Tag: reviews

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

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

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

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

Unboxing and Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s an interesting looking game!  See above!

Rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

It does feel like like all the rules are here.

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

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

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

Solo Mode

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

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

I ended up playing the Hippie and the Cheerleader.

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

Cooperative

We played a 4-Player game.

It moved pretty quickly.

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

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

Vibe

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

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

This game really nails that horror movie vibe.

Randomness

There is a lot of randomness in this game.

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

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

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

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

What I Liked

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

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

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

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

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

What I Didn’t Like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reactions

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing/Gameplay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rulebook

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

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

The components page up front is good. See above.

The game set-up starts …

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

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

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

Solo Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cooperative Play

Teresa and I played a 2-Player game!

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a game where cooperation really shines through!

Reactions

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Forbidden Pandemic Island: The Card Game! A Review of The Four Doors

What do you get when you cross Pandemic with Forbidden Island and make a card game?  You get a cooperative card game named The Four Doors!

This cooperative card is designed by Matt Leacock (of Pandemic fame) and Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback (of many games, but the one I know best is Legends of Sleepy Hollow: See our review here).  The Four Doors is a light little cooperative card game for 1-4 players and takes about 30 minutes to play.  If you have played Forbidden Island (a light little cooperative tile-laying game) or Pandemic (a heavier cooperative game), you might be saying … “Heeeeeeey, this kinda feels like those games a little…” … and you’d be right!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

I ordered this directly from the Happy Camper website (the publisher) about 2 weeks ago?  It arrived fairly quickly (late August).  See above!  It looks kinda neat, but it’s relatively small!  See Can of Coke for scale.

The object of the game is, as a a group, to retrieve the sacred relics above!  Yes, they looks shiny because they are foil covered cards.  They are pretty neat! And yes, this “gather 4 items” kinda feels like Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert … you gotta collect some exactly 4 things and it’s an action point game!  (You only get 3 actions per turn!)

To win, you have to bring the 4 relics to the light house and turn it on to win!  (sarcasm mode on) This is COMPLETELY unlike Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert where you have to return to the launch pad to win (sarcasm mode off).

And you have to turn the lighthouse with a special card! It is pretty cool with that foil.

… just like you need to activate the helicopter/flying machine to fly away in the Forbidden Games…

Players each take the role of one of the characters above, each with a special power (yes, like Pandemic or the Forbidden games). But the powers are pretty cool and a little different.

To retrieve a card, you have to have and discard 4 cards of the same color at a door.  (Yes, more Pandemic and Forbidden analogies).  These are in a deck that you get 2 cards from at the end of each turn.

There’s some special cards you can use (spells) which you can play at any time (not just your turn), but then they are not discarded but put in place (the Hollow) where they (usually) can’t be brought back!

The Four Doors (that’s the name of the game, remember?) are laid out in a column: see above.  Your pawns move up and down the column and you can only retrieve a colored relic at the appropriate door.

So where’s the Bad News?  This is a cooperative game after all!  Every turn, the same cards that help you also come out and hurt you!  The same deck is used for both good cards and bad cards!  It just depends on which phase you draw them!! When drawn and played as Bad News cards, these cards “further open” the rift which may seal the door forever!    If you ever get 4 of these Bad News cards attached on one side of the door, the  doors gets half-shut … then closed forever!  If you haven’t gotten the relic out before the door closes forever, you lose!

The cards attach at the sides, depending on what’s at the bottom of the card: see above and below.

Three cards attaching to the doors should feel reminiscent of Pandemic …

Every time the good news/bad news deck recycles, the difficulty goes up: this chart (above) dictates how many of the colored cards attach to the doors in the bad news part of the turn!

If you retrieve all 4 relics and bring them to the lighthouse before the doors close forever, you win!

Solo Mode

Congratulations to having a solo mode!  (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!)

The solo game is documented on page 9 of the rulebook.  This is a true solo game; the solo player operates one character (but see below).

The only real difference is that the solo player has another action they can take: Swap Adventurer!   This allows the solo player to invest in another character whose special power may help him accomplish a short turn goal easier!

So, I kinda put the adventurers off the side so I could see all their special powers.

I started my first solo game with The Summoner! See above! She makes it easier to get cards you need to get relics!

And I started at novice, and boy I crushed this game.  I didn’t need to start so easy!  I also never used the Swap Adventurer once because The Summoner was so good!  She just gets the cards I want from the discard, so I never needed another adventurer!!  I started thinking about “optimal ways” to use the Swap Adventurers to best effect, which I think might be fun once the game gets harder!

Luckily, it’s easy to adjust the difficulty level by simply getting more cards attached to doors per turn (see card above).  Instead of starting on Novice, I should start on Standard, or Heroic, or Epic…

I felt like the solo mode worked well.  I felt NO NEED to try this 2-handed solo (although it would be easy to); the solo mode seemed to work well. This is VERY UNLIKE the solo mode from Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship from a few weeks ago (see review here);  I did NOT like the built-in solo mode there! I do like the built-in solo mode here in The Four Doors.

I kind of dig that you can switch adventurers to really try some fascinating in-game power switches.  I am worried this may be overpowered, but hey, if it’s too easy, just adjust the difficulty!  It’s easy to do that!

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game went well.  We played as 4-Players.

The game is open-handed, which means all information is shared!  See rules above.  I love that shared information in cooperative games!  It makes it really easy to coordinate and talk.  “Ah man, I need a red card! Wait! I see you have one!! Maybe we should meet!” I personally think this shared-information type game is much more cooperative and interactive as players can talk strategy much easier if they can see everything!  Full information does have the downside that it can invite the Alpha Player to join you, but Alpha Player Syndrome is not a usual problem for my groups.  I suppose it is something to be wary of here.

The opportunities for sharing and doing clever card combos came up quite a bit!  Between the character’s special powers, the spells on cards, and special powers on relics, we were able to pull off some really cool combos!  And the discussion came from everybody; someone might see a special combo others didn’t see!  “We need to get that relic before the door closes!!! Help!”  “Oh! Use my TELEPORT!!”

There was quite a bit of discussion and cooperation; that was really fun for us. 

I was also pleased to see that everyone got a relic, which meant everyone had an “extra” special power.  These relics have pretty neat powers too … and they also help contribute to the conversations of combos!!

Overall, this was a hit cooperatively.  Everyone had fun, there was a lot of interaction and discussion, and the combos we pulled off made us all feel smart! 

Good times.

Reactions

Andrew: Fun, 6/10
Sam: Fun 7.5/10
Teresa: 7/10
Richie: 7.0/10 solo, 8.0/10 cooperatively

My rating was initially a 7.5/10 for cooperative play, but the more I look back on my experience with my friends, the more fun I realized I had as we played!

Which One?

Which game should I play?  The Four Doors is very much like Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Forbidden Desert.  Where does it fit in with those?

I think it depends on what you are in the mood for.  From a complexity point of view, I think Pandemic is the most challenging and complex game, Forbidden Desert is next, The Four Doors, then finally Forbidden Island.  If you want a game that is little bit more than Forbidden Island, but not too much more, The Four Doors is a great choice.  To be fair, I think all of these games are great choices.

Conclusion

I should just called this review The Four Doors: The Forbidden Pandemic! It sounds like a forbidden dance of love! But it’s not; The Four Doors a cooperative card game that feels like Pandemic/Forbidden Island/Forbidden Desert. I do think it’s different enough from those games that you can buy it and not feel like “they are all the same game!”. I think The Four Doors is a nice cooperative game to bring out for someone who is just above Forbidden Island, but maybe not quite ready for Pandemic or Forbidden Desert.

This game is easy to learn, has a great table presence, and can be a jumping on point to learn cooperative games.  It’s a little more complex than Forbidden Island, but I think it can still be a pretty good starting point as a cooperative game.

Even though this is an “easier” cooperative game, the cooperation, interaction, and combos that emerge from the game will also appeal to more sophisticated gamers.  It’s a good cooperative game!

I’d say the solo game is good at 7.0/10, but the cooperative game is better! I’d personally give it a 8.0/10, but as a group, my friends probably average this at about a 7.5/10.  Still, that’s good!

Alibis: A Cooperative Word Game! Does it Get a Pass?

Alibis is a cooperative word game for 1-6 people: think Cooperative Codenames!

This is a game about guessing words cooperatively as a group.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing/Gameplay

This is a very smallish game: see can of Coke above for scale.

Each player gets a little white-erase board to write a single word on (two of these boards of you play 2 or 3 players).

The white-erase boards are used to write a single word; players are trying to connect two “words” together (much like So Clover, where you try connect two words with one word, or Codenames where you give a word clue to connect some words together).

Each player is given some guys to alibi: in a 2-Player or 3-Player game, you get 4 guys.

The single words are supposed to provide “alibis” for two of the guys in the line up!  See above!  For example, “magma” (the + board, upper left) is providing alibis for guy 1 (“island”) and guy 7 (“dragon”).

So, you’d mark a + on the guy 1 and guy 7 on your board! You are keeping track of everyone who has an alibi!

Basically, there is always one guy that’s “the perpetrator” and you, as the players, are trying to alibi everyone else!  It’s a word guessing game!  Can you guess the perpetrator by alibiing everyone else????

This game really isn’t very thematic; the line-up with weird villains has nothing to do with the game.  It’s just a cooperative word-guessing game.  To be 100% clear, there is no real communications among players EXCEPT for the words given.  (That part is very much like Codenames, but not So Clover).

No Solo.

There is no solo mode for this; this is nominally a party game for 2-6 players.

Two Players

My 2-Player game with Don went great.  It works well, as you get 4 guys to alibi, so you have to provide 2 words!  You actually get more options in the 2 (and 3-Player game) as you can choose how to group your 4 guys into 2 groups.  There are 9 guys on the board (see above), and you have to alibi 8 of them!

2-Player worked well, it was fun.

Three Players

In 3-Player mode, like 2-Player, in 3-Player mode, each player gets 4 guys to alibi. See above as me and Caroline and Nathan play!   The difference is that there are more guys out on the board! There is ALWAYS must be one guy out (who is the perpetrator).  In the 3-player game, the players alibi 12 guys, with the 13th guy being the perpetrator! See above.

The 3-player game worked great.

Four Players

The 4-Player game wasn’t … quite as fun.  See above as me, Sara, Teresa, and Andrew play! It’s the same game but you only get 2 guys to alibi (instead of 4), which means you only get to craft one word!  There are 9 guys out, and the 4-Players alibi 8 of them.  See above.

This means you have to come up with a single word to connect two guys.  What does “stuffed” (above) mean?  I don’t know, and I wrote it!!!  And the two words (guys) you get may suck and have nothing in common.  Sure, this happens in Codenames a lot, but at least you start with many many words to connect! You only get “stuck” with two bad words at the end.  In this scenario, you only have two words!  Hopefully they will be easy to connect!

The 4, 5, and 6 player game all play like this; the players each get 2 guys to alibi which means they only get to write/craft one word.

Scoring

The scoring is a little wonky.  Every time you guess something correctly, you remove “heat” (see heat above) from the game!  The more your remove, the better you do!  At the very end of the game, you get told you how good or how awful you are by how mush “heat” you remove.

Eh, it’s nominally a party game, so the score doesn’t matter too much.

Conclusion

If you love Codenames, you will probably love this! If you hate Codenames (Joe, I am looking at you), you will probably hate this as well.

I think Alibis is better at 2 and 3-players, as the players get choices as how to group their 4 guys, so they can come up with better groups of 2 words.  The 4-Player and higher count game “works”, but it’s just not as fun; It like the worst part of Codenames when you have exactly two words that don’t have anything in common … and you don’t know what to do.

This is a fun game, but I’d recommend So Clover over this. I think So Clover is a stronger party game, partly because you have more words and more opportunities to connect things.  Probably more important is that in So Clover players can talk amongst each other, rather than just be quiet (like in Alibis).  That interaction is so much more fun in a party game.

Still, this is light and easy to get into.  It’s fun to play: I’d give this a 6.5 or 7/10 as a 4, 5, or 6 player game and a 7.5/10 as a 2 or 3-player game.

This would probably make our Top 10 Cooperative Party Games, maybe just not near the top.

An Epic Struggle! A Review of Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship

Over the course of a few weeks, I played Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship many many many times and different ways trying to find the joy and fun. I have to admit, it was an Epic Struggle! I gave this game way more chances than I should have because of its theme and designer, but I struggled with it. Follow me in my journey to see if I keep Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship in my collection or throw it into Mount Doom along with the Ring!

My journey to play Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship began back in January 24, 2025!  The game was up for pre-order on the Asmodee web site, and I pre-ordered with an expectation that it would arrive in late May or early June (as was the original promise).

Well, things changed (Asmodee had trouble shipping) and it didn’t deliver to me until Monday August 19th.  This was frustrating because I had seen SO MANY people put up reviews on BGG, and yet, as a paying customer who ordered early, I didn’t get mine until 7 or 8 months later.

I was very excited for this: this is a game in the Pandemic System (see above)!  What that means is that it’s not quite Pandemic, but if you squint, you can see the elements of Pandemic in the game!  I generally love Pandemic and its ilk (see reviews of Pandemic: Ibera, Star Wars : The Clone Wars Pandemic, and World of Warcraft Pandemic), but I have not loved all Pandemics (see our review of Freedom Five).  Will this be a good Pandemic or a bad Pandemic? (What a strange sentence)

Let’s follow this Journey!

Rulebook

The rulebook is very good and is the first thing you see when you unpack the game.  This rulebook gets an A on the Chair Test!

The rulebook opens up and stays open on the chair next to me.  The font is big, the pictures are well-annotated, and it’s easy to read on the chair next to me!

The Component page is well-labelled with pictures and text: see above.

The Game Board Features is really nice as you try to understand this world.

Generally, this was a good rulebook with a Table of contents (yay), but no Index (boo!).  The back of the rulebook shows useful info and icons.

There is one issue with solo rules that’s not well-specified (see below).

Generally, this was a good rulebook.

Unboxing and Set-Up: Building the Dice Tower!

Total time: it took me about 2 hours to unbox and set-up for my first game

See Box above with Can of Coke for scale.

The first part of the game unboxing was building the dice tower: this consumed about 20 minutes!  The directions are pretty good, but it was annoying.  Unfortunately, this was a little foreshadowing for the game itself.

In the end, the Dice Tower looks really cool (see above), but holy cow, this was kind of annoying to build.  Once you’ve built it, it does come apart easily and go back into the box (in 3 pieces: see below).

The board is a huge 6-fold board.  It’s very busy and very daunting at first glance: see above.  It does get better once you get to know the board, but, yes, it is very busy.

I was told by my friends who LOVE Lord of the Rings that this board is very accurate and consistent with the map at the front of the books. 

If you squint, you can see the Pandemic underneath!  The Region cards feel very similar to the player cards we’ve seen from Pandemic!

Just like Pandemic, there’s Events (of course, they are flavored for this universe).

The Skies Darken cards (above) are very much like the Epidemic cards from the original Pandemic!

Like the original Pandemic, you divide the deck into fourths and put one of these “bad news” into each part of the Region cards.  That way you get one Skies Darken at about every quarter of the game!

The true Bad News deck is the called the Shadow Cards; you get two (or more) per turn.  This is just like the Infection Deck from Pandemic.   There’s a big difference though!  If the Shadow Card to the left of the card you play is a red banner (see above), you activate the TOP part of card!

If the left card is a black Banner, you activate the BOTTOM part.  The bad news you get depends on the top card of the deck!  This can have wild swings to the game!

Like Pandemic, these Shadow Cards go to the top of the Shadow Deck and will come out again and again, whenever you draw a Skies Darken!  You seed the game with “troops” (not disease cubes) very much like the disease cubes.

If you’ve played Pandemic in any form, those Skies Darken cards will feel VERY familiar.

Every player will play TWO characters! Not just one! That’s different!

The characters should be very familiar to the LOTR fans! See above!

One characters gets 4 actions (like Pandemic), and other only gets 1 Action Point. That’s a little different.

With those 4 Actions (see documented above), you do things like Pandemic.  However, there are a lot of differences here!  This is where the game starts to drift from the original game a LOT more, as you can attack (with dice), capture Havens, Prepare, Fellowship!  There’s SOME Pandemic here, but the actions you get really are very different.  For example, you can trade in a card for token for hand-management reasons, but only at a Haven!

So I decided to start my journey using the Solo Rules/Set-up! See above as I operate 5 characters (well, 4 and 1).

Winning, as you might guess, is throwing the Ring into Mount Doom: see above, top right!  But before you can do that, you must fulfill the previous three missions!  Each of these missions (see above) is very different: Attain the Blessing of the Elves, Challenge Sauron, Sauraman Your Staff Is Broken!  This is reminiscent of Pandemic, where you had to stop 4 diseases!  Here, you have to fulfill 4 very different missions!  (There are actually a number of different missions to choose from, but you always have Destroy One Ring as the final mission!)

At the end of Day 0, I was pretty exhausted!  Putting together the Dice Tower and setting up the game took a lot of work!

The Set-up actually spans 5 pages!  That’s right, 5 pages! 

At the end of Day 0, I was too tired to move forward and play my first game.

It looks cool set-up on the table though!  See that Dice Tower!  That cool LOTR board!

Playing Solo Mode Using Two Kinds of Solo Rules

The solo rules are well documented on page 22.  See above! (And thank you for following Saunders’ Law!)  These rules are generally very good and very clear. One problem I had: it’s not quite clear if you can share the tokens between all 5 characters, … but you can sort of infer that you can (because when a single players plays two characters, they can share tokens); it should have been stated more explicitly. EDIT: Yes, the rule is there! I missed it, and I could have sworn I looked like 3 times. My mistake!!!

The solo player plays 5 characters … well 4 characters and (Frodo and Sam).   You choose 4 characters to play (although the rulebook suggests characters for your first few games), but you always get Frodo and Sam (since Frodo has to throw the Ring Into Mount Doom) as the fifth character.  Yes, Frodo and Sam is considered one character.

There is only one hand of cards for the solo player, so all the cards are shared among the 5 characters.  This is both boon and bane; you don’t have to worry about sharing cards (indeed, the Fellowship action which shares cards, is disabled in the solo game), but you also are stuck with the 7-Card hand limit for all characters.  

You move the little green solo token around (above) to show which character you are activating this turn; the character you activate gets 4 actions, and then Sam and Frodo get one action.  That’s right, Sam and Frodo always get one action and the other character gets four actions.

My first game ended in a loss after about 14 turns as my Hope went to zero.  That’s right!  If your Hope track ever goes to zero, you immediately lose!  There are MANY things that cause your Hope to suffer: Search Checks, Losing a Haven, running out of cards.   In other Pandemics , the end generally comes when the player cards runs out.  Every game of Fate of the Fellowship I have lost was because the Hope went to zero very early in the game.  It’s VERY EASY to lose via Hope in this game. You have to be very careful with Hope, and it’s generally hard to get Hope back (but not impossible).

It was very weird to me that I lose before I was even barely one-fourth through the game: I had only gotten one Skies Darken!

Although I lost because I lost Hope, generally my combats were terrible; I rolled poorly.

Nonetheless, I realized I had played a LOT of rules wrong.   You have to understand that there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of little rules in this game that you have to keep track of.  As someone who has played many many many games of Pandemic, I think I expected something more akin to the original Pandemic.  Nope!  This game is very different and requires you to bend your brain a lot more.

I was grumpy how hard I lost (as I said, I have played lots of Pandemic), but I realized how many rules I got wrong and things I missed, so my first game just got me the “feel” of the game; I should expect to lose.

My next solo game was a win, but I realized I STILL got a bunch of rules wrong.  

My third game was a complete loss in 3 turns.  That’s right, 3 turns! I got two “Shift The Eye To Frodo’s Region” and the Eye was there.  I had 5 search dice to roll, twice.  I lost because I lost all hope.  In turn 3.  That’s right, 3 turns.

I was ready to throw this game into Mount Doom; this games feels so messy and random.   Sure, I’ve had games of Pandemic go bad, but never this bad. Lost. In. 3. Turns.

I played a fourth game and lost after about halfway through the deck. By losing Hope of course.

I took a break to think about this. I realized that one of my problems was that I sometimes felt like I couldn’t do anything because I ran out of cards quickly.  This is because all 5 characters share the (7-card limit) deck.  When you have turns where you maybe don’t want to move (or can’t move), then you can spend some actions turning cards into tokens at a Haven.  With all characters sharing this hand, this “sometimes” action causes your hand to go to zero cards quite a bit.

So, I decided to play the traditional solo game: play the cooperative game two-handed, alternating between two players. See above.  After playing this way, I don’t think I can go back to the solo mode as written.  With playing 2-handed solo, I felt like I had more options (“how should I activate my characters? 4 or 1 or 1 and 4? Who should move?  Do I need to share?”).  Basically, the Fellowship option is important, but you don’t use it that much in a game—it’s generally better to have more cards in the 2-Player mode.

After 7 solo games, I think that the two-handed solo game is superior way to play solo. The solo player simply feels like he has more choice in actions (to choose how to divvy actions), more cards work with (spread over two hands), more mobility around the board (to deal with bad news as it pops up). To be honest, I didn’t start having fun until I started playing 2-handed solo.

I felt like the built-in solo mode might actually do the game a disservice. I kind of hated my first five solo games; it wasn’t until I went to the two-handed solo mode that I actually started having fun. If you had caught me in my first 5 solo games, this game would be burning in Mount Doom right now. I am someone who loves Pandemic, I am someone who loves Matt Leacock designs, I am someone who has played a lot of Pandemic in his life. Yet, the built-in solo mode almost caused me to hate this game. Caveat Emptor.

I recommend the two-handed solo mode.

Two Player

One of the things that convinced me that the 2-Player solo game was superior to the built-in solo mode was playing two players!

Over one Sunday, my friend Don and I played a 2-Player game and had fun!  Now, be aware that I had played many many solo games my this point, so I had the rules down, I had the strategy down, I had the teach down.  

I think we lost, but I don’t care?  We had fun: Don definitely knows like LOTR better than me and he thought it was fun.  He also reminded me that several of his Pandemic games went south in a few turns.  

It felt like there were more options in a 2-Player game. This cemented, in my mind at least, that the 2-handed solo mode is superior.

4-Player Game

So, after teaching the 2-Player game, we went into the 4-Player game.

The game was fun, but we saw more of the randomness emerge  It was also frustrating that sometimes players couldn’t do anything.  The muster action can only be done on certain locations IF you have friendship cards.  The Prepare action can only be done on a Haven.  So, if you didn’t have friendship or weren’t on a Haven (because you were out fighting), sometimes turns felt a little anti-climactic (as you couldn’t do much).

I was reminded by friends Charlie and Allison (after they played Pandemic Legacy: Season 1), that 2-Player Pandemic is easier than 4-Player Pandemic.  Usually because 2-Players can deal with Bad News “quicker”, as you only have to alternate players.  In a 4-Player Pandemic, the only person who can deal with some “bad News” is 3 turns away.

I think we saw this in our game of Pandemic; we came close to winning, but needed just a few more turns.  We didn’t “quite” deal with the Bad News as efficiently as we should have.

Did we have fun? Yes.  Did we love it?  No?  We liked it.   We would play again, if only to wipe the shame from our faces for losing.

Randomness

There are 4 major axes of Randomness in this game.

Axis 1: The Search Dice.  These must be rolled whenever Frodo travels (if he can’t sneak), or if a Shadows card forces a Search roll.   The number of dice depend on the number of Nazguls in your region.  See above for all 6 faces.   If you roll an “evil tree” (see above), you lose Hope.  Remember, if your Hope goes to 0, you lose.  You can re-roll some dice, at the cost of some resources.  They are re-rolls, not guarantees.

Axis 2: Combat dice. See above for all 6 faces. The red faces mean the bad guys lose a troop. The white faces mean the good guys lose a troop. A particularly bad roll can wipe out all the good guy troops and completely screw you. You can re-roll if you have a character in the region, at the cost of a ring. You can use swords to eliminate bad guys if you still have anything left (if you have a character there).

Axis 3: Shadow Cards.  What bad news do you get?  Even though the Shadow cards go back to the top of the deck (like Pandemic), the bad news you suffer depends on the next card at the top of the deck.  That little difference almost adds an extra axis of randomness.

Axis 4: Cards.  Which cards do you get? In one game, I waited 10? 12? 14? turns and could not get a sword!  See above! This basically meant my mission to win Isengard was thwarted and wasted time/resources.

This 4-axes of randomness (5 axes if you count the extra randomness of Shadow cards) can be debilitating.   There are ways to mitigate this, of course, but sometimes you just get screwed.  Pandemic kind of only had the 2-axes of randomness, and it felt plenty hard.

Be aware.  This game is much more random than the original Pandemic.  It may be too random for you.

Conclusion

It’s hard to recommend Fate of the Fellowship.   The extra randomness (relative to base Pandemic) inherent in the game with the Search Dice and Combat Dice can really bring your game down.  I also think that the recommended solo mode is flawed; and I think it will do a disservice to players if they decide to start with that. If you do want to play solo, I recommend 2-handed solo: you will feel like you have more options and more choices.

The game also feels like you can’t do things sometimes; you can only muster at hubs, you may only prepare at Havens, you may not move Frodo unless you either sneak or roll search.  The game feels like there are a lot more constraints on “useful” things you can do you on your turn … because there are more constraints, I think part of this experience is just realizing how important Havens and hubs are and getting used to that.  But, it “feels like” you can do less and that can be frustrating.

It took me almost 6 plays before I started having fun and figuring out the game works.  There are a lot of complex systems, there is a lot more randomness, there are many more constraints on player actions.  It may take you a while to really get this game; it has a huge learning curve.

Having said all that, Fate of the Fellowship is incredibly thematic, with the map, the missions, the special powers, and the characters!   All of my friends who love Lord of the Rings really feel like they nailed the game.

So what’s my final recommendation?  If you love the theme, you can probably suffer through learning the rules and love this game.  If you are a Lord of the Rings fan, you will probably enjoy this world despite all the complexity and randomness.  Losing is just excuse to embrace this universe and game some more!

If you just like Lord of the Rings, be aware that this game has a huge learning curve, a lot of complexity, and a lot of randomness! Much more so than base Pandemic.  If you can get past all that and learn the game, you can come to like it, but be aware it may take quite a number of plays to get to that point.  However, if you have a good shepherd (someone who knows the game and strategies), those first few games can be much more fun: my friends all had fun playing right away because I had done all the painful prep work.

My final score is a range: 4 to 7 out of 10.  That’s a huge range because I hated the extra randomness (that’s the 4), but when it was fun, it was fun (that’s the 7).  So am I keeping it? Yes. 
Be aware this probably won’t work for you right out of the box; you may have to live with it.

Was this a good Pandemic or a bad Pandemic?  It was a Grey Pandemic.

Top 10 Cooperative Roll-and-Write/Flip-and-Write Games!

When most people think of roll-and-write games, they think of games like Yahtzee!  See above!  Players roll dice, mark things off a sheet, and try to get the best score to win!  Surprisingly, there have been a considerable number of cooperative roll-and-write games over the last few years! That’s right! Players roll dice and cooperatively mark-up sheets to solve/win together!  Now, flip-and-write games are very similar; instead of rolling dice, you flip up a card to show what you are dealing with.  It’s the same idea, it’s just the randomness is a deck of cards instead of some dice!  

Below, we list our Top 10 Cooperative Roll-and-Write Games!  We also rate each game from 1 to 5 on how cooperative it is, with 1 being “multiplayer-solitaire” and 5 being “very cooperative“!  We also note if the game works solo: surprisingly, not all play solo!  Most roll-and-write games are about getting the best score you can collectively, but some have a more precise win condition!

10. Legends of Storm City


Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 2/5
Player Count? 1-4
Print and Play? Only means available
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition? Defeat all Elite Villains or Deactivate the Main Plan

This roll-and-write has a special place in my heart, because it was the first print-and-play I have ever done!  And boy, was it a learning experience!  It also has a cool Superhero theme!

In the end, I liked the game a lot more that my friends; so that’s why this makes the bottom of our To 10 list.  

I liked the way this looked, and I loved the Superhero theme!  Take a look at our review of Legends of Storm City to see if this is something you might like!

9. Mmm!

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 2/5
Player Count? 1-6
Print and Play? No, must buy box!
Type?  roll-and-write*
Win Condition? Mark off all the food!

This is a little bit different than most roll-and-writes on our list: it’s intended for kids 5+, so it’s pretty simple.  The kids roll the dice every round and mark off food before the cat reaches them!  The cat only moves if some piece of food isn’t completely marked off, so kids have to learn when to push their luck and when to stay!

This is also a little different because the “write” part of roll-and-write is “mark-with-a-token” rather than write-on-a-piece-of-paper.  See above.  But it’s the same idea: you are just marking up a board!

It’s also interesting that the board is shared cooperatively among all players, so players will need to talk to help each other “set-up” the board for them on their turn!  This is a Renier Knizia game for kids, but it is kind of a neat little roll-and-write kind of game, even if it’s not “quite” roll-and-write … more like roll-and-mark!

8. Roll or Stand: Forbidden Adventures

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 1.5/5
Player Count? 1-100
Print and Play? Only means available
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition? Make it through all 4 puzzles on a page!

This roll-and-write has 4 puzzles per page, and has a “blackjack-like” mechanism where you push your luck to get more actions and more directions!  But if you get a number that busts, you lose an entire set of actions!  

Each player has their own sheet and uses the dice as given to them, so it’s mostly multiplayer solitaire!  There is a mechanism for sharing, but resources are so limited in this game, we found that we didn’t really use the sharing too much! That’s why it’s 1.5/5 for cooperation … this is a mechanism, but we found we didn’t really use it!

Still, there’s a really neat physical aspect to this roll-and-write as you have to use the numbers marked to move around one of the four puzzles!  See above!  All-in-all, this is a pretty neat roll-and-write game!  See our review here of Roll or Stand: Jurassic Adventures to see if this might be right for you!

7. Mission Control: Critical Orbit

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 4/5
Player Count? 2-4
Print and Play? No, must buy box!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition? Success in mission!

This is an interesting perturbation on roll-and-write games: First, there’s no solo play!  This is only a 2-4 Players game! Second, one player (Mercury) hides information behind a screen, and the other 1,2, or 3 players each operate some other boards!

This is also a polyominoes game, where the Mercury player has to fill in a grid!  It’s a weird cross-section of roll-and-write, hidden information, cooperation, and polyominoes!  But it’s really fun!

6. Escape: Roll and Write

Supports Solo?  No (but you can simulate solo my playing as-if it were a 2-Player game)
How Cooperative? 2.5/5 
Player Count? 2-4
Print and Play? No, must buy box
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Collect enough gems and all players need to be on their end space!

Those of you who know the original Escape: The Curse of the Temple game might be confused by this: “There’s a roll-and-write Escape game?”  Yes! 

It even uses the same dice as the original Escape game!  This roll-and-write is all about the active player rolling dice, using them to move around the temple, and the remaining dice are used by everyone else!  So, there’s some cooperation and discussion about which dice the active player takes!   It’s not super cooperative, as each player moves through their own board separately, but there are still some elements!

This game didn’t take the world by fire, but it’s colorful and fun!  See our review of Escape: Roll & Write to see if this is a game you might enjoy!

5. Luddite

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 1/5 
Player Count? 1-100 (1-4 in base box, but you can keep expanding)
Print and Play? Yes, but there is also a boxed version with really nice components!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Move your hack marker to the end, making sure you do enough damage along the way!

This game is probably the least cooperative and least interactive game on this list!  It’s cooperation is really to average the scores of all players and make sure that average exceeds a threshold to win!  That’s the only cooperation! 

Other than the averaging scores, this game is pretty much multiplayer solitaire!  See above! So, why did this make our list?  Firstly, some people can suspicious of cooperative games: this is a first game that’s easy for people who want to put one toe into the water of cooperative game!

Secondly, this game has quite the story, in either graphic novel or movie form (see above)!  This story really keeps everyone involved in the game!   Luddite can be a real interesting experience if you let it!  See our review of Luddite here!

4. Zombicide: Gear Up

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 3/5 
Player Count? 1-6
Print and Play? No, must buy box!
Type?  flip-and-write
Win Condition?  Take out the Big Bad!

This is a gorgeous flip-and-write in the world of Zombicide!  The components are really great with nice dry-erase boards and cards!   This game is very thematic, as it simulates zombies invading your personal space! But in a flip-and-write game!

Each player deals with zombies on “their board”, but can help out their neighbors (on adjacent boards) using ranged weapons!  This is surprisingly cooperative as you have to decide (with your group) who takes which zombies, and when to use your limited resources to help your neighbors!  

Zombicide: Gear Up went over surprisingly well with our group!  It really felt like zombies were invading … in a flip-and-write game!

3. Roll For Great Old Ones

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 2/5 
Player Count? 1-4 
Print and Play? Yes, but there is also a boxed version with really nice components!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Take out a Great Old One!

Players roll dice and must each choose one of the dice to use on their sheet!  The cooperation comes out in having players decide, collectively, who gets what dice!  After that, each player focuses on their own board to do things!

The art is a little odd, but this game is surprisingly thematic! This game made our Top 10 Solo Games of 2023!  Check out our review of Roll For Great Old Ones to see if this is something you might like!

2. Find the Source!

Supports Solo?  Yes
How Cooperative? 3/5 
Player Count? 1-3 
Print and Play? Yes, but there is also a boxed version with really nice components!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Find the Source! … then get the best score you can.

Find The Source was a game from Kickstarter; it was originally a print-and-play, but the Kickstarter upped the ante and delivered a very nice production with nice art and high-quality board!   See above!

The solo game is quite fun, but the cooperative has players sharing resources easily for one action point.  There’s still a lot of multiplayer solitaire on your own board, but the sharing of resources and hacking inspires a lot of cooperation and discussion!

This was really fun to play!  It even made our Top 10 Solo Games of 2023!  See our review of Find the Source to see if this is for you!

1.  Super-Skill Pinball: Ramp It Up! (Pin Pals)

Supports Solo?  Yes* 
How Cooperative? 5/5 
Player Count? 1-4 (but really only 2 or 4 players for Pin Pals)
Print and Play? No, have to buy box!
Type?  roll-and-write
Win Condition?  Get the best score you can collectively: it’s pinball!

This is a weird choice for #1 for many reasons!  First of all, there’s only one cooperative scenario of the four in this box!  That is the Pin Pals game! The rest of the scenarios are solo/competitive!  Second of all, the cooperative game is really only for 2 people (although you can have two groups of two playing at the same time), so it has limited playability!

Despite these limitations, this was our favorite cooperative roll-and-write game!  You mark off things to help your compatriot all the time as you are playing!  The game moves so quickly!  It feels like pinball!  This was very interactive as we both played pinball on our own boards, but talked as we tried to give each other bonuses!

The wrestling theme was goofy, but worked really well as we “tag-teamed” each other, marking off bonuses for each other as we played!  Even though there is only one cooperative scenario in the box, it was worth it!  I highly recommend the Super Skill Pinball system and the Pin Pals board as a cooperative roll-and-write!  It just moved along so quickly and cooperatively!





What Vantage Is and Isn’t: A Review of Vantage

This week we take a look at a very hot game called Vantage: this is an open world game with thousands of cards! We show pictures of the game with some cards, and although they could be classified as spoilers, all of these pictures are out of context so I don’t think they are really spoilers. If you are really worried about spoilers, just jump to the Conclusion and avoid all the pictures!

There’s already been a ton of reviews of Vantage: reviewers who got it early for free and Stonemaier Champions (members of a club who get Stonemaier games early with a discount).   I am neither of these: I am a plain Jane game player who paid full price for my copy of Vantage! I pre-ordered it from the web site like any schlub and I just got my copy about 2 weeks ago.  I am not a rabid Stonemaier fan,  nor I am not a prepaid reviewer!  I am just a guy who like cooperative games who pays for every single game he gets and never gets ANY consideration from any publisher.  So, my review may sound a little different than the others.

The funny thing is that I pre-ordered the Vantage coins about a year ago and they arrived a year ago.  Yes, they actually had the coins for the game a year ahead of the game itself!  That’s kinda funny.  The fact that I ordered these tells you, yes, I was interested in the game.

We are going to try something a little different: we are going to talk about what Vantage is and what Vantage isn’t.  Vantage doesn’t really fit directly into any mold of what other games are; it’s its own thing!  But, is it something you will want to play?  Is it something you will want to buy?  Let’s look more closely.

Unboxing

Vantage is a fairly standard sized box: see Coke Can above for scale.

Let’s be clear: I bought ALL the extras for this game!  The wooden skill tokens, the metal coins, and the 2 layer player boards (see above).  I was very excited about this!

Because I bought all the extras, I didn’t need to punchout anything.  I just left this sheet untouched.

As you look at the box, you can see it’s got a lot of cards!  It’s actually pretty heavy!

There are a LOT of books: see above.

There are two flavors of cards: giant Location cards (see above) ..

And generic “little” cards which will come out as you play. Items, animals, … just different stuff that emerges with gameplay.

Notice just how many books there are!  They are called Storybooks: we’ll revisit that nomenclature later.

There’s two kinds of dice: Challege (black) and Skill (white) dice.

And there’s a ton of tokens!

Overall, there is a LOT that comes with this box!  It looks really nice!

Rulebook

The rulebook is very good, modulo one or two issues.  The paper is a special “silky” paper that feels really nice.  Note! It has a Table of Contents!  Yay!  But no index!  Boo!

The rulebook gets a straight-up A on the Chair Test!

The rulebook fits PERFECTLY on the chair next to me, and it can lay open just right (see above).  The font is nice: it’s a good size (not too small, not too big) and it very readable.   It’s been a while since we’ve had a rulebook that gets a straight-up A on the Chair Test. Nice job!

The Components and Set-Up are great: they are all on the same page, so it’s easy to correlate what things are and where they go!  Granted, Set-Up is pretty  “easy”, but this works really well. And the Components have pictures and are labelled.  Very nice!

The rest of the rulebook is good: lots of pictures, lots of color to help distinguish things, and sidebars that help explain an issue (without being the only reference to that rule!).

My only complaint is that the back of the rulebook doesn’t have a list of all Icons.  It has friendly reminders (see above), but I feel like that should inside the rulebook.

Now a lot of these Icons are on the side of the box (see above and below)

Or on the back of the books:

However, I was very annoyed that I couldn’t find what the little circle meant:

… until I just happened to find in the rulebook!  I think that means MONEY!  See, it frustrated me that I had to go searching for this.  It should have been on the back of the rulebook with a list of Icons!  I don’t know where this is defined except for the passing reference on page 10 where you have to infer the meaning!

That’s a pretty minor quibble, but it did slow me down for long enough that I was annoyed. And it really shouldn’t have been an issue, especially when the rest of the rulebook is so good!

But overall, the rulebook was very good.

What Is This?

The game bills itself as an Open-World Adventure (see the top of the page).  What does this mean?  We are going to explore this issue via what this game is … what this game isn’t !   If we hack away at the positive space of what the game IS and the negative space of what the game ISN’T, then hopefully that will be enough information for you to figure out if this is for you!

Is This a Storybook Game?

We’ve talked about Storybook games for years here at CO-OP Gestalt; we tend to love them! See our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook Games!

Recently, we reviewed and loved Tales of Arthurian Knights!  There is no question Tales of Arthurian Knights is a Storybook game with a beautiful hardbound book and tons of text! See above!

The text in the book flows and paints a picture of Arthur’s Knights! See how flavor exudes from the text above!

Another game that’s a Storybook game is Wandering Galaxy (see our review here).  In fact, the recent Kickstarter included two ways to enjoy this Story! On way is a full text experience from the entry book (above and below)!

See more flavor exude from the text above!

However, you can also enjoy the story text is from the app: it shows the story, but also has Voice Actors read out the text!  But there’s still a lot of flavor! (And silliness)  It’s very … flavorful!

Why am I going into so much detail about Storybook games?  Because I think Vantage is both a Storybook game and NOT a Storybook game!  It depends on how you look at it! What do I mean by this?

Many, if not most entries in the Storybook, are very very terse; almost like directions.  See above for examples. There’s not of flavor or story in this text!  Sure, there are entries with more flavor and story, but it feels like most of what’s in here is more directions than story.  I struggle a little with the appellation Storybook when that’s not much story.  That’s why I think this ISN’T a Storybook.

My friends LOVE Storybooks and text (see above), and Tales of Arthurian Knights is probably their favorite game of the year!  There is so much flavor, so much story, so much … flowery text in the storybook!  My friends LOVE this type of Storybook!

Before you go off and write me hate mail, I realize that a lot of people don’t like lots of flavor or Story text!  Some people prefer to just get to the game!  You could argue that this is just a very concise Storybook, but it’s still a Storybook!   That’s a very reasonable argument!

But I wanted to point out that some people would see the lack of flavor as a reason NOT to call this a Storybook game.  

It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of Story in Vantage comes from the Location cards!  As you explore the world of Vantage, these little scenes truly paint a picture of what you see!  There’s no need for flowery text in a Storybook because you have beautiful images to tell the story!  Who needs flowery text when a picture paints a thousand words?

The Location cards are, strictly speaking, distinct from the Storybook.  You could argue that because the Location cards are technically not part of the Storybook, that makes the argument that the-Storybooks-aren’t-Storybooks even stronger!  The story is REALLY on the Location cards, not the Storybooks themselves!

That’s a silly argument because Vantage as a full game includes lots of story.  But this is why I wanted to talk about why you could consider Vantage’s  Storybook NOT a Storybook!  These distinctions helps define what this game is.  There’s still story, but arguably it’s distributed among the cards and Storybook.  The Storybook is NOT the traditional Storybook of Tales of the Arabian Nights.  Vantage’s Storybook is … different: it’s more like directions.

If you love flavor text and like reading flowery text aloud (like my friends do with Tales of Arthurian Nights or Wandering Galaxy), then Vantage maybe isn’t the game you are looking for.  But, you may still like the way the story comes out in Vantage (with the art and Storybook giving directional text).

Is This An Adventure Game?

On the surface, the obvious answer seems “Yes! Vantage is an adventure game! Players explore and go adventures and interact with the objects/stuff around them!”

This is basically the same definition we gave for Point-And-Click Adventure games in our Top 10 Cooperative Point-and-Click Adventure Games!  

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

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

On the surface, it looks like Vantage meets these criteria … because it mostly does.  But let’s look deeper into the interactive fiction portion: although there are stories that emerge as you play Vantage, it’s not “quite” the same as interactive fiction where there is an overall story./puzzle you are completing.  This point can be countered by pointing out that there are many many stories in Vantage waiting to emerge!  That’s a fair point, but it’s worth pointing out that there’s not some overall story to this.  If you want a novel or plot to emerge (like The Secret of Monkey Island or Thimbleweed Park), Vantage is not the same thing.

The more crucial thing is the rule that you can’t interact with a Location more than once!  See the rule from the Vantage rulebook above!  In most point-and-click adventures, it’s fundamental that you can go back and revisit a Location and interact in a different way or multiple times or just look everywhere!   This particular restriction seems … strange.  It’s one major reason I would call this NOT an Adventure game.  Or at least not a point-and-click Adventure game?  Maybe that’s the difference?  

Maybe we should revisit our definition of point-and-click Adventure games and add something like “You can generally interact with the environment over and over“.  (And to be fair, there are places in Vantage where you do get a few extra chances to interact with a Location, so don’t go sending me hate mail).

So, this is an Adventure game, but maybe not fully a point-and-click Adventure game?

One other thing also marks this down a little from the Adventure game for me: the exploration.

Is This An Exploration Game?

To say this isn’t an exploration game is crazy!  Players wander!  Players interact with new places!  How could you claim Vantage is not an exploration game?

Consider Earthborne Rangers: a prototypical cooperative exploration game where I joke it’s a 4x game: Explore, Explore, Explore, and Explore! See review here!

In Earthborne Rangers, you can play over and over and over … and come back to where you left off!  You have a map, and you get a feel for the world!  There’s a lot of adventures in this world … just like Vantage!  Like Vantage, you can keep coming back over and over and see more of the world!

Vantage isn’t  a campaign.  You just crash land on the planet every time at a different place: see the chart above.   Every game is different, as seeded by the chart above.

So I finish a game of Vantage.  And it’s over.  My progress is essentially lost.  In Earthborne Rangers, I can continue where I left off and keep exploring.   That’s the difference; your exploration is lost in Vantage (but see below).

When I say I want to explore a topic, when I want to explore an issue, when I say I want to explore … I don’t want to lose all my progress!   Lack of progress can make the exploration feel pointless.   If I don’t have any vested interest, if I don’t have a desire to continue, it doesn’t feel like exploration, it just feels like random-stuff-happening-to-you.  And that (admittedly subtle point) is why the exploration in Vantage may not feel like exploration.

My first solo game of Vantage ended in a win… it was fine!  But it felt vaguely unsatisfying as “Well, I explored this world, but so what? I have no idea where I was or what I was going! I may never come back this way again, so who cares?”

This unease went away a little when I played my second solo game: if you just take the game for what it is, as a carpe diem game and just enjoy it for what it is, then it’s a lot more fun!  This isn’t a game about trying to explore and keeping track of this planet, you just make decisions and live with them!  

Of course you explore when you play Vantage, but it’s not the type of exploration that persists from game to game.   But see below.

Is This a Campaign?

The rules state very clearly that this is NOT a campaign game.  See rule above!

If you play this sporadically and infrequently, then this is absolutely not a campaign.  There’s no memory of previous games.

But what if you play just enough that you start to remember things?  Then is it a campaign game because you can take advantage of what’s you’ve seen before!   Stated in a more mathematical way, as the number of plays going to infinity, this becomes a campaign game!  

I don’t know if you remember Dollhouse; it was a TV show where dolls (people) were wiped of their memories and implanted with new ones weekly. Over time, some of the dolls started to remember what they did in previous runs … and that’s kind of what Vantage feels like over time.  You are a doll from Dollhouse, and some of those implanted memories … stick.  I don’t know of any other game like this;  It’s a very different way to look at a game.

Vantage isn’t a campaign game.  But over time, it can become one.  Sorta.

Starfleet Mode

After my first solo play, I was a little depressed.  I liked this world!  I liked the pictures in the game!  I liked the basic gameplay!  And yet, all the exploration I did was lost.  All that work, gone.  In a later game (I want to say it was my third game), I got to a place where I could keep exploring for a while … and that was cool!  I like being in this world!  But whenever I finish a game, I think “I’d really like to come back to where I was and continue exploring and get to know this world better!”  I get a little depressed when I did all that exploration … for no reason?  

What I want is a Starfleet Mode or Exploration Mode or … frankly, a Campaign mode.  I understand that the game is all about getting your nine cards in a grid, and once you do that, the game kind of ends.  Maybe there could be a way to “continue” the game; maybe you just lose some of your cards and continue?  

The rulebook is very “open” about how you play the game, from the Universal Rule of Thematic Fun (see above), to victory conditions even being kind of what you want!  It’s very open.  But I wanted a more systematic way to explore this world!  Every game starts fresh with you crash landing on a new place on the planet!    Sure, you can make up your own rules for a Starfleet Mode (My current set is: keep all but three cards and keep exploring, but get rid of your old destiny), but this feels like something we should more direction on (from the rulebook).

I want to continue exploring this planet in Starfleet Mode (my own term, it basically means  Campaign Mode) but it kind of bugs me off that I don’t have a systematic or defined way as defined by the rulebook.

Solo Mode

Vantage plays well solo: the rules are very well-defined at the bottom of page four.  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law)!

My first three games were solo games; I think it’s very important to play solo before you teach others.  There’s just enough rules that it’s better to have a sense of the game before you bring this out to a group.  Luckily, the solo mode is easy to get into and learn the game.

My first solo play left me a little … depressed.  I wanted more exploration, but I felt a little unsatisfied that I lost all the exploration I had done.   After thinking about this for a few days, I came back and played my second game.  This time, I was in carpe diem mode: I just played, made decisions, and took the consequences of my actions without caring too much.  I know I probably won’t come back to this part of the world anytime soon, so I just enjoyed what I was doing.  And my second game was much more enjoyable.  But I feel like I almost had to get depressed in my first game to appreciate what this is and what this isn’t.

A third solo game had get to do a little exploration.  And after my third game, I realized that every single one of solo games was VERY DIFFERENT.  I explored more Locations in some games, I interacted in others, the items I got influenced more what I did in other games.  That’s quite an accomplishment for a game! 

To teach the game: absolutely play this solo first, then bring this out to your friends.  Do I like this game enough to continue playing it solo?  Maybe?  If you enjoy the carpe diem flavor of this, where you just enjoy this game for what it is, then I think you will love the solo mode!  But, if you are like me, and wanted more persistent exploration, then you may feel a little unsatisfied.

I think a Starfleet Mode would make me want to play this again solo MUCH MORE.  Sure, I can make my own rules for that, but why aren’t these in the rulebook?  NOTE: (For all I know, the Starfleet Rules are in hidden somewhere in the Secret pouch, or the Books of Secrets, or somewhere else.  But I can only tell you that after about 5 plays, I haven’t seen anything like that).

Cooperative Mode

I invited my Escape Room buddies (Charlie and Allison) to play this with me.  

It was a hit!  We played a two-hour game and had a fun time exploring and reading to each other!  One of things you forget in Storybook games is that everyone stays involved as you read the Storybooks to each other!  

I asked Charlie and Allison what they thought? Would you play again?  Absolutely!  The vague sense of dissatisfaction I had in the solo game went away in the cooperative game, as we all stayed involved and just enjoyed the game for what it was.

The cooperation was .. interesting.    In the cooperative game, we have all crash-landed at different points on the planet, so we are “kind of” playing multiplayer solitaire.  We each have our own viewpoint or vantage (see what I did there?), and we don’t really interact with other (although you can if you end up on the same space, but that’s generally not what happens).

The cooperation comes in by either sharing skill tokens with each other (to mitigate die rolls), or sharing dice-placement locations with each other.  When you make Challenge rolls, you have to deal with the consequences;  you can mitigate the dice-rolls by doing dice-placement on appropriate spaces on characters.   See above as the Blue character can always mitigate a die for a Explore (blue) type roll.  Also, she has a “global” place for any character to mitigate Morale (the lightning bolt means “global: any character may use”).

Any dice you can’t mitigate are either Morale, Health, or Time losses.  See above as each character has their own Morale, Health, and Time.  If any of these go to zero, the game is “over”.

Thematically, it’s a little specious that we can share skill tokens and dice-placement spaces, because we aren’t on the same Locations (usually).   My own interpretation of this: I like to think that we are all in constant communication over some intercomm system, and we can share each other’s expertise!  So, the sharing skill tokens and dice-placement spaces, at least in my mind, is sharing expertise!  “Don’t eat that! Purple plants are generally dangerous!”  I kind of wish the rulebook had done more to explain this cooperation thematically.  But hopefully my explanation of sharing expertise works for you.

One more thing, I kind of think three or four is the best player count; With three, you are only “not involved” every third turn, and you can care about your friends stories … because there’s only three or four of them.  At higher player counts, I think you will “stop caring” and the game will become much more multiplayer solitaire (and you might get bored waiting for your turn).

Things We Were Unsure About

Locations: Charlie and Allison didn’t love that we couldn’t see each other’s Location pictures: but the rules are very clear about this.   I think the game would offer the explanation that it would “break immersion” if we could share pictures: you should only be experiencing your own story.  While I understand this explanation and maybe even might agree with it in theory, it’s so much more fun and cooperative to say “Look how cool this Location is!” .. and show it to everyone. It would actually make the game more cooperative, or at least more interactive.  In fact, if we go with premise that we have an intercomm system that we are communicating on, I’ve got to believe we have a camera on our phone!   🙂 Maybe the game should just allow you to share pictures every so often … the rules are a little draconian on this point, but maybe a little too much.

Bottleneck: The major bottleneck in the game was almost always waiting for Rich (me) to get the cards.  It was probably the most annoying part of the game.  The rulebook suggests that only one player should handle the cards … as it makes the game move faster …  but it feels there could be a better way to share the load on this. Me, as Rich, ALWAYS did all the work and it was annoying.  An easy easy thing would be to let one person handle the Location cards and one person handle the items.  At least then 2 people would be doing that in parallel and share the load!!   The decks can always easily be divided as well.  Maybe it’s too chaotic to split these decks, but I feel like there’s got to a better way to share the load: this is a cooperative game for goodness sakes.   

Conclusion

You might think, that after reading this, that I didn’t like this game.  But I did!  I just wanted to explore a lot of the issues so you understand what this game is and isn’t!  It’s not a campaign game, but it can be over the long haul.  It’s an exploration game, but it’s kind of not as you forget all the exploration you’ve done from game to game (usually).  It’s an adventure game, but it’s kind of isn’t as you can only interact with Locations once.  It’s a Storybook game, but it’s kind of not as the Storybook is more like directions (and the story exists in the Locations).  Vantage is just a little different, and I hope you got that from this review.

I liked the solo mode: it works well and it really teaches the game.  Be aware that you might feel vaguely dissatisfied in the solo game because you don’t get to continue your exploration from game to game.  If you go into the solo game with a carpe diem mindset, and just enjoy this for what it is, you will be much happier!   I’d probably give this a 7/10 for solo mode, but if there were a more systematic way to explore the Planet and keep the exploration going (especially in the solo mode), I’d probably bump this up to an 8 or a 9/10.  It’s a pretty neat world!

The cooperative mode was a hoot and we had a fun time playing!  The cooperation feels a little athematic unless you think of us all sharing an intercomm system!  Then the sharing of skills and dice-placement mitigation spaces is like sharing expertise amongst ourselves; that little premise really goes a long way towards making the game feel cooperative.  Of course, the Storybook reading to each other makes the game very interactive and fun too!  I’d give this 8/10 for cooperative play.  I’d probably never play with more than four players though.

If you are interested in Vantage, you should give this a try to see if you like it: It’s very different from other Storybook games like those in our Top 10 Cooperative Storybook Games!!  I freely admit I didn’t love my first play of Vantage that much; I had to play it a few times.  Maybe you want more flowery prose, maybe you want more story, then consider Wandering Galaxy or Tales of Arthurian Knights instead.   Maybe you want more persistent exploration, consider Earthborne Rangers instead.  But Vantage is such a different beast than many games out there, don’t judge it right away.  Give it  few times to see if you like it.  And it’s okay if you don’t like it.  It’s also okay if you do like it!

 

Late To The Party, But The Party’s Still Going! A Solo and Cooperative Review of Tales from Red Dragon Inn!

So, the original Tales from Red Dragon Inn was on Kickstarter way back in October 2021, and delivered to backers in 2024.  It was so popular, they had a second Kickstarter in June/July 2024, and that’s the one I backed!   This cooperative dungeon crawler for 1-4 players looked really cool!

Why didn’t I back the original? I think I was afraid of getting YET ANOTHER DUNGEON CRAWLER (YADC) campaign that I wouldn’t play!

I do love this universe … especially the Red Dragon Inn cooperative Deck-Building game called Battle for Greyport (see review here and here: It’s also in our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games!)! I love the art-style and the silly vibe of this universe!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a fairly big mama-jamba of a box: see Coke can above and below for scale.

Ah, this game comes with a first-play walkthrough!  This is a really good walkthrough!

What’s in here?

The game comes with most of the cards and minis in this little grey box.  (Grey box?  Greyport? Get it?)

And some dice.

The minis are pretty good.

Underneath all that are the map packs.

This map pack is pretty huge! See Coke can above for scale.

… and there are quite a few maps for the adventurers to go on!

Underneath the maps are TONS OF PUNCHOUTS.  And by tons, I mean tons by weight!

There are 5 individually wrapped punchout sets (with multiple punchout sheets per set!)

And a new chapter rulebook per set!  Whew!

There are … so …. many … punchouts!

But overall, this looks pretty cool!  I am just scared of how many punchouts there … (but keep reading below …)

Gameplay

This is a cooperative dungeon-crawler where each player takes the role of a different hero … the typical Dungeons and Dragons archetypes are all here: thief, fighter, barbarian, etc.  Despite the classes being fairly generic, these characters have so much … character! 

Each character has some character specific cards giving the asymmetric powers.

For example, Zot (above) has some special Actions specific to his character!  But notice the art and the feel!  This is not your typical dungeon crawler!  There’s character and a sense of humor here!  The game looks light and fun … and surprise! It is!  And pooky!

Players will set up the Chapter of their campaign; see scenario 1 of Chapter 1 above!

One of the coolest parts of this game is that the monsters are all described ON THE MAT!  So, you don’t have to go searching books or monster manuals for the monster info!

The minis are color-coded via bases, and this system works great. I was a little worried that the bases might “harm” the cardboard standees ( … Gloomhaven: I am looking at you …), but the standees stand well and the bases DO NOT harm the cardboard (NOTE: After a number of plays, there’s a little bit of wear and tear, but it doesn’t ruin the cardboard: it just indents it a little).

To keep track of hit points, each mini has a number above it, and  it also a little card associated with the number. See above.

It makes it really easy to correlate the mini with its hit point card!  This system is simple and works surprisingly well! They used colors really well here.

Players operate these heroes, explore the dungeon, and fight the baddies!

This is a fight-em-up dungeon crawler!

Combat is decided by the yellow and black dice.  You might be worried that the game is too random if dice decide a lot, but the dice are pretty consistent.  You will always get at least one success per dice, sometimes you will get exploding dice (which you can reroll over and over) and sometimes you will get some extra epic dice for FUTURE rolls!

If you roll the ! (exclamation point) symbol on the yellow dice, you get an Epic black die (modulo some rules) which you can use on a future turn! My favorite part of this is that you can CHOOSE when to use the Epic dice on a future turn!  This reminds me a little of the Hour of Need system (see review here and here) where current rolls can contribute to future successes WHEN YOU WANT/NEED THEM!  You choose when to use those Epic Dice!  That’s so cool!

This is a Variable Turn Order game: each player and each set of monsters gets a token and one players pulls the token out of a bag to decide when each one goes.  See above.  I was very worried when I saw Variable Turn Order: was I going to have to worry about all the problems and try to come up with a solution?  See a very in-depth discussion of Variable Turn Order and its problems/solutions here!

After all was said and done, the Variable Turn Order system didn’t seem to suffer from the problems we normally see!

Depending on the token you draw, you either get 2 Actions and 1 Shenanigan …

Or 1 Action or Shenanigan! (1 and 2-Player games with partial actions).

Your Actions and Shenanigans are well defined on your cards!  See above!

Note that every character has very different Actions and Shenanigans! It’s funny, that one word Shenanigans kind of implies the overall vibe in this game …

This is all about your characters moving around the maps and fighting baddies!

If you reach the final objective (killing the yellow slime above for scenario 1: see above), you win (… if you survive to the objective phase…)! If any character dies, you lose! There are other losing conditions too, as you get further into the game.

It’s a fun dungeon crawler! And you get to level-up your characters too! As the game gets further along, you can get new cards from THE VAULT which you can use to choose upgrades!

Walkthrough

By far the best part of this game is HOW GOOD the first play walkthrough is!

This Walkthrough takes you through the first 4 scenarios of Chapter 1 in great detail!  There’s no need to read the rulebook ahead of time (well, because there isn’t one) … you are just learning the rules as you play from the Walkthrough!

Coupled with the Walkthrough is also the Chapter Guide (see above).  The Walkthrough tells you when to look at the Walkthrough and when to look at the Chapter Guide for specific set-up.

I can’t tell you HOW MUCH I liked this walkthrough!  Worried about getting into the game?  Naaah … this Walkthrough is fabulous!  It slowly introduces you to all the rules as you go.  This reminds me very much a video game training mode; it works so well!

Incremental Punchout

One thing I was VERY worried about was punching out ALL THOSE TOKENS before you can play!  And guess what!  You don’t have to!  You can punchout what you need as the game flows!

Do you need some monsters?  Just punch them out now when you need them!

This Incremental Punchout philosophy worked really well with the way that the Walkthrough taught the rules; learn a little bit at a time, punchout a little bit at a time!!! So, don’t get overwhelmed by all the tokens … just take tokens as you need them.  I wish the rulebook had emphasized this point, because just LOOKING at the token sheets gave me heartburn! 

I strongly recommend you punchout as you go and do not do everything at once: you’ll get right into the game that much quicker!

What Is This?

How would I describe this game?  In one word: Lighthaven!  Tales From Red Dragon Inn has a lot of similarities to Gloomhaven: it’s a cooperative dungeon-crawler campaign!  Players explore the world, fight monsters, upgrade characters, and quest quest quest.  But the gameplay is lighter, the rules are lighter, the world is “lighter”, the art is lighter and cuter … there’s no Gloom here!  

Like Gloomhaven, Tales from Red Dragon Inn does have a lot of components, but this world just feels just so easy to jump into.  

There is some story here: about as much story as Gloomhaven.  If you are looking for more adventure games, consider games like Arydia (see review here) or storybook games like Tales of the Arthurian Knights (see review here).  If you want story story story, this probably isn’t the game for you … this is a dungeon crawler where you fight monsters!

Solo Play

So, Tales from the Red Dragon Inn does support a solo mode!   (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!)   In fact, two solo modes!

It’s a little bit of a bummer that the solo play isn’t addressed right up front … you have to go looking for the solo rules in the Glossary (a very complete book!) that comes with the game.  See above.  There are two solo modes; play normal, but alternate between some characters like a multiplayer game …  or play a solo character with a Companion.

The Companion has a special set of cards: see above.  The Companion rules also take up a full page on the Glossary with lots of exceptions to gameplay.  I usually HATE solo modes with lots of exceptions to the rules, so I opted to just alternate between two characters because there are NO RULES CHANGES.  I strongly recommend this is how you play solo; the Companion is still an “extra” thing to play and doesn’t save that much context switch overhead.  At this point, I have played the first Chapter all the way through with two characters and didn’t have any problem going back and forth between characters. In other words, the context switching between two characters didn’t seem to cause me any issues as I played solo.

My solo game was operating Deidre and Gerki.  They made a great team!  These two characters really worked well together; Deidre is better at long distance stuff, but occasionally she’ll get in there and help Gerki!  If she stands NEXT TO some monsters, Gerki gets his backstab ability (an extra die!)  The amount of cooperation between the two was quite good.  

I have spent about 15 hours playing the game solo.  I learned the game solo, set-up the game solo, upgraded, read the Walkthrough solo, and played all 4 scenarios of Chapter 1!  I had a blast!  I loved the simplicity of the system, I loved how the characters can work together well and support each other, I loved the “sense of humor” the art implies, I loved the art, I loved the vibe!

Once you know the game, your sessions can be quicker, but be prepared for your first 4 sessions to take about 15 hours or so!  But, it flies by!  You are having fun and always doing something!

I look forward to more solo sessions, but I had to reset the game (this is not a legacy game, but it is a campaign game and you can reset it) so I could play it cooperatively with my friend(s).

Cooperative Play

My first cooperative experience was a 2-Player game with Teresa.  She brought over a little red dragon as a mascot … it was quite apropos!

For a different experience from the solo game, I played Zot the wizard.  He was funny!

It’s hilarious that the little guy POOKY who helps Zot summons HIM!  (Not the other way around) See above!  That’s hilarious!  And yes, we are convinced this is the rabbit from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

Like the solo game, we saw some good cooperation as Teresa’s Fiona Character was all melee, while Zot was all distance!  A good combo!

The game also moved much more quickly since I had already played the entire Chapter 1 solo.  A lot of those “15 hours” I spent in the first 4 solo games were shortened considerably!  I think Teresa and I got through Scenario 1 is about an hour!

Playing solo ahead of time significantly increased how quickly we were able to get into this game.  

Will we play more?  Basically, Teresa wants to wait until Sara comes back and then we’ll start a 3-Player campaign!  

I think it was a success cooperatively: it’s always a good sign when your friends ask to continue the campaign!

Story vs Flavor Text

There’s not a lot of story per se, but there is a lot of flavor text that gives the game direction and charm, and helps establish the parameters of the game.   To be clear, you really don’t HAVE to read the flavor text … I didn’t read it all in my solo play, but it didn’t really detract from the game by not reading it.  Teresa LOVES flavor text, so we did read it (see above) and it did contribute to the atmosphere of the game: see above.

What I Liked

Charm: This game has so much charm!   The art style that permeates this game is just so much fun! It stays within the Red Dragon Inn universe … Dragonverse?

Unique Characters: The characters are also so unique and different! For example: the fact that Pooky (the little familiar) summons Zot is hilarious!

Walkthrough:  This first play Walkthrough is exceptional and makes it easy to jump in!

The Dice System:  I was really worried the dice system would be too random, but it’s really not.  You always get at least one success, you can get exploding dice, and you can choose to use Epic Dice if you want for “extra help”!  The Epic Dice system worked well!  You could choose when to use the Epic Dice when you really needed a win!  

Vibe:  This is a light-hearted Gloomhaven … it could have easily been called Lighthaven! Yet, it’s still a deep game with lots of play and meaningful decisions!

Level-Up:  Levelling-up is easy and interesting!  Every character levels up, but it’s not described u pages and pages of tables in a book!  You just grab the cards destined for you, or choose some! It’s really easy!

What I Didn’t Like

SO MANY PUNCHOUTS!  The sheer number of punchouts in this game is terrifying.  Word of advice, just punch out tokens as you need them.  In fact, I ended up trying to put the monsters BACK into the token sheets when I was done with them!  Partly I did this to reset the game, but the game just stores easier if you keep things in the punchout sheets as much as possible. I know, that’s not ideal. 

Part of this was a little foreshadowing too … you saw how many punchout sheets are coming, right?  Do you REALLY think you are going to be able store ALL THESE tokens in bags back in the box?  So, I put as many tokens as a I could back into the punchouts as a favor to future me.

Conclusion

Well, Tales from Red Dragon Inn should have made my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024 because the first release came out in 2024.  But I didn’t get it until the second Kickstarter, so I didn’t get it until 2025!  So, it will probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025 … but it might have to be an honorable mention, just because it wasn’t released in 2024.  Or maybe I’ll just count it as 2025 since I backed the second Kickstarer … not sure …

This is a fun and light dungeon-crawler, but still lots of depth and meaningful decisions.  You fight monsters and you have fun as a group of adventurers!  There is some story here, but it’s mostly just fun flavor text.

Tales from Red Dragon Inn is a great solo and cooperative game: 9/10. It’s so fun!

I think the only reason this didn’t get a 10/10 was because the Variable Turn Order can sometimes be … disappointing.  I wish there had been a way to mitigate/control the Variable Turn Order, but it didn’t get in the way that much. 

 

How Is Only Murders in the Building like Casinopolis? A Quick Review of Casinopolis

Casinopolis arrived at my house just days before RichieCon 2025, about July 7th or so. Casinopolis was on Kickstarter back in February 2025 and promised delivery in June 2025, so it’s literally just a few days late.  I’m counting that as on time!  Especially in the Kickstarter world!

Casinopolis is a 1-4 Player solo and cooperative micro game; it only has 18 cards!  It’s a city-building game, where players place cards in the play area to build the city, based on the current scoring criteria.  See above for an example.

Casinopolis the the fourth entry in the Sprawlopolis line.   The original game was Sprawlopolis!  It spawned 3 more standalone versions of the game, giving a total of 4 games in the line: Sprawlopolis, Agropolis, Naturopolis, and the newest one we are looking at today: Casinopolis.

This line has been incredibly popular, both with my friends and gaming culture at large!  Sprawlopolis (the original) made the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2019, the Top 10 “small” Cooperative Games, and the line made our  Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Playing/Placement Games!

Each of these games has the same flavor: you are playing cards to build a city area with roads.  There are little differences between each version, but they are “essentially” the same game.  See our review of Argropolis here for an overview of the system!

What’s Different About Casinopolis?

In this version, players are building casinos on the strip in Las Vegas.  There are three types of Casinos to be built: Egyptian (gold), Medieval (blue), and Roman (red).  See above.

The strip is a new idea: the longest road becomes “the strip” and you only score the largest Casinos actually on the strip.  See the longest road above forming the strip!

Another new idea is the “symbols” on the roads.  Every time you can get three symbols (or more) of the same type (fruit or lucky), you score 3+ points!  The strip above scores a ton of points!

Of course, there are standard Sprawlopolis type rules, where you draw 3 cards at the start and they form the scoring criteria!  See above for an example.

There is also a notion of a “resort” which has no road or symbols or anything on it.  The resort type just “expands” your casino.

Why Would I Like Casinopolis Best?

Honestly, if the Las Vegas theme calls to you, then this is probably the best Sprawlopolis game for you.  The symbols on the roads should remind you of a Slot machine in Vegas, and the strip and the resort rules pull that theme home too.

If you like city theme, the original Sprawlopolis is probably for you.  If you like nature, Naturopolis is probably for you.  If you like the countryside, Agropolis is probably for you.  It’s all about which theme calls to you.

Only Murders In The Building

I really enjoyed the first three Seasons of the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building.  The first season was so new and interesting! I loved it! The following two seasons were good, just not quite as groundbreaking as the original show.  And by the time the fourth season was released, I was happy for it, but I wasn’t excited for it?  “Eh, I already know what this show does, but do I want to watch more?”  I am happy to watch it, and I will probably enjoy it, but it’s just more of the same.

And that is exactly how I feel about Casinopolis!  The original Sprawlopolis was groundbreaking and fun!  The two follow-ons were good, but by the time Casinopolis arrived on Kickstarter, I was like “Eh, I already know what this game is.  Do I want to play more?”  I am happy to play it, and I will probably enjoy it, but it’s just more of the same.

That sounds harsh, but it’s not meant to.  I like this line of games … a lot!  I just don’t know if I need four different versions of it!  Honestly, the Casinopolis is my least favorite of the four, but it may just be the theme.  If you love Vegas, this is the version I would recommend to you!

Conclusion

Casinopolis is more of the same, which is both good and bad.  Good because it really is a great game system!  Bad become the line is becoming diluted.   If you are looking to play any game in the Sprawlopolis line, I suggest you find the theme that speaks to you (city-building, farming, nature, or Vegas) and run with that.  You probably don’t need all four!

I have all four.  I don’t think I will get the fifth (I am sure they have another in the works) unless the theme really really really really really really really speaks to me.  Wait?  What’s this?  Superheropolis?  Darn you, Button Shy games … Now I have to get it!  (EDITOR: we have no idea if a new one is imminent or if it’s a superhero theme … don’t count on that…)

Leviathan Wilds: More Stuff! A Review of the Deepvale Expansion

Leviathan Wilds has a special place in my heart!  It actually had to go up on Kickstarter twice to get funded originally!   It did well the second time it went up, but it was touch-and-go whether this would do well enough to fund on Kickstarter!  Luckily, it did!  Leviathan Wilds (the base game) was on my #3 on  Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024 and was #3 on my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024!

When the Deepvale Expansion went up on Gamefound, I was pretty much all in!  Leviathan Wilds has gone over great in my groups, both with gamers and people who don’t usually like cooperative games!  See our original review here!

Let’s take a look!

What Came In The Mail?

The Kickstarter actually came with three major pieces; deluxe components, upgrade kit, and the expansion itself. See above.

Deluxe Components Pack

The Deluxe Components pack upgrades a lot of cardboard tokens in the game and a few other things.

What’s in here? See above!

The Rage Track upgrade is now dual-layered.  This pack may be worth it just for this?

There’s a metal coin for the Gambler.

This is the silliest upgrade; the marker tokens are now CLEAR red plastic instead of OPAQUE red plastic!

The tokens go go from cardboard to acrylic.  I love acrylic tokens, but can you tell the difference between the two above?

Similarly for the mushrooms: acrylic tokens are nicer, but it’s hard to really tell the difference.

The upgrade I didn’t expect: the dice! I thought the original dice (left) were great, but apparently they don’t work for color-blind people, so the dice on the right are easier to distinguish!

Oh ya, and a nice wooden first player token (Sage the turtle!)

Do you need the Deluxe Components?  Not really!  They are great, and I am glad I have them (partly because I like the game so much), but you would do just fine with the base components.  Decide for yourself.

Upgrade Kit

What’s in the upgrade Kit envelope?    Basically, errata and upgraded cards for upgrading from v1.0 of the original game to v1.1!

Interestingly, the Gambler token (wood) is also included!  So, you can choose the wood Gambler token (here) or the Metal one (from the Deluxe Components)!  So silly to have both.

There is an upgraded rulebook:  It generally looked the same, but it had an extra 4 pages:

One pack of cards just replaces some cards that needed updating/fixing.  See the “new” card has the left up-arrow in the lower left corner.

I am actually chose to keep both rulebooks, but labelling the v1.0 rulebook clearly! See above!

How many times have you wished you had another rulebook while playing?  Now I do!

The upgrade kit is what you expect: a slightly better rulebook, a few replacement cards, and yet another Gambler token.

Deepvale

THIS is the cool thing!  It’s just more content for Leviathan Wilds!

There’s a new book with 7 new Leviathans!

The Leviathans here are maybe even a little creepier than the original Leviathans!  See all 7 above!

There are, of course, new Rage decks for each Leviathan.

There’s a new Climber: Edge.  (I joked there should also be a Bono Climber as well.  No one laughed.)

There’s also a new class called Harvester.

The Harvester has a die that keeps track of “when can I get the double-sided action card”.  This is a fairly new, if not particularly novel, new class.

Basically, this Harvester card sits on the side, and you have to “work” to get it, but it’s pretty cool!

This is a just a “more stuff” expansion! New Climber! New Class!  And 7 New Leviathans!

Solo Play

Like before (see our original review of Leviathan Wilds), I still prefer playing Leviathan Wild’s solo mode by playing two-handed: ie. play two climbers and alternate between them.

The new first player token makes it a lot easier to keep track of whose turn it is when playing solo!

The very first Leviathan doesn’t seem that hard, but I barely lost on the last turn! I couldn’t get out with the key!

Basically, the opening Leviathan is already a little harder (Level 2 difficulty), as you have to take care of all the crystals AND get out with the key!

I lost with one turn remaining …I couldn’t get out of the cave even though I removed all the crystals!

Still, good times.  This is a great game and I feel like I had to be smart about using my resources and knowing when to push forward.  I am still learning how Edge works, but he’s a great addition.  This is still Leviathan Wilds solo.

Cooperative Play

I told my friend Teresa that I barely lost the solo game, so we had to play it again!

And unfortunately, we still lost playing 2-Player!

The first Leviathan is a level 2 difficulty, and it’s the easiest of the bunch!  Every other Leviathan is a difficulty 3 or 4!  Oof!  These Leviathans are harder!

Nothing broke.  The game still works famously cooperatively. This felt like the same Leviathan Wilds I played so many times with my friends at Dice Tower West, RichieCon 2024, and game nights!

Choice: One Box or Sleeves?

You have a choice to make with this new expansion!  You can either:

  1. Put all the new content into the original box
    or
  2. Sleeve your cards, but have to use both the original box AND the expansion box!

I was tempted to put all the new cards and items into the original box, but once I sleeved the game, there’s NO WAY the expansion can fit in original box.

Yes, it was kind of annoying.

So, if you sleeve (and you want to keep the original inserts), you need both boxes.

Oh well.  I chose to sleeve the game because RichieCon 2025 is coming up, and Leviathan Wilds was such a hit at RichieCon 2024, I thought I’d make sure it stayed in good shape! So, I have to have both boxes.  I don’t think anyone will play it so much at RichieCon 2025 that I’ll need both boxes, so I’ll just take the original box.

Conclusion

If you like Leviathan Wilds, this is just more stuff for it!  Although the Deluxe Component Pack is cool, you probably don’t need it unless you love the game like I do!  And the Upgrade Kit is “nice to have” (fixing some cards) but again you don’t really need it that much.

The new content from the Deepvale Expansion is just that: new content to extend the life of the game!  Again, it’s not strictly necessary (only one new climber and one new class), but having seven new Leviathans will really extend this game for you.

The new expansion, although not really that necessary, is still nice to have.  There’s plenty of content in the original game and … you probably can be happy with all the stuff in the original game.  Still, I am glad I got this.  Solid expansion: more stuff I like.