But first I would like to talk about why I changed my mind about Destinies. Because that has something to do with a realization about what I am looking for in games. At the Spiel I had the opportunity to play Paper Dungeons, a roll-and-write "dungeon scrawler". And it didn't really excite me. Not that it was a bad game, but because of the basic game loop that this game shares with the majority of games I saw at the Spiel convention: In each turn by a mix of random elements and player decisions each player manipulates game elements and records them (typically in the roll-and-write or flip-and-write genre that recording is written on a piece of paper, while in other games the recording is represented by meeples and dice on a board); at the end of the game, each player translates his record into points; the player with the most points wins. Although technically Paper Dungeons is about dungeon crawling, there isn't any narrative experience or exploration involved, turn by turn.

If you look at the "hottest" game at Spiel Essen on BoardGameGeek, they all work like that. There are a bunch of different mechanics, like worker placement, card drafting, tile placement, or engine / tableau building. But it is always player decisions that change game elements, which at the end of the game translate into points, and the highest point count wins. That isn't very satisfying to me. I play games for the experience, not to "beat" somebody. The convention's hottest game, Bitoku, looks like this. Complicated, isn't it? The "game" is to understand this complex board, and to be able to make a move that ultimately maximizes your points. Paper Dungeons looks like this, which at the same time is completely different, but then again totally the same challenge: Understand the complex game state and be able to make a move that ultimately maximizes your points.

How do you win a game like that? Usually some luck is involved, but unless everybody understands the game equally well, the degree of understanding is a better indicator of who's winning. If you play any one of these games for the first time against somebody else who already played it three times, the other player will near certainly win. The consequence of winning by understanding is that nobody explains their moves; you wouldn't want to tell the other players your strategy, and why you think that doing this or that is a better move than what they were doing. And because of the complexity and not knowing the other players' strategy, you often are surprised by the final result; you thought you were doing well, and end up in last place, or the other way around. You barely understand all the consequences of the move you just made, and usually much less the move that other players are doing. It is all very abstract, and all the big surprises come at the end, when points are counted.

I much prefer games in which every move is an experience, preferably one that is shared with the other players. And at least at the Spiel, which is an European board game convention, these more "American" style thematic games are rare compared to the point-counting, abstract, "Euro" games. I bought Destinies not because I thought it was a perfect game, but because there simply weren't all that many games of the style I like that were available. I'd rather buy a game with a strong narrative in every move and some flaws, instead of an abstract Euro game in which narrative isn't really a part of my every move.

The good news is that Destinies is extremely strong in the narrative part. Pretty much every turn is a sequence of discovery, narrative decisions, dice rolls to determine successes, and finding out the consequences of the combination of your decision and the dice results. It fits the description of "role-playing game in a box", with an app serving as the dungeon master. There is also some interest in watching the turns of the other player(s), provided every result is read out aloud, because what another player encounters might give you a hint towards your objectives.

The bad news is that the narrative experience of Destinies somewhat clashes with the game design decision of making the game competitive. In order to explain this better, the following part of the post will contain heavy spoilers of the introductory scenario of the base game, you have been warned! Destinies is principally designed for three players, each playing one of three main characters in the scenario. Each player/character is trying to achieve his "destiny". But the destinies are mutually exclusive. In the introductory scenario the information shared at the start of the game is that there is a werewolf threatening a village, and that the mayor of the village has disappeared. Each player has additional hidden information: The noble just wants to look the hero by defeating the werewolf; the witch is the mayor's mother, and believes that the werewolf is her son, cursed by his wife, who is a sorceress; the huntsman is the lover of the sorceress and knows that she wanted to get rid of her husband by turning him into a wolf, that spell only worked half. Each character has two different ways to reach his destiny: The noble can either collect silver items to get a silver weapon to kill the werewolf, or organize a mob by helping villagers; the witch can either help villagers to get them to help her reverse the curse, or collect ritual items to break the spell herself; and the huntsman could either collect silver to kill the werewolf with a silver weapon, or collect ritual items to help the sorceress to complete the spell. So by the design of the story itself, one player winning makes reaching the objective for the other player(s) impossible.

In a 3-player game, player 1 can choose between pathways A and B, player 2 can choose between pathways B and C, and player 3 can choose between pathways C and A. Ideally you end up with each player having chosen a different pathway. But statistically, if everybody chooses a pathway at random, in 75% of the cases two players will choose the same pathway and get into each others' way, while the third player cruises to victory unopposed. You can change your pathway during the game, but obviously you end up wasting time, which diminishes your chance to win. In a 2-player game the chances are fifty-fifty that the two players either have the same or different objectives. And because everybody sees when the first player picks up his first silver item / ritual item / villager, the second player can then still switch to his other objective if necessary. So for me the game works better with 2 players than with 3.

However, at the start of the game you have no idea where the objects you need to collect are, unless you played the scenario before. And I wouldn't recommend playing the same scenario twice, the game works best when all players don't know the scenario played and each have a sense of exploration and discovery. But if nobody knows the scenario, "winning" the game has a rather big luck component. Yes, sometimes you have clues, for example if you want to gather villagers it makes sense to first stay in the village and talk to people there. But more often than not you don't know where the objects you are looking for are hidden, and end up deciding more or less randomly which direction to go. Now I usually don't mind randomness and dice rolls in role-playing games, but that is for cooperative games in which random results just add to the story, and you "fail forward". In Destinies, with the mutually exclusive destinies, if one player wins, the other players are "punished" by their story getting a bad ending they have to endure passively. Only the winner gets the satisfaction of having driven his story to the good end.

You can, if you want, play Destinies solo. Either you play with a timer, which means that if you fail to reach your destiny in time, you can replay the scenario using the information you already learned and pretty much automatically do better. Or, if you don't want to do things over, play explorer mode, which just means there is absolutely no loss condition, and you play until you reach your destiny. The stories of the scenarios are interesting enough to make solo play viable; but from a pure game mechanics point of view, neither of the solo options really feels satisfying.

With the base game having 5 scenarios and the expansion 3, and the scenario editor and player-created content not being out yet, my plan is basically to play this game 8 times in 2-player mode with my wife. With each move being interesting, the only downside is the pang of disappointment that one of us will inevitably experience when losing a scenario. But while being "competitive", there isn't much opportunity in the game of one player messing up the game of the other, except for randomly reaching an objective first when by chance both players have chosen the same pathway. So in general both of us play the game neither competitively nor cooperatively, but in parallel, enjoying the exploration and discovery. And that joy of discovery is strong enough to carry the game, so we don't mind too terribly when inevitably one of us can't finish his destiny. We would have enjoyed a completely cooperative version, in which players work together towards a common destiny more. But even the way it is, Destinies is a fun game for the two of us.