First of all, The 7th Continent is a board game, not a video game. When a video game tells you that you have lost and need to start over, you don't get much say in the matter. When a board game tells you that you have lost and should start over, you always have the option to say "nope!". The 7th Continent recognizes that with card 777, an optional card you can add during setup, "if you wish to play in easy mode". That card teaches you that if you "lose" because you ran out of cards, you can just shuffle your discard pile into your action deck, and continue. While the card is designed to be used only once, I've seen at least one YouTuber using it twice, just to beat the recommended starting curse, The Voracious Goddess. He argued that it would be boring for his videos to start over from the beginning, but obviously the same holds true if you don't happen to stream your game. Your decision! I would say that playing to the end of a curse and trying to have "as few losses as possible" is a perfectly viable game mode, and much preferable to other possible methods of "cheating", like peaking at cards before taking a decision.

Since the 2nd kickstarter, The 7th Continent also has a prodigy mode. You add 5 cards to your action deck, and these cards are better than average. So you have more cards, and better chances to pull positive results, making the game overall a bit easier. I would recommend using these until you feel you are an expert in playing The 7th Continent. The prodigy card is part of The Crystal's Song mini-expansion, and is also contained in the What Goes Up Must Come Down large expansion.

But while these ways to make the game easier exist, the other option is obviously to learn to play better. So how do you do that? The answer lies in playing the game and understanding what makes you lose, and then avoiding it the next time around. The basic loss condition of The 7th Continent is running out of cards in your action deck, then drawing cards from your discard pile until a curse turns up. Most things you do require you to draw cards from that deck, choose one, and discard the rest. And most curses, except for maybe The Crystal's Song, overall need more card draws than there are in your action deck. So what you need is a sustainable way to recycle cards from your discard pile into your action deck. And that exists in the game, in the form of hunting and fishing spots. These provide meat and fish, which (preferably with the help of a fire) can be eaten to recycle cards. Note that hunting spots can deteriorate in quality over time, so you can't stick around the same spot forever (although sometimes hunting twice in a row is the best option). And it is advisable to once in a while "save" the game, to return the good hunting result cards back from the discard pile into the box. So, if you don't run in circles too much, and you watch out for clues that lead you towards hunting and fishing spots, you can keep up exploring the 7th continent for a very long time.

It is worth noting that besides the explore, hunt, eat, repeat cycle, there is another important cycle in the game: Collecting and using experience points. At certain points in the game, you will get the option to "rest" and draw a 000 card. That is generally a good idea, if you have some experience points collected. The 000 card allows you to draw 4 advanced skill cards, and then buy from that selection, using experience points as a currency. Just like with the prodigy cards I mentioned earlier, the overall effect is to make your action deck thicker, and thus last longer between hunting cycles, and to add more powerful cards to it. You should always seek out resting points when you have more than 7 xp.

While the hunting and resting cycles are important to understand the flow of the game, the ultimate trick to play The 7th Continent better (and I would assume the same to be true for The 7th Citadel), is to use the cards you draw better. You are limited by the number of cards you can hold in your hand, by the number of stacks of items you can have in your inventory, and by the size of those stacks. The numbers depend on the number of players, but you will *always* feel restricted. The solution is to use the cards you have in hand and in your inventory aggressively. Before you do anything with the terrain card you are standing on, always check first whether you can burn some cards from your hand. Cards like "Examine the Notes", "Think", or "Knowledge is Power" are to be used as soon as possible. Don't hesitate to use a "Learning by Doing" card to avoid drawing 2 cards, even if you might be tempted to hold onto it to avoid drawing 3 cards later. Don't hesitate to use your walking stick, and so on. Only by aggressively cycling through the cards in your hand and the cards in your inventory will you be getting the best use out of them. Many people make the mistake of holding onto some cards they think they might need in the future, and discarding the cards they could use right now, and that is the way to lose the game. Sometimes it is better to voluntarily discard a whole stack of cards from your inventory, if durability is low, to build up a new and better stack.

While going through your cards quicker is the better strategy than holding on to them and discarding all the newly drawn cards, overall the possibility to ignore the "loss" state can make this a very casual game if you prefer it that way. Beating the game is less important than having fun with the various unexpected consequences your decisions might have.

Only 3 days to go on the 7th Continent Kickstarter rerun and I finally managed to actually play the game to confirm if it is really as good as evertybody says. Good news: It is! Furthermore it turns out to be one of those rare board games that are ideally played with your significant other, which is exactly what I have been looking for. A “game” of 7th continent can last 15 hours+, but there is a very fast “save” mechanic which allows you to play in a series of short sessions. That would be difficult to pull off with friends you don’t see every day, but works great for me and my wife.

“Saving” the 7th Continent is actually a strategic move by itself, because you don’t save the map you already explored. This represents time passing in the world while you sleep. If you were to backtrack after restoring the game, the basic geography remains the same, but you might get different events happening while exploring. In our first game we saved when we successfully left area I and reached area II, which involved removing the map of area I anyway, so the save didn’t change anything for us. Of course at home you could just decide to leave the game set up on the table instead of saving, if you have a dedicated game table.

*Spoiler alert*

Just like a YouTube gameplay video it is hardly possible to talk more about the game without revealing some of its contents, so don’t read on if you want to avoid spoilers!

We played the first “curse” of the 7th Continent, curses being basically scenarios that give your exploration a starting point and a win condition. The one recommended to start with is called Voracious Goddess. But don’t expect any major storyline connected to that. The 7th Continent is a survival/exploration game, the stories that happen are about what you decide to do and how that worked out, not some scripted storyline to follow.

The core mechanic of the game is that the tile you are on and the cards you already found give you various actions you can attempt. Each attempt consists of drawing a number of cards and counting the number of successes on these cards. Each action tells you how many cards to draw, and how many successes you need, but various rules and cards can modify those two numbers. If you succeed something positive happens, if you fail something negative happens. Often you are allowed to draw more cards if you want, which makes success easy. But the deck of cards also represents your life, so if you draw cards with reckless abandon you will run out of cards. And then you need to use the cards from the discard pile instead, and if you draw a curse you are dead and the game ends.

What you are supposed to do to survive is to find places where you can hunt and find food when you are getting low on cards. Food puts cards back from the discard pile into the action deck, which allows you to keep playing. It is all nicely balanced and doable. Some people do complain they die too often, but there are several solutions to that: Either you handle the loop of goin exploring and taking care of survival by hunting better. Or you change the rules, which is something that doesn’t come natural to board game enthusiasts. But really, the game already does have an official easy mode which starts you with card 777, which allows you to basically ignore your first death. It isn’t such a stretch to expand that to unlimited uses of that item and literally “cheat death”. Instead of “survive or die” the game then becomes one of minimizing the number of times you use the cheat item.

On the other hand I can also see the interest of starting over. The Voracious Goddess curse we are playing starts you off on a small island. As it gives you a rough map, we went more or less straight towards the way off the island. But it turned out that this way we missed an essential item and couldn’t use the submarine to get off the island. Instead we decided to use the costly alternative option of swimming, which ended us freezing on some beach. So our success on the starting island, area I, determined where exactly and under what initial conditions we get to tackle area II. If we restart and play area I again, we’d use a different strategy. Furthermore on the first exploration you end up doing things in which the success isn’t all that great, or not essential for progress. So the next time around you just skip the non-essential parts and thus get to the next area faster and with less of your cards used.

I really like the 7th Continent, and I am looking forward to playing this with my wife for a long time. If ever we find the survival part too harsh, we’ll just change the rules to a more casual version. The fun of this game really isn’t just about winning or losing.

I am not a millionaire. However I am not poor or "just about managing" either. If I had to classify my financial situation I'd call it "comfortably well off". Now if you look at my hobby, games in general, the cost of games is usually in the tens or hundreds of dollars/euros. Which means that the purchase of even an expensive game or a somewhat exaggerated, unnecessary game purchase isn't going to cause me any financial hardship. There are occasions where spending more is a reasonable option for me, even if I wouldn't recommend it for everybody. All this to say that I just upped my pledge for the 7th Continent second Kickstarter project from $49 to $200. Why?

Well, it started with me packing a suitcase for a week of holidays with my wife. We like our holidays to be a mix of visiting things and relaxing, so we always take some entertainment with us. And I was hesitating to take the box of the 7th Continent game I got from the previous Kickstarter. I really want to play this, but what if it gets damaged or the airline loses my baggage and the game is gone? You can't buy the 7th Continent anywhere, it is only available during Kickstarter projects, and they don't happen all that often (about every 2 years).

And then I realized that because there is currently the second Kickstarter project ongoing (I had already pledged to get the next expansion), I could up my pledge and get a second base game too for $129. Throw in a bit more money for optional purchases like expansions (which also aren't available anywhere else) and I upped my pledge to $200. Worst case scenario is that I end up with one extra box I'll never open. Best case scenario is that I'll have a shiny second edition box with lots of expansions at home, and the peace of mind that allows me to take the original box with me on holidays without being stressed about damaging or losing it. Not something I would do for a game that can easily be replaced, but for the 7th Continent I considered it worth the money.

The current Kickstarter project ends in 5 days, so if you still want to join you need to hurry. The projects already has over 33,000 backers and is over 10,000% funded. That is not a typo, they asked for $40,000 and got $4.5 million. As a "second edition" the risk of not getting the product you paid for is much reduced, although it probably will be late again. Great success of a Kickstarter project brings its own logistics problems, and this second run got 3 times the backers and 4 times the money of the first run. The game has raving reviews on BoardGameGeek (Rank #56 out of 96,000 games) and elsewhere. And unlike Gloomhaven you can't just buy the 7th Continent on Amazon. You can get just the base game, in English or French, for $80, but another $49 also gets you the big expansion "What Goes Up, Must Come Down" and the many stretch goals. Or if you are like me you can go all out and get pretty much everything for $200.

As I mentioned before, some people consider the 7th Continent to be a very hard game. After playing some more and watching on Youtube how other people play, I think I know why. Basically the 7th Continent is Sid Meier’s definition of a good game: A series of interesting decisions. Which means that there is a very real possibility of making the wrong decisions. Now of course I can’t tell you which one is the good decision for each of the thousand cards in the game. But I can tell you how to avoid making systematically the wrong decisions in general gameplay.

1) The first easy systematic error is regarding your hand size. Every action in the game involves drawing cards (although sometimes you can draw zero of them); and whenever you draw cards, you can keep one of them. But at the end of the action you need to discard down to your hand size, which is just 5 in solo, 3 with two players, and even less with more players.

If you want to do well in the 7th Continent you need to first use the cards in your hand to get below your maximum hand size before you choose any action on a tile. That also means that when choosing cards to keep, the cards you can play quickly are better than those you might only need in certain situations. Think of it that way: Playing a card or discarding a card due to full hand size both end you with the card on the discard pile. But if you played it, you got some useful effect out of it, which is obviously better.

2) Look at the terrain tiles carefully. In the 7th Continent the artwork on the terrain tile is part of the gameplay and not just decoration. Most importantly look out for hidden numbers, which allow you to replace your current tile with one with more options. But other elements like plants can also become important, provided you found the information what that plant is good for. On some of the event cards the artwork is actually the clue to what is the right decision.

3) Hunt as much as possible. If a terrain card has animal tracks and a spot/observe action next to them, that frequently means a hunting ground. Unless your discard pile is empty, you’ll always want to hunt first, explore other stuff later. And of course you should cook the meat you find if at all possible.

These tips should get you started on a successful adventure full of exploration. If you still find the game too hard, you have two options: One is replaying from the start and using previous knowledge to concentrate on the essential stuff (my wife and me did much better on the starting isle the second time around). The other is to modify the rules. You can use the 777 card. Or you can create a save checkpoint, which is not foreseen in the rules: When you reach a card that feels like a major decision point in the game, e.g. a non-terrain card that asks you whether you want to go north, east, or west, you can simply take a notepad and write down the number of that card, as well as list the cards from your satchel/journal. Then if you die, you can restart from there instead of from the beginning, especially if you already did the beginning several times and don’t want to repeat it.

In a board game, success or failure is determined usually by chance, modified by game choices. You chose to pick up that rope, and it increases your chances in that climbing challenge. Most videogames have an added dimension, where you need to get the execution of a move right, pressing buttons at the right moment. There aren’t many games in which you don’t have constant action or movement, but rather a constantly changing list of decisions you could take. Or maybe there are, and I just don’t know these games. There are so many games on the app store that it is pretty much impossible to find anything you don’t know the name of. You can’t easily search for “decision-based exploration game”.

If you have any recommendation for such a game, I would be grateful.

I received a parcel yesterday which contained the board game The 7th Continent. I had backed the production of that game on Kickstarter. I don't often do that, it is only the 5th Kickstarter project I backed. But I am happy to report that with that parcel I am now at 100% success rate, every single Kickstarter project I backed actually delivered. Of course they all delivered late, The 7th Continent had an "expected" delivery in October 2016, and so is nearly a year late. I think a year late is about average of the projects I backed.

Kickstarter claims that only 9% of Kickstarter projects fail to deliver if successfully backed. But curiously they don't back up that claim with hard data to which they should have access, but rather cite an opinion survey. Other sources claim much higher failure rates. And if you follow games media, stories about Kickstarter failures like this one aren't all that uncommon. Furthermore as long as the developers deliver *anything*, that isn't counted as a failure. That doesn't mean that every delivered product lives up to the hype.

I think that only a very small part of Kickstarter failures are actual scams. I always apply Hanlon's razor and easily explain failures with incompetence without having to imply malice. Some people are simply good at having bright ideas and marketing those ideas in an enthusiastic way, but are just plain bad at project management. Which both explains many of the total failures as well as the 75% to 84% late delivery rate of Kickstarter.

Of course I don't back Kickstarter projects that are predictable failures, like people promising a large MMORPG for under $1 million. In general I would also advise to stay away from all Kickstarter projects for computer games: If the project is an actual success, you will be able to buy it later. So I rather back projects like The 7th Continent, which is so niche that it isn't obvious that one can get the product outside of a Kickstarter campaign. If you want a copy of that board game, you'd actually have to back the Kickstarter for the second print run, it won't be available in your neighborhood games store. I also sometimes back Kickstarter projects that are basically donations for a good cause, like rebuilding EN World.

In short, as long as you are aware of likelihood of failure, and the near certainty of late delivery, backing a Kickstarter project can be a good idea. Just don't fall for the hype and get overly enthusiastic. Or you might still be waiting for Star Citizen 3 years later.

I am not a big fan of Kickstarter. If you consider it as an "investment", the safety mechanisms are worse than for collateralized subprime mortgages. If you consider it as a "prepurchase", it is simply a bad deal because you have to pay far too early, and wait far too long, if not forever. Having said that, the three Kickstarter projects I did back all did eventually deliver, albeit on average a year late. Where I least regret my purchases are the Kickstarter projects I backed for physical objects, because the objects I got that way now can't be bought anywhere; the Kickstarter project was a one-time deal.

So yesterday I backed another Kickstarter project to the tune of a hundred bucks. It is for a physical object again, a board game called The 7th Continent. The main reason I backed it is that I saw a prototype played at the Brussels Games Festival 2015, and it looked a lot of fun. It solves one of the problems of board games (who do I play with?) by being soloable. And it is of an exploration / adventure type where I played games of that type with my wife in the past and we had a lot of fun. Being huge it gets over the problem of you running into the same handful of events over and over. So it is everything that I am looking for in a board game today.

The Kickstarter project for the 7th continent was funded after 2 minutes and 38 seconds. The project still is less than a day old, and has collected over 5 times the required funding, having over 3,000 backers. It passed stretch goal #18 with #19 already rather close. With 2 to 10 additional cards per stretch goal, the initial 1000 cards of the larger explorer version (very few people went for the smaller, 700 card version) has already grown by 10%.

Now The 7th Continent probably will be available in specialized games stores at some point in time, so the one-time deal advantage presumably doesn't apply. But with all those Kickstarter-exclusive stretch goal cards I still feel I'll get something more than if I had waited for the game to come to shops.

On the other hand the planned delivery date is only in one year, and based on past experience might well only be in 2 years. Getting far more money than needed curiously has never helped any Kickstarter project to advance faster. Usually the project creators get dizzy from all the extra money and start expanding the scope, going for a much bigger and more complicated version of the project. And that then ends up being much slower, without necessarily being any better. Nevertheless, having seen the playable prototype, I'm rather confident that again I will eventually get this game delivered.

Yesterday a new Kickstarter from the same people was launched, for a new but similar game called The 7th Citadel. The new game is a bit less survival, more medieval fantasy, and that suits me just fine. They learned from the first Kickstarter and now directly admit it will take 2 years to produce. But I happily prepaid €69 for a board game I’ll get in 2 years, presumably. And I didn’t seem to be the only one: The Kickstarter was funded in under half an hour, and this morning they are already way past 1 million, more than 3 times what they needed, and more than the first project got.

These games certainly aren’t for everybody, but rather for board game enthusiasts. A game takes relatively long (but there is a way to “save” and pack it up in the middle of the game), takes up a lot of space on a table, and is rather complex. But it can be played solo or with 2-4 players, has good replayability, good customer support, and a good track record of previous Kickstarter projects that actually delivered. So if a complex, rare to find board game is something that might interest you, have a look!

In fact I started playing The 7th Continent solo from time to time. I do like complex board games with exploration and story, which I can play solo or co-operatively with my wife. And while surfing the internet with that interest, I came upon Gloomhaven again, the top ranked board game at BoardGameGeek. I watched again a couple of video reviews and play-throughs, and decided that Gloomhaven fits my criteria. And I noticed that on Steam a digital adaptation of Gloomhaven is in Early Access.

So I decided to do a somewhat expensive experiment: Videogame vs. board game. I ordered the board game from Amazon, including some helpful additions like inserts, for €200. And I spent €25 for the Early Access version on Steam, and already started playing through the tutorial. My initial sneaking suspicion is that for occasional solo play, the computer version might be superior, as Gloomhaven has a lots of parts and cards, and the board game version takes a lot of time to set up. But playing coop across a table is probably more fun than on two screens.

The 2nd Kickstarter for 7th Continent ended with 43,733 backers having pledged over $7 million. But if you missed it, there is a possibility to Late Pledge with options limited to getting either just the new expansion, or the whole game plus expansion. I don't know how long this will be possible, I presume it is until the pledge manager goes live in November.

*Spoiler Alert*
My wife and me are making great progress on the first curse, The Voracious Goddess. We lost on the first attempt and restarted. Knowing the starting island better made things easier, so on the second attempt we managed to get off the island the comfortable way. That gives you a choice of three places to continue, and by pure chance we seem to have chosen the absolutely best one. We found a place to rest and spend our xp on advanced skills. We found a place to hunt and recover all of the adventuring deck. And we found the next two landmarks on the clue map.

It was getting nearly too easy, and so we decided to do something more risky. Instead of following the clue map further, we entered what I can only describe as a dungeon. We didn't completely clear it out, because there was a rather suspicious lever we didn't dare to pull. But we did everything else in it and exited with some treasure and more advanced skills. Next we will try to hunt again and then follow the path on the clue map.

One of the first board games in which one could be a warrior or a wizard that I played was Talisman, back in the early 80's. There are a lot of games these days where you play some sort of fantasy hero, one game of that type I own but haven't played yet is Altar Quest. But in this post I don't consider these games, because they aren't story-based. There are numerous "dungeon crawler" games in which you don't take any story decisions, but just fight random monsters in a random dungeon. That can be fun, but here I would like to talk about games in which the story is more prominent.

If the story is an important part of the game, the game needs a way to tell you that story, and ideally in a way that allows you to make decision and get a different story outcome based on those decisions. The classic way to do that is in a book with numbered sections, like a Fighting Fantasy / Choose Your Own Adventure book. For example Legacy of Dragonholt is very close to just being such a book. Probably the best game with a book I played this year is Sleeping Gods, which has a good mix of board game elements like worker placement and cards with a storybook that tells you the story, and a very original one at that. But I also played Folklore: The Affliction, which has a dark fantasy theme. I haven't gotten around to starting Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, but that one is based on a book as well.

Another way to tell the story is via cards. The 7th Continent does that very well. One advantage is that you can have more than one card with the same number, so you can get a random result by drawing "card number 10", while "read paragraph number 10" will always have the same result. The system that The 7th Continent uses, with one or more green cards potentially followed by a golden card, and different instructions on whether to "return", "discard", or "banish" a card is quite intricate. It basically creates a sort of story-telling algorithm with some variability of outcome. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - The Adventure Game, seems to use a much simpler card based story system.

These days more and more games use an app to tell the story. Sometimes you still get a book, but have the option to have the text read to you via the app. In other cases there is only the app. The obvious advantage is that getting the story read to you by a professional voice actor in a 2+ player game is better than one player having to read the story aloud. The disadvantage is that you don't see the algorithm anymore, and don't even know if the result is always the same or there is a randomized outcome possible. We liked Forgotten Waters, and there you can even buy a DLC online and get more content without needing to get additional physical components to the game. Destinies even promised to release a "community editor" software at some point, which would allow players to make their own scenarios. The Destinies app has only minimal voice acting, but then Destinies is by far the cheapest option of the games mentioned in this post. Tiny miniatures too, but still rather good value for $45. Forgotten Waters is about the same price: An app is cheaper than printing a book or cards, but Forgotten Waters has fewer game components and no miniatures. Note that some games come with a book, but you can use a third-party app like Forteller to get the voice acting.

The game that reminds me the most of Dungeons & Dragons is the recently released Roll Player Adventures, which is on my Christmas wish list. It is book-based, but every scenario comes in a separate booklet, which resemble very much the softcover booklets that D&D adventures used to come in before 5th edition. Not sure why all the D&D stuff is hardcover these days. Roll Player Adventures, like Sleeping Gods, uses a book of maps as well as a story book. That allows for more map variety than a single game board like Altar Quest, but is faster to set up than tile-based maps like Destinies. I am looking forward to Roll Player Adventures, because it combines the "roleplaying game in a box" experience with the dice manipulation gameplay of the original Roll Player board game.

While I do like these kind of games, they admittedly do have one big disadvantage: Lack of replayability. Roll Player Adventures costs $150, and comes with 11 scenarios. Yeah, you could play through the campaign maybe twice, choosing to support a different faction. But these games inherently don't have the same replayability as typical board games without a story, which you can play over and over. On the other hand, I already have too many games and too little time, so I'm okay with playing each of these games a limited number of times.

I still haven’t really had the time to playtest The 7th Continent, a boardgame I got via Kickstarter. But now the second round of Kickstarter started. If you are interested, you can get the game here. The game isn’t available elsewhere. That is why I pledged $49 to get the expansion set.

P.S. The Kickstarter is already 2500% funded, so with them having made good on their first Kickstarter promises, this is a relatively sure bet. Might of course be late, but that is pretty normal on Kickstarter.

Examples of board games in which gameplay is very light would be games like Lands of Galzyr, or Roll Player Adventures. Both of these games are full of "fail forward" mechanics, so that if you do badly in gameplay (whether by bad luck or bad skill), you still move the story forward all the time. It is impossible to reach a moment where through a death spiral in gameplay you "lose the game" and need to start over. These are great games for families or casual gamers, but the game mechanics will feel very light and "too easy" for more veteran gamers. Still, I sometimes do enjoy such lighter fare.

At the other extreme are games which nearly fall of the edge of still being considered narrative games, because the amount of story you get is rather small compared to the amount of gameplay. My worst example in recent time was Bardsung, where you only get a paragraph or so of story after every complete dungeon crawl (and the repetitive dungeon crawls aren't fun enough to play anyway). But even a great game like Gloomhaven has far more gameplay than story, and the 95 scenarios (60+ to get through a campaign once) are probably too much for most people, so very few players will get to see the end of the story.

My wife and me are currently playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon on easy "story mode". The problem with Tainted Grail is that exploration takes time and resources; so if by bad luck or bad skill you get into a bad loop of gameplay in which you have no time and no resources, but just make move after move just trying to stay alive. There are even rules for death and complete failure in the standard rules of Tainted Grail, which would ask you to start over from the beginning. However, there are also alternative rules to ignore death and failure, and just keep playing. Basically in Tainted Grail you need to tune the rules to a level of difficulty in which there are enough time and resources left to keep moving the story forward. And even the devs think that the standard rules are a bit too heavy on the gameplay loops, and are working on 2.0 rules to make those a bit easier and less time-consuming. The 7th Continent has similar problems, where a struggle for survival can become so overwhelming as to stop story advancement. Note that of these two, Tainted Grail has the much better story, although I'd say that The 7th Continent has more interesting gameplay. It really depends what you are playing these games for.

A great game with a great balance between gameplay and story is Sleeping Gods. It has just enough worker placement / resource management and character development gameplay to make the gameplay interesting enough for standard gamers, while never getting into the way of the large amount of story content. But Sleeping Gods is clearly primarily a narrative game, and the gameplay comes second. While also nicely balanced in its own way, in Clank!: Legacy - Acquisitions Incorporated the gameplay comes first, and the story is more of a side-show that is there to explain the gameplay changes in the legacy elements. It is more of a story-enhanced deckbuilding game than a narrative board game.

While the balance between gameplay and story is important, even the best balance can't help you if the story is bad or simply not interesting for you. I didn't buy Etherfields because the horror/dream theme of the game didn't appeal at all to me. And I am still on the fence on ISS Vanguard, because I usually prefer fantasy to science fiction. In Destinies you play through a campaign of five stories in the base game, and while we liked the early ones, we felt that the quality of the story decreased markedly over the course of the campaign, and the 5th story was just a confusing mess that was no fun at all. Unfortunately that is the sort of information that even most reviewers never get to, especially not if they reviewed a Kickstarter prototype which only contained the first story or two.

I am buying a lot of narrative board games, because those I can most easily play with my wife. Narrative games frequently shine with lower player numbers, solo or two players, because of the difficulty of getting everybody listening and involved in the story at higher player counts. Even with two players we prefer games in which the story has some app support for voice narration, rather than one of us having to read aloud for the other. At their best, narrative board games are a great way for me and my wife to interactively experience a story together.

For me, any solitaire sport or game allows you to set your own win condition. The world record for running a marathon is just a sliver over 2 hours. But given how most people wouldn't even be able to go the distance, I certainly wouldn't blame somebody for saying that he wanted to run a marathon in under 4 hours today. If that is a reasonable challenge for him, why not?

I recently mentioned that I was playing The 7th Continent solo at the moment. I haven't reached the official loss condition, running out of action cards and then drawing a curse from the discard pile, yet. It takes a lot of hours to get to this loss condition. But when I reach it, would I really want to declare the game a loss, pack it up, and start over? With the game being about exploration, doing the same part of the continent again would certainly be less interesting. What I would probably do is to count "1 loss", and shuffle the discard pile back into the draw pile to continue. The win condition of the game would change from "reach the end without ever losing" to "reach the end with the lowest number of losses possible".

Win conditions in video games are often harder to change. Sometimes you can set a lower difficulty level. In other cases, like Assassin's Creed, you would need to use a hex editor like Cheat Engine to modify the game data. For some games, for example XCom 2, there are mods on Steam that modify the game, or you can edit the settings files on your hard drive. Some mods, for example the famous Long War, completely change the flow of the game. Isn't that great? Why would I consider the completely arbitrary win conditions the game came with as sacrosanct, and not modify the game so that it is more fun for me to play? I am not some sort of a gaming masochist, who would rather play a less fun "original" version!

A game is whatever we want it to be. And sometimes altering the win condition makes a game better. As I don't hurt anybody else, I feel absolutely no compunction for cheating at solitaire.

On the other hand I am glad that I didn't go for a higher "all-in" pledge level. Kickstarter projects have a built-in trap known as FOMO, fear of missing out. If you decided today that you wanted a copy of Tainted Grail, you would have a hard time finding one, and certainly not at the price I paid. Expansions are usually even harder to find (Awaken Realms doesn't appear to have a webshop). The only place I could find those Tainted Grail metal dials now is on eBay, for 5 times the original price. Knowing that, one is easily persuaded to go for an all-in pledge at two or three times the cost of the core game, and end up with far more game than you can ever play. And of course sometimes a Kickstarter game is just not a good game, and then you end up with a huge box full of garbage you don't want to play.

The first Kickstarter board game I bought, 7th Continent, I backed because I had seen a prototype played at the Brussels Games Fair. These days some of those pre-Kickstarter prototype versions are being sent out to YouTubers with board game channels. So these days I wouldn't buy a Kickstarter game anymore without having seen it played and reviewed on YouTube. Having said that, all the game I got from Kickstarter up to now I enjoyed, and I backed another one, 7th Citadel, this year. So I am looking forward to finally playing Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.

Starting with the obvious, narrative campaign board games are to some degree driven by their story. One campaign game I disliked so much I immediately resold it was Bardsung, in which the story was extremely flimsy, and just barely enough to tell the players why they should go into a dungeon. In games with a longer and better story, the question remains how exactly that story is told to the players. Especially when playing with more than 2 players, having to read a lot of text aloud can become rather tiring quickly, and not every board gamer is actually good at reading text. What I do like in Agemonia and Familiar Tales is that they both have an app or website on which you can have the story read to you by professional voice actors. Some games have outsourced that voice acting to Forteller Games, and that likewise works quite well. For me it is always a plus on a crowdfunding campaign if Forteller or other voice acting is available.

The other side of the balance for a narrative board game is the gameplay: How complex is it? Does it offer enough choice and options? It was here where Agemonia turned out to be the better game than Familiar Tales, by being a lot more varied, and being reasonably interesting, without being too complex. A campaign game I tried several times with different groups and never got far is Tainted Grail, but even with the revised rules the gameplay is simply too heavy for what it does. You can get into a situation where 4 players decide that it would be a good idea to all go hunting, and then spend more than an hour to resolve those actions, without that advancing the story in any way. With food being quite important, that happens far too often, and food / resource gathering ends up feeling far too grindy. Every narrative board game needs some sort of resolution system for stuff like combat or skill checks. But the game needs to keep those either simple enough, with just a few dice rolls, or make a more complex combat system which then is only used like once per session for a major battle. There is a particular subgenre of narrative games, which is the boss battler; but the boss battle here is the climax of the game session, with any other systems for resource gathering or skill checks outside the boss battle being a lot simpler.

Another important part of campaign board games is related to bookkeeping. Most board games have systems to manage resources and the like, but only campaign games need ways to "save" the current state of the game and be able to start the next session with the items, counters, and resources you had at the end of the previous session. ISS Vanguard is a campaign game which literally has a book to keep, a three-ring binder with both pages of instructions and binder sheets into which cards are being sorted to show the state of the game. For example there is a page to put "research project" cards in, and rules how to complete those research projects and move the cards to the "production complex" page. Narrative games that offer some degree of choices and consequences of those choices also frequently need some way to keep score of those decisions, and ways to result in a different narrative as a function of choices made. In 7th Continent / 7th Citadel much of the game consists of several boxes of index cards, which serve both as map tiles, action cards, and a filing system that memorizes your decisions. One typical disadvantage of the more complex bookkeeping systems is that in a game with several players, it is hard to share that activity, and you often end with one guy being something like the designated accountant. That makes the bookkeeping part of the game a lot less interactive and interesting for the other players than the rest of the game. An alternative version is veering into the domain of pen & paper roleplaying games, and doing a lot of bookkeeping on character sheets; but one loses a lot of visibility to the other players, and the feel of playing a board game rather than a role-playing game.

The added narrative and accounting parts of campaign games frequently result in these games being recommended rather for lower player counts, like 1 to 2 players. For larger player counts one needs to find a way to split the various tasks, to keep everybody occupied and interested. For Agemonia that worked quite well for us, because there is so much game material that you can easily have different players manage different parts. But I actually have some campaign games, like The Isofarian Guard, that don't even allow for more than 2 players. Keeping everybody interested all the time in a 4-player game is a challenge, and these are games that I never play at my weekly board game night in the local shop, simply because the noisy environment wouldn't work for that.

With my Agemonia group, I might try Oathsworn, a boss battler. Or I could try Nova Aetas: Renaissance, also a very tactical game. Or we could try ISS Vanguard, which is in structure somewhat close to Agemonia, but with some distinctive differences and a science-fiction theme. For the other group, currently playing Familiar Tales, I might try Wonder Book, simply because it is rather short for a campaign game. Or we could try Kinfire Chronicles: Night Fall, but I'm not 100% sure how good that works for 4 players.

Since I bought my 3D printer I have printed hundreds of miniatures for my Dungeons & Dragons game. The miniatures are in a classic 1 inch = 5 feet that is 1:60 scale. So a typical medium sized miniature has a 25 mm base and is around 28 mm tall. As I have written earlier, the main problem of printing objects that size is that printing anything less than 1 mm thick tends to fail, so I had to "fatten" some miniatures or give them oversized weapons to work. Now that I have a good selection of miniatures, I am more often printing larger objects, and the challenges are different.

Now "larger objects" on my 3D printer are limited to 150 mm in any dimension due to the size of the printer itself. Over the last month I printed several objects that were at or close to that limit: Two dice towers, a hinged box, a card tray and two card holders for the 7th Continent, and JoyCon holders for the Nintendo Switch. Apart from the box, which was more of a tech demo to show that you can print a hinged object in one piece, the other objects would be either hard to get anywhere, or be much more expensive. Thus there is some utility to printing these larger objects yourself. The 3D printer also automatically makes items hollow, filled with some honeycomb structure, so a bulky 3D printed object is quite lightweight.

While with larger objects there are no more problems with too thin parts, the main downside of these objects is that the uneven surface is far more prominent. If you are used to holding plastic items in your hand which have a smooth and shiny surface, the 3D printed objects are notably different. Along the Z-axis the layer structure is very visible. And on inner surfaces where the printer had to move across empty space to get to the other side of the object there are irregular imperfections. To some extent you can clean the object up using a sanding sponge. But unless you want to spend hours sanding the object will never be totally smooth and shiny like a commercial injection-molded item.

I still don't believe in a future where we all just 3D print everything we need instead of buying mass-produced items. However there are a few niche applications where a 3D printer can produce a larger object of some use.

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.

They already released a short rules guide, but will also make a better version of the rulebook, and a how to play video. They will release a high quality file of a horizontal board to print out and replace the vertical one. And they are even adding a new game mode, Continuous Dream Mode, without those slumbers that some people so dislike.

I still don't plan to buy the game, as the theme of playing through my nightmares isn't really appealing to me. But I found the concept of "patching a board game" quite interesting. Some of the patched stuff will even become physical, because there is a second production and shipping wave. Note that the second Kickstarter of the 7th Continent had something similar, making an improved 2nd edition of the original game, and offering an upgrade pack to the owners of the 1st edition, so they got cards with errata on them. Of course, some parts of a game are easier to replace than others, cards easier than the game board. But it is interesting that in spite of the Kickstarter business model, in which the customers pay long before receiving their game, the developers still care to improve the game after release.