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Do you like the skirmish, dueling, and wargaming type of games? If so, i suggest taking a look at Wrath of Kings. In this game you select your troops, and then take your army to tactically defeat your foe or foes. The game is set in more of a fantasy-style world of Arikania (sounds very close to Arcadia…) in which 5 houses, or factions (so far) are all at war. The game is played on a 4’x4′ play area, and the rulebook is downloadable from CMON’s website for free, which features a lot of the backstory and great art of the armies and Arikania world. All of which have their own pros and cons.Of the 5 factions there are:

House Goritsi – Vampires and werewolves – lots of fast movement, can heal wounds

House Hadross – Sea-monster people! – very tough troops, slow movement

House Teknes – Techno-science and cyborgs – counterattack, damaging others when damaged and other on-damage effects.

House Nasier – Blademasters infused with elemental magic – extra attacks and re-rolling misses. very offensive army.

House Shael Han – Biotech Dynasty Warriors – ninjas, dragons, and huge ork-like guys with swords.

The replay value is amazing and if you like painting your miniatures from your games you will have a great time with this one. If you are big into games like Warhammer, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, Warmachine & Hordes, Rivet Wars, and the like, you will thoroughly enjoy Wrath of Kings

Growing up playing a game called HeroQuest led me down the road to start playing many other fun RPG-style games. Arcadia Quest captures the same fun of dungeon crawling, killing monsters, stealing loot, and character progression, all while keeping it on a lighter side so that even people who aren’t fans of the fantasy genre can still enjoy.

So here’s how it works. You and your opponents control 3 characters who make up your team or guild. Yes, I said opponents. Where there are times you can form brief alliances with other players, and you are all trying to achieve the same goals relatively, there are other goals for each scenario that involve devastating the other teams in the game. So where other RPG in a box games like Mice and Mystics are a full team of players trying to defeat each scenario, or dungeon, Arcadia Quest is more of a Goblet of Fire contest from Harry Potter. Which leads me to my favorite game mechanic of this game… there is NO game master! Instead, one of your fellow opponents control the enemy monsters turn when they are forced to act. That way, everyone can enjoy the game, and there isn’t one person creating all the action and not getting a chance to have fun killing monsters. Don’t get me wrong, classic style RPG’s are great, sometimes you want to be the person creating the story and putting other people’s characters trough numerous trials and tribulations, but that just makes games heavier in depth and require a lot of commitment. With Arcadia quest you can knock out a scenario/encounter in about an hour, call it quits for the day, come back next week with your friends and pick up where you left off. Plus, all of your characters progress through time. They level up so to speak and get better items to help them deal with the harder dungeons.

PRO’S
-Everyone can play, no GM
-Scenario times are about an hour long
-Progressive characters and campaign
-Awesome replay value

CON’S
-Lacks a lot of depth that you would see in Descent and other games
-Not a true co-op game or a printed option of being one
-Some heroes snowball harder in the later game then some.

Overall this game is great if you love RPGs and some of your other friends aren’t so into them. The miniatures look amazing, the mechanics are simple to understand, and you can play the campaign over and over again with different heroes or use all different scenarios. Even when you’ve played those heroes and missions to death, there are a number of expansions and add-on characters you can buy to add even more diversity. One of my favorites hands down.

For all of you fans of Arcadia Quest, (like myself) who have played the base game, and are now looking to expand on your experience and add a whole new campaign via expansion, don’t look here first! This was a kickstarter stretch goal, and hard to come by. The Beyond the Grave expansion is your best bet if you do not own that already.

Sadly, to a lot of us, we did not know of this great game during its Kickstarter campaign, which was one of the only ways to get your hands on this extra content. Luckily enough, “Cool Mini Or Not” had a booth at PAX East 2015, and upon purchase of other “CMON” games and merch, (Zombicide, Kaos Ball, Dogs of War, Rivet Wars) you could choose through promotional Kickstarter items for whichever game you wished. As far as i know, it was explained that they would continue this limited-release at major gaming cons and functions that they attended, but did not say if they would re-release to the mass public later down the line.

As far as the expansion goes, The Nameless Campaign comes as part of a bigger box called Guildmaster. It contains:
– 25 new heroes to play as, 1 of which is Chooloo who also has a separate miniature and cards for being an enemy.
– 6 other new enemy miniatures that are added as the main evil-doers of the expansion.
– Upgraded wound, death,and guild markers which are much nicer to handle over the cardboard punch-outs.
– 1 Campaign book for The Nameless campaign.

Notice how I didn’t say NEW campaign book for the nameless campaign? That’s because the book that came with this expansion is the base game campaign with the new Evil Guild called “the Nameless” overlay-ed into the story-line. The man at Cool Mini Or Not also stated that they DO have PDF printouts of missions for Arcadia Quest on their site, but I haven’t validated that info yet.

Overall it is definitely worth the money for this expansion for the new characters and tokens that will “****” your set of Arcadia Quest and easily add a lot of replay value to an already vast and versatile dungeon crawl that offers the character building progression, which a lot of RPG-ers will like.

Great game, as opposed to a few others who have rated this, I feel this game has some of the stronger replay value out there. Especially with more people, it makes every game different. It’s a lot like risk, but faster and with some great mechanics. I find myself always up for playing this game. I would even go ahead and say it should be a core game in any avid gamer’s library. I’m actually a big fan of all the games that Days of Wonder has put out, all have great concepts, mechanics, and artwork. Very well done.