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!

Top 10 Cooperative Board And Card Games of 2024!

Wow! What a great year 2024 was for cooperative games! As we put this list together, it felt like any of the games here could have been the #1 game because there were were all great!

Some of the games you might expect to see here might make it on a different list! We will have our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024, our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024, and our Top 10 Party Games of 2024! Check these lists for more great games! Let’s head into our list! This is the best of the best for 2024! It’s so great that cooperative games have really flourished! Now I can play with my friends!

Honorable Mention: Ultimatch

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 10+
Length: 20 minutes

I am so surprised this little cooperative card game didn’t do better! It’s colorful and easy to play! I don’t see many people talking about it, but my friends and I had a great time playing this!

If you are looking for a cooperative game to take out instead of UNO, this seems like a game could fit in anywhere! A light cooperative card game that anyone can play? Sign me up!

This has to make an Honorable Mention because it is such an approachable and fun little cooperative game! See our review here to see if you might like Ultimatch!!

10. Slay The Spire: The Board Game

Plays Solo: Yes (has true solo play, but it’s better cooperative)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 12+
Length: 60-90 minutes per Act

As someone who has never played the original video game, this was a huge surprise! If you like the video game, I think you’ll like this! And if you didn’t like the video game … you might still like this!! This is a surprisingly good game with surprisingly good components! It’s a cooperative adventure deck-building game as players navigate dungeons and fight bad guys … just like the video game!

This game worked so well in so many contexts! It was probably one of the most played games at RichieCon 2024 this year, as I saw it getting played so many times! See above. It also worked with my friends who have played the original video game Slay The Spire, and for my friends who HAVEN’T played Slay The Spire!

This had to make our top 10 list of the year because it was so good! It really is a great cooperative game, as it embraces Player Selected Turn Order and Simultaneous Play at the same time! The only reason it’s at number 10 is just that’s it sometimes harder to get to the table if you already have a game in progress (as cards are stored/flipped and saved in the box). See our review here of Slay The Spire: The Board Game to see if this is something you might enjoy!

9. Union City Alliance: Heroes Unite!

Plays Solo: No (but you can play two characters)
Player Count: 2 to 4
Ages: 14+
Length: 75-150 minutes

This was #1 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022, and it finally delivered this year! Of course I was excited when it came in, but I was wary! Luckily, it was very good!

This is a cooperative deck-building game (a lot of these this year) where players are Super Heroes with special powers and have special cards tailored to their deck! If you like Marvel Legendary, a cooperative deck-builder with Marvel Super Heroes, this might be right up your alley! Union City Alliance is also much more thematic than Marvel Legendary as players are actually Super Heroes moving around a map and fighting bad guys!

The only reason this is a little lower is because it doesn’t have official rules for playing solo (but it seems to work with the solo player operating two heroes), and because it is a little more complicated! This game drips with so much theme that it has to pay a little cost of complexity for that theme! Take a look at our review of Union City Alliance to see if you night enjoy this more than Marvel Legendary! I knowI did!

8. Flock Together

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 10+
Length: 25 minutes per player

This is a gorgeous and very cute game with art by Andrew Bosley. Flock Together is a cooperative Boss-Battler, as players have to battle 3 minor bosses on the way to the final confrontation with the big Boss!

This was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024, and boy was it great! This seemed to hit home for so many people! Flock Together a light cooperative game and it is so easy to get to the table! The art and chicken puns in this game just evoke such joy!

This was another one of the most played games at RichieCon 2024 (see above) as I saw it getting played multiple times! Because this game is so easy to get to the table and evokes such joy and humor, this had to make my Top Cooperative Games of 2024! See our review of Flock Together to see if this might be something you enjoy!

7. Hissy Fit!

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 8+
Length: 20 minutes

Wait, a game about taking cats to the Vet made the #7 position? That’s right! This super cute little cooperative game was a surprising hit! It’s a cooperative game you can take just about anywhere, it’s easy to teach and play, and everyone just responds so well to it!

I haven’t had a bad play of this yet! I have played with my gamer friends, my non-gamer friends, my niece, my best friend, and so many groups and it has been a hit every time! This is a great little cooperative game with a follow-like mechanism that keeps everyone involved the whole time!

In the end, the super cute art will bring in people (see above), but the simple cooperative gameplay (with the involving follow mechanism) and short games of 20 minutes will enchant just about everyone! Take a look at our review of Hissy Fit here and see if you want to take the cat to the Vet!

6. Endeavor Deep Sea

Plays Solo: Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 14+
Length: upto 30 minutes per player

So, I have never played the original Endeavor, but this follow-on (called Endeavor Deep Sea) worker placement game had both a solo and cooperative mode, so I took a chance on it, and it was very very good! A cooperative worker placement game is such a neat thing when it actually works!

Although I liked the game solo and cooperatively, the reason this is higher on the list is that this was a hit for everyone who played it cooperatively! Each player feels like they have so much choice on their turn, so agency is present and relevant, but the discussions for how to achieve the cooperative goals really do elevate the game! It’s a cooperative game where the turns are multiplayer solitaire (which gives each player agency), but still instills a sense of cooperation in the goals!

This was a very thinky and engaging solo and cooperative worker placement game that looks really great on the table! Take a look at our review of Endeavor Deep Sea to see if this is for you and your group!

5. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play two characters)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 14+
Length: 60-90 minutes

This is a fantastic year for board and card games! In many other years, this would have easily been my #1 game of the year, but there are so many good games this year! This is a cooperative boss-battler dungeon crawl campaign game where players play unique and interesting characters in this world of Tidal Blades!

This game is just gorgeous and took up my table for weeks as I played through the campaign both solo and cooperatively! The components are so good and, this sounds silly, but so easy to read and understand the icons and colors! They did such a fantastic job!

The best recommendation you can give a campaign game is that your friends want to keep playing it! I have gone through most of the campaign solo, and I am enjoying playing cooperatively with my friends when I can! See above!

The way players choose a card and then activate all the abilities in the row or column of choice is such a great mechanism! I hope we see this mechanism again in future games! Tidal Blades 2: The Rise of the Unfolders has so many great things (and fixes to Gloomhaven) that I wish I could give this the #1 position, but I liked the next few games just a little better! See our review of Tidal Blades 2: The Rise of the Unfolders here to see if you might like this and argue that it should be #1!

4. Invincible: The Hero-Building Game

Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play two characters)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 13+
Length: 45-90 minutes

Invincible: The Hero Building Game is a cooperative bag-building game set in the Invincible universe. You may have read the original comic book or seen the TV show, but even if you haven’t, you might still really enjoy this bag-building/push-your-luck game! I really enjoyed that no cube is bad on its own, but if you ever draw 5 black cubes, a hero can crash (which is still recoverable). The black cubes are actually good (they are wild) up until you get 5 of them!

There is also a campaign, where each scenario can be just played as a one-shot as well!

Cooperatively, my friends (despite never having seen/read Invincible) still had a good time playing! Sam even mentioned Invincible in his top 10 list at RichieCon 2024 ! I freely admit that the SuperHero nature of this game contributed to me really liking it, but the game is very very good! See our review of Invincible: The Hero-Building Game to see if you might enjoy it!

3. Leviathan Wilds

Plays Solo: Yes (there’s an official true solo mode, but just play two characters: it’s easier)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 10+
Length: 60 minutes

Leviathan Wilds took my gaming groups by storm! This is a game I championed, as it was #3 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024, and boy did it deliver! It seems most reviewers picked up on how good it was!

This is basically Shadow of The Colossus, the cooperative board game! But, instead of “fighting” a creature by climbing all over him, players work together to heal a creature (by getting rid of crystal growths)!

This game works so well because it’s easy to get to the table and has some really unique features! Each player gets to choose a Climber and Class (each with its own deck) and meld them to create a unique deck and personality! The cards are multi-use, and your deck represents your grip! It’s such an interesting and gorgeous game! See below!

My friend Becca (who doesn’t like cooperative games normally) said she really liked this! And most of my friends also liked it! It was hit just about everywhere I went! Take a look at our review of Leviathan Wilds to see if this is something you may like!

2. Sammu-Ramat

Plays Solo: Yes (there’s a couple of ways, either the solo player operates 2 advisors or 3)
Player Count: 1 to 5
Ages: 14+
Length: 60-90 minutes

You haven’t probably heard of this game; it had a very small Gamefound presence, but in the end, it probably should have been game of the year. This game is fantastic: it’s a cooperative war-game with euro-type resource gathering mechanisms! And it’s cooperative and solo! The theme is that players are advisors to Sammu-Ramat, a leader from 811-820 BC known for her wisdom!

In the end, though, this is a puzzle game about how to keep the kingdom prosperous, while still enduring the warlike invaders! How do you handle crisis? What resources do you collect? how do you move about the kingdom to do the most good? It’s such a great and thinky puzzle with almost no randomness to the game (from a few events)!

My friends and I had such a good time playing through this puzzle, but I think I enjoyed the campaign mode best, where you play 5 games back to back using the previous game state as set-up for the next! So interesting and thinky!

I loved this game and strongly suggest you check it out, especially if you like thinky puzzle games! See our review of Sammu-Ramat to see if this might be something you like! If this were any of other year, this would have been my #1, but one other game took almost all my time this year …

1. Marvel United Multiverse/Season 3

Plays Solo: Yes (there’s many ways, but I prefer playing two heroes)
Player Count: 1 to 4 (sometimes 5, depending on the mode)
Ages: 14+
Length: 60-90 minutes

This is kind of a cheat, as Marvel United: Multiverse standalone game comes with Season 3 of Marvel United Multiverse! See above!

Marvel United: Multiverse is the base game that includes heroes from the Multiverse (Loki) and What If? (Captain Carter) and other lesser know heroes and villains.

One of the best new things in the Marvel United: Multiverse game is the Equipment cards! Some of the heroes in the game get some really interesting and choices if equipped! I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the new equipment and its effects on gameplay. See our review here to see if Marvel United: Multiverse might be for you!

Even though Marvel United: Multiverse is out favorite of the Marvel United base games, it’s all the content from Season 3 that made this rise to the top! We spent weeks lovingly going through so much of Season 3 Multiverse!

The Stretch Goals! See the Expansion Absorption Explosion for more details!
The Campaign Decks! Play a campaign with your favorite Marvel comic!
The Inhumans! Play War of Kings with your favorite Inhumans!
Galactus! Play against Galactus or his heralds!

We liked Marvel United: Multiverse so much, we used the Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S location from that box to make our own campaign!

The Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S campaign, using “mostly” Season 3 and Multiverse components took over our lives for weeks as well! See our custom print-and-play campaign of the Project PEGASUS story!

Marvel United has become my favorite game of all time, and Season 3 pretty much cemented it i place! That’s why Marvel United: Multiverse (and Season 3) has to make the #1 spot on our cooperative games of 2024!

A Review of Cyberpunk Unfolds: a Cooperative Escape Room

Cyberpunk Unfolds is a pop-up Escape Room that was on Kickstarter back in December 2023 and delivered sometime in the later 2024. It promised delivery in January 2024, so it was a number of months late. We were very excited to get this, as it was #10 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024!

I think we were SO EXCITED for this Cyberpunk Unfolds because it was another Pop-Up Escape Room game! We had good luck with Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor (see above and below), so we were excited to get another Pop-Up Adventure! A Pop-Up Adventure!

Granted, the Cyberpunk Unfolds is a smaller scope than Doomensions, but it still looked cool.

Let’s take a look! There’s some minor spoilers on the content below (pictures of the game), but it shouldn’t affect gameplay at all if you don’t look too closely.

Jumping In

So, Charlie and Allison are my Escape Room buddies: we have played a lot of Escape Rooms board games together (Unlock, Exit, etc)! See above.

It might seem obvious from the cyber theme, but this escape room requires a phone or an iPad. In fact, you need to scan a QR code to even start the game (see above).

After clumsily trying my phone for a few minutes, we reverted to Charlie’s iPad (see above).

If you play this, get an iPad to play so everyone can see the screen (it’s a bunch of web sites, not an app to download). See above.

Gameplay

The gameplay was a little unexpected, as you interact with some people in Cyberspace almost like a text adventure game! You type in responses, almost like you are playing an old Zork adventure game. See above!

As we played, we were directed by little videos showing us how to open up the Escape Room and get to the next scene. There were a few struggles at the beginning, but it was nice that they actually showed a video showing EXACTLY how to unfold things.

Over the course of 1 night, about 1.5 hours, we proceeded through the Escape Room: we’d solve puzzles based on the current scene and enter the solutions into the “chat” with VIN, which would move us to the next scene.

By the end of the night, we ended up just opening up the puzzle so everyone could see it. It was “cool” that there were scenes that were 3D, but they actually got in the way of everyone seeing the scene! To make it so everyone could stay involved, we just flattened the scene on the table later in the game. See above as we flatten one of the last puzzles.

This is an Escape Room: you solves puzzles based on the current scene and move to the next scene. We don’t want to show too much more for fear of revealing too much.

Reactions

The 3D puzzles and scenes were pretty cool, and we made some cool stuff.

But, in the end, we actually didn’t like this very much. The quote of the night came from Charlie: “There were a lot of awkward points during the game”. Some of the puzzles were awkward and unclear, some of the directions for moving forward were awkward and unclear, and some of the time was spent just awkwardly trying stuff.

There were many times were we would say “Really? That’s the solution?”

You might say “well, you guys are just stupid“. Sure. But we’ve played a lot of Escape Rooms together, so I think we have a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Caveat Emptor.

Conclusion

Let’s be clear; Cyberpunk Unfolds is very playable; there is a help system (so we didn’t get stuck completely), there are some cool puzzles and there are some cool moments. But, none of my friends (not myself) really liked this experience.

There are directions for “resetting the game” … which we chose not to take. We couldn’t see passing this onto another group of friends (see above).

This is not a bad game, it just wasn’t for us. Because it is playable, has a good hint system, and contains some cool moments, we’ll give it a 5.5/10. Maybe you’ll enjoy this more than we did, but we struggled with a lot of points of awkwardness in the game.

Aeon’s End: The Descent. Review After Full Playthrough

Aeon’s End: The Descent (an expansion in the Aeon’s End universe, but also a standalone cooperative game) was on Gamefound back in Februrary 2024 and promised delivery in January 2025. Guess what? It actually got here early right before Thanksgiving 2024 (Nov 20, 2024 or so). That’s right, it’s almost 2 months early! Holy cow! That never happens in crowdfunding land!

I went all-in on the new stuff and got the two expansions* (three if you count XAXOS inside), the mat, and the box!

I freely admit I was on the fence on backing this. I do love the Aeon’s End system and its ilk (Astro Knights (see review here), Astro Knights: Eternity (see review here), Aeon’s End, Aeon’s End: War Eternal (see review here), Aeon’s End: Outcasts (see review here) etc etc etc), but I have a lot of Aeon’s End content already. I mean, this is a great cooperative deck-building game system with a mage theme, and it basically made the #1 Spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Deckbuilding Games!

In the end, I chose to back Aeon’s End: The Descent because I was excited for the new Friends and Foes module which can be used in any game. Not to bury the lede, but I think that new module makes the game that much better. We’ll discuss that in detail below.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a pretty standard sized box: see Coke can above for reference.

If you are considering getting this, I recommend the mat. Of all the mats I have, the Aeon’s End/Astro Knights mats always seem the most useful: look above at how they well they help organize the play! The mat from Conquest Princess last week was pretty good for solo, but not really useful for cooperative play. This mat, for Aeon’s End: The Descent worked so very well in both solo and cooperative contexts.

Just be wary that the mat a little big (see Coke can for scale above) and it’s a little harder to carry around (see below).

There’s a little rulebook for the Friends and Foes module; I think it’s separate so you can use it with other Aeon’s End games easier. See picture above.

There’s a narrative booklet: this is to take you through the adventure with some text. See above.

And the main rulebook: see above.

At its core though, Aeon’s End: The Descent is a card game: see SO MANY cards above and below!

Luckily, these cards are very well organized: they have stop signs cards to surround each deck.

One of my favorite features of this game (and all Aeon’s End games) is that EVERY CARD IS WELL-LABELLED: see above as the Treasure card is from ATD-4-02 (bottom left of the card). If you ever need to put everything back in original order, you can.

Spoiler Alert: I played through the entire campaign, and I was able to reset the entire campaign (sorry, they are called Expeditions here) back to its original pristine state. And you can! See above as I try to separate the cards back!

At its core, each player takes the role of a mage, and his cards become his casting deck (which he has to try to build up using deck-building). See some mages above … and some other ones come out later!

Generally, the mages are fighting a Big Bad! See some above! To win, you usually have to reduce the Big Bad to zero hit points by casting spells to do damage!

Along the way, you make some Friends and Foes, who help or hinder you just a little bit … and more come out as the Expedition unfurls …

There’s a bunch of tokens which you do need to notate moneys, power, charges, and some other stuff!

Generally, the components are pretty high quality, the art is good, and the production looks great. See above.

The Rulebook

The rulebook is .. fine.

It flops over the edges, making it harder to keep open on the chair next to me. It really needs to be a smaller form factor: it gets about a C on the Chair Test. I find myself grumpier and grumpier with rulebooks which are huge when opened up. At least it does sit flat.

The Components page is nice* (*modulo one issue we had with Astro Knights: Eternity: the Component pages STILL doesn’t label the Turn Order cards as coming from one of the 1X decks … you might find yourself searching in vain, until you open up all the 1A-1D decks).

Set-ups are nice, but if you get the Play mat, you really don’t need this section.

Generally, this was a good rulebook with good annotations, lots of pictures, and readable text. It even used color to differentiate new rules (in yellow) from older games.

This is a pretty good rulebook, but it had better be after making 5? 10? different versions of Aeon’s End. Although there is still one quirk in the solo rules … see later below.

Gameplay

I always forget HOW AMAZING the Aeon’s End games are for that first set-up! Aeons’ End: The Descent is no different! See above and below as the sheet that comes with the box helps you quickly unwrap and set-up your first game!

If I ever get an Aeon’s Box in the mail, I am never worried about my first set-up*, because it always goes so well!

I don’t want to say too much about gameplay because we’ve discussed it before in previous reviews. Also, there are a lot of great videos on the internet if you want to see how it plays. But I just want to say, there are a number of new mechanisms and somehow, they keep squeezing new ideas out of the Aeon’s End system! Every game in the Expedition has a new “angle” or “mechanism” that keeps the game fresh! A new Mage? A new weird way to defeat the Big Bad? Somehow, Aeon’s End is still fresh after all these years!

Friends and Foes

Without a doubt, my favorite new thing about Aeon’s End: The Descent is the Friends and Foes module. Basically, two new characters become embroiled in your story: a friend and a foe!

They are so embroiled, that the friend and foe each get their own turn within the turn deck! See above!

Each friend and foe slowly evolves something: the friend is building up something good for the players, and the foe is building up something bad! See above as The Corrosion can add his Draining cards! The nice thing about the friends and foes is that they aren’t too bad; you usually have to make a choice about the goodness/badness every turn they come up! I really enjoyed having that extra choice!

Do you add a few charges to the friend or foe? Do you take some damage to Gravehold to avoid that charge? The players almost always GET TO MAKE A CHOICE: what kind of good news or bad news do you want? The players decide!!

See above as the The Scavanger Foe makes players draw a card and either suffer damage to Gravehold or let the Scavenger charge up!! What do you do? What do you do??

As much as I like these choices, what I like best about the Friends and Foes is that they even-out the problems with Variable Turn Order gameplay. What do I mean by that?

Kickstarter Edition of Aeon’s End and Aeon’s End: War Eternal (with update since I was an original Kickstarter)

Those of you have been following my blog for sometime know that I am not a huge fan of Variable Turn Order: see the blog entry here for A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness. Basically, Variable Turn Order can be too random and cause pathologically bad draws which can make the game less fun. To combat the problems of Variable Turn Order in Aeon’s End (and its ilk), I allow myself a simple House Rule: the Nemesis is never allowed to go more than 2 turns in a row.

It turns out that I didn’t have to use this House Rule in any of my games in Aeon’s End: The Descent!! Why? One of the things we discovered when working with Variable Turn Order in Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze was that the bigger the deck, the less likely you are to have pathologically bad draws! See blog entry for more Discussion here.

Because the Friends and Foes “fill-out” the Variable Turn Order deck from 6 cards (original length) to 8 cards (with one Friend and one Foe), there didn’t seem to be a need to invoke the House Rule!

In the end, I love this new Friends and Foes module for multiple reasons: it mitigates the Variable Turn Order issues I have in Aeon’s End: The Descent, it allows more choice into the game, and it has some really new ideas for how to push Aeon’s End into fresh territory. Not to mention, you can use Friends and Foes with any Aeon’s End game!

I guess I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think the game still needed one slight House Rule: the rules say that the Charges “must go off” when the Charge track is filled (see above). Sure, this makes sense for the Foe, but not the Friend!!! I played several times where the Friend’s ability discharged … and it was completely useless for me!!! But, the Friend is your friend! Ask them to hold on until next round when they activate! This seems like a minor house rule, but I think it feels more thematic and more empowering as a choice-You don’t have to discharge the Friend’s ability just because it’s full.

Otherwise, Friends and Foes is a fantastic module. I probably won’t play without it from now on if I can help it.

Expedition

So, this game comes with a Campaign of 4 Sessions (4 battles): they call this an Expedition (much like in Astro Knights: Eternity … see here). The basic flow of the game is described by the Narrative Book (see above and below).

Each section starts with a TON of text. I have to admit, I was a little daunted the wall of text, until I realized that using the character sheets/mats made it more interesting and visual!

What I did: I found the character mats for each of the Mages described in the text (and the Friend), and then I put them next to the Narrative book! So, as I read, I could correlate who was speaking, who was acting, and who was who! See above! This brought me more into the story, and I recommend the same for you!

After the text sets up the story, the yellow boxes direct you how to set-up the game: see above for instructions on how to set-up Battle 3 (note, not really any spoilers in the set-up).

Most of the special context for the Expedition Battles is in one of three places: The Envelopes, the Specially Wrapped Cards, or the “unspecial wrapped cards”.

The Envelopes typically contain Friends and Foes, a new Nemesis, some dividers, and possibly some new boards. Minor Spoiler for Envelope 3: don’t look too closely at the picture above, but that’s what’s generally in an Envelope!!!

Most of the cards you need come from the special decks: For example, you open 2B at the end of Battle 2!

Or open 1A, 1B, and 1C at the start of Battle 1!

There’s a ton of other decks in the game which just “augment” your game: this allows you to have other choices for your Gems/Relics and Spells.

Although your first game will have a rigourous set of Gems/Relic/Spells (see above), you can choose other cards for these.

Although there are some instructions for reseting the game, I strongly recommend you take pictures (like I did) of all the stuff in the Envelopes: Again, minor spoilers for Envelope 4! See above!

After playing through the Expedition solo (see Solo Play section below), I went ahead and re-sorted all the decks back to their original state! I used rubber bands (I know, some people don’t like rubber bands) to keep them together.

It took about an hour or so to re-sort everything and put the box back to the original state. You can do, but it is a lot of work. I did this so I can play the Campaign with my friends all over again.

Solo Play

So, Aeon’s End: The Descent supports solo play (thanks for following Saunders’ Law). And it has choices!

You can either play true solo mode, where the solo player plays exactly one mage OR you can play solo two-handed. And for true solo, they mention the simple rules “You are your own ally!” (I would have LOVED some better solo play description like this for Freedom Five from a few weeks ago: Oh, Freedom Five, I wanted to love you so much …). In the end, I played true solo: one mage per Battle!

This true solo is interesting, because some variants of Aeon’s End only support the solo player having three turns and the Nemesis having two turns (most notably: the App for iOS! See our Discussion in Seven House Rules For Cooperative Games). This version of Aeon’s End: The Descent seems to let the true solo player have four turns (it’s unclear, because the set-up for the players has rules for 2,3, and 4 players … but not 1-Player? See page 8!). In the end, the defining text seems to be: “The turn order deck is always composed of four player turn order cards and two Nemesis turn order cards” (p. 8, Turn Order Deck).

Over the course of about 4 days, I ended up playing the entire Expedition! Although the game box says 60 minutes per game, I kind of think that’s bogus: I am an experienced Aeon’s End player, and I think I took about 2 hours per game. To be fair, when I play solo, I tend to be more thoughtful and take longer turns.

I chose to use a different Mage for each game: I started with Thraxir, went to Mezahaedron for my second Battle …

Used Raven in my 3rd Battle …

And finally ended Battle 4 with Brama .. the Leader!

Using a different Mage for each battle was absolutely the right thing to do! I got to play 4 VERY DIFFERENT Mages throughout the game! Each play style was very different, and it was fun to try to learn and discover the strategies for each Mage! I had to use Destiny tokens, Knowledge tokens, and all sorts of new stuff I had never seen before!

It was an absolute delight getting through this Expedition. I had a blast!

Although the true solo game has the solo mage advance quickly, I always worry that they may die sooner, because they only have 10 hit points total! At least playing two-handed solo, there are 20 hit points total between the two mages … Luckily, getting too low was never an issue. I don’t know if I just chose well, but my Mages never skirted death! I always worry about the true solo player dying too early because there are no hit point balancing mechanisms (i.e., solo player has 12 hit points or something), but it hasn’t seemed to be an issue.

My only complaint might have been that maybe it was too easy? I didn’t lose a single solo game along the way! And all of wins were pretty decisive! Like I said, I am a fairly experienced Aeon’s End player, so that’s part of it. Luckily, I noticed that every Nemesis does have a “advanced” mode, so if I play again, maybe I’ll do the advanced mode so it’s a little harder …

In the end, I had a great time playing the Expedition solo. I was able to learn the game to teach my friends (see Cooperative Play section below), but still enjoy a full story and campaign! If I never play Aeon’s End: The Descent again, I feel like I still feel like I got my money’s worth. The thing is, I would like to play it again! It was fun!

Cooperative Play

So, Robert, Becca, and Jeff and I played the first game of the Expedition! A 4-Player game!

We ended up winning and generally having a good time!

Becca, who doesn’t really like cooperative games that much, liked it enough that she expressed interest in ordering a copy! I showed her the little catalog (above: came with the game) of all the Aeon’s Ends …

Generally, everyone was able to feel part of the team! But, each Mage has their own personality, and I think everyone felt like they could do something interesting on their turn! Sure, there were moments when one of us “took it for the team” and had a crappy turn, but it was always a conversation! Everyone was always involved, either figuring out their turn, or talking with others!

The only “real” problem was that the game lasted a good three hours! Granted, this is a learning game for most everyone but me, but 3 hours is a lot longer than the 60 minutes on the box! Still, we were engaged the entire time and had fun.

Cooperative play went well, even with 4 people who are all very independent. And none of my friends (except Becca) are really “gamers”, but everyone took to the game pretty well! Generally, it was a smashing success and we had fun.

One final thing: the 4-Player cooperative game seemed harder than the true solo game. I think if we played through the entire Expedition as a 4-Player game, the game would have been much more challenging. The game just seems harder with more people.

“Emergency Sleeving!”

You don’t have to sleeve the game, but you really really really should sleeve the Turn Order Deck (see above). Why? You touch the Turn Order Deck every turn! I didn’t sleeve my Turn Order Deck in the original Aeon’s End, and it got a little grody.

Just as we were starting the Cooperative game, I remembered how “grody” the Turn Order cards, so we had to have an “Emergency Sleeving!!!!”

Okay, you may now resume your regularly scheduled program.

What I Liked

The Campaign, er, Expedition Story: Once I got into the Expedition, I enjoyed the story. I needed the graphic support of pictures of the characters to jumpstart me into the story, but once I got into it, it was surprisingly enjoyable. And maybe even a little moving?

The Length of the Expedition: I liked that the campaign was only 4 Battles: it seemed like just enough to be achievable. It wasn’t too long to drag on, nor too short to leave me wanting more. I said the same thing about the campaign in Astro Knights: Eternity: 4 Battles seems just right!

Friends and Foes: I adored the Friends and Foes addition. It not only fixed the Variable Turn Order problems (or at least strongly alleviated the issues), but also added some extra choices to the gameplay. Overall, this module is a major win for the Aeon’s End system, and may now be a necessary module moving forward.

Still Fresh: Everything seemed “fresh”: the new Mages, the new Nemeses, the Friends and Foes, the new Gems/Relics/Spells, the new mechanisms (Knowledge, Destiny, etc)! Somehow, even after 8 years since the original Aeon’s End, all this content still seems fresh!

New Narrative Booklets: I like that the Narrative Booklets and the Expedition mode gives you an “excuse” to play through all the content. I like this idea! An excuse! It sort of went under the radar, but this also included Narrative Booklets for both the original Aeon’s End and the Aeon’s End: War Eternal. If I need/want an excuse to playthrough those games again, I have it! I think it’s really cool that Indie boards and cards “retro-fitted” the Expedition onto the original games!

Standalone: Were you always curious abut Aeon’s End but were turned away because of something (maybe Variable Turn Order)? Maybe you found the Friends and Foe module alluring? Maybe the idea of a just-right campaign is alluring? You do NOT have to get all the other Aeon’s End content … you can just get this standalone game and be very happy for a while!

What I Didn’t Like

Wall of Text: I grew to like the story that came out, but that wall of text from the Expedition booklet is very daunting; I suspect it will actually turn some people away. I would have considered putting in some relevant pictures in with the next, or at least “suggested” that players keep out the Player Mats so they can have pictures of the characters as they interact.

Friends Ability Activation: I really think that the players should allow the Friend to activate abilities with a little more choice; right now they friend “must” discharge all their charges and activate their ability even if it’s not useful. These seems against the theme; they are our friends, why can’t we work with them so they activate their abilities at better times? This is my only real complaint in an otherwise wonderful Friends and Foes module.

Rulebook and rules: The Rulebook and Narrative books are pretty good, but have a lot of weird discrepancies! Why is one-player set-up not mentioned in the Turn Order Deck section? Why are Treasures not emphasized more? It’s one page in a floating box you will miss on your first read! The set-ups in the Narrative book seem a little … spartan? There needs to be more emphasis that we can choose Gems/Relics/Spells between Battles! And the Turn Order cards are referenced in the Components but “hidden” in the intro decks … it needs a slightly better sentence there.

These are all minor things.

Conclusion

I am not quite sure where I come down on Aeon’s End: The Descent, because I liked it so much! The Friends and Foes module, for me at least, is always necessary for any Aeon’s End game I play from now on! My friends loved this game, even the non-gamers! The cooperative experience has always been very strong in Aeon’s End: my plays with my friends accented how well it works!

My solo games during the Expedition were so much fun, they will probably make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

Aeon’s End: The Descent breathes new life into the Aeon’s End system. I loved it. I think I will give it an 8.5/10 or maybe a 9/10. I don’t know, maybe even a 9.5/10? It was such a great experience both solo and cooperatively!

My only question: should it make my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024 (because it’s a standalone game) or my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 (because it expands other Aeon’s End games)?

An Odd Little Duck! A Review of Cyber Pet Quest!

Cyber Pet Quest is a cooperative boss-battler campaign game. This game was on Kickstarter back in April 2024, and it promised delivery in October 2024. My copy arrived late October just before Halloween, so it arrived right on time! Congratulations to Dead Alive Games for shipping on time!

My version is the deluxe version with lots of little Kickstarter extras (see above).

This is a smallish game, but it still has a 6+ chapter campaign game contained therein!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a small game: see the can of Coke for perspective.

Yet, there’s quite a bit crammed into this box!! See above! So, what is this game all about?

Players each take the role of the cyber pets (above, left-to-right): Roman the Canadian Goose, Clay the Australian Cattle Dog, Freya the North American Racoon, and Jane the Bionic Cat!

You can choose to pick up the pet minis, but I prefer the wooden meeples that come with the game (much like Run Run Run! from a few weeks ago!) Wooden meeples for the win!

Players embark on a 6+ campaign (starting with chapter 0 to get you acclimated) working together to find their master! The campaign is all documented in the little book that comes with the game. It’s a tiny but long (at 108 pages) book describing the rules and the campaign.

Each cyber pet is actually quite different! The cards (above) describe the differences: how many Dodge dice, how many hit points, what actions you can take and their costs, and their special powers! If you look closely, you can see that each pet is very different than the others!

For example, see above for the Actions of Freya with their cost!

Each cyber pet gets a nice dual-layered board for marking energy, luck, hot points, and “sneak status”.

On a cyber pet’s turn, it is either sneaking (metal name token above turned upside down) or in AGGRO mode. When sneaking, most things cost more energy (except for healing which is cheaper) and that pet can’t attack! When the pet has the AGGRO token (bigger metal token), it may attack … but the bad guys are naturally drawn to it AND it takes one more damage from them! Choosing when to sneak and AGGRO is an important strategic part of the game!

There are bad guys to fight: this is a boss-battler after all! The bad guys are the red, green, blue, yellow and BIG BOSS pink meeples! See above!

You generally have 4 CyMS (Cyber-Memetic Sociopaths) … these are generally “the minions” of the big bad boss. See above as we choose 4 for the start of the game! (That dual layer board with the CyMS is the top of the box. …. what??)

Each Chapter on the campaign happens in a group of Location cards: See above for the apartment (where the cyber pets live and start on space 1).

Each Location generally has some items of interest (like the Massage chair) where you have to “interact” or “look at it” to activate it!

Once the cyber pets get comfortable with the mechanics of the game (chapter 0), the CyMS come out! See above as the cyber pets try to get out of the apartment with the CyMS chasing them!

Over the course of the game, you get many things to help you in your quest to find your master! Sometimes you get Items like above (which are one shots) …

Or you may get extra powers that help you! See above as Roman gets a Level 2 power!

There’s also “Charms” which are permanent items that are usually powered by the “luck” resource.

Finally, each cyber pet levels up as they get further into the campaign See above as Roman is on Level 3 … which influences his hit points, powers, and actions!

At the end of most chapters, the pets get some kind of upgrade, and usually it’s a choice! Level up the character card? Get a charm? Get one of two powers? The pets really do feel like they get better as you play!

This is a boss-battler, so there will be big-bad bosses that you fight long the way! See above for the bosses you may encounter!! The story has a few turns along the way, so you may not see all the bosses on your first play-through!

In the end, the components are a little small so they can fit in the smaller box, but they are all well-labelled and very readable I have played through at least one full campaign, and I never had a problem with the smaller components: they are quite nice for this little game. The theme is a bit odd with cyber pets. And the game is surprisingly small. So, this is an odd little duck of a game! (EDITOR: maybe better said, this is an odd little goose … since Roman is a GOOSE not a duck …)

Rulebook and Campaign Book

The rules and campaign are all found in this little spiral bound notebook of about 108 pages (yes, 108 pages!). See the Coke can above for perspective: I wanted to point out how little the rulebook is!

This is about a B or B- on the Chair Test: I can leave the rulebook open on the chair next to me while I am playing , but the form factor is just a little too small; the font is just a little too small to be well-readable. Since the spiral notebook stays open, we leave the grade in the “B” region, as it is still very usable.

Now, the rulebook doesn’t have an index or glossary (booo!), but it does have a nice Table of Content (see above).

The rulebook is replete with Story! It starts off with a nice intro (see above), and continues a story (I should hope so with 108 pages of rules and campaign!).

Although there are pictures of most of the major components, there are aren’t a lot of pictures of set-up except the one above. There were MANY MANY time where the rules referred to some component, and I just had to guess which it was (I found the sleeper components, I think I found the Horde token, but I never found the Hack tokens).

The rules were okay. There were a lot of time when I really wish there had been further elaborations of some of the rules. Many times, I just make the best call I could knowing the basics of the game.

There’s a lot of cute story here, the rules are pretty good at getting us going, but there were just too many times when things were underspecified (which token? Explain this rule please?) so I can’t call this this a good rulebook.

It was adequate to pretty good. I was able to play the game and move forward quickly most of the time.

Solo Rules

So, Cyber Pet Quest does support solo play! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!)

Unfortunately, the solo mode for Cyber Pet Quest is “play and operate all 4 Cyper Pets!” In fact, at any player count, all 4 Cyber Pets must be in the game at the same time!

Some of you might remember Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles from earlier this year: it’s solo mode also has the players operate all four characters at the same time! See above!

It’s not that uncommon to have the solo gamer play all four characters: recall that both X-Men: Heroes Resistance and Marvel Zombies: Hero Resistance also have the solo player play all four positions! See above.

In Set A Watch, although we initially had our reservations about the 4-character solo mode, it really grew on us and became the default way we played the campaign game Set A Watch: Doomed Run! See above. This is because the Set A Watch characters are simple enough that it’s not too much work to context switch between them.

Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance is harder to play solo with 4 characters because the characters get more and more complicated as the game goes on.

Cyber Pet Quest sits somewhere between Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance and Set A Watch. At the beginning of the campaign, it’s pretty easy to context switch between the Cyber Pet characters as they don’t have too many powers, items, charms or actions. So, the initial games are easier to play. But later in the campaign, after each character has levelled-up significantly, each character has a wide array of Powers! Charms! Actions! Each character gets MUCH harder to play, as there so much to do!

See above as the characters have so many cards in the final game: Powers, Charms, Items!!! I admit, the sheer amount of options for each character does get overwhelming … BUT … as the solo player, I have been playing and upgrading the characters by myself! It’s gratifying to see all the characters get better. I think since they have been levelling up gradually (between campaigns), it doesn’t feel that bad. I think it’s actually harder in Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance to deal with the powers creep as the characters go up quickly in the same game! At least with Cyber Pet Quest, you have a chance to become familiar with the new powers/abilities between games.

Still, there is a lot of context switching between characters as you play. I can recommend playing the first Chapter 0 solo to see if you think you can handle this 4 character solo mode; even if you don’t like this solo mode, the Chapter 0 solo mode makes it easy to learn the base mechanics to teach your friends.

I have to say, despite the complexity of the 4-character solo game, I had fun! I found myself playing through the entire 6+ campaign game in a solo mode last weekend! Wait, what?? It so easy to play each game, it was fun to level-up, it was interesting to see what happened next. I must admit, I am a little surprised I ended up playing the entire campaign solo last weekend! But I was having fun! And the fact that each chapter is under an hour contributed to that.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative mode is a little bit more fun than solo mode: for one, you have more people controlling the 4 Cyber Pets! Above, Teresa and I split up the Cyber Pets so that she was operating two (Roman and Freya) and I was operating two (Jane and Clay). I do think it’s interesting that we got very invested in our characters; so much so that we really did know them by name!

This is a light cooperative campaign, where cooperation seemed to happen pretty naturally. Clay was VERY good at taking out the CyMS, while Freya was VERY good at dealing with items and passing them around. Jane was the mover, getting to far-away stuff and distracting the CyMS. And finally good old Roman was good at doing a little bit of everything! We focused on each pet’s strengths and naturally felt empowered and potent as we moved around the apartment.

The game is light and fun! I suppose the best recommendations we can give this game is

1) I am playing it again cooperatively EVEN though I have already gone through the entire campaign!
2) We are planning to play more games (cooperatively) in the future

In a family situation, I can see this “4 characters” working out okay! Maybe give the “favorite” character to the little ones (Teresa really liked Roman, so she got Roman), but they can still give input as how the rest of the pets work. In other words, assign the pets in the way that brings the kidlets in the most! And the “adults” can just make sure the game stays on track!

What I Liked

Game Length: Even though this is a campaign game, I like that each chapter feels “doable” in under an hour. The game box says the game is 30-45 minutes and that’s about right! (Oh! And you can jump into any single game of the campaign if you want a one-shot! There’s a nice page that describes “get theses upgrades for set-up if you just want to play a single session!”)

Sense of Humor: This game is kind of light and fluffy; it has a sense of humor! See above as one of the cards is Red Dog Energy! And there is a Cat Videos on the Internet item as well! This is a campaign game, but it’s light enough that the game never feels “overwhelming”. It just kind of fun.

Readable: I was very worried, since this game was so small, that the components would suffer readability issues. Although I wish the rulebook was bigger, in general, everything was readable at the small size!

Story: The story is quite cute and keeps you in the game. It’s a light story, but still engaging.

Upgrades: At the end of each chapter, there are SO MANY ways you can get upgrades! Charms! Powers! Levelling-Up! And you get choices: Level 1 or Level 2? Side A or Side B? It feels really great to be moving foward and making so many choices! We saw a lot of this same feeling in Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders from a few weeks ago!

Cooperation: There were a number of mechanisms in the game that encouraged cooperation. The Pet Collars that you got in the very beginning allowed Cyber Pets to do extra stuff, but only if they were close to other pets! This made for interesting tensions! And many times, there were things to interact with that required TWO cyber pets in the same round to do something! I liked that! It felt like the pets were cooperating to get stuff done!

What I Didn’t Like

Underspecified: As the campaign gets further and further along, it feels like there are more and more places where the game needs a little more elaboration/specification. The final villain you fight has some real questions about how to operate him (Do you round up or down when you halve? How many hit points does he have?), and these kind of questions came up more than they should have during the game. As an experienced gamer, I know when to just make a ruling and move on. But I worry a family-friendly game like this might cause problems for families that aren’t as comfortable with under-specificity. Caveat Emptor.

4-Character Solo Mode: Although I had fun playing the solo mode, the fact that you always have to have all 4 Cyber Pets in play isn’t ideal. I made it work, I had fun, but it’s hard to recommend the solo mode with a 4-character mode.

Left-To-Right: Every set of Locations had the Cyber Pets move left to right. The topology was fixed in a straight line, and the pets almost always had to move all the way to the right from the left. Although this kept a lot of rules simple (with the AGGRO token and CyMS movement), it felt a little “constricting” that every single Location set “moved left-to-right”. It got a little tedious ALWAYS going left-to-right; I wish there had been some more topology to move around in. And I am tired of saying left-to-right.

Turn Order

The gameplay for Cyber Pet Quest has something of interest from turn order perspective: the game play alternates between pets and CyMS! It’s still variable, as you don’t know which pet is coming out or which CyMS is coming out, but it keeps the game balanced between the two! Recall we have discussed Variable Player Turn Order many times here at CO-OP Gestalt (see here for a culmination of that discussion)! The solution that Cyber Pet Quest employs against the problems of Variable Turn Order is the same as one from Adventure Tactics: Adventures in Alchemy: the Static Initiative Invariant. Basically, this just means we alternate between Heroes and Villains.

Now, I have to admit, even though I do like this solution overall, I was worried it might still be a little too random. But, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the game introduce Charms and Powers and Items that would mitigate some of that randomness! See above as the Honk and Bonk Charm gives the pet some agency over turn order! As the game goes on, and the players become more powerful, they CAN affect the turn order!

So, I was happy to see both Static Initiative Invariant here as well as Power/Charms/Items to help the players control the turn order!

Conclusion

I like Cyber Pet Quest. I really didn’t expect to go through the entire campaign solo this last weekend, but I had so much fun playing, I went ahead and finished it! I like heavy campaign games like Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders (from a few weeks ago), but sometimes it’s nice to have a light campaign game (like Cyber Pets Quest) that feels “finishable”: there’s only 6+ chapters to this game, and you can do it in a weekend! I am living proof!

There’s just enough wonkiness with the rulebook being underspecified that I worry non-gamers might get frustrated with the rules. Although there’s a lot of unique and interesting set-ups and interactions in the game, sometimes they aren’t that well-specified. Just be aware that you might have to make some rule judgements in order to move forward.

I think this game is better as a cooperative game, since it’s just easier to share control all four cyber pets with more players. But I still quite enjoyed the 4-character mode; but you have to be aware what you are getting into with all the extra context switching!

This is a fun little cooperative boss-battler for 1-4 players; it has a cute story and a light vibe that’s quite enjoyable. I’d give it a 7/10 overall: it loses some points for some of the rules wonkiness and limited left-to-right topology, but Cyber Pets Quest was an overall enjoyable experience!

Sentinels of the Defenders of the Pandemic Realm of Multiverses: A Review of Freedom Five. Part I: Unboxing, Solo Play and First Impressions

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!

The dice: no bad outcomes! All good stuff!

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.

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.

Wait, What Am I Unfolding Again? Review of Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is a cooperative campaign that was on Kickstarter back in April 2022. This was the follow on to the original Tidal Blades game (which is really more of a head-to-head skirmish game). I knew nothing about the original Tidal Blades when I backed this: only that the components looked really cool. I backed it because it looked like it had a cool solo and co-op campaign.

I went all-in and got the base game (lower right), the stretch goals (upper), and the miniatures (lower left): See above. This is the deluxe version with awesome miniatures!

The most important thing to realize is that this is a standalone solo or cooperative campaign game! I.e., you don’t need the previous game at all!!!

It’s a little confusing because the side of the box says “Part 2” (see above), but this is really just the next game in the same universe! Tidal Blades 2 continues with the ideas of the original Tidal Blades (which was NOT cooperative) but in a solo and cooperative game!

So, in some sense, this is still a skirmish game, as players play cooperatively against monsters in the game. Honestly, this game really gives me a Gloomhaven (see review of Jaws of The Lion here) or Batman: Gotham City Chronicles (solo or cooperative mode: see our review here) vibe! Players move around on a map in a book and fight monsters! You’ll see what I mean more below.

Let’s take a closer look!

Unboxing the Miniatures

As much as you really want to see what’s in the main box, I gotta show you the miniatures first. They are fantastic!

The minis are washed, they are tri-color, and they have 2 sets of bases! These are some of the nicest miniatures I have seen!

The top part of the box comes with the monsters you fight: they are all notated on a sheet (and, eben better, are labelled where they are in the box!!!) at the top of the box.

Wow! The monsters are all bluish and really great! See above! Let’s take a look at a few!

These are pretty awesome! Below the tray with the monsters are the Heroes and Boss Monsters!

The Heroes are light brownish, and the monsters are very purple: see below.

Let’s take a closer look at some Heroes (below):

The Boss Monsters are very purple! See below.

These miniatures are just awesome!

The game also comes with plastic bases for the minis so you can tell them apart. The normal bases denote the normal monsters, and the sparkly bases denote the “mutant” monster (like the Elite monsters in Gloomhaven). The “mutants” are just the tougher version of the monsters!

We also have really nice plastic Fruit and shells (replacing the cardboard from the base game).

See above as the colored hit point tracks match the colors of the base? And the “sparkly” yellow one is the mutant!

These bases really make it easier to tell monsters apart so you can track the hit points.

Overall, the colors and bases are well-thought out and make each entity stand out on the table. See above with some monsters, characters, and a boss monster all in the same frame!

These minis are just fantastic.

Rulebook

The rulebook is quite good. But it has two major flaws.

The rulebook completely fails the Chair Test! See above as it flops over both edges being almost unusable! This rulebook made a fundamental error by being the same size as the box!

Much like Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, the solution is to use TWO chairs, and have the spine of the rulebook sit in between! See above as we can keep the rulebook open and useful! I do like that the fonts are big! And the rulebook is full of good pictures! It is easy to see the rules on the chair next to me … once there are TWO chairs!

The rulebook has a Table of Contents that make it easy to look stuff up! Nice!

The components pages are great, with every component having a picture and being well-labelled!

The set-up is nice (it’s over three pages), but some of the set-up is deferred to the campaign book. See above.

In general, I thought this rulebook was great. There’s a nice glossary in the back (ya), but no index. I’ll forgive the lack of index because the glossary and Table of Contents were great.

My other major complaint (besides the form factor) was that the combat wasn’t quite as well specified as I want. We’ll discuss that below.

Otherwise, great rulebook!

Unboxing the Base Game

This base box (and the minis box) and both pretty big! My friends lifted the main box and were surprised how heavy it was! What’s in this gargantuan box?

See how tall the box is too (relative to a can of Coke)!

If you want, you can use the Foreteller app to read the “plot” as you go: this is a campaign game where a story unfolds and you may want to get some professionals reading it aloud. I didn’t get the Forteller narration … and it was just fine without it (but it does have the option: sold separately).

There’s a LOT of stuff when you unbox (see above); we’ll go through the components as we discuss gameplay.

Gameplay

Each player (1-4 players) chooses a Tidal Blade warrior to play. See the six options above and below.

Each player gets a sheet with their character: see the six above and one (closer, below).

Each character sheet is for recording stuff as your character levels up during the campaign. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is campaign game! Characters will be leveling up; you will be making decisions about how to do that! This sheet will become incredibly marked up as you play…

See above as Caiman has experienced a lot and marked up his character sheet!

On the back of your character sheet are “tracks” where you will make choices about how you use experience points and other forms of up-levelling. To be clear: each character is different! They have a different sheet with different cards and powers that can be activated!

But, what really distinguishes the characters are the combat decks: see above!!! Each player has a different Persistent Power (see above) when they start, as well as a different deck!!! (Well, some cards are in common, but generally the decks are different!!) These decks will be augmented, culled, and clogged as you play! To be clear, Tidal Blades 2 is not a deck-building game per se (as that implies you are dynamically changing the deck as you play), it’s what we called a deck-advancement game. We made this distinction back in our review of Adventure Tactics: See that review here for more discussion of the difference. Suffice to say, your combat deck only changes/updates at the end/beginning of each chapter of the campaign.

What’s even cooler is that when you use of the cards during play, you activate either a row or a column on your board! What this means, of course, is that you piggy-back on our previous turn! For example, if we just played Careful Strike to the board (top middle), we are allowed to activate ALL the actions in either the middle column or the top row! Some actions give you shells (armor), some actions allow melee strike (swords), some actions give you resources (yellow/pink), some actions give you movement, and so one!

As your character takes excessive damage throughout the game, you can take WOUNDS (see bottom right) which clog your board! Now, if activate the last row or column, you can’t use anything from that last space!

This mechanism of playing a card to a row is central to the game! What card you choose dictates your initiative (Stand Fast! gives me +1 initiative), your current turn, and what actions you might want to play on future turns! And it’s really fun, because you feel like you have a lot of choices:

1) Which card do I play? It affects my current turn and initiative!
2) Where do I place my card? It affects which “core” symbols I block!
3) Which row or column do I activate? What previous cards do I want to leverage?
4) Do I want to finish a row with 3 cards? I may clear it, but I get a very powerful one turn!
Each turn is just rife of choice!

Each character also has spirit, focus, and some “shells” which can serve as armor or activate other abilities! Armor in the game is handled by putting shells from your uncharged area into your blocking area! So, if you want to play defensive for a round, you can choose the shells action! Yet another type of choice: defensive or offensive!

Players move around a map of hexes, fighting creatures! (Sound familiar? Gloomhaven, I am looking at you…) See above.

The map books remind me a little of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, as you just set-up the board from a book of maps and go! This map book was the key innovation in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. What’s cool, is that Tidal Blades 2 furthers that innovation!

The storybook is the play area! Set-up is easy! Just turn to that page!

Players move around the map, but the stupid spiral binding gets in the way of the map in Jaws of the Lion! See above.

What Tidal Blades 2 does is very clever! Rather than just one map book, Tidal Blades 2 has two map books (actually 3), but each book is rotated so that the spiral bindings are on the outside! Instead, the middles just touch and make a contiguous surface! See above! The middle of the board, where a lot of action is, in untainted by the spiral bindings! It looks more like a contiguous surface!

It’s really easy to set-up each chapter of the campaign! Just turn the book to the proper pages!

Combats are decided by dice: every SWORD you generate from your cards gives you a die! Red symbols are a straight-up hit, blue CAN be a hit if you have advantage (if your compatriots are flanking), and yellow focus CAN be a hit … if you spend a focus point! And that decides how much damage you do!

Monster combats are similar: all monsters perform the actions of their current card: see above as the mudcrabs move 2 (to the closest character) and then just do 2 straight damage! (This is modified a little by a damage die).

There’s all sorts of monsters with all sorts of abilities! Some poison you! (See above)

Each monster is tracked by a hit point track (see above) with the bases differentiating them. The purple die (lower left) modifies every monster attack!

There’s a lot more to this game, but that’s the “flavor” of the game!

Campaign

Let’s be 100% clear: this is a campaign game! It last about 18 chapters, and each game is about 2 to 2.5 hours (including set-up and tear-down: a lot of your time will be set-up and tear-down).

Each chapter describes in great detail which maps you need, which monsters you fight, and what the set-up is! See the first chapter above! (Minor spoilers above).

There is a story unfolding (pun not intended) about the folds of time. Each chapter begins with some text describing the story (picture blurred on purpose above).

After a few chapters, there will be Interludes which give you a chance to level up. To be clear, there is SOME levelling-up after most chapters, but the Interludes offer significant levelling-up!

At these Interludes, Players choose where to go to “spend” their resources: the market? The floating gardens? It depends how you want to level-up your character. Cull cards? Add Items? Add skills? Whatever you want!

Although this is a campaign, the Stretch Goals pack (see above) comes with 5 one-shot scenarios.

Since this is a campaign, and you have to mark up your sheet, I went ahead and made a copy of all the character sheets so I don’t have to sully the originals. There are enough sheets in there that you “probably” don’t have to do this, but I prefer not to mark up the originals if possible.

Solo Play

So, Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders has two solo modes! (Congratulations for following Saunders’ Law!) The simpler of the two solo modes is to just play two-handed: choose two characters and operate them as-if it were a 2-Player game. This is the route I chose. And so should you!!

If you REALLY REALLY REALLY want a solo mode where you only play 1 character (but then still kinda have to operate some other pets/creatures anyways) with complicated exceptions, there is a second solo mode. I usually eschew complicated solo modes because the exceptional rules are always SO HARD to keep track of! Play two-handed: you’ll thank me for embracing the simpler mode … the simpler two-handed solo mode has NO exceptions to rules; you just play the game they way it was meant to be played.

At the time of this writing, I am eight chapters into the campaign! I have seen boss battles, several maps, several different ideas (jumping, running water, flying, etc), and some really great miniatures! Every new chapter introduces new monsters and new ideas and keeps the game fresh!

Playing two characters is juuuust about the right level of complexity. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, since each character has their own deck with their own unique cards, but since the system is well-described and well-notated (seriously! The icons are VERY intuitive), it doesn’t make it too hard to context switch back and forth between the characters.

One drawback is that there is a lot of maintenance for the solo player: set-up, run character 1, run character 2, operate the initiative track, operate the villains, lather-rinse-repeat, tear-down. This is really where the vibe felt like Batman: Gotham City Chronicles: there’s just a lot of work to keep the game going! But, it’s kinda fun! Everything is so bright and well-notated! The monsters are well-tracked (with the bases and colored hit point tracks), and the rules are pretty solid (so there’s not much second guessing, modulo one issue).

I really like this solo mode: I hope to finish this campaign at some point during the year. I am currently playing two campaigns: my solo campaign with 2 characters and a cooperative campaign with the other 4 characters (with my friends).

I fully expect this to make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024: it’s that good! There are just so many good choices! Where do I go? What cards do I play? How do I level-up my character? The choices keep me involved the whole time, even if there is quite a bit of maintenance per turn.

The solo game took longer to play than perhaps it should: the box says 60-90 minutes but I frequently was at 2 hours; I also tend to like a little analysis paralysis when I play by myself. There’s no one around, so I can try lots of things without fear of wasting someone else’s time.

Cooperative Play

The cooperative experience is just in its infancy as we are only two games in, but my friends still keep wanting to play it! “Let’s keep playing it!” They really like it!

Every player has agency on their turn; the game is just too complicated for an Alpha Player to come in and ruin a player’s experience … there are just too many choices for a single player: the Alpha Player will be too busy figuring out his own turn!! At the same time, there’s plenty of cooperation and players plan when to flank (see below), which enemies to engage, which actions to take, when to defend vs. attack! This has a good blend of agency and cooperation.

One of the things we DIDN’T like about the cooperative game Endeavor Deep Sea (from two weeks ago: see review here) was that the game didn’t “really” have any mechanisms for helping each other too much; players had a lot of multiplayer solitaire going on in Endeavor Deep Sea. That’s not the case here! Even you though you can choose to play multiplayer solitaire, you can also do quite a few things to directly help your compatriots! You can spend shells to allow your friends to re-roll dice (if they run out of re-rolls)! You can set-up flanking opportunities! You can use skills that help everyone within 2 spaces! There’s a number of mechanisms where the sole purpose is to help your compatriots! And that does increase the level of cooperation! Even choosing the initiative order can be an act of cooperation! And THANK GOODNESS there are no Communications Limitations in this game! Just last week, we saw how the Communications Limitations ruined that cooperative game! Luckily, you can talk all you want and work together in Tidal Blades 2!!

The only real negative for the game is that sometimes it can take a while to get back around to your turn (as there is no simultaneous play): players must play in initiative order. Like any game with lots o choices, sometimes a little Analysis Paralysis can slip in and slow down the game. It’s still not too bad, because you can always be talking with your friends or figuring your own turn out while waiting for others.

It’s easier to overlap turns in a cooperative game (like Tidal Blades 2) because you can ask your friends to leave the board “in a certain state” so you can preplan your turn! In a competitive game, you always have to wait until the previous turns are over to re-assess the board every turn! With a little cooperation, there can be much more overlap! And we saw some of that overlap here in Tidal Blades 2! It’s a minor point, but that overlap can make cooperative games (without simultaneous actions) move a little faster.

Overall, this game was a lot of fun cooperatively. It’s a good blend of agency and cooperation, and there are many ways players can help each other. It’s fun to talk and plan with your friends!

Flanking and Advantage

So, this is, at its core, a miniatures fighting game! Which means you have rules for flanking and advantage! If you flank (players surround an enemy adjacently from opposite sides), you can get advantage (which allows you to turn the blue wave symbols on dice into hits)! This is very cool, because it is a mechanism that encourages the players to cooperate and coordinate their attacks! The best results come if you cooperate, flank an enemy and maybe get 50% more hits because you can gain advantage!

If you saw “Flanking and Advantage” and thought “What is this … 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons?” You are not the only one who thought that!!! But, these ideas in this game really do help improve the cooperation: they encourage an easy way to increase the odds of hits!

What I Liked

The minis! You can get the game and just use cardboard standees, but I would strongly recommend getting the miniatures! See above!! They are so well done, with the different bases, the beautiful sculpts, the different colors to highlight the different types! I feel like they really made the game feel more thematic. The minis add to the cost of the game (as you buy them separately), but I think in this case, they were worth it.

Combat Mechanism! The combat mechanism of choosing a card, then choosing where to put it, then choosing a row or column to activate is so cool! Your choices affect your current turn as well as future turns!! This mechanism is at the core of the game, and it makes you feel like you have choices at all times!

Well-done Monsters! The monsters are pretty easy to run (modulo one problem, see below)! The cards clearly specify what to do, the bases clearly denote which monster is which, and it’s pretty quick to set-up a game! Heck, I spent more time putting plastic bases on monster minis than I did setting up the cards! It really is easy and quick to SET-UP and RUN the monsters!

Not too much Randomness! I was very worried that there would be too much randomness with dice deciding combat … but here’s the thing, there’s not that much randomness! There is usually at least one hit per die and sometimes your focus shows (which means you may have to spend focus if you want extra hits). See the dice above! If you roll XXX dice, you will probably get about XXX hits! If you have extra focus to spend, or some special abilities, or flanking (see below), you may need much better! It’s like having a baseline of hits, and you choose (by having focus, or flanking) if you need to do better! I really like this system! I usually dislike the randomness of dice, but how it’s done here works for me!

Easy-to-Read! The components are well-labelled, bright, and have very easy-to-discern icons! This game is very intuitive and easy to read!

The Components! The components (even if you don’t get the miniatures ) are fantastic!! The dual-book system solves the spiral middle problem, the cards are linen finished, the dice are clear and beautiful, and the cardboard components are well-done … just overall the components are a joy!

Cooperation and Agency! The game has many many ways to encourage cooperation, but still allow each character to have their own agency. The card choice mechanism is very intense and full of choice; players are allowed to coordinate if they like (there are no silly communication limits)!! Players must decide who goes after what! Players must decide if it makes sense to flank! But, you can’t really Alpha Player the game because each deck is so different, and frankly, each character is so involved (in a good way) to run! Players will have intense agency on their turn to operate their character, while still having to work together to come up with a plan! And that flanking mechanism I think really encourages finer cooperation: it’s so good to gain advantage, you just need to!

Loot 2.0! In some ways, Tidal Blades 2 feels like it should be called Gloomhaven 2.0. One of the things we house ruled in Gloomhaven was the Loot Rule (see discussion here: Top Seven House Rule for Cooperative Games). Basically, stopping to pick up loot takes you out of the flow as you have to stop and use actual resources to do that. The nice thing in Tidal Blades 2 is that you can a free action every turn to “interact” with one item! So, maybe you can’t pick up three pieces of fruit or five rewards, but you can move by something and pick it up without needing to spend one of your precious actions. Granted, you may still have to spend movement, but usually a reward (when you kill an enemy) comes out right next to you, and you just pick it up! We enjoyed this free interaction SO MUCH more than Loot in Gloomhaven!

What I Didn’t Like

Wait, What Am I Unfolding? I love story in my games (it’s why I like Astro Knights: Eternity better than the original … it has a compelling story!!), but the story and the writing here feels … forced and a little turgid. And I like story! But it felt like Tidal Blades 2 were trying to hard to have their own “surfer-techno” lingo, and it just didn’t work for me. I tended to just skim over the exposition and head straight into the scenarios.

Enemy Movement: As easy as the monsters are to set-up and operate, the AI for the monsters movement is a little weak. There’s some nonsense about “clockwise heading north” in the case of ties, but the description in the text and the picture don’t match (for me anyways). In the end, the final rule for specifying things is done using “Fastest Initiative”: the character with the fastest initiative is the tie-breaker … that tended to be my goto rule! Many times, that was the tie-breaker (when it was really unclear) for us because it just make things easier. Otherwise, the enemy movement phase becomes an overwrought “look at all possibilities”, which isn’t fun. Gloomhaven did a better job at specifying the enemy AI, but at the cost of more rules.

The AI basically works, but if you focus too much on it, the game can become overwrought. I worry that zealots for rules will make playing this less fun as you spend the entire game getting the AI rules “just right”. And that’s fine if that’s what you want, but I think most people won’t love that. Just play the game; it’s good!

Bases didn’t Work? Some of the mutant bases didn’t quite work: the miniature just kind of “slipped” out the base: see the video above. It wasn’t all the mutant bases, and most of them worked, but it was weird that some of them didn’t work!

Reactions

Rich: This is probably a Top Ten Game of the year, both solo and cooperatively! I am keeping my solo campaign alive as I still venture cooperatively with my friends! There is just so much to like! This feels like the next evolution of Gloomhaven! This is a 9.5/10 for me. I just wish the AI was better and the story was better: that’s what keeps it from a 10/10.
Sara: I really liked it! Let’s keep on playing it! It’s probably a 7 for me!
Andrew: Ya! Let’s keep playing it! A 6.5 or 7 for me!
Teresa: I loved the minis and how the game worked, 7 or 8 for me! It was like a better Gloomhaven, and not nearly as dark!

Conclusion

Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders is a fantastic game! I still am not quite sure what we are unfolding (I think we are unfolding space and time), but there are so many things to love in this campaign miniatures skirmish game! The components are first-class, the miniatures are stellar, the cards are easy-to-read and intuitive, the combat system has so many great choices, the leveling up is fun, and the campaign is really interesting! In some ways, Tidal Blades 2 is the next evolution of Gloomhaven as Tidal Blades 2 evolves the map book ideas, the Loot rules, and the combat with the row/column mechanism!

The card “activate column/row” mechanism works so well, that I think it elevates the game significantly. It’s such a unique mechanism and makes the player feel like they can do so much! I expect to see this mechanism in upcoming games because it just works so well.

This is a 9.5/10 for me, with my group rating in highly with 7s and 8s as well. This will make our Top 10 Solo Games of 2024 and the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024!

RichieCon 2024 and Top Interesting Games Since Last Year!

RichieCon 2024 has come and gone! This year there were some twists and turns, but everything worked out in the end! For those of you who don’t know: RichieCon 2024 is the gathering of Richie and his friends … honestly, it’s just an excuse to play games every year! It’s not even really a Con, but we like to put a little pomp into it to make it sound more bombastic. This is actually the 10th year of RichieCon, but only the 9th actual convocation (as we skipped a year for CoVid).

This year’s RichieCon 2024 token is cool: it’s actually hollowed out and you can only see the year and RTS symbol if you hold it up to the light! See above! You need the Token to get into the Con, and it can only be obtained through “secret means!” (Find me or Max in the Hall). Thanks to Josh M. for designing it and Max M. for printing it!

The name RichieCon is a bit of a joke: I asked my friend Kurt many many years ago:
“Hey, you wanna go this board game convention that’s far away?”

Kurt said, “Man! That’s like a $1000 plane ticket and then a $1000 hotel bill! Why don’t you host your own convention and call it RichieCon! It’ll be a lot cheaper!”

And thus, RichieCon was born.

PreCon

The week before RichieCon is a lot of putting boxes in boxes. To have some semblance of order, I try to put related games in bigger boxes and label what’s in there. See the “hot games” box above!

Sam and Teresa and Sara usually come over and help me put everything together. A big thanks to those three for all their help this year! See some of the boxes we put together above!

RichieCon Day 0: Secret RichieCon House

RichieCon has a lot of out of town guests that come into town a day early (Friday) and randomly show up with no place to go. I learned many years ago that it’s nice to have a “secret” RichieCon house for out-of-town guests to hang out on Friday before the Con.

The “secret” RichieCon house is modeled after the out-of-towners dinner you have for out-of-town guests for a wedding. It’s a way to say “thank you” for coming from so far away! This year, we had guests from Portland WA, Austin TX, Denver CO, Phoenix AZ, Las Cruces NM, Albuquerque NM, and from as far away as Madison WI!

RichieCon Day 1: Morning Pivot!

RichieCon Day 1 hit a scheduling SNAFU, so we had to pivot and hold RichieCon Day 1 partly at the “secret” RichieCon house! I guess it’s not so secret anymore!

Thanks to everyone who helped me move boxes and boxes and boxes of games to the “secret” RichieCon house! I couldn’t have done it without Sam, Charlie, Jeremy, Joe, Kurt, and a bunch of other people I didn’t see moving boxes because I was so busy! RichieCon is a community effort!

RichieCon Day 1: Part II! This Time, It’s Personal

Once we got into the Rec Center for the second half of the day, many games were played!

RichieCon Day 2: More Games!

Sound Mitigation

If you have ever been to a board game convention, you know there is a lot of background noise. We had some issues last year with the background noise being too much, so we tried some sound mitigation techniques. Basically, the Rec Center has very hard sonic surfaces, so sound bounces and echoes a little too much. Luckily, the Rec Center bought a fairly large carpet (see above) to help with some of that.

We also bought 5 CostCo rugs (for $18 each) to augment the sound mitigation of the hard sonically bright floors. See above and below.

I also have some friends who work in theater and they were able to hang up up some “quilts” on the wall:

These quilts (see above) were hanging and absorbed some of the sound.

The general consensus was that the rugs and quilts all helped, but not quite as much as we hoped. We will probably hang more quilts and get more rugs for next year! Thanks to Becca and Jeff for providing the hanging quilts!

Games of the Con

I think the game of the Con was Slay The Spire! I saw this game played more than any other game! I think I taught it 3 to 4 times over the course of 3 days and it was played more time than that! See above!

Flock Together was pretty popular! I saw this played a bunch of times! See above!

The Cat Box was a running joke: “Play Games from the Cat Box!” But, there were a lot of games played from here! Race To The Raft! Cat In The Box! Hissy Fit! Power Hungry Pets! I saw all of those games played at least once!

The Astro Knight games were popular: I saw both the base game and Astro Knights Eternity being played! I suspect that’s my fault … see below …

Casting Shadows was quite popular! I think that was played at least 3 times!

The weirdest game I played was the RPG Fiasco: It reminded me a lot of Spirit of 77! The point is to make each other laugh as you make up crazy stuff!

Forest Shuffle may have the other big game of the Con after Slay The Spire: Kurt taught this game many many times! See above!

SO many great games played! Set A Watch! See above!

Leviathan Wilds was also quite popular! I taught that at least three times, and I saw other people playing it!

Interesting Games

Every year, we stop the Con for a little bit to have a “meeting of the souls” where we all talk about our favorite board games! It’s a chance for everyone to give feedback on games they’ve enjoyed since last we met!! The real point of this is to try to recommend games that people might be interested in. What happens is that we recommend games, and then we end up teaching them the rest of the Con!

#6 What game from the last year surprised you the most? Good or bad surprise?

Rich:

Slay The Spire was a huge surprise to me! I almost didn’t back it on Kickstarter, but wow! My games groups loved it and it was probably the most played game at RichieCon!

Sam:

– Hissy Fit. It’s a light, fast, cute game about getting your cat into the carrier to go to the vet. It is also surprisingly fun to play.

#5 What game in the last year do you disagree with reviewers on?”

Rich:

Two weeks ago, Daybreak won the Spiel Des Jahres. Everybody seems to love this game except for me. I generally love Matt Leacock designs, but this one felt way too random for me.

Sam:

Tom Vasel didn’t like Race to the Raft. However, I really enjoyed the puzzley nature of creating the path and moving the cats to get them all off the island.

#4 What game (that you paid for) did you really dislike? It’s easy to dislike games other people paid for, but what did you pay for that you disliked?

Rich:
The cooperative expansion for Valroc: The Legend of Aquiny. The base game of Valroc is a card-drafting, worker placement game that’s pretty good. The cooperative expansion looked cool with campaign envelopes, but the limited communication was too limited and the very very slow upgrade paths made this not fun. I would still recommend people try the base game Valroc.

Sam:

I picked up a copy of Call to Adventure (a story crafting game) and felt kind of meh about my plays of it. I’m hopeful that it may grow on me as I play more and actually get the rules all the way right.

#3 What game that came out in the last year that you liked but other’s didn’t?

Rich:

Gotham City Chronicles: Solo and Co-operative Expansion. This was so much work to get to the point where I could play solo (6 days of reading and printing and setting-up), but in the end I had fun. I don’t think most people like Gotham City Chronicles, especially Shut-Up & Sit-Down, because it’s so much work. But I still like it!

Sam:

Almost Innocent. I really enjoyed the logic puzzle aspect of it. Richie didn’t enjoy it but was also really tired that night and not necessarily sharp enough to do heavy logical deduction.

#2 What was your favorite expansion that came out in the last year?

Rich:
Set A Watch: the new stand-alone expansion and the Set A Watch: Doomed Run! (Strictly speaking, they came from the same kickstarter)! I love this system because even if you roll badly, you can still place dice on powers to activate them!

Sam:

– +1 on Set a Watch: Doomed Run. I only played one of the missions but it was fun to play the characters that were assigned to me and use their powers and items. The two I had ended up chaining together pretty well.

To be different:: Astro Knights Eternity. It’s a good cooperative deck building game and the story parts surrounding the scenario were really good too.

#1 What was your favorite game that came out in the last year?

Rich:

A cooperative bag-building super hero game set in the unique world of Invincicble? Sign me up! This game was so much better than I expected, the upgrade paths makes this game engaging and keep you involved!

Sam:

+1 to Invincible (Richie) and World Wonders (Kurt)

To be different: Age of Civilization. It’s a really tight worker placement game where you draft your unique civilization powers which include number of workers and then use your workers to research technology, get money, build wonders, and go to war to get victory points. Bonus points: it’s a small box, has good solo modes, and takes 45 minutes to an hour.

Theme Song

During the “meeting of souls” and sharing of games, Joe shared with us his version of the theme Song for RichieCon! Sung to the tune of the Suffragette City by David Bowie! And yes, the entire room said said “Hey Man!” at the appropriate places!

RichieCon City: sung to the tune of Suffragette City by David Bowie (new lyrics by Junkerman)

Hey Man, you gotta play in the game
Hey Man, custom pieces ain’t no shame!
Hey Man, your kickstarter is drear.
She said your package should be shipping by the end of the year

Hey Man, you really gotta choose
Hey Man, which game you gonna lose
Hey Man, you better learn all the rules
She said you’re getting killed by Sauron or the Cult of Cthulu

[Chorus]
Oh don’t lean on us man cuz you can’t defeat the wizard
I’m back in RichieCon City!
Well don’t lean on me man cuz you blew up all the kittens
You know my RichieCon City!
It’s outta sight, it’s alright!

Conclusion

As we bring all the games back to the house …

As we clean the Rec Center and put it back the way it was ..

And we lock the door .. heading home … we wonder …. was it all worth it?

Yes! It was! It so much fun to see everyone, despite the issues! We look forward to seeing everyone next year!

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Unboxing: Day 0 (December 30th, 2024)

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

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

Exploring the World (Day 3, Day 4, …)

Rulebook

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

Solo Play

2024 or 2025?

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

2021:

2022:

2023:

2024:

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

9. Fable Fury

8. Horror On The Orient Express

7. Aetherspire

6. One-Hit Heroes

5. Invincible: The Card Game

4. Unstoppable

3. DCeased: A Zombicide Game

2. LA-1

1. DC Super Heroes United

Honorable Mention: Comic Hunters Cooperative Expansion

10. Marvel United: War of Kings

9. Thunderstone Quest: Raging Seas and Ancient Adversaries

8. Townsfolk Tussle: Foul Neighbors

7. Detective: City of Angels: Saints and Sinners

6. Marvel Champions: Age of Apocalypse

5. Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance

4. Astro Knights: Eternity

3. Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles

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

1. Aeon’s End: The Descent

Honorable Mention: Ultimatch

10. Slay The Spire: The Board Game

9. Union City Alliance: Heroes Unite!

8. Flock Together

7. Hissy Fit!

6. Endeavor Deep Sea

5. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

4. Invincible: The Hero-Building Game

3. Leviathan Wilds

2. Sammu-Ramat

1. Marvel United Multiverse/Season 3

Jumping In

Gameplay

Reactions

Conclusion

Unboxing

The Rulebook

Gameplay

Friends and Foes

Expedition

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

“Emergency Sleeving!”

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook and Campaign Book

Solo Rules

Cooperative Play

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Turn Order

Conclusion

What Is This?

Too Random

Other Problems

Conclusion

Unboxing the Miniatures

Rulebook

Unboxing the Base Game

Gameplay

Campaign