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!

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!

Groundhog Day Meets Murder? A Review of The Revenant Society

Screenshot from 2024-04-21 13-15-26

I picked up The Revenant Society from Kickstarter from March 2023, just about a year ago (it is late April 2024 at the time of this writing): see link here. This game seemed to be the unholy fusion of both a board game and a Role Playing Game (RPG). It has a core rules book, but also many supporting cards and tokens: see below.

What you see above is the pledge level The Revenant Society: Deluxe Box Set (for $75). There was also the option to just get just the core book in physical form ($40) or electronic PDF ($20). Anyone who has been following my blog for a while knows I prefer the physical copies, so I got the Deluxe Box Set (the exact one in the picture above).

What is The Revenant Society? The basic premise is that you have been murdered, but you are given a chance to come back as an undead creature to solve your murder! It many ways, it’s like Groundhog Day (the movie), as you repeat the same day over and over, hoping to find clues to lead you to your murderer! If you fail to solve your mystery after four days, you are stuck in the loop of your last day forever!

What a great premise! I was immediately drawn in and backed this.

The PDF delivered in late March 2024 (I have the PDF labelled as March 29th) from Drive Thru RPG. It has my name and my order number smeared on a number of pages, so don’t ask me to share this with you!

The physical copy of the box delivered in mid April 2024 (about April 16th).

This review is going to take a weird arc: we ended up playing the PDF version of the game in our first session, and then the physical version of the game in our second session! So, we’ll discuss how each sessions went: electronic PDF version vs physical version!

RPG or Board Game?

Is this more of an RPG or more of a board game? The little minis (above) and the cards (below) that come with the game offer some suggestion this has more than a little board game DNA.

After reading the rules and playing a few times, I can tell you this is 95% an RPG and 5% a board game! The boards that you use are “nice” for helping you keep track of events in the game, and the cards and tokens are useful like a board game, but at the end of the day, this is really an RPG!

The biggest clue that this is an RPG is that one player has to be the Dungeon Master (or DM) or Game Master (or GM): they are called the Fate Weaver! The Fate Weaver has to run the game for the other players, just like a GM would. A further clue is that this system is based on an RPG system called the Apocalypse: a lot of modern RPGs are “Powered by the Apocalypse“! So, this is really an RPG with just a touch of board game elements to keep track of a few things.

If you find yourself interested in this, be aware! This is really an RPG where one player (The Fate Weaver) will have to invest a lot of time learning and setting-up an adventure for this friends: this is not really a board game.

Session 0: Getting Ready

So, I ended up being the Fate Weaver and picking an adventure to run: this means I had to do a lot of reading and set-up to get ready! The core Revenant Society rulebook comes with six scenarios, and another expansion PDF (that comes with the deluxe version) another four scenarios. The game is set in either Paris France 1910s or New York City USA 1920s: about half the scenarios are in Paris (see map below), and the other half in New York.

Since the deluxe version hadn’t arrived yet, I made due with using the PDF version. This means I had to print out a lot of stuff to hand out to my players! See below all the stuff I have to print out!

Probably half the stuff I printed you didn’t need: some of it I wasn’t sure, so I printed it, and the other half you can just show the players some pages from the rulebook on your PDF. But you still need to print a awful lot of stuff! Luckily, this is ALL IN THE PDF RULEBOOK!! You just have to print the appropriate pages (near the end of the book).

Over the course of about four days, I read the rulebook a couple of times (it’s like 284 pages, but most of that page count is scenarios at the back of the book/print-outs); I tried to figure out what I needed to print.

I ended up using a paper cutter (see above) to help with some of that.

After reading the rules, re-reading the rules, choosing a scenario, and printing everything I needed, I felt ready to run the game.

Session 1: Paris Scenario: The Petals of Belladona

Like most RPGS, each player needs to create a character to run through the scenario. There are six basic archetypes in the game (one is “The Glamorous”: see above): each player chooses one and expounds on that basic framework to create a more personalized character.

So, my friends and I met for the first session. I had planned to “just” create the characters and explain the game! I “expected” that to last 2 hours, but it went very quickly! We got the characters created and got the the gist of the game in 45 minutes. So, GULP! We just jumped right in!

I think the reason it went so well was because I had spent a lot of time preparing, so I didn’t have to lookup too much stuff as we played! Don’t get me wrong: I still had to make up a lot of stuff as we played … which is typical: most Dungeon Master/Game Master have to be creative and make up stuff to respond to their players.

In the end, we made it through Loop 1 (where we uncovered a lot of the story) and ended with a dramatic reveal! This was all by the seat of my pants, but I think it went well.

Even though we had cheesy cut-out components, it actually worked pretty well. Again, it was probably because I over-prepared so I think I knew everything we would need.

We liked the game enough to want to play again! So, we looked at our schedules and decided to try again in two weeks!

Meanwhile …

While we were waiting to meet again, the physical copy came in the mail!

Instead of cheesy cut-outs, we now have real tokens! Real cards! Real boards! Real dice! And dry-erase boards to boot!

Probably the most exciting piece was the physical copy of the core book! See above and below!

I took a picture with a can of Coke to show how thick the book actually was! It’s a big boy!

In fact, I was worried about stripping the binding, so I made sure to open it and slowly open parts of the book so the binding would get some equal wear and tear as I opened it. We used to do this to all our AD&D books growing up … it keeps the binding fit!

So rather than a sheet of memories (used to generate content) like above from the PDF …

We get a full deck of cards from the physical edition! See above.

Instead of cheesy cut-outs (like above) …

We get plastic minis!

On the left, you see all the things I printed from the PDF … and on the right, you see the physical components.

A bit of a surprise was the character sheets in the deluxe version are dry-erase!

The deluxe version even comes with dry-erase pens!

The map is much nicer too. See the map of Paris above.

Besides the book, probably the nicest component was the Fate Weaver screen!

So, basically, everything now has “deluxe” pieces: the next time we play, we’ll move to the new pieces!

Session 2: Playing Loop 2 With The Deluxe Components

So, in our second Loop of the game, we embraced all the deluxe components. We decided quickly that the dry-erase boards are terrible for writing lots of text (upper left uses pencil-and-paper), but good for writing simple adjustments and damage (upper right uses dry-erase board).

We also put some ultra-fine dry erase pens on standby, but we didn’t need them (because we didn’t write any text on the dry-erase boards, just simple marks). See above as I have the Fate Weaver Screen and the big old Revenant Society core book in front of me.

I ended up putting some markers in the book to remind myself where certain sections were: I found out very quickly that this beautiful book DOES NOT have an index!

Sara ended up using a notebook to take notes through the adventure: she was never tempted to use the dry-erase boards. I will say that the map looks a lot better (see above) and the Fate Loop board is much easier to use with the dry-erase boards.

In the end, we had fun playing. I think we took the game a little less seriously in the second game …

We ended up bringing a very saucy NPC named “Skully” into the mystery … see Teresa cradle Skully in her arm. (They had to wrap Skully in something to shut him up … Skully liked to talk a little too much!)

We went ahead and finished our story that night, completing the second Loop and solving the mystery of the deaths!

We had fun.

Probably the place where the Deluxe Component shone most brightly was the One-Shot Loop dry-erase board with the little Watchers: that seemed to work the best of all the deluxe components. See above.

Well-Crafted Murder Mystery?

After getting through the game, I realized this was not what I expected: the game labels itself with the byline ‘Solve the mystery of your own death in this role playing game‘ (see the cover above). What I thought this meant was that The Revenant Society would provide several well-crafted mysteries for the players to solve. No no no no no no. That’s not at ALL what this game was! This a game where the players make-up-what-they-want about their character and most of the story and the Fate Weaver simply “responds” and tries to push the game in certain directions.

For example, take a look at the clue above: this is something the Fate Weaver is required to physically pass to the player at some point during the game. But this is not a clue about this mystery, this is the player making-up whatever-the-heck-they-want to answer the question!

Another example: at the beginning of every Loop, there are “questions” the Fate Weaver asks the players! (See above) And the players answer whatever-the-heck-they-want!

If you were expecting something like Detective: City of Angels, or Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (or many games on our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games) with well-crafted mysteries, thoughtful clues, and meaningful timelines, that IS NOT what The Revenant Society is! This is a game about the Fate Weaver and the players collaboratively making up whatever-the-heck-they-want. (Well, the timelines are actually fairly well-defined, so I take that part back).

I’ll be honest, I am very disappointed in what The Revenant Society is: I admit that I prefer my mysteries to be well-crafted and thoughtful! I was hoping to be a GM that slowly guided the players to the final solution, by dropping clues and hints as they played. What I got was a game where players do whatever-the-heck-they-want, and I, as the Fate Weaver have to somehow rectify that with the world and mystery they inhabit.

You might say “Well, play the way you want to then! Make up a well-crafted mystery and present that to the players!” I thought about that, but the mechanisms already in the game keep prodding the players to make-up whatever-the-heck-they-want: unless you alter the game drastically, this is a terrible framework RPG for well-crafted mysteries.

This isn’t what I wanted: I usually hate these kind of games, because they remind me of the TV Show: LOST. Things just happen with no cohesion or thought, and frequently things just don’t make sense or get resolved. I really hate shows like that: I want my shows (and my games) to be thoughtful.

Despite

Despite this NOT being a well-crafted mystery, I still had fun running it. Once I set my expectations for what this game is, I did the best I could to stay in the moment.

My friends loved the setting and the idea of a Groundhog Day meets Murder game!

I also did get some enjoyment trying to take my friends’ crazy ideas and turn them into a well-crafted mystery as much as I could! I have seen so many murder mystery shows, read so many books, played so many murder games, that I feel like I do have a chance to turn my player’s crazy actions into a well-crafted mystery. So I did enjoy it, once I got into it.

And Skully ended up being an unexpected fun NPC, even though he hit on Sara the entire night … but that’s just what Skully does.

A Comparison To Spirit of 77

My major compliant with the Revenant Society is that it really doesn’t have well-crafted mysteries: players just make up stuff as they go, and the DM/GM has to rectify what they do.

Another RPG I played that has this same “make-up-stuff-as-you-go” style is Spirit of ’77 … and I loved that style there!! See out review of Spirit of ’77 here! What’s the difference? Why do I love this in Spirit of ’77 and hate this is The Revenant Society? At the end of the day, the purpose of Spirit of ’77 is to make each other laugh! So, anything that takes the game in a weird direction is welcome! To me, the purpose of The Revenant Society is to solve a mystery (and it even says that on the cover of the book), so the “make-up-stuff-as-you-go” style doesn’t lend itself to any kind of well-crafted mystery.

Maybe if you love this setting in 1910’s Paris or 1920’s New York, you don’t care as much about the well-crafted mystery as I do.

The Book

We have to stay something great about the book: it’s very beautiful production. It’s very readable! It has a lot of (it looks like) well-researched history around the two eras of interest (Paris 1910s and New York 1920s)! The font is good sized! In general, it looks fantastic and is almost a piece of art.

Physical vs. Electronic

If you are interested in this game, should you get a Physical version (the Deluxe Components or just the book) or the Electronic version (PDF)?

Those of you know who know me would expect me to say “Get the Physical Product!” And you’d be wrong.

First, let’s talk about the Deluxe version.

Using dry-erase markers is a terrible idea for any meaningful amount of text!!! We saw this waaaay back in our review of The Forests of Admiron (see link here). First of all, the deluxe game comes with fat dry-erase markers … and they are hard to read! See below.

If you really want dry-erase markers, you need ultra-fine to have any chance of them working well.

In the end, Sara’s pen and paper system worked SO MUCH better: See above. We tried it both ways (pen-and paper in Session 1 and dry-erase boards in Session 2): pen-and-paper worked so much better. You really don’t want the dry-erase boards: they are clumsy, messy, and harder to read/write.

I do admit the map looks better (see above), but everything still works fine in PDF printed version (see below).

I am really not convinced the Deluxe version is worth all the extra money, and in fact, makes the game worse with the dry-erase markers!

Should you just get the physical book then? I mean, it it gorgeous and a beautiful production. That’s up to you: left to my own devices, I would just get the PDF. Why? For one, the PDF is electronically searchable, and the physical book DOES NOT HAVE AN INDEX!! For a book with 280+ pages, I am very surprised there is no index: how do you look up stuff in the physical version??? Answer, you can’t without a lot of searching. The only way to really look stuff up quickly is electronically to search the PDF.

Another reason: A lot of the stuff I want to print out comes from the PDF only! I had trouble finding the PDF pages I wanted online … I could only print them from the PDF I owned (to be fair: if you get the Physical version, I think you also get the PDF as well).

The most important thing to print for the players in the Basic Moves! See above!! Players consult this sheet ALL THE TIME: why was it not one of the things printed in the deluxe version? I went out of my way to make sure each one of my players had a copy of the Basic Moves (they could have maybe gotten away with this by putting the Basic Moves on the outside of the Fate Weaver screen, but the Fate Weaver screen has no useful info on the outside).

In the end, you the Fate Weaver still has to print the clues from the scenario (see the Hopeful clue #1), so what’s printing a few more sheets?

In the end, the pen-and-paper approach worked best, with my searchable PDF being preferable to the physical copy of the book (which has no index???). And my laptop also served as a Fate Weaver screen as well: see above. Overall, I strongly preferred the electronic PDF version of this: the dry-erase player boards of the deluxe version just didn’t work that well. I needed to print quite a bit from the PDF anyways, so even though the deluxe version has some nice components, it wasn’t worth the extra money.

Conclusion

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Would I get The Revenant Society again? Even though I did enjoy my plays of this once I set my expectations, it wasn’t really what I wanted … but I would still play again. I wanted a murder mystery game with well-crafted mysteries: that’s not what this is. If you like the idea of playing in this thematic world with your friends, I think you can have a great time: we actually had a great time after setting our expectations!! If the game does sound interesting to you, I strongly suggest you get just the PDF version of the game: you find yourself having to print stuff from the PDF anyways, so you might as well print everything you need at once. We found the dry-erase boards experience from the Deluxe version lesser than a pen-and-paper experience, so even with all the cool stuff from the Deluxe version, it just didn’t seem worth it.

I did enjoy trying to turn the crazy ideas of my players into a well-crafted mystery as much as I could. But the game mechanisms in The Revenant Society don’t really lend itself to any thoughtful crafting: said mechanisms are too ingrained as a “make-stuff-up-you-go” style. This game is just antithetical to any thoughtful mystery crafting . I enjoyed my plays of The Revenant Society, I might even GM a few more games, but I wouldn’t pick it up again.

Maybe you would enjoy living in this world and having fun collaboratively putting together a mystery: decide for yourself! Just be aware, this is not a game with well-crafted mysteries.

Does It Spark Joy? A Review of Spark Riders 3000!

Spark Riders 3000 arrived at my house in the USA on Saturday, March 16th 2024. This is a cooperative game for 1-4 players about flying a spaceship … but trying not to blow up! Players work together to keep a ship operational as they try to deliver some packages, but asteroids, nebulas, bad guys, space pirates, and other wacky things conspire against the players!

This was originally on Kickstarter back in September 2022. It has already delivered to most of the world, but we here in the USA are just getting the game. It promised delivery in November 2023: it’s 6 months late, but in Kickstarter-land, that’s not too bad … at least they delivered!

The version we got from Kickstarter was the Commander Version which is the deluxe version (with lots of plastic instead of cardboard standees). We also got the Prosperity Box (which has 2 new characters and some really nice tokens we’ll see later).

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

Spark Riders 3000 is a pretty standard sized box.

See the #2 pencil and can of Coke for scale above.

The component for this game are just gorgeous and brightly colored and easy to read!

The cards are all brightly colored and easy to read as well! See above.

The plastic minis (in this Commander Version) are just so neat!

The dice and other tokens are also quite nice!

Honestly, this game looks like a big, brightly colored toy! It has very nice components!

Rulebook

Like the components, this rulebook is big and bright and easy to read.

It gets about a B on the Chair Test: it flops over a little too much, but at least the text is all bright and fairly easy to read with a big font.

Unfortunately, the component section (on the first page above) is not great: there is no picture of the components, just a list. So, you have to guess what everything is. It’s not a big deal, but it is annoying.

The set-up pages (above) are very nice: they are well annotated and very clear! Good job!

The rest of the rulebook is quite nice: it’s well laid-out, pretty easy to read and pretty easy to look stuff up.

I would almost complain that the rulebook is too “colorful” (see composite above) because all the color and pretty pages can distract from just reading the rules. I don’t know why I am complaining about this … it’s dumb to complain about that when the rules are quite well done. But all that overload of color is a little distracting.

There is no index. Sigh.

But the last back page is a very useful quick summary.

This was a good rulebook overall. I wish they had an index, but generally it wasn’t too hard to find rules when you needed to look them. The lack of annotated components was easy to get over, but it was still annoying with such a (generally) good rulebook. I suppose the Tutorial takes care of some of that (see below).

The App

This game requires an App!! You CANNOT play Spark Riders 3000 without an App! So, I downloaded the the app to my phone.

It’s a little small on my small phone screen …

However, you can see (above) why I switched to the iPad: I couldn’t press the buttons on the very bottom on the screen! See above. Sigh!! When I saw this, I then downloaded it my iPad.

It’s actually nicer on the iPad: it’s easier to see everything.

But the I got this message … See above?!?!?! I cannot use it on either?!??!?! This is going to be a short review!!

It turns out, even with that message, I could still use the iPad to run the game. Honestly, the iPad is better because everyone can see it a lot easier! I am a little grumpy that I struggled with my iPhone and my iPad. For a very short 5 minutes, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to play the game! (Basically, I was able to press the button … barely … on my phone, and then I found I could still go forward in the game for my iPad. So either way would work).

I recommend using the iPad if it works for you: it’s bigger and easier for everyone to read.

UPDATE: After waiting a few days, they updated the App, so I don’t have the iPad error messages anymore! So that’s good! Unfortunately, the voice recognition is much worse and almost unusable in the most recent version. Sigh. Gain one thing, lose another.

Learn How To Play

So, I learned how to play by first watching the animated video …

… and then reading the rulebook.

Why do both? I found the animated app useful to introduce a lot of concepts, and show some basic examples, but it wasn’t enough to start playing.

I needed the rulebook to look stuff up. Caveat Emptor. Maybe you can just learn it from the Tutorial, but I needed the rulebook.

How To Play

Download the app. Select your heroes!

Each player chooses to play one of five characters (there’s two more characters in the Prosperity Box). Each player has a special ability, basically helping him do one of the 5 major actions just a little better:

The major actions are Pilot/Shoot/Tinker, Move, and Help.

Each character also has some special Help actions specific to their character.

We used the upgraded Help tokens from the Prosperity Box, but there are also cardboard help tokens. See above.

Basically, on the player’s turn, they can each do exactly three things: Move, Help, and “Perform Action” (Pilot/Tinker/Shoot). The cool thing is that this is fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order! That’s right, each player can intersperse their three actions amongst each others actions! For example: Nova can move, then Igor can Help, then Igor can Move, then Nova can Help, then Nova can Perform Action, then Igor can Perform Action! This allows the characters to more easily support each other, as they can break up their turns any way they want!

Players move around the ship, trying to position themselves to do major actions! For example, Igor (above) can Pilot as his major action because he’s in the cockpit! Nova can move three to end up at the laser and shoot!

This game is all about trying to decide when to repair parts of your ship, when to build weapon and their upgrades, pilot as fast you can to complete the missions, while fighting spaceships off the left and right sides of the ship!

See above as Nova can operate the cannon to fire at the Grey Alien!

All the major actions in this game involve dice, but the color coding is pretty clear! Piloting actions require the green dice, Shooting requires the red ice, Tinkering (repairing/upgrading) requires the blue dice, the orange dice are for armor-breaking rolls, and the Black Dice are for armor checks.

After you do a check, you will tell the app what you rolled! Click on the little Robot Icon and say “Speed Piloting Level 3!” (if you rolled three successes on a pilot roll), and the app will respond with what happens!

My first game, the app worked pretty well: I was able to tell the app something, and it seemed to recognize everything just fine!

My second game (after I upgraded the App, only a few days downloaded the original app), the voice recognition stopped working, so I had to use the manual system (inside the app) to specify my dice rolls. This was very annoying, but at least the system allowed me to continue and still enter the information.

Basically, each game has a mission to complete: it specifies what you have to do and the flight you have to take. You have to decide when to run, when to repair, and when to fight in the game!

Solo Game

So, the game does support solo play (Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law: this cooperative game has a viable solo mode!) In this case, it’s very easy: the solo player plays as if it’s a 2-Player game, taking the role of two characters.

In my first game, I played as Igor and Nova: see above. Igor is better at piloting, and Nova is better at shooting.

I was able to barely pull off a win in my first game … but I lost part of my ship!

I choose to make a run for it in the end, which caused me to lose a compartment off the ship! Luckily this thing will fly as long as “most” of the ship is there!

As I played, I would make rolls and and then tell the app what I rolled.

I would generally try to get Nova to shoot (see her operating the cannon above) as her Shoot special ability gives her +1 success!

Igor piloted when he got the chance, outrunning some of the enemies!

Occasionally, my team would come across aliens, and we’d have to make decisions … Fight them? Give them something? Out-run them? There were about 3 to 4 interludes like this, giving us some “Choose Your Own Adventure” type options as we played.

I won my first game … but for some reason, I thought it was just okay. Why?

Problems With Solo?

Over the course of my first solo game, I think I did the Help action exactly three times, and none of them helped at all! (The main “Help” is to allow a reroll, and all the rerolls failed).

The main problem with the Help action is

You have to be close to each other to offer Help (so you can place your help token down). In a two character game, you have to roam the ship to get stuff done and are very likely not near each other!
The Help actions are specialized per character! You can only help on certain actions! “I can help you shoot! Oh wait, you are tinkering, I am no help…”. You can always help with a reroll, but you HAVE to take the second roll of a reroll, and sometimes that’s worse!

Remember, you only do three things on a character’s turn: Move, Place a Help Token, or Major Action. If you can’t place a Help Token anyplace useful, it feels like your Help turn is completely useless!

I felt very much ennui after playing my first solo game. Most of the time, I couldn’t do a Help, which means I lost a third of my turn!!

Solo Game Revisited

To make sure this wasn’t an isolated event, so I played a second solo game, trying to concentrate more on helping.

I did a little more helping, but because the characters tend to be far away from each other, even leaving help tokens laying around to be picked up later still didn’t result in a lot of help!

I think the solo and 2-Player game might not be the best way to play this game: they don’t offer enough opportunities to Help each other! In a game where a third of your turn is offering Help, you can feel very impotent if you can’t offer help!! I am hopeful that this “can’t help” problem will go away in a 3 or 4-Player game, where players will physically be closer to each other a lot more (and thus have more opportunities to help). See that discussion below …

I am not sure I will play the solo game again. This is partly because of the of Help opportunities, but partly because of the “along for the ride” issue we’ll discuss later.

Cooperative Play

We started the cooperative play (4 players) with the Tutorial video. The tutoriual worked really well at introducing the team to the game. It was still helpful that I had read the rulebook, but I was able to shepherd people along pretty quickly.

The cooperative game lasted about 2 hours.

But in the end, the Help actions were MUCH MORE effective in a 4-Player game! It actually felt like you were helping much more! That one little detail seemed to make all the difference in making the game fun … With 4 people wandering the ship, it was much easier to help somebody do something on their turn, even if it was just a reroll …

The cooperative game for 4-Players seemed to fix the main problem I had in the 2-Player/Solo game: the Help actions were much more … helpful.

The App

The app needs to be connected to the internet. That may or may not turn you off, but you should be aware. And the App is required.

The video tutorial in the app was really good at getting everyone into the game quickly.

My friends noted that the App really felt well-integrated into the game! It was very thematic to have a spaceship with a console in the App! It just seemed like having this on a computer seemed so thematic in a space-based game!

We were still having voice recognition problems in the cooperative game. We were able to work around them in the app, but it was still annoying.

Along For The Ride

So, after a number of plays, I realized especially in the solo game, that I felt like I was just “along for the ride” a lot of time. I had no idea what a failed or successful dice roll would do!! For example, When I piloted well, would I out run the enemy ships?? Maybe? I had NO IDEA what the odds were! Was it worth wasting a HELP on Piloting to get that extra +1 for Piloting??? I don’t know!

I don’t know the odds of a ship coming up, I don’t know what part of the ship it will attack, I don’t know the odds of a Orange ship versus other ships. Things just kind of happen to you … and you do the best you can!

Some of you are probably saying, “What are you complaining about? This sounds so cool! You just fly around like Firefly and make decisions! You don’t have to worry about computing any odds or looking up charts, you just do stuff and see what happens!!!:

But that’s the thing, that’s not why I play board games. I like to know what’s going on, what are the odds, should I go for that extra +1 because the difference is huge??

I felt like I was just along for ride: I would roll dice, tell the app, do a few things and just see what happened. It felt way too easy to lose just because they bad guys attacked a random part of the ship, or my armor failed, or something else.

There is a lot to like here: it really does feel like an adventure, flying through the galaxy. But I just felt disconnected from the game (mostly in the solo game) because I didn’t know the odds or have any sense of what a success of failure is. I can see some of this going away if you play the game more and more (and can see the results of your actions), but that’s not what I want to be doing with my time.

Interestingly, a lot of this “Along For The Ride” bad feeling went away when I played the 4-Player game … maybe because I was okay being along for the ride … because I was with my friends?

What I Liked

The production is phenomenal and the game looks like a bright toy!

The app, when it’s working, offers some interesting story elements to help keep the game engaging (both with the story and “Choose your Own Adventure” moments!).

The app feels so thematic because it feels like how you would be piloting a space ship!!

The cards are all easy to read. The color coding system is consistent throughout and makes it easy to correlate pieces and their contributions.

Even when you fail a dice roll, you still get a crystal: if you get enough, you can buy Prosperity tokens in the future! I like this! A failure at least offers you the hope of cool item, so that’s kind of a nice dice mitigation mechanism. Even though this is a dice game, this mechanism makes it feel much less random.

This really is an adventure where you don’t have to worry too much about stuff: the app takes care of a lot of stuff and you can just sit back and enjoy the ride!

I really liked the colorful rulebook .. even though it didn’t have an index, it was still pretty easy to look stuff up!

The tutorial was very good at giving you a sense of the game.

The game is cooperative and has Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained), one of my favorite mechanisms in a co-op! You feel that much more involved if you get to pick the order!

What I Didn’t Like

Like I said in the “Along For The Ride” section, I didn’t feel engaged because I had no idea what my dice rolls meant. I just rolled the dice and see what app told me to do. It didn’t draw me in. Again, this was mostly in the solo/2-Player modes …

The app sometimes worked, and sometimes didn’t. It looks like they got rid of iPhone vs iPad issue with the latest update, but now my text recognition doesn’t quite work. I am pretty confident they will address these issues and fix them (because they are obviously still updating it), but it’s something to be aware of.

The lack of Help opportunities in the solo or 2-Player game was frustrating.

The Help actions seemed a little rough. Since every help token can do different things (you can always reroll, but everybody also has “special” specific help they can give), why didn’t they notate that on the tokens you give? Then you could SEE ON THE TOKEN what the help actions could be!Have side 1 of the Help token show actions 1 and 2, and have side 2 of the Help Token show actions 1,2 , and 3 (because the helpee has to unlock the third Help action). This would have help smoothed out the Help action quite a bit …

Conclusion

Spark Riders 3000 is an absolutely joyful design: the components, the colors, the app, all bring you into this world!

If you want a game where you are traversing the galaxy, making quick decisions, and not sweating the small stuff, this is a game for you! The game is an adventure in space making the right decisions: Fight? Flight? Repair? Everything do you matters!

Unfortunately, I personally had some trouble with the game because I many times I didn’t have sense what my dice rolls meant. I would jut roll dice and consult the app … should I have tried harder? Should I have gone for that extra help? I didn’t know because I didn’t know what the dice rolls meant. I’ll be honest, I really think this is just a “me” problem. This problem seemed to be really exacerbated in the solo/2-Player game.

Cooperatively, this game a is fun romp with your friends! The main problems I had with solo/2-Player (can’t use Help very often) went away with the higher player counts: you are engaged with your friends and all your help actions all matter! I was much more okay being along for the ride when I was with my friends!

There are some problems with the game, but in general this is a joyous adventure in space! I probably would objectively give it a 7/10 at 3 Players or 4 players (but maybe only a 5/10 or 6/10 at solo or 2-Player play). I didn’t love this game, but that’s a me issue: I suspect a ton of people will LOVE LOVE LOVE this game because it’s such a neat adventure. My friends didn’t see the solo issues I saw, so they only saw the joy of the 4-Player game … so much so that they want to play again.

If this game sounds fun to you, I would suggest only playing at higher player counts: that’s when it sparks the most joy.

coopgestalt

A place to talk about cooperative board and card games!

10. Spirit Island

9. Legends of Sleepy Hollow

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition

8. Disparation*

7. Rook City Renegades

6. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Second Edition

5. Any expansion, but especially Rook City!

4. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Second Edition

Sentinels Comics: The Roleplaying Game

3. Game Moderator Kit

2. Starter Kit

1. Core Rulebook

Printing

Gameplay

Solo Play

Cooperative

Pen vs. Pencil

Small House Rule

Things I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

House Rule for More Cooperation

Conclusion

RPG or Board Game?

Session 0: Getting Ready

Session 1: Paris Scenario: The Petals of Belladona

Meanwhile …

Session 2: Playing Loop 2 With The Deluxe Components

Well-Crafted Murder Mystery?

Despite

A Comparison To Spirit of 77

The Book

Physical vs. Electronic

Conclusion

Unboxing

Rulebook

The App

Learn How To Play

How To Play

Solo Game

Problems With Solo?

Solo Game Revisited

Cooperative Play

The App

Along For The Ride

What I Liked

What I Didn’t Like

Conclusion

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