A co-operative campaign adventure story game where heroes work together to complete missions from a large scenario book. Heroes will upgrade their action abilities, collect items and solve adventure puzzles to progress the story. There is no absolute failure as such to each chapter, however your relative success or failure will impact on your rewards and set ups for the next.
A large ring binder provides the maps on which you undertake your journeys, and your heroes will trigger tarot size cards to emerge into play to provide brief storyline and objectives to achieve, sometimes changing the map itself and all working well in shaping an evolving terrain each game.
The seven heroes have nice boards with slots to add your skills to, and a simple action choice system where you automatically receive a movement/recover action each round, and select one additional one such as your weapon to fight, healing or simply take an extra movement. Poker chips represent a heroes stamina and health, which you need to spend during actions and then recover, however these are removed temporarily when you take a wound. There are also three ability stats, might, agility and will and your relative strength in each represents how many dice you roll to undertake a test, many of which are revealed by the story cards. The dice have manipulation features such as explosive rerolls and also the ability to spend stamina to add extra successes.
The components are very good, and the additional plastic chips tend to add a little extra polish if you get them. Heroes are plastic miniatures while the core box enemies are standees, however you can buy a miniatures box for enemies if you wish. The missions are varied and interesting and the whole system works really well to provide you with an engaging adventure over many sessions, with many map interractions during a scenario. There are no tiles, the scenario book lays out your terrain for you and the artwork is great, being colourful for the terrain, and drawings found on the story cards.
There is much to like about this campaign game, it feels well designed and there are enough rules to keep you interested but without being overbearing. The story paragraphs are not too long, and the narrative is interesting and engaging to work through. Overall this is a really good and fun adventure game.
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Expansions
The core set is largely a self contained game but there are some expansions you can add to enhance or change the gameplay (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Gameplay Items
A second printing kickstarter offered two new heroes, using models already provided and some cards to make the enemies tougher. It is not a radical expansion and you already have quite a lot of hero choice already.
Components
Enemy miniatures in the core box are standees while heroes are plastic, however you can purchase an enemies models box for plastic versions if you want them. There are plastic chips available to upgrade the cardboard ones, and card sleeves. coins and dice upgrades and an origins story art book. The plastic chips are good and do feel more fun to use in play, and the rest are more personal preference.