Tag: reviews

Flash Point: Golden State Heroes. A Solo and Cooperative Review After Full Playthrough

Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is a cooperative game about being firefighters rescuing people from a fire! It’s the third or fourth (or even fifth?) version of the Flash Point series of games. This particular one was on Kickstarter back in June 2025, promising delivery in January 2026. It arrived at my house in April 2026, so it’s about 4 months late (which isn’t bad in Kickstarter land).

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty thick oversized box!  See the Coke Can above for scale

The reason it’s so thick is because there are 4 double-sided boards!  (2 of them go together to make a third board, so there are really only 6 different “boards”).

Each player assumes the role of a firefighter, each with different abilities!  The firefighter markers are above …

But you want to pick one of the characters.  The base game comes with 9 different characters (and if you got the Back In Action expansion, a bunch more!)   Each character has a special power that really changes how they interact with the game!

You might notice “Hey! Those are envelopes! Rich, why are they envelopes? That’s weird!!” Yup, this is a campaign game, and you will get to keep your gear in those envelopes between games.

So, this is a campaign game, with a 6 episode arc!  Don’t get TOO excited, because there’s not really that much stuff that follows you between games.  Really, the only thing that follows you is your gear.  Now, each GAME is actually quite different, as described by the Call Guide book above. 

Each episode of the Campaign has some new rules/new concepts for just that game: see above for the rules for episode 4.  It’s not really much of a spoiler; there’s no real story unfolding between games that will be revealed.

The gear is pretty cool; you usually get 4 and choose 2 at the start of the game (in later games, you draw 2 and use the previous gear).  But you get to CHOOSE extra powers to augment your built-in power!  

See as Lisa Beckett (whose base power is to mitigate Fire cards) chose stuff related the Supression Blast actions, so they can augment each other!  That’s some of the fun of this game, is that you get to CHOOSE some of your gear to go along with your innate power!

To win, you have to save 7 people (dogs and cats are people too) before the building collapses, or before 4 people get burned up!  That’s right, if you fail to save someone (because the fire engulfs them), people (dogs and cats are people too) will die!  So, this is a race to save 7 people!

Players traverse a map, looking for POIs: “Points of Interest” (the blue ? markers above).  Usually, the POIs are people (remember, dogs and cats are people too), but sometimes the POI is empty! NO!  

To save a POI (after you flip to a people side), you have to carry them out.  Sometimes, they are healthy enough to walk out on their own, but you need to get them to a “safe place” (usually the ambulance) to count as a “saved person”!

Along the way, smoke and fires comes out!  Every turn, you will roll dice and place a smoke on the cross: see as we place a Threat on 6-8!  Now, normally that would be a smoke (which isn’t QUITE fire), but since it’s adjacent to fire already there … that smoke immediately becomes fire!

This is an action point game: each player has a certain number of action points to spend per turn: see chart above.  (These are nice player summary cards).   It’s only one action to extinguish smoke, but two actions to extinguish fire!  Usually, it’s just one action point to move, but saving people around is pretty intensive, it’s 2 AP to move a victim with you…. 

To be clear, this is NOT a real-time firefighter game!  Players decide how to spend their actions WITHOUT a timer.  If you wanted a more frantic real-time Firefighter game, check out Firefighters on Duty!  See our review of that here! 

There are lots of other little rules, but the most important is that if you have to place a threat on a place with fire, it explodes!  This might a little like  Pandemic, but instead of disease cubes exploding, fire explodes out in all 4 directions!  It’s so much harder to fight fires after the fire explodes and spreads!! Even worse … those fires it may weaken the structure of the building and it may collapse!  Fires are bad, mkay?

This game has a LOT of nice components.  Nothing is super awesome, but all the components are good quality and easy to read.   And there are QUITE a few components in here (see above), which is why you need the extra tall box for this!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good; I have a few issues with it.  

The rulebook gets an A- on The Chair Test!  It fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it has plenty of pictures that are easy to see, and a font that’s easy to read!  It doesn’t waste too much space.  I think the only reason it isn’t an A is that I wish the font were just a little bit bigger.  But Solid A- on the Chair Test!  This rulebook is the perfect size and doesn’t droop AT ALL on the chair next to me!

The Components and intro are good enough, if a little cramped.  

The rules are generally well-spelled out, but as you get into the game, there are a lot of new rules that come out and some of these interactions are not well-specified. There’s going to cracks, helicopters, lift-basket, new gear, new spaces, new vehicles, new rubble, … all sorts of new stuff!  You’ll have questions about how things interact.  Sometimes it will be there, sometimes it won’t.  The nice thing is that this is a VERY thematic game, so can kinda make a call based on theme.

A simple example is my rock, Camila Ruiz (Camila followed me throughout all my 6 games of the campaign).  She can remove a threat marker for free.   I assumed that a threat marker was anything that was a threat!  Fire, smoke, hazmat, livewires … right?  Those are all threats?  I was beginning to think that was overpowered so I went searching.  I downloaded the PDF rulebook and searched for the word threat.  There were ONLY two places; one was a mention (without a definition) and the other was a picture of THREAT next to fire and smoke at the very front!!  So, yes, a “threat” token is sparsely defined to be ONLY a smoke or fire token.  Seriously, we could have used a sentence anywhere in the rulebook, even on Camila’s card (“A threat is a smoke or fire token”).  There’s not even an excuse for not enough space:  see how little writing is on Camila’s card and how much is on Lisa Beckett’s??? See above.

This was just an example of things could have been a little clearer.  It’s not a bad rulebook, and there was a lot of good stuff.

You know, this might be a textbook defintion of why we need an Index or Glossary:  If you had to put together an Index or Glossary, they would have realized “Oh! We don’t have a real good definition of Threat to refer to!”  There are SO MANY new rules that come out as you play, that an Index or Glossary with all the rules might have been helpful?

Anyway, I learned the game from the rulebook, but I made some mistakes.  You might too. 

 

The Campaign

As a campaign, this is probably the least campaigny campaign I have ever played.  Basically, every game was completely independent from the previous games (the final game just uses rules from previous games).

It’s cool that at the end of each game, you get more stuff; Gear and Boost usually.  See above after the end of call 1 (game 1).  I don’t feel any guilt about spoilers because it’s just a few things!

The campaign tries real hard to have an ongoing story: see above for some flavor text after game 3.  I gotta be honest, I never read the flavor text.  It really didn’t add much to the game for me.  My friends enjoy the flavor text a little more than me, so we read some of it in the cooperative game, but … it didn’t really add a lot.

What the campaign is, more than anything, is an excuse to play through 6 different games that come in the box.  There’s really just 6 different games with a little more gear and boosts available.  The grand finale (the 6th and final game) does a little bit more by bringing in rules from previous games, but even then there’s no “state” between games.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the campaign.  It was a fun excuse to play all 6 boards in the box!  But there’s realllllly not a story or any state that moves from game to game (you can save gear, but that’s about it).   The flavor text that’s there is there if you want it.  I didn’t really read it.  Shrug?  Maybe you and your group will really like it?  It’s there?

Solo Game

So, Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is very clear on how to play solo!  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) .  On page 4, the rulebook very clearly states you simply play with 2 (or more) and the solo player operates them! See above!

So, this is not true solo play, but neither do we have to worry about any wonky new rules to adjust solo play!  Just play the game as it was meant to be played!  Like I said, Camila Ruiz was my rock as a I played; she was in every game of the campaign. 

Interestingly, during set-up (each call has its own set-up in the call book) encourages you to use one of the characters explicitly! Call 1 (game 1) encourages using Steve Sullivan by giving him a little bonus at the start of the game! (See the text above in blue).    This was a nice way to make players cycle through all the the different characters in the game to really get a sense of everything in the board.  I applaud this; it gave you a “reason” to cycle through different characters!

I played the entire campaign with Camila as one of two characters.  Each game adds some very different rules (firefighting on a boat, in an amusement park, on the edge of a cliff!), so it was nice to know one of the characters really well so I could concentrate on the new rules being added every game.  Don’t get me wrong, the base game doesn’t change THAT much, but there was some very different and interesting firefights.

I played through the entire campaign solo.  Each game was its own thing; remember there’s not “really” any holdover state from the previous games, but each board was VERY different!

I liked playing through this solo, modulo one or two issues (see below for discussion).  I would play it again.  Playing two characters worked great!

 

Cooperative Game

I wanted to see where this would land with the cooperative game.   I was hoping I could convince my friends to play through the campaign with me, or at least a few games!

What happened: we didn’t do great in the first game.   Or rather, the dice didn’t go our way.  We cleaned out the board quickly when we started, but we got some explosions and empty POIS at the WRONG times.  We played for about two hours and lost.  We lost two ways, out of building cubes and 4 people died!  We weren’t sure what we would have done differently, and I think that really depressed my friends.  

Sara made the comment: “Ya, this is how the game went last time we played”.   We have played previous versions of Flash Point (Legacy of Flame), and had a similar result.

Last week, when we lost our first game of  Firesiege, my friends wanted to play again to redeem themselves! (See review here!)  This week, they were just done and didn’t want to play again.  The game wasn’t broken or anything, but it just felt like it might have been a little too random.  Losing the dog in the fire was the last straw.

Randomness

This is the hardest part of the game to come to terms with; there’s a lot of randomness.  EVERY turn, you roll two dice and place a smoke/fire (see above) … and sometimes you place more!  If you roll poorly, you can cause explosions all over the place!  The more explosions there are, the more fire there is, which makes it easier to have more explosions and fire!   A few bad rolls can really wreck your game.

I got lucky when I played the solo game, but maybe this game is a little easier with two firefighters. 

Flash Point is very similar to another cooperative game called Pandemic in many ways: players travel around a map trying to keep something under control (diseases or fire), players have action points, players have special powers, players need to keep things under control or they will explode (diseases or fire)!  For a while, when I was trying to introduce new people to cooperative games, I pointed to Flash Point!  Who doesn’t love working together as fire fighters to stop a fire?  Over time, I have deferred more to Pandemic as the better game and less random (as there’s fewer axes of randomness), so I would recommend Pandemic first … it’s just the theme of Pandemic is harder to get over sometimes.  We all lived it at some point.

Which Flash Point?

Flash Point has actually been around for some time!  I Kickstarted the original Flash Point back in July 2011!  And then the Extreme Danger Kickstarter too! See picture above!  But, as you can also see … I never got my Extreme Danger out of shrink wrap!  

Then I was SO EXCITED when Flash Point: Legacy of Flame went on Kickstarter in March 2024!  See above!  The game arrived in 2025, and I fully expected this to be as great as Pandemic Legacy!  But after two games of Legacy of Flame, it just fizzled out.  No one wanted to play again. And it all boils down (no pun intended) to the randomness of the game.  No one wanted to play a Legacy game where there was SOOO MUCH Randomness in the dice rolls!  If you start off with a few bad games, you’ll completely screw yourself!  My friends, I think saw this and didn’t want to pursue Legacy of Flame.

The nice thing about Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is that each game IS so independent, you don’t have to worry about being screwed by your previous game!  I think that of ALL of the Flash Points I have played, Flash Point Golden State Heroes is my favorite version.  Why? Because you get 6 VERY different firefighting scenarios that you can play at any time!  You don’t HAVE to play the campaign: you can just jump into any game you want!   The legacy issues of Legacy of Flame don’t become an issue.

House Rule

There’s one House Rule that I don’t think the game can live without.  Sure, the game can be random on dice rolls when the smoke/fire comes out, but the fire dice rolls “generally” distributes the fire pretty evenly over the board.  The game is random at you; that’s what games do.

The problem is the Fire Suppression action.  You spend your entire turn (4 actions) to roll dice and you MIGHT hit some fire.    Are you an incompetent fire fighter?  Can you not see where the fire is?  This is so ridiculous that you roll dice and pretty much have no control over this!

You might remember Lisa Beckett (see above) we mentioned earlier: I went ALL OUT trying to make her the Fire Suppressions expert!  I gave her two Gear related to that!  See above!  And she still sucked!  Because I rolled bad!  Now she’s not just rolling poorly, but she is actively contributing to losing because she has 4 actions THAT DO NOTHING!

The Fire Suppression, I think, is broken.  In fact, I remember playing the original Flash Point, and I tended to eschew the action!  “Oh, you have to roll to see if it’s successful?  And it takes all 4 actions?  And it may not do anything?  No thanks, I’d rather just do something that I know will make some progress”.

We added a house rule: you have more control.  The players, as a group, get 4 tokens. THAT YOU CAN ONLY SPEND ONCE!!  For a  Fire Suppression action,  roll the dice normally (with flips), then you can spend a token to up/down any/either dice any number of times (up to 4).  This makes it so you can maybe can’t cheat and just Fire Suppression the rest of the game, but the few times you do need it, you have SOME control, and not just random crap! This kind of limits the Fire Suppression to 1 or 2 shots … but that’s kinda what you want?

I won’t play without this House Rule.  If I do, I simply won’t do any Fire Suppression.  It is SO AGGRAVATING to spend 4 actions and do nothing.

Conclusion

We’ve sorta been all over the place in this review, and it may sounds we don’t like Flash Point.  We do like it!  It just … it can be frustrating.   As a solo gamer, I really enjoyed playing through all the campaign (even though it’s not REALLY a campaign, just 6 different boards).  I pretty much had to add the house rule about cleaning up the Fire Suppression action, or I might have hated it too.

The cooperative game didn’t go as well unfortunately.  I think my friends would play the game again but the randomness that can happen will prevent them from ever playing any campaign.  

I personally think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes IS the best of the Flash Point games.  If you like the idea of a cooperative fire-fighting game that has a Pandemic feel, I think this is the one to get.  It has so much variety (the 6 boards are all so very different) and you can play any game you want!  It’s not REALLY a campaign; it’s just an excuse to play all the boards!

I think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes has to get a ranged rating from [6-8] out of 10.  Whenever I give a ranged rating, it means the randomness can overwhelm the game and make it not fun, but when the game “behaves”, it can be fun!  The lower end of 6 is when the dice don’t behave; the game still works but it’s much less fun.  When the game is challenging but not too random, it’s fun and can be an 8!  

If you take away my house rule for Fire Suppression, this rating falls an entire point and would be [5-7]. 

 

Firesiege: Underdone But Still Tasty! A Solo and Cooperative Review

Firesiege is a cooperative Tower Defense games that was on Kickstarter back in May 2024.  It promised delivery in April 2025, and missed by about a year.  I got my copy in early 2026.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a fairly standard sized boxed.  See Coke can above for scale.

Players each take the role of a warrior that can earn special powers!

Each warrior starts with NO special powers, and has one of two conditions to flip them to their more “powerful” side with more hits, some powers, and usually more hit points.  See above as Gestha can flip to the other side if she either (a) she spends 5 energy or (b) has any bar reaches its max.

Once the warrior flips, they are more powerful!  And actually have special powers!  One of the tensions in the game is trying to figure when to keep the invading hordes under control and when to work on powering-up your character!

What’s being invaded you might ask?  The citadel!  The citadel is the center of the tower above!  If a bad guy reaches the center, players immediately lose!  Note that there are three lanes in which in the invaders may invade: red, green, and yellow.  

At various points during the game, the “bad news” cards will come out (see above) and cause the bad guys to spawn and move.

There are actually all sorts of different bad guys in the game but the main ones are the Skrell hunters (smaller: with 1 hit point) and Skrell Mothers (large 3 hit points).  See above.  They look NOTHING like Aliens from the movie Alien or Aliens.  Or maybe they do.   We pretty much called them “aliens” when we played.

There are also some “super” bad guys that can come out during the game at various points.  See above.  These typically have a special power and a few more hit points.

Luckily, the good guys summon little white warriors (see above) to help them or even “someone distinct from Hela, but is pretty much Hela”.

How do you win?  You need to get 6 Victory Points, and you win!  There are 3 cards that control the 3 main ways to get those 6 victory points.  The first one (far left) shows victory points you get from killing spawn points in the game … you always have this.  Killing a green spawn point nets 1 Victory Point, killing a yellow Spawn Point 2, and red 3.  Summoning Hela can help you in different ways (and summoning her gets you 1 VP).   Basically, the game can vary quite a bit, depending on the cards you get! 

There is shared tracker which tracks (1) movement (2) summoning (3) extra swords and (4) energy.  As you play, you can choose (as a group) to move these tracks up and down!  The higher the movement, the more you can mover per turn!  The higher the summoning, the more white warriors per turn!  The higher the swords, the extra oomph you can add to a combat! The higher the energy, the more you can power the special powers of the characters!

Each character has a bag of tokens that they draw from to form their turn.  The tokens are unique to the character (and color).

The player draws 3 tokens for their turn and places it on their board.  Note that the tokens have a white side and a black side!  The light side is good things the player can do with that token: actions, healing, energy, moving the V track, adding/removing walls, and a few others things  See the white tokens above.  The black side is (usually) bad stuff!  Roll the black dice!  Advance the V track!  Summon/spawn Skrell!

An interesting thing about this system is that when you choose a tile, you must do BOTH sides!  Good news is on one side, and BAD news is on the other!  So, you must do both sides!  This is a real interesting idea as you are choosing BOTH the good news and the bad news at the same time!

Even weirder is that you can’t see both sides of the tile!  When you draw, you can only see one side, but the REST of your teammates CAN see the other side!  If you have ever heard of Indian Head Poker or Hanabi, this is exactly the same idea! 

Players basically just play until they win (get 6 Victory Points) or they lose (someone dies or the hoarde track reaches the middle).  

The way the game proceeds is quite interesting; the act of selecting a tile causes things to happen (good and bad).   The game is activated by every tile you choose.  It’s kinda different and interesting.

This is a tower defense game where we, as a group try to keep the Skrell and other bad guys from reaching the middle and killing us!

 

Rulebook

Sadly, this is not a great rulebook.

Firstly, it does poorly on the Chair Test.  I think this is a D-; it droops really badly on the edges, has a small font, as is very hard to consult on the chair next to me.  It doesn’t fail completely because I can sorta use it on the chair next to me.

The components page starts on a good note: the components are well-labelled with a little pictures.

The set-up is “fine”, but it’s where also start noticing rulebook issues.  Some things aren’t even labelled (step 7?) and so we have to guess at a few things.  

Over the course of the first night with my game, I had SO MANY questions and issues with the rulebook that I started writing them down! 

I ended up with 2 full pages of questions and notes!  This was not a good rulebook.

If I just had a few rules questions, I would typically head on over to BoardGameGeek and try to get them resolved.  The problem was that there were just too many questions.  I was generally able to “make an assumption” and move forward for most if not all of them.  But this will be a non-starter for some gamers.

This rulebook is missing a lot.  But it has some good things too.  I like that they have a campaign, I like that it has rules clarifications for all the special cards (victory cards, super bad guys, warriors, etc).  But the rulebook is missing too much to be able to call this a good rulebook: it underspecifies the game.

Solo

So, there is a solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! 

This is a true solo mode, with one player taking the role of one warrior.   The only real differences are that TWO bad guys must enter the Citadel (instead of one) to lose … AND the solo player can elect to flip a token using one energy.  Other than that, the game plays the same!

There’s a lot of maintenance for the solo player (Skrell, super bad guys, the track, spawn deck), but it’s not that bad.  It slightly brings down the game (it’s better in cooperative mode when all those systems are shared).    I was able to get my first game going pretty well … I don’t think I made too many rules mistakes (despite the underspecificity of the rulebook).  I had fun.

My second game went a little better as I understood how the systems worked together.  I was looking forward to my second game.

Something about this world is very appealing: it’s easy to get into, the components are top-notch, and generally the game flows really well.  I liked the solo game and would play it again.

The only thing I would change; the game is a little neutered because you don’t have others “sharing” what tiles you might have … the solo game tries to compensate for that by forcing you to spend an energy if you want to flip a tile.  I feel that energy cost  to flip a token isn’t in the “spirit” of the game … I think a better way to handle that is simply: “If you ever have all white or all black tiles in you hand, you may flip one for free.”   That way, you can still make decisions but don’t get “stuck” with all white or black tokens.  It’s a very minor house rule.

Cooperative Play

So, my group played two cooperative games in a row: we lost the first one but wanted to redeem ourselves with the second game!  And we did!  Once we had a “flavor” of the game, we were able to plan and come up with some strategies to win the game!  This is always a good sign when your groups wants to play AGAIN!

We probably could have done better with the limited communication; we sometimes probably overshared.    I hate to say this, but limited communication games typically have this problem!  Unless you are Hanabi with explicit exact rules on what you can say, then most limited communication rules are wonky.  “How Much Can I share?”  To not bog the game down, we just moved forward if we weren’t quite sure.   

Another thing we did which helped the game was share the load: Teresa took care of the super bad guys, Sara handled the Skrell, Andrew handled the spawn cards, I took care of the shared tracks.  Doing this much maintenance for the solo game does bring down my solo score a little, but sharing the load made it so we could concentrate on playing the game rather than maintaining the game as we played.

We did end up using a House Rule: we used Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained: see discussions here) .   This allowed us to be more strategic about choosing the good news/bad news token!  “That’s a real good good news … but can we take the bad news?”  I really did NOT think this Hanabi like mechanism (where everyone can see everyone else’s token, but not their own), but it really did promote discussion as we played.  And I am surprised that it worked.

I kind of think I would only recommend Firesiege when using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained).  Why?  Because without PSTO, then you are STUCK with the tokens you have and you have to play them (your only choice would be the order the 3 tokens you have are played) … that’s the game playing you!   But if all players can discuss playing their tokens, it becomes more interactive, more cooperative, more strategic, as it gives the players more choice!   I played a token, then Andrew played two, then Teresa played one … we got to choose which bad news to take and which good news in the order that was more strategic!  THOSE conversations in the cooperative game made the game for me!

Conclusion

Here’s the thing; objectively, this game has a lot of problems with the randomness, the underspecificity, and the vagueness of the limited communication.  Objectively, I’d probably have to give this game a 4.5/10 or 5/10.  There’s too many problems.

But here’s the thing; I kinda liked it.  I liked the pieces, I liked how much variety is in the game, I liked the ideas that we get to choose how we move forward (bad news/good news) and I liked the way the game unfolded.  Granted, I had to throw a few house rules at this game to like it (fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order especially for the cooperative game), and a few “I think this is how you play” rules.  But I enjoyed every game I played, despite all the issues.   Subjectively, I personally would give this a 7/10; I’d be happy to play it again and teach it again.  But this HAS to be using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) to get the 7/10!

My friends were a little more underwhelmed and might give this a 6/10.  There’s a little bit of caveat with that score:  I gave my friends the best games possible (by limiting their exposure to all the wonky issues), but they did want to play it twice in a a row after we lost the first game, so that’s a good sign.  If they had to learn this from the rulebook, I am sure this would have been a 4/10 … my group would hate the underspecificity.

Obectively: 5/10, Subjectively 7/10. Overall probably 6/10.  

The game was underdone, but was still tasty!

Tembo: Survival on the Savanna. A Solo and Cooperative Review.

Those of you paying attention might say “Wait, didn’t you already publish this?” And you are right! We did! It turns out we got a critical rule wrong, so our review was a little unfair! So, we took down our original review and adjusted it after replaying. Here we go with an updated review!

Tembo: Survival on the Savanna is a solo and cooperative tile-laying/tile-placement game from The Op Games.

This is a game all about exploring the Savanna but keeping the elephants alive and away from the Lion and Lioness!

This is a lighter game for players ages 10 and up.  The time range seems about right at 30 to 45 minutes.  It can play solo.

Is this game good enough to make our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement games?  Let’s take a look!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent.

The game set-up and components are on opposite pages and this works great.  The components are annotated and the set-up is well-labelled.  This part of the rulebook is excellent.

The rulebook is generally okay.  It’s not great on some edge cases: For example: when you rotate a card, can you can also rotate it 45 degree to get diagonals?  There’s no discussion of that!  From a consistency point of view, it seems like you can (because diagonal is considered adjacent), but it’s not clear.  Why are some spaces purple and white on the final board?  Do you have to place final elephants in the white zone?  When the Matriarch is by herself on the board, what does playing the Matriarch card means? When an elephant line gets disconnected, are there any special rules?  If the Lioness eats an elephant, and goes to sleep, then the Lion moves to her space with the Matriarch … it seems like you SHOULD NOT lose (because the Lioness is sleepy), but the rules make it clear whenever the Lioness and Lion are together .with the Matriarch … you lose!  This seems inconsistent with the theme of the game (sleepy Lions).

Oh yes, after a few passes over the rulebook, it’s clear that each player MUST DRAW TO THREE CARDS no matter what, on their turn.  So, they keep drawing. They should have made that clearer, instead it’s kind of buried in the text.

The rulebook was decent, you can learn the game, but don’t expect there to be a ton on edge case clarifications.  You’ll have to make your determinations in a few places.

Unboxing and Gameplay

Tembo is a fairly standard sized box. See Coke can above for scale.

Each player will take the role of one of four herds of elephants.  See the gorgeous wood elephant meeples (elepheeples?) above.

The thing is, there is only ONE matriarch who guides ALL the elephants!  See is the bigger blue elepheeple above.  Her job is to try to keep her elephant herds away from the Lioness and Lion!  See above for the gorgeous wooden pieces! Elepheeple and Lioneeples!

See above as the matriarch is shepherding the pink and grey elephants above (in a 2-player game).  Every new elephant placed on the Savanna MUST be adjacent to another elephant!  It doesn’t matter what color because this is a cooperative game: you can place your new elephants next to any adjacent elephant.  It’s worth noting that elephants are considered adjacent in both orthogonal and diagonal directions!  This is important  to note for later.

Each player has three cards that do double-duty; they form the grid for the Savanna (this is a tile-laying game after all) AND they allow placing the elephants to the Savanna.   Each player always has three cards at the start of their turn: each turn starts with the active player playing a card to the grid THEN playing another card to determine how to place elephants onto the grid.  (Actually; this was the rule we messed up.  You play EITHER to place a grid space OR to place elephats.  This rule was clear in the rulebook, so I have no excuses other than I misread it.  I do think having a player summary would have helped me; anyway, don’t be me and make this mistake).

How you are sitting at the table actually determines HOW you can place your card and your elephants!  Note the arrow in the upper left corner of the card above: if you are facing the grid, you can only play this card to the grid IN THE DIRECTION OF THE ARROW.

If I am facing the grid, you’ll notice all my cards (above) in the grid pointing away.

Interestingly, when you place a card/tile onto the board, the spot you choose has a special power (usually how many elephants to energize).    See above: one spot energizes 2 elephants for ALL players, one spot gives just you 4 energized elephants! You start with only 3 energized elephants, but you can only place energized elephants on your turn!

The secondway you can play a card: the  card you play is discarded, but it allows you to place elephants on the grid ONLY IN THE PATTERN (or just a single elephant) specified on the upper left corner of the card.  If we discarded the card above to place elephants, we could ONLY place 2 energized elephants east-west (next to a previously played elephant somewhere on the board).

To win the game, players must have the elephants visit 6 Landmarks on the board AND make it to the final location.  To “visit” a Landmark, some elephants need to occupy the purple spots of the Landmark.  See above as 2 grey elephants and 1 pink elephant visit the waterfall Landmark and earn the waterfall standee!

If you want to “scoop up” all the elephants on the board, you can play the Matriarch card (elephant card above) which returns all elephants to the players!  You might do this at certain points to limit how many elephants get chased away by Lions (but see below).

The only problem is that it costs 2 (or 5) energy to engage the Matriarch to gather all the elephants!  See the energy track above.  If you ever go to zero energy, you lose!

You can place elephants on the trees to get more energy!  See the red trees above!  If I can place two elephants there, I can get more energy! Yum!

As you play, the Lion and Lioness move.  If they are ever in a Location with elephants, all the elephants are chased off!  (They are not eaten, no.  Even though they are taken out of the game forever).  If you ever get BOTH the Lion and Lioness on the same space as the Matriarch, you also lose!  If you ever run out of elephants, you lose! If you ever run out of energy, you lose! If you ever run out of cards, you lose!

You can only win if your elephants visit all 6 Landmarks AND you make to to the final spots at the top of the board!  See above for  a winning game!

This production is gorgeous and will enchant you.  The Vicente Dutraite art and the wooden meeples are just so beautiful.

Mixing Bad News and Good News

Many cooperative games have a separate deck of “Bad News” cards, that is, cards that keep the game flowing against the players.   Interestingly, the “Bad News” cards are all interspersed into the same draw deck as the player cards!   In this case, there are two “bad” cards.

The first is the Liones/Lion cards.  When the players draw these cards, they activate the Lioness and Lion (in that order): the Lioness/Lion moves, and then will eat (pardon me, “chase”) all elephants in its region.

If a Lioness/Lion eats (chases) some elephants, it has to rest (until it stands again).

Although the Matriarch cards are “Good” cards (you can play them to move the Matriarch and collect all elephants on the board), you are FORCED to play them if you ever get two of them!  This is a unique kind of bad news because (a) you don’t have a choice and (b) the energy cost is much more significant at 5 (rather than 2).   Getting a Double Matriarch (like above) is actually bad!!

Intermixing the Good cards and Bad cards into one deck reminds us a little of The Siege of Runegar (see review here) where the Troll cards were interspersed into the playter decks of this deck-building game.

The Game Can Kinda Play You

You have to be a little careful when you play; the game kinda plays you just a little.

First, there’s not much strategy with the Matriarch cards because you are pretty much forced to play them as soon as you get them.   If you don’t, you will almost certainly get a Double Matriarch where you are FORCED to play them and lose 5 energy.  Energy is a  very limited resource; you can maybe handle losing 5 energy once … maybe.  You are almost guaranteed to lose if you take 2 Double Matriarchs.  That’s 10 Energy, … and you start with 10 or less (depending on the number of players).

After playing a bunch of games, I found that you pretty much want to play the Matriarch card AS SOON AS YOU GET IT (which costs 2 energy) so that you aren’t forced into a double Matriarch (which costs 5 energy).   That’s not really a strategy; you can’t save it up until you need it.   Every time I tried to “be clever” or “push my luck” by saving Matriarch cards, I got screwed by the double Matriarch and immediately lost.   It seems like the best “strategy” is to immediately play a Matriarch card, even if it doesn’t make any sense. 

Now this isn’t quite as bad as I first thought (on my first wrong playthroughs), because the game moves forward more slowly (I originally though you were drawing two cards per turn; BUT you are only playing one and draing one).  But it still seems imperative to play a Matriarch as soon as you can.

The game is kinda playing you.

The other problem is that the “Bad News” cards cluster and cause major havoc.  You ALWAYS have to draw up to 3 cards, even if you don’t want to!  “I’ve got a Matriarch card, I’ll just defer drawing for now!”  NOPE! You can’t do that!  There’s no choice.

The game is kinda playing you.

Games like Pandemic try to mitigate this clustering a little by distributing the bad news cards more equally over the deck (by separating the deck into 4 pieces and distributing the bad cards in those 4 sections).  I wish Tembo did something like this to help mitigate this clustering.  Or give me a choice to NOT draw.  Nope.

The above has a list of the distribution of cards. 

At the end of the day, your game will probably be won or lost by how the bad news cards cluster, despite how well you play during your turn.  But it’s not as bad as I originally thought.

Solo Game

There is a solo mode built-in (thanks for following Saunders’ Law).  

The solo player gets about 24 elephants (collected from two colors: see above as a I mix pink and grey).   The game plays “about” the same, but the solo player doesn’t get the special powers when they play a card on the board: you always just get 4 elephants when the play a card to the board.   And you can, at one time during the game, discard a Matriarch to avoid a double Matriarch,  The solo player just plays turn after turn by themselves until they win or lose.

This true solo way is “okay” to learn the game, but I don’t think it’s the best way to play the game solo.  The problems are two-fold: First, you don’t get the special abilities on the board, which is one of the only ways you can be “smart” in the game …so the solo mode takes away one of the ways you can be clever and sort of dulls the games.  Second, the double Matriarch “fix” isn’t that great.   Sure, you can choose to get rid of a Matriarch ONCE, but as I pointed out earlier, the double Matriarch problem is pretty steeped into the game.  It’s just not fun to play when are you are MORE likely the get a double Matriarch (see below).

A better way to play solo is to play two-handed solo: the solo player plays two elephant tribes, alternating between them as-if it were a 2-Player game.  I think this is a better solo mode for many reasons: 1) You are playing the game the way it was meant to be played: no special rules for solo player.  2) The odds of getting a double Matriarch are actually reduced because you are distributing the Matriarch cards between two hands!   In the true solo mode, you are much more likely to draw double Matriarchs because you have exactly one hand!  At least with two hands, the double Matriarch is less likely.  Finally: 3) Being able to use the special powers on the board allows you to be more clever.

I’ve seen this in so many games recently: a two-handed solo game is always the better way to play solo.

 

Cooperative

I”ll be honest, the cooperative play turned me around a little. I “leaked” the strategy that you must play your Matriarch as soon you get it (to avoid the double Matriarch) and we had a pretty good time playing cooperatively.

As a cooperative game, it’s pretty quick, and the game flows quickly if someone can explain everything. Having played at least ten times, I was able to shepherd Teresa and I through a game … and I had fun.

We didn’t get too unlucky on our deck, and generally we were able to me smart (when to play certain cards, when to eat trees). We were still forced to play our Matriarchs ASAP, but Teresa said she liked knowing that because it made it “easier” to think about.

The cooperative game was fun, we had to strategize together, and the game looks gorgeous. I had much more fun playing cooperatively than solo.

What I Liked

The Production: The production on this game, with the wooden meeples, the linen-finished cards, the gorgeous Vincent Dutraite art, and the quality of the everything really shines.

Specials: There are special one-time tokens that allow you to be “do something” special on your turn. The basic game allows you to start with 5 of them. I think without these tokens, you won’t feel like you can ever be smart, as you can be “stuck” with what you get. I will never play without these tokens.

Special Activations: I really like the decision space around the cards you play on the board. This allows you to feel clever! Do I need more elephants? Then I’ll take the +4 elephants! Does everyone need elephants? Then I’ll activate the +2 for everyone space! But I still need to connect the landmark sites, so maybe I’ll place a tile on a location JUST so I can connect locations! This was one of the most important parts of the game to make you feel smart. Taking this away from the 1-player game seems to neuter the game a little bit.

Diagonal: I really appreciate that diagonals are adjacent! You get so tired of games where everything has to be orthogonally adjacent! I feel like this opened up the decision space a little more!

What I Didn’t Like

Games Plays You. I hated that there is almost no mitigation of the double Matriarch. Can I choose not to draw? Can we distribute the matriarchs and/or Lions over parts? Nope. I sometimes feels like the game just is playing me because you pretty much forced to play the Matriarch when you get it.

It has an edge of randomness. It’s can be frustrating to lose because of the way the deck is laid-out. Or sometimes you get the Lions and all clustered and the Lion and Lioness sneak up on the Matriarch and you lose! Your game can be determined by how well you shuffle! The bad news cards can cluster and completely screw you …

The Rulebook:  The rulebook was great on the form factor, and the rules that were presented were presented clearly.  But the lack of some edge cases might really throw some gamers for a loop.  I have no problem moving forward if a rule is unclear, but some of my friends get stuck and can’t move forward.  I worry that this lack of specificity might turn off some gamers.

Conclusion

I am struggling with the score to give Tembo. I did have a good time playing once I figured out you always play a Matriarch as soon as you get it. But I still struggled with how the order of the deck can completely determine whether you can win or lose: the game can play you. BUT after replaying the game correctly, it’s not quite as bad as I thought. I still had fun.

In the end, I am giving this a ranged score: [6.5/10 to 7.5/10]. I needed to capture that I like the game when the deck is fairly well behaved, but I wanted to give a warning that the game can a little too random and frustrating. If I brought this certain groups, they might get a little frustrated by the game playing you (“you always play a Matriarch as soon as you get it …is that really strategy?”). Other groups would just enjoy the setting and production and art … and the fact that it’s a little random is mitigated by the fact the the game is quick.

I think my friends Max and Cassidy would really like this game (with a little strategy hint); they would like the cute and quick game herein.

Oh, and the given solo game is fine for learning the game, but I think it neuters the gameplay a little. If you want to play solo, play two-handed solo instead to enjoy the cleverness and choice that is still in the game (modulo the deck shuffle issues).

Tembo might make my Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement Games now that I have played it correctly! If I had to redo that list, it would need to be redone anyways to make sure Mists Over Carcassone (see review here) were on it! Tembo too.

Star Trek: Star Realms + Borg Invasion = Great Solo and Cooperative Experience!

So, I downloaded Star Realms to my iPad years ago … and I play it all the time. Even after all these years! It’s so easy to play on the iPad! You can play it solo against the computer, and that’s the only way I play. So, Star Realms to me is a solo game.

I even have the original Star Realms little box game (see above).  I think I have played that physical copy … once?  

I was kind of interested in Star Trek: Star Realms because I love the Star Trek theme. The back of the box even claims there is a cooperative mode in here!

Let’s be 100% clear; what the box (see above) is referring to is a team-based mode, where teams of more than one person play against each other … the teams are cooperative within themselves, but this is NOT what we mean when we say a game is cooperative!! This base game is a team-based game; there is no cooperative mode.

And that’s why we are here! The expansion Borg: Invasion DOES indeed add solo and cooperative play to Star Trek: Star Realms!

Let’s take a look!!

Unboxing Star Trek: Star Realms

See game box above with Coke can for scale.

This is obviously a little nicer than my little Star Realms box! It has a full rulebooks! (The original Star Realms little box has a fold-out for a rulebook!! UGH!!!) It has a mat to keep things straight, and hit point tokens. Oh yes, and the cards.

This is a simple deck-building game: see decks above. The decks above are the four different factions in the game: Federation, Klingon, Romulon, and Dominion. Honestly, these are pretty much exactly the same four factions from the original Star Realms, but using Star Trek empires!

There’s also starting hands (Scouts and Raiders, see above). You use coin (gold coins on cards like Scouts generate coin) to buy new cards every turn, hoping to upgrade your deck. Each card does damage (see red 1 on Raider) to do damage to your opponent.

Each player starts with 50 authority. It’s weird! I would have called it Hit Points (because when you get to 0, you lose/die), but the game uses the more … thematic? less-damagey? more PC? term of authority. Weird. I will probably slip and call it Hit Points.

Me vs. Me

Everything I have seen leads me to believe that Star Trek: Star Realms is exactly like Star Realms (modulo the theme). After playing a Me vs Me game (a solo game where I play against myself by jumping from side to side), I can tell you with 100% certainty: this is Star Realms … with a different coat of paint, but the exact same game and cards underneath.

I didn’t do a card-by-card comparison, but everything I saw was an exact copy of a card from the original game. That’s a good thing in some ways, because it means the balance and original luster and gameplay of the original game has been preserved: it’s just now Star Trek.

Just so you know what you are getting.

Borg: Invasion Unboxing and Gameplay

Let’s be 100% clear!  A copy of Star Trek: Star Realms is required to play with Borg: Invasion! 

See box above with Coke can for scale.  Note that this is exactly the same size as the Star Trek: Star Realms game!

The Borg (which will be played by some AI rules) has its own mat: see above.  The Borg ship you start with depends on the number of players!  See above as the Borg Sphere (not as powerful as the Borg Cube) is the starting Borg ship for the solo or 2-player game; it has 25 Hit Points to start with.  There is a notion of starting hand, but that’s only is a player is playing the Borg! One player can play the Borg against the other players, but we are concentrating on the solo and cooperative rules where the Borg are played by an AI.

To the far-left of the Borg mat are the force-field cards!  When you hit the Borg with some damage, the Borg “modulates” their shields so that race can’t do damage next turn! Gulp!  This is super thematic as it reminds us of the Federation modulating the frequency of the their phasers to keep doing damage to the Borg!

The marauders are deemed “neutral” damage, and even they can be defended against! by the Borg!!  Luckily, if three force-fields come out, they will be dispersed at the end of a player’s turn.  So the force fields don’t stay out forever … but they are really annoying. 

The right side of the Borg mat has places for Hive Assimilation cards! Whenever the Borg assimilates a card, it activates a Hive Assimilation card of the appropriate color!  These are placed on the right side of the Borg mat and activated.

In the middle of the mat are all the cards the Borg have assimilated!  The number of cards is the value of the attack by the Borg that turn!  GULP! The more cards the Borg assimilate, the more damage it does every turn!

The Borg ship itself moves left-and-right on its mat; it’s trying to assimilate the “best” technology (where the card of the highest cost is considered the best).  Like many places in this game, if there are ties for a decision for the Borg (two ships cost the same) , the players get to choose. The Borg always assimilates the ship it’s over (it just tries to move one space towards the expensive), and that’s when the Hive Activation cards activate!  See above as the Borg assimilates the 7 cost card!

The card is then placed on the Borg ship!  It hasn’t FULLY assimilated yet!  If the players can do enough damage to the Ship being assimilated, they can detach it from the Borg ship and put it in their discard!  

The players have to be able to do enough damage (same as the cost of the card).  If the players can’t extricate the card from the Borg, it becomes fully assimilated!  From then on, it counts as another damage towards the players!

The Borg have another avenue to attack … they beam Drones (see above) to you!  About 30 of these cards are shuffled into the Market deck.  If you ever draw one, they immediately go the active players area!  As long as you keep drawing drones, they go to your area!  And they will immediately assimilate cards from your discard onto the Borg Ship!  If you have 5 drones land in your area, they will assimilate cards that cost 5 (starting with the biggest cost cards).   They steal from your discard!

You can fight the drones on your turn (one damage per drone) and they go to the scrap yard.

Now, it sounds like the Borg have WAAAAY too many advantages … and they do!  But, each player  also get two gambit cards. 

These gambit cards can come out at any time of the player choosing, so that they can use a special power.

Basically, the Borg attacks, then the players attack. The AI for the Borg is relatively straight-foward, if a little wordy (just to describe what’s pretty clear).

And yet, when the player takes a turn, it’s mostly like a normal turn of Star Realms! Attack the enemy (the Borg)! Buy ships! The difference is that they player can also attack the Drones (if any have beamed onto his space) OR try to de-assimilate a card that’s about to be assimilated!

Players go back and forth with the Borg until (a) either the Borg is defeated (and the player instantly win) or (b) all players are defeated (and the Borg win)! As long as one player survives to destroy the Borg, all players win!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent to pretty good.

This gets an B on the Chair Test. It fits well on the chair next to me, the font is a decent size,  but it is a little too “thematic” a font; I think it detracts from the rules just a little. Also, the pages are black with white text, which I usually hate for rulebooks.  This probably should be an A on the Chair Test, but the color choice  (white on black) and font choice drop it to a B.

The components pages are nice, but they tends to drift over a few pages, explaining as they go.

It works.

The set-up also works.

 

The rulebook works decently.  I would have made a few changes (for example: you discard all the Hive Integration cards at the start of the Borg turn … I would put that as an explicit step for this instead of it being buried in the description of the Hive Integration cards).  I think all the rules were here, but sometimes you had a took a little to find them.

Does this rulebook need an Index? I don’t think so, and it doesn’t have one so that’s fine.

 

Solo Play

So, we finally have a true solo mode for Star Realms! (I could argue that my iPad had Star Realms solo for years, but that’s an iPad thing, not a board game thing). Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!

The solo mode is a true solo mode as you operate one position against the Borg! It’s you vs. the Borg!

Set-up is some work: you have to shuffle 30 drone cards into the market deck. I mean, the market card deck is pretty big (151 cards?) so shuffling in about 30 cards is kind of a lot of work! You need to make sure the drone cards get shuffled in well, and that requires some real good shuffling; I pile shuffle because I don’t know many people who can riffle shuffle 180 cards!

It takes a little bit of time to get into the groove of the game. The player turns are pretty quick (play some cards, buy some ships, do some damage), but the Borg turns are a little more work. Once you have played a number of Borg turns, it starts to go much quicker. At some point, both sides take their turns pretty quickly. The game gets into a good groove.

I have played a number of solo games, and it always feels like the Borg are just crushing you! See as the Borg assimilate a cost 6 card early in the game!  I can’t get that back early in the game!  “No!  The Borg is totally kicking my butt! I’m screwed!!!” 

After those initial few turns, you start to feel a little more power, but man, the Hive Integration cards really do a number on you in the first few turns.

After a few turns, you finally get your deck going and you feel like the tide is turning!  Well, usually.  Sometimes you just lose because the Borg does so much better … they got all the good cards!

To be fair, this arc really reminds me a lot of Star Realms solo mode on the iPad.  I have played SO MANY games of Star Realms that you think I’d always win, right?  Nope!  Sometimes you are just at the whim of luck and will get bad cards while the opponent gets good cards!  And it will be frustrating! But I keep playing because it’s fun.

After a few solo games, I can pronounce … I like this! I can see myself playing again!  The game feels very thematic as you watch the Borg assimilate cards, then try to wrest those cards from them before they get fully assimilated!  The drone cards in the market deck are an interesting twist, and feel thematic as Borg just “teleport” to your ship!  This game really embraced the Borg theme well.

One thing we like to talk about in a solo game is maintenance: how much maintenance does the solo player have to do in a game?  That usually divides into three sections:

  1. Set-up Maintenance
  2. Game Maintenance
  3. Tear-down Maintenance

The absolute WORST part of this solo game is tear-down!  Set-up is annoying, but not terrible.  The Borg turn maintenance, once the game gets going, is doable.  Once you get to tear-down, you may cry a little!  You have to separate all the drone cards from the market deck, separate the Borg Invasion cards from the Star Trek: Star Realms cards and generally sort a lot of cards.  

Sleeve Your Cards!

This is deck-building game; you should sleeve your cards,  I played my solo games without sleeving, but after touching the cards a lot, I realized I should probably sleeve them,  See above as Teresa sleeves them.

The Borg: Invasion cards fit in sleeved … barely. See above.

The Star Trek: Star Realms cards ONLY fit if you remove the insert.  If you sleeve, you will have to probably nuke the insert.

Cooperative Play: Pregame

Before we played a cooperative game, we did a quick head-to-head game (with two people per side managing one deck); this is the way the original Star Realms is meant to be played, and the easiest way to learn the flavor of the game.   None of the my friends had ever played ANY kind of Star Realms!  Granted, they are all experienced players, but they don’t know this variety of deck-building that Star Realms  offers.

It was a pretty quick game (as are most Star Realms games) and my friends got the feel of this deck-building game before jumping into the cooperative game.

I think I recommend playing a quick head-to-head game of Star Realms to learn the system before you jump into the solo or cooperative game.  It just makes it easy to absorb all the new rules that the Borg: Invasion introduces if you already know the flavor of gameplay.  And it’s quick enough, you don’t have an excuse not to!

Cooperative Play

We played a 4-Player cooperative game of Borg: Invasion.  The games scales simply: when the Borg does damage, it does the same amount of damage to everyone!  Thats’ really the only scaling the game has; no other mechanisms really need to change.

There were a bunch of things we noticed.  

  1.  4 players works, but we feel like it is not the best player count. The game stretches out a little longer and it does take a while to play.  We kind of think that 2 or 3 might be better.
  2. Having more players definitely helped with the load and keeping the game running!  Andrew managed the force fields, Sara managed the Hive Reactions, Teresa handled hit points and counters, and I ran the Borg.  This shared load made it a lot easier to keep the game running.  It also helped out a lot when we had to tear-down!  The worst part, the tear-down, was made a lot better by simply having everyone sort and shuffle together.  It may sounds silly to dwell on this, but as someone who tends to always set-up and tear-down games, it’s really nice when the players all help.
  3. There was frustration.  Sara in particular kind of got shut-out of her deck (the Drones kept stealing her tech) and didn’t have a great game.  The force-fields can be really frustrating in the beginning of the game!  You can’t do anything to stop the drones or assimilation or anything because you have such a weak deck!  Everyone was surprised by the game arc; The Borg tromps you, and if you can survive and build a deck … you have a chance!  This is a very different arc than many cooperative games!
  4. There aren’t a lot of cooperative mechanisms. .  There aren’t that many mechanisms in the game to help each other!  You can’t kill drones in someone else’s area, you can’t share cards during normal gameplay, you can’t share healing.  In fact, the only real mechanism in the game for helping others is when you die: You are allowed to throw one card at someone! This game is very multiplayer solitaire.
  5. There is some high-level strategy.   We did notice some high-level discussions emerge as we played. “Don’t do damage this turn!  I have to kill the drones!”  Honestly, almost all the discussion centered on the force-fields!  We would discuss when/why someone would do damage so that we wouldn’t get locked out on damaging things!  It was a little surprising that so much of our conversation was on those (very annoying) force-fields.

Although the game is pretty multi-player solitaire, there was lots of discussion (esp. on the force-fields) and the load was shared well among all the players.   The arc of the game was strange and different for a cooperative game, but it was interesting.

In general, I think the game was a hit, if a little long and a few moments of frustration.

House Rule

The Gambit cards are really cool, and generally have an effect on how you play the game, but you really don’t have any choice on what you get!  You just get 2 gambits and that’s it!  I think a much more fun house rule is that you get 4 Gambit cards (see above) and get to choose 2!   It just makes it feel like you have more choice, and maybe you can even get Gambit cards that suit your play style a little more.

Conclusion

Star Trek: Star Realms is a great game, as it’s just the great Star Realms with a Star Trek theme pasted on. Up until now, you have no way of playing solo unless you got the iPad! Now, with Borg: Invasion, you can fend off the Borg either solo or cooperatively! EDIT: I think there are some ways to play the original Star Realms is solo/cooperative, but this is the first solo/co-op for Star Trek: Star Realms.

I think the Borg: Invasion is a fantastic expansion! Sometimes I worry that “expansions that make a game solo/cooperative” either do too much (so there’s too many rules: Dice Throne Adventures, I am looking at you…) or do too little (so the game is just some shared victory points: Amber Mines, I am looking at you…). This expansion adds just enough rules to make the game thematic, challenging, and interesting but not so many rules that the game becomes unwieldy! There seem to be just enough new rules, and the game just seems soooo thematic!

The cooperative game is very much multiplayer solitaire, as there aren’t really any cooperative mechanisms for helping each other out (just one: when you die!). Having said that, the high-level discussions about the force-fields and the Market and the drones really do seem to keep everyone engaged and caring about other players turns, so there is some cooperation that definitely emerges.

Solo: I’d probably give this a 7.5 or 8/10. Cooperatively about 7.5 or 8/10. The only reason this isn’t a little higher is that there is a little frustration that emerges in the early game that can be debilitating; that game arc is weird, but still interesting! I suppose if embrace that early-game frustrating arc, this could be an 8.5 or even a 9. It’s so thematic! Just like an episode of Star Trek with the Borg!

Neat game. Fantastic Expansion.

Tales Of The Arabian Nights: 40th Anniversary Edition Review: There’s a Solo Mode??? And If You Squint … A Cooperative Mode???

Tales of the The Arabian Nights is a game I both hate and love. When it’s at its worst, it’s random with banal crap happening to you that you have almost no control over; it’s long and tedious. At its best, it creates some of the most memorable stories (with laughter and tears) on game nights that you’ll remember forever. It’s the best of times that I remember, and so that’s why I chose to back the 40th edition on Gamefound (see above) when it came out.

The original edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights (see above) got quite a bit of play back in my playgroups in Las Cruces. And at first, I hated it. It seemed so random; things would just happen to you!! If you were “lucky” (if you had the right skill at the right time), … things would just go your way. But, if you were unlucky, your entire story became a slog as you failed check after check. If, however, you just realize this is an adventure that “just happens to you”, and you just enjoy it for what it is, you can really have a good time. But ya, you could still have a very bad game. And it could still suck.

BUT in order for this to be a good experience, everyone has to know what they are getting into, and how random this, and how you just “gotta grin and bear it” sometimes. If you play with someone who is too serious, or who get aggravated by random stuff, or who just think “this is unfair” … you will not have a good time. Everyone has to be in on the joke. And you kinda have to be in the mood for it. That one person who doesn’t enjoy this will bring this game down very quickly. So, in some ways, this is a very brittle game because one player can easily ruin it. But if you get the right group, with the right frame of mind, with the right mood, with the right sense of humor, this can be a magical Arabian Night!

Does It Need An App?

So, this is a storybook game with a great physical storybook (see above and below). You read lots and lots of flowery text to each other.

I remember when we used to play the original version of Tales of Arabian Nights, and we’d all say “Ah, I think this game would so much better if it had an App. These books are huge! It’s so hard to remember how to look stuff up! And there’s some fiddliness! It would be better as an App!” Sure, an App could make looking up the text simpler. Sure, an App could handle the fiddliness. Sure, an App might make this easier to haul around if there were no books. But now, after reflecting back to the original version and the new version: it’s better with the books.

The books invest people into the game; people have to dig into the book and get involved! It’s a commitment to consult the grid and find the right entry! The person on your left and the person on your right are helping you look-up things in physical books! You make the choices, but everyone is staying involved! There’s a certain sweat equity in looking up and reading passages from a book;“This had better be good, darn it, because I am doing some work to make sure it moves forward!” You are invested because you are making the choices, and your neighbors are invested because they are consulting grids and charts! Everyone is invested in your ridiculous story!

It’s the physical investment in books and charts that makes this game magic. That’s the magic word; invested. You are physically and mentally and emotionally invested.

Don’t get me wrong; some of my favorite storybook games have Apps: Forgotten Waters, Freelancers, Wandering Galaxy are all excellent storybook games that take great advantage of the electronic genre with voice acting, dynamically generated content, and constantly improving stories!

Yet, Plaid Hat games did go out of their way to make physical copies of their storybooks (see above). Why? Because there is a certain magic to the physical books.

Solo Mode

Crazily enough, they made a solo mode for this game. Whaaaaat? Let’s be 100% clear here: the original Tales of the Arabian Nights did not have a solo mode! And it seems weird to have a solo mode because the fun of the multi-player game is the shared reading and shared experiences in this world. But, I think the randomness of the base game is just too much for a solo player. In the multi-player game, we can laugh at the stupid and random things that happen to each other (“Remember the time that Efreet enslaved you? That was hilarious!” “Yes It was!” ), but somehow that seems less fun in a solo mode.

So, PlayToZ wrote some solo adventures and added it to the box! The solo adventures come in their own booklet (see above) with about 15+ directed adventures. Note my use of the word directed—you still explore this world, but there’s a real underlying and scripted story that unfolds for each adventure in the game. To be clear, there are still plenty of random moments (as you still take some turns like the original game), but about half of the game is a story that’s really unfolding (from the Solo Tales book) and the other half of the game are the silly and random stuff from the base game (from the main Storybook).

My first adventure felt like I was playing a novel! The writing seemed quite good and the story was engaging! This was more like a Choose Your Own Adventures tale with real story and real writing!

The only problem with the solo mode is that the stories are limited: there are only 15+ adventures in the Solo Storybook (see above). Sure, that’s probably enough for most people, but it can limit replayability. The good news is that the story path you take does change if you make different choices, so you can play an episode again and get a different story line, a different timeline. Anyways, after 15+ stories, I will probably forget them and so I could start over. If you have an eidetic memory, you won’t be able to play the stories over without some repeats.

I am shocked this has a solo mode. But it really works well.

Base Game

So, this is a cooperative games blog, but the base game, the game everyone knows and loves, is not cooperative; it’s competitive! Tales of the Arabian Nights is a competitive game about who can get the right glory and destiny (two kinds of victory points) and make it back to Baghdad! “But Rich, you can’t talk about games that aren’t cooperative! That’s off brand for you!! You only talk about cooperative games! And sometime solo games!”

Ah, but there’s two issues here I want to address;

  1. The game is cooperative in the sense in that you are having a shared experience and working together to read the adventures out of the book.
  2. With the advent of the solo adventures, you can make this game truly cooperative by playing team solo: play the solo mode as a group pretending to be the solo player!

Granted, the base game actually has a lot of take-that mechanisms (“Choose a reaction for your opponent!“ “If you have a disease, you can give it to others!”), so I have to admit it’s not really cooperative. Okay, you got me there. But the reading of the storybook gives you that shared experience which feels like a cooperative game.

But the team solo is truly cooperative! You can play through the solo adventures as a team! The solo mode is a little clunky, as the solo player has to choose reactions, look-up in the grid, find the storybook entry, read it to himself, then “pretend” not to see too much on the page (so he doesn’t cheat). With a group of friends playing team solo, all this maintenance (like the base game) can be shared.

So, ya. The team solo is totally a fake thing that’s not in the game; it’s a house rule we made up. But it really works as a cooperative game.

The Base Competitive Game

Like I said, I love and hate the base game. And me and my friends played a competitive game of Tales of Arabian Nights the way it should be played … and I loved it and hated it.

I love it because I loved all the shared mechanisms, the cooperation, the interaction as everyone stays involved. See a 3-Player game above: everyone is involved in reading , listening, and consulting.

And yet, I still kinda hated it. The randomness from the original game is still there if you play the competitive game. It’s still goofy, it’s still fun, you still have to be in the right state of mind, and I still loved it, but I still kinda hated the randomness of the base game. I would maybe give the base competitive game a 6 or 7/10 … it’s very random. But still fun.

Team Solo!

We played as Team Solo one night! All 4 of us playing the solo mode as a group! What happened was that we simply played the game like the solo game, but the books and active player would rotate through everybody. I thought the game would be more cooperative, but what ended up happening was more that the active player tended to make “the choice” and we’d just say “I don’t know if that’s a good idea …” or “That sounds great!”

But, like I’ve said so many times in this review, just the act of consulting charts and reading books is very cooperative! So, instead of inflecting disease upon our fellows, we participate in the shared story … with one person being in the hot seat every turn “making decisions”.

I personally prefer Team Solo mode much more than the base competitive game, but some of my friends actually prefer the base competitive game (“because there are more choices”). So, I had more fun this week (Team Solo!) and Andrew and Teresa had more fun last week (competitive mode). In fact, Teresa likes Tales of Arthurian Knights better in the cooperative mode!

I think the team solo works for a cooperative mode (I liked it), but Tales of Arthurian Knights (see review here) is a stronger cooperative game.

Conclusion

So, this 40th edition of the game is really nice. The base game essentially feels the same as the original Tales of the Arabian Nights! If you play in the original mode, this still feels like the original game. Like I said, it’s a game I both love and hate. If you have a group in the right mood with the right sense of humor, the crazy and random things that happen to you can be hilarious! It can also be very brittle: a single player who isn’t getting it can bring down an entire game, or too many random events can just make the game feel unfun.

The solo mode is probably the most surprising addition to the game, partly because it works so well! It takes the base gameplay and adds direction and true story to the game, giving the solo player a very satisfying experience! I was also very impressed by the writing in the solo mode stories!

But, if you squint, you can also make this a cooperative game! The team solo idea works reasonably well; we tried it out one game and were happy with the gameplay. If you want Tales of Arabian Nights to be a truly cooperative game, you can do it!! Just play the solo mode as team solo … but it wasn’t everyone’s favorite way to play.

If you think you will hate the basic ideas (reading from storybooks to each other, suffering random effects as you play, even in the solo and cooperative mode), you will hate this; you know you. But if this idea of a storybook game with crazy things and lots of reading appeals to you, I think you can have some amazing experiences! And if your group is looking for a little more story, a little more cohesion, a little more cooperation, the solo mode can bring it … for both the solo player or team solo.

9 out of 10 for me for everything this does for solo! This is a fantastic production! I love it! Just be aware of what this is; you may hate it. I honestly would give this a 7/10 if it were only the original base game, but the new solo mode really expands the ways you can play the game! Solo! Cooperative! Competitive! And I liked the cooperative mode of team solo, but my friends still like the original competitive mode better.. as broken and random as that can be.

If you just want a good cooperative storybook game, Tales of Arthurian Knights is better. For a more directed solo game, Tales of Arabian Nights is better. For the competitive game, I think whichever theme appeals to you is probably better.

Burgle Brothers 3: Future Flip. A Solo and Cooperative Review

This is my official first true game of 2026! It came in mid January 2026!

Burgle Bros. 3: Future Flip is a cooperative exploration/grid movement game for 1-4 players. You and your fellows are doing a heist, but it’s in the future! You have to hack the main mainframe and get out to win! This was on Kickstarter in July 2024 and promised delivery April 2025; it arrived mid January 2026, so it’s more than a few months late.

This is definitely a little outside the theme of the previous Burgle Bros games!  Burgle Bros (the original) is a small game about doing a heist! The second one, Burgle Bros 2, was a bigger game, but still a casino heist!  See our review here of that.  Although this game, Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip has the same DNA, with floors to explore and tiles to flips and enemies to evade, it does feel a little different.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is an interestingly shaped box: see above for the curved corner!  The corner doesn’t seem to get in the way (I have opened and closed it multiple times and it hasn’t been a problem), so it does look cool but it doesn’t cause issues.  Also, see can of Coke for persepective.

Each player chooses one of the 10? 14? (if you got the Kickstarter, you got a few more characters) characters that comes with the game.  You’ll note that each character has a special ability, as well as number of actions (clock) and hand limit (hand).  This is a cooperative action point game; each player will get so many actions on their turn.

The wooden meeples correspond to the players.  Weirdly, they chose NOT to have the character cards be the same color as the wooden meeples?

In fact, if you aren’t careful, you may get flummoxed when you can’t find your character!  Where’s the character meeples for the two characters above???

It turns out each character has TWO sides: geared and disguised, and the meeples  ONLY correspond to the disguised side.  See above.  I am pointing this out because it might trip you up a little in your first play.   

Each character also has their own personal gear: note the little character symbol in the upper left of the gear cards.  These are special cards that are one-use abilities during the game.

There are also plenty of generic gear you can pick up after you hack a SysOp; it’s your reward for a successful hack!

The SysOps are various flavors (green, red, and OMEGA PROTOCOL): these are the baddies roaming the floors of the building trying to keep it under control.

The floors of the building are represented by neoprene mats; one for each floor!  And yes, I believe these come standard with all versions of the game!

The Patrol cards (above) control the movement of the SysOps: see above as they set the destination of the SysOp (D3 or D4).   Note that there is a different pile for each floor.

As the characters explore the floors, various tiles come out; see them above!

These are all kept in a nice bag (really, it’s nice and it fits all the tiles well).   The reason for the bag is that the tile you choose depends on either the floor you are on, whether your geared or disguised, or various other things!  This is different from other Burgle Bros games where you just put the tiles out and flip ’em when you PEEK or MOVE.  Here, in Burgle Bros 3, you have to draw a tile and flip it to the appropriate side!  And yes, that’s why it’s called Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip!

As the game unfolds, the floor unfurls and you can see where alarms, walkways, coridors, etc are.   

One of the most important things in the game is to stay out of the SysOps ways as they roam the floors!  Each player has some “cool” and some “stealth”. (eee above: the blue cube are “cool” cubes, and the masks are “stealth” tokens).  While you are cool, you are in your disguised mode but if the SysOps moves to you, you lose 1 or 2 cool cubes!  Once you “lose all your cool”, you flip to the geared side!  And now, when they move to you, you lose stealth! If you are ever reduced to zero stealth, ALL PLAYERS LOSE THE GAME!

The nice little summary cards list all the things the players can do: PEEK at a tile next to you (to avoid setting off an alarm maybe), MOVE to a tile and activate it (because you need to reveal stuff quickly), CHARM (to get some hack cards), LINK and SWAP (to share gear or hacks) or use your Tool.

What’s this CHARM thing??? That seems new???  You can CHARM the co-workers of the building (hey, most people don’t like working for evil corporations and will help you with a little coercion) to give you HACK cards.  Well, they are called PROGRAM cards, but these are the cards you use to HACK the SysOps!

To win the game, you have to HACK the final SysOp on the Mainframe space!  See two such evil baddies above!  Note how many Program cards you will need to hack the final SysOp!  (There are some other preconditions: both floors have to be in OMEGA PROTOCOL and you have to be on the Mainframe space and you have to have all the Program cards!)

Once the main SysOp has been hacked, if all players make it back to the Air Ducts (see above), we all win!  Shared victory!! If anyone loses all their stealth, we all lose!!

Really, this production is fantastic.  I feel like they fixed a few problem we had in Burgle Bros 2!  We’ll discuss that more in the What We Liked Section below.

Overall, great production.

Rulebook

This was a very good rulebook.

It gets an A on The Chair Test: the rulebook fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it stays open, and it has a big, easy-to-read font.   There are also plenty of examples and well-notated parenthetical boxes.  See above.

The Components list is what you want: pictures of all components with an annotation underneath,

The set-up is perfect; it spans two adjacent pages, so you can set-up without having to spill over into other pages!  It’s got a picture for set-up, and it’s well marked.

In general, this was a very good rulebook.

I am on the fence on wether this should have had an Index; this is a pretty straight-forward game, so I am not sure it needed one.  But it would have nice to have an Index to differentiate things like MOVE vs ENTER and a few other concepts.  The rules are all there, not always quite where I expected them, but they didn’t take too much time to find.

This was a good rulebook.

 

Solo Play

Interestingly, Burgle Bros 3 lists solo play as a Variant (see above)  But I loved this!  They specified the  solo mode perfectly.  This is how I want to play solo modes!  Two-handed solo!  Thank you !

See above as I am set-up for a solo (two-handed, playing two characters)!

Your characters start on the Air Duct space, getting ready to explore!

I have to admit, I didn’t enjoy my solo game.  Many, many times, I got stuck.  It’s clear you don’t want to go near the SysOps, because you lose cool/stealth.  Sometimes, you just get stuck in a corner; you could move over the SysOps, but then you lose your precious cool.   The overall theme for this game is patience.  Sometimes, your turn is almost nothing.  It’s unfortunate, if you don’t move on your turn, there’s usually very little you can do.   Sometimes you can CHARM, sometimes you can LINK/SWAP.  But many times your turn is “well, I’d better stay here or the SysOp will move over me”.

I lost my first solo game pretty badly.  I got stick in corners too frequently, and the luck of the dice and Patrol cards just went sour.

I was very frustrated.

 

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game went a little better, but not much.

The same problems that plagued the solo game plagued the cooperative game.  Sometimes, a character would just get stuck in a corner and couldn’t do anything.  They’d have maybe one viable action, but have to basically just waste their turn.  They’d get stuck because a KEYCARD space came out, or the pattern on the floor cornered a character, or the SysOps simply always was coming towards you!  It’s even harder to predict what the SysOp will do when 3 people play after you!  Will you lose your cool???

The best part of the game was the endgame.  Once all the tiles had been revealed, then we could be smart and try to figure how to get out of the building!  In the endgame, we had fun as we tried to puzzle out the best way to use the spaces on the board!!

Unfortunately, I didn’t like the process of GETTING to the endgame.   It just felt so  … reactive.  All we could do was “react” to the state of the board on our turn.  There was a little bit of strategy about where people might go, but sometimes the board layout or the SysOps pattern just stopped you from doing anything.  The game felt like … stuff was just happening to me and I could do very little about it.

I hate to say it, but the game just felt too random.

What I Liked

Rulebook: this is an amazing rulebook; it’s so well done.  The parenthetical notes were just icing on the cake!

Meeples: In Burgle Bros 2, we joked that puting the stickers on the meeples was a legacy game!  Don’t mess up the stickers!  Here, in Burgle Bros 3, they got it right: have the meeples come pre-noted.  See above.

Bag:  The bag is well-done.  It would be easy to screw up how this bag worked, but they didn’t.  it’s easy to pull tiles from it and “shuffle tiles” inside.

Neoprene Mats:   The neoprene mats work well, and they fit back in the box.  (This was another potential issue from Burgle Bros 2: the mats fit weirdly).

Two Share Actions!  I adore that there are TWO kinds of sharing actions!  If you are on the same space, you can SWAP!  If you are both far away, but on a LINK space, you can still share stuff!  Most cooperative games only have one notion of sharing, and I really really liked this!  In fact, it made the endgame so much more fun because we had multiple ways to get Program cards to people to do the final hack!  

Production: In general, the production is fantastic modulo one or two issues.

Endgame: Once all the tiles were out, you could be smart. I loved how the endgame played out.

What I Didn’t Like

Frustration.  Many times, you feel like you can’t do something on your turn.  Sure, you have to be patient, but it just felt there were too many turns where “the smart thing” to do … was to do nothing.  In fact, the frustration was so palpable in the cooperative game and I noticed us getting testy with each other.  I think this is a function of the frustration level!

Colors?  Why aren’t the character cards color-coded to match the meeples?   This seems a strange decision especially because the meeples are kind of small!  The color is the main feature you can see! Making the character cards all the same color makes it harder to distinguish who is who.

Reactions

Andrew liked this the best; he was always thinking of ways to get around stuff.  He gave this a 6 or 6.5, which is actually quite high for him.

Sara liked it okay, but she got frustrated a lot.  She gave the same rating: 6 or 6.5, maybe leaning towards a 6.

Teresa generally liked it.

Rich had to most trouble with it.  He found it too frustrating and too random.  The solo game he’d give a 5, and maybe maybe a 6 to the cooperative game.

 

Conclusion

Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip is an amazing production; the rulebook, the cards, the meeples, are all great.  In order to enjoy this game, you have to be patient.  You have to be able to suffer turns where you do nothing.  If that doesn’t sound like fun, you won’t enjoy this game.   In fact, the game can be down right frustrating when you get stuck.

The best part of the game is the endgame; if you can make it to the point where the board is unfurled, then you can be clever and win the game and get out!  Unfortunately, in order to get to that point, you have to suffer through the random flips and turns which may lead to frustration when you feel only reactive.

This game was a little divisive in my group; some people liked it, some people didn’t.  Hopefully this review will help you decide if this is for you.

The Case For Adding Player Selected Turn Order as a Mechanism to BoardGameGeek

For turn order in many traditional board games, many games use the simple tried-and-true model that “play proceeds clockwise around the table”. The turn order is dictated by where you sit. It turns out, in many modern cooperative games, we have seen a rise in a new mechanism called Player Selected Turn Order which changes this up!

What Is It?

Player Selected Turn Order is a mechanism by which players in a (almost always cooperative) game select as a group the order in which they take their turns. Players together choose the order of play within a turn! This cooperative mechanism gives the players more agency as they can choose the order in which they takes their turns, so as to reinforce another character, set-up another character for a combo, or just get out of another player’s way. Surprisingly, there is no official name for this mechanism!

We have written a few articles about the mechanism over the years:

  1. Player Selected Turn Order In Cooperative Games: This is a high-level article from many years ago surveying the landscape. See https://coopgestalt.com/2018/02/06/player-selected-turn-order-in-cooperative-games/. The same article was put on bgg, and there were some interesting follow-ups. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1934592/player-selected-turn-order-in-cooperative-games
  2. Fastball Special: This is an article discussing why something like Player Selected Turn Order is necessary in cooperative games so you can set-up combos like Wolverine and Colossus’ Fastball Special: see https://coopgestalt.com/2016/07/15/fastball-special/
  3. Seven House Rules For Cooperative Games: This is article talking about some House Rules which make some games more fun; #7 is Adding Player Selected Turn Order to a Cooperative Game. See https://coopgestalt.com/2020/09/20/seven-house-rules-for-cooperative-board-and-card-games/

A game that most people know with Player Selected Turn Order (even if that’s not what they call it) is Marvel Zombicide: Heroes’ Resistance. In this game, the players control 4 Marvel heroes (always 4 heroes), and the heroes are allowed to go in any order they want.

“Spider-man gets out of the way so Hulk can smash! If Hulk smashes enough, Wasp can move and attack other zombies, otherwise, she can finish off the the zombies that will eat J. Jonah Jameson!”

By allowing the players to choose the order they activate their heroes, they can strategize together and also react to the results of the previous heroes’ turn! They can plan strategies and back-up strategies by choosing the order the Heroes play.

  • Player Selected Turn Order makes sense in solo games as well as cooperative games; for example in Heroes’ Resistance, the game requires that there always be 4 heroes in play, so the solo player gets to make activation order choices just like the cooperative game.

Coarse-Grained vs Fine-Grained

There are two flavors of Player Selected Turn Order: coarse-grained and fine-grained. The difference only shows up when a player can do multiple actions on their turn.

Consider Heroes’ Resistance: each hero gets 4 actions to perform on their turn, but they must complete all 4 actions before the next player can go!! This is coarse-grained Player Selected Turn Order: each players must take take their entire turn before the next player can do anything. It is called coarse-grained because the turns are “coarse” and large; all actions must be taken before proceeding.

In games with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order, each hero gets some number of actions, but these actions can be interspersed among the players!

An example of a game with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order is Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles (or any of the Set A Watch games). In these games, each player rolls some dice, and each die can be “activated” to do something (used for damage or activating a special power). When it is the players’ turns, they can choose to activate a die in whatever order they want! The Golem can take out the front heavy hitter with his 12, and he can keep going, or let someone else go. Maybe after everyone else has gone, the Golem can use his last two dice to play clean-up! It’s up to the players to decide the order they will activate their dice (or powers)! No one has to “complete a turn”, players just activate their dice in any order they want!

Basically, with fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order, the actions of the players can be interspersed however they want; there’s no notion of a player completing their turn before another. See above as each character has 3 dice to activate, and they can be activated in whatever order the players’ choose!

It’s called fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order because the player’s full turns are broken up into a finer sub-actions, and these sub-actions can be activated in any order the player’s choose.

No Official Mechanism?

Given how prevalent cooperative games are now, and given how many modern cooperative games have Player Selected Turn Order, it’s surprising that BoardGameGeek (the world’s authority and go-to place for board games) has no notion of this mechanism when it describes game!

When you go the mechanisms of a game, say Heroes’ Resistance (see link here or picture above), you’ll see no notion of Player Selected Turn Order for this game! It’s Cooperative, has Variable Player Powers, but … does it have Player Selected Turn Order? We happen to know it does, but it’s not clear from the mechanisms page!

Proposal

We’d like to propose that BoardGameGeek add the Player Selected Turn Order to their list of mechanisms so that cooperative and solo games can list it! It probably makes sense to add both Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) and Player Selected Turn Order (coarse-grained) since they are technically important sub-genres of Player Selected Turn Order!

In the next section, we document about 30+ modern cooperative and solo games that have Player Selected Turn Order (with notes of fine-grained vs. coarse-grained, if known). This is definitely an incomplete list that we will keep adding to! We also include links back to some of our original reviews so that we “document” that the game has Player Selected Turn Order.

Some Games With Player Selected Turn Order

Arkham Horror: The Card Game. See bgg link here.
Battle For Greyport: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Chronicles of Light: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
CO-OP: The co-op game: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Daedaelus Sentence: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Darkest Night (1st Edition): coarse-grained PSTO. Currently the earliest example of PSTO? See bgg link here.
Descent: Journeys Into the Dark: coarse-grained PSTO. See bgg link here.
Etherfields: fine-grained PSTO. Thanks to Hans
Fateforge: fine-grained PSTO. Thank to Hans
Hacktivity: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Mansions of Madness: coarse-grained PSTO. See bgg link here.
Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Marvel Zombies: X-Men Resistance: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
… and so many Zombicide games
OathSworn: fine-grained PSTO. Thanks to Hans
Paleo: coarse-grained PSTO. See link here.
Reckoners: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Sammu-Ramat: fully coarse-grained PSTO in solo mode, stilted in cooperative mode. See link here.
Secrets of Zorro: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG: coarse-grained PSTO.
Set A Watch: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Set A Watch: Doomed Run: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles. fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Set A Watch: Swords of the Coin: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Sharknado: I don’t think this ever came out? See link here.
Space Cadets: Away Missions: coarse-grained PSTO. Thanks to Scott R.
Slay The Spire: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Spark Riders 3000: fine-grained PSTO. See link here.
Spirit Island. fine-grained, as players play. See bgg link here.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Slaughterhouse: coarse-grained PSTO. Thanks to Edgar
Viticulture World: coarse-grained PSTO (a little stilted like Sammu-ramat). Thanks to Lon.

Are there any we are missing?

Crime Unfolds: How Do You Express That?

Welcome back to Detective Month!  Last week, we looked at the storybook cyber-noir detective game of LA-1!  This week, we take a look at the Escape Room game of Crime Unfolds!  A Pop-Up Escape Game 3D: Immersive Crime Game!

Every few months, my friends Charlie and Allison and I get together to play games … usually Escape Room games! They are my Escape Room buddies! This month, we are trying out the Crime Unfolds cooperative Escape Room game! Nominally, we are detectives solving a crime!

We’ll discuss our first impressions and thoughts on the Crime Unfolds system. It also brings up a few questions to ask yourself about Escape Room games. Why do you like them? Or maybe … Why do you dislike them?

Requires an App

Crime Unfolds requires an app!   That is maybe the first thing you should know.  Some people love Apps with their Escape Room games, and some people don’t.  It’s really not clear by looking at the book that this requires an App.  It’s not a big deal, as Charlie went and got one real quick.

There are 6 cases interspersed in this game.  We started with case 1.  We also, like many escape room games, started with lots of “random stuff we know will be useful later”.

 

Solve The Puzzle vs. Express the Answer

Over the course of one night. Charlie and Allison and Richie embarked on the first case!  It’s supposed to take an hour … it took us more than two hours.  And we are experienced Escape Roomers?? What Gives?

The problem we had over and over was not “how we do we solve the puzzle” but “how do you express the solution”?  We easily solved a bunch of the puzzles, but inputting into the app was the main hurtle!

For example: At one point, we had “shifted” away from a screen that had the arrows for directionality, so we thought we had to express NSEW via UP/DOWN or North/South/East/West using letters on the command line?  We lost at least 15 minutes … when we realized the App had those arrows in another screen.  It was very frustrating!  We had solved the puzzle, but the app had made is less than intuitive to enter.

We were pretty frustrated after this game, but after thinking about it overnight, I have come to realize that most puzzle games are like this!  You have to do two things:

  1. Solve the puzzle
  2. Express The Solution

Solving the puzzle is usually the funner part, and some games make it very easy to express the solution.  We loved Doomensions (see our review here), as expressing the solution was easy; it always took the same form as a 3 or 4 digit code.    Here in Crime Unfolds, the solution expressed itself in so many different ways! Sometimes it was interacting with some widgets on the app!  Sometimes it was saying the right thing at the command line interface!  Sometimes it pressing the right buttons!  

Our frustration with Crime Unfolds was how to express the solution!  Many times during the game, we felt like we solved the puzzle, but couldn’t move forward because the solution wasn’t expressed in the way we expected it!

After cogitating on this some more, I realized this expressing the solution can be just as interesting as solving the puzzle!  To express your solution, you have to change your perspective!! What’s the best way to express this solution?  What’s the most thematic way to express this solution?  What’s the perspective of the player in the game?  All of these contribute to different ways to express the solution.   To be fair, sometimes the expression of the solution is poorly done, and that’s just a frustration of this genre.  I think if you reset your thinking that expressing the solution is part of the puzzle, then it can less frustrating. I realize how hard it can be to do in the heat of the moment, so it’s easy to say this. 

To enjoy Crime Unfolds, you will absolutely have to enjoy thinking about new ways to express a solution to a puzzle.

 

Pop-Up Cool!  But You Need A Magnifying Glass!

One of things that was very cool about Crime Unfolds was the pop-up scenes that came out of the book!  It turns out 6 rooms in the book, and you take a turns visiting some of these rooms in each case.  They look really cool!  See above!

Unfortunately, some of the text/symbols on the board are hard to read!  At one point, Charlie went and got his “fine work” magnifying glasses/helmet!  We also used our phones to zoom in so we could see things!  

The pop-up stuff works well, but be aware that you may have to really zoom on the board.  There is just a little bit of “Where’s Waldo” and “I can barely see that” in this game.

 

Conclusion

Did we like Crime Unfolds?  Yes and no.  We only played one case, but we think it is fairly representative of what this game is.  The pop-up system works and has a very “toy” and “fun” factor to it; that was something we definitely liked.   We liked solving the puzzles but found expressing the solutions frustrating.  I think, upon further reflection, that if you go into the game knowing expression the solutions is PART of the puzzle, that might help make that more enjoyable.   

I hope I can talk Charlie and Allison into playing more cases from this book; I think there’s some fun puzzles here, but I hope we can just get over the frustrations when expressing the puzzle solutions.

 

The Peak Team: Solo and (kinda) Cooperative Review

The Peak Team is a cooperative game for 1-5 players.  This feels like a pick-up and deliver game, as you traverse a map trying to reach flags; strictly speaking,  BGG doesn’t classify this as a pick-up and deliver (see here) but more hand management and pattern movement.

It’s also odd that the BGG entry lists the name of the game as The Peak Team, but the cover clearly seems to show The Peak Team Rangers?  Shrug?

This is a game about players working together to traverse a map and find animals!  The first few games, we joked, were like Pokemon!  Find them all!  You are traveling around a map to complete missions and, along the way, record seeing some animals!  A very fun theme!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

The box is a little smaller than normal; see above (with Coke Can for scale)

There are two rulebooks; basic rules and then advanced manual: see above.

There’s a little bit cardboard to punch out.  The carabiner hooks are pretty thematic for a game about traversing the wilderness.

There’s a really neat map: it has two sides!  One side for 1-3 players, one side for 4-5 players.  The map is easy to read and well-notated.

The most important piece in the game are the Supply Cards!  See above. These are nice linen-finished cards that are the heart of the game; they are multi-use cards that players discard for actions.

There’s simple Missions cards which note Missions a ranger might be undertaking.

There’s also some nice player aids.  Note that this game has 5 levels (!) of play.  We’ll discuss that later.

There’s some player mats (above) with unpunched tokens.

There’s some neat little wooden flags, wooden player tokens, and wooden marker.  These really look nice on the board. See above.

Overall, the components are pretty great; they are easy to-read, well-notated, and have a fun zingy quality to them.

Rulebook

We need to get this out of the way; this is one of the worst set of rulebooks I have read in a while.  They have three major failings.

First of all, these rulebooks completely fail the Chair Test!  Each rulebook is some sort of weird multi-fold rulebook that is impossible pull apart.  It’s not a rulebook with staples; it’s 4 pages in a weird quad-fold.  This is SO HARD to access!  I can’t really set it on the chair next to me, it totally droops!  The font is pretty small, so that doesn’t help.  It does have a lot of pictures, but that doesn’t save it.  This rulebook is almost unusable.    I can’t emphasize enough how horrible this form factor is.

Secondly, splitting this up into two rulebooks seems a weird choice.  The solo rules are in the second rulebook, but the solo mode requires you knowing all about how base game plays.  Each of these rulebook is clunky enough with it’s weird quad-fold, but now, when I go looking for rules, I have to scan two horrible quad-fold rulebooks?

I think abstractly, I like the idea of slowly building game that gets harder and harder, but breaking all those rules into two rulebooks (with rule text scattered everywhere) just makes it that much harder to learn.

Finally, the rules just seem poorly organized and missing some edge cases.  I feel like they did everything they could to make the rules on as few as pages as possible, with a tiny font, and tiny examples you can barely read.  And the solo mode is the worst; the way they solo rules are set out, you can’t “really” play the solo mode until you absorbed ALL the rules of the 5 base games.   The solo mode was just so poorly specified, I had to just make a few judgement calls to move forward.

Let’s be clear: most of the rules are in the rulebook (modulo a few edge cases), so you can pick-up these rules and get through a game.   The set-ups and components lists are fine.

This was a horrible set of rules: the form-factor was terrible, the decision for multiple rulebooks seemed a mistake, and the poor organization was frustrating (especially the solo mode).  BUT you can learn the game.

Once you know this game, you can look back on learning the game as a distant nightmare.  I got through it.  Done.

The real question is; once you know the game, is it a good game?  That’s an interesting question!

Gameplay

The crux of the game is going around the board trying to get your missions (notated by a flag on the board) done.  You get your mission done by moving to your flag.

You discard supply cards to move along paths (each card tells you which path you can take and how far: see above).  These are multi-use cards; you can also discard the card to “record” an animal!  Find them all!!!

You can see a game in mid play (above) as the flags notate where each ranger needs to go!  And you can also see the paths: each one different.  The colors of the Locations indicate which animals are in the area; if you have an animal card of the right color for your spot, you can discard it and see it!

To win, you need to get all your missions done AND see all the animals!

The game graduates from level 1 to level 2 to level 3 to level 4 to level 5!  Each new level adds new mechanism(s) which make the game more challenging: more bad stuff, more good stuff, more mechanisms, more choices!  By the time you get to level 5, you are playing the full game with Special Missions, Weather Events, special Powers, Wildlife with special powers, and road blockers!

Solo

So, The Peak Team does have a solo mode; thank you for following Saunders’ Law!  See above as the Advanced Manual has an entire section on it.

Unfortunately, this solo mode is a “variant” of the base game: you have to read the full rules for the base game (for ALL FIVE LEVELS) to play the solo game.   See above! This was very frustrating.   I muddled through the base game rules for level 1 and had to figure out which rules did/didn’t apply for the solo game.

The solo rules are there (see above) and I did get through them, but the experience with this rulebook was (again) sub-optimal.

The solo game has the solo player take control of 3 rangers on the board.  See above.

The solo player then puts out a grid of 12 cards (3×4 for row-major).  See above.  This is a shared hand (among all three rangers) for the rangers to do stuff.  Note how you can see some of the cards, but not all of them!  The hidden cards will be revealed as you take other cards below, but you still have enough information to make some plans (as you can see the cards at the top).  Cards MUST be taken from the bottom of some column to play it.

The game starts with each ranger having a starting mission; they need to go to that Location to complete their Mission!

To get more missions, some ranger has to end his turn on Ranger station, and then Missions can be doled out. Note that each ranger can “only” have two missions at a time!

Once the solo player decides he’s done, he can stop and go to the next round, exposing new missions.   Remember, however, that all missions must be completed to win, so the missions simply move up to the next day!  And if too many missions are unsolved between rounds, you also lose.

The solo player soon learns to do the bare minimum to not take any penalties, because he can keep cards from previous round!  See above: We have an extra card leftover from the previous round, so the next round will have 13 cards (instead of 12) to be able to do more!

You start the game of Level 1, the simplest mode.  Once you feel comfortable with that game, the next level adds a few rules and makes the game more challenging.   I generally played about two per games per level; the first game was a learning game where I wold lose horribly, but then the second game typically felt like a comfortable win.  I think I played 12 games overall in the solo mode!

I want to make sure this is clear; I wanted to play all those 12 games in the solo mode!  This was a real fun solo mode!  I felt like I had lots of choices (but see House Rules below for more discussion), and I really enjoyed traversing the board to get all my missions done!  There’s a lot of fun decisions; When do I travel?  Who travels?  Do I discard 4 symbols to get a wild so I can force a travel?  Do I pick up an animal because I am here, or do I wait?  Should I force a completed mission so I can have space for a future mission?  Because I am making decisions for 3 different rangers on the board, it always felt like some of the cards I had were useful to at least one of them!! But, it goes without saying that the game is definitely subject to the whim of the cards you get.

It turns out, because this rulebook is such a stinker, that I played a lot of rules wrong.  As I played my 12 games, I’d realize “Oh, I got that wrong” and “Oh, that seems dumb”.  By the time I played my 12th game, I think I had the rules correct.  But I also realized places I cheated, and frankly, some of my cheats made the game more fun.  I’ll note those in House Rules below.

I liked this solo mode a lot.  I was excited to show my friends the cooperative mode!

Cooperative Mode

So, in many ways, the cooperative mode is a very different game than the solo game.

Each player takes the role of ONE ranger and will only have 4 cards to “do something” (keeping leftovers from previous rounds)   The cooperative game uses a form of cooperative drafting; each player gets 4 cards to distribute, passing 2 cards to their left and 2 cards to their right.   During this drafting phase, there is NO TALKING.  So, each player has to just look at the 4 cards they get, then try to decide what your neighbors need.  See above as Teresa passes 2 cards to me (her left neighbor) and 2 cards to Sara (her right neighbor).

Note: This is the same number of cards (4 x the number of rangers) as the solo game, but now the cards are evenly distributed among the players for their turns.

Abstractly, I thought this cooperative drafting would be a really neat idea!  But what happened was that me and my friends got very frustrated quickly.  First of all, there was no communication, so each player had to make choices for their friends.  What if it was the wrong choice?  I am now choosing what cards my compatriots play!  Let’s be clear; this means I AM BEING TOLD WHAT TO PLAY.  Because I have no choice in what cards I get, I have to play what I get.  Sure, this is a cooperative game.  Sure, my friends want to help me. But when I am playing, I feel like I lost some agency along the way; I can only play what I was given!  Even worse, what if my friends had terrible cards?

In the solo game (see above), I could usually apply my cards to at least one of 3 rangers on the board.  But now, in the cooperative game, each player is stuck with ONLY 4 cards, and may have a turn where they can do absolutely nothing.  With one ranger and four cards,  each player is much more at at the whim of the deck.

And what if my friends, when drafting, chose different paths for me?  My friends can’t talk, so they might choose different directions for me to go!  This feels like a dysfunctional family!  We can’t talk about what we can do, so we just do something.  That’s really not fun.

Another interesting part of the cooperative game; each player has a wild action, but you can’t use it directly; only your compatriots can use it (by asking).  You can always refresh your token by discarding 4 symbols.  It was kind of neat that you had this option asking someone else, but it was just so expensive to refresh.

So, my friends and played two Level 1 games one night.  We lost horribly the first game.  And frankly, we only did a little better the second game.  Nobody really wanted to play any more.

Besides the dysfunctional nature of the limited communication, we often found ourselves either overly constrained or simply at the whim of the cards and couldn’t do anything.

Overly And Arbitrarily Constrained

What do I mean by overly and arbitrarily constrained?  It often feels like you only have one choice or no choices many times during the game.

For example, when playing the Missions from a Ranger Station, you choose a person to take the mission and THEN choose the next mission!    You simply are stuck with the missions in the order given!  First of all, this severely limits your choices.  Second of all, it doesn’t seem thematic … I am at the ranger station giving out missions: I can’t see them all?  This just feels like an arbitrary constraint that does nothing but increase the randomness and make the game harder.

Another place: I can only have one animal token (with possibly special powers) at a time.  Why?  This seems like an arbitrary constraint just to force you to use the other animal powers before getting more, even if they aren’t useful.  It just seems like you have to “throw away” some animal tokens sometimes just to get the power of the next one.  What a waste!  I can’t even have two of these tokens at a time?  Dumb!

Another place:  For quite some time, I was under the impression that you could discard an animal to get it because the rules said “if you are on a location in the same region”.  My original reading of this was regions like in Pandemic Iberia, so that at (for example, see above) Location 6 I could get EITHER the deer or the lynx!  Nope!  It’s the color that makes that determination (and it is in the rulebook) … even though 6 is in BOTH the regions.  I think this an artificial constraint; couldn’t it have been BOTH?  Give me more choice, don’t take choice away!!!!

Another place: The ranger station can only pass out missions at the end of the turn if you end there.  ONLY AT THE END.  If someone is on a ranger station, can’t you just distribute missions?  If someone is on a Ranger station at the start of their turn, what if that were their turn?  So, now to get missions distributed, you have to waste turns making sure someone ENDS their turn on a Ranger Stations when thematically, it seems like it should be an entire turn, or also be the start of the turn.   This one really made me mad; it seems very arbitrary.

House Rules

For the solo game, because the rules were so bad, I ended making a lot of calls to just move forward.  As I played more and more and understood the rulebook better, I got to know what the rules really were.   The more I learned the rules, the more annoyed I became with the game because of the arbitrary and overly restrictive constraints.  Here’s some House Rules that made the game more fun.

  1. If any Ranger is at a station, they can distribute missions.  It does not have to be the end their turn there.
  2. If you plan to distribute 3 missions, you may look at 3 missions and then decide how to distribute them.
  3. (optional) you can have at least 2 animal tokens with abilities

These are really House Rules more for the solo game.  This is (mostly) how I played the solo game, although I did play by the rules at the end … and I enjoyed the game a lot less when I played the rules they way they were meant to be played.

I have to admit, I think the cooperative mode just didn’t work for my group at all, so I don’t know if house rules would fix this game for me and my friends.

Conclusion

I am surprised how poorly the cooperative game of The Peak Team went for my group; so much so, that I can’t really recommend the cooperative game.  The dysfunctional communication rules and artificial and restrictive constraints just frustrated my group.  I can’t really call this a full review, because we never even got past level 1.  But it’s hard to move on to later levels when none of my friends thought the cooperative game was fun; they didn’t want to play again! My group was pretty unanimous with 5/10 for the cooperative game.

The solo game, on the other hand, was quite fun!  I found myself playing over and over and over and having fun playing 12 games to get to Level 5 of the game!  I “accidentally” had some House Rules (because the rulebook is so bad) that made the game more fun; with my House Rules, I’d probably give this an 8/10.  As-is, the solo game is still fun, but it’s too artificially and overly constrained, so it would be 7/10 as written; still enjoyable, but could be better.

I wanted to like this more.  I can’t recommend the cooperative game, but maybe that’s just my group.  Maybe you and your group will like it better.

Does Adding Zombies Make Everything Better? A Review of Good Dog, Bad Zombie (Solo and Cooperative)

Welcome back to 2026! This is the last of the games on the cusp of 2025/2026! We received Good Dog, Bad Zombie in late December 2025, but we couldn’t get it to the table until January 2026! So, we are considering this a 2026 release for our internal lists!

I have a friend CC who once conjectured that “Adding Zombies to anything makes it better!” He has since recanted this absolute, but it does bring up the question: does adding zombies to a game with cute dogs work?

Good Dog, Bad Zombie (Second Edition) is a cooperative pick-up and deliver game that was on Kickstarter back in May 2024. It  promised delivery in March 2025; it was about 9 months late.    I had backed this because it looked fun, but I didn’t know anything about the first edition of the game.

My copy (with some expansions) arrived in late December, but I couldn’t get it to the table until January 2026.

Let’s take a look!  We’ll only look at the base game.

Components and Gameplay

Good Dog, Bad Zombie comes in a smallish box: see Coke can above for scale.

Each player takes the role of one dog saving the humans!    

Each dog has its own personality and special powers which make it unique.  Interestingly, this special power can only be activated by a certain instant card in the game.

Note that there are a lot of dogs to choose from!  Each player gets a dog standee and a sheet.

This is a pick-up-and-deliver game where dogs have to find the humans and guide them back to Central Bark (yes, you heard me, Central Bark).  See the board above.

The bones on the map indicate clues about where the humans are!  The dogs have to traverse this post-apocalyptic city full of zombies and SNIFF at the locations with bones to find a human!

Once a dog SNIFFS at a Location, “something happens!”   The player reads the card apropos to the location and either makes a choice or has to roll a 20-sided die!

Most of the time, the human appears right where the dog was SNIFFING and then the dogs can guide that human back to Central Bark!! See above as the dog and human (yellow) are just one space away!  Just make sure to keep Humans away from Zombies!

There’s a couple of ways to get the stupid humans to safety at Central Bark!  The dog can BARK at them to move (see the BARK card middle above) or HERD them and move with them (see the HERD cards left and right).  The iconography is very clear … and kinda funny.  The HERD action has a sheep icon and the BARK action has a dog barking; they are very clearly notated.

To get stuff done, each dog has two action per turn.  They can RUN (to move one space), LICK (to get two more cards), SNIFF (to look for a human at a bone) or play a card (which allows them HERD, CHEW, BARK, RUN far, and a few other things).

This is a pick-and-deliver game as dogs have to “pick-up” humans and deliver them to Central Bark!  It’s kinda funny that you can either HERD humans or BARK at humans to move them … which is a little different than most pick-up-and-deliver games!

If a dog DOES deliver a human to Central Bark, the dog gets a thank-you bonus from the humans: see some above.

Of course, there are zombies to slow you down.  The dogs can, thematically CHEW on the zombies to get rid of them, BARK at the zombies to move them away, or HERD them off the cliffs or rivers to get rid of them!   

Unfortunately, every turn brings a new Zombie into town … the players roll the 20-sided die and that’s where a a new Zombie appears!  See the numbered locations above!

The zombies really start piling up later in the game (see above).  Whenever a new zombie appears on a Location with a zombie, that line of zombies all move over one space  towards Central Bark … which may cause a Zombie to move into Central Bark!  Now, of course the dogs can deal with the Zombie on their home turf, but every time that happens … the  dogs to become more feral!

To win Good Dog, Bad Zombie, the doggies need to save 6 humans before the dog pack turns feral!  (See Human track above).   The Feral Track (also above) increases every time a zombie invades Central Bark or startles a dog (appears on a dog)!   Basically, the dogs stop caring about humans if they become feral! 

The components are cute and everything is well-notated.  Some people may not like the art, but I think the dogs in particular are pretty cute and thematic.    The art fits the vibe of the game, which is kinda cute and not-too-horrific zombies.

Rulebook

The rulebook is good.

The rulebook gets an A on The Chair Test: It opens up and stays open on the chair next to me, the fonts are big and readable, and the pages don’t droop over.  It’s very easy to consult this rulebook on the chair next to me.

The Introduction and Components are well-labelled; there are pictures with annotating text for all the components.

The set-up is well-done: it’s across two adjacent pages, so it’s easy to leave the rulebook open while you set this up.  

Everything is well-labelled in the book (even using alternating colors in a table when describing the actions: see above).

And the rulebook ends with a nice Reference page.

I had no problems with this rulebook. There’s no Index, but this game is simple enough to not need one.

Solo Play

So Good Dog, Bad Zombie does have a solo mode: see above!  Congratulations for following Saunders’ Law!  See above for a list of exceptional rules for the solo mode.

Unfortunately, it’s not the way I choose to play this solo.  First of all, it’s not a true solo mode: you would have to have two dogs in play but then they share a hand.   There are a few more exceptions; it’s not a big deal, but I would rather just play this two-handed solo, like a 2-Player game.

One of the purposes of solo play for me is to learn the game game so I can teach the game to my friends. The more exceptions and changing rules there are for the solo game, the less useful the solo mode is for me.  In this case, it’s probably easy enough to use their solo mode, but as it is, it’s just easier for me to play solo as two-handed solo: play two 2 dogs, and alternate between them as if I were playing a 2-Player game.   

I had a fine time playing this solo.  The dogs are cute, the dog cards are cute, and the actions seem very thematic (LICK, SNIFF, RUN, BARK, HERD, CHEW).  I learned the game quickly.  I didn’t need need more than one game to learn this solo … it’s pretty easy to learn.

I don’t know how often I’ll come back to the solo game; it’s pretty random.  That 20-sided that gets rolled at the end of every turn can be brutal and harsh, or just lucky.  A few bad rolls and the game can be over very quickly.    It might be too light for me for a solo game that I revisit.

I could see maybe, maybe, while I am waiting for some friends, playing a quick game of this solo. It is quick: The box says 45-60 minutes; it seems more like 30 minutes in a solo game.

Cooperative Play

My friends jumped right into this game: they loved the cute dogs.  We played a 3-Player and 4-Player game.

The luck turned on us quickly; we started with a simple game, but still just barely won!  That 20-sided die just turned against us!  If we started even a little harder, we probably would have lost.  Again, this is just because we rolled badly when we spawned zombies.

The thing is; we had fun.  It’s such a light and simple game and it’s very cute: it’s easy to pull out and teach.

Each player’s turn is fairly quick and there’s not a lot of Alpha Playering.  The cooperation comes mostly from talking about what the dogs should do (high-level cooperation), as this is mostly a multi-player solitaire game: each player does their own thing.  But there is a HOWL mechanism that allows you to generate cards for other players!  This can be critical for saving those dumb humans!  “I don’t have a HERD or BARK to save my human! Can someone please HOWL so I can maybe get one???”  It’s not a major mechanism, but it does help encourage a little more cooperation.

We all had fun saving the humans.   

Things You May Like

Ease of everything!: The game is quick, it’s easy to set-up, it’s easy to teach, it’s easy to play.  It’s simple enough to get into quickly, but there is some cooperation in either high-level discussions or HOWLs. 

Cute. The dogs components are super cute, especially if you like dogs.

Adding/Subtracting Players: At one point, we just “added” Andrew into our game halfway into it because we just can!  The game is self-balancing (as each player always does some good stuff, then always adds a zombie), so you just add a new player and start playing!  This is a phenomenal attribute for a game!  This means you can play this at a convention, and not worry about adding/subtracting players!

Things That You May Dislike

Some art: Some people may not like the art of the board and think it looks like a 10-year old made it.  I liked it and thought it was thematic and fun, but it may really turn some people off.

Randomness: The game has a high-degree of randomness depending on what that 20-sided rolls every turn.  You may get unlucky and have zombies marching into Central Bark every turn, or you may get lucky and have the zombies always appear pretty far away.  It really depends on how you roll? 

Conclusion

I liked Good Dog, Bad Zombie and so did my friends.  It’s easy to set-up, teach, play, and tear-down.  Even though the game can be a little random, it’s a quick game … so even if you get screwed, it won’t take up your entire night.  And it’s still fun.

The two best scenarios for playing this game are probably:
1) An end-of-the-night or “I-am-brain-fried” game.  You just want a simple game to play with your friends, and even if you are a little tired, this is a great simple game to get out.  It’s cute and fun.

2) Convention Game.  You are playing in a situation where people may come and go quickly.  It’s very easy to add/subtract people from the game.

Overall, we had fun and would play this again.  We’d probably give it a 6.5/10 for solo play, (it’s not as much fun solo) but maybe 7.5/10 for cooperative play.  

If you love love love dogs, this probably drifts to an 8 or 8.5/10; the dogs are pretty darn cute. 

In this case, adding Zombies to the game with cute dogs DID work.