Invincible: The Hero-Building Game Season 2. Oh, Right! I Love This Game!

Welcome back to Cooperative Comic Book month! We’ve seen the DC Comic Book Universe! We’ve seen the Marvel DC Universe! We’ve seen some crazy space Comic Book universe! And this week, we venture into the Image Comic Book Universe!

I pre-ordered Invincible: The Hero-Building Game Season 2 a while ago from GameNerdz, and it just arrived late September 2026. That’s right! I had forgotten I ordered this! What perfect timing! It came during Cooperative Comic Book month!

This is an expansion for the Invincible: The Hero-Building Game. NOTE! This is not a standalone product! You need the original game to play!

You might remember that we discussed the original Invincible: The Hero-Building Game a while ago (see review here), and we basically loved it! This solo and cooperative bag-building push-your-luck game went over so well that it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024!

Will we like the expansion? Let’s check it out!

Unboxing and Discussion

This is a relatively thin box compared to the original.

Luckily, it’s the same width and height as the original game so you can store them on top of each other.

This is an expansion! It comes with four new characters from the Invincible Cinematic Universe: Black Samson, Monster Girl, Dupli-Kate and Shrinking Rae. See above! Each of these characters plays quite different than the original characters from the base box.

Mostly, there’s just a bunch of new cards that give more Super Powers, more Ultimate Powers, more Events, more Challenges, more Helpers, more Episodes, more Villains and more starting Powers! More cards!!! It’s just more stuff to expand your base game!

Of course, there’s a bunch of new punchouts (the new heroes especially), but most of the new punchouts are tokens for specific Episodes in the game!

There’s two “new” big things in the game. The first is “falter” cubes. These “green” (?) cubes get added to your bag (usually as bad news), and if you draw them, they cause the biggest bad guy (in your area) to get a free shot! The worst part of these “falter” cubes is the color … I can distinguish them from the blue cubes, but I can see a lot of people not being able to.

The other new thing is “fuel” tokens, which you can use in place of cubes. They don’t go into your bag like cubes, but you can use these like cubes to power your powers!

The new stuff is all covered in the (smallish) Rulebook. There are also 6 new episodes in the Episode Guide: It’s basically a new campaign!

Overall. this is just more “stuff” for the Invincible: The Hero-Building Game! It looks like the original game, so the art and graphic design is consistent between them.

I Forgot!

I forgot how to play Invincible: The Hero-Building Game! I remembered “most” of the basics, but realized I couldn’t just jump in without reminding myself how to play the game! To give the expansion a fair shake, I wanted to make sure I was up on the original game! In fact, I had to play the first two Episodes in the original game (so you see ALL the mechanisms on the game) to remind myself of everything!

I forgot how much I love this game! I tend to eschew “weird” solo modes, so I just played Invincible and Atom Eve two-handed solo (with no weird solo exceptions) … just like I did back in the original review! I typically do this because solo games can get messy with extra rules, but if you just played as if it were a 2-player game, then you only have to worry about normal rules!

Oh ya, this is a great game. Even if this expansion completely sucks, it made me play the base game again and remember how much I love it!

New Heroes!

The best part of this new expansion is the new Heroes. Over a bunch of solo and cooperative games, I got to know and (mostly) love these new characters!

Dupli-Kate is probably my favorite! She’s so interesting and different as she can split into three, and you can choose which Kate will perform an action! She is great for keeping the minions under control as she spreads across the world!! She is a little fragile, as each Kate only has 4 points, but she resets if a Kate is killed (and that Kate can come back)! She was SO interesting!

Monster Girl was a close second favorite! Remember those new “falter” cubes? The “falter” cubes still gives a bad guy a free shot, but Monster Girl can use them and treat them as a wild cube! So, you kind of “want” Monster Girl to get “falter” cubes, as she can really use them! And it’s kind of okay if she gets KO’d (she takes a LOT of damage), because she’s so powerful! I think every game that I used her, she got KO’d at least once … and that’s okay!

Shrinking Rae was also great and a close third. She reminds me VERY much of Ant-Man from Marvel Champions (see review here): when she changes to big mode, she spackos a bad guy! And her powers are a little different if she is in big or small mode (and she even had minis for both modes). It makes sense to switch modes a lot if you are Rae!

Black Samson was probably my least favorite; he uses fuel a lot more than other heroes. He tends to embrace the use of fuel! I had trouble getting going with him. He wasn’t bad, and he was interesting with his power suit but I tended to prefer all the other characters more.

Solo

Over the course of at least 6 solo games, I got a good sense of the new heroes and the new powers! I, of course, played solo as two-handed solo (there is NO notion of true solo in this game: everything is balanced for 2, 3, and 4-Player games). I was pleased that I won Episode 1! It was a challenge though!

I lost Episode 2 when using Shrinking Rae and Black Samson! Basically, I couldn’t save enough people! (You have to have at least 2 people per zone “saved” as well as taking out the bad guy!) The Powers I got just didn’t have enough “saves” in them.

In a second game of Episode 2 with Monster Girl and DupliKate, I WAS able to save enough people and win! It seems like Monster Girl and Kate are a “little bit better” at saving the bystanders. Some of this was a function of the powers that Samson and Rae drew (not enough “saves”), but I think some of this was not paying enough attention to saving, and also Samson has NO SAVES on his front side! It was interesting to see that your approach does have to change depending on what you need to do!

Just a lot of fun to play with the new characters: they are all different and interesting, and the solo mode works great.

Cooperative

So, how do the new characters work together? Honestly, the game still flows the same for the most part; there’s no real change in flow.

Players still play “at their own pace”, drawing from the bag and playing cubes simultaneously. The more I think about it, the more this reminds me of how the game flowed with Slay The Spire (the board game: see review here): players kind of “do their own thing” simultaneously, keeping the game flowing, but every so often slowing down and synchronizing with their teammates.

“I need some help with this bad guy! Can you help if you have a chance?”
“I need to save a few people then I’ll be right over!”

Honestly, this “play when you want” works so well in this game! You cam imagine super heroes having the agency to do good stuff on their turn, but still working together as needed! This is the perfect blend of player agency and cooperation!

To be clear, all the new rules (which there aren’t THAT many) don’t really change the flow of the cooperative game. This is the best kind of expansion: give me some more variety, but keep all the great stuff from the original game! This expansion keeps the original flow from the original game … which is so awesome!

Mixing This Up

So, you CAN play the game using ONLY the new Heroes, only the new Super Powers, only the new Ultimates, and only the new Enemies! In other words, if you DO NOT wish to mix all the new stuff back into the box, you can just play the new stuff. You still need a lot of tokens and save dice and all that from the base game, but you can play with “only” the new stuff.

If you look at my set-up above, you can see that I kept all the expansion stuff on the left (far) side of the table and all the base stuff on the right (near) side of the table. I wanted to make sure I kept everything separate so I can put everything back in their respective boxes.

At first I wasn’t worried, because I noticed the Super Power cards are notated with a 2 in lower right corner (see above).

But nothing else is! The Ultimate powers DO NOT have a 2!!

The Villains don’t! have a 2!! The Challenges and Helpers don’t!!! The Events don’t!!!!What the heck!!!??? Why would they mark the Super Power cards AND NOTHING ELSE???? THIS MAKES NO SENSE TO ME!

So, for all my games with the Expansion, I ONLY used the cards from the expansion, because I was afraid I’d never be able to separate the sets!

To help people, like me, who want to know what cards are in here, I have a section at the end of this review where I have pictures all of the cards that aren’t labelled so you can always separate them … if you want. Maybe this is just a me thing, but I am VERY annoyed that only one set of cards are annotated with the 2!!!!

Conclusion

The best expansions remind you how much you love the base game! If this expansion completely sucked, I’d still be happy that it reminded me to play the base game again and rediscover how much I loved Invincible: The Hero-Building Game! In the end, though, this expansion was great: it added 4 new heroes, a new campaign (with 6 episodes), and just a “few” new mechanisms … plus a whole bunch of new cards! It adds a lot to the game without making it much more complicated! I feel like (and did) I could show off the new expansion to a bunch of new gamers without missing a beat!

I am annoyed that the cards are not all marked with a “2” to show they are from Season 2. It’s weird they only marked the Super Powers and nothing else? If you are like me and want to be able to separate things, see the Appendix (below) for pictures of all the cards!

I am less annoyed that the “falter” cubes are SO CLOSE in color to the blue cubes, but I am still annoyed. I was able to distinguish them without problem, but I do worry that others will have issues.

Other than the lack of markings and weird coloring on “falter” cubes, I loved this expansion! I heartily recommend it with an 8.5/10 or 9/10. It’s easy to jump into, doesn’t make the base game much more complicated, but still gives you a lot more content! This is the best kind of expansion: it preserves the flow of the original game, but just gives you more stuff.

Appendix: The Season 2 Cards that ARE NOT MARKED

These are pictures of all Season 2 cards that are UNMARKED. All Super Power cards are marked with a 2 in the lower right corner.

The base powers and starting powers (granted, these probably don’t HAVE to be marked, because it’s clear which hero they belong to).

Season 2 Challenge cards (6 total).

Season 2 Helper cards (6 total).

Season 2 Level 3 Villains (8 total).

Season 2 Level 2 Villains (8 total).

Season 2 Level 1 Villains (3 total).

All Season 2 Villain Cards (20 total … includes Angstrom Levy).

All Season 2 Ultimate Power cards (17 total).

Season 2 Event Cards (9 total).

Escape Comics: The Alien Ship. Review (No Spoilers) after Full Playthrough!

Welcome back to Cooperative Comics month! Earlier this month, we looked at a cooperative Spider-man miniatures games! Last week, we looked at a cooperative racing game in the DC universe! This month we look at something unique and different in the cooperative comic book sphere!

Escape Comics: The Alien Ship is a cooperative Escape Room game that was on Kickstarter back in April 2026. It’s an Escape Room in a comic book!! What does that mean??

This promised delivery in November 2026, and it arrived at my house in late September 2026! What??? A Kickstarter that’s months early? Holy cow!

We paid $83 for the Captains’ Pledge (with some digital content). I think if you see this in retail, it will be cheaper (like $49?)

What on Earth is this strange thing? Well, it turns out you aren’t on Earth … Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is an Escape Room game! The game presents puzzles that players must solve to advance! And I feel like I can’t show too much of the game! Part of the fun of an Escape Room game is the newness and cool stuff! I can show a little: see the box opened up with a can of coke for scale.

We will show a few components (below and beyond) so you can get a sense of the game, but no real spoilers. If you want to be COMPLETELY surprised and just see what we thought of the game, scroll down to the Conclusion section. If you prefer to see just a little bit (with no real spoilers), continue with us!

The very first thing you see is a “how to play” sheet on top of the box explaining how the game unfolds.

All puzzles in the game will be solved using the Clair computer (the puzzle wheel) above. After aligning symbols, the wheel gives you a number, which you look up on an answer card. This system reminded me a lot of the Exit games. That’s a good thing, as those are great Escape Room games!

At the end of the day, the most important thing in the game is the comic book. See above! The comic book presents the story and puzzles unfold along the way. “Usually” you can’t turn the page until you have solved the puzzle on that set of pages!

Below of a quick snapshot of the comic: it gives a sense of the art in the comic book and the sense of the game. There’s no real spoilers on the pages below, but if you want to be completely surprised, scroll by quickly.

It’s a comic book! The storytelling tropes of comics are all there! ZZZAP! KABLAM! Over the top little vignettes! It’s a comic book story, interspersed with puzzles.

The puzzles are presented in envelopes: you have to open the envelope to see the components of the puzzles. Each puzzle is very different!

The components for this game, without showing too much, are pretty awesome. The puzzle envelopes have some great stuff inside. And the comic book was a comic book! It revealed a story (with comic book art) while also forcing players to solve puzzles along the way!

It was exactly what it promised: a comic book Escape Room game!

Playthrough

We ended up with a 3-Player game playing through this. I think the game will play four players, but more people will make this harder … because it’s physically more difficult for everyone to see the comic!! For a 3-Player game, we had to squish together around the comic book (on one side of the table) so we could all read it together! I think four people might have been too much: you’d probably have to pass the book around to four players? As it was, we three players all squished together and it worked for us; this may or may not work with your playgroups.

The Kickstarter showed the playtime at 4-8 hours (see above). We ended up playing the whole thing in one night in 3 hours.

The thing is, I think Escape Room games are easier with more people because more brains can work on the puzzles! A solo or 2-Player game might take 4-8 hours because you have fewer a-ha moments with fewer brains! A 4-Player game, even with more brains, still has to contend with passing the comic book around so everyone can see it, so that will slow the game. I think we had an optimal experience at 3-Players and squishing around one side of the table. Your mileage may vary.

Hints

There is a hint system. We did not use it? It looked liked it worked, but we kind of preferred to solve things ourselves, even if we had to bang our heads against the table!

It is VERY important for an Escape Room game to have a Hint system. We have been sitting on a review here at CO-OP Gestalt because we got stuck in a game … and there’s no hint system. So, that other game sits in Limbo.

Luckily, there is a hint system for Escape Comics: The Alien Ship: If you get stuck, you can still move forward.

Puzzles

I was surprised how much I liked the puzzles in this game! They weren’t too hard, and they weren’t too easy! We made it through all nine? ten? puzzles (depending on how you count them)! Sure, we had to play with components and think and talk along the way, but that’s what you do in Escape Room game!

The puzzles were interesting and had high-quality components associated with them. The hardest puzzle was the last one .. as it should be!

Reset?

The game is completely resettable. After you are all done, you can reset the puzzles (put them back in their envelope), and reset the game. Then, you can pass this along to your friends, or keep it for three years after you’ve forgotten everything and replay it!

Adult?

There’s a couple of moments in the game that are a little graphic and perhaps a touch adult. So, just be aware this isn’t necessarily kid friendly, even though it’s a comic book. I don’t want to show anything, but the 13+ on here might be a little more applicable than other games.

Conclusion

Escape Comics: The Alien Ship was the funnest experience I have had with an Escape Room game in quite some time! The puzzles were just challenging enough to be interesting, but not too easy! The components of the puzzles were also pretty high quality. The only complaint might be that the puzzles had to be solved in linear order, but to be fair, that’s the way they came out in the comic book!

The comic book vibe of this game is totally on point! The game really uses the comic book well! Like, really well! I can’t say much more, because it might spoil some things, but the immersion and use of the media was done extremely well. I was initially bummed I couldn’t show the comic book on a video screen, but I think you NEED to be immersed in the physical book itself to get the full experience! You need to embrace this as a comic book you touch and feel!

To that end, I think the game is best at two or three players. Solo will work, but it can be easier to get stuck on puzzles because you only have one brain; luckily, the hint system looks good. Four players might be too much, because it’s harder for everyone to squeeze around the comic book and read it? You can always pass the book around with four players, but I think the strength of this game is reading and experiencing the story (and puzzles) together.

After the very disappointing Abyss Echo from a few weeks ago, it was great to see a real Escape Room game with real puzzles and a real story! The comic book system totally works in this game! 8.5 / 10.

Top 10 Cooperative Cthulhu Mythos Games!

Welcome to the end … of Cooperative Cthulhu month! We’ve seen three brand new cooperative Cthulhu games in the last month! How do these stack up against old favorites? It seems fitting to end Cooperative Cthulhu month with a Top 10!

This list is a composite of about 20 different people’s opinions! It was compiled over the last month to try and capture what a community of board gamers think of cooperative Cthulhu games! The data wasn’t clear in some cases, so I made the best judgment I could based on all the ratings I saw! In the end, my preferences tended to shape the final list!

10. Elder Sign

At its core, Elder Sign is really just a dice game, kinda like Yahtzee. But it’s the expansions that keep Elder Sign alive and thematic! Players explore someplace creepy, a museum, an ice flow, the oceans, … and uses dice to help resolve things!

This one may have made the list for nostalgic reasons, but there are so many expansions that keep this game fresh and alive through the years!

A lot of people put this on their list, even if it wasn’t their favorite Cthulhu-esque game! This is a favorite that still comes out from time to time!

9. Cthulhu Rift

I was surprised how much my friends who have played Cthulhu Rift liked it! Not many have played this, but those who had liked it and its roll-and-write simplicity!

Like any good Cthulhu game, players must fight cultists, navigate Arkham, find clues, and plug portals! It’s surprising how well this works in a roll-and-write (kind of) games.

Take a look at our review of Cthulhu Rift to see if you might be interested in this! This is a bit of hidden gem, but all my friends who played this have liked it!

8. Roll For Great Old Ones

Roll For Great Old Ones was one of our favorite cooperative roll-and-write games from the Top 10 Cooperative Roll-And-Write Games! It’s actually quite thematic for a roll-and-write game in this universe!

Every turn, players roll the dice and “COPY TWICE” and mark things off their sheet! Summon creatures! Perform rituals! This is a fairly complicated roll-and-write with lots of stuff going on. See one of the the great laminated sheets above! Everyone has their own sheet as well with different powers!

Even though this is a little more complicated that Cthulhu Rift (previously mentioned at #9), I generally think Roll For Great Old Ones is the better game. See our review of Roll for Great Old Ones here to see if this is something you might like.

7. Eldritch Horror

Although I have never played Eldritch Horror, a lot of my friends spoke up and gave Eldritch Horror a nod! For some of them, it replaces Arkham Horror 2nd Edition! It’s nominally a little shorter and less dense!

It’s also a little different theme! Rather than wandering the streets of Arkham looking for Cthulhoid type creatures, you are more like Indiana Jones wandering the earth! This is an adventure game in the Cthulhu-esque universe with epic combats and thematic treks across the globe!

Some people still prefer Arkham Horror 2nd edition, arguing that Eldritch Horror is not THAT much shorter or THAT much simpler. But, some people prefer Eldritch Horror for that epic sprawling adventure! Either way, it deserved a space!

6. Mansions of Madness: 2nd Edition

I have a complicated relationship with Mansion of Madness. The first time I played the 1st edition of Mansions of Madness, I absolutely hated it! The 1st edition is a one-vs-many game as one player runs the mansion, and the other players play against him! This antagonistic atmosphere really put me off the game.

I did pick up the 2nd Edition of Mansions of Madness on a whim, and I am glad I did! In the 2nd Edition, an app plays the role of the Mansion and the players all work together fully cooperatively to survive! Some people may not love the idea of an app running the bad guys, but I it does work.

Over the years, I have played some fun games of Mansions of Madness, usually on Halloween! The game is creepy and thematic as the app boths runs the game and plays creepy music! There’s a ton of content for the game and I have come to have some really good creepy times playing in this creepy Mansion! Also, a lot of my friends also gave the same props to Mansions of Madness, 2nd Edition.

5. Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is probably the most divisive game on this list, which is why it is only #5! Some people loved it, and claimed it as their #1 game, and some people said how much they didn’t like it, and other people said that Marvel Champions has completely replaced The Arkham Horror Card Game for them! It’s very similar to Marvel Champions in terms of gameplay, but arguably the Arkham game has a lot more story!?

Still, a small group of my friends in Las Cruces get together and play this regularly! They LOVE it! There’s a ton of story! There is SO MUCH content with new adventures for this game! If you find yourself drawn to this, you will have plenty of content to choose from! Just be careful, as there is a 1st edition and 2nd edition (and newer one which is still compatible with 2nd).

4. Horror on the Orient Express

For a newer game, Horror on the Orient Express went over quite well with my groups! This is basically Cooperative Cthulhu Clue as players work together to solve a mystery while traveling on the Orient Express!

Players have to uncover facts to find out who are the Cultists in your group, with a kind of Clue-like vibe!

At the same time, players must fight Cthulhoid type creatures racing along with the train in the Dreamlands! It doesn’t matter if you solve the mystery if you can’t keep the train and its passengers safe!

There’s an awful lot to this game: it will require a substantial time investment. And there’s a ton of content and expansions! But, like some of us, if you love the idea of an Agatha Christie mystery novel taking place in a Cthulhu-esque world, this is a perfect game for you! See our review here of Horror on the Orient Express to see if this might be a game for you and your group!

3. Death May Die

Death May Die is not the most popular game in my gaming circles, but the people who love it, love it! This was far and away the favorite Cthulhu game of a number of people, which is why it’s so far up the list!

This was far and away Adrian’s favorite game! And I am pretty sure it is one of Mike Heller’s favorite Cthulhu games too!

2. Mythos Tales

This one might surprise you … some of you have probably never even heard of this! Mythos Tales is basically Sherlock Homes: Consulting Detective themed with Cthulhu Mythos! Of course, there’s a very good chance you’ll go insane solving the mystery, but that’s par for the course for most Cthulhu games!

Part of the reason this game ranks so highly is that it hit some of us so hard … in a good way! My friend Joe, at his job as a teacher, was able to engage at-risk readers with this game! The idea of reading stories, looking at maps, and investigating this world was so much fun! It turns out, if you gives someone a reason to read (investigating horror), then they want to read!

This is, unfortunately, long out-of-print, but it’s pretty easy to get a used copy. If you like the idea of being a detective in the Cthulhu world, using Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective mechanics, this is the perfect game for you! (Make sure you get the 2nd edition if you can; if not, make sure you get the errata).

1. Arkham Horror: 2nd Edition

Arkham Horror: 2nd edition has a special place among me and my friends! That’s why it’s #1! It was arguably the first cooperative board game many of us have played, and we embraced all the content for it! I think I personally have all the expansions for it! You’ll notice Arkham Horror: 3rd Edition is nowhere on this list … frankly, most of us saw no reason for investing in the 3rd edition since we still had and loved the 2nd edition!

At the time of this writing, a newer revised 2nd edition called Arkham Horror: Remastered will be coming to Gamefound. It will curious to see how well this does in our hearts and minds!

At the end of the day, Arkham Horror: 2nd edition is one of me and my friends favorite games of all time. Sure, it’s long. Sure, it’s overly thematic. Sure, it’s complex. But me and my friends have had so many fun hours playing Arkham Horror: 2nd edition, it had to be in the #1 spot!

Legendary DC or DC Legendary? A Solo and Fully Cooperative Review.

Legendary DC released July 29th, 2026. My online order arrived pretty much then; I ordered and bought a copy directly from Upper Deck.

Legendary DC is the a re-theming of the Legendary Marvel game, but in the the DC universe!

Legendary DC is a deck-building game with superheroes from the DC Universe! It’s a fully cooperative (at a certain way to play) and solo game about hiring a team of heroes to fight the bad guys! We love the theme and the original Legendary Marvel made our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero Games!

Will Legendary DC make that Top 10?

Unboxing and Gameplay

The box is a slightly odder shape than the original game: see box and Coke Can (above) for perspective.

It’s a slightly different shape because it comes with a rolled-up neoprene map! See above and below!

The original Legendary Marvel did NOT have the neoprene mat included! Later games in the Legendary line (especially the Legendary Adventures, like Aliens) came with mats! And everyone loved them! So, I think that’s why the newer sets now all have them.

They really do help organize the game. See above.

To play a game, players must first choose a Mastermind to fight: See the base five Masterminds that come with this set. To win, you almost always have to fight and defeat the Mastermind in four battles for an ultimate victory!

The Mastermind has a Scheme they are trying to achieve; the Scheme defines the losing conditions.

For example, Weaponizing Chemo (see above) is a scheme with 7 Twists! If all 7 Twists come out, the players lose!

The Scheme Twists (see above, right) are shuffled into the Villain’s Deck! The Villain’s deck is a mish-mash of all sorts of bad news cards!

Each Villain deck typically includes some Henchmen (see 4 sets above) …

They also include some Villain Groups! See the seven base Villain Groups above!

There’s also some innocent bystanders (some named you will recognize, and some nameless ones) that get shuffled into the Villain Deck …

These cards, also coupled with the Masterstrike cards (which lets the Mastermind get involved) form the Villain Deck! Every turn players must draw a card from the Villain Deck and “something bad” happens!

This deck (see it splayed above) is the Bad News deck. To be clear, it changes in every game, depending on the Villain Groups and Henchmen and Scheme you choose!

Usually, you fight a Villain from the Villain Deck; a Villain will enter the City that you have to fight!

Legendary DC is a little different than most Superhero games! You do NOT play a single hero! Instead, you are collecting heroes in a “team” (your deck) to fight the bad guys!

For example, you have a bunch of Superman cards available! At the start of the game, you can only afford the cheaper Superman cards (cost in lower right), but as the game goes on, you can afford to get the better and better Superman cards!

Every player starts with a simple crew from Checkmate (which is quite a bit like Shield from Marvel)! It’s a low-level group of good guys! The Pawns (you start with 8) can only help you recruit Heroes (the Star is how much “recruitment” they can afford)!

The Checkmate Knights can do a little bit of damage to bad guys! (Players start with 4 of these Knights).

As the game goes on, you recruit better Heroes, save Bystanders, fight Villains and hopefully confront the Mastermind 4 times before his Scheme completes! If the Hero deck or Villain deck depletes, you ran out of time and lost! Usually, though, you will lose because the final Scheme comes out and you lose!

There are a few more rules (which we will discuss below), but that’s the basics of the game! The cards and art are all pretty great!

Rulebook

The rulebook is actually quite good!

The rulebook does really well on the Chair Test! See above as it opens up to two pages just fine without any drooping! It’s probably a B+ or A- on the Chair Test. The font is a little small, and the later rulebook pages have a lot more text than pictures. Still, the rulebook is very usable on the chair next to me.

I think the rulebook actually fails the Components test. The Components are NOT defined until the very last page? They are not on the first few pages? I know how to play Legendary, but I worry a little about newer players; this doesn’t really talk about how to “Uncard” the game.

What do I do with all these cards? I still think the rulebook should have an Uncardening section at the very beginning (somehow coupled with the Components list). See more discussion of Uncardening in our discussion of Union City Alliance (another Superhero deck-building game).

I think the next few pages hold the players hands enough to get them through all the cards. Rather than list all the components up front, this rulebook takes you through them a little at a time. Maybe this works; I still think the rulebook needs to acknowledge how many cards are in the game and maybe even a sentence or two (or picture) talking about how to do an Uncardening.

Still, this rulebook worked pretty well. It even has a list of cards to use for your first game!

As we get later in the rulebook, there are fewer pictures and much more text. I think this rulebook could have used an Index. (I found “Always Leads” finally after looking, but it’s buried in a floating box and hard to find). Maybe you just get the online version and search the PDF and have that be the Index?

Generally this is a good rulebook; I feel like this is a much better rulebook than the original Legendary Marvel rulebook: I hated that rulebook!

Solo Play

So Legendary DC embraces the solo player! Yay! Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!

And you can either true solo or multi-handed solo! To play true solo, it’s one player and one deck (one set of heroes): see rules above.

You can also play 2-handed solo (with two sets of decks) or more! I love that this game embraces both solo modes! I generally prefer the 2-handed solo mode because there are generally NO EXCEPTIONS to rules, which makes it easier to learn! Surprisingly, I think I prefer the true solo for Legendary DC, despite there being some changes. Why? Well, to be frank, there’s SO MANY cards between the heroes, the villains, the bystanders, etc etc etc, it’s easier to JUST manage one deck.

There are some extra rules for the true solo mode: they redefine “Each Other Player” to be yourself (see above; this is a pretty common thing in a true solo mode). They also add an extra Scheme Twist effect and change the set-up so there are fewer Henchmen (and two always start already in the city). The true solo rules are a little clumsier than I thought at first, but I still prefer only managing one deck of Heroes at a time! I think the fewer decks/more rules of true solo outweighs the costs of the more decks/fewer rules for 2-handed solo!

Honestly, the rulebook does a real good job helping you set-up the solo game just fine: see above.

You only get 3 three Heroes, and fewer Villain Groups and Henchmen groups in true solo.

Did I like playing Legendary DC true solo? Yes!!! Over the course of a week, I played at least 7 times solo! There’s so much variety in this game, I loved seeing what would happen! There’s 14 Heroes, 7 Villain Groups, 4 Henchmen, 5 Masterminds, and 9 different Schemes! There’s a ton of variety in this box!

I started with the typical first game of Captain Cold/Rogues vs Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman! Fun! I won the first game!

I then moved to a game themed for Gotham City! Joker/Gotham City Underworld vs. Black Canary/Batman/Nightwing! I actually lost this game, but played again and was able to do a lot better once I knew more about the villains and heroes!

I also did a “weird” group of Heroes with Zatana/Wonder Woman/Martian Manhunter! They are all kinda funky heroes! See above!

And of course, I had to do a Teen Titan’s based game with Cyborg/Starbolt/Nightwing vs. Deathstroke!

Over the course of a week, I played a lot of games and had a lot of fun. There’s a lot of set-up and shuffling for the solo player, as you have to shuffle together all the hero decks and the villain deck. But, once you are set-up, the game flows quickly!

I was generally very pleased with the true solo mode offered by Legendary DC. The worst part of the solo game is the set-up and tear-down, as the solo player has a LOT of decks to shuffle (set-up) then separate (tear-down). But, if you have played Legendary in any form, you already knew this.

Cooperative Mode

It’s a strange thing; this game can be played cooperatively or semi-co-op (getting the most victory points). See rulebook above: If you don’t defeat the Mastermind together, everyone loses! Yet, I don’t personally know anyone who plays semi-co-op for victory points? It seems out of character to play a super hero game … in any way competitively? But you can?

So, cooperatively is all about making sure we defeat the Mastermind in combat 4 times!

One of the best things about playing Legendary DC (or any Legendary) cooperatively is sharing the load for set-up and tear-down! There are a LOT of cards in this game; the more players that play, the more cards! That means set-up is all about shuffling together a ton of cards for the Hero decks and the Villain deck! And then the tear-down is arguably worse, as you have to separate ALL THOSE CARDS back into their original decks. Luckily, if you have a good group, you can share the load and have everyone help. That group help really makes the game feel a little less like work and more like fun.

Although we almost always (always?) play Legendary cooperatively, it’s not particularly cooperative! Don’t get me wrong; we are all working together to defeat the Mastermind, and we point out issues and talk about how to resolve them, but there’s not really a lot of cooperative mechanisms in the game. Each player’s turn is mostly taken in solitaire; this is mostly multi-player solitaire! There’s no real mechanisms for sharing cards, or directly helping someone with your cards! Mostly, it’s about talking about how the solitaire turns will interact with each other and the current board!

Some people might think the “lack of cooperative mechanisms” makes this a bad cooperative game; not at all! This multi-player solitaire nature helps keep the Alpha Player Syndrome in check, so that’s one reason a lot of people might like this! And some people really like the idea of a cooperative game without too much player interaction.

Just be aware of the kind of cooperation Legendary DC provides; it is fully cooperative and players will discuss how to win together, but the turns are mostly multi-player solitaire.

Sleevening

You should probably sleeve your game if you plan to play it a lot. I played my first 7 games without sleeves, and I noticed some of the starter cards (Checkmate cards) getting smudged and a little messy.

I was a late sleever, but I think it’s worth it for this game. Heck, usually most deck-builders are worth sleeving! I used the Sleeve Kings 63.5 x 88 mm sleeves! See above.

House Rule for Schemes To Reduce Randomness

A lot of Scheme cards shuffle a bunch of Scheme Twists into the deck: see above!! But if you just happen to get all of the Scheme Twists at the start of the game, you quickly lose! Sure, it’s unlikely. But after all that set-up, how annoying is it if your game ends quickly because the Scheme Twists end up in the upper part of the Villain Deck?

Games like Pandemic break apart the deck into piles (see rules above), then shuffle one of the Infection cards (like Scheme Twists) into each pile. Then the piles go back on top of each other! See above for rules of Pandemic! This keeps the bad news cards from being all clumped in the top (game too hard) or the bottom (game too easy)!

Why don’t we do this with the Scheme Twists? With the Pandemic method, the Scheme Twists are distributed equally throughout the Villain Deck! This seems like a simple house rule to keep some of the randomness under control.

What I Liked

Hope and Fear: Legendary DC has a notion of Fear and Hope (two sides of the coin). See mat above! Some Villains and/or Heroes do less or more damage depending on where the Fear track is! Superman does better when Hope is higher, and Batman does better when Fear is bad! I like this mechanism a lot; it gives a nice flavor of atmosphere to the game! There’s also a more mechanical reason to like this: if you get a “bad hand” and can “only” generate 3 fight on your turn, you can still do something useful and fight crime (generate hope or fear, as you want)!!! That’s right, if you have really hard Villains out, you can still do something useful! This new feature (at least for me) really helps elevate the game by giving the players more to do on a turn, even when faced with a bad hand!

Art On Cards: The art on the cards is generally fantastic! The heroes, the villains, the masterminds are all pillars of good comic book art!

Rulebook: Despite a few grumbles with the rulebook, I generally really liked this rulebook. Even though I already knew how Legendary worked, I feel like the quality has significantly increased since the first one! It still needs an Uncardening section.

Player Counts All Work: The rulebook goes out of its way to make little mods to make sure sure the game works at all player counts! The solo rules have special set-up and rules, the 4 and 5 player games get an extra “free” turn makes me feel like this game will work at all the player count! My experience is only solo and 4-player, but these tweaks seemed to work!

Variety: There is SO much variety in this game, you could be happy with just this base set for quite a while!

The Player Mat: The fact that this version of the game comes with a player mat is great! It really helps keep the game more organized and easy to set-up!

What I Didn’t Like

The Cover Art: The cover art seems … out-of-place with the rest of the art? The cover art looks like a “Super Friends” kind of art (lesser quality) and the innards are more like “Justice League of America” art (higher-quality)? I don’t know, if I saw this game at a game store and didn’t know anything about it, I might think it’s for young kids only? I think the cover belies what’s inside.

Play Mat: As much as I love the playmat, I think it’s busy and distracting. The Heroes and villains on the mat are “distracting”. They are also of the lesser art like the cover. I would rather have the heroes and villain be removed from the playmat and have the the background only! However, given a choice between no playmat and a busy playmat, I’d MUCH rather have the playmat!

Randomness: The Hero decks and Villain Decks are random: you can get completely screwed by bad draws. It’s not big deal, because it usually balances out (especially if you build a good hero deck). BUT in a game where it’s so much work to set-up and tear-down, it can very frustrating to have a game end because of bad draws; this is probably the worst part of Legendary DC, and every Legendary game ever.

Conclusion

I think Legendary DC is my current favorite version of Legendary! All it’s little tweaks (Fear and Hope, player count adjustments, multiple solo modes, etc) show all the advancements that have been done in this system! This is the newest evolution to this game and it works well. There is also so much variety in the game that you can play this set for quite a while without needing any expansions! Trust me though, more expansions are coming. The art is fantastic and the DC Superhero theme works well with this.

The set-up and tear-down can be daunting, especially for the solo player, but the cooperative game is a lot easier to set-up/tear-down because players can share the load to make it easier for everyone. Be aware: there is a fair amount of randomness in the game, so bad draws that ruin a game are a little more painful when the set-up and tear-down is so pronounced! Having said that, the randomness of the game isn’t “usually” too bad, especially with one minor house rule we suggest.

The solo game is a blast and I couldn’t stop playing it! There’s even rules for true solo and 2-handed solo! I prefer the true solo despite the few extra rules and really enjoyed the puzzle and gameplay. 8.5/10 maybe 9/10?

The cooperative game isn’t that cooperative; it’s more multiplayer solitaire. It’s still a lot of fun, but don’t expect lots of sharing or turns where you help someone else; most of the communication in the game is “general strategy”, but that’s still fun. It’s a great game: players work together a little … but the cooperation isn’t particularly pronounced. There just aren’t a lot mechanisms in the game that promote cooperation. 8.5/10.

I don’t think I know anyone who plays this semi-co-op; it seems out of character for a super-hero game to NOT be fully cooperative.

And yes, this would make our Top 10 Cooperative Superhero Games!! I think it’s better than Legendary Marvel!

Hero Appendix

Here’s all the Superheroes and their cards.

A Review of 20 Strong Nemesis: Is This a Cooperative Game or a Semi-Cooperative Game? Isn’t the Answer Obvious???

I had been hearing great things about this system (called 20 Strong) for years, but I had never played any of the games in the 20 Strong line; the Nemesis: 20 Strong Kickstarter felt like the place to start.

Why here? Because it’s both solo and cooperative! See above from the Gamefound page!

Oh wait, is it cooperative?

Or is it semi-coop? Hmm … looking on the Gamefound web page, there are literally only two mentions of it being cooperative and/or semi-cooperative! And those two terms are contradictory! The two above! Surely, the rulebook will clarify all! (And YES, a fully cooperative game is VERY different than a semi-cooperative game!)

Oh wait, now it’s cooperative again?

Or is it semi? So, the Gamefound site has two conflicting entries and the rulebook has two conflicting entries. Which is it?

Of course, anyone who knows Nemesis (the original game this is based on) knows it’s absolutely a semi-cooperative game (see Shut-Up and Sit Down video above: one of my favorite): it’s obviously a semi-co-op!

…but recent releases do make it cooperative. See video above!

What’s going on here? Which is it? Semi-co-op or co-op??? There were just enough suggestions that 20 Strong Nemesis works cooperatively (and I wanted to see what all the 20 Strong fuss was about), that I went ahead and picked it up and used it as my on-ramp into the 20 Strong system.

How was it?

Unboxing 20 Strong

What I backed (with my own hard-earned money) included the 20 Strong Nemesis box, as well as the two solo boxes for Etherfield and Tainted Grail. See above. We will discuss the Etherfields and Tainted Grail boxes a little more later, but we are focusing on the 20 Strong Nemesis box for this review.

This is a surprisingly small box! See Coke can above for scale. What’s in this thing?

Some dice, a rulebook, a tracker, and the Nemesis box.

First of all, you have to understand a little about 20 Strong. 20 Strong is the fundamental backbone system of a lot of games; it’ s not really a game by itself. It has 20 really nice dice (see above), thus the name 20 Strong !

There are a bunch of generic rules about dice: misses (empty circle, left) and hits (+, middle) and critical hits (+ and more, right). The number of tendrils on the outer circle tell you how many of the 6 sides have hits or critical hits: for the purple dice, 5 of the 6 sides have hits!

Each game in the 20 Strong system takes these General Rules of Play (see above) and adds/modifies/subtracts rules to make a new game based on this fundamental dice game.

Nemesis is the deck that sits on top of the 20 Strong system!

Unboxing 20 Strong:Nemesis and Gameplay

Nemesis 20 Strong card box itself has a bunch of cards; about 85 total. See above.

These cards are AMAZING! They are PVC, not cardboard, so you don’t need to sleeve them! They also all have some foil embellishments that make these POP on the table. These are amazing cards! They look great! And the art is great too!

Each player chooses 1 of 12 characters to play. See above.

Each character has a special ability (see above) as well as some stats. The Red Heart is how many hit points, the purple thing is strategy (that controls some rerolls/retries and how many cards you can have), and finally the green arrow is how many dice you recover at the start of your turn.

Players explore a 4×5 grid (4 rows, 5 columns) of Locations. At the start of the game, all Locations are face-down, so you don’t know what’s what.

As the game evolves, more and more Locations are revealed! To win the game, players must find the Escape Pods, but they can’t activate the Escape Pods until they activate the Engines, which they can’t activate until they find the Generators! It’s all about exploration!

As you explore, you generate noise! There are actually a lot of ways to generate noise! If you ever roll a critical hit (far right) and apply it, it counts as noise! Many Locations also generate noise when you activate them (like turning on the Ship’s engines .. that’s pretty noisy, right?).

See the noise tracker above! Noise is bad!! Why? When the noise tracker comes all the way around, you accidentally summon an alien!

These are the aliens (which look nothing like Aliens from the movies) that hunt you and fight you!

The noise coming back around immediately summons an alien to your Location! Gulp! You better hope you still have some actions to fight it!

On your turn, you have 4 actions to move, attack, salvage, trade, and other. See the Action Reference (on the back of other character cards) above!

To be clear, the dice are key to everything you do here; every move, attack, salvage involves some of the dice.

As you play, dice move from the active to inactive pool! You have to decide how many dice to allocate on your turn! And which dice! Every color die has its own number of successes! The yellow dice are the weakest, and the red die is the strongest! (And you don’t always want to strongest dice on your turn; at the end of your turn you may generate even more noise using the strongest die used!). Let’s be 100% clear: this is a dice game.

Along the way, you can also pick up items when you salvage; see above as I have a Taser and Energy Charge.

If you can escape the ship in an Escape Pod, you “win!” But, winning is very different if you are playing cooperatively or semi-co-op!!

Cooperative vs. Semi-Cooperative

All right, let’s address the alien in the room: is this a cooperative or semi-cooperative game? The answer is VERY much not answered by the rulebook! Nor the Gamefound site! Like I said, both allude to both co-op and semi-co-op natures, but neither really answer the question.

The answer seems to be very much answered by the official How To Play 20 Strong: Nemesis video from Chip Theory games (the publisher). See above.

Semi-Co-op for the Win!

The answer? This is very much a semi-co-op. I guess that’s a “Well, Duh” to most people. But, after “trying” to play it cooperatively, this game can be played cooperatively, but it’s just not as strong. It’s really how you deal with the objective cards in the game more than anything.

At the start of the the game, each player gets two objective cards. At a certain point in the game (when the round dial counts down to specific placed based on the difficulty and player count), you must discard one or the other: this defines how you get points for the rest of the game! This defines your play-style: do you screw your compatriots for points or play nice? The objectives majorly inform your style!

In the semi-co-op game, you are trying to get the most objective points to win! That’s it!! If you die (pardon me, are “defeated”), you can still win if you can get more points than the other players! So, in the semi-co-op game, everything you do is in the name of getting points: you may lie about what Locations you discover, you may lie about what your objectives are, you may lie about what you are trying to do. You do not HAVE to show the Locations you find, you do not HAVE to show your objectives. You may work a little with the other players to discover the ship, but in general, you are trying to get the most points.

In many ways, 20 Strong: Nemesis is Nemesis: the dice game. Cooperate a little, but lie lie lie.

You Can Still Play Cooperatively

But, you can still play Strong 20: Nemesis fully cooperatively; no lying. Unfortunately, the rulebook kinda sucks, and all the things you have to do to “really” play cooperatively aren’t “really” spelled out. Here’s what we discovered to play cooperatively:

You have to share and discuss your objectives pretty heavily out-loud! There are plenty of objectives that are truly mutually exclusive, and you need to talk so everyone can “do the right thing” to make it so everyone can fulfill their objectives!
You need to specify the “fully cooperative” win condition! After playing many cooperative games, the fully cooperative objective seems to be “all players must escape and have enough objective points!” I think all players need to survive and have enough points to call this a win. I “guess” if a player dies, but still somehow has enough points, they are considered part of a winning team?
You need to communicate well. No lying.

The worst part is that it’s not 100% clear what the win condition should be cooperatively! I think everyone should escape AND have enough objective points? But I can also imagine a scenario where one player dies by making the ultimate sacrifice to help the others. but can still is in the winner’s circle because his objective points were achieved.

I taught/watched a 3-Player cooperative game, and my friends did a great job cooperating! They had to figure out a way so that everyone escaped the ship with at least 7 objective points! They talked about their objectives, they talked about how to meet them, they talked about how to help each other meet their objectives!

It was surprising just how cooperative this game can be, if you just know what cooperative rules should be. The rulebook could have easily had a few pages distinguishing semi-cooperative play from cooperative play. And a co-op mode does seem to work.

But as-is, 20 Strong: Nemesis is a semi-co-op.

Rulebooks and Rules

I did not like this rulebook. First of all, it said to try out the Dized tutorial! Not available yet! (at the time of the play).

This game probably gets a D on the Chair Test! As much as I hate the form factor (as it was tiny and small), they did a good job with the font: I could read it.

There were a lot of things that weren’t really well specified. I had to re-read the rules several times (what does the turn timer start at? What does a crit hit do when I attack? The aliens attack? For a noise check? The crit means different things depending on the context! ) I ended up going to the official How To Play video from Chip Theory games, and I still didn’t get everything answered! (The Strategy component is not really explained in the video at all).

It really took about 5 plays to get the rules down. For a “simple” dice game, I was very frustrated. Part of it was also the fact that the base 20 Strong rules are interspersed with Nemesis rules, and it’s confusing: see above.

I recommend watching the How To Play Video from Chip Theory games, and hopefully the Dized tutorial will be online by the time you read this. But you are still gonna have to read this little rulebook a little. I didn’t love it. I hated the form factor.

Solo

You can play solo. I played a few games solo to get the feel of it. You can even play true solo and only play one character!

I won. It was ok. It was .. fine.

Reactions

The reactions … weren’t great.
Ralph: It was ok.
Sara: 5/10. I’d play again if someone wanted to, but only fully cooperative. I’d never play semi-co-op.
Andrew: 5/10. Same
Teresa. It was ok 6/10. I’d never play semi-co-op
Rich: It was ok solo. 6/10. I think the co-op was better: 6.5/10. I also would never play semi-co-op.

Conclusion

I really wanted to like 20 Strong: Nemesis, but me and my groups were pretty disappointed by it. Some of that disappointment was that the co-op wasn’t great, but 20 Strong: Nemesis is really probably best as a semi-co-op. This is management of expectations: you can’t really like a cooperative game if it’s really a semi-cooperative game.

I think if you take 20 Strong: Nemesis as what it is, as a semi-co-op, then it’s pretty good. I think objectively that it’s probably a 7.5/10: it’s a shorter, faster, stream-lined version of the original game of Nemesis. You may love it!

If you take it as a cooperative game, the rating drops to a 5 or 6 for my friends; I was highest at 6.5/10. (Solo was just “ok” at 6/10).

The weird thing is that watching my friends play it fully cooperatively (which is really not an official version), it was pretty darn cooperative! They were talking and working together so well! I have to be honest, I’m not sure what it would take to move this up just a bit more: there is a good cooperative game in here, I just think it needs something else. I saw the cooperation happening! I saw the discussion of mutually exclusive objectives! There is something here! I just don’t “quite” know what’s missing for this to be a good fully cooperative game?

If you are looking for a good fully cooperative spaceship exploration game that’s short and moves around a grid, I would recommend Solar Storm instead of this (see review here); Solar Storm made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2020!

Stupid Fun. A Two Word Review of Camp Grizzly: Second Edition

Stupid Fun. That’s all you need to know about Camp Grizzly: Second Edition.

What? You want to know more? Ok, we’ll talk a little more about this.

Stupid, Random, but very Thematic Fun! There! Is that better?

No? That’s still not enough? All right, all right …. we’ll look a look closer at this cooperative (yes, it is cooperative, that’s why we are here) horror game.

Unboxing

This is the second edition of the silly cooperative game called Camp Grizzly. See Coke can and box above for scale.

I backed Camp Grizzly:Second Edition from Kickstarter back in August 2025, and it arrived at my house in early July 2026. It arrived early! It was originally slated to arrive August 2026!! What? An Early Kickstarter??? That never happens! I was on the fence for backing this, but it was Mike Heller who convinced me this was a good choice! The game I backed was the Limited Release version with lots of acrylic tokens and standees.

Acrylic Standees

I am embarrassed to say that one of the reasons I was so excited for this game was the Acrylic Standees! The version I got (Limited Release) comes with Acrylic Standees that are so funny and goofy and thematic! See the full bag above of them!

The Acrylic Standees work SO WELL for this game! The art style is very “comic booky”, and I find that style works really well with Acrylic Standees: The colors are more vibrant and just pop!

There’s a LOT of them too! See above!! Why so many? Because this particular version comes with 8 expansions, and some of these standees are just for the expansions that come in the box!

Note the two above; the lady on the left has no “symbol” on the bottom of her standee, so she’s a base game character. The lady on the right has a bottle-looking symbol: she’s from the Spin The Bottle expansion!

Some of the expansions have a TON of standees! See all the Mountain characters above!

I adore the Acrylic Standees; they work so well! If you have a chance to buy and/or play Camp Grizzly: Second Edition, try to get the version with the Acrylic Standees! I think they are that great!

Gameplay

The premise of this game is simple; have some Counselors survive Otis and make it to the Finale! If all Counselors die, everyone loses! If some counselors survive, everyone wins! Let’s be 100% clear; some of the Counselors will die!! And possibly you might die!! But don’t take it personally.

Otis (see above) is at Camp Grizzly and he is the BIG BAD HORROR monster chasing the Counselors! Otis is the amalgam of Jason, Freddy Krueger, Micheal Meyers, Leprechaun (blah) and all your “favorite” horror movie baddies! Just to be clear: no player is operating Otis and hunting the Counselors: the game plays Otis via some rules.

There are several modes of play in the game: Modern Murder Mode and Classic Action Mode.

In Classic Action Mode, the players choose 6 Counselors (see all Counselors above; some are from expansions) and the players as a group operate the 6 Counselors: there are always 6 Counselors (well, until they get killed … and they probably will …).

In Modern Murder Mode, each player takes the role a single Counselor: one character per player. If your Counselor dies, you get another one.

And just a reminder, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet, counselors will die.

Counselors each have a Special ability to help them! Kevin (see above), for example, may move to a fight and gets +1 during BOAT finales! Kevin only has 5 hit points (note, it’s NOT the number next to you: that’s your movement). Notice that the healthier you are are, the faster you move! At full health, Kevin moves 3 spaces per turn, but as he gets wounded, his movement degrades to 2 then 1 (and then with a second wind back to 2)! If Kevin ever PANICS (yellow bam), he can run up to 2 away.

The players choose a Scenario (as specified by a number of cards) and set it up!

There are a number of set-ups of different difficulties. The game recommends starting with “Quick and Dirty”: see above.

After reading the flavor test (whosoever is the most dramatic and over-the-top reader should read this), the other side gives the set-up for the game!

The set-up puts the characters, Otis, and some Objective Tokens on the board.

The Objective Tokens have various things on them (First Aid Kit, gas, rope, … other things). The players are trying to the objective tokens so as to trigger one of the end Finales!

There are 4 possible finale-triggers at the 4 corners of the board; the BARN, the BOAT, the VAN, the RANGER tower: see above.

If you can get the three Objective tokens (keys, crowbar, battery), you can move to the Ranger Tower and initiate the Finale!

Depending on which tokens you get (they are all hidden at the start of the game), you may have to run to the VAN or the BOAT instead! Each finale needs different resources! (To be clear, there are a lot of finales; it looks like 24 for my version of the game).

The finale can be SO VERY different! One of them is a Barn Dance, where you have to roll dice and try to get a certain match! In another, I had to sacrifice one of the Counselors! … and each one is really different.

As the game goes on, Otis gets more and more terrifying! He starts to move faster, attack for more!

Basically, as the Body Count goes up (yes, there’s a body count track), Otis slowly get more powerful! Funny, even if the Counselors don’t die, there are extras that die all over the place: Cameos and other NPC campers.

If players can’t trigger a finale, and the Body Track gets too high, there will be a final fight instead!

Along the way, you’d better hope you find some stuff to help you! Sherry was lucky enough to find the Chainsaw and Slicker! See above!

There’s a Cabin deck that players will draw from every turn, and a Survival Deck you can get lucky and draw from occasionally. What’s in the Cabin deck? So much random stuff!

You might get good stuff … like the Slicker …

You might get a Cameo by a famous actor (who will probably die very quickly) …

You might get a Plot Twist, which screws you!

… or you might get Otis Strikes!

You can fight Otis (a little), but generally he overwhelms you and you take damage. If your Counselor runs out of hit points, you either just die (Classic Mode) or respawn a new character (Modern Murder Mode).

Survive the Finale or the Final Fight and you win!

Rulebook

The rulebook is generally pretty good.

It gets a D- or an F on the Chair Test, as the rulebook is the same size as the box, and hopelessly droops over the edges. You might be able to use it on the chair next to you, but maybe not. It’s too bad, because the rulebook is pretty good otherwise.

I wish the rulebook had an Index; there are a few too many concepts and/or keywords, so I wanted to look stuff up quickly via an Index.

Solo Game

So, Camp Grizzly: Second Edition works as a solo game! (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!) Interestingly, because there are two modes to the game (Classic and Modern), you can choose to either play 6 Counselors at once as the solo player in the Classic mode, or you can play true solo in the Modern mode, and play just one Counselor!

I opted for the true solo game with one Counselor. See above as Jody decides it’s a good idea to stay at camp alone at night! Wait … maybe that’s NOT a good idea …

Jody died pretty quickly, but C.J. stepped up (“spawned”) after Otis killed Jody! The great thing is that C.J. was that he was able to pick up all the stuff Jody dropped when he died! See above! This is really thematic that you can loot the dead bodies!

Now, C.J. made it to a Finale at the Ranger Tower! And what happened?? Because there was only ONE Counselor alive, C.J. had to be sacrificed! If there had been TWO Counselors, we could have won, as one of us had to die … but as long as at least one Counselor survives, we win! I COULDN’T WIN! No matter how I played the true solo mode, I couldn’t have won .. at least with this Finale.

Huh. I wasn’t frustrated. I thought it was kind of funny! Are all scenarios this poopy for the solo player?

I set-up the same intro scenario and had Sherry run this one by herself!

Sherry did MUCH better than C.J. or Jody! She made it all the way to the BARN Finale with no wounds and a CHAINSAW!!

The BARN DANCE was a very different Finale! Sherry had to roll some dice to survive … and she did not survive.

Sherry died. So I lost again. But I could have won … I am beginning to think I actually would have had a better chance with at least one more Counselor. I am beginning to think 2-handed solo (2 Counselors in Modern mode) is probably the best way to play solo?

Again, you might think I was frustrated that I lost. Nah. It was goofy fun. You have to realize .. these games were very quick! Once you get into the groove of this game, I think my second solo game took 45 minutes? This game moves quickly. And you really can’t take it too seriously.

Cooperative Mode

So, when I first looked at Camp Grizzly: Second Edition on Kickstarter, the game is billed as “semi-cooperative”; see above!! I actually didn’t back it at first when I saw that!

I don’t think that’s quite accurate. I think a strict playing might be “only the players that survive” are the winners. But the thing is, it’s almost always in your best interest to keep many Counselors alive! I have seen a number of Finales now, and it always behooves you to have more Counselors! The more Counselors you have, the better chances you have of surviving and winning!

Even the rulebook points out: “look, if anyone survives, y’all win”. It’s cooperative! Mostly; even when you have to screw other players (like when we had to sacrifice a Counselor), it’s still in the name of common good! As long as one Counselor makes it out alive, you all win!

The basic cooperative game was pretty easy to explain and jump into. I didn’t have too many problems teaching the game.

The Finale was actually a little harder to explain and how it worked.

This game reminds me a lot of Betrayal at House On The Hill! The Finale was “wonky” and we had to try and figure out what the card meant! I have to admit, I had this problem a little in the solo game too! Each Finale you trigger is very different, but it means the rules aren’t quite as well defined because they are different every time! Luckily, this is a cooperative game (unlike Betrayal At House On The Hill), so you players can discuss “What does this mean?” One of the problems with Betrayal At House On The Hill is that the environment is so tense and antagonistic because you can’t ask questions… because that might give something away! At least here in Camp Grizzly, the wacky Finales can be discussed as a group.

And we definitely saw what “could” be semi-co-op nature of this game!!! We had to leave poor Teresa behind because her movement had dropped to 1! There was no way she could make it to the Finale in time! So, we had to trigger the Finale and “leave her behind”. If this had been a true semi-co-op, Teresa would have just lost. But, like a Horror movie, even if your favorite character dies, you still hope the Counselors will survive! The flavor of this game was cooperative; we aren’t gonna win if we have to wait for Teresa, so we all made the decision to leave her behind! And she was cool … she was just hoping one of us would survive!

In the end, Sara just barely survived the Finale: both Andrew and I died in the Finale, but since Sara survived, we all won! Hurrah! It was a bummer to die, but we “knew” we won!

So, our game was over in about an hour. The game moved quickly, and was “generally” easy to teach! I did have to look up some rules in the rulebook as we played, but it wasn’t too bad.

I think this game is simple enough that a group could learn this “cold” at a Convention without too much trouble. This probably could have made our Top 10 Cooperative Games To Play at Conventions! It is very simple to learn.

Thematic

Growing up in the 80s, I was forced to watch a ton of Horror Movies with my friends. CC and Sloppy loved the horror genre, and I didn’t. But they outvoted me many times! So, I watched a lot more Horror than I expected to as a teenager. In fact, I was once made to watch ALL 7 Leprechaun Horror movies! (Yes!! There are 7 Leprechaun movies!! I think there are more now)!! It was to settle a bet: Which Leprechaun was the best one? CC liked Leprechaun 1 the best, but Sloppy liked Leprechaun 2 the best! But, of course we had to watch them all! (I liked a different one: Leprechaun in Space the best).

All of this is to say, I was exposed to a lot of Horror tropes! And Camp Grizzly nails the theme! Cheerleaders! Chainsaws! Cameos! The big three Cs! And this game does NOT take itself seriously.

But it nails the Horror theme and tropes perfectly.

Randomness

Jody died very quickly in my first because he had bad luck. C.J. did great and made it to the Finale, but lost because of bad luck. There is a LOT of randomness and luck in this game! You absolutely cannot take it seriously! You may die right away. You may win easily. You may get screwed by Otis or a die roll or a bad card draw or ….

There’s a lot of luck in this game. A lot.

Camp Grizzly reminds me a lot of Tales of Arabian Knights: see our review here. The advice we give when we play Tales of Arabian Nights: Don’t take it seriously; play and have fun! I think I like Camp Grizzly better than Tales of Arabian Nights for one major reason: it’s shorter! A Tales of Arabian Nights game can take 2-3 hours! Camp Grizzly? Dead in 45-60 minutes!

As long as you know this game will random and silly, I think you will enjoy it! Just don’t go in expecting a big thinky thing.

Reactions

Not everyone loved this.

Sara said it was “Fine”. That’s a 6/10 for her.
Teresa liked it. That’s a 7/10 for her.
Andrew said it was fine, but he’d prefer Tales Of Arabian Nights over this. He’s probably a 6.5/10.
Rich liked it the best. Maybe a 9/10?

Conclusion

Camp Grizzly is just stupid fun. It’s random, it’s goofy, it’s unfair, but it nails the horror movie theme and tropes! And it’s only 60 minutes!

If you think you would enjoy the Horror theme and like the idea of a stupid fun game, this game is for you. If you don’t like the Horror theme, Tales of Arabian Nights (see review here) or Tales of the Arthurian Nights (see review here) might be better choices for you: they are both silly story games like Camp Grizzly, but with different themes.

The problem with being stupid fun is that some people will just think this is just stupid … without the fun. My friends were more middling on this than I was: they gave it between 6 and 7. I gave Tales of Arabian Nights a 9/10, so I think I have to give Camp Grizzly something similar: 9/10. Tales of Arabian Nights has more “story”, but Camp Grizzly is over so much faster! Both are pretty darn random.

Stupid fun.

Top 10 Cooperative Replacements for Traditional Board and Card Games

We’ve all played that game of Monopoly that lasted 6 hours, or that game of Scrabble where everyone was yelling at each other, or that old traditional game where we all hated each other at the end! In the modern world of board and card games, there’s no reason for this! There are now many cooperative games that can replace the hate with joy! These are ten modern cooperative games that can replace some of old traditional board games with a more interactive and friendly game.

This list is ordered by how “obvious” a replacement game is! The games at the bottom of the list has obvious replacements, but the higher up the list you go, the harder it is to find a cooperative replacement! The top positions will really make you think about how hard it might be to replace those!

10. Monopoly -> CO-OP: The Co-op Game

If Monopoly is all about making money and crushing your opponents in a game that’s way too long, CO-OP: The Co-op Game is all about making just enough money to keep the co-op (a cooperative store and place of business with Customers) alive, while still keeping the place fun! The game is over quickly (no 6 hour game here), as players must learn to cooperative and reinforce each other’s actions! There’s actual “cooperate” actions, where players run Car Washes together to make money, or have Drum Circles to attract customers! At the end of the day, players must still make enough money (like Monopoly) to win, but it’s the delicate balance of money vs. fun that makes this so much more enjoyable than Monopoly!

CO-OP: The Co-op Game also embraces Player Selected Turn Order (see link here) allowing players to embrace the fairly modern concept choosing turn order as you play. As opposed to everyone hating each other at the end of Monopoly, high-fives end of the game when you save the CO-OP in CO-OP: the co-op game!

Disclaimer: the main designer of CO-OP: the Co-op Game is a major contributor to this web site CO-OP Gestalt, so take this with a grain of salt. But we’d still rather play CO-OP: the Co-op Game rather than Monopoly!

9. Poker -> Ace of Spades

Everyone knows how to play Poker … but sometimes it’s not the vibe you want! A “friendly game of Poker” is never truly friendly … until now! Ace of Spades is a 1 or 2-Player game where players cooperatively use poker hands to fight bad guys!

There’s a “river” of cards, shared among the players! Each player needs to form the best Poker hands they can to do damage to the current bad guy!

There’s a series of bad guys you must fight! If you can make it to the last one and defeat him, you cooperatively win! Take a look at our review of Ace Of Spades to see if this might be a good game for you!

8. Scrabble -> Word Weaver Adventures

Scrabble, at least in my family, was a vicious game where players vied for bonus spaces, and sometimes played stupid words just to block others from playing words on bonus spaces! There were heated arguments about words, but also deathly quiet!! The quiet around the table was deafening as players had to think, and there was so much analysis paralysis as player turns took forever! I love word games, but I hated playing Scrabble.

Word Weaver Adventures transcends all those petty issues! The game is gorgeous and encourages talking and communication! The vibe is open and flowing! And players all work on their words together at the same time, so turns don’t take forever! Players are all doing simultaneous word selection!

Everything I like about Scrabble (spelling words by myself, feeling smart using bonus spaces) is in Word Weaver Adventures, and everything I hate about Scrabble (turns too long, tense vibe) is absent from Word Weaver Adventures! See our review here of Word Weaver Adventures to see if this is something you might like!

7. Carcassonne -> Mists Over Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a fun tile-laying game that’s been out for a while! Carcassonne is now considered a “classic”, uttered by many people in the same breath as Monopoly and Scrabble! It’s actually a great game, but if you are looking for a cooperative version of this, the Carcassonne people have you covered! They already have something called Mists Over Carcassonne!

Mists Over Carcassonne makes the game cooperative by adding a new element: ghosts! When tiles come out, you have to worry about capturing ghosts by enclosing them using fairly standard Carcassonne rules! If too many ghosts comes out, players lose as a group!

This is a cooperative victory point game where players have to earn enough victory points (as a group) in order to win, while still keeping the ghosts at bay! Mists Over Carcassonne is a great cooperative tile-laying game, while still preserving all the things you love about Carcassonne! Take a look at our review here to see if Mists Over Carcassonne is something you might like!

If you are looking for more cooperative games that might replace Carcassonne and its tile-laying, take a look at our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Placement Games!

6. Yahtzee -> The Reckoners

So, Yahtzee is all about rolling those dice! Keep what you want, then re-roll! Keep what you want, then re-roll one final time! Sure, it’s fine, but there’s no real interaction among people as you play; you just get the best score you can! What if you could use the Yahtzee ideas to fight bad guys? And play together at the same time??? That’s exactly what The Reckoners is! A cooperative game about fighting the bad guys together, using Yahtzee-like dice! It’s even based on a fairly well-known book by Brandon Sanderson!

The dice: this is really just a Yahtzee game, but the dice are SO nice!

The dice in this game are just gorgeous! Rolling them is a real treat! Players move around a board, looking for weaknesses and fighting bad guys together! There’s even a fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order going on that makes this so cooperative! (See link here discussing fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order).

After playing with this amazing production, you can’t go back to Yahtzee again! See above! The players are all interacting, cooperating, and rolling dice together for the common purpose of taking out bad guys! Playing talk to strategize, figure out how to use their dice as a group, and generally beat-up bad guys! Take a look at our review of The Reckoners here and it’s expansion here to see if you might like this more than Yahtzee!

Another set of games which can replace Yahtzee are roll-and-write games! See our Top 10 Cooperative Roll and Write Games for another angle on Yahtzee replacements!

5. Apples to Apples -> Just One

Apples To Apples is a fun party game that had its heyday 20 years ago! One player would be the “judge” and everyone else would try to play a card to “play to the judge!” It introduced the idea of the judge player to many people, but it was still competitive! Some of my friends would get angry if the judge didn’t choose their cards! And people would get frustrated if they got crappy cards! Apples To Apples became an instant classic, but it has faded out for my groups because of the frustrating problems.

Just One took the judge idea and made it cooperative! Now players were working together to get the judge to guess the one word (word 2: Frankenstein!) Players could be creative and think of any word they want! They tried to think out-of-the-box so as not to collide with other words! Now, no one was getting mad that their word wasn’t chosen!! People would laugh when you only had one clue, and people would generally high-five when the judge guessed the word! Just One is all the great things of Apples to Apples without its baggage! Just One is a shared experience that has worked every time I have played it! This recently the #1 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Games To Play At Gaming Conventions!

4. War -> Regicide

War is the game I remember playing at sleepovers when I was a kid. You’d take a normal deck of cards and just play all night. So easy! Cut the deck in half, each player gets a half! Flip the top card; whosoever has the highest card wins both cards! A tie? You resolve with 3 more cards, then flip again! I remember so many sleepovers and just playing this all night long.

Later on, you come to realize that War is just random. If only there were a cooperative game of fighting you could play with just a deck of cards! With a little more strategy! There is! Regicide! Regicide has the vibe of War very much; you have to do enough “damage” to bad guys (not each other), take cards, and you have to worry about losing cards!

Regicide has the benefit of using any plain deck of cards, and had the vibe of War! It is, unfortunately, more complicated than plain War, but it is a good cooperative game you can play with a plain deck of cards! See here for the free rules of Regicide! Or, you can order a deck with the rules and get the cool art!

3. Spades, Hearts, or Bridge -> The Crew: Quest For Planet Nine or The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

Spades, Hearts, or Bridge are standard trick-taking games that many people grow up with! Bridge even has its own groups! My Mom had Bridge ladies over all the time for tournaments! It was serious business to play Bridge! My Mom was actually quite good, but it was hard to keep up with her! In fact, you couldn’t keep up with her! She would destroy you!! If only there was cooperative trick-taking I could play with Mom instead of Bridge!

There is! The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine, or its second version The Crew: Mission Deep Sea are cooperative trick-taking games where players of all skill levels can play together! Even though none of us are as good as my Mom at Bridge, we can all still have fun playing this together, and still get that trick-taking game vibe my Mom loved so much!

There’s actually quite a number of cooperative trick-taking games that can take the place of Spades, Hearts, or Bridge! See The Top 10 Solo and Cooperative Trick-Taking Games here! But The Crew is our favorite replacement!

2. Risk -> Spirit Island or Horizons of Spirit Island

Original version of Spirit Island from the Kickstarter: signed by R.E. Reuss!

There’s a rather infamous story in my friend circle from High School about me giving Joe a bloody nose during a game of Risk! Yes, Risk is random, Risk is mean and vicious, but it’s the standard area-control game for most people! If you don’t want to risk giving bloody noses to your friends, then maybe there’s a better area-control game than Risk?

Spirit Island is game where players work together to control areas to to kick-out invaders! Players have to strategically inhabit the lands and keep control of lands (much like area control)! Spirit Island is an incredible modern hit, making our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2017 and, as of this writing, the #11 game OF ALL TIME on the BGG list of games!

There’s even a slightly lighter version of Spirit Island called Horizons of Spirit Island! And it’s available at Target!! Spirit Island is a very complex game, and jumping straight into Spirit Island from Risk maybe a bad idea, but jumping into Horizons of Spirit Island from Risk is probably the right way to start with it! Horizons of Spirit Island is simplified enough to get you going and see if you might like it! Take a look at our review here of Horizons of Spirit Island to see if Spirit Island can replace Risk for you!

1. Chess -> Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx

Chess is a hard game to replace. People either love or hate Chess, usually because games are so imbalanced when one player is clearly much better than the other. What if there was a way to take advantage of all that Chess knowledge to solve puzzles together?

Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx is all about moving pieces around the board, getting into position, and strategically setting up the next turn! It has a very “Chess” feel as players move pieces around the board to solve a puzzle! Let’s be clear, Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx is absolutely a puzzle! The board sets up a puzzle and players have to solve it as a group or solo player!

This absolutely feels like Chess as move you characters around the board and solve the puzzles presented! Every Chess player I know thinks of board configurations like “puzzles to be solved”! Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx absolutely has that board configurations as “puzzle to be solved” vibe, but working together in a cooperative game!

See our review here to see if you think Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx might replace Chess for you! This is probably the most oblique replacement on our list, which is why it is #1! Let’s be clear; you need both Santorini and Riddle of the Sphinx expansion to play this!

Clark Kent Robs a Train? A Review of The Glasgow Train Robbery

The Glasgow Train Robbery is a 2-Player only cooperative game that was on Gamefound back in April 2026. I backed it, and it delivered to me in late June 2026. That’s right, only 3 months from crowdfunding to delivery!

This is the story of the Great Train Robbery of 1963 (see wikipedia entry here)! Yes, this game is modeling a real event! Two players work together to try to pull off that same train heist! This is an asymmetric cooperative game with limited communication for only two people!

Let’s see how well in works!

Unboxing and Gameplay

See Coke can above for scale.

This is a dual-language product: Spanish and English. See above for the two rulebooks that come in the game!

Some cards are language independent (see middle set above) and other cards are definitely tied to a language (the same card in English on the right and Spanish on the left).

I had to spend a little bit of time separating the two out. In the end, I put all the Spanish cards together with one rubber band and just put it back in the box.

The two players are playing very asymmetric roles in this game. One player plays the Glasgow side, playing the Coordinator. See above. I wish the game had included ome way to mark which side was which, so I made my own little cards!! The Coordinator is all about supplies and handling the first four stages of the Plan for the train robbery! The first four Plans are all about the set-up and execution of the robbery!

A Plan (level 1 above) is executed by spending the resources (on the left side of the card) when the train is at the location (upper right on card) with appropriate characters (upper left of card) next to it! So, you need resources, minions in the right place, and the train in the right place! Whew! Now, you can resolve a Plan card, even if you don’t have all the resources, but the penalty is listed on the bottom of the card for EACH resource you can’t pay! In this case, you add more fingerprints to the bag.

This is also a bag-building game to some extent; the bag is filled (very carefully and specifically) with resources that you may need to complete challenges. The big is filled and emptied (usually only) when players REST for an action.

The resources (see above) are all tokens you can collect by either drawing from the bag (at certain points in the game, usually a REST), visiting a hideout, or having a special card! These resources are “criminal” resources: gloves, guns, rope, etc (see above) needed for the heist! These resources are surprisingly sparse; it’s harder to get resources than you think.

The resources are usually managed by the Coordinator: the Coordinator’s side has a house with all the resources. When it’s time to put resources in the bag (during a REST action), one resource is put in for each person in the room with that resource! The Coordinator moves people around the house (and outside the house to help), so this is a delicious tension! When should the Coordinator use his precious turns to move people in the house (so we can have more rope in the bag at a REST) or when should he move people OUTSIDE the house because the other guy needs more help?

The Operator is the other side (in London). Once the people have left the house, the Coordinator no longer controls them; only the Operator may move them! The Operator’s job is to have people in the right place at the right time! The Operator is also given the unenviable position of dealing with unexpected “issues” that crop up! The game calls these issues Contingencies.

Contigencies are kinda similar to the Plan cards; they are resolved by discarding resources, but you have to have enough characters next to the landmark to resolve the contingency! See above. If you don’t take care of contingencies, they cause time to expire sooner, fingerprints to explode, and make the game end faster.

This is a limited communication game; you can occasionally discard a card to say “3 keywords” and tell the other player what you need. RED-BLUE-TOWER probably means “get a red guy and a blue guy next to the water tower so I can complete phase 1 of the Plan!”

This is very much an asymmetric game; each player has special decks (Coordinator or Operator decks), different ways to operate, and different actions! If you can get solve stages 1-5 of the Plans without leaving too many fingerprints before the Train gets to London, you win! Whew!

This is a really interesting looking game with its own “style” of art! I think it looks pretty neat.

Clark Kent is Robbing a Train?

When my friend Teresa first saw the game box, she said “Is Clark Kent robbing a train?” I had to tell her, no, he’s not, but I can see why she said that.

I think the game art is meant to mimic some known pictures of the original heist members, and if you look at the pictures from Wikipedia on The Great Train Robbery … that one guy on the right looks suspiciously like Clark Kent.

Solo Play

Let’s be 100% clear; this is ONLY a 2-Player game! There is no solo mode at all. None. No Saunders’ Law here!

And yet, solo was the first way I played!!! And I recommend you play solo the first time as well! What do I mean by this? This is applying the Changing Perspectives idea (see link here) where you “pretend” you don’t know what the other player knows, and try to play the game without using the other character’s knowledge. In this case, you alternate between the Operator and the Coordinator characters, but “pretend” you don’t know what Plans/Contingencies they have!

It is a little wonky to play the game solo like this, and it’s also hard! You can only use the information on the board and the keywords communicated to inform your decisions! It’s also very instructive to think: “Ok, if I didn’t know what the Operator’s Plan’s were, and only the keywords they’ve told me, what would I do?” This is a really interesting thought experiment. It’s also a better way to play solo than I thought it would be. It does work, but you just have to have the mental discipline to not “cheat”!

Even if you hate this idea of the Changing Perspectives, it’s a great way to learn the game: you get to play both sides, you get to see what operations are available, you see when it makes sense to communicate, and you see how the game flows. I also recommend physically switching sides when you play one position or the other: you almost have to because of the way the game sets-up! I strongly encourage this physical switching; it really throws you into the appropriate character when you are in their physical shoes!! (I don’t recommend changing shoes every time you switch sides; that’s too much).

Play the game solo once using Changing Perspectives idea, then you can decide if you ever want to play it again solo. I think I do? But, more importantly, I can now teach my friend how to play!

Cooperative Play – Two Players

Of course, the real way this is meant to be played is 2-Players! On opposite sides of each other! We can see the guys and gals we have in play and their specials, but we can’t see each other’s Plans or Contingencies.

I’ve played a few 2-Players games now (with first Teresa then Sam), and it’s clear that first game is absolutely a teaching game. The Glasgow Train Robbery has a lot of systems and rules, and seeing how all these systems interplay is complex! My first games with both Sam and Teresa were both losses. Because they are learning the game!

After we lost, we talked about “WHY” we lost! “Oh, I need to move the people out quicker so they can have more stuff” “Oh, I need to be communicating sooner”, etc. Let’s be clear; it does feel like we have enough agency to affect the endgame; we just need to know what to do with that agency!

This is an odd game with lots of systems, but it works as a 2-Player game. The Limited Communication takes a little getting used it (you can really only communicate using keywords when you take that action), but it does work. It even seems thematic to a certain degree, because it was a lot harder to communicate back in 1963! No cell phones! Fewer phones!

Those first few games take about 2.5 hours. The box says 60 minutes. This estimate seems really wrong, unless you have mastered the game.

What I Liked

Style: The art style and graphics design is “quirky”, but it works. It is very readable as well.

Quirky: Everything about this game is quirky; the art, the gameplay, the actions, the limited communication, the gameplay, the asymmetric sides, it’s all so … quirky. But it works.

Monopoly: In the original real-life heist, they literally caught some of the people by finding their fingerprints on the board! And this game models that mechanism! The more people people in a room with the Monopoly token when you REST (see above), the more fingerprints get thrown in the bag! If you ever run out off fingerprint tokens, you lose! The police caught you!

That’s right, this game penalizes you for playing Monopoly, like it should.

What I Don’t Like

Keywords: When you communicate to the other side, you can “only communicate in keywords” (see rules above). But, it literally never defines what a keyword is! The only two uses of the word “keyword” are on page 17 of the rulebook (above). They give an example of a communication, which gives you a sense of what a keyword might be! But it’s very frustrating they don’t define this! Can you use numbers? Character’s names? Can you use purple to imply red + blue? It seems like you might be able to be smart and come up with a code and get more info out! For a game where limited communication is such an important part of the game, this really needed to be more clearly defined. What you can/can’t communicate is poorly defined, and it will affect your gameplay in some way!

Action Cards and Randomness: There are some great Action cards, and there are some not-so-great Action cards. Some of these Action Cards can mean the difference between winning and losing IF THEY COME OUT EARLY in the game! So, for example, you may get lucky and can activate a character powers early on … and that makes the game viable! But it comes out too late, it sorta screws you. It can be a little frustrating to have such a swinginess to a game with so many systems. It’s frustrating when a complex game like The Glasgow Train Robbery can go south because of too much randomness.

Things I Am Not Sure About

Modules: There are 5 modules you can add to the game to change it up. That’s cool. You can extend the life of the game. I just don’t know if I will ever play any of those modules? This game is hard to get to the table as it is, with its 2-Player only, limited communication, asymmetric play! I don’t know if I can about these modules?

Conclusion

It’s hard to recommend this cooperative game; it’s quirky, complicated, asymmetric, limited communication, 2-player only, and it’s hard to teach. And yet, I do recommend it! Its quirky nature makes it something different and interesting. I would suggest playing this (at least a few times) to get a sense of it before you decide if you like it or not. You have to kind of absorb it because there’s a lot going on; I think the juice is worth the squeeze.

This is 6.5/10 for solo (I know, it doesn’t really have a solo mode, but you can play it solo using the Changing Perspectives idea), and 7.0/10 for cooperative. It’s right on the cusp of a full recommendation, but I do like it and I do recommend it. It’s just so quirky.

I am guessing this game would be great for a couple who could really dive in, try multiple plays, and enjoy the modules.

Boaromia: The Goofiest Cooperative Game You’ve Never Heard Of!

Boaromia: The Cooperative Festival Game! was a very small crowdfunding game that was on Gamefound in Dec. 2025/Jan 2026! It has only 97 backers for €7293!!

This is a game for 3-8 players (!) and it is pretty quick; 60-90 minutes feels right, but it can be quicker with fewer people.

Let’s take a look at this goofy game! Is it fun?

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty weird sized box; it’s not standard sized. See Coke can above for perspective.

Boaromia is a game for 3-8 players! Each player takes the roll of a friend going to a music festival! Each different friend has a special “gift” that helps them navigate the music festival! See above!

For example, Crazy Q (above) has the “Festival Vibe” and can push through crowds without being hindered by them!

There’s a board (2-sided) which is the festival grounds! (One side is easier than the other)

Players move around the board, going to venues to see concerts! Seeing concerts with your friends is the best way to have fun in the game!

The object of the game, and this sounds ridiculous, is to have fun! Although you have metaphysical “fun” while you play, each player has a “fun” marker (see pink cube above) which you need to get to 8! If each player has 8 fun and can end together at the same location for a final picture, you win! That’s right, to win, you all have to have fun together!!

So, when we won, we all took a photo together!! See above!

Although alternative ways to have fun come up as you play, the best way to have fun is to attend the MUST SEE bands with your friends, and avoid the MUSS MISS bands! For example, Fire Circle and Primatez are MUST SEEs and Pale Pink and Harinna are the MUST MISS bands! Now, you get +1 fun per MUST SEE bands, but if a friend is with you, you get another +1 (as does the friend!)

To see a band, you (and hopefully your friends) must all end a turn at the Concert Venue with that band! See above as all three friends get +1 “fun” for seeing a show … another +1 if it’s a MUST SEE!

There is a concert schedule showing when and where the bands all play! See above! The colors are used very well to demarcate each venue and when bands are playing!

This game is all about coordinating with your friends to try to see bands together! Sometimes you see a band just to have fun together (even if it isn’t a MUST SEE), and sometimes you have to see a MUST SE band by yourself because everyone else has their own MUST SEE bands, and sometimes you may see a MUST MISS show just to cheer up a friend who isn’t having as much fun!

This game is all about seeing shows with friends and having fun together.

You have to keep your energy up, by visiting bars and the food court! A festival can be draining, so every round, you lose energy! You gotta get beer and coffee and curry to keep moving! See the BAR above (left), where you can get beer, coffee, mix drinks, and water … and see the fry stand above (right) where you can get food!

You start the game with some money to buy drinks and food. Notice that you have a BLADDER track (see above)! All this drinking blows up your bladder … if you are ever have a full bladder, you can do nothing else on your turn but find the restrooms! Just like a real festival, this game is all about seeing shows, keeping your energy up, but also keeping your bladder under control!

You can get money by going to the ATM, but you can also share money if you are on the same space with your friends! “Dude, low on energy? Let me buy you a curry!!” This is a cooperative game, so of course you are going to keep your friends spirits up!

Like any cooperative game, this is bad news of some sort. In this game, the EVENTS unveal every round (the first part of the festitval is in the day, the second part at night). The EVENTS move the “talky” guy and the crowds around! The crowds and the “talky” guy are the things working against you!!

The “talky” guy hangs out at the bars across the festival and moves around in the game. If you ever enter a bar where the “talky” guy is, you have to immediately end your turn! “Hey Rich! Come here! I gotta tell you something!” The “talky” guy is nice, but he can mess up your movement plans if you don’t stay away from him!

The other part of the bad news EVENT cards are the crowds: see above as the DUROC venue is full of people! Crowds don’t STOP your movement, but they impede it; it takes 2 movement points to get through a crowded space! (Everyone has 6 movement points per turn, modulo special abilities like Crazy Q who isn’t affected by crowds!)

There are some side goals that come up as you play which can help you. For example, if two of you end up near the swings, you can immediately satisfy the “Blurred Lines” Goal and one of you gets a fun! Presumably, one player pushes the other player on the swing … these goals are “secondary” ways to get fun!

At the end of the festival, if everyone has 8 fun and you all end up on the same square for a group picture … you win! If not, well, it was fun to see those bands anyways!

The components aren’t great, but they work and are readable. There is one major issue we will discuss below!

Overall, the components work.

Rulebook

I liked this rulebook. First of all, it wasn’t on shiny paper! It was on ordinary paper! See above! I think I’ve come to prefer rulebooks on non-shiny paper! It makes it SO MUCH easier to read in the light! There’s no reflection! Those of you paying attention might remembers The Plum Island Horror from a while ago (see review here); it also had the non-shiny paper! I find myself wishing more companies would use non-shiny paper!

This game is an A on the Chair Test! It fits very well on the chair next to me, it has a very readable font, I can see and consult the rulebook on the chair next to me, and the rulebook is filled with lots of good pictures!

The Components page and set-up were fine! They showed the map and where to put things!

I think there were a few minor rule questions as we played, but overall this was a good rulebook! Lots of examples, well-laid out rulebook, lots of pictures; they did a good job. Did it need an Index? I don’t think so? It’s a pretty simple game.

Solo Game?

So, there is no solo mode! See above as the player count is 3-8 ! Boo for not following Saunders’ Law! … until I tried it solo!!

So, I said, “I’ll just try a 3-handed solo game!” See above for set-up! This should work, right?

Nope! I got slaughtered! This game is all about planning how each character separately moves about the map! Each character MUST SEE some shows, and tries to hook up with their friends for other shows! Sometimes there are Goals which are useful, but this game is all about the coordination and trying to get to events! Every game I have played has characters barely making events at the last minute! And that’s the fun! Trying to hook up with your friends.

As a solo gamer, it’s too much work trying to run 3 characters at the same time. “Wait, he has to be here, she has to be here, wait, he needs energy, he needs to pee… ARGHGH!” I totally understand why there’s no solo mode. Having said that, I think I would recommend trying a solo game three-handed just to see how the game works! For the purposes of having “fun”, a three-handed solo game isn’t fun, but it’s very instructive.

Play solo (three characters) once to learn the game, then never play solo again.

Cooperative Play

This game is totally made for cooperative play! There is so much to keep track of for just one character, so you pretty much have to play just one character! You have to make sure your character achieves their goals … but in order to get fun (and win), you absolutely have to work with everyone!! Part of the fun of this game is calling out to the game board:
“HEY! I MUST SEE the Primatez!! Who wants to come with me?” And you’ll hear,
“I’d love to, but I have to pee first! I’ll see you at the stage!”
“Not me! I HATE the Primatez!!! I’ll get some curry and meet you later!”

The game is goofy! You are all trying to coordinate your actions to see as many shows as you can! You have to manage your money, your bladder, and your fun as you run around the board.

This game is so cooperative! You have to work with your friends to see shows, because the best way to get fun in the game is to see shows together, with your friends!!!! It’s actually a lot of work to have fun at the show!

The theme of the game is so goofy, that if you lean into it, you can have so much fun! We would high-five as we saw a MUST SEE show together! We’d share money so our buddy could get a curry and keep his strength up! We’ve go swing on the swings together between shows!

I have played a 3-player and 5-player game of this, and both worked so well! Everyone was laughing and having a good time!

What I Liked

So Interactive! As we played, there was so much interaction! Sometimes you’d hang with one set of friends, sometimes you’d hang with a different set of friends … and see shows together! The game was all about seeing shows with your friends, even as little groups come and go as you see your MUST SEE bands!

Goofy! I loved how goofy this game was! The band names are goofy, the character names are goofy! It makes it easy to lean into this theme and just have goofy fun! I don’t mean goofy to be bad in any way! I loved the goofy nature of this game!

Band Names: In case you haven’t figured it out, all the band names in this game as “peterbations” of real names! Some of the fun was trying to figure out who the “real” band was! Lukewarm Vanilla Snippets? We are pretty sure they are the Red-Hot Chile Peppers!!

What I Didn’t Like

Pawns and Character Colors: The worst part of this game was the mapping of the character colors to the pawn colors! Look above at all the characters! The washed-out colors all kind of blend into each other, and some character colors are almost indistinguishable! The pawns to character mappings are also very unclear, to the point where it sometimes interfered with gameplay! “Wait, why are you moving my pawn?” “Oh sorry, I thought that was my color!”

Considering how WELL they used colors to distinguish the venues, the colors for the characters pawns and character mats seemed surprisingly poorly chosen. I think they were trying to use primary colors for the venues and “off” colors for the characters to distinguish them? I applaud the effort, but it just didn’t work.

A Worry About Replayability: The game uses the same schedule and the same band names for every game. I’ve played the game at least 3 times now, and the game is still a hoot! I worry it will become “samey” after a few more games; I wish there had been another schedule with different band names.

I think this game needs a Heavy Metal expansion, with names like “Poorly Whiteless’ Prismatic Spray” (for “Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow”) and a different schedule! I kind of wish that more schedules with different theres: a “Pop” and a “Heavy Metal” and a “Alternative” festival should have all been included. But I get it; I think this is literally the smallest Kickstarter I have ever funded. It only had 97 people, so they could only do so much with limited funds.

Conclusion

Boaromia: The Cooperative Festival Game is definitely a hidden gem of a game! If you have a group of friends who can lean into the music festival theme and enjoy the dynamic little groups that form from show to show, I think this will be a great hit! If you are looking for a deeply serious and strategic game with cooperative elements, Boaromia: The Cooperative Festival Game probably isn’t for you. This game is best enjoyed by being goofy with your friends!

From this description, I think you will know if you and your friends will like Boaromia! I am surprised how much me and my groups of friends liked this! I was going to give this a 7/10, but I can still see the smiles on ALL of my friends faces as we played this … it has to be at least an 8/10!!

There are few issues to consider; the game might be come a bit “samey” as the bands and schedule don’t change, and the color choices for the pawns and characters mats actually detract from the game. I would love to see a bigger better edition with better colors, multiple themes/bands, with multiple schedules to give the game some variety! But as it stands, I really enjoyed this game!

I think this game would would work fabulously in a convention environment! The raucous energy of this game matches the raucous energy you get at a board game convention! I expect this to be on my Top 10 Cooperative Games To Play at a Convention next week! (Spoilers!)

Cooperative Scrabble? A Solo and Cooperative Review of Word Weaver Adventures

Word Weaver Adventures is a cooperative word and (sorta) boss-battler game from Gamefound back in June 2024. It arrived at my house sometime April 2026. There were delays along the way from tariffs and other issues, but it delivered!

I have to admit, I almost didn’t back this! This wasn’t a well-known company or anything like that, just a bunch of passionate new gamers. They promised a cooperative word game (maybe like a cooperative Scrabble?) .. and the art and the enthusiasm for the project amped me up enough to back the project! It ended up being a smallish Gamefound project at about $13,000 with only 152 backers.

In the end, when the game finally arrived, I enjoyed the personal letter they sent. See above.

Will this be a hidden gem? Let’s check it out!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Word Weaver Adventures is a smallish box; see Coke can above for perspective.

The rulebook is, unfortunately, a folded pamphlet. Sigh. See above.

If Ace of Spades (from a few weeks ago) uses poker hands to take out bad guys cooperatively, then Word Weaver Adventures uses words (with point values like Scrabble) to take out bad guys cooperatively! There’s actually a surprising amount of overlap in the ideas!

Each player takes the role of one of four characters: see the choices above.

Each character has a special ability, powered by letters and gems. See above as Fulminate : The Exploder can double the value of a letter!

Each use of your power consumes a gem and 2 letters (see above). You only start with 3 gems, which means you only get to use your special ability 3 times during the game! And that use also costs precious letters!

At the start of each turn, each player draws up to 7 letters, and uses them to try to spell things! It has kind of a Scrabble vibe, eh?

The letters are really nice wooden letters, ala Scrabble. They are in a very nice bag holding them … see above!

The words you spell do “damage” to bad guys! How much damage? It depends on how much the letters of the words are worth! JARS above (with no modifiers) would be worth 8+1+1+1 = 11 points of damage!

This is a boss-battler game! Sort of! To win, you have to take down one of the big bosses (see above) by doing enough damage! I keep saying this is a boss-battler, but these “bosses” are just challenging you to spell! My first pass through the game, I thought these were bosses you “defeated”! No no no!! The theme is that they are teachers quizzing you, and you have to get enough points to move on to the next teacher! The “damage” you do is just points towards overcoming a “test” or “quiz!”

Along the way, you must pass smaller quizzes from Assistant Teachers! See The Termite Colonizers above! He’s an Assistant Teacher who gives you little quizzes! They are just a minor quizzes on the way to the big test at the end! (The bad guys are all grouped; we are spelling for the yellow diamond bad guys! See the little yellow diamond in the upper right corner)

The (left) bottom of the card describes how many points they have, plus (right bottom) how much “damage” they do to the characters if the survive to the next round! Damage to characters is done “cracking” a letter spot so that character(s) get fewer letters next turn!

If the players can survive the big boss (called Head Teacher) test and take out little spelling quizzes along the way (with Assistant Teachers), players win! Basically, if all slots are cracked (meaning players can’t draw any letters), players lose!

Overall, these components are just fantastic!

Rulebook

Yes, the rulebook is a pamphlet. Sigh. I really detest this form factor for rulebooks.

It DOES fit on the chair next to me without drooping, but the text is a little hard to read. They did a good job of not wasting space (there’s almost no wasted space: see above), and there is no droopage, but it’s still a pamphlet that’s kind of hard to read: this gets a C on the Chair Test?

The rules were ok, but a little unclear on a few things. I didn’t realize until I looked at the Variations, that you can generally only spell one word per turn with your tiles! If you play the Early Spellers Variation (above), you can spell multiple words! Whoops! I wish that had been clearer!

I mean, I got the game played from this rulebook. . I would have been so much happier if this had been a little rulebook. But I get it; there were only 152 backers for this campaign. They did such a great job with the cards and characters and the art therein, I guess someplace had to suffer a little. I’d rather have the great art and cards (which you look at all the time) and an ok rulebook (which you only ever look at once or twice). So, I get it. The rulebook mostly taught the game; It was fine.

Solo Play

Strictly speaking, this game DOES NOT support the solo player! Only 2-4! So sad, no support for Saunders’ Law.

It is SO EASY to support solo play! Just play the 2-Player mode (play as two characters) and alternate between them as-if the game were 2-Player! This is perfect example of 2-handed solo working just fine! I found that this solo mode worked! I am a little surprised they didn’t include this simple solo mode.

This is how I learned the game; playing 2-handed solo mode! In the end, I had a fine time playing.

Cooperative Mode

We played a few cooperative games. We liked it enough, after the first game, that we wanted to play again! In fact, we probably should have upped the difficulty in the second game! We crushed it!

From a mechanism point of view, there isn’t really that much cooperation. Every turn, you can maybe swap one letter each, and each player can only swap once! (Which means in a 3-player game, there is a limit of one swap total per turn). Basically every turn is mostly multiplayer solitaire (see Teresa above looking at her letter) as each player tries to get the best word they can with their letters! So, there’s not that much cooperation, at least at the spelling word level.

Interestingly, even if the “spelling” part of the game had pretty minimal communication and/or sharing, some of the higher-level strategies emerged as we chatted. “You know, if I spell a lesser word, I can use my shield to protect us all from cracking!” “Oh ya! Do we have good letters? I can double the best letter? Is this a good idea now?” As the monkey, I was good at shielding …

The special powers and special cards (treasures) actually became very important part of the strategy of this game. The discussions that revolve around when to use these cards was the main cooperation that emerged.

To be clear, there are NO communication limitations (thank goodness) in this game! Players can talk as much as they want! And even the rules aren’t 100% clear, I am pretty sure you are allowed to show all your tiles to all other players! That encourages the cooperation and helping! You can kinda tell when someone is having trouble with their letters, and you can look across the table and offer suggestions! I did that a few times … and I was offered suggestions a few times as well. It works; each player still make all the decisions with their own letters, but minor help occasionally from your friends does help.

The game is mostly multiplayer solitaire, as players spell their words fairly independently. There’s a minor mechanism for sharing letters, but much of the conversation that flows in the game is high-level strategizing about how to use special powers and treasures. Despite the multiplayer solitaire nature of the spelling part of the game, the rest of the game is fairly interactive and cooperative!

What I Liked

The Art: The art in this game is generally fantastic! I love the vibe that this art exudes! No adjustment needed on the art at all! This art is AWESOME!

Cooperative Scrabble: I like that I can generally describe this as a cooperative Scrabble game! Most people know what Scrabble means, but they wonder how it comes together as a cooperative game! It’s tempting to hear, “Oh, you can play Scrabble cooperatively?”

Easy To Pull Out. In general, this game is easy to pull out and teach.

What I Didn’t Like

No Solo Mode? It’s really weird that there’s no solo mode. Play 2-handed solo; it works fine.

Scaling: The game scales weirdly. It’s supposed to be Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty, but honestly, the game is so much easier with more people! If you have 4 people, you can do so much more “damage” per turn! I was struggling in a 2-Player game at the “easy” level, and I realized I would be destroying the game with 3 or 4 characters playing! So, it sorta feels like the difficulty should be a function of the number of players? It’s not!!! I think that the difficulty level should probably be the number of characters in play: Use easy for 2 characters, medium for 3 characters, and hard for 4 characters. (Note that I say characters because a solo game would be 2 characters!) I guess you can choose to make the game easier or harder by upping or lowering the difficulty.

It felt like a mistake the game had no notion for scaling for the number of characters in play. This is probably the biggest flaw in the game; there needs to be an orthogonal scaling factor for the number of players and the difficulty; they conflated them and I think that’s a mistake (and confusing).

Pamphlet For Rulebook. Yes, I’ve complained about this a lot; I’ll shut up now. I’d much rather have the amazing art and a pamphlet than mediocre art and a real rulebook. I’ll shut-up about this. The pamphlet worked. This is a personal issue.

What’s a Word? There is no discussion really of “what’s a legal word I can use?”. I think they are relying on the Scrabble back-knowledge of most people, assuming people will use standard Scrabble rules for “what’s a legal word”. But there wasn’t really a discussion.

Conclusion

Word Weaver Adventures is a hidden gem of a game! Most people know what Scrabble is, so it should be easy to pull this out and teach this to most people. As long as you know about the scaling issues (and know how to correctly use the difficulty based on the number of players), this game is great! 8/10.

You can play solo; have the solo player operate two characters and alternate between them. It’s surprising this solo mode isn’t in the rules.

I am so glad I have a simple and gorgeous cooperative Scrabble game I can pull out and show anyone.

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

Unboxing and Discussion

I Forgot!

New Heroes!

Solo

Cooperative

Mixing This Up

Conclusion

Appendix: The Season 2 Cards that ARE NOT MARKED

Unboxing and Gameplay

Playthrough

Hints

Puzzles

Reset?

Adult?

Conclusion

10. Elder Sign

9. Cthulhu Rift

8. Roll For Great Old Ones

7. Eldritch Horror

6. Mansions of Madness: 2nd Edition

5. Arkham Horror: The Card Game

4. Horror on the Orient Express

3. Death May Die

2. Mythos Tales

1. Arkham Horror: 2nd Edition

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Play

Cooperative Mode

Sleevening

House Rule for Schemes To Reduce Randomness

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

Hero Appendix

Unboxing 20 Strong

Unboxing 20 Strong:Nemesis and Gameplay

Cooperative vs. Semi-Cooperative

Semi-Co-op for the Win!

You Can Still Play Cooperatively

Rulebooks and Rules

Solo

Reactions

Conclusion

Unboxing

Acrylic Standees

Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Game

Cooperative Mode

Thematic

Randomness

Reactions

Conclusion

10. Monopoly -> CO-OP: The Co-op Game

9. Poker -> Ace of Spades

8. Scrabble -> Word Weaver Adventures

7. Carcassonne -> Mists Over Carcassonne

6. Yahtzee -> The Reckoners

5. Apples to Apples -> Just One

4. War -> Regicide

3. Spades, Hearts, or Bridge -> The Crew: Quest For Planet Nine or The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

2. Risk -> Spirit Island or Horizons of Spirit Island

1. Chess -> Santorini: Riddle of the Sphinx

Unboxing and Gameplay

Clark Kent is Robbing a Train?

Solo Play

Cooperative Play – Two Players

What I Liked

What I Don’t Like

Things I Am Not Sure About

Conclusion

Unboxing and Gameplay

Rulebook

Solo Game?

Cooperative Play

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion