I’ve already written about this one before. It was on Kickstarter over a year ago, and Rogue Angles is a game I’ve had a chance to play and preview. But it’s back, and doing quite well this time, so let’s look at the game. What makes Rogue Angels a game that I want to get my hands on and play and back? So, it’s less of a Back or Brick but more of a conversation about what makes this game so good.

What Caught my Eye with Rogue Angels

So let’s talk about the reasons why I am backing this game. It’s another big campaign game, this time set in space, and I already own two games like that, ISS Vanguard and Stars of Akarios. What is it that makes me want to add Rogue Angels to my collection?

Story

I’ve experienced some of the Rogue Angels story and I’ve experienced it somewhat out of order. But the story with this game is just fun. Emil, the designer, refers to it as a Mass Effect style of story and game. One where you are making agreements with different groups, getting back stabbed, possibly turning on groups yourself, and making choices that affect where everything is going.

I really like it when the choices that I make in a game influence that game going forward. That is something that makes Stars of Akarios and Roll Player Adventures stand out to me. Rogue Angels offers that same feeling. I feel like the choices I make, in the end, really do matter and influence how the story goes. Whether it’s in that scenario or throughout the campaign.

Scenarios aren’t Kill Everything

Speaking of scenarios, one of the knocks on Gloomhaven, a game that all campaign games get to compared to, is that you just kill everything. Well, Rogue Angels is not the same game, and Frosthaven even learns from the mistakes so it’s not a kill everything, the follow up to Gloomhaven.

But Rogue Angels actively doesn’t want you to kill everything. Maybe at the end of some scenarios that is the case, but part of the puzzle is that you can’t. Enemies activate in two groups. If you kill all the red enemies, groups are red and yellow, the yellow enemies activate every time. So now you’re dealing with a group that’s harder to avoid because they are coming faster. So even when you want to kill everything, you need to be strategic about it.

Other times you really don’t. For the game reasons as before, the other group might activate faster. But your goal, and you have a limited number of turns, is to move a box of goods in a pick-up and deliver scenario. Now you have bad guys shooting at you, but if you stop to kill them, or have everyone stop to do it, you won’t win the scenario. And that is just a simple example of different scenario types.

Card Play

Card play or something interesting and unique that you do with your character are important for making a campaign game feel different. I think that there are a good number of dice chuckers out there. And I wouldn’t mind another, but I prefer it when a game does something unique. And Rogue Angels offers something different.

You get to play out two cards, or up to, each round, that do actions. It might be as simple as a basic movement or interaction with an object. Those slot into a cooldown track of 0 and immediately go back to your hand. So you could move twice. Or you might, instead, go and pull out your big gun to try and take out an enemy in a single shot. That has a cooldown of four. After four rounds you’ll get that gun back, so make that shot count.

But, if four is two long, you can hurry it along. It cools down one each turn, and then you can also not play a card to cool down again. And sometimes that is the best action, but it isn’t getting you closer to your objectives. Do you wait or do you really need that gun back now?

Dice Modifiers

And basically every card allows you to roll dice. Those dice offer some different bonuses, though not work on all cards. By that I mean that some actions allow you deal damage, interact so much, or move a distance, and you roll the dice and you can increase that. You look for +1 or +2 in those cases.

Other times, you can’t do that. The amount of damage you do is fixed, or the amount of tokens you draw on an interact is fixed. But you still get to roll some dice. Why, you can get back shields, your defense, that way, or you can get movement. It gives you, potentially a bonus.

And of course, you might need a +2 to your damage off of two dice and you don’t get it. That’s okay. There is a resource you spend to reroll. Granted that’s a limited resource as well. But if you really need to deal enough damage to take out an enemy or your cooldown track will fill up with damage, it’s a good plan.

Damage Cards

Finally, let’s talk about how you take damage, because I mentioned it above and I really like and dislike it. I dislike it because I take a lot of damage in Rogue Angels, sometimes that is even intentional. Other times, the enemies act in a way that I just can’t avoid them.

But when you take damage it goes into your cooldown track. There are some interesting things it does though. When I play a card to the track if I can’t play it to it’s cooldown slot, I can always go to a higher one. With damage, I just get that card back. So you might get back a really powerful card. But now you are trading that off for having less space in your track to play cards.

And the damage cards also are one of the ways that you can set your difficulty level. They have three different groups of bad things that they can do to you. You pick, as you start to play, what level you want to be at. It might be that you want a more casual story driven experience. So you only play with the first bad thing, and sometimes there isn’t even anything in that section. Or you play on hard core mode, and now you’re dealing with some really rough things. It’s a nice simple system to set your difficulty.

Back or Brick?

You already know that Rogue Angels is a back for me. I said that at the beginning, this is a game that I just have way to much fun with. In fact, it was my #1 anticipated crowdfunding game for the rest of the year. And now that it is live, I am even more excited for it. This is really a great game that has just enough luck an randomness that it might mess you over. But there is also a lot you can do to mitigate that, if you planned it well.

If you like campaign games, if you like fun story, I really recommend checking out Rogue Angels. Again, you can find the Kickstarter project here. Hopefully I haven’t oversold it or built up the hype too much. But don’t just take it from me, checkout other previews out there as well.

And there are more out there. Just two of the previews that I really like. And let me know if you’re interested in backing this game? What drew you in to back it?

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