ElfQuest Adventure Game

EvEvanstar1,6

This is an adventure card game, in somewhat similar nature to Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords – Base Set or Shadowrun: Crossfire. The primary difference is that this game isn't a pseudo-deck-builder. At the start of the game, you get all of your skills and abilities on different cards. Over the course of the game you can expend these cards to get bonuses to die rolls. There are ways here and there to recover the expended cards, but that takes time, which you are also budgeting. As you play through the game, the challenges ramp up in difficulty and you find yourself having to make tough choices as what to spend and when. Each character has different specialties, but these differences don't make them play any differently, as everything in terms of mechanics comes down to rolling some dice, and counting your matching keywords to figure out how many re-rolls you get. Some of the quests (meaning die-roll challenges) can be attempted by multiple players at the same time using all their actions for the turn. I didn't feel this was very thought out in terms of game design as this isn't significantly different from having each player in turn try to resolve the quest themselves. In terms of theme, I am a big fan of the Elfquest comics, and I do think it's cute how the game takes you through the plot of the first two issues of the original series. I was troubled somewhat in that we used the character Winnowill who was a KS bonus, and her powers and abilities didn't really reflect her evil nature. In terms of components, the game box is way too small, and barely fits the bits. No hope of sleeving the cards or organizing the stuff in baggies. There are a number of embarrassing misprints, which the designers provided PNP versions of to replace or update, but really, it's troublesome. The biggest problem with this game is a lack of ambition in it's design. Die rolling alone doesn't do justice to it's theme. Varying the way the characters preform the different jobs seems like the least that should have been done. Great examples of this are Myth and Legends of Andor. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

AtAtomicFenixstar6,0

Coop