Okie

I’m an avid reader and struggling writer, so it seems natural that I’d love a storytelling game like this. And I do.

Speaking first from a game perspective:

The initial “out of the box” experience is fabulous albeit a bit overwhelming at first. There are a ton of tokens, cards, etc that need to be sorted and organized to ensure gameplay is efficient and understandable. The quality of the components is good quality cardboard and plastic.

The artwork is beautiful…from the map to the cards & tokens to the character icons. The game is visually lovely to experience.

Where I rank it a little lower out of the box is the “ease of learning” aspect…though not necessarily because of any problems with the instructions or with overly complex rules. As I mentioned above, the out of the box experience can be overwhelming. When I first pulled it out, each of us around the table gave a slight gasp and even cringed a little. Looking at the pile of components and the size of the books (~20 page rulebook) sitting in front of us, there was a little anxiety to learn the game.

Once we got everything organized, we found that the instructions were fairly well written and opened up the game world to us in a logical and easy to follow way. There were still a number of times we had to refer back to the rules to remember what we needed to do to handle encounters, movements, items, etc but we got the hang of it fairly quickly.

My biggest complaint with this game is definitely NOT a knock on the game…my biggest complaint is that each gameplay ends long before I want it to. Whether I “win” or lose, I want the game to keep going. I’ve generally played the game with 3 players and our average gameplay has been ~80 minutes. Sadly (for me), that’s about the max single-game session that these gamers want to have. So they don’t concede to my request that we keep playing…or that (when we start the game) we begin with a goal of 30 destiny/story points.

I want to try out the solo variant just so I can get more experience, but part of the fun is the storytelling with other players.

As a final note – if you’re going into this game expecting a strategic game or a full role playing game, you won’t find what you’re looking for. While there is some minimal strategy (which decision do I make, which skills do I select, etc) and there is some role playing (encounters, skills to level up, items/treasures to collect), this game is really NOT a strategic game nor is it an RPG based on the general usage of the term. This is an EXPERIENCE game with an amazingly intricate storytelling system that is a lot of fun.

With that in mind, give it a try. It’s a lot of fun.