Now half way through the campaign, I feel like it’s time to talk about and review Roll Player Adventures. That might seem a bit early for you, but I do think the game play loop is something that I clearly can see at this point after six games. And that the story, it’s going to come down more to taste, though, I’ll talk about the story more later. But let’s talk about what Roll Player Adventures from Thunderworks Games is all about. Because this is a very big box campaign game.

How To Play Roll Player Adventures

Roll Player Adventures is a game that comes in basically two parts, but we’ll get to those in a second. What you need to know is it is a massive story driven adventure game where you explore pieces of story, fight monsters and complete challenges. You do this by making storybook choices, and then playing a dice manipulation game.

Let’s start by talking about the storybook phase. A lot of what you do in the game is move around to different locations. When you reach one then you read some story element. Often times it’ll give you someone to interact with or choices of other things you can do. It’ll send you to another part of the story and then you make more decision or often go into the next part of the game.

The other part of the game is dice manipulation puzzles. This comes in the form of either combat or a skill check. To do this, you use the stats of your characters to build up a die pool, spending stamina basically in those areas to get dice of the needed colors. Then you roll all the dice in your pool and manipulate them so you can cover up the spots. But you are limited in how you can manipulate by the cards you have. And the fact that each person can only play one card.

Eventually you either die in a combat, or you make it to the end of the scenario. Then you reset and start another scenario.

What Doesn’t Work?

There’s not too much that I’d complain about with the game. My one, and this will depend on your group, but I found that it is pretty easy at 4 players. The game seems like it likely would balance best at three players. At four and if you are smart, you get a lot of things that you can use in that dice manipulation puzzle. So there’s rarely a case where we can’t deal with a skill challenge or even a combat in one round. And we rarely get close to dying even if we don’t rest for a while.

This is going to show up in a positive as well, but I think that the Nefras’s Judgement expansion is pretty important for the game. I know it’s Roll Player not Role Player, but the expansion really does help add in some role playing as you think about what your character would do. Do you need it for the game, no. I do think that it makes it better though, and it’s a lot to add, as in spendy, worth it, and I understand why not in the main box, but it adds a lot to the game.

What Works?

Dice Puzzle

Let’s talk about the dice manipulation to start. I like it as a puzzle. Like I said, I do think at 4 players it is a bit easy at times, and most of the time. But I do like the puzzle. And very rarely is it a puzzle that we solve immediately. So from that side of things it works well. I like sitting there figuring it out, talking through what everyone has that can work and eventually coming up with a solution. The fact we can do that is fun and it gives you a sense of accomplishment.

Characters

I also enjoy the different characters. Just basic out of the box they are fun. And getting the character backstory is Nefras’s Judgement, I think adds even that much more. You get to learn about your character and make decisions around that. Yes, you can import characters you play in regular Roll Player, but they wouldn’t have the backstory. So I don’t know that I’d do that.

And besides the backstory, I like building out my characters stats. I think it adds into the fun of the game. In our group I focused on charisma and wisdom, a lot because of backstory, but I’m great at those and have no strength. It makes for an interesting character. We’ve balanced our party with what people go for, everyone having their area of strength. It makes it feel like we can contribute in interesting spots.

Story

Now, I know I said that story is pretty subjective, and I think more than any part of the game it is. I enjoy the story of Roll Player Adventures. Without getting into the details too much, it’s a fun multiverse romp of a game. But not in the way that you’d expect it to have worked. And the writing is good, I don’t think it’s great, but it’s good.

I would put the writing in Roll Player Adventures on par with Gloomhaven, you just get a lot more choices. It is not on the level of Tainted Grail. Actually the closest I’d put it to is probably Stars of Akarios. Mainly because it’s fun but it’s not always the greatest writing.

One thing that I really like about the story is that you get titles. Instead of a checklist of things that you mark off, you get a card with a title. And if you have that title you get some extra story and flavor at the end. Which of course is warning about things that might happen in future games because of choices that you made. I think it’s a good way to do it if you don’t just want to have a checklist.

Who Is It For?

This one is hard to say, I think. For our group, it’s some people who were interested in a bigger campaign and myself who had played several before. So I ran with it, learning the rules, etc. Do I think a group of new players could jump into this campaign game? Better than a lot of campaign games. I don’t think Roll Player Adventures is that hard to learn. But it’s a massive box and is intimidating that way.

So I think that this is a good game for those people who want to dive into a first campaign game. They play other games, so they know how to learn rules, but they want to learn something bigger. It’ll be intimidating but I think that it’s very worth it for the game.

Roll Player Adventures Final Thoughts

I like this game quite well. Though, for so many campaign games it is about that experience of playing that game that really drives it. So if you don’t want a campaign game, you probably won’t get that much out of this review.

I do feel like my negative should pull it down further for me than it does. It being too easy is a negative, I don’t want to die, but I want to feel like I might. And in a combat, sometimes it feels like we can’t get it all done that we want to, and that’s good. But rarely with my health do I ever feel like I’m too damaged to continue. Or maybe that the scenarios could end in a good or bad way. The tricky part with that is that Roll Player Adventures is not built to branch that way. The titles are really how you get that branching story.

My Grade: A
Gamer Grade: B-
Casual Grade: B

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