Sunday, July 16, 2017

Adventure! boardgames to fill the gap.

Adventure boardgames have been around for a lonng time. And these days, it seems like every big game company has one, and some of the smaller ones do, as well. Why not capture the great stuff of an RPG at the table without having to get the same group every time?

Here's an informative video about one of Games Workshop's old adventure games that is currently not in print:


Thanks to jimfear138.

So let's get to a few of these:

Fantasy Flight Games has a LOT of these. Descent and Runebound for fantasy gamers, Imperial Assault for Star Wars fans, an entire Arkham Files line for Cthulu fans(who may or may not have read Lovecraft), and has til recently had the Games Workshop boardgame rights, producing the recent editions of Talisman, Warhammer Quest, and others.



Games Workshop has and has had a large number of these games over the years. Recently, they came back into the boardgame market with another Warhammer Quest game, and some standalone games that intro to their minis games.

Flying Frog has a Weird Western game called Shadows of Brimstone, which has two large base games, and a lot of expansions.




There's a series of D&D adventure games, I think they're up to four or five large boxes now, crammed with decent minis, and at least a couple had good adventures. These have largely preprogrammed movement and actions for the monsters.

Mage Knight from Wizkids games has a lot of people liking it, though there's a lot of moving parts in this Vlaada Chvatil game.


Gloomhaven and Kingdom Death both have a lot of Kickstarter buzz with them. Gloomhaven is by far the more general market game, while Kingdom Death is not for children. and possibly some adults.



Catacombs is an interesting take on the dm vs. all option, in that it's a dexterity game, somewhat in the same family as Flick 'Em Up! 

       Gelatinous Cube gets fed!


Mice and Mystics is the most family friendly entry here. You're playing as the king's heroes after they've been turned into mice by an evil wizard. Try to avoid the cats and bats, get the cheese, and save the king.



Pathfinder Adventure Card Game- This deckbuilding series currently has four different base sets, each their own campaign. These games do require a regular group, and buying a lot of small expansions, for more adventures, and characters. I'd post a pic, but as it's all card piles, it won't pass much on to the reader.



There are others, of course, but this is a decent list to look at if you like the idea of RPGs, but nobody you play with wants to run a game, especially the fully coop games.

When you play Social Justice, the world loses.

1 comment:

  1. If you want to get a boardgame version of Traveller there's Firefly the Game and Xia.

    ReplyDelete