After going on a pre-Christmas board game shopping spree, I really have enough board games to last me for the foreseeable future. And then I made the mistake of watching "best board games of 2020" videos, and ordered another game: Forgotten Waters. I'll talk more about it once I have actually played it, but in this post I would like to talk about one major point that made me buy the game: Voice acting.

Now voice acting is a bit of a sore point with me, because I am unable to do it as a DM in Dungeons & Dragons. I have no talent for fake accents and voices, and us playing in French, which is only my third language, doesn't help. With the world's most famous D&D DM being a voice actor, the public perception of how D&D should be played has shifted, and a lack of voice acting is perceived as a lack of quality of your game. But apart from that issue, I do appreciate how a professionally read text can come to life beyond of what you could do by reading that text aloud. Thus I am a fan of apps like Forteller, which add voice acting to story-telling board games.

As long as I play solo, I don't mind having to read text in a story-based game. But as soon as I play with my wife, things get a bit more complicated. Either we have to sit side by side with the book set up in a way that we can both read it simultaneously, in not the perfect position for either of us. Or we read the text one after another, which means both of us need to wait for the other to finish. Or one of us reads the text aloud, which my wife refuses to do, and I'll only do for shorter stuff like text on cards. So when we play Gloomhaven, we like the Forteller app reading the introduction, trigger, and conclusion texts of the scenario we are playing to us.

Unfortunately not every board game is covered by Forteller, or has its own app. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective has an app, but for some strange reason that app is bugged on my device, and only ever reads the text of the first case, even if I choose another case. So when I was considering whether Forgotten Waters was the right game for me, the fact that all of the story elements in the game are narrated by excellent pirate voices on an app really clinched the decision for me. Plus, I like the pirates theme, and the reviews are excellent.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 12:53 PM Permanent Link