MarkyD1733

Ancient Terrible Things is unique, colorful yet dark yahtezee-style dice game where you seek out challenging encounters deep within a jungle river in the hopes to survive and have the most tales to tell. The game offers simple game play, while offering a brilliant set of choices each and every turn using an intuitive resource economy of money, courage, feats, and focus.

GAMEPLAY: Each turn, players travel up the river, to one of six location. Each location contains an encounter that requires a particular set of dice to complete and a location-specific “power.” The power may be a choice of certain resources, swapping resources with another player, swapping out feats, or becoming first player. In addition, each encounter itself is worth points, but also provides one or more resources based on the encounter type–Villains, Horrors, Artefacts, and Pitfalls. Each player can use the various resources in order to try and achieve the required dice results. Treasure allows players to buy equipment that can help. Enough courage lets a player take “desperate measures” in order to complete the encounter without rolling dice. Focus lets players reroll dice. And Feats are needed to play feat cards…another set of strategic actions players have available to them. The economy is elegant and offers players lots of ways to complete encounters. If a players does not achieve the necessary dice results, the encounter is lost to rumors, and that player must instead take a tentacle token which provides negative points. As the game progresses, the encounters become increasingly difficult, but worth more points. Lastly, if any player has the highest number of an encounter type, there are additional endgame bonuses awarded.

Overall, the game is a simple push-your-luck dice-chucker. The 4-resource economy, however, gives the game interesting choices and solid depth of play. It is perfectly colored in creepy dark colors with a slightly “chunky,” comical art style that is very pleasing to the eye and sets the overall tone and feel of the game as very light, old-timey, pulp horror. Even the standard dice used each turn are a translucent, deeper “jungle green” color, rather than a standard bright green. Production value high, IMO, so it looks great on the table. Additionally, the iconography is simple and easily interpreted, despite the fact that there are a lot of things going on in all of the encounter cards, equipment cards, and feats cards. Along the same lines, there is a good deal to learn about the game. Once, learned, the elegance of the rules and gameplay become self-evident.

So, if you like Yahtzee-style dice games where you need to make certain sets and can attempt to manipulate them, Ancient Terrible Things, will give you a solid press your luck experience—if you can survive!