#RELIC ADVENTURE ZONE FULL#

The leader does the same thing whenever a new face-up card is revealed. The players then decide on names and other details. The team leader reads the descriptions of the villain, relic and locations, and creates the bare bones of the story, and why those three things are together. No matter how bad your drawing ,might be, it adds to the immersion. There’s even a space to doodle a picture of your character, which I suggest doing. This does a great job of getting the players invested with what’s going on, and sows the seeds of getting involved with the story. There are some choices on the backs of the sheets for this, or you could roll the die to choose one, or even just ignore them and make up your own. They then answer three questions which have prompts on the sheet. That role is akin to something like a Dungeon Master, and their job is to help create and steer the story unfolding on the table in front of them.Įach player takes a sheet for their character, in one of the five classes available, and gives them a name. To facilitate that, every game needs someone to act as the Team Leader. The Adventure Zone is a mechanism to tell stories, first and foremost.

The TAZ D20, with its critical hit symbol – a guaranteed win Follow The Leader But to go into The Adventure Zone with the mindset of ‘this is a game to win’ would be missing a big part of what the game does, and does really well. Not the sort of thing I normally go for at all. Roll a die, compare some numbers, take a card. Hoorah! You might think that all sounds pretty lightweight as a game, and you’d be right, it is. Once the players get through the relic deck and either one of the other decks, they win. If the arrow on the card adjacent to the one you’re taking on shows ‘+1’, then you need to add 1 to that card’s strength) ( note: there seems to be an omission in the rule book around the numbers in arrows on the challenge cards. Any failures knock their health track down a step or two. That number is compared to the big number printed on the card, and if the total is the same or higher, the players win. That card is something the team are trying to overcome, and to do that they add up the strength from their character sheet, any additions from items or other players assisting them, and the roll of a special D20. On a player’s turn they choose one of the face-up cards on the top of one of the piles, and try to resolve it. Each has its own deck of cards, which are placed on their spots on the board. The game begins by choosing a villain, a relic and a location. Fans of the podcast will recognise a Lich and Fantasy KostCo, home of Garfield, the Deals Warlock The second problem, that of scoring a story, is also handled well, but I’ll come to that later. The Adventure Zone game immediately deals with the first of those problems, by making it a co-operative game. Nemo’s War 2nd Edition did a good job, but it’s still possible to play while totally blanking over the flavour text. So many games are built around the concept of a score and determining winners and losers, that something as fluffy and abstract as ‘telling a story’ is hard to incorporate. A few have made a worthwhile attempt at it, games like Tales of the Arabian Nights for example, but for the most part your options are extremely limited. I believe that story-telling is woefully under-represented in board and card games. It’s a game about the thing the podcast does so well: story-telling. What you’ll be pleased to hear (if you came here to read reviews about board games and not RPGs that is), is that this game isn’t a reinterpretation of D&D. The artwork is great, and the iconography is clear and simple A bit like when you play with a Lego set based on the Lego Movie, which is a film about Lego.Īnd to think, they say creativity is dead. That’s right, a game based on a podcast, that was based on a game.

#RELIC ADVENTURE ZONE FULL#

The show grew so popular that it spawned three graphic novels, and in an act of coming full circle, there’s now a game. Seriously, if you haven’t heard it yet, you should listen.

The guys are funny and engaging, and the world and stories Justin McElroy created are amazing. I absolutely loved the Bureau of Balance arc, which spanned three years of episodes. The characters they created and the campaign settings grew their own universe, lore, and fanbase, and it’s incredible. It started off as a pretty standard D&D campaign, but very quickly took a more story-oriented direction. The Adventure Zone is a massively popular fantasy/comedy podcast run by the McElroy family. It was a smash hit that spawned graphic novels and a huge fan following, and now, a game. The McElroy family put together a podcast chronicling their adventures in a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign called The Bureau of Balance. If you listen to podcasts, you may have heard of The Adventure Zone.