I am very depressed as I write this.  Freedom Five made the #2 spot on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games from 2021!  I was so looking forward to this!  But I find myself very disappointed by it.

It’s not that I didn’t get a lot of stuff: I got so much!  The box arrived at my door October 26, 2024.  Freedom Five was on Kickstarter in Oct 2020, and it promised delivery in Nov. 2021.  So, it’s three years late. And it’s been four years since I Kickstarted it!

There’s so much stuff here: no, they delivered everything they promised.  Well, most of it.  I still seem to be missing some stuff … (A Dice Tower unboxing showed them getting more stuff…)

This is going to be a little different than most reviews I do.

What Is This?

Freedom Five is a basically Defenders of the Realm with Sentinels of the Multiverse theming, i.e, it’s a superhero game!  And I love my Superhero games!

Defenders of the Realm itself is just a gyration on the game system Pandemic: in very coarse terms, Defenders of the Realm is really just  Pandemic with dice.

In Pandemic, you fight disease cubes, but the randomness is mostly in the decks of cards; most players turns are very deterministic and players can make progress against the badness.    In Defenders of the Realm, every fight or check is a dice roll.  Let me repeat that: every fight or check is a dice roll.

Freedom Five is the newest game in the Defenders of the Realm game system.  Every fight or check is a dice roll.

Too Random

First and foremost: this game, Freedom Five, is simply too random.  Everything in the game is a dice check: 
1) Fighting Henchmen (like removing disease cubes in Pandemic: you have to roll dice to get rid of Henchmen! And you frequently can’t do anything else on a space until you get rid of all Henchmen!)
2) Skill Checks: roll appropriate dice
3) Anarchy Checks (which are arguably just Skill Checks)
4) Fighting Villains or Masterminds: roll dice based on how many cards you discard

The problem is that the Defenders of the Realm system is simply too random and frankly it feels out-of-date.  If this game came out 10 or 20 years ago, Freedom Five would have had quite the “wow” factor.  But now, we have seen many games in the Pandemic with dice ilk that do the dice better!  Here’s four more recent games that improve the Pandemic with dice genre … two of them are actually Pandemic games!

1) World of Warcraft: A Pandemic System (see our review here).  This is Pandemic with dice, but the dice are much less random: essentially, all good outcomes!  See above! Some of the outcomes are just slightly better than others.  When you roll, you have a really really really good idea what you will get.  

2) Star Wars: The Clone Wars (A Pandemic system) (see our review here).  The same idea happens here as in World of Warcraft, except the “dice” is one 12-sided die with essentially all good outcomes, again some are slightly better than others (sometimes the hero takes a damage).  See above.

3) Hour of Need with it’s exploding dice! (see our review here). See above! This is one of my favorite dice systems: even if you fail (explosions are successes, masks are failures), you still get a FOCUS token for every failure … which you can turn a failure into a success at a later date! This feels intuitively like you are “learning from your mistakes”! It also makes it so you can still succeed even if you roll poorly! Even if you roll poorly, those FOCUS tokens turn failures into successes!

Given that Hour of Need is a Superhero game, this dice system is perhaps the most relevant here, and we will discuss it more later.

4) Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders (see our review here):  The dice here are similar to World of Warcraft; they almost always succeed, but if you are clever and have flanking or enough FOCUS, you can do better!  Let me repeat that: If you are clever, you can do better!

These four newer games all improve on the basic dice formula; they don’t feel very random and there seems to be a predictable baseline of success which allows you to be smart. Freedom Force feels much more random as you can fail on every die when you roll. You have to roll above a threshold to succeed (just like Defenders of the Realm). You cannot have any sense of how successes you will get, as you have to roll “above” a number, …. but, if you roll all 1s … you are screwed! (Yes, yes, there are dice mitigation methods, but they are limited).

My problem with so many things dependent upon these dice (and almost everything in the game is a dice check) is that Freedom Five is a game that makes me feel impotent and unlucky; I can’t tell you how many turns I had where I simply lost an entire turn (5 actions) when I couldn’t roll anything good!!  In fact, in some turns, I actually caused more problems: many of the Anarchy checks cause problems when you fail!   How is this fun?  You are supposed to be a Superhero and you can’t even take down one henchman?????

There is an old mantra: “I’d Rather Be Lucky Than Smart” … and that mantra applies wholesale to Freedom Five.  It doesn’t matter how “smart” I play, if I roll poorly (which is easy), I will lose.  And that’s the fundamental problem I have with this game: I can’t be smart.  I can just try my best and hope I’m lucky.  Even worse, though, this is NOT a short game.  A game with this much randomness needs to be short, but the first few games I have played have lasted 3 hours?

I don’t feel like I want to play this again because it feels sooooooooooo random.    Right now this is a 4/10 for me. You heard me.   A Superhero game with great components:  a 4/10.

However, there is hope.  See below.

Other Problems

There are other problems I had with the game.  Given that I waited four years for this, I am still frustrated at some of the issues that came up: these issues also contributed to my 4/10.

Bases: The bases of the miniatures should be the SAME COLOR as the type on the card!  And they are not!!! See above as Proletariat is BLUE type, but his base is purple?? Ermine is green and her base is not green!  Looking across the board, I’d like to be able to correlate the Villain to his relevant color!!  I don’t think the colors ever change for the Villains, so this is very frustrating visually.  This is especially hard after coming off of Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders (see our review here) where the minis all had color-coded bases!

Backs of Villain cards need to be better:  When you defeat a villain, you flip his card to show he’s been defeated!  But, you have NO IDEA what color he was???  Why do you care?  Because the BLUE henchmen (who Proletariat was) are easier to defeat and it’s good to have a visual reminder!  But the back of the card has NO INDICATION of what the color of the villain was!  (If it had a color-code base … see previous point … that would work).

Hint: I ended up putting a colored meeple on the DEFEATED side so I could remember which Villain was which color.   See above. (And get rid of the BIO: replace it with instructions what do when you battle a defeated HENCHMEN).

Back of rulebook: There are no player help cards, or Turn Summary cards.  It might have been nice if they put the turn summary on the back of the rulebook. Or symbols or anything useful to gameplay.

Upgrades: When you get an “upgrade” to your deck, THE NEW CARDS AREN’T LABELLED WHERE THEY CAME FROM!!!  The “better Flight” card (left) is from envelope #1.  From now on, I take pictures of my upgrades so I know where they came from.  That way I can reset my game.

Bystanders:  There are 42 bystanders.  Note the Best Friends #1.  You know how unlikely we are to get all 3 best friends?  More untethered randomness.

And some bystanders cause penalties.  Whee. That was fun. In a game where I have so much randomness, it’s good to know some bystanders will cause issues. It’s maybe thematic, but it’s not fun.

Binding:  This binding on the scenario books is UNFORGIVABLE.   You have to have the pages of the book open to see the rules, the end of turn actions, and it’s SO HARD TO KEEP OPEN without overfolding/destroying the binding.  See above.  We saw this WAAAAAY back when we reviewed The Forests of Admiron when we hated the binding on the rulebook.  I can’t keep the scenario book open (easily) to look up the rules.  This is unforgivable; the scenario book should have been a book that could lay flat.

I ended up using one of the unused character boxes to hold it open.  That was a workaround: see above.

Minis:  The minis are just … okay?  I got the prepainted minis … and they look a little soul-less?  See Legacy above.  

Compare the minis to acrylic standees in another superhero game: Tokyo Sidekick (see our review here).  See above.

I kind of think Acrylic Standees with Legacy’s art (see above) would have been so much cooler.

No Solo Rules: I played my first three or so games solo, but there is no acknowledgement of solo rules anywhere in the rulebook!?  I think you can play solo with one character, but I don’t know. In fact, Legacy has cards that affect “other heroes” … so do they affect no one?  Himself only?  Does the solo game change slightly so that they affect himself?  I think the game is “probably” better with 2-handed solo (the solo player playing two characters), but I wanted ONE SENTENCE in the rulebook:

“You can play Freedom Five solo with one hero: the only change is that any hero card that affects other heroes will instead affect the solo hero.”    

I am genuinely surprised there are no solo rules.  The only acknowledgement of any solo mode was a 1-5 Players notation on the bottom of the box.

And the bottom of the box is so hard to read!

Conclusion

Several of my friends have asked me “Are you going to sell the game?  Or can you come up with some House Rules to save it?”  Firstly, I have only played this game solo.  It’s possible the game will get better with more people, as they can maybe (maybe) help mitigate some of the randomness I hate so much. 

At first I thought: “This game was irreparably random; there’s no way I can fix it“.  But all my friends encouraged me to try to come up with some house rules.  Given that I spent $375 on all this, maybe it’s worth a little extra time.   And after recovering from my depression about this game, I actually think I have some ideas that might help.

Right now, Freedom Five is a 4/10.  But that’s only from solo plays.   Come back in a few weeks after I get some cooperative plays, and maybe I try some house rules.  Maybe then I can recommend it?

I hope so. I really really really want to like this game.  As it is right now, I don’t.

UPDATE: I sold it. I couldn’t bring myself to play it anymore, and there’s too much negativity when you propose house rules. Those of you who are interested, I wanted to use the Hour of Need dice system (current failures become future successes) for all dice rolls EXCEPT the four villain rolls! There is a lot of fun when you roll 14 dice to see if you can take out the final Villain! But the piddly dice rolls for Henchmen and stuff, that wasn’t fun; that’s what I think needed the Hour of Need dice system.