Dice

The Tallest Tales – The Adventure Zone – Bureau of Balance

So, there’s me, Mittens the rogue, and Laurak the wizard, right. And we’re in this creepy cemetery, fighting off a swarm of rats, while having a dance-off, but it’s okay, because you know me, I’ve got this unique and distracting odor, plus I’m good with an axe. Before you know it, things have escalated beyond all sense and Mitten’s ex shows up with this arcane riddle she’s got to answer before we can get on with destroying this bone throne.

*swig*

Right, it’s your round pal. When you get back, I’ll tell you about the time we ran into this sarcastic specter while trying to win a talent show.

If you’ve ever wanted to knock out a low-seriousness fantasy roleplaying campaign in under two hours, you could do a lot worse than the rules-light role playing game in a box: The Adventure Zone – Bureau Of Balance.

Loosely based on one of a bajillionty podcasts by the McElroy Brothers. It’s designed for 2-5 people and takes 60-90 minutes to dungeon crawl through. There’s no maps, no hefty tomes full of rules, only one type of die, and very little maths. Setup is pretty simple, players take a character sheet based on class (warrior, rogue, wizard, bard, or priest) and answer a few questions about that character (there’s prompts on the back of the sheet to either steal from or just get ideas about who your character is). There’s also space to name their adventurer and even draw a mugshot for posterity.

That’s it! No rolling stats, no picking up gear, no deciding on which pack is best for your adventure. All the numbers come printed on your sheet and they never change. Warriors are good against monsters. Wizards are good against magical challenges. The point of this game is not to worry about numbers so much as to tell a fun story together.

Now, to the adventure itself. Forgoing the common use of a Game/Dungeon Master player typical of most role playing games (thought there is a team leader who is in charge of gently nudging play forward), BoB sees this role taken by small Challenge Decks. One to represent a villain and their minions, the next a relic of power, and finally a location for it all to take place. The game includes a number of each so you could be after the Lich who wants the Ring and hangs out in the Tomb, or the Cult after an Idol on a Train. All of the decks are playable with each other meaning you can get an awful lot of replayability out of this box. Besides, playing with different groups, who knows how they’ll interpret the story in their own way.

Each deck includes 10 cards, each with a scenario and a few numbers. There’s a big number at the top of the card, this represents the score the players need to beat that round. To the left and right, there may be an arrow, which includes a modifier number for the card in that direction. For example, Reliving Your Biggest Mistake, includes +1 to the left, this could make the Swarm of Crawling Hands (usually only a 7) up to a difficulty of 8 (as I said, it’s very simple stuff).

Below the numbers are the card’s name, and below that there may be symbols, denoting the type of encounter this is (monster, spooky, magic, etc). Next is an all purpose box for prompts, and special rules. Some will include effects that remain as long as the card is on the board, others will grant bonuses if you can explain some story aspect of the card (what does something look/smell/taste/sound like?) during your encounter with it. At the very bottom, there’s a skull with a number, showing how much damage it will do if you fail your encounter, and another showing the value of treasure you get for defeating it.

Which brings us to Fantasy CKostCo (it’s legally distinct for the board game) cards. If you’ve earned three loot, you can grab yourself an item card from the deck. It could be Railsplitter, an axe that gives you an ongoing bonus against monsters and a bonus when you help a friend fight a monster; or some very adorable Slippies of Haste, which give you a bonus against monsters and traps. If you’ve got the deluxe edition of the game, you’ll get an adorable slot-together model of the Fantasy KostCo to hold your cards, but it doesn’t seem to stay together very well (at least ours doesn’t) and you’ll regularly end up with cards flying everywhere (save yourself $20 and get the standard edition).

You’re not allowed to hold more than two item cards, but there’s a really nice mechanic, whereby if you earn enough to get a third item, you can immediately give one to someone else on your team, meaning that even if one player hasn’t managed to get any loot themselves, they won’t be underprepared as you move on through your adventures.

If you’re playing more than two players, the last thing you’ll need to do is add a surprise card to each Challenge Deck, to be uncovered once you’ve got past the first four cards. These surprises are helpful friends who will aid you in your quest. They even get their own little space on the board to hang out in, until the next surprise comes along to take over.

So, the board is set, the quest is planned(ish) and the party introduce themselves (and show off their stick figure art of a wizard gnome), time for adventure. On a turn, players chose one of the three challenges to take on, work out how much strength they have (based on the numbers on their sheet, plus any bonuses from items or surprises), tell the story of how they’re going about this quest, ask for assistance from another player (if they don’t think they can beat the challenge alone), and finally roll their dice.

I forgot to mention the dice in this game. They’re big enough to concuss someone if you are the type to throw things when you fail a roll (please don’t, and maybe get some help for your anger issues). While they look like standard twenty-sided dice, they actually only feature the numbers 1-6 (three times each), as well as a big X for an epic failure, and a Bureau of Balance symbol for a critical success.

Anyway… roll the die, add it to your total strength (including any modifiers for items or help from your party) and if it’s higher than the challenge rating, you win and you get that card.

The story ends once two of the challenge decks are exhausted.

If you’ve got people who are really able to go with the flow and can whip up some silly detail about their challenge, you can get some really fun group storytelling. Even if you’ve got one fairly quiet player, you can still get a fun story together, thanks to the cards themselves and the way the game wants you to interact with it. I’ve had some fairly difficult games with this box (and more than a few adventures that got really horny), but never one that didn’t get at least a few good belly laughs.

The Adventure Zone – Bureau of Balance probably isn’t for hardcore Pathfinder or D&D players, but if you’re looking to experience a rules-light, no-DM, co-operative story you can play in an evening with no prep, you could do a lot worse than this. Perhaps a good introduction for getting friends into the world of role playing, without scaring them away by making them read a 300 page player manual first.

Pros:

  • Easy to pick up
  • Nice artwork
  • Lots of fun

Cons:

  • Can experience difficulty spikes
  • Not very deep
  • Deluxe edition feels unnecessary

Final Score: 6/10

Most Non-Triumphant – Bill & Ted’s Riff In Time

I made the mistake of looking up when the first Bill & Ted film came out and now I feel really old. How in glob’s name did they manage to get a sequel made in 2020?! Yeah, it’s been 29 years. Keanu Reeves is heading towards 60. Nostalgia bucks are big bucks I guess. Anyway, we’re not here to talk about movies, we’re here to talk about related board games. *sigh*

Bill & Ted’s Riff In Time from Warcradle Studios is very much like the 2020 movie, Face The Music. It’s alright. Didn’t hurt anyone. It passed the time. It was nice to look at the art and go “oh yeah, it’s them” (and then “this game has a minis expansion, doesn’t it”, to which the answer is yes, of course it does). All the artwork is of the painted minis, but without the expansion, you’ll be pushing cardboard figures in plastic stands (with the exception of the player minis) around. It’s designed for 1-4 players and takes around 80 laborious minutes (not that time should really matter when you have a time machine, right?).

The basic plot is that there’s all these rifts opening in time. This has caused personages of historical significance to wind up at places and times they really don’t belong. It’s up to Bill, Ted, Elizabeth, and Joanna to jump into their time booths (for the sake of the game they have one each, I guess they’re just giving them out like free samples these days. Hey future people, where’s my damn time booth? I’m British, so I guess it’s a phone box with a missing door that’s been smashed to crap and smells like stale piss and hepatitis. Plus, it’s probably stuck at a lorry park/lake in Kent, we’ll move on eh) and go put things right.

Each player picks a character who will have a special ability such as swapping their riff card or extra movement. They then get dealt out two objective cards and choose one to keep. These are personal missions you can complete to gain additional abilities going forward and will involve things like doing some repair work on multiple rifts, or having a particular character with you and travelling to a specific location. They’re then given one additional objective card, which you get as a free ability for the game, with no need to complete it (Excellent! *air guitars like a pro*).

To set up the board, you shuffle the location discs and place them in little divots on the board (which reminded me of Pokémon Master Trainer). Next you shuffle the location cards and place the personages of historical significance standees. Finally place the player minis in San Dimas and shuffle up the riff deck.

At this point in play, it’s your last chance to turn back, but you’re here for a review, so I guess I have to keep going. I do these things for you. I hope you appreciate it.

On your turn you draw a rift card and perform whatever action it demands. This could be something as simple as advancing the rift counter on your location; something bad, like advancing the rift counter on 5 separate locations; something annoying, like advancing a particular location’s rift counter and then transporting you, or even all players there. This can leave you feeling you have very little agency if you draw a lot of them in a row. There are like five Excellent cards in the riff deck that actually benefit you, but it’s a big deck so you don’t rely on them turning up when you need.

Next, players roll up to four action dice from their pool and perform actions based on what luck has brought. You do get one free re-roll, but after that, you’re probably on your own. There are four colours of dice, most of which show the same icons in differing amounts. There’s Move which allows you to travel through the circuits of time to connected locations; Interact which allow you to pick up characters, drop them off, or start repairing rifts in locations that have already had their correct personages of historical significance dropped off; Excellent which can be used as any other type of action; and Bogus which will cause you to raise the rift counter on your current location (or the San Dimas counter, if it’s already at its limit).

At the start of the game all locations are set to level 5, except San Dimas, which starts at whatever the player count is. Early on you’ll probably feel like things are a little dangerous as you will most likely feel like riff cards are seeing you constantly raising levels and really struggling to do anything to mitigate the gaping holes in freaking time!

As you pick up personages of historical significance (yes, the manual insists on using the full title every damn time) they will grant you temporary boons and/or banes while they’re travelling with you. Usually adding a blue die (mid-tier) to your pool and a move, interaction, excellent, or re-roll action to use each turn. Some of the more wild characters, like Genghis Khan, will add black Bogus dice, which you have to roll as one of your four each turn. These only have Bogus actions or blank sides. As such, it’s best to get these characters on a swift pick up and drop off service or risk a major bummer each turn.

Riff In Time (and yes, I was regularly tripping over riff and rift while playing this game, because both words come up so often) is a game of three parts. The early panic of trying to get things under control can feel kind of desperate, the solid mid-game where you’re starting to get into a rhythm and build your dice pool, and then the plodding, pedestrian final phase where you’ve got everything well under control and it’s just mopping up the last people and places.

Ultimately Riff In Time is… fine-ish, I guess. It’s easy to teach, easy to play, doesn’t require much in the way of strategy, but is ultimately quite a hollow experience. The manual spends too much time trying to be late 80s/early 90s cool and could have been simplified without really losing anything of the theme. The standees are of that design that doesn’t really grip the cardboard so won’t chew it up with continued use, but ultimately can’t always be picked up by the card part, as the plastic base just falls off. It’s fun enough for two thirds, but fails to stick the landing. It doesn’t stand up well against other modern board games and so just like Bill & Ted Face The Music, it feels about 20 years too late to be fully appreciated.

Pros:

  • Dice feel pretty decent.
  • Board art is nice, clear, and colourful.

Cons:

  • Feels like a movie tie-in board game from 1991.
  • Lots of empty space in the box.
  • The central location marker for San Dimas never seems to sit properly on the board, making it easy to knock and change the value it’s pointing at.

Final Score: 4/10

The Roof Is On Fire – Flash Point Fire Rescue

Fire. The hot burney. It’s warmth, light, tasty foods, your un-pissed on enemies getting their comeuppance. Despite all these benefits, fire can also be destructive (who knew). At such times of firey destruction, true heros step up to save the day.

Flash Point sees players taking the roles of firefighters as they attempt to control the Big Yellow Toasty and rescue those trapped in its too-warm embrace. 2-6 players grab a mini in their preferred colour and prepare to tackle the blaze.

Action takes place on a 8 x 10 squared, double-sided board. Each side is laid out as a home, with kitchens, bedrooms, living areas, bathrooms, and closets taking up the middle 6 x 8 squares with a single space a border around the building where a fire engine and ambulance can be placed.

Initial setup is done by rolling a six and an eight sided dice three times to decide where the initial fires have broken out. The dice are then rolled three more times to place points of interest. These could be a person, a pet, or the empty nothingness of the void, a reminder of the endless abyss that awaits all things come the heat death of the universe (which is to say you probably heard a noise but it wasn’t produced by anything sentient (that you know of)).

In harder difficulties, (of which the game has 3, plus suggestions for other ways to make things more or less difficult) you will also roll to place hazardous materials which could explode in the event that they catch fire. Additionally, the initial fires will be marked as flash points. These can be made temporarily safe by extinguishing the fire, but should you roll that space again, you’ll not only place more smoke there (which can turn into fire in an instant), but you’ll also be rolling again to place more smoke. If the second roll is a clear space, or even just smoking, it becomes a flash point. If not, you’ll keep rolling again and again, placing more and more smoke, until you do. As in real life, a house fire can escalate really quickly.

When you roll a spot that is already on fire, you’ll have to deal with other chain effects. The spaces around that spot will be affected. This may mean more fire in each cardinal direction, but more than that, it could mean structural damage. Walls can be destroyed if they’re hit twice, turning them into smoking doorways, doors themselves can be permanently destroyed, and the more open an area is, the easier it is for fire to spread. Plus, if the building takes too much damage, it may collapse on you, ending the game.

Once you’re out of family mode, you’ll also start using uniquely skilled firefighters. These may have more or less actions per turn and will have their own abilities. This could be providing movement actions to a fellow firefighter on your turn, to have a number of free fire suppression actions, or to be able to heal survivors – making it easier to get them to safety.

The main goal of the game is to rescue seven people, however, there’s nothing to stop you going for the full complement of ten. As mentioned earlier, hidden among these “points of interest” are some blank tiles. As such, you could go tearing across a burning building to investigate a space, only to discover it was a waste of time. Time that has allowed the fire to grow to new heights.

People are rescued by getting them outside, to the ambulance, which can park on any of four spots, and can be radioed to move to another location for precious action points. This means you can just dump someone outside on an ambulance spot, return to fighting the fire, and then arrange for the ambulance to pick them up once things are under control again. I’m sure the ambulance will see them there, and not accidentally run them over. They’re having a bad enough day as it is.

If the fire reaches a point of interest, you turn it over to find out if someone has been flambéed or if you saved yourself a few action points you can use to tackle the fire. Either way, at the end of that player’s turn, you roll to add another point of interest to keep the total at three. Should you lose four people at any point, that’s the game over.

Quick, important note here: at the start of the game, it asks you to remove two people and a blank tile from the pool of points of interest. This pool does include a dog and a cat. If you think losing either or both pets would be distressing to you, you can make these the two you don’t play with.

In addition to the ambulance, there’s the fire engine. Here you can change roles to a different fire specialist, take a ride to another engine parking space, or use the mighty (ish) deck gun.

The deck gun fires a big burst of water into the building, based on where it’s parked, and can help deal with heavily affected areas… if you roll well. You see the deck gun is based on dice rolls, you have to roll within the section of the board you can reach from it’s current parking spot, but on top of that, land it on the wrong side of a wall, and you’ve just rolled to make the carpet squelch, while the kitchen continues to be a raging inferno. When it works, it’s great, when it misses your target, it’s a massive sink for your action points, and that fire is still doing its thing.

I’ve found that you start to develop little narratives about the building as games proceed. A spot you keep rolling to catch fire becomes “that spot on the couch someone accidentally spilled a whole bottle of whiskey last Beltane”; the new point of interest you rolled, that is in the other bed spot, next to where you just rescued someone becomes a whole thing about someone hiding under the covers, worried that firefighter was an angry partner coming home to catch you. I wasn’t expecting it, but it seems to happen every game. “Who keeps smoking in the damn closet?!”

The varying difficulty settings mean this game can be played for family board game nights with kids as young as ten, all the way up to top strategists who can think 8 moves ahead. The double sided board adds additional replayability and there’s about 5 major expansions that add additional, double sided boards, as well as new features (such as windows you can open to climb through and fragile walls).

I wasn’t expecting to like Flash Point as much as I do, I’d taken it for Pandemic, but with the disease being fire (it’s not). What it is is fast paced, thoughtful and strangely fun, considering the subject matter.

Pros:

  • Lots of difficulty levels mean you can play with different ability groups.
  • It’s an easy teach.
  • Lots of fun.

Cons:

  • Sometimes you will encounter extreme difficulty spikes due to rolling in the same areas on consecutive rolls (the joys of randomness).
  • You might need to play a few games at a new difficulty before you work out how to even begin to manage.

Final Score: 8/10

Pretty Wrong – Stuffed

Stuffed first caught my attention on Kickstarter, and like most boardgames I’ve kickstarted, it actually arrived (woo!). The biggest pull is the amazing artwork, which admittedly isn’t the best thing to base a purchase on (no shit Janey!).

The component quality is amazing. The custom dice have nice art and a really nice weight. The card art is incredible, the box opens like a story book which is held shut with a magnetic clasp, there’s enough space to have sleeved cards in there, and the vacform tray is very nicely designed to show everything off.

The plot of Stuffed is… *makes slightly embarrassed noises*. Luckily, it’s not well conveyed in the game itself, which is probably for the best because it’s a massive yikes once you put in the context of some of the cards. Those who were destined for great things, but fight their destiny, waste their talents and let time slip away, fail at their purpose. Their vice leads to the penalty that they become adorable, but troubled stuffed animals.

This is the only time ‘vice’ is brought up, usually the game talks of burdens (or rather, birdens). So what does the game consider a vice or a personal failing that sees you damned to the plush realms? Hatred – sure, addiction – makes sense I guess (if you completely ignore the underlying issues of addiction), self pity – I… suppose, regret – shaky ground, fear – what?!, broken – huh?, depression – oh do fuck off.

See at this point I just want to shake the designers and ask how they didn’t see the problems here. These ‘vices’ are mostly just mental health problems. You made a game where if you had mental health problems from anxiety, to depression, to trauma, to anger issues, and so on, you’re doomed to be punished for that in the next life. You done goofed. You’ve done a bad job, game designers *baps on nose with a newspaper*.

Why didn’t I notice this in the Kickstarter? Because the plot and the birdens (get it? They have birds on) weren’t shown together. Indeed, the use of the birden cards is considered an alternative play style (more on that later).

I genuinely think that if Certifiable Studios had framed it as: those who had, through their own failings or lack of bravery, failed to do the things that really mattered to meet their destiny, and then changed the titles of each birden, that this all could have been avoided.

Stuffed sees you trying to complete a mission by putting a dedicated team together and gathering the necessary supplies to complete it. That’s it, no need to blame people who have mental health problems. Just adorable stuffed animals (some of whom happen to be mercenaries) going on a quest together. Even with the birden cards in play, you can read it as “we came together as a team, and overcame those birdens”. They simply had to avoid framing them as vices or personal failings.

Ok, major glaring issues addressed, time to talk about gameplay.

Players take turns rolling 8 custom dice to earn money, gain advantage cards, gain loyal companions and specialists, or hire mercenaries. Each ally (and the player’s avatar) allows you to spend a die with a matching symbol to manipulate one or more dice. The avatars always allow you to spend one paw symbol die to re-roll any number of other dice. Others may ask you to spend a leaf to modify one of the dice to your favour. It’s this ability to re-roll and modify dice that takes a lot of the frustrating randomness out of the game (which is always a risk with dice rollers).

Loyal allies only require you to spend the correct symbols from dice in order to join your team, but specialists will also want you to spend gold to recruit them. Whereas mercenaries may even want you to part with your advantages as part of their cost. Luckily you can trade in three matching symbols for a coin or four for an advantage card (unless you rolled birds, those pesky birdens ruin everything). Advantages can be played for various benefits such as a free re-roll, an additional resource, to modify a die, etc. Some may even be played as allies in their own right.

As you progress through the game someone will eventually hire a mercenary. Once the first one is hired a new, pink die goes into the mix. This is rolled with the other dice on each player’s turn and should it land on a symbol matching a merc in play, their current employer gets a benefit. That could be extra gold, to steal gold from another player, to manipulate one of the current player’s dice, remove dice from the current player, etc. However, they wouldn’t be truly mercenary unless you could do the most devious thing, and just hire them straight from whoever hired them last, instead of from the pool of available companions.

Basically that’s the base game. The mission will have a description like “Break the curse and wake up the sleeping town of Totta”, but what it requires is (with a single exception) the same thing: have 2-4 teammates, 1-2 must be a mercenary, then spend 5-6 resources (dice of the correct type and possibly some coins or an advantage card). Once that’s done, that’s it, quest complete, game over.

That said, there is a rules variant which tries to bring in some of the plot, but even then only loosely. At the start of the game, each player can be dealt two birden cards (*angry hisses at birden cards*) depending on the card they will have different requirements in order to overcome them – such as spending 4 coins to rid yourself of anxiety, or dealing with your personal issues by hiring two mercenaries (sounds serious), or dismissing a teammate (who is not a mercenary) to rid yourself of depression (as someone with clinical depression, I can assure the designer that pushing your friends away is not how you deal with it). Once both your birdens are removed, you can complete the mission. It’s pretty flimsy but stops people rushing to the end game. Even so, you’ll probably be done in 20-30 minutes.

Stuffed has such beautiful art (even when it’s being kinda dark), but the story and the flavour of some of the mechanics really let it down. It feels like they had someone with incredible talent design the cards and then they just spitballed the plot while drunk and high. A real shame, and the reason I’m not that interested in Certifiable Studio’s next Kickstarter project. My advise is, if you’re going to play it with friends, let them know the rules and then put the manual away.

Pros:

  • Amazing art.
  • Custom dice have nice art and a lovely weight.
  • The box opens like a story book.

Cons:

  • The game treats mental health problems like personal failings.
  • Doesn’t really tie all it’s concepts together very well.

Final Score: 6.5/10