Tag: review

Prepping for the Standardized Test: A Review of A Carnivore Did It!

A Carnivore Did It! is a cooperative and solo game of logical deduction where players only use logic to discover the solution  (as opposed to social deduction, where players deduce using very human tells).  I ordered this directly from the Horrible Guild website and it arrived late October 2025

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty small package: see Can of Coke above for perspective.

This is a game where you have to deduce (via logic) “who is the culprit” (or in later games, “who are the culprits“)?   There are from 3 to 7 suspects, depending on the case. See above.

There are 2000 cases (!) in the game; see the cases on 20 cards above (100 cases per card).

Each card has 50 cases per side.

Using a little card overlay above,  you choose a case with its solution.

The line describes the “statements” needed for the case .. see above for case #1.  We need statements 31, 2 and 10.

There are 50 statement cards with different true/false statements: see above.

And the solution is in exposed by the red acetate on the back side (see above, slight spoiler, except its so hard to read, it doesn’t matter).

The case is specified by the numbers: the numbers choose “statements” each suspect will make.  See above for statements 31, 2, and 10.

These statement are attached to the suspects (in order) so that each statement has a statement which is either true or false.

At the top of the case card, it tells you How many suspects you need (3), how many Culprits are there (1 mask), and how many LIES are being told (the red X1).  All the cases on this card share these characteristics.

Then, using the fact that there is EXACTLY 1 lie (or 2 truths, or whatever the card says), you have to deduce who’s lying, and who’s telling the truth.  The statements veracity or falsehood will indicate who the culprit is!   Fun fact; the suspect lying MAY NOT be the actual suspect. People just lie sometimes!

This is a pretty compact little logical deduction game.  The components are fine, except for one thing: see below.

Solo Mode

This is a Solo Team type of game; all players must work together to come up with the final answer of who did it.  So the solo mode is implicit; the solo player works together with himself to solve the puzzle!

I gotta be honest; A Carnivore Did It!  feels like the logic puzzles you find on standardized tests like the GRE and PSAT and SAT (although it’s been a long time since I took those); you use logic to figure out the culprit.  So, playing this solo somehow gave me vibes of doing a standardized test, but without the #2 pencil and little bubbles.

To be fair, I LIKE the logic puzzle this presents.  But, if you don’t really like these logic puzzles because it DOES remind of standardized tests, you will hate this solo.  You may still like it cooperatively (see below).

Cooperative Play

The cooperative play went as expected.  Sometimes you get lost in each others thoughts, as they try to explain their reasoning.

It was VERY important to come up with a systematic system to eliminate/verify statements, especially in the cooperative game!  We ended up using the Trouble and Rare tokens from Kinfire Council to be False and True (respectively). See above.  Without these tokens, I think it’s too easy to get lost in each other’s logic.  Or just to get lost.  If we were sure of a statement’s veracity/falsehood, we would add the token to the RIGHT side of the card.  During hypothesis phase, we’d out a token on the LEFT side of the card to show “it’s just a hypothesis”.

Somehow, it’s a little less daunting to play with someone else, because it forces you to be more systematic.  Even better, If you are flailing, then you can defer to your friend.

Cooperative was a little more fun than solo, even if we had to argue/prove a little bit more.

Issues

Trouble Reading: I really had trouble reading the solution.  I had to zoom in with my phone (see above) and I still could barely read the answer.

In fact, we tried using the little red acetate from Cantaloop to see if it worked better!

It worked “a little better”, but it was still hard to read!

No Explanation:  So, I/We have been able to reason out all the puzzles we’ve have seen … so far.  But what if you are wrong?  You have no place to go to see a solution.  I wish they had a web page you could go to to see the solution for each one.  But there is NO explicit solution in the rulebook at all.  All you get is an answer … the game does not “show its work”.

Clumsy and Frail;  You have to slip the little decoder on the cards.  This felt fraught with peril; I was very afraid it might break over time or maybe you accidentally tear it when you slide it down the card.

Stuff I Liked

Lots of cases: Yes, 2000 cases!

Very Clear Presentation!  The rulebook even does a good job of discussing when things would still be true or false, to help answer some of the “well, what do they mean by THAT“.  The and/or questions … they have a little section to help discuss that. Still, the AND/OR stuff can be confusing.

Conclusion

You probably already know right away whether you will like this game or not.  If you love logic puzzles, I think this game will really resonate with you.  A Carnivore Did It! reminds us a lot of the simpler logic deduction game Cat Crimes (see our Top 10 Cooperative Cat Games here).

If you liked the simpler Cat Crimes, then A Carnivore Did It! is the next step up in complexity (especially when you have 7 suspects and multiple culprits)!  The later cases (see one above) can be pretty challenging (but still doable).

If you don’t like logic puzzles, you will probably hate this as a solo game; it probably feels too much like a standardized test.  Even if you don’t like logic puzzles, you may still like this cooperatively; sometimes it’s fun to be a fly on the wall and all of a sudden start participating and getting involved when you see the solution unfolding!  Or you may hate it and feel stupid and just draw away.  Only you know you.

This would probably get a higher rating if there weren’t a few component issues.  This should be probably be a solid 7.5/10 or even better, but the fact the little acetate reader is really hard to use, hard to read, and possibly fragile, I worry. I also wish they had they shown their work for solutions.  So, this might be a 6.5 or 7/10 instead.  Or maybe it won’t bother you, and this is exactly what you wanted: “I can read the solution, and I don’t need them to show their work … I can figure it out myself!”  If that’s the case, you may love this game and embrace it with aplomb …  for an 8/10 game.

Dice Throne Outcasts + Dice Throne Adventures Unchained. Part II of II.

Join us for the second part of our review as we look closer at the Dice Throne Adventures Unchained Expansion. Part I showed us the terrifyingly thematic Halloween characters of Dice Throne Outcasts, and now we look at the new solo and cooperative modes of Unchained!

If Dice Throne Outcasts provides the core characters for head-to-head play, then Dice Throne Adventures Unchained gives us more ways to play solo and cooperatively!

We have to 100% clear here; Dice Throne Adventures Unchained is an expansion for Dice Throne Adventures! See above! We really liked the Dice Throne Adventures Expansion (see review here), so when we saw there would be more content, we were excited!  So, in order to use this new Unchained expansion, unfortunately, you do need the Dice Throne Adventures box.  That’s right, Unchained is an expansion for an expansion! 

And to further muddy the waters, you need at least one of several boxes of characters to play.  We’ve been playing with Outcasts and have been loving it, but there’s also Marvel Dice Throne (see review here), X-Men Dice Throne (see review here), and Seasons I and II of Dice Throne (see review here).

In other words, to play Unchained, you also need a core box as well as the Dice Throne Adventures box!

So, if that hasn’t scared you to running away screaming  (“Really? Three boxes total?”), we can look objectively to see if it is worth getting the Unchained Expansion!  I will tempt you by saying that we have two new solo modes AND a new cooperative mode!

Unboxing

The Unchained box is small, but it has quite a bit of stuff.  See Can of Coke above for scale.

The coolest thing is the new Loot cards which can be mixed in with the original Dice Throne Adventures. Loot is just upgrades as you play! See above.  The Legendary cards are even foil! Oooooohh!!

The most fun new rule of the game is that Loot is added instantly to your hand when you get it!  So, there’s a new Loot table for instantly adding stuff! 

There’s also a whole bunch of new Minions (levels 1-4, sorry I-IV).

There’s a new Boss!  The Vault Witch!  

As a boss, she has her own deck (and sleeves)! See above!

In the base Dice Throne Adventures, you can choose to fight the Vault Witch instead of a normal boss, by collecting the Witch Keys: see above.  This allows you to vary the bosses a little in the original Dice Throne Adventures game.

There’s also 3 new sheets (double-sided) for 6 new one-shot scenarios!  

Overall, this looks great and totally fits the feel of Dice Throne, especially the Outcasts set!

Rulebook

The rulebook is a tiny thing.

This rulebook probably gets a B- on the Chair Test. It does stay open and stays flat, and the font is big and readable, and it has lots of good pictures and annotations … but it’s still just a little small.

The components page works well: see above.  

Like all Dice Throne rulebooks, they do a good job labeling pictures and having a good sized font.

Generally, this rulebook was fine.  It even finishes with some useful stuff on the back cover.

Solo Mode: Minion Rush

The game comes with a new solo mode called Minion Rush!  See rules above! 

As you might guess, you just go and fight a bunch of minions (no bosses allowed!).  These new rules span 2.5 pages in the rulebook: see above.

At the end of the Minion Rush (after you die, … and you will die), you get Points for every Minion you killed!  (Harder Minions are obviously worth more). See above as I get 27 points for killing all-but-one minion!

I tried to set-up a Minion Rush using only the new Minions  (see above)… but you don’t quite have enough Minions in the Unchained expansion to do this … you gotta get some from the main box.

I was actually incredibly disappointed you couldn’t JUST play Minion Rush with the Unchained expansion: you need 13 Minions, and the Unchained expansion only comes with 12 Minions!  D’oh!  It sounds stupid, but I thought it would have been nice to need almost nothing from Dice Throne Adventures.  To be clear; for Minion Rush, you STILL NEED Dice Throne Adventures. 

In the end, I played Minion Rush with mostly Unchained Minions!  See above!

It was reasonably fast and fun to play, like 1.5 hours?  You just beat-up Minions!

You have to choose a path to follow … once you start following a path to the left or right, you have to keep going on that path!

As you go, you get upgrades!  And these upgrades persist! See above!  Yay! But so does damage and poison!  Boo!  Basically, it feels like a Dungeon delve!

Minion Rush is a fun way to play solo without too much set-up.  This is another great way to learn the characters!  If you don’t want to me play the Me vs Me solo mode (like we saw in Part I of our review), then Minion Rush is a fun solo mode without too much commitment.  

I used to the solo mode Minion Rush to learn the Raveness character!  See above!

“But Rich!” … I hear you asking. “Why do I need special rules for the Minion Rush??  It feels like I could just play the Dice Throne Adventures and use these rules? Do I really need Unchained to do this?”  

You are ALMOST right.  You need two major things from Dice Throne Adventures: the status tokens (and the back of the Dice Throne Adventures rulebook), but arguably more important thing you need is … the new Loot Chart.

New Loot Zoot Suit

Arguably, the best new rule in Unchained is that you get IMMEDIATELY get Loot into your hand when kill a Minion!  See above for the One-Shot Loot chart!  One of the complaints of the original Dice Throne Adventures was that your deck upgrades went very slowly … you might only get a few Loot as you play per session.  And you might not see it very much!

The new One-Shot Loot chart (if you roll well) immediately puts Loot into your hand.  So, as you kill a bunch of Minions in Minion Rush, your hand is getting better, and better immediately!

So, the new One-Shot Loot chart is paramount to making this Minion Rush work! 

“But Rich”, I hear you say, “Can’t you just make a copy of the One-Shot Loot Chart and play Minion Rush without Unchained?”  No, because you still need the status tokens and rulebook from Dice Throne Adventures.  Why don’t you just support Roxley and quit trying to cheap-out?  They’ve made a great game for you to play … besides, Unchained comes also with new Minions, new Boss, new Loot, and … a new co-op mode!

New Cooperative Mode!

That’s right, people!  There’s a new cooperative mode in Unchained!  Whaaaat?

The One-Shot Adventure is a new cooperative Adventure!  See rules above. 

One-Shot Adventure: Solo Mode!

Technically, the One-Shot Adventure is also a new solo mode, as you can play that One-Shot Adventure by yourself!

This new One-Shot Adventure addresses the problem many people had with the original Dice Throne Adventures … it was too long!  Dice Throne Adventures required an investment in a long, on-going adventure, and there kinda wasn’t a way to just play a one-off!  Now you can!

There are three One-Shot maps (dual-sided), (see one above) and they basically represent a “condensed” Adventure where you fight some Minions on the way to fighting a BOSS!  The map above represents you “going through a dungeon”!  Along the way, you fight Minions, find treasure, find healing, and try to get to the BOSS  at the bottom!!

I played a One-Shot Adventure (see above) solo to see how it worked!    When you play the One-Shot Adventure, you have to embrace needing Dice Throne Adventures, some characters (from Outcasts, but really any), and the Unchained expansion! 

To help myself keep things separate, I actually physically separated the Dice Throne Adventure components on the left side of the table (see above) …

.. and the Unchained and Outcasts components to the right side of the table! 

This helped me keep track of what goes where!

I really enjoyed this solo; it felt like it took all the complexity of Dice Throne Adventures and compressed it into a bite-sized adventure I could play in about 1.5 to 2 hours!

With the One-Shot, you get to fight BOTH a lot of Minions AND a Boss in a smaller time frame.

I really enjoyed this “new” solo mode.  Of course, like we said in the Minion Rush, part of the reason the One-Shot Adventure works so well is that we have the One-Shot Loot chart and immediately get Loot so we immediately feel more powerful as we play!  See above as I already have some great Ghost Equipment out and upgrade cards to fight the new big bad!

The new boss is cool; I have to say I defeated her pretty readily in my One-Shot Adventure, but she was still fun to play.

Again, The One-Shot Loot chart makes this new cooperative work so well.

One-Shot Adventure: Cooperative Mode … Prequel

One big mistake I think we made in playing Dice Throne Missions was NOT playing a quick head-to-head game to learn the characters.  (You might remember my friends were frustrated when playing Missions: see review here).   When confronted with all the new rules of the cooperative modes, I think it’s too easy to get lost.  So, before we jumped into a cooperative game of Unchained (the One-Shot Adventure), I asked my friends to play a quick Head-to-head game.

I recommend this to you and your groups as well.  Don’t just jump into Unchained.  There’s a lot of rules.  Let your players get comfortable with the basic rules and characters they want to play BEFORE you jump in.

Playing a quick head-to-head game first was absolutely the right thing to do;  I know it from both the positive side (my friends above said they were very glad we did a quick pre-game) and the negative side (when my other friends felt frustrated in Missions).

One-Shot Adventures: Cooperative Mode!

So, I shepherded my players into a One-Shot  Adventure!  They generally had fun, although we saw a few problems: 
1) Four players may be too many.  Even though the game moved fast, some times you felt like it took too long to get to your turn.
2) Because it takes some turns to get some of the characters flowing, sometimes having the next player fight the minion slows down your progression.  Both Raveness and the Headless Horsemen suffered from that a little; both of them require a “commitment” to an opponent to see a result.  If the opponent is killed by another fellow player, you feel a little frustrated as you couldn’t “get your character going”.

Both of these problem are solved, I think, by simply limiting the number of players. My friends had fun playing cooperatively, but I think Robert (Headless Horseman) and Becca (Raveness) were a little frustrated getting their characters going.

The other thing to be aware of, (and note that I am not calling this a problem), is that the game isn’t particularly cooperative. It’s pretty much multi-player solitaire as you all just take your turn and try to kill Minions/Bosses. Occasionally, you might help each other with cards that give re-rolls, (“I really need a re-roll! Can someone get me a re-roll?” ), or you might get rid of a status (“Please get rid of this poison!”) If you like cooperative games that are mostly multi-player solitaire with a sprinkling of cooperation, this is a perfect game for you. If you are looking for a more cooperative experience, Dice Throne Mission might be a better choice? (I say this because characters like Cyclops are made for cooperation).

Conclusion

It’s hard to recommend  an expansion for an expansion (remember, Unchained is an expansion for Dice Throne Adventures), but I think Unchained crosses that threshold!  I actually think this is an essential expansion; Unchained fixes two major complaints about Dice Throne Adventures!   

The first complaint about Dice Throne Adventures was that the upgrade path was too slow; it took forever to see new Loot cards in your hand!  The major fix in Unchained is the new One-Shot Loot chart and rules that make you upgrade SO MUCH faster!   You feel powerful quickly, and that’s a great feeling!

The second major complaint about Dice Throne Adventures was that there was too much commitment needed to play it; it took too long  to play the long adventure! Now, with the One-Shot Adventures, you can play cooperatively in one session, fighting both Minions and a Boss!  No need for the long game!

There’s even a new solo mode with the Minion Rush, which makes it a little easier to learn characters!

There are few things to be cognizant of: you probably shouldn’t play the new cooperative mode with the full four players if you can help it.  My friends still enjoyed it, but I think it would have been more fun at a smaller player count.  Two, maybe three players is probably best.

You should also be aware that the new cooperative modes aren’t super-cooperative.  There are occasions for cooperation, but generally the game is multi-player solitaire. It’s not a bad thing, you just need to be aware of what this is.

I also STRONGLY suggest you make sure your players are familiar with the characters before they play; play a head-to-head 20 minute game before ramping up into the One-Shot Adventure, or your players might get mired in rules and frustration.

Finally, would I recommend Dice Throne Missions over Dice Throne Adventures + Unchained for the solo/cooperative game?  It depends on what you want!  Dice Throne Missions has short adventures (two sessions), and simultaneous dice-rolling which moves the game quicker.  Missions is much more super-heroey, and Unchained is more dungeon-delvey!  If you want the One-Shot Adventures so you can just jump in-and-out, then I think Dice Throne Adventures + Unchained is the better choice.  If you just want short-little adventures, the super-hero theme of Missions may call to you! Honestly, they are both good choices! 

I think Unchained is an essential expansion and makes Dice Throne Adventures that much better.  It adds new Minions, new Loot, new Boss, new solo modes, new cooperative modes, but most importantly, fixes some major problems of Dice Throne Adventures.  9/10.

Top 10 Cooperative Things to Pick Up Before Greater Than Games Goes Away Forever

I have been buying a LOT of stuff from Greater Than Games over the past few weeks to get ready for GMing my first game of Sentinels Comics: The Roleplaying Game! I have played the game many times (with my friend CC GMing), but I have never GMed myself! So, I have been catching up on supplies. Unfortunately, because of the unpredictable tariffs, Greater Than Games has “shuttered” themselves to a large degree, laying off almost everyone, and is just liquidating stock. See news announcement here! (This was a while ago, but I am just buying stuff now)

https://www.greaterthangames.com/blogs/news/greater-than-games-team-reduced-in-response-to-tariff-crisis

I really do hope they come back from this, but I have been trying to get everything I can in case they disappear forever! Here’s my Top 10 Cooperative Things (games, expansions, other) from Greater Than Games to get before they go away forever!

10. Spirit Island

Of all the games in the GTG lineup, I feel like  Spirit Island is the least likely to go away.  Even if Greater Than Games dies completely, I am very confident someone else will pick this up! At the time of this writing, Spirit Island is #11 OVERALL on BoardGameGeek!  I see Spirit Island in Top Solo Games lists all the time (and it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2017 as well!).  I love this game, and if you’ve never tried it, it’s a great game! It’s almost a euro-cooperative game! I put this at #10 not because it’s my lowest rated game,  it’s just that I suspect this game will never go away; it’s too popular.   Someone will pick it up, even if Greater Than Games falters forever.

(And yes, there are a TON of expansions for Spirit Island, they are all fun, but I almost never play them.  I view all the expansions as Honorable Mentions for this list).

9. Legends of Sleepy Hollow

My group really liked this cooperative game, The Legends of Sleepy Hollow, but it has some wonkiness to it.  See our review here.  But they fixed some of that wonkiness with the Errata (see Errata review here).  If the idea of a cooperative game in the Sleepy Hollow universe sounds fun to you, check this out … and pick it up before it disappears forever!  Just make sure you get the Errata!

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition

The next three entries all all related to the Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition

8. Disparation*

The Definitive edition of the Sentinels of the Multiverse is “essentially” the third edition of the game.  See our review here for more details.  The Disparation expansion for it … may or may happen.  When GTG first announced they were shuttering, it sounded like they shut down production of it, even though printing had already started!  Over the past 6 months, we had news that maybe it will print, maybe it won’t.  As of this writing, production has started back up again!  So, Disparation may still reach its Kickstarter (sorry, BackerKit) backers.  It’s unclear if this will ever see retail; if you see it, pick it up.  You may never see it again.

7. Rook City Renegades 

The first expansion to the Definitive Edition, Rook City Renegades, definitely did make it to retail, so you might still see it around.  See our review of it here.  If you end up getting and loving Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition, you probably want to pick this expansion up before it disappears forever!

6. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition

This is the third edition of one of our favorite cooperative games of all time!  I feel like I am Superhero in a superhero’s world, battling villains and working together with my friends!  Take a look at our review and see if you might like this!  This is a rare 10/10 game for us, and you may be kicking yourself if you don’t pick this up before it goes out of print forever!

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Second Edition

The next few entries are related to the second edition of Sentinels of the Multiverse!

5. Any expansion, but especially Rook City!

There are a TON of expansions for the Second Edition of Sentinels of the Multiverse!  They are all good!

But, if I ever do a list of essential expansions for a game, Rook City (for the Second Edition) will be #1 on it!  This is one of my favorite expansions of all time!  The Villains and Environments in here are just so amazing!  This expansion really took the original (second edition) of Sentinels of the Multiverse to the next level!  (I think this is currently only offered as a bundle with Infernal Relics: I have the original).

4. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Second Edition

This is also called the “Enhanced Edition”.  You might wonder why the second edition is higher on the list than the definitive edition!  Well, to be frank, I like it better!  I think the coloring and art make it easier to see cards from across the room!  And even though the gameplay is “less smooth”, I am used to it.  Still, most of my friends liked the Definitive Edition better: See our review here!

It’s possible you might find some great deals on the Second Edition in the used market, so be on the lookout!  Just be careful not to mix editions!  Luckily, the only things for Definitive Edition are the three we list (that and foil cards)!  Just about everything else should work with the second Edition!

Sentinels Comics: The Roleplaying Game

Our last three entries are exclusively for the Sentinels RPG!  And yes, we consider this RPG a cooperative game!  What can be more cooperative than heroes coming together to save humanity?

3. Game Moderator Kit

2. Starter Kit

1. Core Rulebook 

You might wonder why Sentinels Comics: The Roleplaying Game stuff makes the top 3 spots on our list, despite the original card game(s) Sentinels of the Multiverse being some of our favorite games of all times! I think you’ll be able to find Sentinels of the Multiverse card games for some time, but I am not sure the Sentinels Comics stuff will be around! I think that the Sentinels Comics RPG didn’t get a lot of love, but it’s a pretty neat RPG system. My friend CC said it’s his favorite RPG to run! See our review here!

You can dip your toe in the water with The Starter Kit (#2) to see if you even like the game! The Starter Kit comes with pre-generated characters and pre-generated adventures so it’s easy to jump in!!

But of course, the funnest part of Superhero games is making up your own heroes, which the Core Rulebook allows you to do! The Game Moderator Kit is just icing on the cake if you decide you like this system!

Check out Greater Than Games Website (see here) to see if you can still pick up some of these things!

Kinfire Council + The Winds of Change Solo And Cooperative Expansion. A Journey and A Review!

No, this has nothing to do with the Scorpion’s song Winds of Change from 1990.

You guys are totally gonna laugh at me.  I didn’t back the original Kinfire Council when it back on Kickstarter! Despite it being a Kevin Wilson game! Why??? I usually really like Kevin Wilson games!  Between cooperative games like Arkham Horror (2nd Edition), Kinfire Chronicles (review here), and even traitor games (which I don’t usually like) like The Stuff Of Legend (review here), Kevin Wilson makes some great games!

The base game Kinfire Council (see above) is a competitive worker-placement game, which looked pretty mean!  It has voting on resolutions (which may screw the town or other players), and cultists that players may join-up at any point!  It looked like someone put traitor mechanics and take-that mechanics into a worker placement game!  No thank you!  Me and my group like cooperative games; this just didn’t look like it was for me/us.

Somehow I missed the memo that Winds of Change (see above: an expansion that seemed to be part of the same Kickstarter) made the game solo and cooperative!  You have to forgive me on this; it’s buried a little bit in the Kickstarter page! In fact, if go searching the page within your browser, the word “cooperative” doesn’t even come up! (It’s hidden in the pictures of the page).

Also, I am always suspicious of games where the solo and cooperative game are obvious add-ons. 

But I did get it.  It took some effort.

So, is this any good? Is it worth getting both Kinsfire Council and the expansion Winds of Change JUST so you can play solo and cooperative?  The answer’s a little more subtle than you might think.

Unboxing And Base Gameplay

The base game is pretty standard sized box; see Coke Can for perspective.

There is a LOT of stuff in this box! See above!

Each player chooses (or randomly gets) a Worker sheet … see above …

And a Councilor sheet! See above!

Together, the Councilor and worker sheet form your tribe!   See above!  (They don’t actually have an official name for this combination in the game, so I am using tribe to mean the combination of a worker sheet and a Councilor).  The Councilor is cool because it gives special asymmetric powers (see Head of the Temple above; she knows how to handle gold)!  Each player also gets a number of “generic” workers (see the 5 above).

The acrylic standee is a special worker called “The Seeker” who can go outside the city and do other special things.

As the game unfolds, you can upgrade your workers!  See above as Doma gets to be a Merchant!

At the end of the day, this is mostly a worker placement game!  Your workers and Seeker can be placed throughout the city and activate Locations!  Only one per Location .. unless you have something special!

Many Locations have a choice: do you activate the top or bottom?  For example (see above): The top is a choice between EITHER getting 2 coin or 2 food.  The bottom action is trading; the worker can convert 2 food or 1 common into a moon stone (rare) OR one moon stone (rare) into 4 coin.  These are some of the main resources in the game!

It’s probably safe to say this game is a resource acquisition/conversion game too!  See a bunch of the resources (from the Upgrade pack) above.

Kinsfire Council is also a voting game; you are members of a council for the city (I mean, it’s in the name for goodness sake).  Every turn, two Decree cards come out (see two examples above).  In order for these decrees to pass, they have to get a majority vote!  If you are in league with the Cultists, you may want to vote against them!  Or you may want to pass a decree that helps you but hurts the city!  Or you may not care at all and just ignore the decrees, preferring to spend resources on other things!  It DOES cost action/resources to vote!  So, you have to decide to vote or not!

Another issue the players have to deal with … Cultists come out!  They clog the worker placement board  and make it so you can’t go there!

See above as the #1 Cultist clogs the #1 Action space!  Luckily, your workers can arrest Cultists, by being adjacent to them (but unfortunately, arresting a Cultist takes your action, unless you are a guard…).

The Cultists also cause threats to come out!  The threats don’t necessarily immediately trigger!  They usually only trigger when enough Trouble tokens gets placed! (Thing in the Tunnel above needs 2 Trouble to trigger). If you can discard the necessary resources (at the bottom left of the card), you can stop the threat before it comes out AND get victory points (bottom right)!

Every Cultist placed will either place a new threat or add a trouble, depending on its number (see the bottom of the threat board).

It sounds crazy, but Cultists are resources too!  Even after you arrest some, you can still use the Cultists (say, as hostages for taking out threats: see above!).

There’s lot of good stuff going on too; you can also upgrade spaces on the board by using the City Planning space!  See above as it flips the white space to the blue side making it better!

There’s also Research (which is like good news cards) which can be really helpful too.  Like everything in Kinsfire Council, the Research cards are ALSO resources that  may be traded in (besides doing the something useful).

Along the way, you have to keep the city healthy: the chart to the left are the resources you need to “feed the city” (3 food) and “keep it clean” (1 gold): this is called City Needs!!  If players don’t collectively keep the City Needs under control, the city get more Cultists!  Interestingly, you don’t have to use a full action to take care of the City Needs; this is just an errand … every action has a free errand you can run! (Thematically, it somehow makes sense that politicians see taking care of City Needs as a simple errand, not a full action).

As part of the errand phase, you can also build the tower!  (See three such tower cards above!)  The Towers serve as inspiration to the city!  The Cultists hate the tower, because it provides inspiration and hope!  So, the less of the tower you build, the more Victory points the Cultists get!

To win, you need the most Victory Points: this is a Victory Point game! See the Victory Point track above!   You’ll  also notice that the Cultists have their own Victory Point marker!    It’s possible for the Cultists (to be clear, Cultists are NOT a player) to win the game!  If the Cultists win, whosoever has the most Cult Influence wins the game instead!

At the very end of the game, the Cultists reveal the Hidden Threat deck (created at the beginning of the game, and added to by certain decrees and threats) and add THOSE Victory Points to the Cultists!

The above 4 Hidden Threats would add 44 Victory Points to the Cultists!

This is a worker placement game, but with some really interesting ideas with voting, upgrading spaces, battling cultists, special workers, upgrading workers, collecting resources, doing research, building towers, and maybe … aligning with the Cultists behind the scenes!

Do you try to keep the city healthy or just let it go to hell and let the Cultists take over?  That’s all part of this competitive game!

Rulebook

Good rulebook. 

It gets a A- on The Chair Test (it could be an A, but the font could be a little bigger, especially seeing how much white space there is on the page).  BUT the rulebook has a great form factor, has some decent pictures, doesn’t droop down over the edges of the chair next to me, and it stays open to be easily consulted.  Great job guys!

The components pages are good; pictures and correlating text is always a good thing.  See above.

The set-up is also good; pictures and labels help!  See above.

Holy crap, there’s even an Index, and I used it multiple times! It was a useful Index!

The rulebook even ends with something useful on the back; see above.

My only complaint was that there were a few things that were unclear in the rulebook.  I posted on BoardGameGeek and got some responses; I post the thread here so you can benefit from my questions!  (The Designer, Kevin Wilson even answered and tacitly approved the answers).

Other than that, very good rulebook.

Solo Game (Unofficial)

To be clear, the base game of Kinfire Council is for 2-6 Players and is a competitive worker placement game.   There is no solo game built-in to the base game!

BUT, if you squint at the 2-Player rules a little (see page 20 from the base rulebook above) you can see the implications of a simple solo game!

In fact, the solo mode from the Winds of Change expansion is ALMOST the 2-Player game from the base game!

Basically, the official solo game and 2-Player game doesn’t allow player(s) to go after Cult Influence.  To win, the player(s) must get more Victory Points than the Cultists!   Interestingly, the solo (and 2-Player mode) redefine the Cult influence action to eliminate Trouble tokens and SUBTRACT Cult VP (rather than add Cult Influence and ADD Cult VP).

So, you can play the base Kinfire Council solo … unofficially! It’s really just the 2-Player game where you MUST be against the Cultists!

To win the (unofficial) solo game, you play like normal, and BOTH players VP must surpass the Cultists!  See above as I lose my first unofficial solo game as the red tribe is still behind on VP!

To be clear, this is an unofficial solo mode that is my own creation to just learn the game.  It’s not very hard, but it does teach how the game plays.  The solo player takes control of two tribes and plays the game normally, like a 2-Player game, but alternating between the tribes.

So, I played a couple of solo (unofficial) games to learn the game.  This is a great way to see all the rules and systems!  This (unofficial) solo game is MUCH EASIER than the official solo mode.   The official solo mode is WAY HARDER, but when you are learning the game, I think this (unofficial) solo mode is more approachable!  Basically, the official solo mode has more rules, more things to keep track, is a little oppressive (especially at the beginning), and may be a little too frustrating (in the beginning). 

I lost my first (unofficial) solo game and decisively won my second (unofficial) solo game.  But I learned the game.

If you have played The Captain’s Chair, you know that it has two official solo modes. The “simple” solo mode teaches most of the mechanics of the game without being too oppressive.  Once you know the basics, the “hard” solo mode is how you want to play.  I think that same idea applies here.  

Play the (unofficial) solo mode (which is basically just the solo player operating the 2-Player game by himself) to see how the game works; you only need the base game for that.  If you enjoy that, then you can decide if you want to move on the official (and much harder) solo mode from Winds of Change.

Winds Of Change Unboxing

Winds of Change is the expansion that provides official solo and cooperative rules for base Kinfire Council. 

It adds a bunch of new Locations you can swap from the base City Locations.

It adds three new Towers to swap in.

A bunch of new cards.

And a new resource called Favor Tokens which is like Magic, but its use gives the Cultists Victory Points. (Honestly, in all my plays, I stayed away from these resources)

BUT the most important thing this adds is the new Cult Decree Cards (see above).  This is what makes the solo and cooperative games more challenging!  This is the new key ingredient!

Basically, every turn, when you normally get two decrees (which you may or may not want), you ALSO get a Cult Decree card at the same time!  Just like the Decrees, you have to get the votes on Cult Decrees to make sure they don’t take hold!

The Cult Decree cards are even worse than you think because they ALSO have an immediate bad news (look at the bottom of the card)!

Official Solo Mode (Winds of Change)

If the (unofficial) solo mode is too easy, it’s the Cult Decrees that make the official solo game in Winds of Change a LOT harder.

The official solo mode is very much like the 2-Player mode.  Two tribes must work together (see above) to make sure the city survives the Cultists!  The three real differences are:
1) Players must now deal with Cult Decrees (GULP!)
2) The two tribes share all resources in one pot
3) Each tribe only has three generic workers instead of five generic workers

Since the two tribes now share all resources, there is only one Victory Point marker.  Both tribes move the same VP marker!  See above!  To win, the solo player must simply beat the Cultists!

The official solo mode is still basically the same game, but there’s no back-stabbing or bad councilors to worry about!  The two tribes cooperate!  The solo player alternates between the two tribes and plays normally.  The real difference is that all resources are shared between the two tribes AND they have to deal with the pesky Cult Decrees!

The official solo game definitely feels more oppressive!  Your first few turns feel like you can just barely hold back the tide of Cultists! It’s a little overwhelming!  I think I had some bad luck in my first official solo game, so I cheated a little just to make sure I moved forward to see the whole game!   

In my  second official solo game, I felt like I got it!  In the beginning of the official solo game, it’s HARD to keep the Cultists under control, but by the time you make it turn 5, you have a little bit of an engine going and you have enough resources to make a difference!  It feels  … inspiring … when you can wrest control of the city from the Cultists!  This is our city, darn it!

The official solo game is much harder that the (unofficial) solo mode (as we discussed earlier), but it is a good challenge and it will be a solo mode to keep you coming back.

It’s just a little bit of work to keep the solo and cooperative components separate from the base box.  (I actually ran out of space on my table, and had to put the Winds of Change box on my stove!!! See above)  It’s actually kind of annoying to put everything away.

Cooperative Game

You could easily play the 2-Player mode from the base game cooperatively as a 2-Player game.  And frankly, except for the Cult Decree Cards, it’s pretty much the same game.  Again, the Cult Decree Cards make the game SO MUCH harder. 

For one of our 2-Player cooperative games, we played with the official Winds of Change cooperative rules with the Cult Decree cards.  We wanted the challenge!

In the cooperative game, each player has their own VP marker.  Like before, ALL PLAYERS must have more VP than the Cult, or they lose!  See above as we win!  Both Teresa and I had more VP than the Cult!

The Winds of Change also has new Player Aids (which are quite good: see above).

Basically, we had fun playing cooperatively!  There’s a lot of multiplayer solitaire, which means we both have agency on our turns.  But we still have to talk a LOT to make sure we arrest the Cultists and keep the Cult Decrees under control!   I think this game a really good balance of having solitaire agency but still requiring plenty of cooperation!  At the end of the day, YOU decide how to move your workers, but still work together to keep the Cultists down!

House Rules: Cooperative – Sharing

There was one thing that really surprised us in the cooperative game; there is no rule for sharing resources!

In the official solo game, the two tribes share all resources, so there’s no need for any sharing rules.  But, the cooperative game has no mechanism for sharing?

We came up with a House Rule that seemed to work fantastically!  You can use an errand to share any single resource!!!  It’s an easy place to add the sharing mechanism, and it’s very thematic!  “Oh, as an errand, I need to make sure my friend has some Magic to stop the threat on their turn!”

It’s not free, as it still takes up an errand to do it, but it made the game a LOT more cooperative!  “Can you deliver me a Cultist?”  If my friends just needed one resource and could save us an action, why not do it?

It was sort of funny to have all resources (including Cultists and Cards) being something you can share.  For the Cultists, it reminded us of doing prisoner transfers across town.

We STRONGLY recommend adding this House Rule: as one of the options for an errand, you may choose to share a single resource.  If you can’t build the tower, or resolve City Needs as your errand, maybe you can still do something useful with your errand and help your compatriots.

Sharing as an errand made the game more cooperative, more interactive, and more fun. 

House Rule: Solo – Don’t Require Alternating

In the official solo game, you MUST alternate between the two tribes as you play.  But, why?  Since all the resources are shared, it doesn’t matter as much!  In fact, sometimes you have more options if you can choose any order you want!  Maybe you want to use tribe 1’s three workers FIRST (because they are all guards) and THEN do all of tribe 2’s workers after the board has been cleaned of Cultists!  I found many times, when playing solo, I accidentally didn’t alternate ANYWAYS!  You sometimes forget to alternate … but it doesn’t really change the game.  In fact, it gives you more options!  If you can choose the order of the workers of the tribes, sometimes you can pull off something really clever that maybe you couldn’t if you were forced to alternate.

This isn’t a big deal for a House Rule, but I think it makes the solo game just a little more fun: give me more choice so I can feel clever. 

Thoughts

We were originally supposed to play a 3-Player cooperative game, but Sara fell sick and just wanted to listen to us.  Here’s the funny thing; just listening to us play and narrate our turns to her, Sara gave this game a 7.5/10! She said it sounded really fun!

Teresa really liked it.  About a 7.5/10 as well.

I liked both the solo and cooperative modes a lot.  The solo game was about a 8.0 as was the cooperative game.  With the house rules we proposed, both go up to an 8.5/10. In fact, the sharing as an errand rule was such a good house rule, it might even make it a 9/10.

Conclusion

You can play the base Kinfire Council game as a solo and cooperative game to see if you like it (using the unofficial rules we described).   These unofficial solo/cooperative modes are pretty easy, but they give a good sense of the game.  If you like the game, then the Winds of Change expansion makes the game much more challenging.

Is it worth getting both?? I personally think it’s worth getting both  Kinfire Council and the Winds of Change expansion to play this solo and cooperatively.  It’s a lot of work to get there, between learning the base game, cooperative game, set-up, combining games, and set-up, but the unofficial solo rules can make it a LOT easier to learn the systems of this game.

If you do get Kinfire Council and Winds of Change, I strongly suggest you play with the cooperative house rule sharing as errand, as it makes the game more cooperative, more interactive, and more fun; it brings the game to almost a 9/10 for me (cooperative mode).   Even without that rule, it’s still an 8 or 8.5/10.  It’s so cool that a cooperative worker placement works so well!

The official solo mode is great, but a minor house rule (for relaxing the alternation) makes it a little more fun, as it gives the solo player more choice.  Solo: 8 or 8.5/10.

Storyfold Wildwoods. An Intimate Little Experience.

Storyfold Wildwoods is a solo storybook game that was on Kickstarter back in November 2024.  It promised delivery in September 2025, and it made it on time in September 2025!

This is a game with story, and a slightly weird worker placement mechanic.

Storyfold Wildwoods  presents itself as a solo game, but that’s not how we played it.  This review will be a little different than my normal reviews.

Team Solo

Even though this is a solo game, my friend Teresa was really interested in this dark themed storybook game.  So, we ended up playing Team Solo: both of us making decisions as we played as a team, pretending to be a single solo player.

I usually play solo first to learn the rules and teach my friends, but there was no need to in Storyfold Wildwoods; the games presents the rules as you play. 

There is a Rules Reference, but we only looked at it once or twice when we played.  Most of the rules are covered fairly well as the game unfurls itself.

What Is This?

This is a story game: you play a little girl and her animal companion wandering in the dark forests.

The story is dark both physically and tonally, as you are playing to stop both the physical and metaphysical darkness in the forest.

This is also kind of a worker placement game, as you decide which actions to perform. There’s a river of actions you can perform: the further down the river the actions are, the easier they are to preform.  See above as Explore is easier to activate since it’s at the start of the river.

There are dice in the game, so the actions you attempt may or may not fail.   So, this is a worker placement game where your actions “may” or “may not” succeed.

This is also a lot of game in the cards: there is a lot of story buried in the cards in enemies, and other things that come out.  See the 6 chapters above (the first, Prologue takes you through the rules).  Each Chapter of cards is a fairly hefty deck.

Experience

This is an experience of a game.  You read the story and you make decisions, and it’s heart-wrenching when your die rolls fail, as you are letting the darkness in.   It’s surprisingly depressing when you lose and end up All Alone in the Dark.  See above.

Although this is meant to be a solo game, it worked quite well as an intimate 2-Player game, where the players collectively make decisions.   It took some of the pressure off the dark theme as we decided and worked as a small group.  I suspect this COULD work as a 3-Player game, but I think that might be too much.   Teresa and I had a great time playing as Team Solo.  Er, not a great time … as we lost, and ended up Alone In the Dark … maybe better said as “we enjoyed the experience”.

Theme

I want to be 100% clear; the theme here can be too much; it’s pretty dark. I am not sure I would want a young a kid to play this by themselves (even though the main character has a little kid in the forest).  I do think that this could be a good game to play WITH a kid; that way you can explain/mitigate/explore the darkness and failure together.   Honestly, I think if theme appeals to your child, playing Storyfold Wildwoods Team Solo with your kid might be a fantastic way to explore this world and its dark themes.

Conclusion

I don’t want to say too much about this game, because there’s a lot of neat stuff to uncover, and it’s better if you just find it out yourself.  The way the game presents the rules makes it easy to learn the game as you are playing.

The theme is dark: be aware.   But the art is beautiful and the story is interesting.

The play mechanics might be a little simple, and maybe even a touch random, but this game is an experience more than a game.  It does have a real game underneath, but its the experience here that you are embracing … the game actually hits you emotionally pretty hard.

Even though this is nominally a solo game (and it would work as a solo game), I think I enjoyed it more playing it more as an intimate 2-Player experience (with shared reading and responsibility).  I think this would be a good 2-Player game to play with you and your Mom, an adult and a child, or a boyfriend and a girlfriend.  There’s something in the game that bonds you when you play; maybe facing the darkness together brings you closer together.  Even if you fail, you still have each other.

8/10.

The Original Ikeans: Vikings Building Furniture! A Solo and Cooperative Review of Valheim

Follow us along as we enter the world of the Vikings! Explore lands, find resources, fight big-bads, and … build furniture? Valheim is a big game that I had to “absorb” over a month to crystalize my feelings. I have lots of thoughts … as do my friends! Did I like it solo? Did me and my friends like it cooperatively? Follow us on our journey!

Valheim is a cooperative boss-battling and furniture-building game (yes, you heard me right) that was on Gamefound back in October 2024.   It delivered in October 2025.

This is an exploration game where players play as Vikings exploring the world and looking for resources to build furniture and weapons!  Although some of my friends might see the furniture-building as the main goal of the game, the furniture-building is a secondary goal; the furniture is for upgrades so players can fight the big-bad at the end of the game!

Let’s a take a look!

Unboxing

The first day I got Valheim, I spent 2 hours unboxing, punching out tokens, sleeving cards, and generally organizing the game.

The unboxing was a full two hours of work!  

Valheim is a big mama-jama of a game!  See above! I backed the full all-in package for this: SPOILER ALERT!! You don’t really need most the stuff from the deluxe kickstarter version.  The Dice Tower? Nah.  The Dice Tray? Nah.  The Playmat?  Nah (the board is better).  The card sleeves … there are issues (see later).  The Wooden Furniture is by far the best thing to get.  See below.

If I had to do this over again, I probably would have gotten the non-deluxe version. But I still would have somehow tried to get the wooden furniture….it’s awesome and thematic.

The deluxe box is huge: see the Coke can next to it.

This is just a big game.

It’s pretty fancy looking.

Like I said, it took a while to unbox/organize this; about 2 hours.

Gameplay

Each player takes control of one of the four characters.  These characters boards are really nice dual-layered boards: see above.  But the characters have no name or even designation (the archer? Maybe?)

Each character is just an empty template until you choose the skills; each player gets three skills! See above as the archer? (no name) gets Healthy, Carpenter, and extra move (lower right).

As you play, you can fill in the consumables area with all sorts of cool meads, potions, and things like honeycomb!  (You can actually build a beehive in the game!  That’s a type of furniture!)

As the game progresses, players can make or find weapons and armor to help in their quest.   See above as the yellow swordsman (seriously, no names for anyone?) gets a Hammer, Leather Tunic and Fire Wood Bow!

The cost of each items is in the lower left; you have to build your items too!

Players explore a world of hexes as defined by the scenario chosen!  See above!  Players are looking for resources from which they build their furniture and their weapons!

Resources generally are at particular Locations: see above, where blue archer can go exploring at the “rocky place” to get rock.

As the game unfolds, the players collectively collect more and more resources!  See above.

The resources in the environment are in a nice container (see above).

Another resource tray holds potions, consumables (like honeycomb) and other tokens.

The resource trays sit at the bottom of the board, right next to the house. 

The house is where you build furniture and keep resources.

Of course, this is a hostile work environment, and there are little monsters to fight along the way!  See the Greyling one space away.

The monsters are pretty well-defined on their cards.  The Greyling has 2 hits, rolls 1 black die during combat, and gives some resin as a treasure if you kill it.

But of course, the final thing is (usually) killing the big-bad!  See above!

In fact, fighting the final big-bad is a very different combat!  You “summon” the big bad, then fight them in a special arena!  See above!

If you can drop the big bad (Ekithyr above) to zero hit points, you win!   If you all die in the final arena, you lose! (You can also lose if you fail to summon the big bad before the event deck runs out)

Explore hexes, gather resources, build furniture, fight monsters, roll dice, and summon the big bad!  That’s Valheim in a nutshell!

Rulebook

The rulebook is ok, but it has three major major flaws.

First: The binding for the rulebook is NOT stapled pages … so it has trouble laying flat and open!! It uses a glue binding (usually that’s what most graphic novels use):  see above! We saw this binding in many games over the years, and we are were just as appalled now as we were then (most recently in War Story: see review here, but also Freedom Five: see review here).

The problem with this kind of binding is that it may/may not stay open!  Notice above that I have my two fingers on it to hold it open!  You can always “break the spine”, or “bend it back” to hold it open, but that severely limits the life of the the rulebook!  The worst  part is simply that the rulebook does NOT lay flat so you can see it on the chair next to you!  This rulebook FAILS the Chair Test!

The thing is, this rulebook is like 52 pages long! I think they only used the glue binding because it’s so long … but then I remind myself that Gloomhaven’s original rulebook was 52 pages: and it used a stay-flat stapled rulebook!!! Why on earth did they use this binding?

Second: Another problem with this rulebook is that it has two halves; the first 32 or so pages are the rules, but the last pages are all summaries and explanations of cards!  See above!  I think they should have SEPARATED the rulebook and summary book into TWO books!  That way, you could have had a separate stapled lay-flat rulebook and a separate stay-flat book describing all the cards and systems in the game.

(We’ll get to the third problem in a second). Let me say that this game has a great Table of Contents (yay: see above) but no Index (boo!).  I do think that this is a game that needed an Index!! Not all games need an Index:  we just recently saw that Ham Helsing has an Index, but it really wasn’t necessary.  But I think Valheim does need one …  but, this isn’t a deal-breaker.

The components pages are great.

The set-up was pretty good for the generic game: see above with lots of pictures.

The font is big and easy to read.  There are also a hefty amount of pictures; maybe even too many flavor pictures? See above.

The book also ends with a summary of tokens which I appreciated (unfortunately, it didn’t cover Kickstarter extras; that had to come in a separate sheet).

The final problem with the rulebook is that I feel like it missed a lot of edge cases that seemed to come up again and again.  For example; in raids, does the ! summon the raiding party if you are close by it? Not clear?  In the final arena combat, what happens if you die when the big-bad does?  Do you lose? Win?  Tie?  It all depends on if the actions of the big-bad are “atomic” in one transaction, or not.   Can you run away from combat? Can your skills be used immediately again and again and again and again if you can power them? (I think that last one is you can).  When you get the honeycomb, do you get to see what it is when you put it in your character?

It feels like these edge cases came up as we played.  We were able to get through them, and most of the rules were well-defined, but there was just enough edge case ambiguity to be frustrating.

But, this is a beautiful rulebook with a readable font, a good set-up, components, table of contents, and fairly detailed rules.   I just hated the binding, I wish it had been separated into two books, and I wish it handled more edge cases.

I learned the game, and the rulebook was good enough for that.  But that was in spite of the rulebook … see below.

First Play: Solo Game Tutorial

So, my first game was a solo game using the tutorial: see above.

The tutorial takes you through the game; setting you up, and taking you through the game in about an hour: see set-up above.

There is a deck of 50+ cards that holds your hand and takes you step-by-step through most of the systems of the game!  See the deck above.

The only problem with this tutorial is that you MUST have all 4 characters in play!  For the solo player, this is a LOT of work as he has to operate all 4 characters at once! GULP!

It was daunting, but you know what? It worked!  See some of the tutorial above!  This was a good tutorial.  There were a few places where it was a little unclear (and they actually made at least one mistake), but this method of walking the four characters through the game worked!

I would ALMOST say this is a great tutorial, but it just had a few problems.

At some point, you build some furniture … but it gets the cost wrong.  The cost to build the Fire Table is TWO resin and TWO wood, but the tutorial card shows ONE resin and TWO wood!  We assume that the summary (on the right) is correct?

The combat is pretty well-described, but  one card describing the combat with multiple participants was … poorly worded.

After all was said and done, this tutorial worked well,  Not great, but well.  I still had some questions, but I felt like I understood most of the systems of the game.

I was also exhausted, because operating four characters during the tutorial was a lot of work.  I was just a little disheartened by the few mistakes and a few poor wordings.

First Cooperative Play

A week later I was able to get a cooperative first play in!  It lasted about 1.5 hours from start to finish!

For our first cooperative play, we simply played through the Tutorial again.  We each played one character (there were three of us), and kind of “shared” control of the fourth character.

One of the great things about cooperative play is the sharing of the load. As a group, we set-up the game, as a group we ran the game, as a group we read the tutorial cards.  Remember how I was saying how exhausted I felt after my first solo play through this tutorial?  A lot of that went away when we played solo.  And I think this game really benefits from that sharing of the load, because there are a lot of systems to run.

As we played through the tutorial, it was good to get a refresher from the runthrough.  And it seemed to go well.

By the end of the night, the game Valheim had introduced itself to me and my friends. We did encounter the “poorly worded” multiple combat card and mistake of the fire table again, but we just moved through it.

My friends wanted to play again, after running through the runthrough.  I could call that a successful runthrough. 

True Solo

Strangely, I couldn’t find any reference in the rulebook to solo rules?  I even downloaded the PDF I could find and searched for the word solo.  No mention.  The only acknowledgement that you can play solo is the player count on the box!  See above.

My reading of the rules is that “each players selects a character”.  If you are playing solo, you only select one character, I guess?  Implicitly, this is a true solo game!  I just wish they had acknowledged that with a single sentence somewhere: “The solo player takes control of a single character and plays the game as-is”.  (And you almost always need to say “effects on another player in the solo game affect the solo player instead”; that wasn’t in here.  It should be).  Recall, last week we saw Fate: Defenders of Grimheim did exactly he right thing and made it clear how to play solo!  I wish Valheim had done this too.  Oh well.  Moving on, assuming true solo play …

My first solo game was the first scenario from the Scenario book (as recommended by the rulebook).  We have to deal with Ekythir again. Sigh.

The solo game is harder.  You get used to having a weapon in the Runthrough, but in the “real game”, you don’t start with any equipment!  You literally have to build EVERYTHING from resources!

And you find out right away that you CAN fight without weapons; you just get the yellow die WITHOUT any doubles!  Gulp!  So, you start the game feeling VEEERY weak!  

I start with nothing but the skills on my back!

This game is all about exploring the world so you can get resources!  You need resources for weapons and furniture!

As the game goes on, you had better be collecting resources so you can build some cool furniture back at home! See above as I build the rug, the fire table, the barrel, and the beehive!

Why do I build all this stuff??  Is the furniture even useful??  Absolutely!  The rug heals your stamina by 1, the beehive gives you consumables (see above), the barrel gives you mead, and the fire table allows you to have fire arrows!  See above for all the cool stuff I got!

And I need ALL of this as I go into my final combat!

Depending on how I played it, we either both lost, we both won, or I just lost?  In the final round, we both killed each other … maybe?   It’s not clear how much is simultaneous!    To be fair, with a very small retro motion, I was able to use my skills (powered by stamina) to kill him before the last round.  BUT I wish this would have been clearer.  

Generally, I had fun exploring the lands and gathering resources and building furniture!

Cooperative Play (Scenario 2)

A week after we played through the tutorial as a group, my friends were excited to build beehives together!

After learning the basics of the game through the good tutorial, we settled in for a real game Scenario 2.

In Scenario 2, we get to fight …

The ELDER!

Some good cooperation came out as we played.  Each of our skills requires all of us to “do something” to activate them (for example, I had to build 3 pieces of armor).   This game each player focus, and we all tried to activate all of our skills.

This meant working together to allow us to do stuff!  “Oh! You need to craft some armor three times? Okay! You need copper and I need to go kill monsters!”  Generally, this worked pretty well, as we all pursued our goals, and there was just enough serendipity that our goals helped each other.

Over the course of the night, we built tons of furniture to build our characters up.  In the end, we summoned the Elder and beat him up!

Good times.  I think my friends really enjoyed building the furniture building and world exploring … maybe even more than the combat (which can be a little random).  The combat almost seemed a necessary evil so that we HAD to build furniture.  I am telling you, I think my friends enjoyed the furniture making more than anything else in this game!  Just ask Sara how much Teresa talked about the beehive ALL WEEKEND LONG.

Issues

This game feels like an A game inside a B body.  There were so many places where a little extra thought/effort could have made things just a little better.

Raid Rules: these seem poorly specified.  They aren’t covered in the intro, so I had to go find the rules for Raids in the rulebook.   What happened to me: I was two away from the raiding party, so could I attract the raiders if I rolled a ! on the explore dice?  Thematically, it seems like they are trying to coalesce to attack, so they wouldn’t attack!  Pedantically, the rules say the raiders would move to me.  Which is it?

Sleeves for weapons/armor:  The sleeves fit on the cards just fine, but the sleeved cards DO NOT fit great into the dual-layered player boards.  They “sorta” work, see above.  But it feels nobody really tried the sleeves with the boards!  They boards should have slightly bigger or the sleeves slightly smaller … a small adjustment here would have made a huge difference!  

Sleeves for normal cards: The sleeved cards BARELY fit into the plastic insert.  You have to SQUASH THEM HARD to fit.  Even after you put on the cover, the cards slide around a little. See above.  Sigh.  The spaces for cards only had to be a touch taller and this wouldn’t have been an issue.  Well, at least the sleeved cards actually fit in the insert … barely, but not great.  See, they work, but it feels like a B work … not A work.


The house: This may just be a deluxe version, but the house doesn’t work.  Sorry, to be clear, the house stands up and can hold things, but it ends up obscuring the resources and furniture!  Although the cardboard house has a cool toy factor (see above), it is NOT useful for playing!  

In the end, we just took down the cardboard house so we could ALL see the insides of the house!! See above.  Again, cool thing, but interferes with gameplay.  Coolness gives it A, but then interference with gameplay drops it to a B.

Hex Spaces Feel Crowded: The spaces on the board feel very crowded if there’s more than one thing on there.  See above!! What resources do the minis cover?  It almost feels like the hexes should be one size bigger?  The game is still usable, but this kind of made the game clumsier.

Better notation:  If there are multiple enemies, there’s no “clear” way to notate which guys have taken damage.  

This immediately drew a comparison to Tales From Red Dragon Inn (see above), where each mini is CLEARLY marked with which has which hit points!  Sure, we can work around this, but it seemed … annoying they didn’t think of a better system for this.

Can’t Run?  If you get stuck in a combat you’d rather not, there’s no rules for escaping.  There are rules for others to come help you, but it seems strange there is no way to get out of combat once you are in!  If you character dies, it’s not the end of the world (you spawn back in the house), but … I think I wanted to run away from a Troll once and I couldn’t???

Odin Skills: The Odin Skills don’t fit great back into the insert.  You kinda clumsily plop them in.

Just Everywhere!  When you go to set-up the game, it’s a mess! I had to put boxes and box tops everywhere because this game is so big!

Table Space Constraints:  I feel like game REQUIRES you to turn your game longways.  The way the resource trays and home are set-up, there’s no way this would fit on my table any other way than the longways: see above.  So, I ended up sitting at the end of the table!  This just wouldn’t fit if  I used the prescribed layout!  I mean it looks cool (see above) but only one way.

What I Liked

Gorgeous:  This is a gorgeous game with great (modulo some issues) components.

Furniture:  Something about the furniture puts a smile on me andmy friends faces …  We are building furniture!  Cool theme.

Gameplay: Was generally straight-forward, once you got the hang of it.

Tutorial:  The tutorial was well done.  Not perfect, but good enough to get you into the systems of the game.

Conclusion

For Teresa, Valheim may be her game of the year!   She loved the theme so much, she was able to overlook all the issues we encountered along the way and just embrace Valheim!  I struggled a little more with the issues; I feel this could have been a great game, but the issues brought it down to a good game.   Maybe you’ll be like Teresa and absolutely love this game!  Maybe you’ll be like me and just like it.  That’s still a pretty good recommendation either way.  Hopefully our exploration of this game will help you decide what you might think.

Both Sara and I do worry a little about replayability; once you build all the furniture, what else is there to do?  Because of that and all the other issues I had, this is probably a 7/10 for me and Sara … just barely a recommendation, but we still liked it.  But Teresa will give this an 8.5/10 and point out that you can build a beehive!  That’s all that matters!

Fate: Defenders of Grimheim. A Solo and Cooperative Review of a Tower Defense Game

I didn’t know a thing about this game until I saw it on a BoardGameGeek advertisement!  Fate: Defenders of Grimheim is a cooperative tower defense game for 1-4 players.   A tower defense game is when monsters move towards a “tower” with the intent of wrecking it!  Your job, as the players, is to defend said “tower”!

This is a game from Fryx games; I ordered directly from the website (and had to pay some extra money because of Tariffs, so that was stinky).  This is the same Fryx games that gave us the enduring Terraforming Mars, the great Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (see our review here), and not-as-great Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game.  

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

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

Players each assume the role of one warrior protecting the homestead! Bjorn, Alva, Embla, or Boldur.  See above.

The homestead is at the middle of the board!  See above.  Every time a bad guy makes it to the homestead, the players lose one (or more) of the homes there. Lose too many homes, and the players (collectively) lose the game!

At certain points during the game (including the start of the game), a bunch of bad guys are placed into the game at the edges of the board.  See the card (above) describing where the bad guys go …

… and see the same bad guys on the board!  Note that the arrows denote how they move during the move phase! (If they hit a trail, they start following the trails).

There’s three different flavors of enemy: the Dead (coming from the northwest part: see above).

The Trollkin, coming from the northwest (see above)

And the Fire Hordes, coming from the South.

This is a tower defense game!  You have to kill the bad guys before they make it to the center of the board!

Each player (hero) has a bunch of tools to help them stop the bad guys; these tools are all special to that hero!

There’s abilities (like above) which can help the player in many ways. These abilities are paid for with experience /gold.

There’s upgrades the players can get (if they do the quest at the top of the card).

Generally, each player has a starting main weapon and starting ability, plus a special ability.  See above.

As the game unfolds, the player quickly upgrades and gets new abilities and weapons!  See above!

If you can keep at least one structure left (the fountain is the last thing to go) before the timer runs outs and/or you kill all enemies, you win!

Rulebook

I liked this rulebook.  Except for one thing.

The rulebook is just too big; it almost fails the Chair Test.  See above as it droops heavily over the edges of the chair.  The only reason it doesn’t fail the Chair Test is that it stays open, and is easy to read.  I can barely use on the chair next to me: this gets like a D on the Chair Test.  Honestly, this rulebook could have easily gotten an A on the Chair Test if it hadn’t been so droopy.

The Components page is nice and well-labelled: see above.

The first few pages didn’t jump int set-up, they talked about the cards and components.  This worked well to get you familiar with the components of the game.

The Set-up is pretty good: the picture’s a little small, but it does work. See above.

Generally, though, this rulebook was really good.  I had no real grumpiness as I read it.

It’s only about 12 pages, but it’s pretty easy to read.  There’s no Index, but I think that’s okay for this game.  This game is pretty straight-forward and I don’t think it needs an Index.

Generally, good rulebook.  I just wish the form factor were smaller.

Solo Game

The solo game is very well-defined on page 11: see above. Basically, there’s no rule changes! This is a true solo game, where the player takes control of a single hero in the game.  The game is self-balancing: the number of monsters that come out are essentially a function of the number of players. This is a fantastic solo mode with no real changes to the rules!  Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!  This gives us a solo mode that scales to cooperative mode with NO CHANGES!

After the solo modes for so many games have left us underwhelmed lately (Lord of the Rings, I am looking at you), it’s great to see a simple and scalable solo mode.

I took control of Alva for my solo game.

Her cards and figure come from the Alva/Bjorn box.  It’s a little hard to find the starting cards, but once you know what you are looking for, it’s easy enough.

Basically, the solo game starts with fewer homes in the middle and only one set of enemies come out at first!

More enemies will come out when we hit the Axes (above) on the timer.  You draw one card of enemies for each player (that’s the scaling part).

Over the course of the shorter game, I had to go and kill some enemies before they reached the homestead!

One of the best parts of the game is how quickly you gain new abilities and new weapons and new upgrades!  Generally, you seem to be able to get something new every other round or so, which is great!  Your character really feels like they are progressing as you play!

Near my solo end game, I had at least 3 new weapons and new abilities (some of them upgraded!)

It was a pretty quick game; the box says 30 minutes per player, and my experience says that’s accurate.

It was very easy to jump into this game, a lot of fun to perform upgrades, and some strategy as I tried to figure out the best way to kill the bad guys before they invaded!

The solo game works great.  And it’s trivial to apply the lessons of the solo game to the cooperative game, since it’s essentially the same game!

Cooperative Game

My friend Teresa and I played the cooperative game!

We each took control of a separate hero.  Now, the monsters, scaling for the player count, come out twice as fast!

It was interesting to see how the cooperation unfolded.  Generally, each player is different enough and has very different cards that’s there’s not really much chance for Alpha Players.  The cooperation that happens in the beginning of the game is more coarse discussions about which sets of enemies to handle.  “I”ll go over there and deal with the enemies to the South, you deal with the enemies to the North”.

In the beginning stages of the game, the game is more multi-player solitaire as each player handles some part of the board.

As the bad guys get closer and closer to the homestead, some more cooperation unfolds as players may need to back each other up.  “Can you please get that stray bad guy for me?” “I suppose…Sure!”

There’s not tons of cooperation, but there is enough interaction as players talk and even lament the task ahead!

I got Grendel (one of the really big bads) later in the game, and it was good to have Teresa nearby so I could complain how hard he looks!

Generally, each player is very involved in their turn as they try to figure out how to activate all their abilities and cards and weapons.  It’s kind of cool in the later game just how many directions and how many options you have for killing bad guys!

In the end, the cooperative game was fun and engaging!  There was no real chance for the Alpha Player, but there was still some high-level cooperation (with a smidge of low-level cooperation in the later game).   Good times.

What I Liked

The shapes: The enemies of the same flavor are all the same shape (see above). This makes it VERY easy to see which types of enemies are which.  This is a small touch, but it really helps players quickly distinguish enemy types without having to squint.

Well-Labelled board:  In the same vein as the shapes, the board is well-labelled with a big font describing the enemies special abilities!  There’s no need to consult the rulebook … the rules are on the board!

Well-Labelled Enemies:  The enemies themselves are well-labelled: how much damage does the bad guy above do?  5 axes!  How many hit points?  6!  How many experience from killing it? 3!

The board is gorgeous:  I really like the art and how clean this board is.  It’s clear where mountains are, it’s clear where forests are, it’s clear where trails are, and the art just looks fabulous.

Upgrades Happen Quickly!  As you play, your hero very quickly gets new cards, upgraded abilities, and new weapons!   This allows the player to build something of an engine as they can use abilities to power other abilities to make stronger attacks!  The feeling of upgrade is strong and very fulfilling for a game that is only 30 minutes per player!

Easy to get to the table:  This game is very easy to get to the table.  There aren’t a ton of rules and the board is well-labelled, so it’s pretty easy to start into a game.

What I Didn’t Like

Dice and Randomness:  At the end of the day, all combat is decided by dice … and that can be frustrating when you are rolling badly.   There are some mitigation techniques, but generally you just hope you roll well enough.  I didn’t hate the dice, but I didn’t love them.  I guess they are a necessary evil to keep this game “interesting”.

The Character Art:  The Character art reminds us a lot of Red Dragon Inn … it has a cartoony vibe to it (see our review of Tales From Red Dragon Inn here).  My friend Teresa didn’t love the art; it wasn’t quite as good as Tales From Red Dragon Inn, and it was also a little inconsistent with the art on the board (which we loved).  I thought the art was ok, but the character art can be a little off-putting for some people?  Shrug?

Minis: I went out of my way to spend extra dollars to get the minis for the Legend monsters (see above) … and you almost never use them.  You may get a Legend monster in your game, or you may not.  I don’t think it was worth getting those extra minis, especially because I probably had to pay way too much for them because of the tariffs.

The Cover:  I didn’t love this cover.  I think if I saw this in a game store, I might pass it over.  But my friend Teresa said she liked it.  Art is in the eye of the beholder.

Conclusion

I liked Fate: Defenders of Grimheim.  The game is very easy to get out, very easy to explain, and very easy to play!  While playing, there are so many opportunities for upgrades and doing clever things with your weapons and abilities that make you feel smart!  The cooperation isn’t through the roof in this game, as most players are engaging in multi-player solitaire activities, but there is some interaction and cooperation (moreso in the later game).  I also don’t think you’ll really have to worry about the Alpha Player ruining your game, as each character is very different, causing each player to be very independent.

This game sits in a nice niche; it’s got enough meat-on-its-bones to be interesting, but easy enough to play quickly.  I think this would be a perfect cooperative game for a convention!  You can pull it out and quickly jump into it for engaging play!

I think the only reason I don’t adore this game is because the dice can be unforgiving … they can be a touch too random for me.  Still, I liked this solo: 7/10.  I’ll call the cooperative game 7.5/10, and I would point out that this would be great convention game where you can get strangers together and quickly playing a fun cooperative game!

Ham Helsing! Pig Puns For The Win! A Really Great Cooperative and Solo Game!

Ham Helsing is a cooperative boss-battling board game from Fireside games.  I had heard about this game various places online, and I was excited for it!  I ended up ordering it off the Fireside games web site and had it shipped directly to my house: It delivered in the first week of October 2025.

So, this game is based on the Graphic Novel Ham Helsing by Rich Moyer.  I literally know nothing about the graphic novel!  Luckily, you can play the game without ever having read the Graphic Novel!  I am sure there are references and funny callbacks which would make the game more enjoyable, but you don’t need any of that to enjoy this game.  Spoiler Alert: I really liked this game, despite not knowing anything about this world.

What is this game?  This is a cooperative card-crafting and boss-battling game.

Let’s take a look below!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This feels like a little smaller game than a Ticket to Ride size box.  See Coke can for scale above.

The components are all very nice and cartoony.  They seem to fit this world … which I know nothing about.  But the art is all very consistent with the cover and the cartoon pigs.

Each player takes the role of one of the main characters from the comic book (left-to-right): Malcolm, Lobos, Ham, or Ronin. See above. I LOVE the acrylic standees!!

The players choose one of the 4 bad guys in the game:  Hen, Chad, Robo-Knight, or Silk (with Silk being the hardest). See above.  The players must defeat that bad guy to win.

Players move around the world of Ham Helsing on the map above.

Little minions cover this world: you must keep these minions under control or they will “destroy” locations on the board!

Each Location has an upper limit of how many minions can be there: note the 3 above on Gigantovia … if more than 3 minions ever end up a Location, it is lost and much more expensive to deal with!

In an interesting twist, the minions come out (from a bag; see above… it’s quite nice and big) and attach to all Locations adjacent to the player!  This is an interesting way to have the minions overrun the board! You kind of control where the minions come out by the nature of where you end up at the end of your turn!

How do the heroes operate?  Each Hero (see Ham above) gets their own character board and their own unique deck of cards.  See above how Ham has his own deck of specialty cards!  (Yes, they are sleeved, yes, you need the sleeves, but yes, they do come with the game!)

See above as Lobos has slightly different cards!

Players each have  deck of cards that can do things like fight, move, get gold, and invoke Knuckles! See above!

Players play these cards to get stuff done: see above.  The icons on the left of the card are the actions you can do (attack a blue or yellow enemy above).

This is called a deck-crafting game (or you might hear card-crafting game if you have played Mystic Vale) where you can add little clear sleeves to improve the cards as you play!

The bad guys also does bad stuff … see his cards above.  This is a quick game; you only have 5 rounds to take out the bad guy!  This is a boss-battler game!  If you fail to take out the bad guy after 5 rounds, you lose!

I really like the way this game looks.  See a 2-Player set-up above!

Rulebook

The rulebook was okay.

The form factor is a little off—it doesn’t fit well on the chair next to me.  This gets like a C+ on the Chair Test; you can use it on the chair next to you, but it could have been better.

The Components section made me very grumpy.  There is a little list of components at the bottom of page 1 (see above), but it has NO correlating pictures! I had to figure out what-was-what from context as I set it up!  That made me a bit grumpy.

The Set-up spanned 3 pages?  And you had to cross page boundaries?  I feel like this Set-Up could have been on two pages facing each other making it easier to read.  This rulebook feels very “crammed” in there, like there were trying to get page count as small as possible.  I appreciate not wasting space, but this rulebook feels very cramped.

I feel like all the rules were in here, but for some reason, the flow seemed “off” to me.  I found rules, but not always where I expected them.  But they were in there.

The rulebook does have an Index, but it’s not that useful?  I hate saying this, because I applaud Ham Helsing for having an Index!  … but I just didn’t find it useful?  I went looking for a few terms and found them in SO MANY PLACES (Health track pretty much lists all pages of the rulebook) that it was almost useless.   This index needed to be curated a little better, and use italics or bold to distinguish mentions vs definitions.  Sigh.   I really like that they tried using the Index.  It didn’t quite work.

I found all the rules, I was able to get the game played, but the rulebook “flow” seemed off; I think it just felt too cramped.

The rulebook was just okay, but it does teach the game, so I guess that’s all that matters.

Deck-Crafting

I think the reason I was so excited for this game was the deck-crafting (or card-crafting, since you are constructing a better card … I wonder if Fireside Games can’t use this term because Mystic Vale copyrighted it?).  This is where you upgrade the cards in your hand to make the cards better and better (by allowing each card to do more stuff).

For example: Take a look at Pig Up The Pace above.  All the base card does is move 2.   (And yes, there are a LOT of pig puns in this game.  Get used to it).  Pig Up The Pace is a pretty minimal card. BUT!  I am about to card-craft!

By putting the clear upgrade into the sleeve, I can add more actions to the left side of the card! I can attack red +1, and attack a yellow for +1 now!

By the time I am done “upgrading” the card,  Pig Up The Pace not only moves Ham twice (the original action) but also can attack with +1 red and +1 yellow attacks!

Players can buy these upgrades every turn; the cost is on the upper right.  Players cooperatively figure out who should buy what when they buy … this is a cooperative game after all.

There are two types of upgrades: mostly attack (see above for that deck) …

… and specials (which have special text).  Usually, the specials are more powerful but more expensive.

You gotta upgrade the heck out of your cards if you want to win!  See Thwip above with 2 or 3 upgrades in it!

Solo Game

So congratulations to Ham Helsing for following Saunders’ Law and having solo rules!

Unfortunately, the built-in solo rules are half a page of exceptions.  And they aren’t even true solo play rules!  You still have to play two characters in the official solo mode; the only real savings of the built-in solo mode is that you have one deck to manage (instead of two).

Instead of the built-in solo mode, I recommend that you play 2-handed solo with all the normal rules: take control of two characters and alternate between them as if you were playing a 2-Player game!!  The 2-handed solo mode is much better than the built-in solo mode!  In the 2-handed solo mode, the game plays as it’s mean to be played, without any special exceptions.  See my 2-handed solo mode play above.

I really enjoyed my first solo play, but boy did I get crushed!  I even played the simplest Villain, Hen!  I just couldn’t do enough damage to Hen before the end of the game!

There’s quite a bit of strategy in how you handle the minions across the board!  See above! Get too many minions in a region, and you may lose the region or have have them bleed into your regions and do damage! You WANT to kill the minions yourself, because you get gold and experience … which keeps you upgrading as you play! But you also need to keep the minions on the board under control!

You can use Knuckles (see above) to help you keep the Locations clean of minions, but then you don’t get that much needed gold and experience!

My second game was MUCH better as I started to get the hang of how to balance all the different systems in the game!  See above as Ham and Lobos take out Hen!

I had a BLAST playing this game solo.  It was so much fun upgrading cards, figuring out strategies, keeping minions under control, but still trying to get enough gold to keep upgrades happening!  There were so many delicious decisions!

And the game is just adorable.  I think the look-and-feel made this solo game even a little more light-hearted and fun.

I could have done without all the pig puns, but it made it more fun.  EDIT: That’s not true.  I loved the pig puns, but I couldn’t admit it without some therapy.

Great decisions, great upgrades, great fun.

Cooperative Game

I may have actually done my friends a little disservice by discussing all the strategy up front! I didn’t give them a chance to discover all the repercussions themelves!!  Still, we had a full 4-Player game and has a great time!

The cooperation was great; we worked together to keep the minions under control, all the while getting gold for upgrades!   I didn’t use the trade action to any effect when I played solo, but I did see Madelyn and Andrew use it very well to make sure they had the right attacks and cards to deal with the minions!

Although ending up on the same Location at the end of your turn as another player allows the player to draw an extra card, sometimes that comes with a cost! At one point, we accidentally lost the Swamp `O Lies because we tended to congregate there!  And the minions swarmed up! GULP!  We saw yet another delicious trade-off … stay together to get more cards, but disperse to keep the minions away!  Neat tradeoff!

One thing that seems overlooked is the question: Can you share gold in the Market Phase?  Players are all together buying cards!   Can you share?  It’s not addressed in the rules!!! There is a trade action players can invoke during Play Cards phase which allows players to share gold, cards, shield, and katana. But the rule is very clear: only during your turn!   Since it’s not specifically addressed in the Market Phase rules, it seems clear: you can’t trade/share gold!!

This problem reminded us a little of The Secrets of Zorro (see review here) when, even though we were all together in an end phase, we couldn’t share gold!  See above.  We house-ruled The Secrets of Zorro to allowing sharing then, and that little change made the game more cooperative and more fun!   So, we are house-ruling that here as well: you can share gold (or  cards or normally sharable stuff) in the Market Phase … and it even feels like it makes sense thematically!  We are all shopping together at the same time at the same Rat Store!  (Seriously, rats are selling us stuff.  I am not making that up).  It makes sense to say “Hey Lobos! Can I borrow 1 gold??”  And to allow it … “Sure!”

In the end, all of us took turns beating up the Hen together! So, we all participated and we all felt we mattered in the final rounds of the game!  And we won!

There was a lot of cooperation and a lot of fun.

Reactions

Positive reviews.

Andrew: 6.5/10 (which is actually high for him).  It was too easy, but we also only played the easiest of the villains AND I may have helped too much in getting strategy going!
Teresa: 8/10
Madeyln: green (doesn’t have numbers; she either likes it (green) or doesn’t (red))

Rich:  Wow.  I loved this game.  I would love to play it solo or cooperatively.  9/10 because there so many delicious decisions AND you get to card-craft!

A Worry

After two games (just TWO), you can already see fingerprints on the clear sleeves.  I worry that this might become a bigger problem the more you play.  At some point, I might have to go in an windex/clean all my cards?  That doesn’t sound like fun!

The Randomness

There are two dice that you roll occasionally; usually for when you fight the big bad guy.  The bad guy, in the final combat, BLOCKS the color of attack you roll.  With four colors of attack, you are guaranteed that at least 2 of your attack types will get through, maybe more?  So, you always have a sense of how much damage you will do.

The other major source of randomness is pulling the minions from the bag.  You can only take out minions you have matching attacks for, so you can get screwed if the wrong cards or wrong minions come out.

But, I never felt like the randomness was too much.  You had a lot of control on how many minions came out, based on where you ended your turn; this was a unique way of dealing with “where do the minions come out”!  It is completely deterministic where they come out!  I really liked that choice, as it gave us yet another delicious thing to think about!

And Knuckles was always an option to keep the minions under control too … couldn’t fight anything?  Let Knuckles go disperse those minions for you!

I always felt like I could do something on my turns.  I did not think the randomness was unhinged by any means.

Conclusion

Wow, Ham Helsing is a great game!  The toy factor is high with the card-crafting system and the super cute art!  The components are just great!  The solo and cooperative games were super fun with lots of delicious tensions about how/when to keep the minions under control, balanced with keeping gold coming in so you can perform upgrades!

My only concern is that this game may be too much for younger audiences; the game says 10+ (which is probably the age range of the graphic novel), but there are a lot of rules to keep track of, and a lot of subsystems to keep operational as you play.  I worry that a couple of 10 years olds trying to learn this game without anyone present might really bounce off this game.  Ham Helsing is a lot more complicated (there are a lot of rules and a lot of interaction) than it looks!  Maybe make sure you shepherd younger kids if you get this for them?

Other than that, I adored this game.  9/10 for both solo and cooperative for me.  So neat and so fun. I admit that my rating of Ham Helsing was higher than my friends, but they liked it a lot too!  And to be clear; you DO NOT need to know anything about the Graphic Novel to enjoy this game!  None of us knew this IP, and we still enjoyed the game tremendously.

Drop Bears: Drop A Little Horror in Your Life! A Review of Drop Bears

Drops Bears is a cooperative survival (horror) game that was on Kickstarter back in July 2022: see here.  This promised delivery in April 2023, and it just arrived ay my house a few weeks ago in late August 2025.  That’s right, it’s over 2.5 years late! Ooof.  Even for Kickstarter games, that’s not great.  But they did deliver!  So, kudos for that!

This game is sort of an odd duck; it calls itself a survival game.  I’d call it more of a horror game where survival is a big component!

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

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty thick game, but it has the Ticket To Ride box profile.  See above for scale.

The first thing you are met with is the “put the box back” and “build sheet”.

Why is there a “build sheet”? You have to build the little tower that holds the tiles.  Oh yes, this is definitely a tile-laying game. Sort of (see below).

Building the tower wasn’t too bad; it wasn’t nearly as hard as building Sauron’s Dice Tower from Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship from a few weeks ago!

It fits pretty well back into the box (but see below).

The Drop Bears are the horrific creatures you are fleeing from in this game!

These miniatures are utterly fantastic.  I love them so much!

The miniatures are by far the coolest thing in the box. I don’t even feel like you have to paint them; they are pretty terrifying as they are!

The players each take control some camper: see above and below.

There’s 10 total; 2 of them are for solo play (the companions).

Players run away from the Drop Bears; each bear has its own flavor/character.  And by flavor/character, I mean ways it eats you up!

Players have to keep track of health and heart-rate; lose too much health and you die!  Have your heart-rate go too high, and you panic/run away!  Luckily, you have equipment (like the very Australian Vegimite Toast) to help the players.

Players explore the tiles and have to survive the Drop Bears until Dawn.

There’s a little counter showing the progression of the game: see above! Campers act, bears act, campers act, bears act, etc etc … until Dawn (the end of the track).  If the players don’t die “too much” and they have enough survival points (to survive the Australian bush in the day), they win!  Otherwise, they lose!

It’s an interesting looking game!  See above!

Rulebook

This rulebook straight-up fails the Chair Test!  It’s waaaaay too big and droops over the edges!  There’s no way I can easily look stuff up on the chair next to me!

However, you can always use the “two chair” workaround; at least then it’s usable.

The Components page is very nice and shows all the components (except for the arm?)

The Set-Up page works well; it’s on two pages exactly, so I can set-up the game without having to turn the pages! Good job!

The “Index” on page 3 is NOT an Index; it’s a Table of Contents.  (An index is sorted alphabetically by keywords with references/page-numbers/hyperlinks to appropriate pages.  A Table of Contents is sorted by page numbers, listing the sections of the rulebook in order).  This mistake put a bad taste in my mouth, but it’s probably just me.

This rulebook was okay; it had big fonts and lots of pictures with some examples.  My biggest complaint about the rulebook was that it was too big; too many rules and the form factor was too big.

It does feel like like all the rules are here.

The rulebook also ends with a list of Icons!  Thank you!

There’s some good stuff to like in this rulebook; big font, good components and set-up, icons on the back, but the form factor and just general size of the rulebook was too big.

I learned the rules from the rulebook.  It seemed to work, but it is long and daunting.

Solo Mode

So, there is a solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)!  In fact, there’s multiple solo modes!  Huzzah!  The solo rules are presented on pages 26 and 27.

You can either play 2-handed solo (control two campers and just play the game as normal), or have one camper and a companion.  I am am gun shy about using “alternate” solo rules, (especially after Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship solo rules infuriated me), so I went ahead and played 2-handed solo.   Since my next activity is to teach the cooperative game, I prefer to learn the game WITHOUT too many exceptions!  Learning it 2-handed is the best way to learn how the game is meant to be played cooperatively.

I ended up playing the Hippie and the Cheerleader.

It was fine. It taught the game.  I survived the bears. And it was quick.

Cooperative

We played a 4-Player game.

It moved pretty quickly.

At the end of the day, it didn’t feel very cooperative.  A few times, we cooperated so that we’d end up on a search space so we all benefited, but generally, each player wants to be as far as possible from the others!  Multiple players on a single space will ALL get attacked, so it’s really in everyone’s best interest to be separated!  Many cooperative activities (sharing, swapping stuff) have to be on the same space … and it’s hard to stay close.  So, we can’t cooperate very much.  We kind of just did our own thing and stayed away from the others.

The game moved quickly though; we enjoyed how quickly the game does move.

Vibe

This is a horror movie.  It’s a horror movie with tile-laying and panic-ing!  But, everyone will get eaten by bears.  Seriously, you will get attacked by a bear almost every round or every other round.    You have to deal with it!  It feels like a horror movie!!! No matter what you do, YOU WILL GET ATTACKED.  And at least one person WILL PROBABLY DIE.  But’s that okay!  This is a horror movie!  And that’s what happens in horror movies.

So, you can’t play defensively and just run away.   The Drop Bears will drop on you and will attack you many many times.

This game really nails that horror movie vibe.

Randomness

There is a lot of randomness in this game.

Axis 1: Attack dice … when the bears attack you, you typically have to take 4 dice of rolling.  You may get light damage, or even nothing, or you may get ravaged!  You can reroll dice with survival points, but it’s just a reroll, not a guarantee.  And you need survival points to win!

Axis 2:  Search dice!  When you go looking for items at locations, you have no idea how long it will take to find something!  Maybe only two turns if you roll well!  Or never if you roll poorly! Let’s be clear, these items can make a huge difference in surviving.

Axis 3: The tiles you when you “Scout”.  If you go a direction with no tile, you randomly pull a tile and get a random tile!  You could get a Park Ranger’s Hut or something bad!   There is no “look” option without moving! If you want to expand the map, you must just move to a random tile and hope it’s good!

There’s only 3-axes of randomness (we saw arguably 5 axes in Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship), but the game just feels a little too random.  Maybe that’s okay because the game is short and it is very horror movie vibey!

What I Liked

The miniatures: The minis for the bears in this game are SO COOL.

Art Vibe: I don’t necessarily love this art, but I think it fits the vibe of the game. That cover (see rulebook above) think presents an accurate “feel” for the game: This is a horror game!

Quick: Once you know the game, it’s pretty quick.  That 30-40 Minutes is pretty accurate.  And it doesn’t take “too long” to get the sense of the game.

Disambiguation:  The cards for each bear do an EXCEPTIONAL job of indicating who they will attack when they drop.  Me and my friends all liked that the rules were very clear on WHO got attacked!

Death: It’s sorta funny that “even if you die”, you can just re-spawn and keep playing.  The game “expects” death, and that’s sorta funny.  I mean, it’s a horror movie, right?

What I Didn’t Like

Set-Up: the set-up is a little clunky, especially at step J/K!  I had to kind of figure out what that meant, which meant kind of paging through the rulebook.  It felt like this could have been simplified.

Can’t Repeat Actions!  Eh?  You only have two actions per turn, and you can’t do the same one again?  YOU WILL FORGET THIS RULE because it doesn’t seem very thematic!!! Why can’t I search twice?  Why can’t I run twice?  Whaaaat?  This rule seemed … dumb and athematic.  Yet, I don’t think I can offer a house rule because I really do think this game was play-tested with this “no repeat” rule, so I feel like ignoring this might break the game.

Only 1 Actions Card???  WHY is there only one Camper’s Action card??? In a 4-Player game, this was very annoying.   The best thing I’ll say is that the Camper’s Action card became our first player token because we passed it around on players turns!!  It seems dumb there weren’t more of these.

Why Can’t You “not do anything”?  The rules are very clear; you MUST do two actions.  You can’t just “do nothing” on your turn.  And why the heck not?  That seems SO ATHEMATIC!!! How many horror movies have you seen where the chased just stops to let the bad guy run by? Or tries to hide?  We just worked around this by allowing a “Heal” or “Rest”, even when you were all full up. (This exception seems dumb).

The Tree doesn’t QUITE fit:  The tile-tree doesn’t QUITE git back in the box; see above. The edges of the hexes push up just a little and cause the top to jut out just a little.

Too many rules:  This, fundamentally, is a simple game about running from Drop Bears and getting beaten up.  Yet, the rules are 32 pages!  In a big rulebook!  There seem to be too many rules for what is essentially a very random game.

No Look?  This is a cooperative tile-laying game, but there is no notion of just “looking” ahead; you just get what you get!  I don’t love that; it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to add a “look” action to the game so you can be a little more discreet when you move. This, I would argue, SHOULD be a house rule.

Reactions

Sam: 5.5/10 using the BoardGameGeek system.
Andrew: 6/10
Teresa: 5.5/10 or 6/10
Rich: 5.5/10 or 6/10
Basically, me and my friends had fun playing Drop Bears, and even though the game was a little random and messy, at least it was quick. None of us hated the game, but none of us loved it.  The general sense overall was that it was ok, but maybe it needs someone who really likes horror games … it does have a good vibe for a horror movie!  That’s just not our thing.

Conclusion

If you like Horror Movies and are looking for a game that really captures that vibe of a horror movie, I think you’ll really like this game.  Drop Bears really nails the horror movie vibe! The game is quick and thematic with amazing miniatures, and that may be enough for you to just love this game!

It really felt like there was a need for refinement of rules (can’t repeat actions, no empty action, can’t look) to make the game just a little more simple and streamlined.   There just felt like too many rules for what is fundamentally a pretty random game.  But, at least the game is quick.

I think Drop Bears really nails the vibe of the Horror Movie, but it just didn’t land for me and my group, but it might for yours.  We’d probably give it 5.5 or 6/10, but the horror movie vibe, quick play, and AMAZING miniatures may take this to a 7 or 8 for your group.

Firefighters on Duty: Real-Time Fun from Someone Who Never Played Project Elite!

Firefighters on Duty is a cooperative real-time game for 1-4 Player about being firefighters putting out fires and saving civilians!  This is a game all about rolling dice and moving firetrucks as fast as you can! This was on Kickstarter back in Nov/Dec 2023.  It promised delivery in November 2024, but it arrived at my house in late September 2025 … so it’s almost a year late.  Well, at least it made it.

Apparently, this is similar in many ways to the original real-time game Project Elite!  Project Elite (see BGG link here) was a real-time cooperative game where players moved around and rolled dice … but players killed aliens instead of fire!  Firefighters on Duty is by the same designers as Project Elite, but BGG does NOT list it is as a re-implementation … so it is different.  Unfortunately, I have never played Project Elite, nor do I have access to it, so we can only discuss the Firefighters on Duty by itself.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing/Gameplay

See Coke can above for scale.  This is a pretty standard sized board game box.

Each player takes the control of one of four firetrucks: red, blue, green, orange.  And yes, everyone wants the red firetruck first!

Of course you need water to put out fires, and water in this game is represented by little blue dice!  See above! When you try to put out a fire, you roll the blue dice!

You carry water in your firetruck, and you decide (when you fight a fire) how many water dice to roll!

Each Location has a little blue water drop; in order to take out a fire at “this location”, you need to roll higher than this number!  See the 3+ and 4+ above … if there’s a fire there. you need to roll 3 and above (or 4 and above).

The game is controlled by action dice!  You can only do what the action dice tell you!  Each player has two dice (the solo player has three), and they are just constantly frantically re-rolling these dice for each 2 minute chunk (4-minute chunk for solo player).  What do these dice do?

Firetruck: move any vehicle one space.  Besides your firetruck, there is also a water truck (to bring more water to you) and an ambulance (for wounded civilians) that you can move
Water: Add one water to the fire station well
Fireman: Move one of your firemen (carrying one thing only)
Gear:  Do an action; usually try to put out fire, but sometimes chip with axe or turn off electricty.

The game lasts six rounds (the round marker is in the Hospital above).  During each round, you have a two minute spurt of activity where you roll-and-execute-as-fast-as-you-can!  A timer marks the time (on your cell phone, the game doesn’t include a timer).  After the real-time phase ends, you have to suffer the consequences of what you couldn’t get to (fires burning, fires exploding, people dying).

Fire is represented by little red wood markers on the board.  There is a little bit of a Pandemic element to the game as spaces with “too much fire” can spread to itself or adjacent spaces!

How are fires set-up initially?  There are 3 scenario booklets (see above), one for each of the player counts!

There are multiple scenarios per book for some variety.  Each Scenario (see one above) shows how to set-up the map and how to put out the people, fire, and hazards!

Guided by the scenario book, you set-up fires, fire hydrants, hurt civilians, hazards, trapped civilians, and the general map!  See above!

Your goal is to put out all fires (usually) and save civilians! You are “docked” points for things you don’t do, and as long as you have a positive score AND have put out all the fires, you win!

The game is all about getting your firetrucks and firemen to the dangerous places!  You can’t put out fires unless your firemen and connected hoses (back to your fire engine) are on fire spaces!

This game is about rolling as fast as you can to get your firemen and firetrucks to the right space!

The components are all very nice and very readable.  They have to be!  You are looking at stuff in real-time and can’t second guess yourself!

Rulebook

The rulebook is a little daunting at a 20-page large rulebook for a real-time game!

The game gets about a C on the Chair Test: see above as the pages droop over the edges when I try to put the rulebook on the chair next to me! Luckily, the font is pretty big and the pictures do a good job of describing things.

The components page up front is good. See above.

The game set-up starts …

.. and then goes to the next page!  Set-up is a little bit of a bear in this game.  Your first time through, it might take you a good 1 to 2 hours JUST to set-up!  Luckily, once you get going, it goes much quicker.

The rulebook is good enough.  The game does have a lot of rules for a real-time game, but don’t worry; it does sink in pretty quickly once you’ve played a game or two.

In general, this was a pretty good rulebook except for the form factor.

Solo Game

Perhaps a little surprisingly, the game does support solo play (thank you for following Saunders’ Law!).   The solo play is not true solo play; you will be taking control and operating two firetrucks.

The solo rules are outlines near the back of the rulebook (see above).  Basically, the solo player has to operate two firetrucks, but has twice as much time per round (4 minutes instead of 2 minutes).

The solo player also gets three action dice (instead of two); it makes it a little easier to roll what you need.  The solo player also gets one more scenario point, and “failures” by the solo player cause fewer deductions for scenario points.

The solo player gets twice as much time because he has two firetrucks!

Let me tell you right now; you will almost certainly lose your first game.  If there is ever fire on a space with wounded civilians at the end of a round, you just lose.  See above.

That first game is ALL ABOUT learning how the systems work;  you learn that trucks can block other trucks (the hard way: “MOVE THAT TRUCK! I gotta get up there!”), you learn how to put our fires, you learn how to move the firemen, you learn to think about how to stock the truck, when to use the water truck, etc, etc, etc.

In my first game, I would stop the clock a lot to look up rules. “Okay, I moved my firemen.  How do I put out a fire again?”   To be clear, there are a fair number of rules and you won’t get everything the first time you play.  I think it’s totally fair to stop and start the timer as you learn the game.

It’s sorta funny, when you lose …  you feel like the experienced Fire Chief is looking back at you and saying “Ok newbie, what did you do wrong?”  Then you realize all the things you did wrong.  There’s actually quite a bit of strategy in the game!  When do you bring out water trucks? When do you return? When do you bring out ambulances?  How do you deploy trucks so they don’t block each?  How do you deploy firemen so they can reach all the fires?  There’s quite a bit of strategy here that isn’t self-evident when you first hear “Oh, this is just a real-time game”.  Nope!

The biggest mistake I made in my first game is setting up the game on one side of the table. See above.  Nope nope nope nope nope.   The problem is that you need to kinda “move around” and “be flexible” as you roll, and place stuff!  Being constrained and squished behind my chair caused me to lose precious time.

In my second game (and believe me, after losing horribly in your first game, you WILL want to play a second game), I set-up around the edges of the table, making sure all chairs were clear so I could easily get to all sections of the board!  See above!  Much more mobile!

And all the stuff that you have to deal with “between real-time rounds”? I put out of the way, away from the action. You DO NOT want these cards and others tokens to get in the way while you are playing!

For the record, this scenario still didn’t “quite” fit around the table!  You need a LOT of space to play this game!  The fire stations (see above) are supposed to be longer, but then they don’t fit on the board!  You may find yourself adjusting the map slightly so it still fits on your table.  So, yes, this game takes a LOT of space!!  Both ON and AROUND the table!

In the end, I won my second solo game (after lots of readjustment), but I still remember stopping the timer at least once to look at the rules.  It’s gonna take at least two tries to get this game.

Let’s be clear; I wanted to play a second time to try to win!

Like usual, I think it’s important to play the game solo before teaching it.  There’s a lot of rules, and it’s better to have a sense of the game so you can teach it and run it.  A lot of questions come up when playing, and I think it’s ok to be able to “stop” the timer occasionally to explain the rules.

Cooperative Play

Teresa and I played a 2-Player game!

After learning my lesson in my solo games, I set-up the table so we could both people could stand easily around the table.  And yes, Teresa wanted the RED firetruck.  I think you need to prepare yourself for people fighting over the red firetruck in the cooperative game 🙂

After a few rounds, Teresa got the game!  Before each round, we’d discuss our strategy: “What am I doing?  What are you doing?  What are you concentrating on? ”  And then we’d start the real-time part of the round, and roll-roll-roll!  We’d deal with the consequences of our actions: watch fires consume stuff, and start with a new strategy for the next round!

We did lose our first round (the ambulance blocked the street and the firetruck couldn’t get through), so we had to learn from our mistakes!

To be clear, we played second game because we WANTED to!  It was fun, and we wanted to learn from our failure, and we wanted to set the course right!

The real-time phase tends to be a little more multiplayer solitaire, as each player concentrates on their region/responsibility, but later in the game, you both realize you need to coordinate in real-time phase to handle fires that are far away!  (One truck with two men isn’t quite enough for some of the faraway fires)  This seemed to work well; as we got our “sea-legs” for the game, then we started realizing: “We need to cooperate more”.

There is a quite a bit of cooperation in this game!  In between the real-time phases, players work together to come up with strategies to defeat the fires!  And players start being multiplayer solitaire in real-time phase, only to realize they have to cooperate in the real-time phase in the later game!

This is a game where cooperation really shines through!

Reactions

Teresa: I liked this! I wanted to play again!  I also liked this better than the other firefighter game we played (you can actually see the other game Teresa is referring to: Flashpoint: Legacy of Flame behind us above!)  Firefighters on Duty is probably a 7.5/10?

Rich:  This was different than any cooperative game I played in a while!  I think the game is much more fun cooperatively than solo, but the solo game worked!  6.5/10 for solo, maybe 8/10 for cooperative?

Conclusion

So I went full in and got EVERYTHING for the Firefighters on Duty Kickstarter: see above!  And you know what?  I don’t think I’ll ever play the extra stuff!  I am not even sure I needed the sleeves (and they didn’t even give me enough sleeves??!)!  The base game has more than enough content for quite a bit of replayability!  If you are thinking of getting this game and you are considering the extra content, I’d hold off!  If you play the pants-off this game, sure, you can pick up the extra stuff later, but I don’t think you need the extra stuff!

This game really invokes a lot of cooperation!  You start off only cooperating in the non real-time strategy phases, but then end up cooperating intently in the real-time phases too!  As a cooperative game, this is fantastic!

Firefighters on Duty is quite a unique event!    When you play it, I almost guarantee you will play twice!  You will lose the first game, then want to replay it to redeem yourselves!  I didn’t expect myself to like this so much (since it’s a real-time game), but it worked really well!   The game started multiplayer solitaire, but the cooperation unfolded as we played more and more!

This is a really neat game; the solo game works well, but it’s not my favorite … but you absolutely need to learn this game solo beforehand to teach it!  And the solo mode works really well for that teaching.   The cooperative mode is really neat; 2 to 3 players seems best (there might be TOO MUCH going on for 4 players?).  6.5/10 for solo game, 8/10 for cooperative game.

I don’t want to play this all the time (real-time games sometimes require me to be in the right mood), but when I want a real-time cooperative game, this is a fantastic choice.