Oh yeah, I remember liking Return of the Heroes. I played a solitaire game on the floor of my otherwise empty apartment the day of my college graduation ceremony. I wonder if it still holds up?
Does Gumshoe count? Difficult to think of a game with better writing.
Xia: a space adventure that largely forgoes flavor text and instead pulls theme from it's mechanics and let's you fill in the story.
Talisman 2e: a fantasy adventure that largely forgoes mechanics and instead relies on excellent vintage GW art, vibe, and infinite reserves of silly bullshit. Pleasantly dumb.
Dungeon Degenerates: excellent art and world building, a really cool branching campaign, and a pretty okay game too. Some of them game part is on the clunky side, but the vibe is strong with this one. I like the writing and art enough that I bought all the lore books even.
Dark Venture: a late breaking entry. The game part of this is a mess, but it's workable. The art and the vibe do so much heavy lighting here. But the art! The vibe!
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I love adventure games. You usually don't have to spend a lot of bandwith on strategy and all that, but can concentrate on experiencing the story beats. Like Shellhead my favourite is also Arkham Horror 2nd though I usually only play with one extra town expansion so I don't have to spend too much time travelling. Great for solo, also good with the kids.
And that's another good thing about adventure games. I can play it with the kids who don't read English yet (currently 9 and 5), and it's usually super easy to just ask "what do you want to?" and then handle the rules from there on. Other favourites are:
Sleeping Gods - such an impressive design.
Runebound - I loved 2nd, but switched to 3rd which is very good. But I curse myself for not buying the coop expansion. You can play the monsters yourself when soloing, but I would love to try a scenario that's specifically made for coop.
Andor The Family Fantasy Game - is a solid adventure game for kids and families. Not as mathy as the original Andor game, and you get to flip a lot of tokens and roll dice.
Just last week I bought Chronicles of Avel which is another family adventure game. Lots of dice rolling, a bit of exploration, and you get to pull cardboard equipment from a bag. It's very simple and maybe it will turn out to be too much the same every time we play (even if the map is customizable), but the 9yo started making a D&D like adventure from the components right away, and the 13yo likes it, so I think it stays. Also, the mini expansion has small cardboard ballistae you get to assemble, so that's a plus.
Merchants and Marauders: With the seas of Glory expansion, best on my shelf. Runebound 2nd ed: Still looking for the Midnight expansion, but always a fun time. Eldritch Horror: I prefer the global scope and decreased fiddliness as compared to Arkham. Exalted: Legacy of the Unconquered Sun: Garbage rulebook, but there is a fun game underneath with a movement planning rondel that works great. Relic: Better than Talisman, but I'm not sure why I feel like that since it is the same game. Exploding dice maybe?
A lot people have already said:
Xia
Western Legends
Talisman
Merchants & Marauders
Escape from 100 Million BC
Fallout (competitive is kind of a mess but I got the co-op mission pack and looking forward to trying it)
gonna add: Android. Damn I wish there was an expansion with more characters.
Legomancer wrote: gonna add: Android. Damn I wish there was an expansion with more characters.
I wish I could play Android enough times to share this wish. I loved my two plays but it’s a strange game to want to play for six hours.
Arkham Horror 2e
Eldritch Horror
I'm still in the process of figuring out which of these two I like more. I like the scope of Arkham but prefer the smooth gameplay and no fuss approach to actually playing the game that Eldritch provides. Modularity is overrated in general but specifically for Arkham Horror; just let me shuffle in expansions and forget they exist.
Merchants and Marauders - I loved my plays of this but haven't played in many years and am not sure when I'll have a chance to change that. I like adventure games but don't play them as often as I used to.
The recent conversation about Dark Venture has me tempted to set up my copy for some solo play. Sleeping Gods is also on my up next list. I haven't heard anyone say anything negative about it yet.
I like Android, but I left it off my list because it doesn't quite offer an adventure game experience. You travel around the map but you don't have encounters, just execution of actions. The narrative encounter kind of stuff happens instead in the light and dark cards and the personal story stages.
I have only played Talisman and Relic once each. I won Talisman and I lost badly at Relic, but was disappointed with both games. I disliked the boring board layouts, I felt that I didn't have any meaningful choices, and all strategy came down to rolling the dice well. The Relic game went on for hour after hour, and I lost every single fight that game.
Virabhadra wrote: Do you folks play Android RAW, or should I skip directly to the Director's Cut?
I haven’t played it but my reading of the Director’s Cut is that it represents a misreading of the game and an arrogance in thinking that they know better than the actual author (
In hindsight, I did too much with one game, but I was chasing a very particular experience in my head - a sort of m… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
). You are not directly playing the characters or making their choices, the role of the player is more like that of a director or screen writer. People complained that the game felt like you were framing somebody for a murder but I don’t think that was the intended framing and therefore isn’t a problem that needs solving. My recommendation, play RAW. The game needs fixing but the self appointed Director’s Cut isn’t likely to be the right fix.
You know I think that ultimately is where Android tripped up a lot of folks…that disconnect between “murder mystery” context and the actual gameplay which is more about setting up your suspect to win. It’s dissonant and at the time, it was especially so because the assumption was that it was an adventure game with a narrative that your character moves through. But your “ego” really is more of the unseen writer crafting the narrative.
Always a fascinating, completely screwed up game. More like that please.
I'm not a cop, let alone a homicide detective, but I have watched a lot cop shows, especially The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets. I assume Kevin Wilson has a similar background. It seems like homicide detectives, at least the fictional ones, tend to become fixated on a specific suspect and work to build a case against them. That seems to be the approach that Wilson took to designing Android.
Years ago, I pondered a minor house rule that would change the feel of the game. Instead of drawing and placing evidence chits, Android players could instead deal out an equal amount of evidence chits to each of the three evidence categories on each suspect, and peek at one chit each time they resolve a clue of the appropriate category. But then that would require doing away with a preferred suspect for each player, and having each player guess the killer just before the end of the game. Might be workable, or there might be problems with respect to some of the cards and scenarios.
Eldritch Horror is great for a quick to the table Scooby Doo adventure game. There's not a lot of rules to teach the new player, as you can do all the bookeeping for the monster stuff.....pick an action or two then flip some cards and roll some dice. Tells some funny stories...created some tension, and really only over stays its welcome at higher player counts.
This might make me a gaming heretic and purveyor of wrongbadfun, but I don’t know if I particularly like any adventure games. Just kinda feels like “flip a card; see what happens to you.”
Jexik wrote: This might make me a gaming heretic and purveyor of wrongbadfun, but I don’t know if I particularly like any adventure games. Just kinda feels like “flip a card; see what happens to you.”
It comes down to what entertains you about playing a game. I want a game to tell me a story, or at least a semblance of a story, which is why I generally don't like abstracts or euros. Technically every game tells a story, but I'm not interested in a drab story about economic efficiency. A game that doesn't tell me a story feels more like a structured and fiddly activity than a game. But that's just my personal bias.