Call to Adventure is a hero crafting story game where you are building your character in order to defeat a final adversary via a tableau of cards, which you will select or win during your turns. It has solo, co-operative or competitive elements, and is very much role playing in its essence, with three core versions of the game, the original version with an expansion built around the Name of the Wind books, then one based on the Stormlight Archives, and now a more traditional Dungeons and Dragons version called Epic Origins.
The game has amazing visuals, with tarot size cards containing excellent artwork, alongside a mechanic of casting runes to overcome challenges and gain cards and victory points. Your character will begin with a race type, such as Elf, Halfling or Dwarf, and will gain traits such as being adventurous or a hunter. As you progress you will beat challenges to gain heroic titles, such as being at one with nature, or climbing a summit, and start to build up a picture of your journey towards your destiny.
Your core abilities include strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma, each represented by runes, and you will increase some of these as your undertake your journey. Each attribute you hold will allow you to roll extra runes to complete challenges, thus gaining even more experience. Also you have a triumph or tragedy points tracker, which determines your path towards the light or a darker path.
This is not a complex strategy game, but a lighter game of telling stories, rolling runes and completing challenges to up-skill your hero. You will have a main adversary to cooperatively overcome between the players, and there is a winner called based on victory points, although this can rather feel secondary in nature to the telling of your heroes story. It is a game which looks great, is fun and easy to play, but does require you to interact with storytelling and imagination. The epic origins version of the game includes more co-operative focus via a campaign series of bosses to defeat.
Why i chose not to keep it …
This is a light game in that you select a card, meet a challenge and build your character to overcome a final opponent. It is very likeable to play, with great artwork, but it shines more when you tell you story alongside another player. As a solo game it does not really contain enough progressive game elements to keep you coming back as the strategy is light and your boss encounter somewhat forces you to focus your skill development into certain areas each time. There is strong competition on my deckbuilder collection now.
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Expansions
There are expansions you can add to enhance the gameplay and visual appeal (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Core Boxes
There are three core box editions, the original with an expansion based on the Name of the Wind book, the Stormlight Archives themed edition and the most recent the Epic Origins which is Dungeons & Dragons themed. Each of these is stand alone but can equally be mixed up to expand your encounter variety.