Tag: rpg

Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative And Solo Games of 2026!

It’s always fun to look ahead and see what might be coming! We’ve backed a bunch of Kickstarters this year, but which ones are we most excited to see?

As we look forward, we also look back to see which games we anticipated, which delivered, which we liked, and which we didn’t! We’ll start with some games from 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 … which believe it or not, some games from 2021 still haven’t delivered!

2021 

  • The only game left from 2021 that hasn’t delivered is Onimaru.  We have received no updates in the last year and few months; it’s pretty clear they took our money and ran away.  This is a sobering reality check! We love Kickstarters and all the great games we can get, but there are charlatans out there who want our money. 
  • This is the only thing from 2021 that hasn’t delivered.  And I don’t think it ever will.

2022

  • Rat Queens to the Slaughter has had some major ups and downs, as the original creator “took back” the project after it was flailing.  We are seeing updates pretty frequently with lots of new art and cards, so I think we will one day see this deliver. One day, maybe even 2026. 
  • This is the only thing from 2022 that hasn’t delivered.

2023

2024

2025

  • Floe + Monsters Unleased: It’s taking a while for this.  I have to admit, I have been a little frustrated that they did more development than I expected for a game that was “supposed to be basically done”.  It still hasn’t delivered, even after promising a June 2025 delivery.
  • Fable Fury:  This delivered sometime in November.  It was a beautiful production, but me and my friends didn’t like the game.  I didn’t do a review because I couldn’t even finish a game with my friends. Beautiful game, great art, wonderful production, but too random.
  • Horror On The Orient Express:  We see lots of activity and updates, but it clearly missed its August 2025 delivery!  I am confident we will see it deliver, maybe 2026.
  • Aetherspire:  This one kind of makes me mad;  I haven’t gotten my copy at the time of this writing (early December 2025), but in late November I saw two copies at my FLGS!  I may see it in December 2025, I may not!  If I had just WAITED, I could have picked this up from FLGS.  The developer apologized online, and I get it, but it is still frustrating since I paid real money to back his Kickstarter, and others see the game first. UPDATE: it arrived Dec 18th.  I don’t know if i can get a review out before the end of the year.  UPDATE UPDATE:  See our review of Aetherspire here!
  • One-Hit Heroes:  One-Hit Heroes delivered to me in early 2025, and it was a hit with everyone I played it with!  See our review here!  It also made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025!
  • Invincible: The Card Game:   This re-theming of Astro Knights into the Invincible universe delivered to use in September 2025!  We liked it; it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025!  In some ways, it’s the best version of the Astro Knights system (esp. with the Assist keyword)!  Check out our review to see if this might be for you!   Get the main mat, but probably stay away from the player mats.
  • Unstoppable:  This cooperative deck-builder game for 1 to 2 players delivered in early 2025!  Nominally, it’s for 2 people, but it’s really a solo game. This made our Top 10 Solo Games of 2025 and was a real unique treat!  See our review of Unstoppable here!
  • DCeased: A Zombie Game!  This kinda delivered, but not really.  The main delivery, which is full of games, it still in production.  But an early version of DCeased: Gotham City Outbreak went on sale on Amazon!  
  • LA-1: It’s close to being done.   The updates have closed for shipping addresses, and the updates seem to indicate shipping is happening.  I suspect we’ll see this in early 2026.
  • DC Super Heroes United:  This is in the same boat as DCeased.  The main, huge order of games hasn’t delivered, but they did put up one of the games on Amazon: DC Super Heroes Batman Hush.   DC Batman Hush was our favorite game of the year!  See our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025! 

On to our anticipated cooperative games of 2026!

10.  Journeys Afar: The Ketsueki

Platform: Kickstarter Journeys Afar: The Ketsueki
Promised Delivery:  December 2026
Summary:  Welcome to Journeys Afar, where infinite worlds filled with boundless possibilities are connected by a single road: the Ketsueki. Along this path, brave heroes venture forth, each journeying to distant, mysterious lands. On their travels, they explore sites of great importance, acquire powerful items, make offerings to benevolent spirits, sharpen their skills, battle fearsome ronin, and form lasting bonds. But in the end, only one will be remembered as a legend.

Journeys Afar: The Ketsueki is a sandbox game of epic adventure, where the journey matters more than the destination. Each player is a unique hero from a distinct world. Your world defines everything in the game: encounters, quests, threats, upgrades, and special rules that reshape every session into a new experience. As heroes travel across The Ketsueki, they impact the worlds they visit and discover who they truly are.

This is a competitive game, not co-op, but I’ll probably be playing it all solo (there is a solo mode).  Everything I have read about this game makes me feel like it SHOULD be a cooperative game, so maaaaaaaybe I’ll try to get some cooperative house rules going.  This game, as an open world, just looks AMAZING!  I am super excited to get it solo, and you MAY just see some cooperative rules on our site for this game after we give it a solo go!

9. StarDriven: Gateway + Invasion

Platform: Kickstarter StarDriven: Gateway
Promised Delivery:  Jan 2026
Summary:  In StarDriven: Gateway, 1-4 players each control their own starship and crew while determining the fate of distant colonies near an ancient alien gateway. The game can be played competitively, co-operatively, or in solo mode depending on which episode you select at game set-up.

Your objective is to be the most renowned and respected Crew by gaining the most points. You gain points by increasing your reputation with the Council Worlds, promoting your Crew, researching Anomalies, recruiting Freelancers, and completing Missions. All of these brave endeavors will score you points and lead to your victory. Running your starship entails assigning crew to different stations on your ship board, which allows you to assign dice to those stations to activate ship actions. Move and explore space, encounter raiders, face anomalies, and use your crew abilities and skills to fulfill mission requirements and activate their bonuses. Manage your ship’s power, weapons, and shields, and recruit and promote crew members to enhance your ship and achieve objectives to ensure your side prevails

This is #9 on the list because it is only cooperative with the Invasion expansion that comes with the Kickstarter!  Usually a game that has an expansion to make it cooperative isn’t great cooperatively, but we had fantastic luck with Kinfire Council with the Winds of Change expansion making it cooperative!  Honestly, we backed this because we had such a good time with games my Mike Gnade: his Set A Watch series just knocked it out of the park for us (see here, here, here, here, and here)  … so if he is doing this game, I’m in!  The Set A Watch games made so many of our Top 10 lists!  The ultimate was when Doomed Run made our #1 spot on Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!   A co-op game in space by Mike Gnade? I’m in!

8. Honor’s End

Platform: Kickstarter Honor’s End
Promised Delivery:  Sep 2026
Summary:  Honor’s End is a 1–4 player cooperative deckbuilding adventure set in a medieval world overshadowed by a mysterious truth. You can play it as a standalone session or as part of an episodic campaign that gradually unlocks new content and challenges.

Players must band together to overcome escalating threats. By wielding hero, action, and equipment cards, they’ll strike at their foes while fending off dishonor—brought on by danger dice rolled each round by their enemies.

Each knight chooses a path of Valor, Fortitude, or Wisdom, building a deck that shapes their abilities and tactics. Enemies, forged from the traits of Wrath, Deceit, and Despair, create unpredictable and unique battles every time you play.

Victory demands more than raw power. Success lies in balancing honor, clever deckbuilding, and shrewd use of the Temple and Monarch reward tracks. Defeat all three enemy champions to claim victory—or watch your honor slip away.

This is a game where the gameplay sounded interesting despite the art.  I don’t love the art I have seen, but it’s all thematic.  This cooperative campaign deck-builder looks like it will be a lot of fun with some possibly unique gameplay.

7. Exoterra: The Giant Mech

Platform: Kickstarter Exoterra
Promised Delivery:  Aug 2026
Summary: Welcome to the universe of ExoTerra, a sandbox strategy game with tactical planning, deep customization, and enemies who are complex and highly challenging.

ExoTerra is played cooperatively over the course of many sorties in a campaign. Each Player takes on the role of a Pilot in charge of requisitioning equipment, personnel, supplies, and, most importantly, Jackets – massive humanoid weapon systems, to be customized and fielded in battle.

Leveraging a new system of enemy generation, battles should always feel different, even if facing the same enemies. This is accomplished through several factors of enemy customization that force players to assess each situation individually. You can rely on your experience from past battles, but must be able to change your strategy on the fly based on the variables of the mission.

This looks like an amazing Mechs game!    I was on the fence on this one, but it just looks really neat.  And I think the idea of customizing your Mech is what finally sold me.  That and cooperative play!

6. Viking Route

Platform: Kickstarter Viking Route
Promised Delivery:  Oct 2025 (ya, they didn’t make this.  It will be 2026)
Summary: In the co-operative game Viking Route, your heroes sail a magical Drakkar to the World’s Edge and beyond. Influenced by magical ravens sent by Odin to steer your course, and by the winds of Fate, you will face powerful and monstrous creatures out of the Norse mythos to fulfill your quests and prepare you for the final challenge to defeat the greatest enemy of the Gods and prevent Ragnarok!

Viking Route uses a compass-and-magnets movement mechanism first introduced the game The Faceless. The main game piece — the Drakkar — is represented by a compass, and multiple magnets (representing ravens and wind) are manipulated by players to steer the course of their ship.

Magnets and compasses?  In a cooperative game?  Yes please! This game looks really interesting and definitely has a high toy factor!  Let’s hope the game underneath is good as well!

5. Ghostland: The Game

Platform: Kickstarter Ghostland
Promised Delivery:  March 2026
Summary:  Jurassic Park meets Ghosts in this Co-operative boardgame about a theme park gone mad! It’s opening day at Ghostland, a theme park that contains actual ghosts! However, havok has immediately broken loose, and the ghosts are attacking guests left and right. It’s up to you and your friends to stop the ghosts, build Field Generators to contain them, and finally face off against the most sinister ghost in the park, the infamous Rex Garrote!

Each players picks a character that is unique and contains their own stats and abilities to help you not only survive the theme park, but hopefully save the day as well! The game is played in rounds where players move arounds the park, fight ghosts, buy items, or try to build a Recurrence Field Generator.

Once players have successfully built three Recurrence Field Generators they will summon the big bad himself, Rex Garrote, for them to defeat! But if the park’s human population reaches zero, it’s Game Over!

Ghosts in an amusement park?  And a co-op to boot?  Who needs a Scooby-Doo game, because this sounds like it might scratch that it!  This may or may not be a Birthday present for my friend CC!  He loved amusement parks and horror-themed games!  I just hope I don’t like it better than him or I may keep it!

4. Sail: Legacy

Platform: Kickstarter Sail Legacy
Promised Delivery:  August 2026
Summary: Assemble your crew, captain your ship, and take on the high seas in this legacy co-op trick-taker!

In Sail Legacy, you and your best matey will go on an adventure across thirty unique missions. Upgrade your ship, outfit your characters, and tune the deck itself to avoid a watery grave!

Sail Legacy evolves from the core Sail game mechanisms as you cooperatively use “must-follow” trick-taking to take on the unforgiving ocean — and the mythical beasts that call it home. Based on the combination of symbols in the trick, you’ll steer the ship, charge ahead, or fire the cannons. Throughout the game, you’ll tweak your pirate’s asymmetric player powers. Will you have a well-balanced team or specialize in one area?

We really liked the original 2-Player Trick-Taking game Sail; it made it pretty high on our Top 10 Solo and Cooperative Trick-Taking Games!  This one takes that formula and transforms into an Legacy games where maps changes and components may change forever!  It’ such an interesting idea; I am really looking forward to this!

3. Companion Quest

Platform: Kickstarter Companion Quest
Promised Delivery:  Dec 2025 (ya, it’s not making that; we’ll see it in 2026!)
Summary: Companion Quest is a cooperative game for 1-4 players, who take on the role of gnomes, tasked with preventing Gu’Gu from causing chaos. Players will collect magical Energy Cubes (dice), tasty Snacks (resources), and fantastical Companions (abilities) along the way. Each Companion has unique abilities that allow players to manipulate their dice to overcome the challenges they will face.

Complete quests before the Mischief Meter reaches the end of the track and things spiral out of control!

This looks like an epically cute dungeon crawler in a small but beautifully cute package.  The BGG pages lists this as 30 minutes and 10+ ages, so I suspect it will easy to jump into! Sometime you just want a fun and fast and cute dungeon crawler!

2. Abyss Echo: The Forbidden Rite

Platform: Kickstarter Abyss Echo: The Forbidden Rite
Promised Delivery:  April 2026
Summary: Step into the shadowed halls of Miskatonic University, where fate and madness echo behind every closed door.

Abyss Echo: The Forbidden Rite is a deeply immersive narrative game that weaves branching storylines, dice-driven uncertainty, and evocative physical artifacts — blurring the boundary between reader and protagonist. Here, you are both yourself and the 1920s student investigator, their fate and sanity intimately entwined with your own. Guided by cryptic letters, you’ll piece together elusive clues, test the limits of science and reason, and confront choices that might reshape reality itself.

This looks to be Cthulu meets escape room a little bit!  I am usually not huge into Cthulu, but the components look stunning … and I love mystery stories!  Cthulu, mystery, escape: count me in!

1. Doom Guard

Platform: Kickstarter Doom Guard
Promised Delivery:  May 2026
Summary: Doom Guard is a cooperative board game for one to five players, who don the mantle of Earth’s mightiest heroes and villains as they are forced to work together in order to protect Earth from total annihilation!

Defeat the minions of Cthulhu, fight the spread of corruption, and beat back the forces of evil through 45-60 minute scenarios that can be played individually or as part of a complete campaign.

This looks like a really neat super heroes vs Cthulu game!  I like the art and the vibe and I am really excited for this!  I have always wanted super heroes in my Cthulu mythos, and now I have them!  This is a smaller endeavour (“only” $103, 000), so let’s hope it delivers! UPDATE: They delivered the PDFs to backers (Dec 16th?) already! A good sign!

Aetherspire: A Solo and Cooperative Review

Welcome to 2026! This month, we are looking at games that were on the 2025/2026 cusp. This one we received December 18th, but we couldn’t get it played fully until January 2026, so we are counting it for our lists as a 2026 release! Take a look below!

Aetherspire is a cooperative tower-defense, 3-D building game that was on Kickstarter back in October 2024; it promised delivery in October 2025.  There were some miscommunications, and some retail stores had copies (in late  November 2025) before Kickstarter backers (my copy arrived December 18th, 2025).  I admit seeing this in retail before I got my copy made me a little grumpy (since I kickstarted and paid real money to back this), but I guess I am just glad to see this game get out there.

This is a really interesting looking game (“3-D building?? What is that??? That sounds cool!”) that piqued my curiosity in last year’s Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2025!   But because of the late arrival, we couldn’t get it played fully (solo and cooperatively) until 2026, so we are counting it (for our internal purposes) as 2026 release.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

See Coke Can above for scale.  

There are quite a number of really nice components in this box.

There is QUITE a bit of cardboard to punch out!

Most of the cardboard is for pieces to build 3-D structures on the board!  See above!

There’s also a really nice board where you build!

Overall, these components are pretty great!  (In the previous Kickstarter that failed, the components were even nicer, but they were a little too expensive, which is why this regrouped and relaunched.  To be honest, I am very happy with the quality of the current version).

Gameplay

Each player takes control of one of 15 (!) characters; each character has special powers.

Each character’s power are notated on the sheet (see above). Generally, these special powers allow the character to manipulate tiles, manipulate dice, and/or manipulate spires.  

This is a bag-pulling game; it’s not really bag-building, as bag-building implies players put stuff in there for purposely to change the odds.  Having said that, there are decisions players make during the game that do change the distribution of the pieces … so you could argue this is a bag-building game?  Maybe?

The pieces you put into the bag are dual purpose: they are both the invaders (that clog spaces on your board) and spell-pieces that allow you to use special powers!

At the start of each player’s turn, he/she get 3 pieces that go into the spell area above.  Discarding combinations of the pieces allow the players to cast spells to help them!  See above!!!  The spell is the important thing here (Lava Bomb destroys invaders!), but again the pieces do go back into the bag, so what pieces you use for spells has at least some bag-building implications.

During the end of every turn, using the same bag, the invaders are pulled and placed on the pieces in the middle!  The invaders clog spaces so you can’t build!  

As the game unfurls, you are trying to build spires of height 4 (for each element).  You use puple pillars to build bases for the next levels: see above.

The purple dice are “generally” how you build purple pillars!  Note above as the player can build three pillars on water spaces, and one pillar on an ice space!  There are other powers and spells to build pillars, but generally the purple dice build the purple pillars.  

At the start of every player’s turn, they get to roll 5 dice, and they help determine what the player can build/do that turn!

A completed structure of height 4 (where all levels are the same element) allows the player to build a spire!  See above!  Once all four spires have been built, players win!

If there are no empty spaces for the invaders to occupy, then they tear down the walls and attack the gooey center!  If all the purple (circular) pieces in the middle are removed, players lose!

A winning game looks like the above!  3-D towers built with 4 spires!  Pretty cool!

Along the way, during the bad news phase, the spirits of the elements are awoken.

Each one of these has special powers which makes it harder to build the spires.  But building a full spire will KILL the appropriate spirit, so some of the game may be deciding which one to go after!

There are other ways to lose, but usually you will lose when too many invaders come out and there’s no place for them to go!  (If you wait too many turns, you run out of time and just lose: see above).

Even if you don’t win, a “nearly-completed” gane looks pretty cool!  See above!

Rulebook

The rulebook is good.  

The font is pretty big and readable, the rulebook stays open next to me on the chair, but there is a little bit of droopage over the edges, so this gets about a B+ on the Chair test.

The Components are well-documented with pictures and annotating text.

The set-up is perfect: it spans two adjacent pages, stays open, and marks where everything goes.

There’s no index, but there is a glossary (see above), and we found that to be good enough.

The rules end with a nice Icon reference.  See above.

Generally, this was a good rulebook.  There were a few questions on some edge-cases on rules (see our BGG post here), but the designer seems pretty engaged and answered our questions over there pretty quickly.

Overall, nice job.

Building vs. Dexterity

The rulebook makes it VERY clear this is not a dexterity game.   See above.  In all my plays of the game, I never really had any problem knocking stuff over.  (EDIT: update, yes, in our cooperative game we had an “oops” moment, but it was easy to rebuild).  But I like this acknowledgement!  This game is about building cool towers!

Solo Mode

Yes!  This rulebook does a GREAT JOB of acknowledging how the solo mode works! See above!  Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!  The game is true solo, were the solo player operates one character and pretty much plays the game just like normal (no real changes).   I applaud this solo mode!

Over the course of a week, I played about 3 solo games with different characters. The purple guy!  See above!

The blue guy!

…and the red guy!

Strictly speaking, I didn’t win any of my games!  I cheated in my middle game just to see what the endgame looked like (and it was a minor cheat, but it was still a cheat).

This game is hard.  You have to balance the randomness of the dice with the number of invaders points and the scarcity of spell components.  Every decision you make has some repercussion: if you kill some invaders with a spell, then the spell components go back into the bag … which kills the invaders, but changes the distribution in the bag!  If you build too much too soon, you may build so that the invaders have no place to land and they end up breaking down the walls!

I have, over the course of my plays, developed some strategies.  There is some strategy, but also a lot of tactics, as you have to play the dice as they are given.

The randomness can be a little frustrating sometimes, but usually there are just enough mechanisms to deal that randomness (you always get a free re-roll every turn, your special powers can do stuff to  “useless” dice, and the spells can help.  Having said that, the game can sometimes feel just a touch too random.  At the end of day, if you roll poorly, you will lose.

But I liked the way all the systems of the game worked together; they all interacted in interesting ways.  I had fun playing.

As a solo gamer, it’s easy to get this out and start playing.  The amount of maintenance per turn isn’t too bad, and the game moves along as quickly as the solo player likes.   The only “bad part” is how much work it is to clean up the game at the end; there are a lot of components that need to be separated!

Cooperative Play

Cooperative play went over very well!

Using a minor house rule (see below), we were able to win a game!  It was very satisfying.  

In the cooperative game, there’s no real mechanisms to encourage cooperation.  Each player’s turn is very multi-player solitaire!  A player rolls the dice and decides how to use the dice and the spells and deal with the invaders.    A lot of people I know really like this style of cooperative game, as it’s much harder to have an Alpha Player ruin the game … since I can only use my own powers and my own dice.  (Typically, none of the special powers of your character can be used outside of your turn).   So, it might seem this game isn’t particularly cooperative.

Even though the game has no mechanisms to encourage cooperation, a lot of “high-level” cooperation occurs!  Which invaders do we deal with?  Which spells do we use?  How do I use rerolls?  What Spires do we complete?   It’s all high-level discussions.

My friends and I, who cooperate very well, had a great time playing this.  We talked a lot about high-level strategy and interacted/discussed/cooperated quite a bit.

I also think this would be an excellent game to play at a convention!  Since you may not know other players very well at conventions, a multi-player solitaire game is a good choice.  It’s harder for Alpha Players to show their ugly head, and each player can execute their own turn, but still conversing with other players!

House Rule: Re-rolls Must Roll Something Different!

There is a very frustrating thing with using re-rolls as a mitigation mechanic: if you re-roll and roll EXACTLY THE SAME THING.  As a house rule, we suggest that, if you roll the same thing on a re-roll, you can re-roll until you get something different.

Some Component Issues

My board had trouble laying flat; I had to use a Board Butler (see above) to make sure the board stayed flat.  I feel like this is a bigger deal in this game because you are building a 3-D structure and the board NEEDS to be flat and stable.  After my third game, it was a little better and I didn’t need the board butler. 

The spires didn’t seem very “stable”.  See as the green spire just kinda opens up, but the white spire stays very compact.  I suspect a little glue might fix this issue.  It’s not a big deal, but it was annoying to try to move the spires around when they sometimes kind of open up or fall apart.  Again, I think a little bit of glue will fix this, so it’s not a big deal.

Randomness

There’s a lot of ways to mitigate randomness in this game, and there are a lot great decision points;  I really like all the places where you can make choices.  For example, at the start of every turn, you get one building piece (you choose the pile), but you can still swap away if you get something you don’t want!  I also like that you essentially have a re-roll every turn! (But see our House Rule above).  I also like that the spell pieces are also the invaders!  It’s cool that you have to think about how the invaders and spell pieces distribute into the bag! All your choices seem important.

At the very end of the day, though, this is still a dice game.  If you roll poorly and there are no mitigations left, you will lose.  It’s not a big deal because generally there’s enough mitigation so that you don’t have this feeling too often.  Be aware: occasionally, you will be grumpy when you roll badly.   You have to decide if that’s too much for you.  The good news is that the game is pretty quick.  I think 45 minutes estimate might be too little shy; my games were more like 60 to 90 minutes.

Conclusion

Aetherspire is a really neat tower-defense and 3-D building game.  I liked it and my friends like it.

The structures you build are very cool and look great!  It’s fun to be part of that process! See above!  It’s a very kinesthetic and interactive experience!

The game can be just a little random, but there are enough mitigation methods (plus our House Rule) that it’s not usually a problem.  At the end of the day, this is still a dice game that can still stab you in the eye.

My friends and I had a great time playing this! It looks good, it’s fun to build, and there’s enough choices that you always feel like you can do something!

Me and my friends all agree in this one: 8/10 for cooperative mode! It was so much fun!  8/10 for both solo and cooperative mode … although the cooperative might have been a little higher if there just a few more mechanisms for cooperation: the cooperative mode is pretty much multiplayer solitaire with a few high-level discussions of strategy … but that may be what you want at a convention … or to avoid the dreaded Alpha Player.

Side Note: This probably would have made my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2025 if I had gotten it a little bit earlier … be on the lookout for this on my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2026!

A Review of Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Welcome to 2026! Some of the games that came out in December 2025 feel like they are on the cusp of 2026! Do we count them as 2025 or 2026? We’ll start this month with a game we received in early December … it was early enough that we got in enough plays in to count it as a 2025 release!

So, I never got into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When I was in college, my friend CC was really into the black-and-white Eastman/Laird turtles, but they all had the same color headband … because they were in black-and-white. See below.

The reason I picked up this set because I really like what the original Unmatched Adventures did for the Unmatched universe:  It makes the game cooperative!  See original review here!  So, is it worth picking up the TMNT set even if you don’t like the turtles?  

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

See TNMT box above with Can of Coke for perspective.  This is a pretty normal sized box, but it is taller.

It’s taller because it breaks into two sections.  The top section holds the four turtles: their minis, their cards, their sidekicks, and their initiative cards.   The top of the box is JUST the plain Unmatched turtles.  If you wanted to play turtle vs turtle in a standard Unmatched head-to-head game, you’d only need the top.  To be clear: you can use any of these turtles in the standard Unmatched game with any other set (Rafael vs Bullseye?  Donatello vs. Sherlock Holmes? Michelangelo vs. Bruce Lee? Leonardo vs. Tyrannosaurus Rex?) to play out any head-to-head fight you want.

If, however, you want to play the cooperative Unmatched Adventures part of this box, everything you need (except the initiative cards) is in the bottom part.

There’s minis for Shredder and Krang (the two big bad bosses you fight in the two scenarios), and a bunch of tokens for the minions, the cards and some dice!

There is a LOT of cardboard to punch out. See above. 

Most of the cardboard is for the spinners: these are hit point markers for the turtles (4), the minions (6), and the sidekicks (4).  I think I spent more than an hour punching out the spinners and putting them together; this might have the worst part of the game (although I have friends who love to punch stuff out for fun).

These inserts are exceptional, as everything fit back into the insert very well.  Everything in its place—see above as the spinners fit in really well into the grooves.

The pieces are all nice (and I only got the standard retail version: there’s a version/auxilary with a lot more minis).

The two-sided board is easy to read/see.  Each big bad boss has his own side of the board: Shredder or Krang. See above for Krang’s side.

The production on this game is fantastic: see above.

Rulebook

There are three rulebooks that come with this: core rules, set rules, and adventure rules.

The core rules are the basic head-to-head Unmatched rules which describe how to play head-to-head: the way Unmatched was originally meant to play.  This ruleset has evolved over many sets, so it’s great and describes the game well.   The Unmatched Adventures requires players to know the basics of the core game: the three things you can do (scheme, attack, or maneuver), the combat rules, set-up, and such.  This is a good rulebook that has evolved very well over time.

The set rules (above) simply describe and give more detail on the specifics of the turtles and their special powers. See above.

The Unmatched Adventures rulebook describes how to play cooperatively against one of two game-run big bad bosses: Shredder or Krang!

The Adventures rulebook does pretty well on the Chair Test: it droops ever so slightly over the edges, but the font is readable, the pictures and useful, it stays flat on the chair next to me, and it’s easy to read. B+/A-.  See above.

The Contents page is great: annotated pictures of everything.

The set-up is perfect: it spans two pages (without crossing a page-turn boundary), and it is well notated.  See above.

In general, this is a good rulebook.

We wish there had been just a little more description in a few places:  for the Minions (For example: can we ever get rid of the Mousers?  The lack of text implies not, but I wish they would have stated it explicitly), and I just wanted a little bit more.  There was also some discrepancy between turns and rounds (especially on Raphael) that tripped us up, and some of the text of Krang was unclear of the relationship between the machines and the zones. 

Generally, good rulebook though.

Gameplay

This is a variable turn order game, with the initiative deck dictating when the good guys (the players) go and when the bad guys (the big boss and his minions) go.  The gameplay is very similar to what we saw in Unmatched Adventures: see that review here.  

I still have some problems in general with variable turn order games: see a very full discussion here: A Discussion of Variable Turn Order and How To Mitigate Its Randomness.  

Some of my favorite games have variable turn order, but that still doesn’t mean I love the mechanism; it seems to be a necessary evil for some games.  As we dive into different player counts, we’ll see how this affects the game.

Solo Play

To be clear, Unmatched Adventures supports solo play! (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law).  See 1-4 Players on box!

In fact, Unmatched Adventures support pure solo, as one player controls one character! See above as Leonardo takes on Shredder all by himself!

There are two main mechanisms for game balance at different player counts:
1. The big bad boss Hit Points (Shredder above) scale for the number of players.  It’s 7 * (number of players + 1), so 7 * 2 = 14 hit points for the solo game.

2. The number of minions is the same as the number of players.  My solo game (above) has one minion: Rat King!

The solo player still has to manage his deck as well as the Big Bad Boss and Minion deck.  There is some maintenance as you play solo, but it’s not too bad.

I think the worst part of the solo game is how small the initiative deck is: only 4 cards!  One for the player/sidekick, one for the minion, and two for Shredder!   I still liked the solo game, but I was often frustrated when the bad guys got so many turns in a row!  In the worst case, the bad guys can get 6 unanswered turns in a row!  

I still liked the solo game.  I like how it’s true solo play (you only have to play one character), I just noted the variable turn order felt overwhelming sometimes … to be fair, that does sometimes describe how a true head-to-head game feels: sometimes the other guy will just mess you up!  (This just re-emphasizes some of these same feelings of the solo mode in our previous review).

As usual, we recommend playing solo first so you can learn the game to teach your friends cooperatively.  And the true solo mode works, if a touch random.

Cooperative Play (4-Players) With No Fans

It goes without saying that we had to eat Pizza first before we played a full-up all four turtles game!  I am not a TMNT fan, but even I know they eat pizza!  

The four player cooperative game went over pretty well.   Like we noted in previous Unmatched Adventures, the variable turn order problems are much less pronounced with more players.  There are enough initiative cards that players don’t get stuck with the bad guys getting too many turns in a row.

A problem we had with 4 players is that it was sometimes too hard to get around Shredder to do damage!  Each of the turtles gets a sidekick, so there are 8 good guys (4 turtles and 4 sidekicks (April, Casey Jones, etc) and sometimes it was a little frustrating as they couldn’t get some of the good guy to do anything useful!   This does feel a little like a first-world problem (“Oh no, we can’t all do damage to Shredder!”), but it did cause some frustration in my group as sometimes you couldn’t get anything done on your turn because there was no place to move to!

We generally had fun and took down Shredder as all 4 turtles!

Interestingly, no one in my group was a TMNT fan!  They all knew of the turtles, all were okay with the turtles, but no one was “a fan”.  Despite not being fans, we all had fun playing the turtles. 

Generally, I think the game is more fun cooperatively than solo.

Cooperative Play (3-Player) With A Big Fan

My friends Jon is a huge TMNT fan; so I had to make sure to get is opinion when he played.

In general, he liked it.  I do think a 3-player game was a little better than 4-player game you get back to your turn quicker,  and vying for space around the board wasn’t quite as bad.  4-Player still worked, but I do think 3-Player is better. 

Solo Play (2-Player)

For comparison purposes, I did want to see how (a) how other heroes played in this world (b) how the Krang scenario played (c) how 2-Player/2-handed solo played.   So, I played a two-handed solo game of Daredevil and Bullseye against Krang!  See above!  It’s an unlikely alliance, but Daredevil and Bullseye have teamed up to protect their city!

The first game went horribly as Krang took out Daredevil early. Bullseye just looked at the board, said “no way”, and walked away (he is, after all, a villain).  Krang won!

After resetting, Daredevil and Bulleye used their abilities better together and Daredevil took Krang our with a Feint on the very last round (see below) … he only had to do one damage, but the Feint cancels all bad-guy effects!  So, Daredevil‘s Feint won the game! It was great!

This was a very thematic session of two games: Daredevil and Bullseye failed in the their first team-up (Daredevil  Comics #992), but then after learning from their failure, they were able to go in and take out Krang! (Daredevil Comics #993).  It just felt like two comics back-to-back!

I think I enjoyed two-handed solo more than pure solo.  Like I have said many times, the presence of more heroes in the initiative deck helps “smooth out” the randomness of the variable turn order system.  And, in this case especially, it felt very comic-booky over two issues.

Dice Throne Adventures/Missions vs. Unmatched Adventures

What Dice Thone Adventures does for Dice Throne, Unmatched Adventures does for Unmatched: it takes a head-to-head game and turns it into a cooperative adventure!  If you weren’t sure which one to get, let’s do a quick comparison. 

  1. Both have Marvel Characters
    1. Dice Throne has 8 Marvel generic and 9 X-Men=17 characters
    2. Unmatched has 16 generic Marvel characters (only 1 X-Man).
  2. Both have a ton of other/non-IP characters.
    1. Dice Throne has 16 from Season 1 and 2, plus Santa and Krampus, 4 for Outcasts, another 4 from Vanguard = 26?
    2. Unmatched has sooo many characters, I can’t even count. See here!

The fun of these systems is that there are SO MANY characters to choose from both.  Dice Throne has a slight advantage in Marvel characters, but Unmatched probably has more characters overall.

The one thing I will say is that I think it’s easier to jump into a Unmatched Adventures game than a Dice Throne Adventures game.   We found out the hard way that you HAVE to play your Dice Throne character(s) beforehand, otherwise the rules overhead will be too much.  Usually, this means playing a quick head-to-head Dice Throne game to see how the characters work.  As we’ve seen in this review (and the Unmatched Adventures review), we’ve been able to drop new players into the  Unmatched Adventures game and they immediately understand!   

Dice Throne Adventures is a little more tactical (but see randomness issues below), but the powers of the Dice Throne Adventures are pretty neat too.  I’d recommend playing them both to see which one you like better; they both scratch a similar itch.

Scenarios

Of the two scenarios, I liked the Shredder experience more: it was  less random.  

The Krang scenario had a little too much luck for me.

This deck in particular (see above) was very random and kind of made me mad a few times.  And you have to roll every round to maybe/maybe not activate machines.  I didn’t love the randomness of the Krang scenario.

Overall, I will probably play the Shredder experience a lot more than Krang, but Krang is a unique experience for which I will “tolerate” the randomness now and then.  Of all the scenarios from both Unmatched: Adventures: Mothman, Aliens, Shredder, and Krang … Krang was by far my least favorite.   

Unfortunately, the randomness of the Krang scenario does bring my rating down a little for this set.  It makes it a little harder to recommend this for a non-turtles person.

Sharing the Load

Because there is one minion per player (for scaling to the number of players), we shared the load by having each player operate one of the minions.   I liked this because it makes everyone feel a little more invested! If I were running everything myself, then people would feel less involved (and I would be grumpy because I was doing everything).  Since everyone has to run at least one of the minions, that makes the game feels more interactive.

I liked that we could share the load; it made the game feel more cooperative.

Conclusion

Everyone liked  Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; it was fun at all player counts, with pure solo possibly being the weakest.  Even if you don’t know/don’t like the TMNT, this is still a good get because it expands the Unmatched Adventures world and gives you two more scenarios!   (Be aware that one of the scenarios is more random than the others,  so that might have an influence on your decision).   And the turtles were fun to play, even though we didn’t know/love them.

Overall, Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably about a 7.5/10 or 8/10.  If you love TNMT, that probably adds another 1 or even 2 points to that score.  If you are turtles fan, be aware there is a mini-upgrade kit (see above) which turns a lot of tokens into cool minis … you might want that.

To be clear, this is a standalone set. If you love TNMT and don’t really care about any of the other Unmatched warriors, this is perfect for you: you don’t need anything else. If you just liked Unmatched Adventures system, this does add more scenarios for you! Just be aware that Krang is a little more random.

We liked this enough to be on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2025!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unboxing

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

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

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

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

There’s a new Boss!  The Vault Witch!  

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

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

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

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

Rulebook

The rulebook is a tiny thing.

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

The components page works well: see above.  

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

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

Solo Mode: Minion Rush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Loot Zoot Suit

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

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

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

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

New Cooperative Mode!

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

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

One-Shot Adventure: Solo Mode!

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

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

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

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

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

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

This helped me keep track of what goes where!

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

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

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

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

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

One-Shot Adventure: Cooperative Mode … Prequel

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

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

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

One-Shot Adventures: Cooperative Mode!

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is This?

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

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

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

The side lists the four characters in the box.

And the bottom talks about what this is.

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

Unboxing

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Characters

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

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

The Necromancer

The Necromancer uses corpses to summon undead fight for him!

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

The Raveness

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

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

I like the subtlety of the Raveness.

Headless Horseman

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

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

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

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

Pale Lady

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

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

The Characters Have Character

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

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

Solo Mode: Me vs. Me

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

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

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

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

Conclusion to Part I.

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

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

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

Appendix: Silly House Rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Spirit Island

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

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

9. Legends of Sleepy Hollow

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

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition

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

8. Disparation*

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

7. Rook City Renegades 

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

6. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition

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

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Second Edition

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

5. Any expansion, but especially Rook City!

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

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

4. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Second Edition

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

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

Sentinels Comics: The Roleplaying Game

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

3. Game Moderator Kit

2. Starter Kit

1. Core Rulebook 

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

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

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

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

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. 

 

A Cooperative/Solo Print-And-Play Roll-and-Write Game! Roll or Stand: Jurassic Adventures! The Theme is EXACTLY What You Think It Is!

Roll or Stand: Jurassic Adventures is a print-and-play solo and cooperative roll-and-write game that was on Kickstarter back in March 2025, and it promised delivery in April 2025.  That’s right! One month afterwards!!  And it did it!!!  How did they do that?  Because there was no actual physical delivery; I was sent some PDFs in email after the Kickstarter fullfilled.  It’s a print-and-play!

In order to play, you need to print 3 pages per player (if you want the full campaign). You also need just one copy of the rules (4 pages of rules) and one copy of the campaign rules (1 page).  See above. For one person, you need to print 3+1+4 = 8 pages.  For 4 people, you have to print 4*3 + 1 + 4 = 17 pages.

Ever since my first print-and-play was a little more work and money than I expected (see our review of Legends of Storm City), I picked up a newer printer that was was MUCH cheaper to print stuff on.  I was able to print pages for one solo game and a 4-Player cooperative game without worrying too much about the cost.  (But see our Legends of Storm City review if you want more discussion of how much it can cost to print print-and-play games!)

In case it isn’t instantly clear (see above): this is a roll-and-write with a Jurassic Park theme! The publisher probably won’t get sued for calling it Jurassic Adventures, but you never know!

Let’s take a look!

Printing

What are the pages you need to print?

The rules: See above.  The rules are very nicely done over 4 pages.  The rules have lots of examples! The font, although is a little small, is very nice and, dare-I-say, pleasant to look at?

There were a few times when I wish the rules were a little better, but they do seem to specify everything: you might just have to look through them a little.   Luckily, you can reuse these rules over and over after you print them.

The Campaign Sheet:  See above.  This sheet gives bonuses and starting conditions for each game plus a little flavor text.  You only need one of these for each group (arguably, you can reuse this over and over if you don’t put your name at the bottom).

But the most important pages are the 3 Scenario Sheets (see them above). Each player will need their own copy of these Scenario Sheets to play: this is the one thing of which EVERYONE will have to have their own copy!

Each scenario sheet has four chapters (puzzles) at the top of the page (see above), and a shared preparation area at the bottom.  The player will marking both the top part AND and bottom part up! See below!

Gameplay

Every turn, two dice are rolled (you have to supply your own dice).   These two numbers are shared to everyone playing.

The stamina area “forces” dice to a certain regime; if there is no entry (“charge”) for one of the numbers you rolled, you must decrease that die until you find an empty charge (rolling over back to 6).  Once a stamina line is “filled”, you move to the next line … and possibilities open up again.  Let’s be clear; when the stamina line is almost filled, you have a very good idea what the next numbers will have to be!  This really helps mitigate some of the randomness of rolling dice!

After you get your two numbers, you choose to record one number on the left Preparation side and one number to the right Preparation area. See above.

If you wish to “futz” with your two numbers, you can cross off “ideas” to add or subtract one to the numbers (for you only: this doesn’t affect anyone else).

You record the number to the next empty box.  If you want, you can push-your-luck and “roll”, hoping to add more numbers to you line on the next roll of the dice.

Or, if you want to, you can “Stand” (marking off the leftmost square with a cross) and activate your actions!  You are now committed to act!

The number of actions you get is based on how far you pushed your luck: the longer you wait, the more actions you get.  See above as I get 6 actions when I activate my line!

How many actions do you get?  Your sum (4+2+6 = 12) – rightmost (6) = 6 actions!

Note that you CAN BUST if you put too many numbers on a line!  In the case above, I BUST because my numbers exceed the MAX (10) by being 2+3+1+6 = 12!!  If you do BUST, you lose all the actions of that line BUT you get a booby prize of one of the tools (the rightmost symbol: the binoculars at the right under the 6).

So this is a game about pushing your luck, and knowing when to activate a line to get your actions! The Kickstarter called this a “blackjack-like” mechanism! Basically, push-your-luck so you don’t bust!

Once you have your actions, what do you do with them?  Basically, you mark off lines on the current puzzle!  With each action, you can mark a line!

Which lines?  It depends on the numbers on the line!  On the line above, I had a 2, 4, and 6 which means I can only draw upper left, upper right, and down lines!

That’s right!  You are limited to what lines you can draw by the numbers you used to activate the line!  

This is why ideas and Tools are so important! If you really need to up/down a dice, you can use ideas or tools to draw the line you need!  Be careful!  Ideas/Tools are a limited resource!

After you achieve the current puzzle, you immediately move to the next! 

If you can get all 4 puzzles done before the stamina or preparation lines run out, you are done!

Whether or not you win depends on “how many puzzles you failed!”  If you failed NO puzzles, you get the Success story!

If you have under 1 failure per player, you get the Delayed outcome (which is usually still a success .. see above!)

Play all 3 scenario sheets for a full campaign!

Solo Play

I had my solo copy ready since April 2025, but I just had never gotten around to playing it.  It didn’t take too long to print out (3 months ago), but I was ready to go!

Over the course of one evening, I played through the entire 3-sheet campaign. I took a break after scenario 2 for dinner, but came back to it.  All in all, it probably took about 2 hours to play all the way through, with about an extra 1.5 hours of reading and deciphering the rules.  

The solo campaign is easy to get to the table; it has some interesting decisions as you have to decide when to use your limited ideas, limited tools, which dice to use in which area, when to stand and when to roll!

This is also a very spatial-oriented puzzle, as you have to make sure you have the right line segments to do what you need to on your current puzzle!  The puzzle above starts at the top (3), and you want more “downwards” line segments to help!

There’s a lot of great decisions, but the game moves along at a pretty good clip.  You can have as much analysis paralysis as you want, but generally the game moved along.  I freely admit that I stopped a few times and had some analysis paralysis …

I had a fine time playing solo.  Even though the puzzles are similar in some ways (just draw line segments), they were pretty thematic with the “Jurassic park”-like concept.  There was a good variety over 12 puzzles in the campaign—I saw a neat little story unfold.

Fun solo.

Cooperative

For my cooperative game, I readied myself for a 4-Player game.  I may have overprinted the game; I probably didn’t have to print rules sheets for everyone, but in my group, people like to have their own copy of the rules!

We ended up only playing a 3-Player cooperative game!  

This went over … okay.  The only real opportunities for cooperation are that you can share Ideas and/or Tools.  Thematically, that made some sense!  “Hey!  I got an Idea I can share with you!” Unfortunately, we didn’t end up sharing at all!  The resources are so limited in the game (you only have so many Ideas and Tools) that it never felt good to share them!  Although the opportunity was there, we never availed ourselves of the “sharing”.  

This game was mostly multi-player solitaire. But at least we weren’t getting in each others way.

Pen vs. Pencil

A pencil probably won’t work with this game.  Can you tell I circled the first 5 Ideas above?  No? Me neither!

I ended up using a red sharpie so it was VERY clear when I noted something. See above.

Ah!  Now you can tell I circled the Ideas!

Of course, sharpies may bleed, so I got a paper bag on the back side to handle any bleed through.

The only problem with the Pen is you really can’t correct any mistakes.  Remember my BUST example?  Can you tell that was a 6 on the right?  It was only a 6 after I “sorta” corrected it.  

If you find yourself wanting to play more of this, consider laminating the Scenario sheets and using dry-erase (extra-thin!!) markers; then you can correct them and re-use the sheets over and over.

Small House Rule

The rules specifically say to write the number of actions in the right most area: see above as I clumsily write a 6, and it obscures the direction wedges!

What I ended up doing is writing the number of actions off to the side!  See above as the actions are on the LEFT for the left prep area, and the actions are on the RIGHT for the right prep area!  And then it’s MUCH easier to see which wedges are available for your actions, since the action number isn’t obscuring the wedges!

Things I Liked

Theme: there’s a surprising amount of theme and story 

Choices: I generally feel like I have a lot of choices, and I know what’s coming because of the stamina concept forging the dice.   This had just enough randomness to be interesting, but not enough to infuriate me.

What I Didn’t Like

Too small: the sheets at times felt a little too small! Each scenario sheet feels like it should be two sheets; the top half should be its own sheet, and the bottom half should be its own sheet. I am surprised this wasn’t a printing option. The whole thing does fit on a page, which is nice, but I think if I wanted to laminate this and use dry-erase pens, I’d want bigger sheets. I wish a full-sized upper half and full-sized lower half had been PDFs included in my distribution.

Cooperation: There wasn’t really any cooperation.  Although the opportunities were there, we didn’t avail ourselves of them because the resources were so limited.

House Rule for More Cooperation

How can we cooperate more? One complaint is that the game really wasn’t that cooperative.

Looking back on our cooperative game, the one thing you can do is change the dice separately! The players have to take the dice as rolled, but then each player can spend Ideas “separately” to +- 1 the dice on their board. What if this were more cooperative? What if, as a group, we could decide to spend an Idea and have it change a dice for all of us? This would promote a lot of conversation and lots of interaction! “Well, I really need a 6!” “But we both need 5s!” “Hm, you can save an Idea if you change it once!”

This is just an idea for a House Rule, but it would make the game more cooperative and interactive.

Conclusion

Jurassic Adventures was a mixed bag.  I liked it solo and might play it again: the theme and gameplay was fun!  It was a 6.5/10 or maybe 7/10.  My friend Sara probably wouldn’t play it again cooperatively, (5/10) but my friend Teresa would (6/10).  Although the game bills itself as cooperative, it felt much more multiplayer solitaire … mostly because the resources were so limited that it was too hard to share!   We do propose a house rule that might make Jurassic Adventures more cooperative and more enjoyable, but you may like this “mostly” multiplayer solitaire game as it is.

If you do play this, make sure you play with a pen instead of a pencil; even though you can’t correct your pen without making a mess, you just can’t see the pencil marks!

RichieCon 2025 And Top 6 Interesting Games In The Last Year!

RichieCon 2025 had a lot of drama this year!  We had to get a new venue this year because of … reasons. 

If you want the long version of why we got a new venue, I encourage you to listen to “Tales of Horror” in the Dice Tower Podcast “Where Credit is Due” (timestamp 32:41, see link below)
 
 

New Venue

For RichieCon 2025, we had to go looking for a new venue.  We ended up at Fruchthendler Elementary School!

This venue was great! It was a little expensive to rent it for two days, but it was spacious and easy set-up in!  The cafeteria had plenty of tables!

It even had a stage which we used some presentations (see below).

The best part of the new venue was the sound baffling!  The major complaint we always got from the Rec Center was how LOUD it was.   With the Sound baffles all over the cafeteria, that was not a problem this year!

Because of the cost, we engaged a Sponsor to help defray the costs: Thanks to Return From Subroutine Games for helping out!  See their website here!

Day -1: Getting Coolers

Because of the new venue, we don’t have a refrigerator any more! So, I had to put the call out to all my friends to get coolers to store drinks and perishables in!  In the weeks leading up to RichieCon 2025, I collected about 10 coolers!

We actually ended up having too many coolers, but that’s a good problem to have!

Day 0: Boxception and Sleeve-It!

We end up playing some games as we get ready for RIchieCon … but they aren’t the funnest games in the world!

The Wednesday before RichieCon has become Boxception: The Cooperative Dexterity game of putting boxes in other boxes! 

We end up putting about 200 games into 20 boxes over the night! (Some boxes have tons of games, some have just a few!)

We also spend some time playing “Sleeve-It!”  In this case, Teresa played a solo game of “Sleeve-It!” with the Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking game!

Day 1: The Secret RichieCon House

A large contingent of people rent an AirBNB and stay near Fruchthendler so that it’s easy to go back and forth: it also is a great place to game before everyone arrives!  Most of the out-of-towners end up here over the course of Friday before we have access to Fruchthendler!

Day 2:  RichieCon 2025 Starts!

Day 3, The Last Day: RichieCon 2025

 

Top 6 Interesting Games Since Last Year!

On Saturday of RichieCon, we like to do a little show to bring the RichieCon Community together! In that show, we discuss some games that drew our attention since the last year.  The purpose of this list is to give people some ideas of games to play for the remainder of RichieCon! Without further ado, here’s our 6 questions with answers from Richie, Kurt, and Sam!

#6: What game from the last year surprised you the most?  Good or bad surprise?

Richie: The Secrets of Zorro.  This fun little cooperative game didn’t have a very big Kickstarter, but me and friends really liked it!  It’s quick, it’s fun, and very thematic!  Good Surprise! See our review here to see if you might like it!
Kurt: Wandering Galaxy; disappointing given the awesomeness of Forgotten Waters & Freelancers Sam: Luddite. From watching the comic book into video on the wall in the man cave I was expecting it to be very story driven and thematic and RPG-like. It turned out to be a very fun roll and write that had none of that. See Richie’s review here.



#5: What game in the last year do you disagree with reviewers on?

Richie: Tales of Arthurian Knights.  This game went over like gang-busters in my group, getting played multiple times and getting borrowed for birthday parties!  All of my friends gave it a strong 8.5 (maybe 9), but the the Dice Tower seemed less enthusiastic and only gave it a 6 or 6.5.  We were very surprised!  We loved it!  See our Review here.

Kurt: THE GANG! Tom Vasel didn’t like this game very much, but my group (Kurt’s group) loved loved this game! 

Sam: Soul Raiders. Tom V. thought it was great end gave it an 8. I wanted to like it because it has great art and a great premise but ended up being too random and grindy for the story driven feel that it was giving off. My final score 5.5.  See our thoughts here.

#4: What game (that you paid for) did you really dislike? It’s easy to dislike games other people paid for, but what did you pay for that you disliked?

Richie: I bought and sold two games because I disliked them so much.  Corps of Discovery: in a game where one resource can mean the difference between winning and losing, the rules needed to be tighter.  It didn’t land for me (I gave it a 4/10), but it might for you.   The Dice Tower and other reviewers seem to like this game (9/10), so try it for yourself to see if you might like it.  See our thoughts here.    I also wanted to like Freedom Five sooooooo muuuucch, but I ended up hating it and selling it. I am still very depressed about this: see our very different review here.

Kurt: Bear Mountain Camping Adventure.  It’s all Richie’s fault; he pointed me at the game! I backed it, but when it came in, it wasn’t fun even though the production was gorgeous.

Sam: I don’t actually have one this year… Perhaps because I’ve been both buying and playing less this year I’ve been more selective (sorry Rich) and haven’t both bought and played a game I didn’t like. EDITOR: to be fair, part of Rich’s job is to review games, so he’ll take chances more

#3: What game that came out in the last year that you liked but other’s didn’t?

Richie: Dice Throne Missions/Dice Throne X-Men.  I loved this new system that makes the Dice Throne game work solo and cooperatively, but my friends didn’t love it nearly as much.  See our thoughts here.
Kurt: Link City.  This is pointed at Rich: he said he didn’t like it.  (EDITOR: To be fair, I didn’t love it as much as other people, but I recognized that lots of people did, so it still made the Top 10 Cooperative Party Games of 2024!)
Sam: Ecosfera. This one is the opposite for me – I didn’t like playing it 2 player because it felt like my turns were basically scripted and I had no agency. However others in the group enjoyed it at higher player counts.  See the review here to see what Sam’s talking about!

#2: What was your favorite expansion that came out in the last year?

Richie: Aeon’s End: The Descent.  Aeon’s End is a great cooperative deck-building game with mages working together fighting the Big Bad.  Aeon’s End: The Descent is a standalone expansion in the same universe, but adds the The Friends and Foes module!  This module makes Aeon’s End a little more balanced as it tends to mitigate the Variable Turn Order problems! See our review here for more discussion.

Kurt: Forest Shuffle (Alpine & Woodland Edge)
Sam: Townsfolk Tussle: Foul Neighbors. We played with the expansion characters and bosses and it worked great. Our final battle ended in the perfect cartoon way of pushing the plunger on the dynamite and blowing up both the outhouse and the big bad in one shot. (EDITOR: It was so fun! That’s why it made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024!)

#1: What was your favorite game that came out in the last year?

Richie: Marvel United Season 3/Multiverse.  It’s not even close: I spent so much time playing the content of Season 3 and I had so much fun. Sentinels of the Multiverse used to be my favorite game of all time, but I think Marvel United has supplanted it!

Kurt: Tie: Fromage & Fellowship of the Ring Trick taking game

Sam: Limiting to only those released in the last year: Fellowship of the Ring trick taking game. It’s light, fast, thematic to the story, plays well, and is easy to just keep playing and lose track of time while going through the different chapters.  Expanding to played no matter release date: Imperium (specifically classics). I really enjoyed how each civilization feels and plays differently from each other even though they all share common market decks and basic mechanics.

Solsbury Hill

It’s become a tradition that every year, Joe must sing a parody song and make everyone laugh.  This year, I helped and together Joe and I penned the parody Fruchthendler (sung to the tune of Solsbury Hill) as a means to vent our frustration of getting unceremoniously kicked out of the Rec Center.  It’s mostly meant in jest, but with a little heartfelt sentinement!  We also had the audience participate with Kazoos.  No joke. Thanks for Mike H. for directing the world’s greatest kazoo group!  See lyrics below, and video below that!!!

Fruchthendler – sung to the tune of Solsbury Hill

Driving up to Fruchthendler
I could see the parking lot
Left the public defender
Firebird is our new mascot   (Firebird is the mascot of Fruchthendler Elementary school)

This was something of a mess,
Called HOA, they had disclosed
Richie Con would be suppressed
Through attrition, I got hosed

I called Cthulu in frustration
The Swim Team cancelled my reservation,
It’s like that game of Gloom Gloom Gloom,
“Joe”, I said,
“Grab your games, we’re going to clone the zone”

Yeah, clone some zones

The Aquatics had made me blind
The chlorine spewed out from my guts
Our holy grail had been maligned
Our old game venue had been cut

So I bravely ran away
Quest to find a new place to hut
With my minstrels Joe and Mike
And where’d you get them coconuts?

I was feeling down in chicanery

Highly Overbearing Authority  (stop song in cheesy fashion to point out that we satirically re-acronymed HOA)
They won that game of Gloom Gloom Gloom”
“Mike”, I said,
“Grab your games, we’re moving Richie-Con”

Hey –like your mom…

Found a new place to play our games
It’s probably when we want to be
Because of HOA I have no claims
To a place I thought was free

Screwed by faceless bureaucrats
Who close their gates to my party
Add one to my gaming stats–
In their pool, I will pee                –soon as I saw “pee,” I had to go there…

I’m not afraid of their displacement
Even if I have to pay rent
I won that game of Gloom Gloom Gloom
“Kurt”, I said,
“Keep your games, and come to Richie Con!”

“Wha!”

“Hey!”

“Con!”

Most Played Games

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition was played quite a bit! I personally saw at least 3 plays of it!

By far the most played game was Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking game!  We had sleeved it just before, and it was good thing we did!  It was pretty much always being played!

I saw Lon teaching Nana (Japanese version of Trio) quite a bit!

I saw Aeon’s End: Descent played a number of times!

Weird Games

Lon brought a lot of weird games from Japan.

 DroPolter (above) was this weird one like Jacks where you grab things on the table, but can’t drop anything!

Toy Story is a cooperative memory game ONLY in Japan! It was my birthday present!

Nana is the original Japanese game that’s the inspiration for Trio!

There were several RPGs going too!

Kurt R. brought the original Dark Tower game … and it worked!  Did you know that they stored the values in BCD in 128-Nibble RAM memory?  Josh looked it up!  This game is from 1981!!!

Conclusion

After all was said and done, was it worth it?  I think so! I got to see friends from out of town and play games with everyone for my birthday, and that’s what I wanted!

What will happen next year?  I really don’t know!  This was a very expensive and stressful year because of the events leading to the venue change.   I love the new venue, but it is expensive.  Will we come back?  Come back next year and find out!

 

The Dark Quarter: Into the Muck

It arrived!  No, not the physical copy of The Dark Quarter!  That arrived like early 2025!  

But the APP finally arrived at the iOS store!  See above! Late May 2025!  This game is completely unplayable without the app, so my physical copy of The Dark Quarter sat silently in the corner for months, waiting for the APP to be available!  And it finally arrived!  I think I downloaded it May 25, 2025.  I have been really looking forward to this, as it was my #4 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2023 … it’s years late at this point!

So, in any other year, this might be considered weird to get the physical game before the APP is ready, but with the Tariff situation changing daily, I think Lucky Duck/Van Ryder games did the right thing getting to us ASAP!  

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

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

The game comes with a lot of cardboard tokens (see above),  but I had gone all-in on the Kickstarter and got the nice plastic tokens as well.

I also got the metal coins (see above).

Even though I got the miniatures expansion as well, you will still need some of the little hexes with people on them.

You could play this game just fine with the cardboard, but the upgraded components make you feel…. like you’ve spent more money. 🙂  No, they are nice.

The little plastic cubes denote your ability scores.

And each player will get their own dice (see above, as the dice as color-coded for the 4 players).

There’s some nice Location  cards that will come out (see above) as you explore.

And there’s both objects (see above) and story cards (see below).

What’s that?  Yes!  A QR code!  These cards will be scanned when you play!

The minis are pretty good, but not great.

But the minis are notated with a number on the bottom so you can put them back where they belong (see above and below).

I mean, this game looks pretty good, ya? 

Rulebook

The rulebook is fine.

It fits pretty well on the chair next to me open flat, and the font is pretty big.  This is venturing into A territory (although it maybe could have used a few more pictures) for The Chair Test.

The Components page is well-labelled.

The set-up is pretty good, although there is always confusion in an APP based game: usually the APP sets you up, so do you need this?  You kind of need both the rulebook and the APP for set-up.

The last page has an ICON summary, which is great! … but I don’t think I ever used it once in all my solo or cooperative gameplays.

The rulebook is pretty good, but you don’t spend a lot of time there; you are always in the APP.

Warning! 18+!

You may miss it, even though it is clearly on the box (see above) but this is clearly an 18+ game!  Between language, grisly murders, some sexual references, and just dark imagery, you probably don’t want to play this unless you are ready for a dark, grimy, and morally ambiguous world.

Teresa, who started out censoring the bad language from the APP, was swearing like a sailor by the time we finished our first session!  She really embraced this world! Be aware, this game will corrupt … something?

Gamplay

Each player takes the role of an “investigator/consultant” for the Beaumont Detective Agency.  Each character is flawed in some way, but they are generally seeking redemption (but that’s your choice to make).  

Players use the APP to guide the game.  The APP shows how to set up places of interest (see above):

And you reflect that on your game board.

The boss lady tells you what to do in the APP, and you explore a 1980s New Orleans investigating a murder!

Each characters gets some items they can use, and has some level in 4 different skills/abilities (see above).  These abilities are rolled against, and however many you surpass is how many successes you get.

This is absolutely a dice game!  Almost every turn, you will roll the dice to do “some skill check”.  You always get your two base dice (color coded for the characters: see above), and some extra effort dice.

These effort dice are enabled as you play.  You always get one effort die at the start of your turn, but sometimes you will get more through other actions.

Players explore the city, trying to investigate a murder!  The APP controls the narrative, with the players making choices, and the dice determining success or failure.

You’ll notice a lot of items have a QR code (see above): you will be scanning your items to interact with them.  This may remind you of Chronicles of Crime (that made our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games), and it should!  Lucky Duck (who teamed up with Van Ryder Games to make The Dark Quarter) also made Chronicles of Crime!

Honestly, playing this game reminds me of playing out a Detective series on HBO or Apple+ mini-series.  Story happens, characters develop (or regress!), and a lot of swearing and adult situations occur.   

Solo Play

So, you can play solo (thank you for following Saunders’ Law).  

However, solo play has you take control of two characters: there is no true solo play. See above as I chose to operate both Constance Moreau and Winter Mullins.  

The rules do cover the case where the solo player has to play two characters (see above), and justifies needing at least two characters as “the stories are intertwined; you need at least two characters to get the best out of this!”  And that makes sense; these characters destinies are all tightly coupled!

So, I started a game.  And went back and forth between the two characters.  And I didn’t enjoy it.

The back and forth between the two characters as a solo gamer just didn’t work for me.  It felt like I couldn’t get any thing done, as just as I did one thing at a Location, I’d have to immediately go to the next character.  I remember loving Detective: City of Angels (A Van Ryder game also in our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) because you had four precious actions on your turn and how you spent those actions mattered! It felt like you could concentrate on a Location and get stuff done!  In The Dark Quarter, I frequently felt like I got to do just “one” thing, and then it was the next character’s turn.  

I played out the first two sessions as a solo player, but … I kinda stopped caring.  I felt like I couldn’t get anything done as a solo player, I was so busy “advancing the story”, I felt like I wasn’t playing the characters or solving the mystery.  I felt like the game was playing me.  

The story was interesting, but I felt like I couldn’t focus.  Some of that  lack of focus was the context switching between two characters, and some of that was going back and forth between the game and the APP, some of that was all the dice-rolling, and part of it was just how “little” I felt like I could do on my turn.  I just had to swap between too many things, and it took me out of the game.

I hoped a lot of these issues would go away when I played cooperatively.  I was expecting to love and adore this game straight out of the box.   I didn’t, and my solo experience wasn’t great.

Cooperative Play

Whew. Luckily, the cooperative experience was much better!  The fact that the focus moves around quickly between characters is actually good in the cooperative game, as most people feel like they get their chance to play; quickly and regularly.

You can see as the board and locations expand out!  The world definitely envelops you as you play!

This game feels “tuned” to work best as a cooperative experience.  The 3-Player game we played was fun!  We ended up playing about 3 hours and still didn’t finish the first play!  But, we still wanted to play more, so we kept playing …

The game, in the rulebook, does a really good job of emphasizing “READ EVERYTHING OUT LOUD!”  See excerpt above.  This really encourages everyone to stay involved with the story and all the decisions in the game.  Even if some decisions are only character-based, everyone stays involved.  I am glad to see that emphasis in the rulebook (see above), and I think that is the best way to play the game.

Good times.  The cooperative play has been a success.  Currently, we have played two weeks in a row, having invested about 6 hours into the game … and wanting to play more!

Solo Vs. Cooperative

It’s really interesting to me that the solo experience fell flat for me, and the cooperative experience worked so well!  It makes sense; the game seems “tuned” to keep stories and plot points coming out, as to keep the players all involved! 

Like a car “tuned” for Sports mode instead Eco mode, The Dark Quarter seems “tuned” to cooperative mode.  The solo mode will work, but the game operates (in my opinion) at a lesser gait.  At least, that was my experience.   (And you have to understand, I love mystery games!)

Length of Game

The game is long. Longer than you might expect.  We played for three hours straight the first session! And three hours the second session!  And we still had a lot to see!  And we still have more to go!

Luckily, the APP can help you save the game between sessions.  There are several points where you can save the game; these intermissions happen about every 45 minutes or so.  So, if you really wanted to, you could just take up about 45 minutes. But given how much set-up and tear-down there is, you probably want to play at least two sessions.  We ended up playing three on our first playthrough.

The App

The APP is pretty good.  We didn’t encounter any real glitches or problems in solo or cooperative play.  Although it took them a while, the publishers did get the APP out and stable.

One problem: the font is probably too small.  We had trouble reading all that text (to be clear; the players read the text out, not the APP), and we wished we had a control to resize the font.  

Another gripe about the APP; there was no UNDO!  This is one of my biggest pet peeves in cooperative APPS; the lack of UNDO makes me me grumpy!  If this were a completely physical board game, UNDOs are easy:  “Oops!  I meant to go to the Graveyard!  Back me up!”.  Nope.  There is no UNDO in this app.   I think this actually slows down gameplay a little: “Are you SURE you want to do that?  We can’t back up!”

In general, the APP seemed to work fine for us in both solo or cooperative play.  It was pretty good.  Be aware, the players still have to read all the text out loud!! The APP does NOT read the text for you!

Dice and Murder

I said this earlier, almost everything in this game is a skill check with dice.  The game seems pretty balanced.   For instance, if you fail, the game typically gives you an “extra” effort die for your next die roll (which I appreciated).

But in the end, The Dark Quarter is still kind of a dice game.  Which I don’t love!  I feel like a detective game should be about following the evidence, making best use of your resources, and generally trying to be smart/clever.

Detective: City of Angels, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, are detective games where you have to be smart.    Although The Dark Quarter is a nominally a detective game, it has more drama in it than I expected.   The dice contribute to that drama, because they make the game more random and unexpected!

When I play Detective: City of Angels or Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, I feel like I am playing a detective show like Death in Paradise, or Midsomer Murders where the mystery is front and center.  When I play The Dark Quarter, I feel more like I am playing a police drama where the mystery is less pronounced.  It’s not bad, it’s just not quite what I was expecting.  

If you want to jump into a police drama in New Orleans in the 1980s with lots of magic and character development and story, this is the right game for you!  If you want more of a mystery, well this isn’t quite that.  But there’s still more than enough mystery to keep you going!

Conclusion

The Dark Quarter is a really interesting game, but you have to know where it fits best.  I don’t think it works great solo, it’s more random than most mystery games, it’s very dependent on the APP, and the 18+ age requirements are pretty stringent.

But, if you find a group that wants to jump in to a 1980’s drama/mystery with lots of adult twists and turns, The Dark Quarter is the game for you!  It’s got great story, interesting interactions, and plenty of character development/regression!   Instead of watching an adult mystery/drama on HBO or Apple+ tonight, consider playing The Dark Quarter instead!

Solo play: 6/10. Cooperative Play: 8/10.  I think most people would probably give this a 9/10, but I think I wanted just a little more mystery and a little less dice-rolling. It’s still really good though.