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 Review of Weirdwood Manor: Putting a Weird Manner into a Cooperative Game!

Weirdwood Manor was #7 on our Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! This is a bit of a weird entry into the cooperative games space: it’s a cooperative boss-battler worker placement euro game with elements of Pandemic! Whew!

I backed Weirdwood Manor when it was on Kickstarter in April 2023, and it promised delivery in April 2024. My copy of the game arrived in June 2024, so it’s about 2 months late … which is actually quite good in Kickstarter terms.

This is a cooperative game for 1-5 Players, Ages 13+. I think the 90-120 minutes (as reported by the box above) is too short: It’s been more like 2 hours + 20 minutes per player in my plays. All of my 4-Player games have been 3.5 hours or more!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a pretty big boy, but it still seems about standard box sizes: see above with Can of Coke for reference.

This is gorgeous production! See above!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good overall, but has two major flaws.

First problem: Weirdwood Manor makes the fatal mistake of making the rulebook the same width and height as the box! It’s a giant square! It gets like a C+ on The Chair Test, as I can’t really lay it on the chair next to me! It flops over the edges and is harder to read.

The second major problem: there is no index. In many games, that’s not a huge deal, but Weirdwood Manor is a very complicated game with many, many, many, many rules: it is in dire need of an Index!

Other than those two flaws, this rulebook is pretty good.

The Components page is great, even differentiating between the deluxe and retail versions!

The Set-Up was mostly really good.

In general, this rulebook is pretty good: it’s just long! This is a very very very very complicated game with lots of moving parts (both literally and figuratively)! The rulebook does a pretty job of explaining most of the pieces and showing nice pictures/examples! See above!

I always feel like the rulebook is doing something right if the back cover contains a summary of rules/flow/icons, which Weirdwood Manor does. See above.

This rulebook is pretty good, besides the square form factor and lack of index. It taught the game pretty well. Just be aware: it’s a long rulebook because it’s a pretty complicated game.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Each player takes the role of one of 6 characters (see above) in the game: these characters are all magically oriented. These are the good guys! They have magic powers and spells! Note how nice those dual-layer boards are!

Each player takes the corresponding standee: I have the deluxe version which has the acrylic standees (they are just cardboard standees in the normal version of the game). See above.

Each player gets their own very specific deck of cards. Every turn, each player must play exactly one of their cards to “do something”! See the decks above!

As a cooperative boss-battler game, players choose one of three bosses (see above) to fight. Each one is very different!

As a cooperative boss battler, there will be a lot of dice rolled when attacks and defenses happen! See above!

The monsters (and Lady Weirdwood, off to the left above) are also acrylic standees!

The good guys characters and the bad guy monsters are all very different! The good guys each have a different deck of cards with different emphases! See some above!

Each character also has a different experience track! When you “do stuff” in the game, you get experience which you can immediately spend to upgrade your character! With experience points, you choose which track to advance, and each character has different annotations (see above) on their three experience tracks!

Other things make the characters asymmetric:

when the character rolls a STAR, a special ability (for that character) only activates
each players has different start resources
each character has VERY different spells they can activate
each character has a different progression to get dice

In general, these characters are VERY different and will play very differently!

The Manor: Worker Placement Rooms!

The core play of the game is in the Manor (mansion) above. It’s a bit of chore to build!

You place tiles in concentric rings: the outer ring (above)…

The middle ring … (see above) …

And the inner ring! See above!

Players place their standees on the entrance to begin: see above.

This game almost has a worker placement feel as well: when you end your turn in a room (see above), you activate the special ability of the room. See above for two rooms! The top one will allow you to get resources and the bottom one will allow you to rewind time! Each room has a very different ability to activate in the game!

When the Manor is all built (see above), it has a very daunting table presence! See above!

Resources

There are a number of different resources in the game you get (usually from activating a room): Power (pink), Scarabs (yellow), flame (blue), or books (green). See above! These resources are spent for many different things in the game: activating spells, buying dice, buying Companions, and many more things!

The small twist here is that the Scarabs, even though they are resources you need (yellow, see above) are also the “Bad News” tokens and they spread “kind of like” the disease cubes of Pandemic!

Scarabs in a room make it so you CANNOT activate the special ability there! You would have to go into the room and specifically fight them to get rid of them … and if you kill all the Scarabs on your room, you may still activate that room at the end of your turn.

Scarabs advance from the inner rings to the outer rings when “The Scarab Phase” happens. It reminds me of Pandemic for two reasons: 1) the Scarabs will “blight” a room if there are ever two or more in them (not unlike losing a city in Pandemic Legacy). This blight causes you to lose the room as a worker placement spot! (Don’t despair, you can always repair a blighted room) 2) The progression as Scarabs are always coming out and spreading … just like the disease cubes in Pandemic are always coming out and spreading!

Generally, flames and books are easy to get from rooms, Scarabs have to be obtained from fighting, but power is harder to get!

There are limited rooms with power tokens, but most power tokens comes from advancing the Power track on your character (the pink track above).

There’s a reason we call this a cooperative boss-battler worker placement euro (with elements of Pandemic)! The worker placement and resource management aspects feel very euro.

Time

Many cooperative games have some flavor of timer on it: you must win in so many turns, you must win before the Bad News deck runs out, and so on. Time is handled very interestingly in this game! In between the concentric circles of the rooms are two rotating rings that tell time! The first ring (above) is like the hour clock: as you play, time advances from sunrise to morning, to afternoon, to night, and back around! See above!

The outer ring is like a day clock: it has numbers from 1-12 on it (see above)! Every time the inner ring advances from night to sunrise, the outer ring spins! If the outer ring ever moves from 12 to 1, players lose! They have run out of time!

How does time advance? In two ways! First, the Monster “bad news” card moves the inner hour circle; see above as the monster card will cause hour time to advance 4 spaces!

The second way is that a player’s card is to be placed in one of the 4 positions above his character sheet: see above. Each position is labelled with a time of day: The Lore Master Meditation card (above, far right) has been played above the Night symbol, which means the player MUST SPIN the inner circle to the next night phase symbol! Every turn, the player MUST play a card to one of the spaces above. Part of the choices are trying to advance time as little as possible.

This time advancement mechanism must be balanced against matching symbols on the top of the card: see above as Prepare Defenses shield matches the Touch the Fae card! (Wild) If these symbols match, the player gets that symbol’s effect (a shield gives one more defense in combat). Sometimes you may choose to waste more time to get a better symbol match!

This is just one of the many choices players make when playing a card: Which card? How does time advance? How do symbols match?

Doors and Connectivity

These spinning concentric circles of time also controls the connectivity between rooms! See above as the characters in the room with the Chaos Ogre can’t get out to the middle rings! There’s NO DOOR between the middle ring and outer ring! When the day counter spins, the doors will spin and an exit will emerge!

These “moving” doors take a few turns for players to get: “Wait, playing my card will move the rings before I move my character?” Most of the time, we would “pretend” to advance the ring to see what connections would open up and then if the connections looked right, … then we would commit. I do admit, this is very daunting the first few times until you get a handle on it.

Spells

Each player has three spells on their character board: see above (Upper right of the board). These spells vary tremendously between characters! Some characters are more help-focused, some are more defense-focused, some are more combat-focused Each character’s spells are very different.

The spells are activated by spending resources … with Power usually being one component. See above! This is why Power is such an important resource in the game component! The spells are incredibly powerful, many times making the difference between a winning and losing combat!

Companions

Players can also recruit Companions to help them! Companions cost resources (of course), but give two main abilities! First, they usually give a nice little power you can use once (before you recharge).

Possibly more important, the Companions give another position to play cards, so you reset time less often! (Every reset causes a Scarab phase!) See above as Oliver has two companions, so he can play two cards without resetting!

Solo Game: True Solo With One Character

The game has rules for a solo variant (congratulations on following Saunders’ Law)! Basically, you can play as many characters as you want! The game recommends playing two characters, to get some synergies between characters going!

You might notice, I spent quite a bit of time describing the components and mechanisms of this game! I don’t know about you, but playing two characters seemed a little much for my first solo game! I ended up choosing to play my first solo game as a true solo game: one character. See above.

The game really needs no changes to play solo with one character: the main balancing mechanism of the game is advancing time for each play, so the total number of plays of the characters remains about the same. Very approximately, a game is “about” 2 * 12 = 24 turns total. Each character moves up the hour wheel by 1 or 2 spaces per turn, but the monster moves the hour wheel by 2-5 spaces per turn. On average, it takes about 2 player turns to advance one day, so at 12 days, the games lasts about 24 turns. So a true solo player will have about 24 turns, a 2-Player game would have each player take 12 turns, and so on.

The point of all that is — Sure! You can play this game true solo without any real rule changes! I always love it when the solo game follows the main rules: it’s usually so much work to apply solo rule exceptions to a game!

After playing a true solo game, let me say three things:

This is a pretty fun game solo.
It is a bit long. I think it took about 2 hours 30 minutes?
I absolutely would suggest your first game be a true solo game! This game has SO MANY RULES! And SO MANY INTERACTIONS! Your first game will struggle with rules, discrepancies, and just getting the game. The last thing you want to do is to context switch between two characters! Remember, every character is very different and plays very differently! Context Switching between two characters (as we’ll see below) is rough.

The true solo game works, and it works pretty well.

Solo Play: Alternating Between Two Characters

So, because the rulebook “suggests” that two character solo is the preferred way to play, I ended up playing a two character game that way by myself. At this point, I had at least one true solo game under my belt, so I at least felt ready with a decent understanding of the rules.

You can see above as the game table became even busier! And I remember this solo mode working, but I felt like I just had to “get through” it. There was so much work context switching between characters that it was overwhelming. I’ve emphasized this point quite a bit: the characters in this game are very distinct and very complicated to play! Each character requires a lot of focus to play it well.

Maybe this is your favorite game of all time! Maybe you want to explore all the characters and how they work together! I remember in Set A Watch (a cooperative dice placement game we reviewed most recently here), the 4-Character solo seemed daunting! Over time, I came to love that 4-Character solo mode after I had totally absorbed the game! Maybe the same thing will happen here?

But, I think focusing on a single character is a lot more fun. The 2-character solo play felt a little like a slog; don’t get me wrong, it worked, but I just felt like I was going through the motions. But, maybe after I absorbed this game some more, maybe I will come back to the 2 character solo mode? Maybe?

Right now, I can only recommend the true solo game, especially if it’s your first game!

Cooperative Play

I was able to get two big cooperative games together: both of 4 players.

These game groups are very different, but two things seemed to remain the same between the groups.

One: This game is very long: both 4-Player games took more than 3.5 hours. Some of this time will go away since it’s a learning game, but all my friends are seasoned gamers and jumped right in (with my help: I taught the games knowing the rules pretty well by this point). It feels like Weirdwood Manor is going to last at least 3 hours no matter what. See above as we all go away to dinner, leaving the game set-up to finish later!!!

Two: All the games I have played had the players “multi-player solo” in the beginning of the game, but engendered cooperation more in the later game. Well, we strictly speaking, didn’t have to cooperate, but we would have lost if we hadn’t! Many times, we had to figure out cooperatively how to engage the boss, but someone would have correct the topology (remember the rotating rings?), or defeat Scarabs protecting the boss, or any other issues … someone had to “blaze a path” for the next player! Or the next player had no chance!

Early in my first 4-Player game, I had to “clean-up”the Scarabs in the middle of the board (to protect Lady Weirdwood), but it meant I had to “take one for the team” to do this! It meant I had to lose a lot of resources and be behind the ball for leveling up my character! But we ABSOLUTELY had to do this, or we would have lost! (If Lady Weirdwood dies, we lose!) So, I took one for the team … enabling my compatriots to continue!

Generally, the game starts out very “multi-player solo” because everyone is in dire need of resources! To get anything going in this game, players have to concentrate on themselves … then, as the game gets further along, it’s clear players HAVE to cooperate, or they will lose!

Some characters had more abilities or spells that enticed cooperation, so the choice of characters also can affect how much cooperation there is!

What I saw in my game groups was that the Alpha Player was kept at bay because (as we saw in the solo section) there’s just too much to keep track for a single character! It’s much much harder to Alpha Player when you are busy concentrating on running your own complex character. The cooperation happened more organically by people asking for help!

“Hey, can you get rid of those Scarabs? I need to attack the boss!”

“Hey can you make sure time doesn’t advance too far? I need to make sure the boss isn’t angry yet!”

In general, there was a decent amount of cooperation, it just happened more in the later game.

Things I Liked

The production is amazing. The game pops on the table!

The Bad News cards (the Monster cards) are labelled on the back with a “hint” of the basic operation of the card! The Monster Card (see above) tells us that the Monster will “move somehow”! You flip the card and find the monster moves! This is a fantastic mechanism! It allows players to try to play cards with some general knowledge of what the bad guy will do! I remember seeing a variant of this mechanism in the cooperative game Paleo (see our review here) where the back of the wilderness cards was labelled with a generic icon as to what was coming! (We think a mechanism like this could have helped my friends like Hacktivity, from a few weeks ago, more).

I adore the acrylic standees. These alone made the Deluxe version worth getting! They are beautiful, well-labelled, and just pop on the table. They even emphasize the color on the bottom!

Playing cards into a slot to control the time advancement is really neat and interesting.

The rotating rings being used for both TIME and TOPOLOGY is very different and interesting! It took a little getting used, but it was cool.

The experience point tracks work really well: you get to make choices and advance your character at the same time! I think this one mechanism engages players more than might have expected: you become attached to your character as you care how he levels up! And your character just gets better and better as the game goes on, so you feel like you are doing something!

What I Didn’t Like

Probably the biggest detriment is the length of the game: several of my friends complained how long the game was. There’s that table (above) left set-up while we went to dinner because the game was so long …

As cool as the rotating rings are, sometimes we struggled to rotate them: this is a physical issue! We had to readjust the board on the table to avoid the crack in the middle! Even when it lay flat on another table, sometimes it didn’t advance great? It usually worked, but it just needs a slight tweak to make it easier to rotate the rings.

Speaking of the rings, why does time advance COUNTER-CLOCKWISE in the game???? When time advances in the game, you spin the rings COUNTER-CLOCKWISE!! In real life, when a clock advances forwards, it’s CLOCKWISE … thus the name CLOCKWISE! The rulebook even used the terms clockwise and counter-clockwise in descriptions! It knows the terms! This seems very counterintuitive to me!! It really seems like time moving forward should have been CLOCKWISE (like clocks). I dealt with it, but this little thing really bothered me!!

Complexity: this is a very complicated game with lots of moving parts and a long rulebook. It will take a while to absorb this, and some people may bounce off of it hard because of the complexity.

Even though this game has a lot of euro elements (worker placement, resource acquisition) and a lot of predictable elements, there’s still enough randomness to that it might just frustrate you. The game is, at its core, a boss-battler with lots of dice! You will be rolling dice and you might roll great and you might roll poorly! My friend CC got completely screwed early in one game, and had trouble recovering: he got completely smashed by the boss, and spent the rest of the game trying to recover … meanwhile watching while the rest of us were doing really well!

That element of randomness … might make one of your friends have a bad game.

Reactions

The reactions to this game from my friends was generally positive, well, except for CC who got trounced. CC’s reaction was probably the most nuanced:

I think I might have liked Weirdwood Manor more if I had gotten to play to the end. Sounds like my character got to be useful later on, which was a feeling the game had lacked for me in the turns I got to play. I liked the theme of that one and some of the mechanics were fun, but I got pretty frustrated when I kept getting shut down while watching other players advance. Nice table presence, though, and it felt like it was telling a story in a cool environment which I liked.

Kurt: He started at a 7.5, but upped his bid to 8 or 8.5/10. He really liked it!
Joe: 7.5/10
Teresa: 7/10
Sara: 6-7/10, but want to play it again for more precision
Andrew: 6 -7/10, but wants to play it again for more precision
Me: Solo (true solo), 7.5/10, Solo (two character) 6.5/10, (Cooperative) 8.5/10

Conclusion

Weirdwood Manor is a beautiful cooperative game with a beautiful production! But you have to know what you are getting into! This is a very long and complicated game with euro worker placement elements. The game always seems to start “multiplayer-solo”, but evolves into more cooperation as the gameplay advances … if you don’t cooperate in the endgame, you will lose!

I could easily see Weirdwood Manor being someone’s favorite game of 2024! It has so many unique and quirky mechanisms, satisfying advancement, and engaging play! Just be aware how complicated this game is! The extra complexity does have the advantage of keeping the Alpha Player at bay!

I recommend staying with true solo (take control of one character) to learn the game, and only tackle solo with multiple characters if you want more challenge.

My groups all like the game, with ratings between 6 and 8.5, with most people giving it at least a 7.

Hopefully this review helps you decide if Weirdwood Manor is for you!

Point-And-Click Adventure for Families! A Review of Eppi: An Interactive Adventure Book

Eppi is the second series of games in the Paper Point-and-Click line of games from Lookout Games.

img_9161-e1623455483876

The first game in this series was Cantaloop by Friedemann Findeisen: see our review here! We loved Cantaloop so much that it made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021! This was a series of three games: we liked all three of them! See here, here, and here!

What makes these games so interesting is that they are the paper book equivalent of the old “point-and-click” video games!

Think of the Secret of Monkey Island, King’s Quest, or the more recent Thimbleweed Park. Players “point-and-click” at objects in their world (on the computer screen), combining objects to solve puzzles! Players also move around, exploring the world they play in!

underwater

These games are all about combining objects and exploring the world, trying to solve the puzzles in the story you uncover along the way.

However, instead of a computer screen, these Paper point-and-click games have book and cards! You combine cards, solve puzzles, and flip through the book exploring the story therein!

Let’s take a look at Eppi!

Unbooking

We can’t have an unboxing, as this is mostly a book. So this is an unbooking.

Eppi is a book first and foremost: everything else is contained in the front pouches at the front of the book.

The big bottom pouch contains the inventory page, the play sheet, a postcard map, but most importantly … the red decoder!

This little red decoder is the main gimmick of the game! Hidden text in the book waits for you to unearth via the red decoder! The red decoder reveals important text in the adventure! See above as you encounter Eppi for the first time in the hall!

Most of the “objects” you will interact with come from the three card pockets. As you reveal text in the game, you will uncover more cards which you can combine!

One thing that’s differentiates Eppi from the original Cantaloop series is that about a third of the cards are stickers rather than cards: see above That’s right, this is a legacy game (but see below)! As you explore, you will put stickers on locations to reveal new options or hide old options that are no longer relevant!

The map tells you where you can go in the house, and the corresponding pages of the book. Note that you can’t get into certain rooms until there are unlocked via triggers! (You can’t get to Saira’s Study until you hit trigger D4!)

The play sheet comes with a little matrix of “triggers”: as you explore and combine objects, you will mark triggers on the sheet to show you’ve “accomplished certain things”.

This same Play Sheet also has your “TODO” list: in order to win the game you have to accomplish 5 goals! See above. (Why are there two Play Sheets above? Keep reading!!).

The rest of this game is the book!

The introduction and tutorial is fabulous and tells you how to explore and combine objects!
The next section has the 12 Locations (2 pages each) in the game
The next section are Cut-Scenes (further expansion of the plot as you move forward)
Finally, the last section is a Help Section

This game looks great! It has a very family-friendly and welcoming vibe to its art. It’s very clear this is aimed at younger kinds and families! I mean, it says that on the cover, but the art choices reinforce that.

Legacy or Campaign Game?

Since you are supposed to put down stickers as you play, this is pretty much a legacy game! You won’t be able to replay it again … or will you? You really can’t remove the stickers (they are very sticky), and you also mark up the Play Sheet with the triggers. So, this is a legacy game (but see below)! And honestly, what kid doesn’t like putting on stickers? For some families, the stickers may the best part of the game.

Having said that … If you are very careful, you can reset the game: you can use little pieces of tape to “tape” the stickers in the book rather than stick them.

I was able to play the entire game all the way through, using just little bits of tape on the edges to hold the stickers down (see above). After I was all done, I was able to reset the entire game by just carefully pulling off the tape! If you use small, little pieces of tape, you can keep the stickers down without too much work to remove it later. The bigger the piece of tape, the harder it will be to remove!

The only thing other thing you need to do to reset it: make a copy of the trigger sheet! That’s why I have two copies of the Play Sheet above: one is a copy!

So, with those two “tricks” (tape and a copy of Play Sheet), I was able to reset the back to pristine condition after full playthrough (it did take a little bit of time to undo the tape).

It’s a little fiddly to keep making little pieces of tape, but I suppose no more fiddly than trying to stick the sticker on and aligning it just so. However, I suspect the best way to play is to just put the stickers in: the best part of being a kid is playing with stickers!

The only reason you may not want to put stickers in your game is that this is a 3-Part series (I think): this is Part I after all. The next Eppi book is “probably” a year away, so you may want to replay this game again just before the next one comes?

In general, it’s probably more fun to put the stickers in (it’s a legacy game)! If you are just a little careful, you can get by and make it resettable (making it a campaign game). It’s up to you!

The World

Most locations in this world look like the above: the left side of the page has a lot of hidden text (to decode with the red acetate) and the right side of the page is a picture of the room you are currently in (with objects you can combine with). As you explore the room, you will combine objects and read some of the text on the left!

The typical way to combine objects is to align the left side of a card with either a location or the right side of another card. If the two letter code (u6w6 from the picture above) corresponding to the arrows shows up on the appropriate sheet, you can read it with the red decoder! Otherwise, if there’s no such code, nothing happens! (It’s like trying to combine a bowling ball and a feather, it doesn’t make sense, so nothing happens).

Sometimes, the little red decoder will tell you to read a cut-scene: it looks like the above, where characters talk to each and further push the plot and character development.

This game is all about “trying” things in this world: Do these objects combine? Do this object combine with this location? Nothing here? Let’s look around at a new Location! You try stuff, go to new Locations, and just keep exploring this world.

Flow

This is an adventure game: you will start off making tons of progress, then slowly and slowly start making less and less progress until you hit a wall. Eppi has the same ebb and flow as most adventure games: sometimes, when you are stuck, you just have to go around and just “try stuff”! Arguably, the least exciting thing about adventure games is the brute force approach is sometimes needed: it can be boring and soul-crushing to just try stuff that makes no sense. Even worse, it’s harder in this game because you physically have to do a lot more work to just “try stuff” (turn pages, combine items, look up text, see if it decodes: Lather, rinse, repeat). But once you break through that wall, it’s so exciting! The story picks up again, and things make sense again!

565435-the-secret-of-monkey-island-special-edition-playstation-3

Eppi is an adventure game! Every point-and-click adventure game I have ever played has this same flow: lots of cool stuff then some frustration, then excitement, some more frustration, then more excitement!

Help

If you do get stuck, there is a Help Section in the back of the book (see above). In this case, you lookup help sections by seeing what trigger conditions you are missing! You correlate your Play Sheet and find the lowest trigger you are missing! This is usually where the problem is!

A few times, I had to look up some help, but I had to look at more than one trigger to find what I needed. But it was there! It’s a little confusing the first few times you try to use the help. One of my biggest problems was that I sometimes forgot to mark off a trigger, so that prevented me from moving forward!

This isn’t the best Help system, but it seemed to work for me once I kept at it.

Story: Solo vs Cooperative

So, Eppi is a family friendly story! In fact, the main characters of the game are a family! Mom and Dad and some kids of all ages! As you explore this game, a story moves forward. But, why read a story when you can play it?

The two main ways to play Eppi are solo or cooperative. Cantaloop (the first of this kind of games) definitely felt like more of a solo game, although arguably you could play it cooperatively. Eppi feels like it is better at being both solo and cooperative: it absolutely works solo (that’s the way I played it), and then it absolutely works in a family environment (a 7-year old girl and her family gave us some feedback).

Solo

I ended up playing the entire game solo one Sunday: it took about 5 hours (the box says 5-8 hours, so that’s accurate).

I definitely stopped and took a break at some points when I was getting frustrated, so wall-clock time was probably more like 7 hours, with 5 hours of play and 2 hours of taking a break.

This would be easy to reset if you needed to: you just take a picture of the cards you have, and put everything away. If possible, it’s probably just a little easier to keep everything set-up between sessions, but you may not have that luxury.

The solo game worked pretty well. I got stuck a few times and had to consult the Help. In general, it was pretty fun.

Cooperative Family Mode

123_1 (4)

What I Liked

Turning pages to explore and move through Locations worked great: the binding is good for that, and the pages are high quality: they definitely learned from the Cantaloop experience! The very first Cantaloop game had lesser quality paper, and it actually made a difference, as you were much more careful turning pages (afraid to tear them)! With the higher quality paper and binding, it’s easy to make your way through the book.

The stickers are cool. In Cantaloop, they “new scenes” were on cards, and if you turned the page, you would have to reset the scenes. By putting the “new scenes” on stickers, you can work through the book quicker, as you don’t have to worry about “new scenes” flopping around! Besides, stickers are cool … especially for kids! (And, like we said, if you are careful you can get the equivalent experience with taping the cards, but you should use the stickers!!!)

By making the Eppi game more “family-friendly” (to be clear, Cantaloop was NOT family-friendly), it opens the door to cooperative play more than the original Cantaloop: the story and art is very inviting in Eppi! It’s just something the whole family can be immersed in. This definitely feels the cooperative mode is much more accessible. I loved Cantaloop, but it really is best as a solo game. I think this might Eppi might be more fun as a cooperative game.

I adore this genre: the Point-And-Click Adventure game is fairly rare! I am so glad Cantaloop did well enough to spawn further games in this genre. I love this genre so much! More games like this please!

The tutorial was very good: it showed what you can and can’t do when you combine objects.

What I Didn’t Like

In the original Cantaloop, when you combined cards, the lowest number card ALWAYS had to be on the right: this reduced the number of ways you could try to “combine” two objects. Why didn’t Eppi adopt this rule? You effective may double the amount of work you have to do to combine objects, as you may have to combine the cards twice!

I liked the story here, I did. But, the wit of the original Cantaloop isn’t in here … which makes the game seem like a little more work. Even if you got a puzzle wrong in Cantaloop, frequently there were funny jokes or amusing turns-of-phrase! So, every time you worked for clue, you got rewarded by either advancing the plot or some joke! I didn’t realize until I played Eppi that the jokes in Cantaloop distracted me from all the physical work you have to do to move the story forward! Let’s be clear: there is a lot of physical activity of moving cards, combining objects, reading red text, turning pages, marking triggers, turning to cut scenes! Whew! All physical activities!

I think some of this will go away if you play cooperatively, as the game is more about the cooperative experience with your family. But I think the “work” to move the game forward is a little more prevalent in Eppi if you solo it.

The final puzzle was pretty hard. I feel like it was almost out-of-scope/too hard for a family game: I suspect you will have to use the Help System to finish the game. That last puzzle seemed a little too much, even with a whole family looking at it.

Conclusion

I am so happy there are more Interactive Adventures like Cantaloop! Eppi is a fun game solo or cooperatively, but I think the best place for it is the cooperative game with the family …

… and that’s what the cover says! It doesn’t lie!

I like Cantaloop better overall, partly because of the non-stop humor, but I had a lot of fun with Eppi. This is a solid 7.5 solo, maybe 8 cooperatively with your family.

Shadow of the Colossus Lives Again (in Board Game Form)! A Review of Leviathan Wilds

Leviathan Wilds was on Kickstarter first in July 2022, but then they pulled it down and re-tooled it: they were on again on May 2023 (see Kickstarter link here) and ended funding at a pretty good level at about $208K. This cooperative boss-battler game was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024 and finally delivered to me in early May 2024 (about 2 weeks ago).

This game has a very interesting theme: it’s basically the old PS2 game Shadow Of The Colossus!

The board game plays 1-4 players, but the original PS2 game was a solo game! In the original PS2 game, players have to take down very large creatures by climbing their huge bodies and attacking certain points, all the while with the Colossus attacking them! It’s a very interesting theme!

In this board game (see sample above), you fight one of 17 Leviathans (you can’t call them Colossus … you wanna get sued?) and win if you can free the Leviathan of its constraints! Leviathan Wilds has a friendlier theme than the original Shadows Of the Colossus: rather than attacking the Leviathan, you are healing the Leviathan by taking out the Binding Crystals. So, when you and your friends cooperatively win … you have freed the Leviathan, rather than killing it!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Players choose a Leviathan to help from the Book of Leviathans.

Each Leviathan is a massive 2-page spread from the book! Sage, above, is the suggested first Leviathan to help.

Each Leviathan has its own small deck of Threat cards (5) and some story cards. See the Introduction above.

The 5 Threat Cards (just below the Leviathan) control what the Leviathan does at the end of the turn(s).

Some Threat Cards attack the current player with an area of effect!

See above as the area of effect above on the Threat Card (it’s just the orthogonally adjacent to the original site). If your climber can get out of the area by the time your activation is complete, you can avoid the attack completely!

At the end of 5 turns, the Threat deck is reshuffled and comes out again. To escalate the game’s difficulty, each Threat Card has two rotations: blue and purple, with the blue rotation being the “harder” challenge! See above!! As the game progresses, more and more of the blue sides are revealed, making the game harder!

To win, players cooperatively must take out all the Binding Crystals (represented by dice) at various points around the Leviathan. See one such Binding Crystal above. You spend Action Points (or cards) to reduce the value of the die, until it is zero, at which point you remove it!

There are quite a number of Binding Crystals set-up at the start of the game (purple and blue: purple Binding Points are straight-forward, blue Binding Points have side-effects). See above.

Each player takes control of one of eight Climbers! These Climbers climb (duh) the Leviathan to take out the Binding Crystals! See the eight different Climbers above and below.

Each climber has a personality and special unique ability: see above. Each climber also has a small hand of cards.

Climbers then choose a Class (one of eight) to play: See above. Each class also adds a number of cards to your deck.

Combined together, the Climber and Class form your personality and your deck! See above as Kestrel the Breaker takes form and becomes a character in the game!

The deck is what powers your character! You have three multi-use cards (in hand) every turn that you can use for Actions Points or their Special Abilities! See above and below.

Players have a certain number of Action Points per turn, depending on which card they play to start their turn. Like we said, the cards are all multi-use cards: you can either play them to get Action Points (upper left corner), or as-is to get its effect (bottom of the card).

There are basic Actions (see above for a list of actions on your character board) that each cost a number of Action Points. Some Climbers (like Kestrel) have special Actions only they can perform with their Action Points.

Every turn, a Threat card comes out, specifying what the Leviathan does. You may/will take that effect after you activate … sometimes you can avoid the effect completely if you play smartly (by either blocking or moving out of the way). The player takes his full activation and DOES STUFF: moving around, playing cards, and trying to take out the Binding Points. Threat cards take effect after the activation, and play moves to the next Climber.

Repeat until players take out all Binding Crystals or lose (by dying)! See above for a winning game with two Climbers!

Cool Things

The number of cards in your deck represents your grip: if your deck (left) is ever empty, you immediately fall until you hit a platform! This deck sort of reminds of Gloomhaven, but rather than the deck being your hit points, the deck represents how “well” you are holding on! It’s a cool ballet in the game, knowing when to rest (to recoup your grip) and when to push ahead (to get stuff done).

The multi-use cards are quite clever: you HAVE to choose a card to play for its Action Points at the start of your turn, but that means you can’t use the special ability on it! It’s a very clever way to make players really think about what they want to do with the cards they have!

The components are pretty top notch in this game.

There’s a lot of variety in this game: there are 64 combinations of Climber/Class, each with their own unique deck! There’s also 17 Leviathans, each with a very different Threat Deck! Some of the fun in this game is exploring the best combos for the different Leviathans! I expect to lose many games as I learn some of the later Leviathans … but with loss comes knowledge on how to win!

It’s also clever that the Threats don’t take effect until AFTER you have activated your turn: this sort of represents the interplay in a Video Game! You see what the Leviathan is about to do, and you can react! Sometimes you can mitigate the effect and sometimes you can’t, but it’s a clever way to that Video Game interplay.

One other multi-use card thing that’s cool is some cards that you play as Action Points have a “blocking” icon underneath the Action Points! If you play Hidden Paths above for 4 Actions Points, that also means you can’t lose any “grip” (cards from your deck) during your activation!

So that means you can using the cards for Action Points as well as possible blocking! That makes the choices even more delicious! The multi-use cards are just fantastic in this game.

Solo Play: Two Modes

So, Congratulations on offering an official solo mode! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) The official solo mode has the solo player operate two characters with a combined deck.

The Solo Play is described on page 11 of the rulebook (see above).

The solo player chooses two Climber and one Class deck, and then combines them to form “the solo deck”: both characters use this same deck for their play. Play alternates between the two Climbers, using that same deck for both characters. The idea, I think, is to reduce management overhead by only having one deck.

This is the official solo mode (above). It is fine. I played and was able to win with the second Leviathan.

However, I think the better solo mode is simply to take complete control of two Climbers, each with their own deck! (Like above)! I like the “solo player takes control of two Climbers with separate decks” rule better than the official solo mode. Why?

The official solo mode has “exceptional” rules you have to remember (only get 7 cards when you rest, both chars fall when the grip runs out, etc).
The solo player with two characters with separate decks is more like the cooperative game; I have to teach my friends this game, so I’d rather just learn the cooperative game as it is!

Basically, the official solo mode has exceptions to the base rules which I have to remember. I’d much rather just play the game in “normal” mode without any exceptions: it makes it that much easier to teach!

Both solo modes are very fine and very fun and very playable. The official solo mode has less management and takes up less space (see above). The unofficial solo mode with two Climbers and two decks requires operating more cards and takes up more space, but it feels more like the normal game (see below). I personally prefer the latter: play as if it were a 2-Player game, just alternating between the characters. Decide for yourself! They both work!

Cooperative Mode

Cooperative mode works great! Sara had a chance to watch a rules playthrough earlier, so we were able to jump right in!

We tended to mostly play our own characters, with a little bit of coordination about which Binding Crystals to go after. I think each player felt very different: my Climber/Class had a lot of blocking power, and Sara’s never saw a single blocking card!

Sara also reminded of a rule that tends to evoke more cooperation … you can throw Mushrooms to each other! The maps have some Mushrooms (see above) scattered about! And Mushrooms all do good things! You can throw a mushroom to help your compatriot … if you are close enough!

Generally, this game went over very well ! The theme really impressed by friends, they loved the art, and they loved the quick 60-minute game!

I think the amount of cooperation depends a little on the Climber/Class pairs you choose. The “Saavy” Climber (see above) tends to be very useful at helping everyone in the game at some point, so playing “Saavy” will elicit more cooperation! “Fix” (above), on the other hand, is just focused on “Hit It Harder”, so he will tend to just do his own thing.

The amount of cooperation will depend on a lot of things: the Climbers, the Classes, the Mushrooms, and the topology of the Leviathan! The game may feel multi-player solitaire in some games, and incredibly cooperative in other games!

Conclusion

Leviathan Wilds was, luckily, a good game! I was a little nervous about it, because frankly I hadn’t heard too much about it from any other source. But I think this game is great! It has some really unique ideas that make it feel almost like a video game: deferring Threat activation until after the player finishes, player cards that can be played instantly, multi-use cards, Threat Cards that rotate to get harder (levelling up!), and a Leviathan topology to maneuver!

I am a big fan of this game: the official solo mode works well enough (although I prefer the unofficial solo mode), but the cooperative mode works even better. There’s not too many rules, the game is a short 60 minutes, and yet it feels like this is a deep game with lots of replayability! The Climber/Class combination system works great for keeping the game interesting! The 17 Leviathans give the players lost of creatures to help!

This is a fun, fun game. Right now it sits at an 8.5/10 for me, but this could easily go up to a 9 or 9.5. This totally deserved to be on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024! It’s a blast!

A Review of Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition: from the Perspective of the First Edition

Can you say a game is one of your favorite games of all time if you haven’t played it in five years?

Is it even worse if you have all the expansions and have never even opened them? See the shrink wrap still on my expansions above and below!

Although some might answer differently, I am going to answer with a resounding .. YES! Robinson Crusoe can still be one of my favorite games of all time even though I have all these unopened expansions and I haven’t played it in a while! It reminds me of a favorite musical album I haven’t heard in years: when I hear it again, it just evokes all the feelings of joy and happiness … even if I haven’t heard it in a while. I still love it! When I play Robinson Crusoe after five years, I still love it!

Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition was on Gamefound a VERY LONG TIME AGO … and it finally delivered to me in February 2024. I backed the campaign on March 24, 2021, so it took three years for this to deliver!!! I know a lot of people who were very very upset with Ignacy (the designer and publisher) over this lateness. I guess I wasn’t as upset as others, but I also had to wait five years for Sentinels of Earth Prime to deliver, so three years feels like a breeze!

This is a deluxe version/expansion for the game. If you have the original first edition game (which I do), this is just an deluxified expansion for the game. Now, the Gamefound claims that this expansion works with the first edition of the game (which I have). And it …. mostly does. We’ll discuss that more later.

The expansion box adds some great minis, as well as some deluxified components.

However, since this was a Gamefound event, they also offered a lot more stuff to expand the game. See above! We’ll take a look at a little of this below.

Unboxing of the The Big Box

A big box arrived outside my door February 2024. What’s this?

Still not sure even after opening it … is that a playmat?

Oh ya! It’s Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition! Holy Cow! I forgot that I also ordered the playmat as an extra! This is literally THE BIGGEST playmat I now currently own! It takes up more than half the table and is huge … see the pencil and Coke can for perspective.

Inside are also a lot of deluxe additions and expansions to the game. Note: these components do NOT come by default with the Collector’s Edition! They are stretch goals and just generic add-ons from the original Gamefound event.

I also got upgraded components for the food, wood, and other resources.

There’s some very nice wood dice to replace the plastic dice in the game.

There’s some more cards??? What are these??? See above.

There’s some more minis to expand the already crazy minis we’ll see in second.

And a few other expansions. To be clear, the Coke and the pencil are there for perspective, they dot no come with the game!

It might be easy to get lost with all this content (I did), but there’s a nice booklet in the box that explains what everything is!

Those cards we didn’t know what they were .. they are described in detail.

In general, everything is described, in some detail! This is something this deluxe edition got right: within the book, they make sure to describe everything that comes in the box … even the Gamefound expansions! It’s too easy to let that stuff lag and say “just look at the Gamefound site” … nope! This explains everything that comes with the game!

One final thing I want to mention: I got the Book of Adventures. This is one of the nicest spiral bound notebooks I have ever seen. It essentially collects together all (?) adventures and scenarios we’ve seen for Robinson Crusoe over the year into one volume. This is gorgeous.

This is just all the extra stuff from the Gamefound event! See above. But, what actually comes in the box: Robinson Crusoe Collector’s Edition?

Unboxing of Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition

The actual box is pretty large! This is the box you can buy in stores …

It’s taller than my can of Coke!

At the top is the Introductory Campaign Guide!

This guide looks amazing, but it gets only a C on the Chair Test: Why? Because it hopelessly flops over the edges of the chair next to me… see below.

Underneath that is the content guide we saw earlier …

Under that is some cardboard pieces: the volcano and some tokens.

IMG_2998 (1)

But what everyone wants to see are the minis!!

These are the sundrop minis … that I paid way too much for. But they look cool.

Most of the minis replace the two worker placement tokens.

Underneath the minis are some space.

The players boards in the box replace the original player boards: they are 3 level boards and look fantastic!

The rest of the box is pretty empty … it holds a few mini expansions and cards.

Basically, this box is supposed to replace and hold all of your original Robinson Crusoe content.

You can see everything in (and not in) the box above! This is a really nice expansion.

The Case of the Missing Monkey

IMG_2998 (1)

Those of you paying attention might notice the missing mini in the upper right of the mini box. Did I lose a mini when I unpacked it? Did the publisher forget a mini?

Turns out the missing mini is a Monkey … that I had to specially order. I didn’t just get it. Supposedly, they publisher will offer the mini on the website after the fulfillment is done.

See this Board Game Geek thread here about the Case of the Missing Monkey!

First Edition

To be clear, I have the original first edition of Robinson Crusoe which came out in October 2012. See above and below: it’s not exactly the best organized. But I played the heck out of this solo over the years!

The rulebook for the first edition worked for me, but a lot of people complained about it .. they also wanted to upgrade the game as well. So, the second edition of Robinson Crusoe came out: it had a much better rulebook as well as numbered the cards on certain decks and other things.

Now, I backed the Collector’s Edition because the publisher said “it does support the first edition!” And they are mostly right. The real issues come up when playing the Introductory Campaign; These issues are three-fold:

The cards in the original First Edition are NOT numbered: a lot of the set-up instructions refer to cards numbered xxx-yyy. Luckily, they also list all the cards, so this isn’t a deal breaker.
Some cards are missing. A few cards that the tutorial refers to are simply not in the first edition.
Some cards are relabelled. The Cure is labelled something else … the card is there but has a different name in the First Edition.

We’ll address each of these in more detail when we discuss the tutorial, but other than that, the Collector’s Edition did work with the First Edition. To be fair, none of these issues made the game unplayable, but you do have to be flexible.

The Introductory Campaign

The most interesting thing to come in the Collector’s Edition (besides the minis) is the Introductory Campaign Scenario Book. This is basically a 4-scenario long campaign that slowly brings you into all the rules of this big complex game called Robinson Crusoe! It’s basically a very guided tutorial to get people playing.

The campaign starts very simple, showing off some of the base rules. Every new scenario in the campaign builds on the previous rules until the last game is a “full” game of Robinson Crusoe!

Over the course of March 2024, I played through one scenario a week (solo) until the end of March 2024.

Scenario 1: Warm Welcome To Tamatoa

Scenario 1: Warm Welcome to Tamatoa from the campaign doesn’t use the main map. It uses the actual campaign book: see above and below.

This particular scenario is a very very abbreviated version of the rules. I figured since I was an experienced player that I’d walk right through this: nope! it’s actually a nice little puzzle. I had to play it twice to win!

IMG_3040 (1)

You’ll also note that I forgot to use the minis for the workers in my first game: I used the original wood disks. I know, how did I miss that???

In my second game (after losing the first), I did use the minis. Look how nice they look!

This is a real nice way to ease people into the Robinson Crusoe game. This first scenario was a fun little puzzle.

My only real complaint was the that I had to go looking for cards #1-#3 for the Event Deck .. but remember that the First Edition doesn’t have the Event deck cards numbered! Luckily, the card names were listed so I could just hunt for the right cards: Vertigo, Fight, Memories of the Cruise.

But in general, this first scenario is a great way to get people into Robinson Cruose.

Scenario 2: Which Way The Wind Blows?

My second game didn’t start off great. Why? You build the Event Deck with cards #5-#8 (Loss of Hope, Bear, Body on the Beach, and Despondency) … and there is no Despondency card in the First Edition!!! See this Board Game Geek thread for more details.

In the end, I just picked a random card from the Event Deck (Fight) and moved forward.

You’ll note, of course, that I put a sticky note in my scenario book describing the issue (so I don’t have the “rediscover this issue” in the future).

After getting through this rather aggravating issue, I was able to play the second Scenario: Which Way the Wind Blows without any further issue.

The second scenario also uses the map in the scenario book and just builds on the rules from Scenario 1. It worked well, despite sometimes having to page through both the rules for Scenario 1 and 2 (as the rules from Scenario 2 build on the rules for Scenario 1).

Scenario 3: Looking For Answers

Unfortunately, we also ran into set-up issues for Scenario 3: Looking for Answers. The Medicine Invention card is called Cure in the first edition … so it’s there, but if you don’t see that right away, you could be looking around for quite some time! Also, there are no Poisonous Spores card: I just used Poison. Again, I noted the issues on stickies so I could replay this again without issue.

Again, because the cards aren’t numbered, I had to go searching for Mystery Cards …

And Adventure cards. Luckily, everything was labelled but remember … there are no numbers on the cards in first Edition!!

IMG_3284 (1)

It’s here at Scenario 3 when then full map comes out! That’s right, the game starts to really flesh out and start to feel like a true Robinson Crusoe game: Inventions are out, Risky Actions are out, and Mystery cards are out!

I ended up keep the instructions on the right, with the full mat on the right.

The game really starts coming alive in this Scenario as you are exploring and look for Treasure Chests!

Scenario 4: Lords Of Fog

Finally, by Scenario 4: Lord of Fog, you are playing the full game! There’s no special set-up of the cards (thank Goodness!) so no issues from the First Edition come up!

In game 4, you add hunting mechanics and the weather dice back into the game. By this point, you are fully invested in this adventure and want to see it through!

It’s a bit of table hog at this point, as I need to have the mat and rules and original box on the box (for components).

I will also say that this game really tested me: I should have lost.

My last round needed two build actions to win … “I have this in the bag…” until the Strong Winds Event came out! “What??? I can’t build because I don’t have enough actions???? I’m screwed!!”

I needed to get some characters on Brew to win, but I also needed to build some things!

In the end, I figured out a very clever way to get what I needed! It was such a trying moment to feel I had come all that way just to lose because of Strong Winds!

I think this is just a testament to how strong this game is: there’s so much choice you can usually do something interesting and useful in response to bad news.

What a blast!

Set-Up

By far, the worst thing about the Introductory Scenario was the set-up: between First Edition problems and just so many components and books, I was struggling to keep everything in reach and organized as I set everything up.

The reason this took me a month to play was that each Scenario really took it’s time to set-up and tear-down. I mean, I guess Robinson Crusoe has always had that problem to a certain extent, but it seemed more pronounced this time.

Other than that issue, I think this Introductory Campaign is a great way to get people into Robinson Crusoe! I am … or I used to be … an experienced Robinson Crusoe player, and I had fun playing the abbreviated versions of the game.

Conclusion

Do you really need the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe? Nah, not really.

There is so much content out there for Robinson Crusoe that you probably would want to get first: both Mystery Tales and Voyage of the Beagle have tons of stuff for you to do.

But if you love the ideas of amazing minis (especially as your worker pieces) and a really well-designed intro, then maybe this is for you! I feel like the introductory scenario(s) got me to fall in love with Robinson Crusoe again.

It’s hard to recommend the full Collector’s Edition (which has the base game and minis and intro) because it’s a lot of money, especially if you don’t know if you like the game! But if you know you like the game and want to jump into this world, it’s a very cool place to start!

If you are like me (with the First Edition) and like the game, there is a way to get the “minimal” Collector’s Edition which just has the new stuff. Although First Edition has its own problems, I am still happy I got this. It’s breathed new life into my Robinson Crusoe and reminded me how much I like the game … and isn’t that the purpose of an expansion?

Top 10 Cooperative Point-And-Click Adventure Board and Card Games

Welcome back to Cooperative Adventure Game Month! We have talked a lot about cooperative adventure games this month, from the silly Starlings Box One to the grimy noir Saints and Sinners. We end this month with a discussion of a Top 10 of one of our favorite kinds of cooperative adventure games: the point-and-click adventure!

Make sure you re-read that! Yes, this is a list of Board and Card Games (not Video games) that work like the original LucasFilm point-and-click adventure games such as The Secret of Monkey Island, The Day of the Tentacle, or the more recent Thimblewood Park! Granted, a board or card game doesn’t have a mouse pointer to move and click, but there’s certain elements that make a game feel like a point-and-click video adventure game!

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

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

So, if a board or card game has these fundamental elements, we call it a point-and-click adventure game! If it moves from location to location like a duck, combines items like a duck, and is part of a story like a duck, it’s a duck!

the-secret-of-monkey-island-commodore-amiga

Take a look at our review and discussion of the newest Monkey Island game for more thoughts on what we like about these type of games!

To be clear, all the games on this list are “play-once” because you reveal the plot and main elements! You can play it again, but you probably want to wait a few years until you forgotten everything!

Honorable Mention. Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but best with a group
Number of Players: 1 or more Players
Time: 60 minutes per chapter (5 chapters)

This isn’t quite a pure point-and-click adventure game, but it’s so close we have to mention it! You explore a very silly world, find objects, and use them for both dice mitigation and helping you with puzzles.

But this feels so much like a point-and-click adventure! We make choices in the game and we explore the world, but it so silly! The dice are the only reason House of Danger is down at an Honorable Mention: the dice take the pure puzzle aspect out and poke just a little bit of randomness here.

There is another game in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, but House of Danger was the funnest!

10. The Shivers

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? No, there has to be a GM: best with a group
Number of Players: 2 or more Players
Time: 60 minutes per chapter (5 chapters)

The Shivers is almost more of an Role Playing Game (RPG), as you have to have to have one player “run” the game, so you can’t really play it solo. That’s really the only reason this is #10 on this list ….

Otherwise, this is a beautiful game with Pop-Up Components! The physical nature of this game makes it feel more like point-and-click than many of our games on this list! But the RPG nature and lack of solo drop it just a little.

This game is a fun little cooperative point-and-click type adventure game with a sense of humor and beautiful components! Take a look at our review of The Shivers to see if this is something you might like.

EDITOR: We recently got a comment on our blog about the Shivers from William T Tiller:

Its funny you should compare it to Monkey Island because I did the Shivers art. I am Bill Tiller, and I worked at Lucas Arts as a lead artist on the adventure games The Dig, and Curse of Monkey Island, and A Vampyre Story. In fact there are a few refences and easter eggs that refer to Monkey Island in The Shivers. Larry Ahren, a writer, designer, and animator on Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and director of Curse of Monkey Island also wrote one of the scenarios in the game. Those may be the Shivers game feels a lot like a point and click adventure game.

9. Coded Chronicles: Scooby Doo! Escape From The Haunted Mansion

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but best with a group
Number of Players: 1 or more Players
Time: varies (there are a number of interconnected scenarios)

Players take the role of their favorite Scooby Doo characters and explore the Haunted Mansion, solving puzzles to pursue the mystery in this box! The object interaction is very simple (using the first number of the character combined with the number of an object), but it’s a pretty simple and elegant way to combine objects!

This is one of the simpler point-and-click adventure games on this list (with House of Danger being the simplest), but it’s a really fun mystery! And it totally feels like a point-and-click adventure as you explore the house, combine objects, and work towards solving the final mystery!

There are other games in the Coded Chronicles series as well if you like this style of adventure game!

8. Paper Point N Click: Eppi

Ages: 8+
Play Solo? Yes, but best with a group. The solo mode is still quite good!
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 5-8 Hours for the whole adventure

Eppi is the next adventure book game series in the Paper Point-and-click line of games.

This game is an exemplar of the great things a board game can do in the point-and-click genre! This particular game is aimed more towards families and is probably best in a cooperative group, but it still works very well solo. The exploration, story, and puzzles that come out of this game are just outstanding! This feels like a real point-and-click adventure game. This is aimed at a younger or family-friendly audience, which may be outside your wheelhouse (which is why it’s only #7).

Unlock Epic Adventures: Mission #07

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-6 Players
Time: 60 minutes

The Unlock! games are nominally called Escape Room games, but they share quite-a-bit of DNA with point-and-click adventures! The Unlock! games, which use cards and an app on a phone to direct the action, are a perfect example of point-and-click adventure games! A story unfolds as you unlock new locations and items, and you to explore and combine items to push forward!

This particular box has three adventures in it (See Unlock! Epic Adventures, which we reviewed here), all of which are great point-and-click adventure games!

But it was Mission #7 (the last of the adventures) that really captivated us! This story was fun and interesting and tried a few new things we haven’t seen in Escape Rooms before!

6. Unlock! The Adventures of Oz

IMG_2690 (1)

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-6 Players
Time: 60 minutes

The original Unlock! games came 1 game to a pack: later on, they started packaging them up up three at a time.

IMG_2692 (1)

Before we got Mission #07 in the Epic Adventures box, The Adventures of Oz was available and one of our favorite Unlock games!

IMG_2691 (1)

My favorite explanation that this is a Point-and-Click adventure is the back of the box: Search the scenes! Combine Objects! Solve Puzzles! The Adventures of Oz was a really fun adventure that I was mesmerized back at an early RichieCon in 2018: it tried some really interesting things and was such a great adventure!

5. Chronicles of Crime

Final Box Art

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 60-90 minutes

Chronicles of Crime is very much an app-driven game! It made the #2 spot in Top 10 Cooperative Games 0f 2018! To quote:

If I had to characterize this game, I’d say it’s an old text-style adventure game! What? In the old adventure games, you could only “manipulate” the items on screen on in your inventory. “Get light”, “Drop light”, “talk man”, “ask guard about skull” and so on. In this game, all your items are on cards in front of you! When you want to interact with the items, you use your smart phone to scan a code on some cards! So, if you want to “ask guard about skull”, you’d scan the code on the Guard card, then scan the code on Skull card! And the phone would tell you what he said!

This interaction is great! Except, you are trying to solve a crime by interacting with the world in front of you! Really, really fun! You move around from location to location, physically LOOKING at animations at locations (really!), and then scan cards. (“I think there’s a shovel here at this location … Um … Oh! There’s a ‘gardening tools’ card! Scan that!”)

Surprisingly fun, amazing graphics (you HAVE to have a smart phone to play), but a lot of content! It’s also easy to play! A GREAT game!

There are multiple versions of this game: 2400, 1400, 1900, all of them very interesting iterations on the base game! I’d recommend any of them! In fact, 2400 made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2021!

4. Unlock! The Treasure of Tonipal

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-6 Players
Time: 60 minutes

So, this is one of the more difficult of the Unlock! series! The pirate theme and puzzles really kind of make of you feel like you are reliving some of your Secret of Monkey Island days!

Without giving away too much, this point-and-clock adventure had one of the funnest stories and the best “last puzzle” I’ve ever played. I want to replay this again it was so much fun!

3. Adventure Series: The Grand Hotel Abaddon

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 90 minutes per chapter (3 chapters)

This is a very different kind of point-and-click adventure game: it’s quite text heavy, but it uses cards to denote objects and locations.

The Location cards are oversized cards, and the objects in the game are plain cards marked with numbers.

Every player assumes the role of a character, with little standees moving around this world. The story centers on a hotel as “strange things” happen. It’s quite an interesting story that unfurls over 3 sessions! This is the 4th game in the Adventure Series line: it made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2022! We really loved this game!

2. Adventure Series: The Dungeon

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 90 minutes per chapter (3 chapters)

The Dungeon is in the same series of games as our last entry: The Adventure Series. This game series burst onto the scene in 2019, and it was so fun it made it all the way to out #2 spot on the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2019!

This was probably the first board and card game that really felt a point-and-click adventure game! You explored a dungeon! Combined items! Solved puzzles! You ventured through a story together! There was nothing else like this, and this series totally captured my game group!

1. Paper Point N Click: Cantaloop

img_9161-e1623455483876

Ages: 16+
Play Solo? Yes, probably best solo
Number of Players: 1+
Time: 5-8 Hours

Cantaloop nails the point-and-click adventure book game better than any game I have ever played! When this came out in 2021, it was ground-breaking! Using the book format with red acetate decoder to move through an adventure game was new and original.

The way players moved through Locations, combined objects, and solved puzzles was very innovative! Even the help system was innovative!

What made this so good was the writing! Jokes were strewn everywhere, and everything seemed well-thought out! Remember when Monkey Island would tell you a joke when you tried to combine two weird things? The same happens in Cantaloop! Cantaloop rocketed to the #1 Spot on my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021 !

This series is an ongoing story over three books, told in 3 standalone books: Breaking Into Prison, A Hack of a Plan, and Against All Odds. See our reviews of all three games here, here, and here.

The only thing to be careful of is that the games are slightly raunchy (see above) and some adult material slips in (which is why the game is 16+ for ages), but it’s always done to be funny and doesn’t detract from the game.

Play An Episode of House! A Review of NYC: Emergency Room (A Medical Mystery)!

Welcome back to Cooperative Surprise Month! This month has seen a surprisingly good cooperative game set in 700 BC called Sammu-Ramat, a “lost” review of Chainsomnia, and a light-and-fun cooperative game called Hissy Fit with the surprisingly weird theme of taking cats to the vet! This week, we take a look at another game with a surprisingly weird theme: NYC: Emergency Room!

NYC: Emergency Room is billed as “A Cooperative Medical Mystery Game” for 1-4 players, Ages 14+. That lower bound of age may seem low or high, depending on who you are, as there are discussions you would want “mature” adults discussing (birth control, the human reproductive system, death, pain, diarrhea). So, be aware that this medical mystery game requires an adult attitude!

NYC was a game I picked up at Target a few weeks ago (early February): I was on the fence about it. On one hand, I love murder mystery games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) and escape room games. On the other hand, I generally don’t like medically themed games (too depresssing). Should I pick it up?

Then I remembered how the TV show House was originally billed as a a medical mysteries show. If you don’t know the TV show House, it is basically Sherlock Holmes as a doctor solving strange mysteries, but in the medical field (Get it? “House” & “Holmes” … “Wilson” & “Watson”). The show, while pretty dark, is quite interesting!

In the end, that’s why I picked up the game: “a fun medical mystery like House”. Or at least, that was my hope!

Unboxing

NYC: Emergency Room is a pretty standard sized box. See the Coke Can and #2 pencil for perspective.

The game is really just a bunch of envelopes! All the components are in one of six envelopes.

Four of the envelopes are cases for four different patients. Each one of these is a different case.

There is one envelope that has components every game needs: that’s the Code/Research/Rules envelope. See above.

The first patient, though, is not one of the four envelopes… there’s a tutorial that walks you through your first case: Nurse Judy recognizes you are just starting out, and tries to help you through the process!

It’s kinda cool is that every envelope tells you exactly what’s inside (see above)! I can totally see passing this game onto other people after I am done, so it’s good to make sure each case has everything you need to do it!

Considering this is a game from Target, the quality is actually pretty good for everything (see above for some contents of the first envelope). It’s surprisingly good how good these components are!

Rulebook

There is a rulebook, but you don’t even start with it. You start with Nurse Judy’s tutorial pamphlet. It walks you through your first game, and honestly, it does a fantastic job.

By the time I got through the Tutorial, I don’t think I ever looked at the rulebook! (It comes in the black Codes envelope). Seriously, I can’t complain or laud the rulebook because I never needed it. The pure joy of the Tutorial made the rulebook almost unnecessary. I may have looked it at once later for a rules clarification, but I’m not sure how much you’ll use it. Listen to Nurse Judy, and you’ll be fine!

The Tutorial

The tutorial takes you quickly through a simple case with Luana Kapule: see above.

This was very easy to set-up and a very quick game. I think I got through the Tutorial in about 20 minutes.

Seriously, this is one the best tutorials I have seen in a while. You see all the things you should do, the things you shouldn’t do, and the game walks you through the playthrough very precisely.

You know that a Tutorial is good when you don’t think you need the rulebook anymore: 20 minutes in, and I think I know the game. I call that a successful tutorial!

Gameplay

The game is all about what tests and consultations and medications to administer to a patient over a night (a timeline). You are measured by, frankly, if the patient survives the night. You have a sheet that you keep track of everything you do and what time you do it: see above.

As you run tests on your patient, you will get codes to look up in the code book: they tell you what happens: frequently, this means you draw a card from a deck of “how the patient is doing”. Note: the results of the tests do change as time marches forward! Gulp! Make sure you run that test at the right time!!

What tests do you run? Holy cow, all the things you can do or know is presented in about 5 pamphlets brimming with medical information! See above. This particular mechanic kind of reminds of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective.

Not directly, but the sheer volume of medical information in the game reminds me of the sheer volume of materials in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective: the maps, the phonebook, the newspapers. This is a good thing: it really feels like medical mystery! You just have to look in the right place to solve the mystery!

If you can keep the patient alive by running the right tests (remember, tests can be invasive in many ways) and finding the right thing to do (which may be medication or something else), you win!

It goes without saying, but if your patient dies, you lose!

Solo Game: Patient 1

Strictly speaking, my first solo patient was from the Tutorial: but Nurse Judy basically kept me out of trouble, so I don’t know if that counts.

Before I began, I made a copy of the timeline sheet (see above) and left room for notes on the left. I strongly recommend you do this as well! First, by making a copy, you can reuse the first case later. More importantly, I think, is that having the extra space to make notes was a big deal.

You never forget your first patient: mine was Shyla Patel.

I had to make sure I interviewed her to make sure I knew what was going on.

I was able to do the proper tests and figure out what was going wrong with her. Along the way, there were places where I could have done “something bad”, but in the end, I kept Shyla alive.

She left the Emergency Room alive and in good health. It was a good day.

Shyla never saw me looking, but my head was buried in these medical pamphlets the entire time. This is a game about research, it’s a game about following up, it’s a game about what it’s like being a doctor. (I always wonder if doctor’s do the same thing when we aren’t looking … “What the heck was that? I gotta look in my pamphlets!”)

It was incredibly engaging, but there was a lot of research, a lot of taking notes (see above) and a lot of reading. I love that stuff, but some people don’t.

Why watch an episode of the TV show House when you can just play it? I really enjoyed this game solo.

Cooperative Game

It’s Charlie’s fault I started watching the TV show “House”, so I felt it was apropos that he and Allison play this with me!

Rather than try to explain the game to them, I simply had Charlie and Allison go through the Tutorial. This was interesting: I am so used to explaining games to people, but I realized this game is just complicated enough that it makes sense to use the Tutorial again! Rather than teach the game, just play the Tutorial! It really is that good!

After they finished the Tutorial, we encountered Patient 2: Adrian Alexopolous.

The cooperative game was very much like the solo game, but now we have a group of “other doctors” we could bounce ideas off of! I like this shared responsibility: it’s a little scary to take full responsibility for a patient yourself, and this shared burden made it a little easier to endure.

The burden of taking notes, reading cards, consulting pamphlets also made the game move a little more quickly than the solo game.

Although I liked the solo game, and didn’t have any problem taking the full responsibility of a patient myself, I can see many people bouncing off this! By having a team of doctors helping each other to help the patient, I can see many people preferring the cooperative mode over the solo mode.

What I Liked

The Tutorial is fantastic. It just gets you into the game right way: it’s the best way to teach new players, even if you already know the game!

I like all the medical information available. I wish the medical pamphlets were bigger books written in a bigger font. I did a lot of reading and research with these! It felt like the world was large, something to explore, even though I was only reading medical texts.

The mysteries are interesting and engaging. And the components are great too, especially for a Target game.

What I Didn’t Like

I already said this in the What I Liked Section, but I wish the medical pamphlets were bigger with bigger fonts. In fact, a lot of these pamphlets had two or three different things in them! I wish they had been broken up a little better … I am sure this is a “it costs money to make big pamphlets” issue, but they would have made it a little easier to use.

In the end, I made copies of the charts/timeline, but it bugged me a little that there weren’t multiple copies of these little sheets: there was only one for each patient! For multiple reasons (extra space for notes, enabling this patient to be re-used), I strongly advise you to make a copy like I did above!

Conclusion

I really enjoyed NYC Emergency Room and so did my friends. As long as you don’t have trouble with the theme, mature situations, and potentially life-or-death situations, this is a great mystery game!

In fact, you could argue that the theme is very engaging because you are making “real” life-and-death situations for a person you meet in the Emergency Room! Those tense situations may be too much for some people, but if you can handle it, I think it is fantastically riveting!

Allison gives this a 8/10, Charlie says it’s a “Solid Game” (I couldn’t get a number out of him). I think I am right with Allison: this a 7.5/10 or 8/10 for me. My hesitancy comes only the theme being potentially being very divisive: “I don’t want to be a doctor right now, that sounds too stressful!“. I get it, sometimes it might not be as appealing to be a doctor in a stressful situation! Having said that, in the cooperative game, that burden is shared making the game a little more palatable.

Why watch an episode of House when you can play it? Just remember when doing patient interviews: “Everybody Lies.”

A Review of Chainsomnia

Welcome back to Cooperative Surprise Month! Last month we looked at the brand new game (Sammu-ramat) which was so surprisingly good! This week, we surprised ourselves by finding an old review which we never published! This is a review for the cooperative game Chainsomnia by Seiji Kanai! Let’s take a look!

Chainsomnia was a cooperative game I picked up from GameNerdz fairly recently (EDITOR: at the time this was written, it was June 2023 .. ahem). It was a Kickstarter game, but I didn’t know that when I ordered it from GameNerdz (I guess I missed the Kickstarter). Chainsomnia was appealing to me because it looks like a light cooperative game from the designer (Seiji Kanai) of Unicornus Knights! I think that Unicornus Knights is something of a hidden gem (see Part I and Part II of our review), as it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2017!

This game is about a bunch of nightmare-ridden little kids trying to get out of a castle of nightmares! It’s for 1-4 players, 40-60 minutes, and ages 14+. Let’s take a look.

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty deep box. The Coke Can actually fits inside it pretty well!

Seriously, this is a pretty deep box: mostly for the tiles.

Each character takes the role of a child trapped in the castle:

Each character has a standee and a character sheet.

Each character has some abilities (Strength, Luck, and Wisdom) which will form the the basis of a two-dice ability role.

For example, Chloe above has 3 Strength, 3 Wisdom and 3 Luck. She can also get rid of Bad Dream easily with an AP (Action Point).

AP stands for Action Point. The little chart to the left shows you how many AP you have per turn. As you get Chains in the game (Ryan above has 2 chains), it reduces the number of AP you have per turn.

The Summary Cards summarize what you can do, but basically explore, search, give, skill, move, use or take.

In order to win, the characters must cooperatively explore the Castle to find the way out: the Way Out is the last card in the tile deck. See Chloe winning the game for everyone by finding the Way Out … when there are no Bad Dreams on the board.

Like most cooperative games, there are “Bad News” cards that come out. In this case, the Bad News cards are called “Events” and come out every time you explore and discover a new Room.

Generally speaking, the Event cards are full of nightmares that clog up the rooms. You can’t enter a room with a nightmare until you take it out. How do you take it out?

Each Bad Dream is different (for example, above you have to discard an Item), but generally you have to make a skill check on 2 dice, and roll higher than your skill. If Ryan’s Strength is 5 and requires a 11+ Strength to Vanquish, then Ryan will need to roll a 6 or more (6+5 >= 11) on two dice to succeed in the Skill check.

Incidentally, skill checks are how you get Items (very useful tools): generally, each room will tell you what you need to roll to get one. In the first room (see below), if you roll a 12 or higher on any skill check, you get an item.

There are other very bad cards that modify the Event Deck (see Shriek above) but if you make it through all Event cards without finding the Way Out you lose. If you can get to the Way Out and defeat all Bad Dreams on the board you Win!

The components are quite cute, if a little minimal. The cards are not linen finished.

Rulebook

The rulebook is good, except that it doesn’t talk a lot about edge conditions. As we played the game, a bunch of questions came up (“Are Action Points dynamic? Do you immediately lose/gain an AP as a result of a chain change?”). There was a FAQ, but it didn’t answer the questions that seem to come up with us.

The components list had no pictures, but the Set-up was well-labelled to counteract that. In general, there were appropriate pictures and the game was explained well-enough. I even like that it had a FAQ, it just didn’t seem to address the questions we had. I’ll call the rulebook good enough.

Solo Mode

Congratulations to Chainsomnia for following Saunders’ Law and having a solo mode!

Unfortunately, the solo player must take control of 3 characters. Similarly, a 2-Player game would have each player take control of 2 characters. Basically, there must always be 3 or 4 characters in the game. This isn’t ideal for the solo because there’s always the context switch issue as you jump from character to character, playing each one separately.

Luckily for the solo mode, the context switch issue is not too problematic: each character has a pretty simple character with one “major” power. For example, if one of your characters were Ryan (see above), it’s easy to remember he’s strong (strength of 5) and can also eliminate one monster for one AP. There’s not too much to remember for each character, so context switching from character to character isn’t a big deal. Contrast this to the characters from Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance where each context switch becomes heavier and heavier as the characters get more and more abilities in the game (see our review here). While the extra abilities in Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance are cool, it makes it significantly harder to play multiple characters.

It took me two solo games to get a win. I remember losing my first game and saying, “Nope! I wanna play again! I know what to do now!” I think your strategy really depends on the characters you choose, so my second game was with the same 3 characters.

I made one major mistake in both solo games: I forgot to save my Ominous Event cards and my Auspicious event cards. In most every other cooperative game, you throw away events when you are done … Nope! Here, they are a measure oh how well you did.

When you open the secret envelope, you need those cards. I didn’t realize this until after my second game!

(Picture deleted from review to avoid spoilers)

Minor Spoiler: Basically, you measure your victory (in the event of a win) by how many Auspicious Events and Ominous Events you got. That was kind of cool: it’s a hidden and secret way to measure success, and gives you a reason to play again to try for a “better” win.

I didn’t love solo mode (mostly because of the 3 character issue), but it was fun enough to play again. It also gave me enough insight to teach to my friends.

Cooperative Mode

This game went over pretty well as a cooperative game: probably better than I expected. Since you always need at least 3 or 4 characters in play (this totally reminds me of Unicornus Knights), a 3 or 4-player game is probably ideal: that way every player gets exactly one character to operate, and it’s easier to inhabit and connect with the game if you are “that character”.

I noticed that, as we were playing, we really did consult each other a lot … and console each other a lot. “Hey, don’t worry: I can take care of that nightmare!” “Hey, don’t worry, I can get you an item!” Sara’s character’s power allowed here to give items to other people anywhere on the board … this was huge! It allowed us to power up! Even if we had a bad role, the game evoked a pathos: “It’s all right, we’ll get you out of that mess.” Maybe there’s something about being a little kid that brings out the best in people, and makes them want to help each other?

There were a lot of fun little moments playing cooperatively. I knew the game had gone well when we spent the post-game talking about all sorts of other ways we could have won/lost, been more strategic, etc. People cared enough to keep thinking about the game, even when it was over!

Repacking

What’s going on with this box? It has a huge insert, but the game doesn’t fit back into the box unless you do one of two things:

Always remove the plastic bases
OR
Pack the dice into the fingerholes!

Those of you who have played GloomHaven know the problem with constantly removing/adding the plastic bases! Basically, the bottom tears! So, I chose to leave the plastic bases on. Which means the game box WHICH IS HUGE doesn’t fit the game! I had to be clever … and put the dice in the fingerholes.

Yup, not ideal, but then the game fits. See below for pictures of how I fit the game in.

Conclusion

Chainsomnia was pretty fun. Although the rules were missing a lot of edge cases, the game was still pretty easy to teach and play. The group liked it, but didn’t love it:

Teresa, Rich: 7/10, liked it, would suggest it
Sara: 6.5/10 liked it, would happily play, maybe wouldn’t suggest it as first choice
Andrew: 6/10 Liked it well enough, would play again

The biggest issue with the game was that it felt a little “samey” after a few plays. You could mitigate that by switching up the characters to have different strategies. It was also maybe a little too lucky with so much emphasis being placed on the dice.

Chainsomnia was fun enough. We actually would not recommend this for kids: even though this game is cute, the nightmares attacking kids might not go over well with younger players. This game is more for older kids who like light cooperative games with an anime look.

EDITOR: At the time Our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Placement games was written, Chainsomnia just barely squeaked onto the list as #10. I hate to say it, but I think Race for The Raft came along, moved to the top of the list, and pushed everything down one space (see our review here: it’s that good)! So that means Chainsomnia is #11 now …

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Unboxing the Miniatures

Rulebook

Unboxing the Base Game

Gameplay

Campaign

Solo Play

Cooperative Play

Flanking and Advantage

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Reactions

Conclusion

PreCon

RichieCon Day 0: Secret RichieCon House

RichieCon Day 1: Morning Pivot!

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

RichieCon Day 2: More Games!

Sound Mitigation

Games of the Con

Interesting Games

Theme Song

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook

Good Guys and Bad Guys

The Manor: Worker Placement Rooms!

Resources

Time

Doors and Connectivity

Spells

Companions

Solo Game: True Solo With One Character

Solo Play: Alternating Between Two Characters

Cooperative Play

Things I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Reactions

Conclusion

Unbooking

Legacy or Campaign Game?

The World

Flow

Help

Story: Solo vs Cooperative

Solo

Cooperative Family Mode

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Unboxing and Gameplay

Cool Things

Solo Play: Two Modes

Cooperative Mode

Conclusion

Unboxing of the The Big Box

Unboxing of Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition

The Case of the Missing Monkey

First Edition

The Introductory Campaign

Scenario 1: Warm Welcome To Tamatoa

Scenario 2: Which Way The Wind Blows?

Scenario 3: Looking For Answers

Scenario 4: Lords Of Fog

Set-Up

Conclusion

Honorable Mention. Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

10. The Shivers

9. Coded Chronicles: Scooby Doo! Escape From The Haunted Mansion

8. Paper Point N Click: Eppi

Unlock Epic Adventures: Mission #07

6. Unlock! The Adventures of Oz

5. Chronicles of Crime

4. Unlock! The Treasure of Tonipal

3. Adventure Series: The Grand Hotel Abaddon

2. Adventure Series: The Dungeon

1. Paper Point N Click: Cantaloop

Unboxing

Rulebook

The Tutorial