Pros

• Mystery adventure game
• Pop-up book style rooms
• Artwork
• Developers project management experience
• Price
• RPG Lite

Cons

• Replayability
• New Kickstarter company
• RPG Lite

The Page

So I point out in the cons that this is a new kickstarter company, but looking at the layout of everything, this isn’t someone who isn’t familiar with Kickstarter, they clearly know what they are doing with the layout, the graphics, the shipping, and everything, so while it’s always a con, I think it’s more of a con because it might be delayed more than some other Kickstarters, not because I worry about them not fulfilling.

I like the diversity in the cast of characters in the game as well. It’s better than a lot of games where it’s your standard fantasy cast. They seem like fun characters and a good group to play with. While I’d definitely say they fall into tropes for RPG’s, I think that works well.

But let’s chat about this RPG element a little bit. This is something that always concerns me in these type of games. I know that T.I.M.E. Stories has this as well as a kind of selling point. I think games like those can have it, but it’s generally brought by the players, it isn’t something that is inherently part of the game. Unless you’re talking about dice rolling for checks, which really isn’t an RPG element to me, I get that’s where it comes from, but not enough to be called that.

Back or Brick

This one is a tough one for me. The game looks beautiful, but I need to sit down and watch videos as to how this plays and see people’s thoughts on it, because I worry about the game element itself. With that said, I think that the price point is amazing and the game, even without it ever being played, is such a beautiful piece of artwork that it probably could be bought and displayed just for that. I think I’d more likely be in on this game with less hesitation if my kid wasn’t a toddler right now and was 7 or 8 years old. I worry that it might just be one that sits on the shelf for a while until that point in time, which is 5-6 years down the line. I have it notifying me for the final 48 hours, and I’m going to be keeping an eye on it, plus, GloryHoundd and DrGloryHogg are going to be discussing this one Friday as part of their weekly Kickstarter video, linked here, and I’ll be in the chat, hopefully, discussing it with them and hearing other peoples thoughts to help me figure out my own. Right now it’s a brick, but that’s mainly because I want to look into it more, but I could easily see this switching to a back.

How about for you, is this a game that looks interesting to you? Are you going to back it?

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Legacy of Dragonholt is a combination of an RPG and choose your own adventure book. However, it does feel different from something like Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger as in that game you just have the choose your own adventure, you don’t have a separate character, everyone just plays as a single investigator. You do the RPG like thing of creating a character before you start playing Legacy of Dragonholt.

Let’s talk about character creation first. It’s a very simple and fast process compared to character creation for something like Dungeons and Dragons. In here you are still working off of the normal selection process of race and class, but you aren’t rolling up stats and everyone doesn’t have all the skills. In some ways, the best way to compare skill selection is in D&D classes you have a certain number of skills you can pick from a list of skills to be proficient at. You do the same thing based on your class and race in Legacy of Dragonholt, but you don’t get to have all the other skills that you can try to do. If you are “proficient” at the skill, you can use it, if you aren’t, you can’t use the skill. This means you have to diversify more across the group, but you generally will want to have a few of the more common skills and a true fighting skill. While this does make character creation a whole lot faster, because of how turn ordering works in the game, and because you can’t just try to do things, you’ll probably end up missing out on some story at times that you might have liked to get into.

So, how is the other big part of the game, the choose your own adventure side? To tie it back into the skills, I do really like the ability to use skills to open up story that feels more specific to your character. So that is a fun part of the story and making choices. When you have that skill ability though, you almost always feel like you should be doing that part of the story than one of the more mundane options. The writing isn’t extremely consistent on tone as well. I feel like they shy away from anything that would make it feel mature, but then sometimes you get situations where you’re fighting someone and you get a pretty detailed description of the damage you have caused, but then they try and stay away from saying that the person you were fighting died. It’s just an inconsistent blend in something that feels like it’s pretty often dumbed down and targeted to a young audience. I don’t think this is bad, but it needs to be feel more consistent and actually nail down what it wants to be. That said, the story is most definitely fun. I will say that I haven’t played through the whole story yet, but from what I’ve heard, the inconsistency does stay. I’m also not sure how you get around that feeling without either targeting only the younger or older audiences.

So, does this work as a game? I think it does, though it might be as much of a story activity as a game. It kind of walks that line where it doesn’t have extremely tough choices that you have to make, it’s always just choosing at a story point. But it is also clearly not just an RPG or clearly a board game. It certainly has been fun playing, and even though I’ve only played through the first chapter twice, once by myself and once with Kristen, it was fun and different enough each time. There were no extremely different new paths that I came across, but there were a few new things that happened in it that told a slightly different story than I’d play through before.

There’s also the question if this is something you can come back to again and again once you’ve played it? If you’re a completionist and must go down every path, I guess there is a lot of replayability, but having played through the first scenario twice now, I don’t feel like I’m going to want to come back to it any time soon, and the chunk of time between plays helped. It is probably something that I could come back to eventually and have a few story points forgotten, but as it’s not an extremely complex story, you’re going to generally know what happens once you’ve played it before. I don’t know if Fantasy Flight has plans to add in expansions, but that would certainly be a way to continue the game. Bring in new adventures that another adventuring party could face in a stand alone expansion. I hope, in some ways, that it happens as I could see playing this game as a family activity or an introduction to RPG’s.

Overall, it’s a fun time. If you’re looking for a grand and epic game, you aren’t going to love it, if you’re looking for amazing writing, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you go into the game just looking to have a fun time with it, it can certainly meet those expectation. And as an introduction to RPG’s, I think it works quite well. Probably the next step if someone likes the House of Danger game.

Overall Grade: B-
Gamer Grade: D
Casual Grade: B

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Story games are interesting because they care as much about the story and theme as they do about the mechanics a lot of the time. But for a long time there weren’t a ton of story games. Games, for a long time, were pretty straight forward either luck or logic games. A game like Chess or Go doesn’t really tell a story because it’s all been abstracted away. Even though you have two armies facing off in chess, they are just pieces that have specific movement rules, not like they are tied into the different types of characters and why they move the way they move.Or you would have luck based games. A game like Monopoly seems like it has some more story that is going on, but the game is so random that you can’t really tell a story in it.

Then there started to be some story games, but they weren’t your regular board games. RPG’s were the first games that really told stories and really focused in on story telling. There was story in some games prior to that, war games for example told the story of a battle, but D&D and RPG’s were the first to really create those story gaming moments. But even they had a lot of rules at the beginning, now we’re seeing the loose story based RPG’s that don’t care nearly as much about the rules or have abstracted most of the rules away into a single, simple roll of the dice for anything.

But in board games there were games that tried to delve more so into story, and we’ve actually seen the idea of story telling board games really take off as of late. A lot of this can be attributed to the growth of the hobby, but some of the earlier ones also helped the hobby grow. While games like Catan or Ticket to Ride have abstracted away all of the story and are some of the biggest ones for growing the hobby, story based games helped the hobby continue to grow into the big hobby it is today. Finding that sweet spot of where people could play a game the way that they want while still having some rules and structure makes gaming a lot more appealing to a lot of people.

There are a number of different story telling games. There are some that are basically light RPG’s and some that are board games that tell you a story. We have a number of interesting examples to look at though in board gaming.

Tales of the Arabian Nights and Near and Far are two interesting games where you are going out exploring. There are plenty of game focused parts to what you are doing and you have some skills, but the main focus of the game is going out exploring and getting a little bit of story. So that’s what most people are playing them for, being able to make those few decision bits in their story. Now, I personally enjoy both of these games, but they do have a bit of a flaw to them. That’s in both games the story while being loosely connected at items, especially in Near and Far, are random bits of story that you are reading from a book. The story isn’t cohesive as it goes along so while it starts to feel like a story game, it is missing a little bit.

Take that in comparison to a game like Sword and Sorcery. Now I haven’t played Sword and Sorcery, but it is one that I’ve seen played. In that, and in Tainted Grail, you are finding story events for various scenarios that unfold the story for you. A certain card or a certain place might trigger a different bit of the story. So while you don’t have to find the story in a specific order, always, you are figuring out the story and what’s going on in the world as you go. These games are newer than either Tales of the Arabian Nights or Near and Far (though Near and Far is quite new), and they can get away with it, because you are playing through chapters and scenarios.

That leads us into other scenario games. In particular, I’m thinking of Legacy games here. I don’t know that you’d consider Pandemic Legacy to be a scenario based game, but as you play through and find out more information about the story, it feels like it’s a scenario based game for how you have to win each game. In this case, they are handing out specific story points at very specific points in the game. And that works really well for a game like Pandemic Legacy or even a game like Gloomhaven which isn’t a true legacy game or is the new wave of legacy game where you can play it repeatedly without buying a new copy.

Seafall in comparison gives you a different story feel. While in Pandemic Legacy you can make choices that will affect the game, you are following a pretty linear story. In Gloomhaven you can go further afield from the story, but you are still focused on the story and you get the main story to unfold in a certain order. What Seafall tried to do was too ambitious in creating a story that unfolded in whatever order you read it. The issue is that it doesn’t really work, because you have to be so vague about it. That turned the story into a bit of a mess.

So, what other ways are we seeing stories besides these scenario games?

We’re also seeing story in games where the game is about making up your own story. Once Upon a Time and Gloom are two examples of this. In Once Upon A Time you are trying to create a fairy tale by playing cards while telling a story and eventually leading the story to your own ending that you got at the beginning of the game. This works okay as a game, but does run into a run away leader problem and the rules are just very loose, so it isn’t going to work for everyone. Gloom on the other hand is a depressing story as you try and kill off your family of characters while they are miserable. But the more miserable they are, the more points you get, so you are playing a card each turn and telling a story as you play the card as to why your character is more miserable or someone else’s character is less miserable. These games take the story telling away from the game itself, and mechanically add the story telling element to the game with what the players need to do. The downside to this is that if you don’t have a creative group, or more so, if you don’t have a group that is just going to be silly, the game isn’t going to work as well.

On the opposite side of things you have games that basically are only story. I did an article on them recently with RPG Lite. But two great examples of this are Legacy of Dragonholt and Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger. Both of these games are really just Choose Your Own Adventure, with a couple of mechanics added in so that you can’t quite just only do it as a book.

On the opposite side of things you have games that basically are only story. I did an article on them recently with RPG Lite. But two great examples of this are Legacy of Dragonholt and Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger. Both of these games are really just Choose Your Own Adventure, with a couple of mechanics added in so that you can’t quite just only do it as a book. That takes away the pressure of the story or the pressure of learning a lot of rules from the players and puts it back onto the game designer, but when you strip away most game mechanics, you can basically just worry about writing a story, it works well.

So, where do I fall with story games?

For me, if a game doesn’t have an interesting theme, I’m less apt to enjoy the game. There are some games where the look is nice enough or the mechanics are good enough, that I like it without having an interesting theme. But most of the time I want theme, and because of that, it means that I want heavy story as well. The story is one way to get a lot of theme into the game. So you’ll see what are commonly called Ameri-trash games showing up on my reviews more likely than a Euro Game because Euro Games tend to be pretty themeless. Even Euro Legacy games, like Charterstone, the story is 100% outside of the game and doesn’t impact what you do or how you play the game at all.

I also think that story is something that is important to games in terms of getting new people into games. There are some games that are simple enough that they don’t need story, but it’s easier to pitch a game to someone where they get to be a hero fighting against the evil corporation, versus a game where they are collecting gems. Even if the second game is a better made and balanced game, it’s still harder to get people to play it.

So, let me toss it out to you, what are some games that are story focused that you really like? How much story do you need in the game?

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