However I am starting to wonder whether I haven't gone down too far down the rabbit hole when I ordered Altar Quest recently. Because that Kickstarter had only 5,355 backers. It's a niche within a niche. I can still find content about the game on the internet, but it sure is thinner than for the more popular games. And while I do want to talk in this post about some of the design decisions of this game, because I think they hold some general interest, I am pretty sure that nobody in my audience will play this game. And while very successful Kickstarter games get reprinted and become available in retail, the more niche games might not, and end up being forgotten by everyone but the few owners.

What I find interesting about Altar Quest is that it is a game about emergent stories, not written stories. Board games with written stories are pretty popular right now. Okay, the story in games like Gloomhaven / Frosthaven is on the thin side, but games like Folklore: The Affliction, 7th Continent, Tainted Grail, or Etherfields are all about the players discovering a story that the developers have written down in story books or on cards in the game. Sure, with a "choose your own adventure" style of game, different players will to some extent experience different stories. But usually not different enough for one player to want to replay the same story again.

Altar Quest also has a written story in the campaign books, but that is actually only one of the three modes you can play the game in. It isn't really what the core game is about. The core game is about stories emerging from randomness, because the encounters in Altar Quest aren't scripted. You set up a game of Altar Quest using "modules" that consist of decks of cards. You select a quest, which is a deck of cards. You select a villain, which is a deck of cards. You select minions, which come as a deck of cards, and you don't need to make the minions be the same race as the villain. The features of the dungeon are a deck of cards (but unless you have expansions, it's always the same deck.) When you play Altar Quest, you can start in any room you want, and when exploring the next room you'll get a random dungeon feature (which you need to interact with for the quest), and random threats and minions. The dungeon isn't scripted, it comes into existence by drawing random cards while you explore. And because the decks are modular, and you can play another villain, other enemies, and another quest with a different win condition next time, every game is very different. And that randomness creates its own story moments, when by some confluence of random events suddently the situation gets very dangerous for your character, or by some combination of features you manage to pull off some cool trick. The stories that emerge from gameplay of your character are always more memorable than the stories the developers wrote down.

In a way, Altar Quest is the anti-thesis of Gloomhaven. Gloomhaven has very little randomness, just enough to make it not completely foreseeable. The scenarios are carefully scripted, and would feel very similar if you played them again. It is basically a puzzle, in which you are looking for the best solution of combinations from your cards, and you can even calculate a turn or two ahead. And while that is fun, having to deal with the ever changing randomness of Altar Quest is also fun, in a different way. And somewhat lighter hearted. It feels like an adventure not because somebody has set up the story and the scenario to create an adventure, but because you can't know what will be after the next door, and how that next room will play out. You get a lot of resources which you can use to deal with randomness, and the game is about using these resources in the most clever way to make it through the unknown.

At the end I would like to mention two rather brilliant design decisions in Altar Quest, which I would hope future games will steal. The first is that the dice with which you determine your successes don't have failures on them. There are half successes, successes, and more-than-one successes on the dice, nothing else. Which is psychologically brilliant, because it still means that you can have a bad roll that isn't enough to overcome a problem, but you don't have that in-your-face failure symbol on your dice laughing at you. The second is that the monsters don't roll for attacks, all dice-rolls are player-centric. If a monster attacks you, it attacks you for a fixed amount of damage, and you roll dice to reduce the damage. That is a lot faster and more elegant than having to roll both for attacks and defense. And in the end, chance still determines the outcome, you just don't need so many dice and so much math to determine the result.

I don't think Altar Quest is a better game than the more popular board games I mentioned. It clearly has flaws, and the time you gain from a faster dice system is lost by having to deal with a large number of cards. Also, unless you play the faster encounters on the small maps, the full map games are a bit long, and I'll have to work out whether playing with fewer features would work as a house rule. But I am looking forward to have a game in my library that uses randomness cleverly, doesn't rely on a written story, but is endlessly replayable through the combination of the many modules.