Roll Player Adventures: Gulpax’s Secret

I can talk a bit more about this game because this is a game that I’ve played. Roll Player Adventures is a big choose your own adventure, exploration, and fighting game. In the base game you try and explore to figure out what is happening with a conflict between three parties, the King, the Dragul, and the Starlight Door. Much of what you do is in a choose your own adventure style where you reach decision points and decide what to do as a group. But it is very open in that you can come back and probably do some of the options again.

But then there is the combat or skill tests as well in the game. Those are where the mechanical part of the game really starts to take hold. Roll Player Adventures is a dice management and hand management game. You expend points in stats to use them to get the color dice you need, and you expend cards to manipulate those dice to the right sides.

What Doesn’t Work?

So, I have one main knock on the game. I think that Roll Player Adventures doesn’t do one of the things that I expect campaign games to do well. That is, I don’t think that Roll Player Adventures scales super well. From what I know, two players can be very challenging, but four players, what I am playing at, is very easy. Well, not very easy, but almost always able to be solved.

We get into combat and we can generally win in two rounds. We’ve gotten enough cards and enough XP to push us to be able to win. Same with skill challenges which are I think easier. You only have one round, so they need to be. But, we can basically always solve them.

Now, some of this is how we built out our characters and what has come up. And it is not a fast process at times where we figure it out as a group off the bad. It often takes a lot of thinking and planning. So the game is still challenging to come up with a solution, but a solution can basically always be found. I’d like to feel a bit more crunch and pressure to get things right.

What Works?

On the flip side, the story in the game is fun. And I think that Roll Player Adventures has a lighter story with it as well. So game play where you are doing well, I think that makes sense. It is a campaign game that I can have fun with, who have played heavy campaign games, and I know of families who are playing it together. If Roll Player Adventures were harder, and it could be, I think that it’d push it further into the hobby side of the game.

And, I also very much enjoy the characters in the game. Nefras’s Judgement is to me a needed expansion to the game. Now, the downside is that it adds to the cost of the game and all it’s doing is adding in some backstory. But that backstory really helps you flesh out a character. And it does set your alignment. Which I think is important because often players feel like they don’t know what to pick for an action. But when you have a backstory that says you’re “chaotic good” or “lawful evil” that can help direct that decision making process.

Finally, I think the core mechanics of the game are fun. I called them easy because we win our encounters. We haven’t lost one or we haven’t had a player go exhausted during the game. But I like the puzzle of the dice manipulation. And I think it’s one that people can get into because it’s not too complex.

Who Is It For?

Now, who is Roll Player Adventures for, I think it’s an accessible campaign game. Now, not in the way that Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is, a game in a small package. But more a game that has a massive box, but once you get into the box and you see the story books and maps, it isn’t nearly as component heavy as a lot of campaign games. So if you can get past the box size, it is an easier one to pick-up and play with any group.

What Is New?

So, why back it now? Firstly, it’s a big box, it won’t hit retail much because it doesn’t work well on a retail shelf. But also there is now Gulpax’s Secret. This is another story that you can play through, and it’s cheaper because it doesn’t need to give you all the dice and everything if you already have the base game.

On the flip side, if you haven’t played the game, I don’t think there is anything in the new stuff that you need to get. The base game offers a lot of options and I fully expect Gulpax’s Secret to be available again on a future crowdfunding campaign. Probably with another story that they come out with eventually.

Back or Brick: Roll Player Adventures + Gulpax’s Secret

I really like this game. I backed, or late pledged, the original. And I got to play it at Gen Con 2019 as a prototype. So I have a good connection to the game. I am also having a ton of fun playing through the adventure with friends. So for that reason it is a Back for me. Even if it shows up well after we are done, I can see coming back to it. If I were just looking at it now and with the reviews out there, I think that the base game is worth backing as well. But I’m just in for Gulpax’s Secret.

Is this game a Back or Brick for you?

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So, what did I get?

Terraforming Mars & Prelude Expansion

Terraforming Mars is the #4 right now on the Board Game Geek games list. That is super high, and the concept of Terraforming Mars has always interested me. So why for such a popular game am I getting to it now? Well, it looks bad. There’s no other way to put it, the tiles look pretty boring, there are a lot of cubes, nothing, when I look at the game says play me. It says, I am a dry and boring game. Now, from the game play, I think it’ll be a very interesting engine building game.

And it is an engine building game. I tend to like engine building games. The reason that I did get an expansion, Prelude, for it, though is that the engine building is apparently a little slow in Terraforming Mars. Prelude creates a variant way to play that jump starts that. Now there are a whole lot more expansions that I might get after I’ve played, but only that one for right now. And there is an amazing tile set that was Kickstartered a while ago that I can track down, maybe, later to make the game look better.

Res Arcana: Lux Et Tenebrae

So this is an expansion for Res Arcana. I needed a small thing to get me to the free shipping. And this actually seems like a really good expansion. It adds in a few things, allows you to play with five players, and helps with scaling of the game. Not sure that scaling is much of an issue, but it’s nice to have that option to play with more. Mainly this seems to add in more of what was already there for Res Arcana. Another engine building game and one that I really need to play because it seems unique.

The Bloody Inn

This game is one I’ve wanted to play for a long time. With how Zee Garcia from The Dice Tower and the Brothers Murph, from the Brothers Murph, describe it sounds like a lot of fun. You all run your own Bloody Inn where you know it is easier to just kill the people and steal their money than make an honest living. In the game you hide bodies and bribe police to look the other way. It sounds morbid but also kind of silly.

The theme will help sell The Bloody Inn to some people, and I know it did to me. I don’t mind dark humor, especially since this is such an absurd concept. I could be running an inn and just making money like normal, but no, it is easier to kill the people, steal their money, and hide them away in your in. That makes no sense, but sounds like a lot of fun.

Which Sounds Most Interesting?

While I think that The Bloody Inn might be the one that gets played the most for me. I really want to try and play Terraforming Mars. I know it is a bigger game, but the concept of competing to terraform Mars seems really cool. It is also a game that must be solidly put together, so I want to dig into the mechanics. Sure, it might not be for me with all it’s cubes and drab looks in the end, but I really do want to give it a try and see how it is.

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The Game

In Ohanami, you draft two cards at a time and put them into up to three different columns. Splitting up the cards that you drafted is fine, but there are rules to placing in a column. The number you put down either is put at the top and has to be higher than the highest number in that column, or at the bottom and lower than the lowest. So you will end up with three different columns all in numerical order.

The scoring in this game is interesting. You play through three hands, the first hand you score all of your blue cards for three points each, then next hand as you continue to build the three columns in front of you, you score blues for three points each and green for four points. Finally in the third hand you score grey for seven points. As well at the end scoring pinks based off of how many pinks you’ve collected. The player with the most points wins.

What Doesn’t Work?

Honestly, I got nothing for this section. That isn’t to say that this is a perfect game. I think that everything works well and it is light fast fun. Jokingly, I wish I paid more attention to the artwork on the game. The game goes so fast that you don’t really have that much time to appreciate it.

What Works?

The drafting in this game works really well. 10 card hand would be a lot to draft from, but you draft two at a time. That means it goes by really quickly. The drafting is also extremely simple. Something like Sushi Go Party has a few more moving pieces to it and the scoring, here you simply draft two cards and add them to columns. Or you can toss a card if it doesn’t work for you. So there is some strategy in your drafting, but there is very little to no hate drafting in the game, because getting points yourself is better than taking an ideal card for someone else.

The scoring adds a lot of depth to this game. It seems pretty simple, but it does make what you draft matter. If you get blue cards in round one, let’s say 5 of them, that’s 15 points in round one, 15 points in round two, and 15 points in round three, assuming you don’t add any m ore. If you get them in round two, you miss out on the first 15, and so on. So while blues can score you the most points, 9 per blue card, that’s only if you get them early. So blues are worth the most in the first round, greens in the second and greys in the third. But you also have to think about pink, you can score a lot of points if you have a lot of them. A few pinks, say two or three will probably cost you point in the long run, but if you can get up to 6-7, now you’ll score a lot more points, and up to 10-12, way more points. So there is a balancing act, because pinks don’t score you points early.

And really, the time works so well for this game. After teaching it once, the subsequent games were 15-20 minutes, so extremely fast. That makes it a great filler and it should be a game that works well with less than four players, even though that’ll make it more random. Because you don’t know when you’ll see cards and who will see them first, you can’t fully strategize anyways, so the randomness at less than four won’t be a big deal. In fact, it can probably enhance some strategies if things shake out right and you’ll see your own hand again more often, in four players you only see two cards again. But no matter the play count the game shouldn’t balloon too much in length. It’ll take longer if you play with analysis paralysis prone players, but hopefully even they can play this game fast.

Final Thoughts

This is going to be a game that is good for a lot of people. The game play is so fast, and there are interesting decisions to be made as you go along. The scoring is what pushes those decisions but gives you flexibility to think about strategy and to think how much of a gap you want to create between numbers, do you want to throw away a card and things like that. And this is a good game for non-gamers and introducing them to an idea, such as drafting. This is as about as simple a drafting game as you can get, so even before something like Sushi Go or Sagrada, this game would work really well.

Overall Grade: A
Casual Grade: A
Gamer Grade: B

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