Tag: reviews

Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2025!

What makes a good solo game? I find them many times when I start playing solo games to learn games cooperatively for my friends. If a game starts to enchant me and I can’t stop playing it solo … there’s something to it! Most of the games on this list were games I played solo to teach my friends … but then I kept playing! Some of these games will end up on either my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025, but some of them may end up on my Top Cooperative Expansions of 2025, but one things for sure … they are all great solo!

My tastes are a little funny; see if you agree or disagree.

For more great solo games, see last year’s list: Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

Honorable Mention. Broken Sword: Shadows of the Templar (Reforged)

This is a solo game I played quit a bit in 2025, but it can’t “officially” make this list for a number of reasons.  For one, it’s a video game!  Broken Sword: Shadows of the Templar is a point-and-click solo adventure video game … (See our discussion of point-and-click adventure games here in Top 10 Point-And-Click Adventure Board Games here)! This game is sometimes what I want when I want to play solo: it’s an all-consuming adventure game with story and exploration! 

My physical copy arrived about November 2025, so I can still count it as 2025 (even though my digital copy arrived in 2024, so that’s another reason).   I know, it doesn’t really belong on this list, but these point-and-click adventure video games totally scratch my solo game itch sometimes!  And I spent a fair amount of time playing it solo in 2025!

10. Wroth

What a strange journey Wroth was!  This is a solo, competitive, and cooperative area control/area majority game, which is a real interesting mix of game modes!   Unfortunately, the solo play is hard to get to because you have to learn the base competitive game BEFORE you can play the solo/cooperative mode!

Along the way, I discovered I actually liked the competitive game but disliked the cooperative game!   And somewhat paradoxically (because the solo game is the cooperative game), the solo game ended up being a really fun puzzle!  After almost selling the game (because I disliked the cooperative mode so much), it was the solo mode that prompted me to keep this game.

Wroth also has one of my favorite covers of the year!   Check out our journey with Wroth to see if this is a solo game you might like! 

9. Earthborne Rangers: Legacy of the Ancestors

This is an odd entry for a few reasons!  Firstly, this was the expansion for the original Earthborne Rangers that was part of the first, original Kickstarter!  Even though I ordered this expansion many moons ago (from the first Kickstarter: see our review here), this expansion didn’t arrive until 2025 (and even BGG says it’s a 2025 release date)!

This probably should go in my Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2025, instead of here in my solo list … but the thing is, I only ever played it solo!  Even though you can play 1-4 players with Earthborne Rangers, I think one or two players is the best count for Earthborne Rangers! In this case, one player was best! 

In some ways, the abundance of storybook games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025) just reminded me what a great exploration and storybook game this is!  I got to relive the fun of exploring in this system  in this exploration and story-filled game! I got the explore … The Arcology!

8. Storyfold: Wildwoods

Storyfold: Wildwoods is both a perfect entry and an odd entry to this list.  Why is that?

In name, this is a solo game only!  It’s about a little girl and her animal companion roaming and exploring a dark and depressing forest.  There is a little bit of worker placement, a little bit of dice, and little bit of story, and a lot of dark experience!  It’s a solo game!

I ended up playing this solo game as a two-player game, as team solo!  In other words, me an my friend Teresa operated the solo game as a team, with both of us working the solo position!  We would operate the single position, but discuss tactics and strategy together.  I argue that this is still a solo game, but you can just choose to be on team solo together!  See our review of Storyfold: Wildwoods to see if you agree!

7. Santorini + Riddle of the Sphinx

Riddle of the Sphinx is an expansion that makes the  Santorini base game solo and cooperative.  

Of all the games on our list this year, this is the most thinky puzzle-like game; you have to figure out how to build and acquire resources in an environment of scarcity.  The gods offer special bonuses and resources as you burn through them.  

This game stayed on my solo table until I had to go to Dice Tower West! Although I enjoyed the cooperative game as well, I think this really engaged my solo gamer brain, and I loved moving the characters around to try to solve the building puzzle in an optimal way!  Take a look at our review of Riddle of the Sphinx to see if this is something you might enjoy!

6. Unstoppable

Unstoppable is nominally a solo game or 2-player cooperative game … but almost all my plays were solo!  Honestly, it feels more like a solo game than a 2-Player game anyways?  Honestly, that co-operative mode does feel a little pasted on; I mean, you can’t even share money…

 This is a deck-building game with some card-crafting going on!  Cards slip into sleeves and upgrade your cards, all while you are still trying to build a deck!  

There’s some really interesting mechanisms going on in here, as the things you battle flip and give you good stuff!  Overall, I got to play through all the scenarios in the base box and really enjoyed this deck-builder.   One question you may want to ask yourself: would you prefer Unstoppable or Astro Knights (both deck-building games)?  See our review for more discussion!

5. War Story

This was such a unique adventure to play through solo.  This is all about being part of the French Resistance in World War II, and it’s pretty brutal.  You shoot Nazis, see most of your team die, and try to survive a wartime environment.

Even crazier, all of this happens in a Choose Your Own Adventure book situation!  This is a game where your choices really do matter; everything you do affects the final outcome and how well your team does!  Do you show mercy on the Nazi your captured?  How do you silence the little boy so he doesn’t alert the authorities?  Everything you do matters!

The game comes with 3 adventure books, as a full adventure unwinds over three big sessions (and each session affects the others)!  After playing all the way through solo, I was emotionally exhausted but strangely fulfilled!  Take a look at our review of War Story: Occupied France to see if this unique experience is up your alley!

(This is a game that has a 2024 release date on BGG, but try as hard as we could, we couldn’t get it until 2025, so we count it as 2025)

4. Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game

I ended up enjoying the solo mode for this much more than I expected!  For a cooperative trick-taking game that has a lot of similarities to The Crew, its one big difference is that it has a solo mode!  And it’s very very good!   If you love Lord of the Rings, this is an easy recommendation.  Even if you only “like” Lord of the Rings, it’s still a great solo game!

Over the course of several weeks, I ended up playing solo through all 18 chapters!  Each chapter has a nominal play-time of 20 minutes … but if you fail a chapter, you have to keep playing it until you win!

The production on this game is amazing, the solo game is amazing, it’s quite thematic, and the 18-Chapter campaign was so much fun!  It’s easy to get this to the table … as even though I was a little sick, it was engaging enough to forget I was sick for a week.   I made it through all 18 chapters solo, and it was a blast.

See here for our review of Lord Of The Rings, The Fellowship of the Rings: The Trick-Taking Game to see if this something that might appeal to your inner solo gamer!

(This is a game that has a 2024 release date on BGG, but try as hard as we could, we couldn’t get it until 2025, so we count it as 2025)

3.  DC Super Heroes United: Batman Hush

DC Super Heroes United: Batman Hush is a great game for both cooperative and solo.  In the end, though, I probably played it a lot more solo than I did cooperatively!  In fact, I couldn’t stop playing it solo!

I ended playing just about every combination of heroes and villains from this base box, as a solo game!  Now, you have to understand that I strongly prefer playing Marvel and DC United solo as 2-Player multi-handed, where I operate two characters and alternate between them as if it were a 2-Player cooperative game.   I find the “official” solo mode of the United games just too contorted.

It was such a blast to play DC heroes like Batman and Robin together solo!  See above.

I couldn’t stop playing this solo!  I kept trying more and more!  I even started pulling out some Marvel United and combining DC United and Marvel United together!  See above at Batman hangs out in Stark Labs! I got such a giggle imagining Bruce Wayne critiquing Tony Stark’s tech!

See our review of DC Super Heroes: Batman Hush to see if this is something you might like as a solo player.    This probably would have been out #1 solo game of 2025, but the next two games offered such unique solo experiences, they had to be just above it!

2. Arydia

It was very hard to choose between #1 and #2 on this list; either of them could have been #1!  I also feel bad not putting Arydia  in our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025!  In the end though, I only played this solo, but I had a heck of a great time!

Arydia is a huge adventuring/dungeon crawler game with tons of content: maps and cards!  See above!  And the components are just fantastic!

This game, with its unique map(s) system(s) and combat stayed on my table for a straight week as I couldn’t stop playing playing!  I wanted to see what would come next in this world!

This is an adventure-laden dungeon crawl that reminded me a lot of the old computer game  Ultima IV: it had combat, little maps, big maps, and a big adventure!   I had such a wonderful time playing this solo!  Check out our solo review of Arydia to see if this is something you might like!

1. Star Trek: Captain’s Chair

At the end of the day, I slightly prefer space over fantasy, so I think that’s why Star Trek: The Captain’s Chair ended being the #1 solo game of 2025 for me!

This is such a neat deck-building game, but calling it JUST a deck-building game seems to be an insult!  There’s so much to this game that it actually almost took me the whole year to absorb it, get it to the table, and play it!  Make no mistake, this is a big and complicated game with lots of rules!  The rulebook is very very good, but I joke that it feels like a legal document!

One major feature of the game is that there are two solo modes: the Cadet Training Mode (see rules above) aka easy mode, and the normal solo game aka hard mode!    The easy mode gives you a chance to learn the systems of the game in a simplified scenario! 

The Cadet Training Mode also a great way to learn a new Captain’s Deck!  Another great feature of this game is that every Captain in the game (see above) has a unique play style that is encapsulated in a different Captain’s deck!  Sisko is different than Picard who is different from Koloth!  See the six different Captains above!

In the end, it’s the normal solo mode (which has its own rulebook!) that makes this game a wonderful challenge.  An AI runs another captain playing against you; see above as I play Picard facing off against AI Koloth!  This solo mode is challenging and interesting and has a ton of variety as each Captain is so different!

This is a large, sprawling, solo game with ships warping to planets, planets being taken over, landing parties landing, crew members beaming to ships, crew members on duty, drafting new people, cargo, allies, and ships on your way to being the better Captain!

It’s hard to recommend this game for many reasons: the base game is actually competitive (the solo modes are add-ons), the game is pretty complicated with a legalese rulebook, and apparently it’s sold out everywhere as I write this!  Despite all that, I had a heck of a time playing Star Trek: Captain’s Chair as a solo player! It was such a unique experience that it had to be my #1 solo game of 2025.  See our review here to see if this might be something you enjoy!

Top 10 Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2025!

Welcome to the end of 2025! This is our top 10 games that were from 2025*! The best of the best!

This was a slightly weird year for cooperative games, if only because it’s not 100% clear when some of our favorite games came out! Some of the games on our list were “officially” released in 2024, but as a real playing customer, we couldn’t get them until 2025. This is also a reminder that we here at CO-OP Gestalt pay for every single game we get as a real consumer! We receive absolutely no consideration of any kind from Publishers for free review copies of games or expedited delivery or anything like that! We just play cooperative games because we love them so much that we want to share them!

Some games you might think would be on this list might have made our Top 10 Solo Card and Board Games of 2025 or our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2025!

There’s some great cooperative games that came out this year, let’s take a look!

Honorable Mention: Tales From The Red Dragon Inn

Plays Solo:  Yes (two-handed or with a special companion)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 13+
Length: 90-120 minutes

So, this is an example of game that we picked up on the second Kickstarter; it really did officially come out in 2023, but the second Kickstarter delivered to us in 2025.  So, we are counting this unofficially as a Honorable Mention for 2025 … because it’s so good!  

This is dungeon crawler game that is fun and quirky, but it has a well thought out combat system!  

Despite it having a Variable Turn Order system (we have so many opinions on Variable Turn Order), this game is a fun dungeon crawler.  We joked that this should be called Lighthaven!  It’s like Gloomhaven in many ways, but so much more light-hearted!  Take a look at our review to see if this is a game you might like!

10. The Dark Quarter

Plays Solo:  Yes (operate two characters)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 18+
Length: 120+ minutes

This is more of a story than a game; I was originally hoping for more of a detective game set in voodoo-laden New Orleans, but this is more of an adult crime novel set in a voodoo-esque New Orleans. 

This is a game with lots of plot points that unfurl like an adult crime thriller on HBO or Netflix or Apple TV.  As you going through the game, you are enjoying the story as it happens, and you get to make some choices along the way.  Rather than watching an HBO crime drama, you are part of it!

An App runs this; this is one of four Storybook games in our Top 10 this year!  This is less interactive and more about coming along for the story!  The Dark Quarter  also very very 18+ with adult language and adult content.  If you want to immerse yourself in a crime story in New Orleans, there is nothing else like it! Just be aware that it’s very story-driven, but maybe not too much game. Take a look at our review to see if you might like it.  My friends and I enjoyed the experience, but others didn’t, which is why this is only #10.

9. Wandering Galaxy

Plays Solo:  Yes (very special mode: true solo, but has two sidekicks)
Player Count: 1 to 6
Ages: 14+
Length: 60+ minutes

This is the third in the series of storybook app games from Plaid Hat: the first two being Forgotten Waters (which made #8 on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2020) and Freelancers (which made the #4 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022).  These are all silly games where players go through an adventure together!

This particular silly adventure is set in space!! An app (website) controls your progress through the story, as it offers voice-acting as it reads little vignettes aloud!  This is a space-based game where players roam the galaxy in search of adventure, using some worker placement and deck-building along the way.

This is a very cooperative game, as players must operate many positions of a star ship together (like the crew of the Star Trek Enterprise with helm, weapons, … etc!)   This is one of four Storybook games that made our Top 10 list this year!  This one concentrates on the humor and the voice-acting of the app to tell the story!  See our review to see if Wandering Galaxies is a game you might like!

(This was also a game where we got the physical copy very very late in December 2024, but the app didn’t “really” work until 2025, so we count this as a 2025 game)

8. Vantage

Plays Solo:  Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 6
Ages: 14+
Length: 120-180 minutes

Vantage is one of the four storybook games on our Top 10 this year!  It’s a very divisive game, which is why it’s lower on the list! Some people love it and some people hate it!! Why?  Vantage weaves in and out of different definitions: Is it a storybook game? Is it an exploration game? Is it an adventure game? Is it a campaign game?  Take a look at our review of Vantage here (What Vantage Is and Isn’t) to see if this is something you might like.

At the end of the day, me and my friends had fun exploring this game world with it’s beautiful art and very different worlds.   The solo experience is good, but I believe this is a better shared experience as a fully cooperative game, as players read to each other and explore with each other.  This is a gorgeous and well-produced game that you may love too!

7. One-Hit Heroes

Plays Solo:  Officially no (see the cover), but there are two solo modes in rulebook
Player Count: 2 to 4
Ages: 10+
Length: 20 minutes

This game made our list this year because it felt like I could bring it out to both gamers and non-gamers, and both sets seemed to enjoy it!   This is a simpler game that only last 20 minutes (but you can keep playing if you like the little campaign); it’s all about battling some bad guys together!  It’s major premise is that if you take one hit, you die (much like real life)!  So, you have to work together to keep out to harms way!

I was able to play the game with my nieces, and they had fun!  They aren’t really gamers, but they were good sports who enjoyed the experience!

This is a light, bright, fun and somewhat innovative cooperative game.   I am glad to have some lighter, simpler games to teach my gamer and non-gamer friends and family.  See our full review here of One-Hit Heroes to see if you might like it!

6. Secrets of Zorro

Plays Solo:  Yes (true solo)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 10+
Length: 45-60 minutes

The Secrets of Zorro is the surprise hit of the year for my groups!   We played it over several weeks of game nights because it was such a fun and thematic cooperative worker placement game!

The cooperative worker placement works so well in this game as you move to places for upgrades, visit the local tavern to get rumours and tactical info, visit the blacksmith for stuff, visit your home for “stuff our Dadleft us”, and just try to get ready for the craziness of the night mode!

This is a game that embraces Player Selected Turn Order (one of my favorite mechanisms)!  It is a thematic and interactive romp through the mythos of Zorro!  Check out our review of the Secrets of Zorro to see if this is a game you might like (we also suggest you have House Rule that makes the game more fun and more thematic and more cooperative).  This is a Hidden Gem!

5. The Lord of The Rings, Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game

Plays Solo:  Yes (very different solo mode)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 10+
Length: 20 minutes (per episode)

As we head into the top 5 games, realize that any of these could have been our #1 game!

This little cooperative trick-taking game took all my gaming groups by storm!  My friends in Las Cruces played though the whole campaign!  Me and my friends played it over and over and over at Dice Tower West!  My friends in Tucson loved it!  Everybody who played this loved it!

Everyone seems to agree that this is a very thematic game, with characters from The Fellowship of the Rings having specific thematic goals to meet as you play.  The game unfolds over many episodes, and each episode is a piece of the story of The Fellowship of the Rings!  I was told by my friends (who love Lord of the Rings) how thematic the story and episodes were!

This made the #2 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Trick-Taking Games, and it is a fantastic game!  It is very easy to get into and everyone I played this with seemed to love it!  Check out our review here to see if this is a game you might like!  

(This is also a game that BGG lists as 2024, as I think it was released in Germany first; but I tried like crazy to get a copy and could only get one delivered to me in 2025 in the USA!)

4. Tales of the Arthurian Knights 

Plays Solo:  Yes (very different solo mode)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 12+
Length: 45 minutes per player

This is the fourth and final storybook game on this list.  This was far and away my friends’ favorite game of the year!  They liked it so much they went out and bought their own copy almost immediately!  

This is a game all about exploring the world of Camelot (and yes, it can be a silly place with lots of Monty Python references) while reading flowery text from the Book of Tales!  See above!  Of all the Storybooks on this list, this is the more prosy!  This would easily make our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook Games!

It’s hard to believe that this is actually a competitive game FIRST, and that the cooperative and solo modes are actually add-on modes!  Regardless, the only way me and my friends play this Storybook game is solo and cooperatively!  And it works so well!  My friend Teresa actually borrowed my copy to play at her Mom’s birthday party and they adored it!  Take a look at our review of Tales of Arthurian Knights to see if this is something you might like.

(This is also one of those games that BGG lists as 2024 but we tried like crazy to get a copy, and we could only get one delivered in 2025, so we call this a 2025 game!)

3. Invincible: The Card Game

Plays Solo:  Yes (true solo and two-handed solo)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 14+
Length: 60 minutes (well, it’s 2x that)

Invincible: The Card Game (not the confused with other Invincible games) is a re-implementation of Astro Knights (the cooperative Deck-Building game: see here and here).  Does this re-theming and re-implementation work?  Absolutely!

Cooperatively, everyone gets to take the role of a Superhero in this very thematic deck–building game!  This is also the best iteration of the Astro Knights system, partly because it add the Assist keyword which really brought out extra cooperation as we played!! 

See our review of Invincible: The Card Game to see if this is something you might like!  Oh yes!  And you can even mix this with Astro Knights if you wish! 

2. Ham Helsing

Plays Solo:  Yes (true solo and two-handed solo)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 10+
Length: 60-90 minutes 

I really did not expect Ham Helsing to be so high on my list, but this game was so much fun!  Ham Helsing is a comic-book universe (of which I knew nothing about until I played this game)!  The art and cards in this game follow the style of the original artist Rich Moyer, and I gotta say, it works!  This is basically a cooperative boss-battler game where each player takes the role of a character from Ham Helsing!

This is a card-crafting game where you can upgrade your cards by adding clear plastic to them!  See above!  This is definitely a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick that works!  It’s fun to upgrade and choose your little cards and slide them into the sleeves!

Between the clear cards, the cute art, and the acrylic standees, this game’s production is gorgeous!  There is also a sense of humor that underlies all of this, giving it an air of extra fun!  Take a look at our review of Ham Helsing to see if this is a game you might like!  We loved it!

1. DC Super Heroes United: Hush

Plays Solo:  Yes (so many ways, but just play two-handed)
Player Count: 1 to 4 (5, depending on the mode)
Ages: 14+
Length: 30 minutes (well, usually longer)

As I wait for my kickstarter of the original DC Super Heroes United (which was #1 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2025) to deliver (which looks like it won’t deliver until 2026), CMON gave us an early sneak peek of the system with DC Super Heroes United: Batman Rush.   Surprisingly, I had never read Batman: Hush (a well regarded Batman story by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee), so this gave me a reason to finally pick up and read it!  It was great!  


DC United: Hush is a beautiful game; it is basically the next small evolution of the Marvel United system that we love so much!

The game contains equipment (one of the newer additions to the game system, which does make the game feel like you have a little more choice), plus a few new kinds of cards. It’s the next (and probably best) evolution of this system!

But most importantly, it add DC heroes like Batman and Robin and DC Villains like Hush and Joker and Harley Quinn!

This game was on my table for weeks as I played through all the combinations of heroes and villains both solo and cooperatively!  My friends and I played cooperatively, and this system just works so well as a group game!  People can choose the heroes they want!  And re-use symbols!

One of the best parts of this game is now you can play with DC and Marvel universes together!!  I got such a giggle when Batman and Robin were on SHIELD HQ battling Marvel’s Taskmaster! See above!

This game was on my table for weeks and I still want to keep playing it. I knew it when I got it, and I know it now as I write this: DC Super Heroes United: Batman Hush is my game of the year, not only for being a great game, but also introducing me to the Batman: Hush story!

Origin Story: Adding a Cooperative Mode

Origin Story is a competitive trick-taking game for 1-4 Players. It has a Super Hero theme, as people grow into their Hero forms over 5 rounds. At its core, it is a trick-taking game: Players gain tricks for victory points, gain powers for special abilities, and emerge slowly over time. The player with the most Victory Points after 5 rounds wins.

We played Origin Story, admired how well it works, especially with the powers, strategizing a limit of 5 rounds and the artwork is amazing. While playing, we couldn’t help to think “Being a Super Hero game, is there a way to play cooperatively?” We fervently decided a new mode of gameplay should be added; a cooperative mode! Over a month or so, we developed some simple rules to make an optional cooperative mode for Origin Story. These rules probably need a little more play-testing, but frankly, we all enjoyed the game in a whole new way with this cooperative mode. Now, as well as playing the current mode to be the best Super Hero and win, all the Super Heroes can now work together to save the planet in a cooperative mode!

Communication

We loved the cooperative trick-taking game  Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game! It inspired us to make these rules!  See our review here!   It just works so well as a cooperative trick-taking game!  Just like LOTR, the Origin Story cooperative game keeps the basic limited communication rules; you can’t ever talk about what’s in your hand.

About the only rule in LOTR that we didn’t like was that you couldn’t really consult each other about which characters to take; there’s not SUPPOSED to be any conversation about who takes which character, because it might give away info about your hand.  It doesn’t really give away that much, and we really enjoyed the discussions and interactions that happened, so we inserted a house rule saying we COULD discuss the characters in the LOTR trick-taking game.

So, in Origin Story Cooperative Rules, players are allowed to discuss who should go into Hero mode and Secret Identity mode; you may have full conversations.   The Origin Story cooperative game encourages a little more discussion than the competitive mode, but to be clear; you still can’t communicate what’s in your hand (unless you are forced to by a power).

Ruleset

We really liked the idea that a  Super Hero game should be cooperative.

See rules below. The current version is 1.0.0. As we get feedback, we may update this.

Version 1.0.1: Some disambiguation, added notion of notating travel with markers
Version 1.0.2: Added note, making sure each player takes control of a marker

OriginStoryCooperativeMode-1.0.2Download

Star Trek: Captain’s Chair. My Solo Game of the Year.

Star Trek: Captain’s Chair is a solo and 2-Player head-to-head game in the Star Trek universe (from publisher Wizkids).  I bought my copy online sometime in early 2025 (I don’t even remember when; March? April?), but the game was so daunting that I was scared to open it up.

Look above to see a full solo game set-up!  Gulp!

I literally spent almost a year learning this game!  See above as I JUST set-up the game, to get a sense of it!  I ran out of time, so I had to tear it down before I even played it!  In fact, I think I set-up the game at least three times before I actually played it!

What is this thing and why is it so daunting?  To call it JUST a deck-building game with Victory Points seems to do the game an injustice, but at its core, it really is a deck-building game; if you get the highest score you “win”.

Let’s take a closer look.

Unboxing and Gameplay

The Captain’s Chair is about a half-sized box. See can of Coke above for scale.

Each player takes the role of one of six Captains from Star Trek: see the Captains above.  And NO Captain Kirk is not in this set;  you have to get one of the Expansions (due out sometime in Q4 last time I looked).

The Captains each have their own little deck hubby hole in the box.  See above.

There is a metric ton of cardboard in this box.  

Most of the cardboard is is tokens and the 6 player boards for the 6 captains.  See above. 

To be fair, I think you WILL have to throw away the Punchout Skeletons to fit everything in the box (what are Punchout Skeletons?  See here).  It hurt me a little to throw these away, but the game just barely fits in the box, and all the Punchout Skeletons do is puff up the box.  So, you will have to throw away them … see a video of me doing it here …

https://www.youtube.com/live/aMSZ3QDeQYM?si=4z8aaQzBlCOyjh8V&t=1073

Like I said, this is, at its core, a deck-building game.  So, you have all sorts of cards that you can buy/accumulate into your deck!  See above all the Common cards: Allies, Cargo, Persons, Ships, Incidents, Locations, and Encounters!  These are “generally” the plain cards you will acquire to build your deck.

But there are lot more very thematic rules than just “build a deck!!” You can acquire ships, and warp them around!

Very thematically, you take control of a Location if you have enough landing parties and/or ships there!

Each Captain has their own very special deck of cards, which only THEY may use!  These cards in the Captain’s deck represents their “style”.  So, even though a Captain can buy/acquire Common cards, a Captain’s deck is a thing unto itself; it slowly unveils itself.  The Captain’s deck (see above) start with Available cards, slowly adds Reserve cards (as the deck cycles), then you can develop Development cards as you see fit!   

Captain Picard, for example, is all about getting Allies!  His Mission (each captain has a base mission which shapes his play-style) is to beam 3 Allies onto a ship!  See above.

Koloth the Klingon has a very different play-style; he is all about getting Ships into play and controlling planets! 

The game also has the notion of the Duty Officer; if you play one, it will allow you some extra activities.

For example (see above), if Ryker is your Duty Officer, he can use one of his Activations (as well as his Play if needed).   There is this notion of “deploy” which allows you to put ships, duty personnel, and other things into play so you get that extra Activation possibility on your turn!

If you deploy the Enterprise-D above, you can use it’s Activations!  (Right now, Picard is fulfilling his Mission of getting 3 Allies beamed aboard!)

There’s also an interesting notion of “play”.  For example, the Set A Course card above has two choices for how to play; you can either use one of your 3 Actions (represented by the blue isolinear chips) to play for the “major” action, or you can just play the card as-is for the lesser play ability (but it doesn’t take one of your 3 Actions).

You can take Control of Locations (see above).

As you play, you need to advance your Specialty tracks.  There’s many ways to advance your Specialty track as you play (it’s all on the cards), but the higher the Tracks are, the bigger the multiples for end-scoring.  See above as Picard has advanced Research (blue) to space 4 (for a multiply of x2), Influence (yellow) to space 3 (for a multiple of x2), and Military to space 0 (for just x1).  

At the end of the game, you look at the bottom right of the cards and they will get you victory points! Right now, Picard would get 3 cards times 2 =6 Victory Points for the Research, and  5 cards times 2=10 Victory Points for Influence.

Of course, some cards just give straight Victory Points.  See above.

Whosoever has the most Victory Points wins!

The gameflow is controlled by the 27 Stardate cards (see above).  Depending on what mode you play (solo easy, solo hard, 2-Player), these cards control how the game unfurls.  They usually just act as a timer (you put Victory Points on the card and when the Victory Points run out, you move to the next cards until the game is over), but they also keep the game flowing by wiping the market occasionally and wiping the Neutral Zone of uninteresting planets.

Over the course of the game, your Captain will warp ships, launch away parties, try to take control of Locations in the Neutral Zone, acquire Tech or Allies or People or Ships or Encounters to meet their Missions in an ultimate attempt to get the most Glory (what we have been calling Victory Points)!

Honestly, there are still plenty of subsystems and rules we didn’t talk about; there is so much to this game!  There is alternate way to lose via a “Burn” if you get too many incidents, there are special Encounters which feel like cool Star Trek vignettes, and many other cool things that if you know Star Trek, you’ll say “That’s very Thematic!”

Rulebook

This is one of the best rulebooks I have read in a while.

First of all, the rulebook gets an A on the Chair Test!

The rulebook opens up, stays flat, and is easy to consult.  The Font is very readable, but they somehow mix the thematic font of Star Trek for headings with a readable font for rule text, and it works.  There’s tons of pictures scattered in with the text, there’s tons of examples!  The rulebook also uses color and italics well!  Seriously, maybe this is an A+ on the Chair test!

The Components pages are great; pictures are notated.

The Set-Up (even though it spans 4 pages) still is done well …

With both a Common Set-up (above above) and a per-player set-up (above).

The rulebook ends with a good summary of symbols.

About the ONLY thing this rulebook does wrong is that it doesn’t have an index.  It has a table of contents and a Keywords in Detail section, but for a game this complicated, an Index is essential.

Other than the lack of an Index, this is almost a perfect rulebook.  I have to be honest, the rulebook almost reads like a legal document (because there are so many rules and systems), but everything is in there and well-explained.

Ways To Play

So, there are three major ways to play The Captain’s Chair (four if you count the unofficial cooperative mode, which we’ll discuss in the Appendix).  The “main mode” is the 2-Player head-to-head mode; this is the way Star Trek: The Captain’s Chair is meant to be played—Captain vs. Captain.   Even though this is a thinky and complex deck-building game with Victory Points, there is some take-that in the 2-Player game, as you can do things to mess up your opposing Captain.  Honestly, it really depends on the Captain(s) you choose; Koloth will have a very different play-style than Picard, who will have a different play-style than Sisko.

For solo play, there are two solo modes built-in:  The Cadet Training Mode, aka The Easy Mode and the Official Solo Mode aka the Hard Mode.   That’s what’s so great about this game; you can choose the mode that fits you!

The Cadet Training Mode

The Cadet Training Mode is probably the best way to learn the game!  Honestly, I can’t imagine jumping into the head-to-head game without learning the easy solo mode first.  See above for the rules for this mode on page 28 of the rulebook.

My first game (strictly my third game, since I set it up 2 times before I ever played!) was The Cadet Training Mode! See above.

The basic idea is that you are fighting an opponent that has “1 of everything”; you are fighting a faceless and nameless opponent.  

Basically, you are just playing turn after turn by yourself and trying to discover how all the mechanisms of the game work.    You don’t operate another Captain or anything like that.  There are enough systems in the game where you “affect” the other Captain, so when you would do that, it’s just a faceless, nameless opponent who has “one of everything”.   For example, how many landing parties does the faceless, nameless opponent have on the planets above?  One each!

This solo mode flows pretty well.  You don’t feel the glaring stare of your opponent as you learn the game; you just try stuff out to see how everything works.

My first solo game scored 69, so apparently I didn’t know how to play just yet.

 My second solo game was much better as I got a 121.  

This solo mode is the way to learn the systems of the game without the immediacy of an overwhelming opponent.  Recall, we suggested that Kinfire Council + Winds of Change sorta has an easy solo mode and a complex solo mode!

The rulebook even suggests this is a great way to learn the deck of a new Captain!  Recall that each Captain has a VERY different play-style, so this is a great way to take the new deck through its paces!

As you can see from my two scores (69 then 121), after my second game on Cadet Training Mode, it was getting too easy.  This  solo mode is a great way to learn the game, but it wouldn’t be much of a challenge now that I know the deck.  I need a new challenge.

Starfleet Command Training Program

The Hard solo mode has its own rulebook!  See above!  This rulebook, called the Starfleet Command Training Program, outlines how to play Star Trek: The Captain’s Chair in a truly complex and challenging solo mode!  This rulebook is also very daunting (at 20 pages), but it’s really not that bad (the second half talks about different modes and a 5-year mission).

One major change is that you have a different set of Starfleet cards to control the pulse of the game. See above.  

The real difference is that you are fighting a real Captain!  See above as Koloth and Picard battle!

You operate one Captain “normally” like you did previously; see as Picard gets set-up normally.

The Captain you are battling has a  very different set-up!  You still use the deck of the other Captain, but now an AI will control how that Captain operates!

There are two Control cards for each AI Captain; these are the AI cards that control what the Captain does on his turn!  Depending on what card you draw, the directions on these AI cards tell you what to do!  (Things at the top of the card take precedence over things lower on the card if there’s any question).

Basically, play alternates between the two captains; the solo player will take his turn normally, but then the solo players uses the AI to operate the other Captain!

See that big number 2 on the Starfleet card above?  That tells you how many cards the AI Captain will get to draw and resolve on his turn!

So, Koloth above draws two cards from his deck and consults the AI cards to see what those cards do!

As the game goes on, it gets pretty complicated!  Koloth is all about getting ships out, and you can see that his AI respects that .. and (see above) as he has so many ships and worlds under control in the later game!

Solo Captain and AI Captain alternate until the game end is triggered by the Star Fleet cards! Whosoever has the most victory points, wins! (If you want to be funny: I Captain goes, then AI Captain goes!)

Just like before, you count the Victory Points to see who wins.

To be clear, this is a pretty complicated AI.   There’s lots of things you have to look up as you play! Where do you send ships? Landing parties?  There’s also a notion of most valuable to me and most valuable to you that controls preferences of cards.  Sometimes determining which cards the AI prefers is pretty exhausting.  I found that it feels like the solo rules do a pretty good job of covering all bases and preferences, but it can feel hairy the first few times you try it.

This is NOT a quick one hour solo game.  This is probably at least a 2 hour game, especially your first few times.    You will find your head buried in the solo rulebook as you try to remember/discover/rank what actions/cards the AI prefers.  It gets easier as you play, but it is very daunting.

I want to be clear that I like this solo mode, but it is not easy.  

Legalese

These rulebooks are very very very good, but I kind of feel like a lawyer when I am playing.  What do I mean by that?  I have to study the rulebook to make sure I have a handle on everything; I want to say I spent a good hour (or more!) reading the rulebook the first time!!!  There are very specific rules to handle just about every exceptional case, but you have to understand how to apply the rules like a lawyer might have to understand how to apply the law.

This might sound like a negative, and for some people it will absolutely be a negative; those people will hate this game: “it’s too complicated, it’s too much, there are too many rules”.  You know if that is true for you.

But if you like a system where things are very well-specified and you don’t mind burying your head in the rulebook a lot, then this is a great game.

Theme

This game feels very thematic.  If you like Star Trek, you will see and feel the theme in this game.  We’ve said that this is a deck-building game, but all the other supporting systems of this game make it feel like Star Trek: duty officers, warping ships, developing cards, acquiring Allies, Cargo, Ships, sending out landing parties, taking control of planets … it feels very Star Trek.   This is arguably the most thematic Star Trek game I have played?

Conclusion

Star Trek: The Captain’s Chair is a daunting beast of a game.  The rulebook feels like legal document, there are many complex systems within the game, and the rules are complicated.  Yet, this is probably the most thematic Star Trek game I have played!  Each Captain’s deck matches their play-style, making them different and interesting to play!  The actions and cards feel like they are right out of Star Trek!  This feels like a love letter to Star Trek.

As a solo gamer, I love that there are two solo modes built in!  The easy solo mode provides an onramp to learn a new Captain’s deck (because they are all so different)!  The complex solo mode provides challenges for the future!  There are 30 different ways to permute the Captains in the complex solo mode (6*5=30 because order matters; which is the AI and which is the player). This gives plenty of ways to try different permutations for quite a bit of variety!  I also happen to know that at least 2 more expansions are planned, so there’s more content coming!

Sure, there’s a 2-Player head-to-head mode … which I may never play.  As a solo gamer, I am very happy with what this is. 

Be aware that this is big complex game with lots of rules and a legal document for  rulebook.  If that doesn’t scare you away and you love Star Trek, I think you will love this game.  I do. 9/10.  I think this would be a 10/10 if it had a good cooperative mode; I really want to be Picard and Sisko fighting the Borg! Or the Dominion!  So, the Appendix below …

Appendix

There is an unofficial cooperative mode: see link here.

   

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

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

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

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

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

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

Each card has 50 cases per side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solo Mode

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

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

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

Cooperative Play

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

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

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

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

Issues

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

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

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

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

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

Stuff I Liked

Lots of cases: Yes, 2000 cases!

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to our two-part review of Dice Throne Outcasts and Dice Throne Adventures.  In Part I of this review, we’ll look closely at Dice Throne Outcasts and see what it has to offer.  In Part II of our review, we’ll take Dice Throne Outcasts and use it to play the solo and cooperative Dice Throne Adventures Unchained Expansion!  

The full Dice Throne Outcasts + Dice Throne Adventures Unchained set arrived at my house in mid November 2025!  See above! This was on Kickstarter back in Oct 2024 (about a year) ago.  It promised delivery in October 2025; I think they were trying VERY HARD to make Halloween, but they just missed by about two weeks.  Two weeks late in Kickstarter terms is still very good!

What Is This?

Dice Throne, by itself, is a head-to-head Yahtzee battle dice game.  Each player takes the role of some character, and goes into battle with another character/player!  The two characters battle it out with dice (using a Yahtzee-style mechanism to activate powers)!  It’s best played as a head-to-head game of character vs. character.   There’s a TON of characters in different sets!  We’ve seen the Marvel Dice Throne Set (which we discussed here), the X-Men Marvel Dice Thone Set (which we discussed here), and Dice Throne Seasons I and II (which we discussed here).

This set of Dice Throne is essentially the Halloween themed set: Dice Throne Outcasts!  It has four characters inside!  To be clear, you can JUST buy this and play the head-to-head game by itself; strictly speaking, you don’t need anything else to play Dice Throne if you just want this box!  (If you want to play solo or cooperatively, however, you will need some more stuff: that’s what Part II of our review will discuss).

This box is gorgeous with the art of Manny Trembley. See above and below.

The side lists the four characters in the box.

And the bottom talks about what this is.

I gotta be honest, this cover is a contender for best cover of the year, especially the raven side.

Unboxing

The box top is actually a magnetic wrap-around board! Inside, you get a little cartoon intro to the characters! See above!

The box itself contains four trays, each with different cards and fold outs.

There are also some cardboard tokens which are perfectly fine (see right).  You can also choose to get the acrylic tokens as an add-on; I really like how cool the Acrylic tokens are, but if you are on the fence on getting this game, the cardboard tokens in the box are JUST fine.

There is also a perfectly fine rulebook that comes with it.  The rulebook also has pointers to videos to teach the game.  I even referred to the rulebook a few times to remind myself how to play.  After years and years and years, they have the rulebook down.

There are four characters in the game; they are easy to take out with their game trayz.

And that’s really all that’s in the box.  The game is really contained in the characters, so let’s take a look at those.

The Characters

Over about a week, I was very excited to try this game, so I got a chance to play all the characters in various modes: head-to-head, solo, me vs. me, and cooperatively.

These characters are fantastically thematic.   Each one of these is unique and dripping with flavor!

The Necromancer

The Necromancer uses corpses to summon undead fight for him!

The funnest to play overall was definitely the Necromancer!  His components are just top notch, and the Undead that come out look so cool!  The best part is that he has an ability called (I am not making this up) Corpse Explosion!  When playing a big group, every time that ability was invoked, people either laughed or went “Ew!!” It was very funny.

The Raveness

The Raveness has a Raven which flies around and sucks energy from characters in slight attacks!

The Raveness feels more “subtle” than the other characters is some ways, as she has to get her Raven to the opponents! But the Raven simply “steals” life force and brings it back to her master!  This is interesting because the Raven’s life steal is not an attack that can be defended.  If played well, she can subtly funnel energy back to herself without provoking a Defense Roll!  It was also very thematic to summon the Raven with feathers … I had a picture in my mind of a Raven forming up from the feathers and summoning it …

I like the subtlety of the Raveness.

Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman throws his big pumkin head on baddies and has tokens to terrorize!

The Headless Horseman was fun to play, as you throw your giant Pumpkin Head on your opponents!  It is a little harder to get the Headless Horseman going, but once he gets going, his pumpkin head is a sight to be seen!

His Terrorize tokens are really interesting, as they can be discarded to Terrorize your opponent with the pumpkin head!

I do think that the Headless Horseman may have my favorite art in this set.

Pale Lady

And finally the Pale Lady slips back-and-forth to lady and werewolf form!

My least favorite was the Pale Lady/Werewolf; not because she’s bad or anything.  She’s weird because she HAS NO UPGRADES. (Normally, most Dice Throne characters can upgrade their board).  I think the back-and-forth between the two sides (Pale Lady/Werewolf) was supposed to emulate some of the upgrades.  She’s definitely a butt-kicker, especially with the bleed tokens she just spews out, but she seemed the least subtle.  I guess that’s very thematic, since she is a werewolf!! GROWL!

The Characters Have Character

It might be trite to say, but the characters in Dice Throne Outcasts have character!  Thematic character!

I still liked every character!  The Necromancer might be the best one to give to newer players, not because he’s simplest, but because he’s so much fun!  The Necromancer might really bring new players into the game … they just might need a little help to operate him.

Solo Mode: Me vs. Me

The base Dice Throne games have no solo mode … BUT you can play in Me vs Me mode, which is just the solo player playing both characters!  I have done this Me vs Me mode for every single Dice Throne set I have gotten!  It’s a great way to learn the characters at your own pace!

The solo player just jumps from one side of the table to the other, alternating play of each character!  I recommend physically changing sides because it helps you “become” that character since it’s just in front of you!  Yes, it’s slightly annoying to get up and go to the other side of the table every turn, but it really does help immerse you into the characters!

If you are curious who won with the Necromancer vs. The Headless Horseman … it was close, but the Headless Horseman won!

If you don’t have anyone to play against, and you don’t have any of the solo/co-op expansions, the Me vs. Me solo mode is a fine way to learn the characters.   In fact, for this set, I played all the characters at least once so I could teach them.  The characters in this set are a little complex, so it’s nice to have seen how the characters work for when your friends have questions.

Conclusion to Part I.

Many of you are aware that I generally really like mostly solo and cooperative games.  Even though Dice Throne Outcasts is a base competitive game, I really liked it!  The art was fantastic, and the characters were dripping with theme!  In fact, I am a superhero guy, I and I think  Dice Throne Outcasts is better than X-Men or Marvel Dice Throne!  The characters are just so well-thought out and thematic!

If you just want a thematic horror-based battle game, Dice Throne Outcasts is fantastic: 9/10.

But if you want to play Dice Throne with a “real” solo mode or a cooperative mode, follow us in Part II as we explore Dice Throne Adventures Unchained …

Appendix: Silly House Rule

I also picked up the Dice Throne Outcasts Hero Sculpts (see above).  These are for the cooperative game only.

They are just some neat little minis you can use on the board when you play Dice Throne Adventures.  They are completely useless in the base game.

Or are they?  We instituted a silly House Rule: the minis can be used as “worker placement” tokens to mark which ability you invoked with your dice!!  Sometimes, your dice can match multiple abilities on your mat, and thisis just a way to denote which one you chose!! See above as the Raveness mini marks us use the “small straight” option instead of a different match.

Or above as the Raveness marks that we used Murder of Crows II.

This is an absolutely silly way to use the minis. But, it helps you feel like you got more for your money if you DID get them.  Which I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I did get it.  It took some effort.

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

Unboxing And Base Gameplay

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

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

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

And a Councilor sheet! See above!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rulebook

Good rulebook. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other than that, very good rulebook.

Solo Game (Unofficial)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winds Of Change Unboxing

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

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

It adds three new Towers to swap in.

A bunch of new cards.

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

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

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

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

Official Solo Mode (Winds of Change)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooperative Game

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

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

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

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

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

House Rules: Cooperative – Sharing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House Rule: Solo – Don’t Require Alternating

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

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

Thoughts

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Storyfold Wildwoods. An Intimate Little Experience.

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

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

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

Team Solo

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

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

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

What Is This?

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

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

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

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

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

Experience

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

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

Theme

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

8/10.

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

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

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

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

Let’s a take a look!

Unboxing

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

The unboxing was a full two hours of work!  

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

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

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

This is just a big game.

It’s pretty fancy looking.

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

Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The house is where you build furniture and keep resources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

The components pages are great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Play: Solo Game Tutorial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Cooperative Play

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

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

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

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

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

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

True Solo

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

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

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

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

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

I start with nothing but the skills on my back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooperative Play (Scenario 2)

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

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

In Scenario 2, we get to fight …

The ELDER!

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

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

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

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

Issues

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Liked

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trollkin, coming from the northwest (see above)

And the Fire Hordes, coming from the South.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rulebook

I liked this rulebook.  Except for one thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solo Game

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

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

I took control of Alva for my solo game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooperative Game

My friend Teresa and I played the cooperative game!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Liked

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Didn’t Like

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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