When the designers of Mansions of Madness and Descent come together, you get this wonderful creation.
Once again, Fantasy Flight has shown why they continue to have the licenses they do with this Intellectual property. This game feels like they went back to the drawing board and studied their previous games and said, we can do better.
Yes it requires an app, but unlike the app for Descent, this one was built from the ground up to run with this game in a seamless way.
In Journeys, there is no overlord, the app is the DM. Each player is part of the adventure party and they win or lose together.
Before we get into gameplay, I want to talk about the art. It is fantastic, the cards, the boards, the terrain all look beautiful. They follow the books more for how the characters are described than the movie. I was very impressed.
Ok now on to the game itself. As I mentioned, it is a hybrid of Mansions of Madness and Descent, with a bit of Fallout. First off, there are no dice, all the skill tests and combat are card driven.
To start, each player picks a character (base game comes with 5) and builds their characters deck. Each deck has 6 basic cards, 5 character specific, the first three of your role(you can choose this, but the learn to play recommends one) and one weakness. Each player takes the 1 card for their role and places it below their character sheet. This is the prepare area. Each player can have up to 4 cards in their prepare area to use the ability it gives.
Set up the weakness, damage, and fear cards, similar to the health and sanity cards from Mansions of Madness. Start the app. It will prompt you to select the number of players, character, role, and it informs you of your starting equipment. Each player can hold one item in each hand, one set of armor, and any number of trinkets. Select the Adventure and difficulty and you are ready to play.
There are three phases in each turn; Action phase, Shadow phase, and Rally phase.
The action phase allows players to perform 2 actions; Travel, Attack, and Interact. To Travel, a player moves two spaces. If the player comes into an area with an Exploration token, as a free action, they may interact with it. The app instructs what skill to test, again very similar to Mansions.
To perform an attack, a player selects an enemy group, and based on the item being used, they test against that stat. Each enemy has a number of damage points before they are defeated. Based on the number of successes made, damage is dealt and recorded in the app.
Let’s take a moment to discuss skill tests. Each of the cards in your deck have either, a success, fate, or nothing. To resolve a test, draw the appropriate number of cards that correlate to the required stat. Add up the successes and either pass or fail based on the results. The app will inform you of the result. If a card has a fate symbol, a player may spend an inspiration token to change it to a success.
For example in a combat test , Aragon is fighting a group of ruffians, he is using his sword which uses his might stat. He has 3 might, so he draws 3 cards. He has 2 inspiration tokens. His 3 cards show a success and two fate. Looking at his sword, one success deals 2 damage but 2 will add 5 making a total of 7. Each ruffian has 5, so he spends an inspiration and deals 7 damage. He kills one and deals 2 to the other. The app will ask if an enemy is in range, if adjacent with melee or one space apart with a ranged. Since there is one ruffian remaining, select yes, and the app will counter attack. If a player suffers damage and or fear, draw the appropriate number of cards and resolve them. All damage and fear are dealt face up, unless instructed.
The cards are then placed in his discard pile. If he had a card in his prepared area, he could have used that ability as well.
Inspiration is found by defeating enemies and exploring the land.
The last action is interact. The app will instruct you when and where to place one of the 3 interact tokens: Search, Threat or Person. To interact with a token simply select it from the app, and follow the instructions. The app does not keep track of how many times you take actions, so it’s up to you the player to be honest.
Once each player has taken their 2 actions, they tell the app to move on to the Shadow phase. This is where the forces of darkness spread and increase their hold on middle earth. Enemies attack, darkness effects occur, and threat increases. There are certain thresholds that trigger events when threat reaches them. Again the app will give instructions on what actions to take.
The last phase, is the Rally phase where each player takes their discard and draw pile and reshuffles it to form a new draw deck. Then each player draws two cards off the top as a scout action. They have the option to prepare one or return them to the top or bottom of their deck in any order.
The game continues until the players have completed the quest, or have been defeated and lose.
There are some other details that I will let you discover, but I hope this gives you an overview of what the game is and how it plays.
The elimination of dice, follows suit with another dungeon crawl game, Gloomhaven. Both use a deck of cards and this deck can be added to as the game progresses with more powerful cards, new equipment can be found and the challenges become more complex.
I think, while drawing cards is random, being able to scout each turn allows players to build their first turn planning their actions more than just rolling dice and adding modifiers.
The app allows for replayability of the quests as it changes the layout of tiles and challenges with every game.
In addition the game really brings the theme alive, with the music and narrative the app gives. If you are a Lord of the Rings fan, I don’t believe you will be disappointed.
Since this is game is very new, I mean it released last week, there are not many reviews on it yet. I think Man Vs Meeple shows you what it looks like and gives some good insight.