308 – Different Ways to Adventure with Board Games

This week, we’re talking about adventure! What games make you feel like you’re going on an adventure? There are more ways to accomplish this feeling than you might think.

308 Facts – The fastest time to walk down a 5-story flight of stairs (77 steps) on hands is 30.8 seconds.

Also – The Dragon C2+ mission included a canister containing samples of cremated remains of 308 people for a burial in space.

The Monthly Report

Andrew: 17 distinct games, 20 times. H-index 2. Most played: Tall Tales (our review), Condotierre, Aldabas: Doors of Cartagena

Anitra: 16 distinct games, 25 times. H-index 3. Most played: Aldabas, Word-A-Melon (our review), Disney Sorcerer’s Arena

Backtalk

Anitra mistakenly said that Aldabas was from Spain. It’s not! Cartagena is in Columbia, South America. Marc from Grand Gamers Guild (who publishes the game) graciously corrected us.

What We’ve Been Playing

Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances – arena fighting with a strong Disney theme.
The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future
60 Second City
Chronicles of Avel
Venn
Merchants of Magick
Flamecraft
Drop It (our review)

SNAP Review – Gurms

Gurms is a simple tile placement game from Bananagrams. Is it contagiously fun? Maybe not. Read the transcript or watch our video with these cute germ-like creatures.

Welcome to the community!

We’ve got two more new members in the Facebook community this week, including last week’s special guest Jon Manker!

Adventuring in Board Games

Board games are often an escape from every day life. How can a board game take us on an adventure?

It depends very much on the players and their feelings on the theme of the game.

If you’ve followed The Family Gamers for a while, you know that our family often has a hard time with storytelling and role playing games.

But let’s start with table top RPGs anyway. There are very simple systems, like Hero Kids and Cora Quest, and also systems that have nothing to do with traditional fantasy adventures, like Paranoia.

We did a whole episode on storytelling games (episode 110) – they’re not exactly the same as roleplaying games, but there are a lot of similarities there. Use a system like Untold to create whatever kind of adventure setting you want – be unconventional with a western or history – or even a modern-day city setting!

More ways to adventure

Getting a little farther away from role playing and story telling – there are lots of dungeon crawl games or games that have that feeling: Quest Kids, Karak, Chronicles of Avel, Clank!, etc. In all of these, there’s definitely an adventure going on, but you have the freedom to flesh it out.

But there are even more games that will give you a rich setting that gets you ready to adventure. Anitra’s favorite is probably Forbidden Desert – you’ve been dropped into a survival situation. Now what? These don’t tell the story for you, they just put you into this situation. Cooperative games seem to be particularly good at this. But they’re not the only ones! How about Dungeon Academy – Anitra is really inspired by the theme: you’re a student trying to fight through a maze and also level up. Andrew feels that way about the Cuphead dice game and Lords of Waterdeep.

Games where you play out a pre-determined story will pull players in: EXIT, Unlock, Coded Chronicles. Even better if they let you make choices that really affect the outcome! (Adventure Games, Choose Your Own Adventure, maybe Above and Below).

Could you play Wingspan in a way that feels like an adventure? Maybe. You definitely could with Ice Cool… or even Candyland. Prompt your children – “what would it be like if…?”

Do you go on adventures when you play board games?

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