks.” “Ya, I can be Tom Bombadil I guess”. Here’s the thing: the rules are VERY CLEAR that they can’t do that!

I read the rulebook aloud to my friends: this explicitly say they can’t do this …
“During setup, players should not discuss character preferences, as this may reveal information”

My friends hated this rule! This is the one and only chance to really communicate on the game, and they felt like it made the game more fun! “Give us SOME choice! This is a house rule for us!”

I didn’t mention this, but I ended just watching and shepherding my friends through 8 chapters (I was the fifth wheel and didn’t play). And watching my friends “discuss” which characters to play seemed to engage them and made them talk! They REALLY had fun picking characters! I think it also gave them more “skin” in the game, as they weren’t just “saddled” with a character, they had a choice in the pick!

It’s very explicit in the rules that players can’t reveal any intent on characters, but I think that’s a mistake. I think the game is more engaging and more fun if players have some choice there! Honestly, this helps combat the problem I have with this game: there’s no “special communication” allowed (like The Crew!). Watching the game, it was VERY clear that allowing the players to help choose their characters was more fun, so we made it a house rule:
“Players can communicate preferences for choosing characters, but just can’t reveal what’s in their hands”.

With the house rule:
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 3 (house rule)
Without the house rule:
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (no house rule)

The Campaign

The Campaign is … just the game getting harder and harder. The campaign follows the story in the book really well; one of my players is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and they noted how well the Chapters followed the book. But, at the end of the day, each game is pretty much independent of the previous game. There is no “levelling-up”, there are no major penalties for losing—each game just gets “harder”. Certain characters are “revealed” as you play, but generally the campaign is just harder and harder games. It’s a linear campaign.

If you were looking for a more operatic campaign with levelling-up, branching narrative, satisfying punishments, debilitating punishments, and state changing, this isn’t the game for you. But, if you want a bunch of games in a row that nominally follow the plot of the book The Fellowship of the Ring (without too much maintenance in between), this is a good game for you.

What Do You Do When The Campaign Is Over?

There are rules for playing the game after you finish the campaign: see rulebook above. Honestly, I would just rather play the campaign again; the campaign is easy to reset, and setting up games “post campaign” looks messy.

What I Liked

The art: This stained-glass art for the characters was very thematic and very appealing. The art on the Mountains, Rings, Shadows, etc. suits was also very thematic. The art and theme is much more appealing in this game than the Crew:
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 4(with house rule and art)

The Characters: The character art and win conditions were all very interesting. One of my players pointed out they liked that the win Conditions changed every time, but they followed the characters! The Crew is a little different in that the win conditions just a condition. I think it’s a win for the Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game that there are characters. Having characters makes the game a little more engaging! For my group at least.

The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 5(with house rule and art and characters)

Solo mode: The solo mode is good. It’s easy to get into, and it’s easy to start/stop it at any time. We’ve already noted that the Crew does NOT have a solo mode, whereas this does.

What I Didn’t Like

Communications too limited: I think the Crew has the major advantage by giving players “chances” to do communication at critical times: There is no such mechanism in this game. I don’t want to undersell this point: this is one of the major reasons I adore the Crew! The whole idea of communicating a critical piece of information at JUST THE RIGHT TIME is such an engaging and interesting mechanism in the Crew. There is nothing like that here.

I will say that the House Rule we proposed (allow characters to more interactively choose characters) goes a long way towards alleviating this issue.

So much shuffling! Just be aware how much shuffling there is … you may want to sleeve your cards. Since each game is only 20 minutes, these cards get touched and shuffled a lot. I currently don’t have my cards sleeved, but maybe I should.

Conclusion

The Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a fantastic game that I think people will adore. I watched as my group just jumped in and played 3 hours, and they had a ball! I watched as I played solo over the entire campaign, and I had a ball!

The best description I have of this game is The Crew meets Lord of the Rings! It’s a very thematic co-op, at least moreso than The Crew. My friends all preferred this over the Crew … but only if they had the House Rule that they could talk more about character selection. Watching them play cooperatively, I would strongly recommend this House Rule: it really seemed to make the game more engaging for my friends!

The solo game was very engaging and I would play it again.

This is a very easy game to jump into, either cooperatively or solo, and it’s easy to play (with lots of fun decisions). I personally prefer The Crew over this (because of the critical communication rule), but my friends all preferred this game. If I want to play solo, I can’t play The Crew, but I can play this.

Great game. I will keep both The Crew and Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game in my collection, but it appears my friends all prefer Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game.

You might want to sleeve your game if you pick it up. My cards have started getting a little grody.

Unstoppable: A Solo and Two-Player Cooperative Deck-building/Crafting Game. A Review.

Unstoppable is a cooperative deck-building/card-crafting game! This was #4 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2025! This was on Kickstarter back in June 2024, and delivered to me Saturday January 17th, 2025! I backed it, expecting it to arrive later in 2025, but it actually delivered early! (It originally promised February 2025). Amazing!

This delivered with three playmats, the Tyrant’s End expansion, and the base game: see above.

So what is Unstoppable? The game describes itself as a Roguelike Momentum Deckbuilder … meh, that’s an okay description, but I’d prefer to call it a deck-building/card-crafting boss-battler instead (I think it’s just “hot” to call games “roguelike” at the moment).

Be clear that this game ONLY supports 1 to 2 players before you get too excited; this game reminds me of a more tightly-coupled Astro Knights (see our review of Astro Knights here and here): Unstoppable still has that sci-fi feel, that deck-building feel, and that boss-battling feel … just like Astro Knights, but it also has some really different ideas. What do I mean by that? Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing

The Unstoppable base box is actually not that big; see Coke can for perspective above.

This is a deck-building game (and card-crafting: we’ll touch on that in a second) , so there are a ton of cards: See above.

There’s also some money tokens (credits, far right: I mean, this is a deck-building game, so you have to buy SOMETHING to upgrade your deck), hit point tokens (middle: you gotta do damage to take out minions on the way to the big bad boss), and some action point tokens (far left: yes, this game has action points too!).

There’s not THAT much in the base box; mostly cards and tokens and a few larger mats.

Playmats

I can hear some of you asking … “So Rich, why are there three playmats?” An excellent question.

The playmats are double-sided.

One side of the playmat is a single player mat. This is where one player’s cards, play board, threat, tokens, etc. goes. See above.

The other side of the playmat is where the main upgrades (this is a deck-building game, remember?), the core cards, and the big bad boss you battle lives. See above.

The reason there are three playmats is because the game is either 1-player or 2-players! Each player gets a mat (2 mats) and the big bad boss gets a mat (for up to 3 mats). See below for a 2-Player set-up:player 1 on left, player 2 on right, upgrades/boss on top.

So, to be clear, the playmats cost extra money; they don’t come with the game. Were they worth the extra money? So, I paid $100 for the base game, 3 mats, and one expansion. I like how they mats organize the game, but strictly speaking you don’t need them!

The rulebook DOES show how the game sets-up without the mats, so you don’t need them. But I liked them; much like the Aeon’s End: The Descent playmat was so useful, so too was the playmat for Unstoppable. But maybe you should see if you like the base game before you go investing all the $$$ for the playmats and expansion … keep reading …

Rulebook

I am a little grumbly with this rulebook. There are about 3 or 4 things that it could have EASILY done to make it SIGNIFICANTLY better.

The good news is that it gets an A- on the Chair Test.

It opens up and sits perfectly well on the chair next to me, making it easy to consult. So, they definitely did that right: see above.

The Components page (on the left above) is “okay”. The first real problem is … how do you set this up? There is a discussion (right side of the page) about “how you set-up and sleeve” the game, but THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PICTURE describing it! I was able to figure it out, but people who have no idea what card-crafting is or even deck-building will be completely lost with these directions (far right side of the page). A single picture might take this game from unplayable to playable for certain people. And a little picture would have made me happy; show me how the decks fit together. Please? I feel like the description above wasn’t quite enough.

The set-up was pretty good: see above.

The next place I had problems was the card anatomy. Here, the Defense and Bonus areas on the Threat Cards were poorly described. The problem is that most Threat Cards use the SKULL symbol, and it’s not clear what that means (the skull on the Threat Cards is a different color and/or outline than the reference card: we discuss more below). A simple example describing one combat would have helped that.

The rest of the rulebook is pretty good.

I also really wanted a game summary on the back; I ended up paging through the gameplay pages over and over as I played; it would have been nice had those been summarized on the back.

This rulebook was … ok. I just wanted a few more examples, a few more discriminators, and a few more pictures in the rulebook to help me get into the game. After a little trek onto BGG (see thread here), I feel like I got my questions answered, but the rulebook could have been better.

It worked. Mostly. Except for set-up. It could have been significantly better with a few extra pictures.

Storybook

There is a storybook for the game. You don’t need it to play the game. It’s just flavor text. I never read it, and I feel bad for not reading it?

Sleevening

Like I mentioned in the rulebook section, it was more work than I expected to get this game into playable shape. It took me about an hour or so? Basically, you have to “sleeven” the game and put a bunch of cards into sleeves.

Let’s be clear: the sleeves come with the game! Although this is “mostly” a deck-building game (you can build a deck, add better cards, and cull lesser cards: See our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games for more discussion of deck-building games), it is also a card-crafting game; this is a term that came into parlance with another of John D Clair’s Games: Mystic Vale (although this is a slightly different flavor of that idea). This game is built for you to put cards inside the sleeves, and have multiple cards together at the same time.

Once the cards get going, they will have two sides: a core side (above right: the GOOD side) and a Threat side (above left: the BAD side). There we actually two cards inside the sleeve! This basically allows the GOOD side and BAD side to vary independently.

The GOOD sides are what the characters can do in the game: deal damage, shield themselves, etc. See above.

The GOOD cards tell you which BAD cards they pair with; see the backs above (well, the intro cards do, once you start playing, you get random BAD cards).

The Threat cards (the other side) will be the bad guys that the players fight during the game. These cards, when defeated, will turn over and flow into the GOOD guys hand on the good side!

You might ask “Why do we have these weird rules and weird backs/fronts?” It’s to support UPGRADES (and allow the fronts and backs to vary independently, but that’s a complex discussion).

Probably the coolest part of Unstoppable is that you can UPGRADE a card: it stays attached to the card … in the sleeve! The reason these cards are so WEIRD-shaped is that the upgrades go into the right part of the card and basically stay attached/stay in the card sleeve so that card is better for the rest of the game!

See above as we try to choose between two UPGRADES: Do I want to making it Repeating or add a 2000w Arc Capacitor? The repeater gives me three separate shots, but the capacitor gives me one big shot!! Which do I want?

I choose the capacitor! See as I slide it in …

… and see as it augments my card! Pretty cool!

This is the core crafting mechanic of the game; this is the cool gimmick.

Gameplay

Each player chooses one character to play: see above.

The back of your card indicates which specialized cards you start with (and a little flavor text).

The player sets-up with their starting deck: three special cards and 7 standard “starting” cards. They set-up on the player side.

Your deck goes on the character mat, with Armor and Hit points being tracked.

You also set-up three Threats you must deal with in your personal space. You start with three cards in hand, three action points, and three Threats to deal with.

To play a card, you need to be able to pay the Action point cost (in the upper right corner). Playing Strike gives you a simple 1 hit point of damage.

You do damage to one of the three Threats: see above (more of them if they are FAST); if any of these Threats survive to the next round, they will do Damage to you!

If you take out a Threat, the card FLIPS to the GOOD side and comes into your hand! That’s right, you don’t really draw from your deck: the main way to get new cards in your hand is to take out Threats! That’s very interesting!

Of course, this is a deck-building game, so you have to get new cards somehow. Basically, every turn, you get to choose one of three (you draft) the three cards where the BLUE LEVEL marker is (see above). There are 6 levels of core cards, with higher levels being obviously better!

Every time you empty your deck, you level up and move the level marker up. (There are also ways to move the level marker up quicker, but only temporarily). Leveling-up is a fun time; you get to CULL a card, move the level marker up, and anticipate some new “better” cards!

This is a boss-battler, so you have to take out the BIG BAD BOSS; depending on which one you choose. See above. Interestingly, you can only do “boss damage” (see it blurred below) when you kill certain threats from your deck. These special threats get added every time you level up (and you usually start with 2 of these “boss threats”: see Below.)

There’s actually quite a bit more to the game, but that’s the basics.

Build a better deck and craft better cards! Take out local Threats on the way to taking out the Big Bad!

Solo Play

So, this game is definitely built for solo (thanks for following Saunders’ Law), with 2-Player being the secondary mode. See above: even the font hints at that disparity (SOLO is all big)!

I ended up playing about 10 games of the solo game in the first few days after I got this game! There are three bosses that come with the game, and I was able to defeat each one … after I lost a few times. (There are ways to up the difficulty, and there are 4 characters to play with to give the game more replayability)

It takes a little while to get into the “flow” of the game. There are a lot of rules, there are a lot sections, but there are a lot of decisions (in a good way) to make too.

For example, there are 4 factions in the game that all play VERY differently! If you have multiple cards of a faction, they can “support” the other cards and make them more powerful! I tended to get the Silver faction (the little diagonal raven) in my first few games. But there is also worth in getting multiple factions, especially with the UNITE keyword which gives you special on how many different factions you have in play/in hand!

My favorite decisions in the game came when I was stuck; it was pretty clear that I was going to die and lose, but if I could upgrade my cards JUST RIGHT before I went into battle, I could stay alive! The UPGRADES, and the fact that you can do them anytime on your turn, really make it so you can pivot and be smart! I really appreciated that I could feel clever. Deck-building games tend to have some randomness in them, but the UPGRADE mechanism is what kept me from being too grumpy with that randomness.

I will say that the solo player doesn’t have to do too much work once the game is going, but the set-up and ESPECIALLY the tear-down is a lot of work! Going through your entire deck and separating the core cards and threat cards is so much work. Besides the “unsleevening” (which was a sub-optimal experience), the tear-down is one of the biggest “oofs: that’s a lot of work” in the game. See above as I tear apart the decks!

There are a lot of rules, a lot of Icons, a lot of factions. I appreciated that, by playing this solo, I could learn the game and take whatever time I wanted. I could then teach my friend. Not friends, because the cooperative mode is ONLY 2-Players.

Cooperative Mode

Yes! Thank you! Unstoppable has a cooperative mode with NO Communications Restrictions! I get so tired of having some obscure rules to obscure the communication when playing cooperatively with my friends! I said this in Everdell Duo (see review from a few weeks ago) and I’ll say it now: let me and my friend(s) talk! We play games to play, laugh, talk, strategize, and have fun together! I am so glad we don’t have to worry about any Communications Restrictions as we work together! Thank you Unstoppable for allowing full communication!

The rules for 2-Player are in 1.5 pages (pages 13 and 14: see above); the idea is pretty straight-forward: each player is playing multi-player solitaire for the most part. The BIG BAD BOSS has twice as many hit points (for scaling to 2 players), so both players still have to do “about” the same amount of damage and play “about” the same amount of game.

Most of the 2-Player cooperative game proceeds simultaneously, as both players play out their turns at the same time. (This helps keep the game flowing quickly). The only times where the two players must worry about the order they play is (1) when drafting the new card (players are allowed to choose who drafts first), and then (2) in the Main Phase, the game uses Player Selected Turn Order (one of our favorite mechanisms), where players can intersperse their plays however they want! This is fantastic! Me and my friend can decide the best way to take out Threats together! The only prerequisite is that the entire action must “finish” before the next one. (We found we could even do the Main Phase simulataneously many times as well!)

Although the players can talk through how to play together, the only way they can help each other is to eliminate Threats (by attacking their battlefield) for each other … and that’s it! There’s no sharing of any resources (credits, cards, armor) or anything else. So, this is very much multi-player solitaire.

In my first two-player game, I lost because my friend has a bad draw and couldn’t recover … if I just could have given him a few credits, he would have survived! So, although you can talk and strategize together, you can’t help each other out THAT much. The game is balanced pretty well for the solo player, so it’s rare you can actually “eliminate a threat” from your friend without screwing yourself, at least in my experience.

I liked the 2-Player cooperative mode, but I wish there was a little more cooperation: this is generally a multiplayer solitaire experience. Even sharing credits might have made this feel just a touch more cooperative without changing the gameplay too much … it’s even thematic! “I’ll wire you some credits!” This is a minor house rule that would I suggest to make the game just a little more cooperative.

Things To Look Out For

As I played a bunch of games, I ran into some issues that I feel I should point out; maybe I can make your experience better.

What does the Skull mean? When you see the SKULL on the Threat (MONSTER) card (see above), that means “use the current level number on the BIG BAD Boss card“. You might miss this the first time through because the Reference cards have the SKULL as a black on white, but every single Threat card has the SKULL as white on grey like the example above (or white on orange) … so you don’t correlate that they are the same symbol because the colors don’t match!

…Even more confusing, the marker on the BIG BAD BOSS map is red. So, these symbols don’t color-coordinate at all! When the RED token is on the 1, it means “1” (for the Defense of the Monster above). There was never a clear example of this in the Rulebook, and the lack of color-coordination can can be confusing, so just be aware of the issue. Once you know this, it’s easy.

Boss Cards Shuffle Weirdly: Because the Boss Damage cards (see above) don’t ever have a Core (GOOD card) inserted in with it, they shuffle weirdly. I tended to get all the BIG BAD BOSS cards at the front or back of the deck because they are just “lighter” and shuffle differently in your deck. Go out of your way to make sure you shuffle your deck well (maybe a pile-shuffle) so that you don’t have all these cards clump together. (You DO NOT want these cards to clump together)

You can put the cards in backwards! See above as the Viren card is in the sleeve upside down. You know this because the card next to it is correct with the Core card extruding out the top. If you put a core card in here, it won’t line-up correctly.

…Have the opening on the Threat cards on the TOP so the Core cards can just slide in; see above.

Multiple Attacks vs. Adding: It’s still not clear if each Orange Swirl is considered a separate attack or just additive. If I add the Repeating, does each attack get the addition of the card it augments? Probably not? Also, since there is (currently) no notion of damage reduction in the game, 3 single attacks of 1 and 1 single attack of 3 will be the same against one opponent, but the Repeating will obviously be better IF if it really is 3 separate attacks (which is probably why it’s more expensive). I am using deduction (based on what I know about the game) to figure this out, rather than having the rules tell me. That frustrated me a little.

When Defeated: What does it mean when the “When Defeated” shows the Attack icon for the Boss Threat cards? See above! Does the Boss Threat have a Death Curse and do 4 Damage to you as it dies? Or do you get to do 4 Damage to another threat? It’s not clear. After playing about 10 games, I am pretty confident it’s a true bonus for the player: because the Boss Threats don’t come back into your hand (they do Boss Damage), they don’t help you with other threats, so you need the Bonus damage to be a HELPER! So, it’s a true bonus; you can do 4 damage to something else! If it were the other way around (with the Threat doing 4 damage to you), this game would be called Unbeatable instead of Unstoppable because it would be so hard!

What I Liked

Factions: The factions in this game really added a lot of flavor to the game. I mean, this is a deck-building game, which we’ve seen tons of. The four different factions really added some new flavor to this genre.

Threat and Core: The fact that the core cards and the Threat cards are tightly coupled was really interesting! Granted, this is the core gimmick (pun not intended) that makes this stand out (with the card-crafting), but it does work.

UPGRADES: At the end of the day, the UPGRADE system worked so well; this is the fundamental reason this game stands out. You can upgrade your cards independently, and that’s a really interesting decision! Adding the UPGRADES on an ad-hoc basis saved me many times, and it really makes you feel clever when you upgrade and turn a 3-Action Point card into 1-Action Point card!

Looks: The game looks good. And the playmats really do help.

What I Didn’t Like

The Introductory Experience: The introduction to this game and the “sleevening” weren’t great experiences. I am very worried they would turn off a less-experienced player to the point of abandoning the game. It reminded me a little of my first experience with Marvel Legendary many years ago … if a friend hadn’t helped me with my first game, I may have given up on it! Just a few more pictures and explanations, please? (Another game I really liked from last year, Union City Alliance (a co-op deck-builder) had this same problem: see here).

Tear-down: The game moves quickly as you play, but tear-down in this game is a lot of work: you have to separate many many cards from their sleeves.

Ambiguities: There were just enough ambiguities in the game that I was frustrated a few times. Again, I wish the rulebook had a few more examples, a few more pictures, a few more discussions, maybe even an index. In this review, I tried to point out problem areas so hopefully they won’t trip you up.

Theme and Comparison to Astro Knights

How much theme is here? There’s about as much theme here as in the base Astro Knights game; although I think I would give it to Astro Knights for feeling just slightly more thematic.

Although, If we were comparing it to Astro Knights: Eternity, I would definitely say Eternity is more thematic … mostly.

Although the thematic element depends on which BIG BAD BOSS you fight! In your first few Unstoppable games, you should fight The Harbinger then The Triumvirate (in that order). Those games teach you the technical mechanisms of the game. The final boss (Duomo’s Menace: see above) actually has a little story and some choices! See below!!

There is a deck of 21 cards (see above) and you make decisions (like a Choose Your Own Adventure story) as it takes you through different parts of the deck!

Minor spoiler above (that’s why it’s sideways), but it’s the first decision you would come to … see above. These decisions take you through different parts of different stories!

There’s a bunch of different endings (don’t look too closely above) for that adventure! The final boss Duomo’s Menace has quite a bit of theme and feels like a little adventure!

Would I recommend Astro Knights or Unstoppable? They are both great sci-fi cooperative deck-builders, but it depends on what you want! Astro Knights is a little simpler and plays more people (at 1-4 players). Unstoppable is more difficult and plays fewer people (1-2 players). Astro Knights, especially if you are playing the Eternity expansion, feels more thematic, but, Unstoppable has slightly better gameplay with its card-crafting mechanic …and it does have a thematic adventure for the final boss!! As a cooperative experience, I would give the edge to Astro Knights because it feels more interactive. In the end, I have both and like both!

Conclusion

Yes, I liked Unstoppable! Quite a bit! It’s definitely staying in my collection for the solo game, but I can see it being ideal for playing 2-Player with my friend Joe!

The deck-building and card-crafting aspects of this game are unique and this brings some new ideas to that genre: upgrades, defeating cards to draw them, special boss damage … to name a few! To be clear, the main gimmick of this game (the card-crafting) DOES WORK and it works well.

I really did like the playmats and would recommend them, but they do make the game more expensive; strictly speaking, you don’t need them.

Overall, I’d have to give this a 8.5/10. I want to give it more, but the “unsleevening” experience and the rulebook could have been a little better.

Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2024

What makes a good solo game? I find them when I typically start playing solo games to learn that game cooperatively for my friends. If a game starts to enchant me and I can’t stop playing it solo … there’s something to it! All the games on this list were games I played solo to teach my friends … but then I kept playing! Some of these games will end up on either my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024, some but of them will end up on my Top Cooperative Expansions of 2024, but one things for sure … they are all great solo!

For more great solo games, see last year’s list: Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023!

Honorable Mention: Solo Project PEGASUS Campaign for Marvel United

After getting Marvel United Multiverse Season 3 with all of its content, I was very taken with the Campaign Decks (see below and see review here), but I was saddened to learn there was no campaign for the Project PEGASUS saga (see above)!

So I spent many many weeks developing my own campaign using all of the Marvel United content! This is a print-and-play campaign for Marvel United! I played this campaign solo over and over and over again (multi-handed with 2, 3, and 4 characters) as I playtested all the the different combinations of characters! There is no game I played more solo this year than the Marvel United: Project PEGASUS campaign!

It’s awkward to put this on our list since I developed it, but I had so much fun playtesting it solo over and over for weeks and weeks, I had to acknowledge how much time and how much fun I had with this! If you liked the Marvel United Campaign Decks and wanted more, check out the free Project PEGASUS Campaign here!

10. Skytear Horde: Monoliths

Now, Skytear Horde: Monoliths is a standalone expansion in the Skytear Horde universe! This is a great little solo and cooperative tower defense game! But you might ask: “Why isn’t this on the Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 instead of this solo list?” That’s a very good question! It’s because, although this is a really good expansion with great components and cards, the game really works best as a solo game.

We tried it cooperatively (see our review here), and it was just okay. It’s significantly better as a solo game! It feels like most of the balance and playtesting was done as a solo game, so it can’t really go on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 list … because it really is best as a solo game.

It’s got some great components and some really great art! Take a look at our review here to see if this is something you might like!

9. Batman: Gotham City Chronicles + Solo/Cooperative Expansion

So, you can’t play Batman: Gotham City Chronicles solo without both the base game (which came out years ago) and the Solo/Cooperative Expansion (which came out this year)! In order to get to the cooperative game, I had to wade through learning the original base one vs. many game, then learn the solo game, to finally learn the cooperative game! Whew!

Now the cover of the Solo/Cooperative Expansion looks great! See above!

But there were some major production issues with the expansions as: 1) The English translation still had some scenarios in French! And 2) The binding on the solo/cooperative rulebook is terrible! It’s impossible to hold open! See above as I came up with a kludgy workaround for that! Objectively, I feel like I had to give this game a 5.5/10 since the production had issues!

Yet, even after all those issues (and the sheer complexity of the game), I still enjoyed being Batman in this solo romp around Gotham City! Subjectively, I gave it a 7/10 because I felt like I was Batman! Because of the production issues, this has to fall close to the bottom of the solo list, but I still enjoyed this overall! See our review of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles Solo/Cooperative Mode to see if this might be something you enjoy!

8. NYC: Emergency Room

This might strike you as an odd pick: A Medical Mystery game! I picked this up at Target and really enjoyed playing through the mysteries of the game! Instead of solving a boring old murder mystery (sarcasm here: I loved my murder mysteries), you are doing research, asking questions, running tests, and trying correctly to diagnose a patient!

There’s only a limited number of mysteries per box (see the envelopes above), but if you ever wanted to play a medical mystery and diagnose like Gregory House, this is the game for you!

I love my murder mysteries (remember: Suspects made the #1 spot on my Top 10 Solo Games of 2023), and this was a great spin on that genre! See our review here to see if it’s something you may like!

7. Everdell: Duo

I wasn’t expecting to like Everdell: Duo as much as a I did! My first playthroughs were a bit “clunky”, as the game has some fiddly bits and documentation issues you have to get through. But once you “get” how the game works, it’s quite fun! (I also never played the original Everdell)

To play solo, you have to man both the tortoise and the hare as they build their respective cities! See above! There’s a lot of thought about when you share, when you place workers, when you buy, and when you draw cards! You are looking for the combos to help both the tortoise and the hare! It might “seem” like both the hare and tortoise are playing multiplayer solitaire games, but as the game opens up to you, there’s more collaboration between the two than you might think!

That delicious (solo) collaboration plus the beautiful components and the cute vibe of the game put this on my solo list! I am just as surprised as you are that this made my solo list! My only concern (which is why it’s at #7) is that can be at the whim of the card draws, but most of the time there are so many ways to pivot around that! See our review here to see if this might be something you like!

6. Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2

I didn’t know a lot about the original Tidal Blades when I backed this, but Tidal Blades 2 looked like a fun little cooperative dungeon crawler. Holy Cow! I was blown away about how good the gameplay were and how great the components were!

As silly as it sounds, they did such a great correlating the colors, giving bases for the monsters, and generally making the cards very readable!

But the coup de grace was the card system where you could choose a card, a row or a column, activating everything there! This was such a unique and different combat system, it really made this game stand out. The game is better with more people, but I had such fun playing through (most) of the campaign solo!

See our review of Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2 to see if this game might be of interest to you!

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

This is an odd duck of an entry; the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe arrived this years (3 years late, which made a lot of people angry) and had some amazing minis and components … for a worker placement game that probably doesn’t need them!

See above for one of the Sundrop worker placement tokens!! Did I really need this? Nah! But did I love it? Ya!

In the end, the reason this made the list (besides how stupidly nice it looks) was because of the Introductory Campaign Scenario Book! I love Robinson Crusoe, but I hadn’t played it in 5 years! The Introductory Campaign gave me an excuse to enjoy a nice 5-Game campaign in the world of Robinson Crusoe! Over about a month, I’d play a scenario on a weekend and just have a good old time in this world. Good times! It reminded why I like Robinson Crusoe so much!

Check out our review of the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe to see if this might be something you might like!

4. Marvel United: Campaign Deck. Dark Phoenix Saga

The Campaign Decks (see above) came with Season 3 of Marvel United: Multiverse. These decks takes all your Marvel United content (and I mean ALL of it) and gives you some “stories” or campaigns to run through.

The Dark Phoenix Saga is a campaign centered on the X-Men from issues #131-137 back in the Byrne/Austin/Claremont days. This campaign takes you through a story, lasting 5 battles (or more) as the X-Men fight the Hellfire club, others, and (spoiler!) deal with Jean Grey turning into Dark Phoenix.

This was a heart-breaking, soul-wrenching campaign as I played through one of my favorite Marvel X-Men stories! I can’t share too much, but it was a great solo experience over a number of days.

xmen132
See our review of the Campaign Decks to see if this might be something you might like! Some spoilers included, but they should be well marked!

3. Aeon’s End: The Descent

This one was a late comer and almost didn’t make our list! It came in late late November, just before Thanksgiving! I ended up playing cooperatively with my friends and had a grand old time, but the solo experience was truly phenomenal!

First of all, Aeon’s End: The Descent has true solo play (which makes it a lot easier to jump into)! And all the new Mages and ideas it adds to the system were … surprisingly fresh! Even after 8 years, this standalone expansion breathed new life into the Aeon’s End system!

But, at the end of the day, it was the new module called Friends and Foes that made this stand out so much! This new module adds new ways of winning and losing with some interesting ideas, but what it does best for me was mitigate the problems with Variable Turn Order!

Playing through the four Chapters of this narrative campaign was a thrill! The story was pretty good (once you got into it), and the new ideas generated throughout were fantastic. I played a different mage in every chapter and just had a ball figuring out how to play each new mage! Sure, you can play this campaign with many people, but I really enjoyed unravelling this story as a solo play. See our review here of Aeon’s End: The Descent to see if this might be something you enjoy!

2. Sammu-Ramat

Any other year, this probably would have been my #1 game of the year! I went back and forth a number of times, so this could easily be my #1! Sammu-Ramat is basically a cooperative euro-puzzle game; it immerses the players into Queen Sammu-ramat’s rule of Assyria in 9th century BC, as guided by her advisors.

It’s kind of a war game, as you fend off invaders, but it’s also a euro game gathering-resources games, but it’s also a logistics puzzle as you try to balance keeping the kingdom defended and fed!

You can play either a one-shot (which is a great way to jump in), but it really shines as a 5-game campaign where you leave the game state as set-up for the next game! This game was such a great surprise! I adored playing it solo, especially through a campaign (although it needs a little house-ruling). I really wish it could have made my #1 spot because it was so good. See out review of Sammu-Ramat here to see if this is something you might like!

1. Set A Watch: Doomed Run

This game has no right to be the #1 spot; this is a giant campaign game in the Set A Watch Universe. First of all, of the Full 7 Game Campaign games I played, I ended up playing two of them cooperatively! So, that means I only played 5 of the games solo!

And to play the campaign, you must have ALL The Set A Watch Content! And I mean all!! (Including the Outriders deck)! This means: Set A Watch, Set A Watch: Swords of the Coins, and Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles!!! See how it takes up one half of my table just to separate the different games above?

And Set A Watch also has the solo problem that “you must play 4 characters”, so that’s not ideal either: see above as I try to operate 4 characters!

Despite all that, this game spent 11 days taking over my table, and I had a ball playing through it mostly solo! Once you know Set A Watch, especially solo, it’s such a fun game! I know, this really has no right even being my favorite solo game of 2024, but I had so much fun playing it (mostly) solo, it has to be #1. See our review here to see if Set A Watch: Doomed Run might be something you enjoy!

Wandering Galaxy Review: Who’s Wandering Here?

To be clear: you are wandering the Galaxy, but it turns out the Galaxy itself is wandering (if you believe the intro text)! Wandering Galaxy is a cooperative adventure game for 1-6+ players and it is set in spaaaaaaaaaace! This is a silly cooperative game that kind of feels like Firefly if it were a comedy (with just a little bit of Star Trek thrown in). (I mean, Firefly is already kind-of a comedy, but I digress). (But this may be too many parenthesis).

Wandering Galaxy was on Kickstarter back in July 2024, and promised delivery in December 2024. And you know what? They made it! My copy arrived about December 20th, 2024! With some qualifiers … see below …

See above: So, the game wasn’t QUITE done, but the only thing left unfinished was the App. My physical copy arrived but the app still needed some work. To be fair, I was able to play some of the game before the end of December, so it’s enough to say “Eh, close enough”. I’ll call it on time.

Let’s be clear! Wandering Galaxy requires an App (or the Entry Book … more discussion later if you are violently opposed to an App).

They say “App”, but it’s really more of a web portal situation: point your web browser at WanderingGalaxy.com and go! It reads the text to you!!

So, what is this? Wandering Galaxy is a cooperative campaign game with many different mechanisms: story-telling, worker placement, bag-building, deck-building, pickup-and-deliver, and even a little bit of a real-time! It is both paradoxically a lighter game and a heavier game! The gameplay is light and fluffy and moves along quickly, but there’s a lot of stuff underneath the hood that keeps this from being “just” a dumb little game!

What do I mean by this? Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing

So, this is a pretty standard sized game box, about Ticket To Ride sized. See above with Coke can for perspective.

There’s a decent amount of stuff in here! See above! Lots to punch out!

There’s a lot of tokens to punch out! Whew! Luckily the game includes some bags!

There’s also a fair number of cards in the game: remember how I said this was a deck-building game? There are the cards for your decks!

I got the sleeves for this: 9 times out of 10, if a game says it’s a deck-building game, you should probably sleeve it. (This might be the 10th game).

I spent WAY TOO Much time sleeving all the cards. See above!!! This card-sleeving was one of the first things I did when I got the game. I will say, after a few plays, I am not entirely convinced that this game needs sleeves. If you didn’t get the sleeves, meh, don’t stress: I don’t think you needed them. (I am addressing this to my friend Kurt who didn’t get the sleeves).

But there is a nice box for holding all the cards, with little dividers that clearly mark sections. And it looks like it would fit WITH or WITHOUT sleeves just fine. Little tip: it may look like some cards are missing (because of missing numbers), but probably not! Some are missing for “future expansion”: Check this BoardGameGeek thread for more details: Anyone missing cards?

There’s a lot of other punch outs for the stations … see below.

There’s a lot here, but it is very cool looking!

Rulebook

This rulebook … isn’t great.

It flops over on the edges, probably get it a D on the Chair Test.

In the end, I had to use the standard workaround of putting out two chairs with the spine in the middle.

There’s a lot of stuff in here, but I also found there was a lot of stuff missing. For example: The travel section discussions were unclear: Do you spend 3 power on each section? Do you have to stop in each section on your way to your destination? The answer to both questions, according to this BoardGameGeek thread, is yes!!! I think you will find yourself on BoardGameGeek a lot when you have questions! Apparently the designer is very responsive on BoardGameGeek if you have questions, he answers quickly … so that’s good. There is also a Discord channel (mentioned when you bring up the app).

What I found is that the App is very good at helping you set everything up! I tended to use the App for all my set-ups and only use the rulebook to look up a few rules. In general, the App taught “most” stuff. A lot of things were in the rulebook (and there’s even an index)! But there was still a lot of stuff missing that you will have to look at BoardGameGeek for … Another example: What does a damage token do? It’s unclear unless you read this BoardGameGeek thread!!

So, quick summary: use the App when you can, use the rulebook with the index if you have to, then use BoardGameGeek if things are still unclear. You might go to BoardGameGeek more than you like.

Story-Telling

Everyone gets to play a different character in this game! The art and style of the minis sets the tone for the game: see above!! It’s very nice art, but with just a hint of silliness.

Each player chooses a character to play: there are quite a number of characters, and they each have their own special sheet. See Muze above … that was my first character!!! I ended up making a copy of the character sheets (using my crappy home copier; it was good enough) so I didn’t mess up the original sheets that came with the game. (There are a number of these sheets included with the game, but you can either print them yourself or just order more sheets from the web site if you don’t want to sully the sheets).

These character sheets are two-sided; the back has your “back-story” (no pun intended). You fill out the little questionnaire on the left, and that informs your Story So Far… (on right side of the sheet). This gives you some items and sets the tone for your hero! This is part of the Story Telling aspect of the game.

There’s also a sheet for the spaceship (I also made a copy as to not mess that up either).

Of course, the App itself has most of the story! It’s pretty cool; it’s narrated with different voices and is pretty funny.

I would say, first and foremost, this is a Story-Telling game. All the other mechanisms in the game support that central tenet. You are all characters being swept up in this space opera!

Worker Placement

I’d say the next mechanism that you feel is the Worker Placement part of the game. The Location book (above) has the location on the left and the Worker Placement spots on the right.

Players look closely at the Icons on the worker placements places and place their dudes there. This is cooperative worker placement, as you are all trying to work together to get certain things done. To avoid too much “analysis paralysis” or “Alpha Playering” here, the players have 45 seconds to place their dudes! (That’s the extent of the “real-time” part of this game. if you were worried about me saying real-time, relax! You can almost even ignore the real-time part … it’s really just to keep people from taking TOO LONG to play their dudes …)

Once the dudes are placed, the right hand side of the page shows in detail what each action does.

Sometimes your action triggers some text in the App; it gives a number (like 133, see below) and you lookup that entry in the App!

You spend a decent amount of time here on the Worker Placement pages. It wasn’t until my third game that I realized that the Combat also happens using the Worker Placement system …. what? Yep! You head to a special page where you are in “Combat!” Your actions move the ship (so enemies are in view), fire guns (port, starboard, ahead), or even work the ship to repair damage!

This Worker Placement system seemed to work pretty well, and it’s cooperative.

Deck-Building

A lot of the game revolves around Skill checks … using your deck! (I told you there was deck-building in here!) When you need to make a Skill check (say Muze needs to SNEAK), you draw cards and add up the symbols that match that check! SNEAK needs blue stars and red hands, so Muse has 3 above. To be clear, the more symbols, the better! (You can also use PERK tokens, the little Saturn token, for extra plusses, but you do have to discard those)

There’s also Items you can “hold” between hands, which you can choose to “help” in your Skill check. That’s kind of a neat gizmo in the deck-building mechanism.

At certain times during the game, you have a chance to add cards (or cull) you deck based on the actions you take! There’s a nice set of 4 improvement card (above the the book, see above and below) that you can choose from! I mean, it’s deck-building: you have to be able to improve your deck!

Campaign

This is a campaign that can last … as long as you want it to! There is also deck-advancement, as your deck build survives between games of the campaign (luckily, you lose things like Injuries that can clog your deck).

So, when you finish your current game, you can just be done, or save off the game to play again later! Nominally, your first full adventure (spanning many games) will be paying off the loan for your ship!

Bag-Building

Even though there is deck-building in here (a deck for each character), there is also a bag-building portion! See the bag in the bottom right corner above!

When you travel through space, you typically pull tokens from the bag to see “what happened” as you travel through space!!! (See the tokens you can pull above). Generally, travelling through space is tough on your ship as you take little bits of damage as you travel.

You can take time at Space Ports and other places to “Work the Ship” to help fix it back up (putting tokens back in the bag). It’s not a huge mechanism in the game, but it is important to be aware of what’s in the “travel bag” and try to keep it cleanish so that you don’t take too much damage as you travel. The bag also controls threat, which is how the game can end … poorly.

Star Trek

I said there was some Star Trek vibe in here as well … there is! There are 6 “positions” of the ship that must be manned by the characters! One player is the Engineer, one player handle Logistics, … Operations, Science, Navigation and Security! In a game with fewer players, some players will have to man multiple stations!

This reminds me of the characters sitting around the bridge of the Enterprise, with Spock manning the Science station, Worf manning the Security station, and Paris manning the Navigation station! (Look, I didn’t say WHICH Star Trek …)

We’ve already seen this “station” idea in Forgotten Waters (see our review here) and Freelancers (see our review here)! Thematically, it worked great in Forgotten Waters (as pirates worked together to man the “stations” of a ship), and less so in Freelancers.

Thematically, it works really well here too. Basically, the stations help keep everyone involved in running the ship and contribute to the theme: we are flying a space ship together!

Pickup And Deliver

One of the main activities in this game is pickup-and-deliver: you are a space-faring crew wandering the stars, looking for adventure, but usually you are delivering stuff to make ends meet!

The Jobs you get (above) inform where you go on the star map (see below) by marking them with little waypoint markers.

The yellow waypoint marker is the yellow job (Escort Shipping Barge). This pickup-and-deliver mechanism sort of guides were you go in the game. If you don’t like pickup-and-deliver, you might still like this game, as there are so many other mechanisms in the game. If you do like pickup-and-deliver, then you will be happy.

Solo Play

So, Wandering Galaxy embraces the solo player! (Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law!). I am surprised a little because the previous games in this series (Forgotten Waters and Freelancers) supported solo mode, but they were bastard step-children solo modes that were only supported by consulting the some arcane rules on the web site! Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little when I say that, but Wandering Galaxy really does embrace solo play.

The rules and the App support solo play as a first-class mechanism! The app asks you how many people are playing and helps you set-up the solo game in the normal flow!

The solo player still operates one the main characters: see above as I operate Muze … (notice I made a copy of the sheet…)

…. but the solo player gets to control two Sidekicks (see Bugs and Tress above). These Sidekicks aren’t “full characters”, but they are much much easier to operate. Normally, I don’t like solo rules that go too much outside the normal flow (I usually prefer to play multi-handed solo), but the app was so helpful in setting this up and getting to solo play that I didn’t mind!

So, when the solo players does Worker Placement actions, the solo player plays his player, and the two Sidekicks as well.

This means the solo player is also controlling all six stations! Interestingly, you still have to assign one station for each of Bugs and Tress. See above as Bugs and Tress each have a station (to their left).

See above as I have the 6 stations, my character Muze, Bugs and Tress, the Worker Placement book, the map of the Galaxy and the App open! Whew!

And then the solo player still has to manage the cards (see chair on the left with the card box) and the ship (see the table on the right with the ship)! And, occasionally the solo player must still consult the rulebook! See as the Rulebook sprawls across two chairs …Whew!

… and it’s actually not that bad. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff to manage, but the App takes you through the game pretty darn well. I played my first few games solo, and I had a good time. I never felt like the ongoing maintenance (to keep the game moving forward) was too much work.

Setting up is a bit of work, as is tearing down (see above), but again, the App helps guide you through it. I’ll be honest, the Rulebook for this game looks daunting (with set-up and rules), but let the App guide you and just use the rulebook when you “have to”!

I thought the solo game worked well, even better than Forgottten Waters or Freelancers. I jumped right on and had a grand time. I would definitely play this again solo. I honestly think the App made the solo play that much better.

What about the Sidekicks Bugs and Tress in the solo game? They really are easy to operate: you just use your deck but get slightly different bonuses (depending on which character: Bugs is good at Piloting for example). They kind of remind me of characters on Star Trek you see in the background all the time, but don’t get much development. They aren’t full “main” characters who get their own story arcs … like “unnamed Corporal 2”. For example, when Bugs or Tress would get REPUTATION (a fun way to move a character story forward), they just get a PERK token instead. Poor Bugs and Tress. Maybe they’ll get higher billing in the next Star Trek show. (We only have 13 shows, we need a 14th Star Trek show starring Bugs and Tress!!!) (And yes, I added extra exclamation points there, because that’s how strongly I feel about poor undeveloped Bugs and Tress!!!!)

Cooperative Game

My crew showed up, ready to take the Galaxy by storm! The crew was originally supposed to be a full complement of six, but space sickness and space madness and space baby-sitting caused us to winnow down to just three. But what a great crew they were!! Too bad the spaceship exploded on the pad. But I digress …

Cooperative play worked really well. Luckily, I had played the game solo enough to smooth out some of the rules (even still, there were ambiguities as we played which were frustrating). Part of why this game works very well for a cooperative game is that each player owns their own station, which keeps them in involved as they play! And each player has their own character with their own worker placement token! So, players are always involved (via the station and worker placement) as well as connecting (as they “bond”) with their character, and making shared decisions about the fate of the ship and crew!!! (More exclamation mark for you!!!)

My friend Teresa liked her character so much that she took it home as a souvenir!

We ended up playing a one-off, but once my group regroups, I suspect we will settle in for a fuller campaign. It is nice that you can play this as a full campaign or just a one off.

Sense Of Humor

Just so you know: this game is kind of silly. The story is silly, the voices are kind of silly, and even the first player token (I chose the Christmas Tree) is silly. If you were looking for a grim-dark Star Trek game, that’s not this.

The game has a sense of humor, but it’s not just ALL silliness. You still have to build your deck, make smart decisions, deal with damage on your ship, pickup and deliver stuff, place workers, and generally make a lot of decisions. But the undercurrents of the game … are a little silly.

Even though Wandering Galaxy is silly, it’s still not quite as silly as Freelancers or Forgotten Waters: those games just seem to have sillier stories and sillier resolutions. So, if you were just slightly annoyed by the silliness of Freelancers or Forgotten Waters, maybe Wandering Galaxy is a better choice for you … but it’s still silly. Just not as silly.

You know a game is silly when it brings out the silliness in you! When we performed the Skill checks, we started singing the Lucky Charms cereal theme songs! “Blue Stars, Yellow Eyes, Purple Brains! Frosted Lucky Charms, they are magically delicious!”

Entry Book

Some of you might have been very non-plussed by the necessity of the App in this game. Well, if you like reading text from books, there are Entry Books available! The Entry Book isn’t QUITE done at the time I received my copy, but it will be. In the meantime, I did pickup the the Forgotten Waters and Freelancers Entry Books (those were part of the Kickstarter).

Basically, all the reading and entries that the App does is encapsulated in the Entry Book. There’s something kind of nice about having a “backup” for this: I have had some games where the App goes dark (Rising 5, I am looking at you); with this Entry book, you can always still play the game if the App goes dark.

My friend Joe actually prefers the Entry Books: he uses these games for his English classes, as it encourages reading out loud!

What I Liked

Supports Multiple Players Well: the game really works well with many player counts. The station system helps keep everyone involved, even at higher player counts. I am glad to see the Solo mode as a first class object.

Story: Really, this game is all about the story. How do you want your adventure in space to proceed? Life is what happens when you are making plans, especially in space! Every player is involved as they explore, but generally the story just unfolds and everyone is along for the ride. If you want to play a space opera rather than watch one, this is a good choice.

The App: Despite the app not being quite done (some of entries didn’t have full voice acting, and some entries were incomplete), the App worked quite well. I think it’s really evolved and easy to use, especially for set-up and first play! (I mean, they have had 2 iterations to get this right). It’s also good to know there is a backup Entry book in case the App ever goes dark …

Sense of Humor: I really like the silliness in this game. It’s not quite as funny as Freelancers (which was much sillier) or Forgotten Waters, but it was funny. Caveat Emptor: you may not like the silliness.

What I Didn’t Like

Ambiguity: By far the biggest complaint is the ambiguity in the Rulebook. There’s just too many places where things are NOT well specified. We’ve mentioned at least three things in this article alone where we had to go to BoardGameGeek to find the resolution! The game still works, but it’s very unsettling to have just a few too many places where the rules are poorly specified. Some of this is because maybe the game came out early; the App still needs some work, and maybe they will fix-up the ambiguity in the App. Unfortunately, the Rulebook can’t be amended (unless they put up a version 2.0). Just prepare yourself to look stuff up on BoardGameGeek.

Conclusion

I liked Wandering Galaxy and so did my friends! It’s the next great game in the Crossroads games series (after Forgotten Waters and Freelancers). It’s probably the most complicated of the three games, but it’s possibly the most thematic of the three. Be aware that that there are a lot of mechanisms: deck-building, campaign, bag-building, pickup-and-deliver! … but the game feels paradoxically both heavy and light! The game glides along as you enjoy the story, with some heavier mechanisms behind the scenes.

An App is required to play … unless you have the Entry book (at the time of this writing, the Entry Book for Wandering Galaxy is not out, but should be soon (the Forgotten Waters and Freelancers books are already out). Despite the App not “quite” done at the time of this writing, it did a marvelous job bringing us into this world. It even embraced the solo player well!

This is a great light-hearted cooperative adventure for you and your friends! It’s not “quite” as silly as Forgotten Waters and Freelancers, but it’s still pretty silly.

This is probably an 8/10. The only real problem with the game was the ambiguities that kept coming up: If you are pick-up in this game, I suspect you will be looking up a lot of stuff on BoardGameGeek. But, since the App is a dynamic entity, hopefully they can address a lot of those issues within the App itself. Hopefully, by the time you read this, the App will have fixed all those problems and this will rise to a 8.5/10. It’s a really fun game.

A Review of Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread. Part I: Unboxing, Set-Up, Solo Play, And First Impressions After 20 Hours of Play

Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread is a cooperative adventure campaign set in a fantasy universe. This was on Kickstarter back in August 2021, and promised delivery in December 2022.

It arrived at my house Dec 30th, 2024! So, it’s about 2 years late! I mean, I have been looking forward to this for some time: it was #6 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!

Has this been worth the wait? Let’s take a look!

Unboxing: Day 0 (December 30th, 2024)

This is a big mama-jama of a game! It took up the entire delivery box with no extra room! As soon as this game came in, I went to the game room and immediately opened it up!

See the Coke Can above for scale! It’s HUUUGE!

It’s is just chock full o’ stuff.

There’s even a list on the side how to put this back together (I still recommend taking pictures as you unbox) because it’s so big. Oh yes, there’s also a list of everyone who backed the game on Kickstarter. Do you see my name there? (No, I don’t either … that is a tiny font!)

The rulebook is a reasonable size and has great art: it’s right on top.

There’s some punchouts below the rulebook: these are REALLY nice punchouts: they are thick cardboard and very well notated (and readable). These are all tokens that come out slowly as you play: you don’t have to punch things out until you need them (which is kind of nice).

And what’s all this? So much cool stuff!

There are some tokens (red for damage, orange for “wear-and-tear”, and combat dice) as well as some minis.

The minis are HEADLESS! You heard me! No head! See above!

You choose a head that matches the character you choose!

So, if you choose this guy with this body, you can make the mini! This is a cool idea, but I felt like I had to be very careful as a I put the head in … I was kind of afraid I’d break something! They did work, but … just be careful.

There are a lot of boxes in different colors; each color is correlated to a “Path”, or a type of character (Class) you take.

There’s essentially 3 boxes for your Path: the card boxes (below), the Treasure Chests (far right) …

And the long thin boxes (above). These are all for your character!

But I want to end my unboxing the same way I ended Day 0: setting up the card and map decks. These card decks (see three boxes above) control how the game unfolds: the stories, the combats, the twists, the turns … all of the game is in these three decks.

One of the first things you have to do is put the backers (see above) in the card boxes to indicate where different sections start and end.

This is literally one of the first directions in the quick-start: “Insert Dividers” .. see above.

So, at the end of my first day of unboxing, I ended up putting the dividers in. This was … more work than I expected, as the card decks have a very precise way they need to be set up. I think I spent a good 30-45 minutes inserting the dividers (don’t laugh! It’s true!).

There’s also dividers for the maps (which we’ll talk about in the Day 1 section below) that you have to insert. Really! It’s more work than you might expect to put in these inserts!

So, at the end of Day 0, I got all the dividers set-up and the basic game unboxed. Overall, I probably spent 2 hours to get to this point.

Starting First Play: Day 1 (December 31st, 2024)

NOTE: Some of the stuff here might be considered spoilers, as it’s from the Quick Start Guide, but it’s the first things you see, so it’s not much of a spoiler. Feel free to skip this if you want to be completely surprised.

We didn’t focus on this too much in Day 0, but there is a really nice Quick Start Guide (see book above) to guide the players through the game.

This Quick Start Guide is 16 pages long … yes, let that sink in … a Quick Start Guide that is 16 pages! That’s because the rulebook is 36 pages! And yet, the Quick Start Guide does a GREAT job getting you into the game! I spent Day 0 setting up the decks and maps (which is described on page 1 on Quick Start Guide). The next page has the components! The components are interestingly listed in both the Quick Start Guide (see above) and the Rulebook. I mean, a good list of components and correlating text is ESSENTIAL to any good rulebook, so I am all for this!

The next step, which I spent a lot of Day 1 on, is Character Creation (see page 4 of the Quick Start Guide above). This guides you through the process of choosing a Path (Rogue, Cleric, etc, basically a Dungeons and Dragons Class).

I chose the purple boxes, so I am a Rogue! (you actually get to read the summary of each type if you want more info before you choose). The small card box contains a d20, some colored cubes, and cards describing your skills. See above.

The long thin box (above) contains your character sheets (below) … which are all double layered boards!

See above as my Rogue has his skill tree board (left), character board with skills and inv (right), and the the character profile (above, right), and the more descriptive skill cards (above, left).

At this point, you also choose your name, character mini, head (which still sounds weird), and race. See above.

Your Race (I am human, see above) choice also get some special abilities (the Human gets a free re-roll every so often).

This process of choosing characters was really well done! They even give you a hint how combat will work: see how one sheet has an armored profile which armor covering areas?

The next step has you start into the world! This game is combination of exploration, combats, and puzzles and quests! You start on the WorldMap (“the Basin”, see above) and explore, looking for stuff!

There is a REALLY NEAT mechanism for discovering the hexes: the hexes are inserted in, but you can “push” on the right of the hex and pop it our easily, as there is a little ledge underneath the hex! This makes it VERY EASY to pop out a new hex! The world starts unexplored, except for the Exile’s camp! See above!

When you explore a location (like the Exile’ camp), the game will direct you to use some of the maps that come with the game! The maps are LNG (long), MED (medium), SML (small), and BIG (big). See above.

One side of the maps describes the scene with words and text! See above!

Then you flip it to the other side! And then you explore the maps at that Location! At that maps are POI (Points of Interest), FOE (foes, potentially), NPC (Non-player characters), and other stuff! You interact with the place by moving to them (if you start a board with a FOE … you start combat immediately! We aren’t quite there yet!)

Interacting with a NPC (or POI) is basically the same: everyone interested goes to that Location! You get their card and read it! The first NPC you encounter is Guild Leader, Thades!

Then one player “roll plays” the card to another group, and the group makes decisions! See above as the group can ask about the GUILD, the SQUILLS, PRACTICE DUMMY, or LEAVE! Basically, this interaction is kind of like some of the point-and-click adventures we’ve seen before (see our Top 10 Cooperative Point-And-Click Adventure Games)!

And sometimes these interactions will point to a new map, a new card, a new KEY (a way to keep track of open adventures), or other stuff! See above as we head into our first combat!

This game definitely has a lot of combat in it! We are fighting the Practice Dummy!

Where does the little Practice Dummy come from? The Fig Box of course!

Each FIG box has a bunch of closed windows, so we can’t see what’s coming … we can only the window for the mini we want!

That’s right! The minis are all “hidden” until you encounter them! So cool! (Advent Calendar!)

So, at this point, we switch to ANOTHER rule book, The Combat Example book!

Every single Path (character Class) has a different combat example book! See all 6 of them above! That’s right, you have a specified walkthrough FOR EACH DIFFERENT Class (Path)!!!

This is really cool, as it kind of tells you how the character works! The Rogue-like Class (I mean Path) is very much about hiding and laying traps! This 4-page tutorial takes you through one combat with the Practice Dummy, showing you all the different things you can do!

Basically, the combat alternates between the Bad Guys (the Practice Dummy here) and the Good Guys (you and your group).

A deck controls what the Bad Guys do: usually either upping the THREAT level or actually attacking using the current THREAT level! The more THREAT there is, the more intense the attacks by the Bad Guys!

When the Bad Guys attack you, they “hit” automatically (unless you have some mechanism like the Rogue to stay hidden) and do damage based on the die they roll. The Practice Dummy rolls a RED die, and hit you square in the middle! See how the die specifies where it hits?

We saw a similar mechanism for hitting back in Sleeping Gods (see our review here)! This as one of our favorite parts of Sleeping Gods! It seemed like such a cool combat mechanism to have your body “mapped” for hits!

The Bad Guys have a similar system, where they have an array of “hits” and you only kill the Bad Guys if you hit every spot!

EDIT: Some people complained about SPOILERS, so I turned this picture into a link instead; it shows a more complicated monster, but it does reveal a monster you haven’t seen yet. SPOILER in this picture: click on the link if you want to see it
SPOILER: shows a more complicated monster

Later Bad Guys have significantly more spots that contain damage points, so they are harder to kill! (Minor spoiler in the picture above, but trust me, you won’t see this one coming!)

See above as I have taken out the Practice Dummy!

So, I was able to explore a little part of the world and have my first combat! And I was still only halfway through the Quick Start Guide! However, I ran out of time. This was a good 4 or so hours of set-up and exploration and play. But that Combat Guide is SO GOOD!!! I loved that! I really felt like I understood combat after that!

Rewards, Level Ups, and Exploration: Day 2 (January 1st, 2025)

So, now halfway through the Quick Start Guide, I had all day to play on January 1st!! I got my rewards (some experience points) and moved on. Incidentally, Experience Points make it easy to level up and upgrade your character. Let me repeat that: You get to Upgrade your Character!

I was able to explore the Location a little more, and found a neat little cave in the same area. This found me a KEY (think keyword) that allowed me to get off the map and move on to more explorations.

Just like NPC, the interaction with a POI feels like a Video Game!!!

The Quick Start Guide also talks more about KEYS and STATE CHANGES (a way to keep track that you have completed quests). A STATE CHANGE represents something “changed” in the Adventure and the way the card deal with that.

Next, you get to go to a town and heal up. For those of you who have done any Dungeons and Dragons, towns are very important waypoints to heal and get new stuff! In this case, the Exiles Camp also allows you to Level-UP! The back of the Path card has a Level Up Guide!

I chose to make a copy of it, so you didn’t make the pristine cards (you can also download these and print them).

Levelling-Up is a great time for the Adventurer, as they can choose new upgrades to their abilities!

They can also choose a new Skill from their Skill tree (if they have the prerequisites)!

Now, after levelling up (and healing), we are ready to explore the world! The explore deck above is used to tell you how exploration is going!

Basically, depending on what terrain you are traveling through, you may have simple success travelling or some hardship!! See the card above, as Mountains, sea, and sign posts/roads are just a simple travel, but Plains,Grassland, Forest and Ice you become frustrated!

Basically, you may to flip some of your tokens to represent the hardships. It’s not too big a deal when you start your travels, but it’s possible the hardships will start overtaking you if you don’t rest after too many travels! I thought this mechanism was fairly thematic and simple and interesting!

At this point, the Quick Start Guide ended and I was ready to take on the world! The Quick Start Guide takes you through so many of the games mechanisms so well, I didn’t feel the need to read the rulebook!! I learned Travel, Days and Resting, Points of Interest, Non-Player Characters, Combat, Experience, Levelling Up, WorldMap Travel, Location Travel, Town Actions, Floors and Stairs, Events, Character Creation, and so much more!

Exploring the World (Day 3, Day 4, …)

From this point on, I was exploring the world myself, levelling up, and find the stories of this land! Arydia has ended up on my table continuously for about 6 to 7 days. Some days, I would play for hours, or some days it would be just one combat. But I couldn’t bring myself to put it back in the box …. there is a SAVE mechanism, but it’s still a lot of work to SAVE and LOAD it back. It’s just easier to keep it out.

Rulebook

Great rulebook.

It droops just a little, but the rulebook is so well done, I am willing to overlook that.

Honestly, I didn’t need to rulebook (because the Quick Start Guide was so amazing) unless I was looking up a rule! And guess what?? There’s an Index! There’s a pretty good Index on the last page! So, this rulebook delivered and became a good resource when I needed it.

Let’s be clear, this is a complicated game, so there are always questions that don’t get addressed (what’s the order of operations of a combat hit if the last hit damages a point what heals another point? Does the heal happen before the final death?), but in general, I was pretty happy with this.

In fact, the Quick Start Guide and Combat Guide gave me SO MUCH Confidence to just jump in! The Rulebook with its Index worked well when I needed it. This is one of the better documented games I have seen in some time. Kudos!

What Is This? Do You Know What Ultima IV is?

Ultima_IV_box

What is this game? If I had to describe this to someone who played Video Games in the 80s, I’d tell them that Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread reminds me so much of Ultima IV for the Apple II and Commodore 64! If you have ever played Ultima IV, you know what this is! It’s a game where exploration is a major component of the game!

You explore the big map (like in Ultima IV) and the little maps (like in Ultima IV).

Your interaction with NPC and the environment feels like the way you interact with NPCS in Ultima IV! “I am the king of Eros! I am all about Honesty!” “Tell me about Honesty!” The keyword interaction system just feels like Ultima IV!

And the combat, which is an important part of the game, feels a little like Ultima IV combat! You interact on a Grid and move about!

But Ultima IV is all about the Quests and exploration as well!

But, if you are a more modern gamer and have no idea what Ultima IV is, I’d tell you that this feels like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion … with more story and exploration. Jaws of the Lion is a fantasy exploration and combat game with great onboarding … sound familiar? Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion (see our review here), but I always felt like there was too much focus on combat. Sure, there was always some exploration and such, but at the end of the day, it felt like most of the hours you invested into the game were mostly combat!

Possible SPOILER picture, so turned it into a link: Possible SPOILER: picture in a town with a combat yet to be seen

I feel like the little stories and quests and puzzles in Arydia are more … fun? That’s why I make the Ultima IV comparison: the end all of Ultima IV is to pursue the quests and stories, with combat being some part of that, whereas Gloomhaven (all of them) seem to have so much more gameplay focused on Combat.

Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread feels like the board game manifestation of the video game Ultima IV!

Solo Play

So, Aydia: The Paths We Dare Tread has a solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! And guess what? It’s a true solo mode: one player playing one character! (Although the Rulebook does mention that you can play multiple characters, but it will just really slow down the solo game).

This game works so well as a solo game. In a few places in the text, there are slight adjustments for solo games (the RP: Role Play Points, for example, allow the Solo Character to hold more RP than normal), but in general the games seems to scale just fine. Like we said earlier, this game has great documentation, so they few places (like Role Playing Points) where there are adjustments for solo play, it’s very well documented!

Combat seems to scale fine, as the Combat alternates between Bad Guy and Good Guy (one from the party). For example, consider a 4-Player game: in four turns, the Bad Guys goes 4 times, and each member of the party goes once. For a solo game, this balance stays: the Bad Guys go 4 times and the Good Guys go 4 times … it’s just the solo player goes all 4 times! The only thing I worry about is that the solo player might have too few hit points, as a 4-Player games would have 4x the hit points! What balances this out, of course, is that all upgrades get applied to the solo character, so he tends to be more of a superman as he levels up …

Frankly, this was a great solo experience. I have played probably about 20 hours as I write this, and I have really been enjoying this. I like the Video Game feel of exploration and combat.

This will probably make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2025.

2024 or 2025?

This delivered to my door Dec. 30, 2024. I got through “a lot” of the Quick Start Guide on Dec 31, but finished the Quick Start Guide in January 1st, 2025. So, is this a 2024 game or a 2025 game? BoardGameGeek lists the date as 2025! Since it is SO CLOSE to the end of the year … and a lot of people on Kickstarter haven’t gotten their copy yet, I am calling this a 2025 game!

What I Liked

Hidden Minis: The way the figures are only revealed one at a time through an Advent Calendar like mechanism is pretty great. I have no idea what I am fighting until I open the little door from the Figure Box!

The Card System: The state of the world is handled in the three card boxes above. What adventures have you seen? What NPCs have you talked to? Where have your Travels taken you? This system seemed to work so well! Rather than getting caught up in a big book full of cross-references, this card system makes the adventure “bite-sized” so you never feel too overwhelmed by the text! There’s just enough adventure on the cards to keep the game interesting, but not enough text to be overwhelming! (I am looking at you, My Father’s Work as an exemplar game with too much text…).

Quick Start Guide: This guide works SO WELL for introducing the players to the world.

The Combat Guide: The fact that there is a combat guide tailored to each type of class (Path) in the game is tremendous! Each class (Path) has such a different play style, it’s great to see Arydia embrace all the different styles! It’s like having 6 different experts in Cleric, Rogue, Mage, etc! This just works so well!

The Adventure: I love that this game is all about adventure too! The cards present stories and interactions that make this feel like a Video Game! Ultima IV!

Levelling Up: As you explore this world, you get to level up and become better! You choose skills that get better and better, and you may even change direction in your skill tree! One of my major complaints about Sleeping Gods is that you never felt you you were getting better, but just barely getting by (and I had a similar complaint about Lands of Galzyr, but we never reviewed that). Here in Arydia, you absolutely get better, and you feel like you have a hand in choosing the direction! You feel involved as you become more powerful! I just feel like that’s so engaging!

Well-Thought Out: The production is amazing and well thought out. Everything in the game seems to be a well-thought out decision. How does this game go together? There’s even a guide on the side of the box.

Combat: The combat in Arydia is interesting and different, but it’s not the entire focus of the game (like Gloomhaven’s combat is). I like the combat, but I don’t feel like it takes over my life. I can explore when I want, and do combat too!

Resettable: You can reset the game back to its pristine state: this is not a legacy game.

What I Didn’t Like

Overwhelming: Sometimes I felt overwhelmed. When you explore a new Location, you have to find all these maps, then all these POI and NPC, and all these new minis, and set everything up. Sometimes it was just a little overwhelming. Some of this would probably go away in the cooperative game with more people to share the load, but there is a lot of maintenance by the solo player to keep this game going.

Only One Save Game: There is only game going ever. Period. The state of the card boxes represents the majority of the state of this game. You can’t have multiple games going on! We were able to have a solo game and a cooperative game simultaneously running in Tidal Blades 2 (see our review here), but only because most of the state was in the sheets and some cards. Here in Arydia, you can only have one game ongoing.

Conclusion

This solo game took over my life for about one week! I love Arydia: The Paths We Dare Dread! It was definitely worth waiting for (from the #6 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!) even though it took two extra years to arrive! This is a 8.5 or 9/10! This feels like an exploration Video Game that I kept coming back to!

Unfortunately, I can’t say anything about the cooperative game (from 2-4 Players) because I have only played the solo game! As great as this game is, I can’t have multiple games going on at once!

So, now that I have played the solo game and really enjoyed it … I are going to reset the game back to the pristine state (this campaign is resettable) so that me and my friends can try the Cooperative Game! This makes me very sad, as I will lose all progress in my 20+ hour campaign!

If you see a Part II review of this, you will know that I broke down and reset the game to be able to play cooperatively with my friends! If, on the other hand, you never see a Part II of this review ……… well, maybe I didn’t want to lose my progress … and I selfishly kept playing the solo game …

Let’s see what happens!

Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2025!

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

2021:

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

2022:

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

2023:

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

2024:

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

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

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

floe1

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

floe2

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

9. Fable Fury

fablefury1

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

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

fablefury2

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

8. Horror On The Orient Express

orient1

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

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

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

orient2

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

7. Aetherspire

aeth1

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

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

aeth2

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

6. One-Hit Heroes

onehit1

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

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

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

onehit2

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

5. Invincible: The Card Game

inv1

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

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

inv2

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

4. Unstoppable

unstoppable1

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

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

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

3. DCeased: A Zombicide Game

dceased1

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

dceased2

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

2. LA-1

la1

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

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

la2

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

1. DC Super Heroes United

dcu

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

dcu2

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

Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Game Expansions of 2024

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

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

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

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

Honorable Mention: Comic Hunters Cooperative Expansion

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

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

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

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

10. Marvel United: War of Kings

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

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

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

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

9. Thunderstone Quest: Raging Seas and Ancient Adversaries

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

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

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

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

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

8. Townsfolk Tussle: Foul Neighbors

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

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

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

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

7. Detective: City of Angels: Saints and Sinners

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

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

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

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

6. Marvel Champions: Age of Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

5. Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance

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

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

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

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

4. Astro Knights: Eternity

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

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

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

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

3. Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Aeon’s End: The Descent

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

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

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

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

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Day 1: Unboxings and First Plays

Day 1: The Figurines Unboxing

Day 1: Acrylics and Sleevening

Day 1: First Play

Day 1: Missions Unboxing

Day 1: The rulebook

Day 1: Set-up for Solo play

Day 1: Side One of the Mission

Day 2: More Missions

Day 3: Cooperative Play

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

Reactions

Conclusion

Sam’s Perspective

10. Word Traveller

9. Landmarks

8. Adventure Party

7. Message From The Stars

6. Expressions

5. Da Da Da

4. Link City

3. Spotlight

2. Wilmot’s Warehouse

1. That Escalated Quickly

Unboxing

The Rulebook

Storybook

Punchouts

Status Cards

Quests

Destiny

The Map and Encounters

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

House Rules

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Randomness

Conclusion

Unboxing and Gameplay

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

One Ring To House Rule Them All

The Campaign

What Do You Do When The Campaign Is Over?

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Unboxing

Playmats

Rulebook

Storybook

Sleevening

Gameplay

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

Things To Look Out For

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Theme and Comparison to Astro Knights

Conclusion

Honorable Mention: Solo Project PEGASUS Campaign for Marvel United

10. Skytear Horde: Monoliths

9. Batman: Gotham City Chronicles + Solo/Cooperative Expansion

8. NYC: Emergency Room

7. Everdell: Duo

6. Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2

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

4. Marvel United: Campaign Deck. Dark Phoenix Saga

3. Aeon’s End: The Descent

2. Sammu-Ramat

1. Set A Watch: Doomed Run

Unboxing

Rulebook

Story-Telling

Worker Placement

Deck-Building

Campaign