I'm sorry to hear the loading wasn't as smooth as it should. I hope to have some improvements on that front, especially with the holidays coming and people playing more and therefore burdening the servers more. Glad to hear the game was inspiring to play, and you look forward to getting it back onto the table! 😊
One of my favourite parts of the skill system is how thematic the circle of skills is, including the fact that you can use adjacent skills, so in thievery your perception and might come in handy, or in survival check your knowledge and might help a bit as well. All this combined with item and companion effects makes the skill check choices very compelling, and creates little stories of their own.
Solo works well on the site as well. Results are hidden until revealed with a click. You can roll your skill check and some of the other triggers (other die faces) as a result of your roll are hidden.
I believe there are also local quests on the board which change to other cards during the storage phase if you don't pick them up, I thought that was pretty cool to have the world change because you didn't interfere.
I was really surprised at how great this game wise. Firstly, I think one should note the excellent soundtrack you get with the app. It is really nice and well produced and not an elemnt usually associated with a board game.I don't think this was widely mentioned by reviewers and I think it is really awesome and should receive the praise it deserves. I just put my headphones on and the immersion is perfect. As to the game itself i'd call it Zen and the art of narration. What I mean is that every skill roll you make (even those you actually fail) are so well written that there is no 'doom and gloom' if you do not succeed in an action. The time invested by the author to recount every 'half success' or sometimes even a positive failure reduces the stress one gets when playing a more traditional system like those of fighting fantasy and their likes. The result is a delightful tale where heroes are not always perfect, where they could get lost on their way even though their expert explorers , or where they could actually change. Events allows the player to move his charcter from being one persona in the begining but due to events and encounters change to something different. You virtually go with the flow and accept the good with the bad ... OMMM ... :) Finally , the level of writing is excellent. Initially I thought this might be more effective with Children as the art and some stroy lines might seem, but I found that even though there is a healthy dose of the naive there are also dark elements and themes which account for the 14+ age recommendation. Saving and restarting s a real breeze and there is no setup or take down fatigue. I will happily recommend this to any person who likes games that takes them on journeys of discovery, introspection and adventure. (sorry for the long comment)
Two games that I can think of that have "memory" are the old Warhammer Quest and Blood Bowl, both my Games Workshop. Warhammer Quest was a simple dungeon crawl game, where your character would level up and gain new equipment as a result of adventuring. But there was no over arching campaign. The difficulty of the dungeon scaled based on the average character level, which if memory serves me correctly, was pretty hit or miss. Similar with Bloodblowl, a football/rugby style game also set in the Warhammer universe.
I have to check this game out. My wife and I are looking for another story-based "campaign" style game while we wait for others. Has elements that reminds me of 7th Continent and RPA. I like the use of the app; something I feel Sleeping Gods, RPA, and Tainted Grail would have benefited from. It got somewhat tedious flipping through story books and trying to avoid spoilers.
Thanks for sharing. I'm in the idea stages of a similar style game and those gameplay ideas for saving are clever but simple. Love it. The idea of saving in a board game for some reason keeps making me think of a big ol' floppy disk. Do you have any type of save mechanics in your games? Or do you have a video of favorite save mechanics? It's oddly specific but I'm very curious the different ways of implementing it.
That's a great question about favorite save mechanisms. We have two campaign products (Charterstone and The Rise of Fenris). Charterstone uses stickers and gives each player a tuckbox into which they place their components; The Rise of Fenris does something similar, but without stickers.
I only have 1 campaign game where you can save your PC's advancement. It is called Bloodborne. Basically your PC's advancement is in the form of # of cards and when you want to pause the game, the box insert has spaces to hold your character "deck". Storywise though, I don't think you can pick up where you left off. The story is divided into chapters so I think you would have to restart the chapter you stopped at.
How in depth are the outcomes for the stories? I played Above and Below a few times and often felt disappointed that the outcomes were often purely mechanical. You would get a mushroom or something, but there wouldn't be any flavor text for how you get the reward. It's made me a lot more hesitant about these games with 'choose your own adventure' type narrative mechanics.
I would say the story is very closely tied to what you get in long-lasting ways. For example, Megan gained a few companion cards because she went out of her way to support some critters in need. She also made several decisions that led to her helping to build a resort, which permanently changed the board (with a card, not a sticker).
How is the combat? I don't think you mentioned much about how combat works except for the difficulty. I'm also concerned about its dependence on an app to play the game. I passed on My Father's Work because of it.
There's no combat--everything is a skill check. There's also no app. It's just a storybook that happens to be digital (you can download it and store it forever that way, no web access or updates necessary).
I'm sorry to hear the loading wasn't as smooth as it should. I hope to have some improvements on that front, especially with the holidays coming and people playing more and therefore burdening the servers more. Glad to hear the game was inspiring to play, and you look forward to getting it back onto the table! 😊
It really wasn't a big problem once we realized it was specific to the iPad--it loaded very fast on the laptop!
One of my favourite parts of the skill system is how thematic the circle of skills is, including the fact that you can use adjacent skills, so in thievery your perception and might come in handy, or in survival check your knowledge and might help a bit as well. All this combined with item and companion effects makes the skill check choices very compelling, and creates little stories of their own.
I really like the adjacent skills too!
It’s extremely difficult for my wife and I to have a campaign game going with any more players than the two of us, so this persistence seems great!
Solo works well on the site as well. Results are hidden until revealed with a click. You can roll your skill check and some of the other triggers (other die faces) as a result of your roll are hidden.
I believe there are also local quests on the board which change to other cards during the storage phase if you don't pick them up, I thought that was pretty cool to have the world change because you didn't interfere.
Oath comes to mind as a game that remembers previous sessions.
That's true! I found Lands of Galzyr significantly easier to setup/cleanup than Oath in relation to the game remembering/evolving.
I love board games and gamebook so I get the best of both worlds with this game.
I was really surprised at how great this game wise. Firstly, I think one should note the excellent soundtrack you get with the app. It is really nice and well produced and not an elemnt usually associated with a board game.I don't think this was widely mentioned by reviewers and I think it is really awesome and should receive the praise it deserves. I just put my headphones on and the immersion is perfect. As to the game itself i'd call it Zen and the art of narration. What I mean is that every skill roll you make (even those you actually fail) are so well written that there is no 'doom and gloom' if you do not succeed in an action. The time invested by the author to recount every 'half success' or sometimes even a positive failure reduces the stress one gets when playing a more traditional system like those of fighting fantasy and their likes. The result is a delightful tale where heroes are not always perfect, where they could get lost on their way even though their expert explorers , or where they could actually change. Events allows the player to move his charcter from being one persona in the begining but due to events and encounters change to something different. You virtually go with the flow and accept the good with the bad ... OMMM ... :) Finally , the level of writing is excellent. Initially I thought this might be more effective with Children as the art and some stroy lines might seem, but I found that even though there is a healthy dose of the naive there are also dark elements and themes which account for the 14+ age recommendation. Saving and restarting s a real breeze and there is no setup or take down fatigue. I will happily recommend this to any person who likes games that takes them on journeys of discovery, introspection and adventure.
(sorry for the long comment)
I'm glad you're enjoying it too! I completely agree about the varying degrees of success and failure--there's always a sense of progression.
Love the game for the reasons said 👍
I thought for sure I was at 1.25x playback speed. Went to bring it back to Normal but was already there. lol
(Not so patiently) waiting for this to hit retail so I can pick it up!
Two games that I can think of that have "memory" are the old Warhammer Quest and Blood Bowl, both my Games Workshop. Warhammer Quest was a simple dungeon crawl game, where your character would level up and gain new equipment as a result of adventuring. But there was no over arching campaign. The difficulty of the dungeon scaled based on the average character level, which if memory serves me correctly, was pretty hit or miss. Similar with Bloodblowl, a football/rugby style game also set in the Warhammer universe.
I have to check this game out. My wife and I are looking for another story-based "campaign" style game while we wait for others. Has elements that reminds me of 7th Continent and RPA. I like the use of the app; something I feel Sleeping Gods, RPA, and Tainted Grail would have benefited from. It got somewhat tedious flipping through story books and trying to avoid spoilers.
Thanks for sharing. I'm in the idea stages of a similar style game and those gameplay ideas for saving are clever but simple. Love it. The idea of saving in a board game for some reason keeps making me think of a big ol' floppy disk. Do you have any type of save mechanics in your games? Or do you have a video of favorite save mechanics? It's oddly specific but I'm very curious the different ways of implementing it.
7th Continent did this really well too, slightly different system but also saves the game to a stack of cards.
That's a great question about favorite save mechanisms. We have two campaign products (Charterstone and The Rise of Fenris). Charterstone uses stickers and gives each player a tuckbox into which they place their components; The Rise of Fenris does something similar, but without stickers.
I only have 1 campaign game where you can save your PC's advancement. It is called Bloodborne. Basically your PC's advancement is in the form of # of cards and when you want to pause the game, the box insert has spaces to hold your character "deck". Storywise though, I don't think you can pick up where you left off. The story is divided into chapters so I think you would have to restart the chapter you stopped at.
How in depth are the outcomes for the stories? I played Above and Below a few times and often felt disappointed that the outcomes were often purely mechanical. You would get a mushroom or something, but there wouldn't be any flavor text for how you get the reward. It's made me a lot more hesitant about these games with 'choose your own adventure' type narrative mechanics.
I would say the story is very closely tied to what you get in long-lasting ways. For example, Megan gained a few companion cards because she went out of her way to support some critters in need. She also made several decisions that led to her helping to build a resort, which permanently changed the board (with a card, not a sticker).
How is the combat? I don't think you mentioned much about how combat works except for the difficulty. I'm also concerned about its dependence on an app to play the game. I passed on My Father's Work because of it.
There's no combat--everything is a skill check. There's also no app. It's just a storybook that happens to be digital (you can download it and store it forever that way, no web access or updates necessary).