Adventure favorites

What are your favorite adventure games?

I’m thinking of games where you travel around a map, have encounters, maybe achieve some goals. But if you have another style of game in mind, I’d be happy to hear about it.

I really enjoy Firefly. It feels like a living setting to me. I can travel around, find people to join me, get equipment, take of jobs, see what kind of situations I can get myself into.

Yep - Firefly can be classed as a 'pick up and deliver' adventure game and I like it (won't be selling it).
I have to say my top adventure game has to be Tainted Grail, a very dark and massive exploration adventure game.
Others in my collection I enjoy playing:

Waste Knights
Fortune & Glory: The Cliffhanger Game
Merchants & Marauders
Runebound
Sword & Sorcery is a dungeon crawl adventure game hybrid I'd say, but understand if others disagree.
Western Legends
Age of Conan

Got a lot of kickstarters arriving this year (hopefully) that fall into this as well.

Fallout - great quest system
Runebound 3rd edition - cool system although I wish I could get the expansions without a second mortgage
Relic - infinitely long but stupid fun

Great thread. I am VERY interested in the responses here. I am looking for such a game but it has to be in print.

Western Legends
Waste Knights (can't decide which edition I like more, but 1st is OOP)
Merchants and Marauders
Dungeon Degenerates

Shiver Me Timbers is pretty solid as well if you shorten it by removing event cards.

If Tainted Grail, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Sleeping Gods qualify, those too.

FFG is the measuring stick on this one with their branded properties. For adventure systems I will only play co-op.

The Lord of the Rings, Journies in Middle Earth is great but requires a tablet/laptop. I enjoy the core mechanic of your deck being the skill check. At the start of every turn you look at a few cards and select one. Do you want that good card in your tableau or do you want a guaranteed success on that attack on the orc? Utterly dripping with flavor and you really have to pay attention to the text to be efficient. I've read the just released expansion will be the last big box. So maybe timing will be good.

Runebound 3rd with the coop expansion is fantastic. You can choose to teamup to tackle a goal or perform better in combat, or split off to finish a quest/shop/whatever. Scenarios are filled with theme.

Western Legends. So much freedom to be a jerk, or do your own thing, or whatever suits your fancy.

I assume RPGs are off the table. But you can play lots of them in a very boardgame-like fashion. Hexcrawls, encounters, etc. Minimal or no speeches, intrigue, etc.

My girlfriend's favorite game is "anything with a story" and I love sandbox-y games with flexible rulesets, so we've played primarily adventure games during quarantine.

Arkham Horror 2e - Classic. Never upgraded it with "deluxe" components. Never felt like I needed to.
City of Chaos - Really unique, feels like it was ahead of its time. Monster footprint.
Dungeon Degenerates - We just started a campaign as a Sharpshooter and the Fishy Confectioner. We've been trailed by hordes of monsters through the Wetlands and I'll be surprised if we make our first stop the Stone Circle.
Fortune and Glory - Bonus points because I painted it. The rules make it seem a lot more complicated than it actually is, but the game is a blast.
Merchants Marauders - All-time favorite. Everything from the Seas of Glory expansion is a welcome addition.
Quest for Shangri-La - You don't really need to look this up if you've already played Talisman, but it hangs together as a game shockingly well. I always (and only) play ICP when this hits the table, which led to this bit of weirdness in my Spotify year-end wrap-up.
Spire's End - Just excellent. I don't want to spoil anything.
Sleeping Gods - It's as good as most people are saying.
A Touch of Evil - Like Arkham Horror, in like a third of the time. The 10th Anniversary box is a great package.

Good thread. We play a lot of this kind of stuff.

Probably top:
Arkham 2nd edition
Xia: Legends of a Drift System
Robinson Crusoe

Gotta be Tales of the Arabian Nights for me. PURE adventure with very few fiddly mechanics to intervene. The book of stories is a very underutilized technique IMHO.

Surprising no FATties, my all-time favorite is still Arkham Horror 2nd. With all the expansions, it is a big, deep sandbox of pulp adventure and horror. It may not quite capture the spirit of Lovecraft's writing, but is an excellent adaptation of Chaosium's wonderful Lovecraft country sourcebooks. Arkham Horror 1st was my favorite adventure game up until 2nd edition fired it.

Escape from 100 Million B.C. is a fun romp with dinosaurs and time travelers, and the unique board offers a surprising amount of replay value for a game without expansions.

I may eventually come to love Magic Realm, despite the very complex rules and setup process. Until then, Dark Venture is a light substitute.

Someday, I will get around to reprinting The Search for the Emperor's Treasure, a light adventure game designed by Tom Wham and published as an insert to an issue of Dragon magazine. I doubt that it will live up to my fond memories, which is why I haven't got around to it yet.

I am supposed to finally receive my copy of Sleeping Gods this week, and I have high hopes for it.

I've never actually considered things like Firefly or Merchant & Marauders to be adventure games, because it's possible to play them entirely without engaging in adventure (going to new places, encounters people/monsters, etc.) To me, they're PU&D games.

I own a complete set of Runebound 2nd Ed and the base game of Runebound 3rd Ed and those are the only two adventure games that remain in the house. I did have a complete set of Talisman 2nd Ed and a complete set of Arkham Horror 2nd Ed, but traded them both away after many years of play. I also had a copy of Relic for a while, but traded that away rather quickly.

I still think Runebound 2nd Ed is my favorite because of all the varieties of play possible with all of the small story expansions and large setting expansions. But it's not a genre of game that I've really felt compelled by in recent years.

Leaving Earth

I started out trying to think of what my favorites are here and it really just comes back to Talisman. What all of these other games miss is how simple Talisman is. There’s all of this mechanical frippery and pointless detail. The adventure in Talisman is finding out what happens when you flip a card and roll the dice, which creates a story. That’s all you need.

Magic Realm is so very great and so very impossible.

Dark Venture is neat and a total mess.

Mage Knight is brilliant but I’m not sure it ever really feels like an adventure.

Runebound 3rd is excellent but it’s very Terrinothy- I’d love to see a new edition with the style of Descent LOTD.

Star Wars Outer Rim is totally an adventure game and a great one.

Stunned to see that ICP game here. There one card that I love, “A wizard wearing a vulgar t-shirt steps out from behind a curtain”.

City of Chaos is amazing, they REALLY don’t make them like that anymore.

My enjoyment of adventure games has lessened since I started roleplaying. I think what I want most of this kind of tabletop experience is best achieved through RPGs. That's not to say everyone will feel the same way, more just how I feel.

For that reason Talisman is easily my fav. Like MB said, it's a straightforward game that, to me, better evokes a world I get to inhabit. I think it comes down to not having a whole lot of control.

Star Wars Outer Rim is up there as well. It's much more my kind of Star Wars game than Rebellion, X-Wing, or most others.