I fondly love Halloween, even though we don’t usually go to parties and haven’t decorated much until this year. I’m not even really into the carnival manifestations of this holiday specifically. But the combination of fall gloom and scary fairy tales, gothic stories and twilight cemeteries – that’s it for me. And I really, really love Stranger Things (I’m just now rewatching the 2nd season), so I couldn’t pass by a game based on this series by Rob Daviau.
Yes, you’re not wrong, the master of legacy games here has taken to making a little non-legacy co-op.
In the game, we can only “go through” the first two seasons of the show, with no one to one tie-in. The field simply has two turns and corresponding locations, enemies, and objectives per party. We played the first one.
All characters, including the demogorgon and demodogs, are represented in the game by miniatures. Because it’s CMON 🙂 But to be honest, I really enjoy walking around the field with a figure rather than a plastic or wooden chip. Especially the demogorgon is beautiful!
What’s also nice is that the game doesn’t use photos from the show, but illustrations of familiar characters and places. Only the action cards are as boring as possible.
The game mechanics reminded me the most of Horrified, but here there are always 2 kinds of enemies on the field. The field is a network of locations connected to each other, where you can perform different actions. In this respect the game is more favorable to Horrified, because the actions will be different: either to try to take a useful item, or a helper, or to fight with enemies, or to rest.
The heroes have a personal tablet where, like in Robinson, individual fear levels will be tracked. If even one person gets really scared, the game is lost.
The individual property is also listed there and allies and items are stored there. Which you can’t swap, even if you’re standing in the same location.
It’s standard to walk around and do something on your turn. Except that you have to spend action cards from your hand for everything. On the strength of the card it will be possible to walk and do something.
At the beginning of the turn you have 5 cards with values from 1 to 3 in your hand, and you have to spend them wisely. What I like here is the strengthening of part of the cards, if you are not alone in the location, but with a friend. That is such an initiative not to share (like in silly horror movies :)). And in general, it’s usually a very good idea to stand not alone, because all sorts of caca often happens to someone who was alone.
A deck of cards with different events, like in Horrified or Pandemic, will be responsible for the “poo” in the game. Only here the events are a bit more varied: monsters attack, feds go on a rampage, or even the day ends and you have to reshuffle everything.
By the way, there’s an epic screwup with this deck and card. Having misunderstood the condition of the end of the game and how the “End of Day” card works, the game masters at Gencon taught the game wrong! They broke it completely, making the loss by shuffling the cards, which ruined both people’s impressions and the game’s ratings…
The game is actually quite brisk and not that easy to play. The event deck is very unpleasant, the checks are unpredictable and often difficult. The checks here are in the form of a stack of tokens with numbers, which you need to “beat” with your cards. Tokens can be from 0 to 5, plus one special monster token, its value changes over the course of the game. A bit reminiscent of Arkham Card Horror.
This part of the game was pretty boring, to be honest. You sit there and count your cards every time to see if you have more or less than what’s on the tokens. And you do this very often, because checks are needed for everything.
Yes, it’s curious to calculate your cards so that you have enough to go around and still have enough to perform the action. Plus the moment with the luck check: all the tokens except the top one are closed and we don’t know what’s there. It adds to the excitement. But, I repeat, there are a lot of such checks during the game. Just want to screw some simpler option.
Also pretty boring were the items you could find in the locations: that’s just plus a few points to passing different checks, meh. Oh well, and the mink Eleven is just there as a round marker, so too bad.
Still, we had fun! Killing the Demogorgon was a challenge (he kept getting away, there was no way my Nancy could swat him), the feds were mean, co-op worked, plans had to be made ahead of time. If I didn’t like the IP so much, I might have been more bored. As it was, it was really fun, I even forgot to make a video, so I was immersed. And we won by a slim margin.
If you like classic co-op, the Stranger Things series, minis, and arithmetic, you may well enjoy the game. I would definitely play the second season.
