Review Roll Player Adventures

 My first gaming love was Dungeons & Dragons. Like many people my age, I started with the red and blue boxes, then moved on to the D&D advanced rules and played several other editions over the years. Many board games try to be that elusive RPG in a box that doesn't require a game master. Many of these games are basically tactical combat with character leveling and some story. Maybe there is a choice, but you follow a linear route, just punching monsters until they drop loot like an armored piñata with teeth.

 Roll Player Adventures is more of a convoluted choose-your-own-style story with dice-based puzzles that drive the plot forward. Is Roll Player Adventures an RPG in a box for those who want to go beyond just fighting the whole game?

OVERVIEW OF THE GAME PROCESS

 To start your campaign playthrough, you can use your own characters from the Roll Player or choose a ready-made one. Each scenario has its own booklet, reminiscent of late first edition D&D modules, and a map. The booklet contains a brief description and information about the preparation. Then you follow the instructions to place the XP tokens and cubes, place your team miniatures, and you're ready to play.

 Throughout the game, you will acquire different skills and go through combat encounters. In both cases, you can spend stamina dice (one for each character on the team) to add a specific color of dice to the starting set. You can blindly draw new dice until you reach the dice limit. After rolling these dice, you match the color and the required values. If you are just rolling the dice, there is a chance that there will be open slots that require dice to complete successfully. And here the cards in your hand will never let you down. However, if this happens, the monsters will turn against you and deal damage.

 Each player can play cards up to the allowable game limit. Players can receive Bonus Action Tokens that will allow them to use additional cards within the limit of Bonus Action Tokens players have. The cards allow players to add more dice to the dice pool, count the dice as different numbers, and change values with re-rolls, assignments, or flips. As you adventure, you'll earn and buy new cards, expanding your toolbox to tackle more challenging challenges.

 Battles can last three rounds, with enemies dealing damage for each open slot on their map and inflicting other negative effects in the second and third rounds (usually damage, lost treasure, or experience). If a character's stamina tokens in the spent token box equal or exceed their health, they are eliminated from the challenge. If all characters are out, players lose the scenario and read the text in the encounter book for this mission. Tin Scraper Lock Pin XL Puzzle Eye of Needle (2249) ( 6035 )

 Players gain XP for closing certain slots during a skill check, even if they fail the check. After each challenge, all cards from the discard pile may be returned to players' hands. When players rest, they can reclaim spent cards and regain stamina. Stamina recovery is based on a dice roll equal to the amount of XP spent. But you should be economical in spending XP, because with their help you improve your characters.

 At the end of each adventure, XP and gold can be spent on character improvements, called development. XP is spent to upgrade abilities on the mastery track, increase health, increase the limit of combat dice, and add additional bonus action tokens. Gold is used to buy items, with some cards giving discounts on a character's race or abilities.

GAME EXPERIENCE

 The experiences I look for in an RPG-like game include character development, a sense of adventure, character choice (which is an RPG aspect), an immersive narrative, tactical combat, and a general sense of discovery.

 Aside from tactical combat, Roll Player Adventures delivers on all of these aspects. But the lack of tactical combat comes with very quick setup and assembly times, at least in part thanks to trays that conveniently house most components.

 Characters develop by adding found or purchased cards, and even by increasing abilities by advancing through the mastery track. It's generally simple and nice, but — especially for solo players playing multiple hands — there are a lot of cards to keep an eye on. On the plus side, as the game gets more difficult, you have more dice and more cards to use. And, with a few exceptions, I've found that after a few scenarios I can handle most challenges fairly easily. Overall it was very enjoyable, but especially towards the end it started to feel a bit tedious, especially as the dice pools got bigger and there were more dice to manipulate. But such a feeling may not arise in everyone.

 One of the strengths of Roll Player Adventures is the sprawling plot and overall world building as you travel through locations on beautifully illustrated maps. Throughout each scenario, you'll mark keywords and collect scenario-specific items that you can interact with in various locations (sometimes with funny results when used in combination). Keywords can lead you to different paragraphs and to a different story event than those with a different keyword. You'll also earn title cards, which contain a couple of small sentences of text that can influence the plot in future scenarios. By "may" I mean that there will be an impact, but you won't know if it's good or bad, or sometimes both.

 Despite all the branches, the main story campaign is linear, and you'll likely run through the same main story points on repeat campaigns. By favoring different factions or making different choices, you'll unlock alternate story episodes and small events, but probably without changing the brief description of the overall story arc. As for the overall replay value, I think it's still pretty high if enough time passes between campaigns. It often happens that you have a choice of how to act in this or that situation (various skill checks are offered), so playing as different characters, with different cards in hand, you will also solve different puzzles.

 In addition to the main plot, dozens of characters you will meet and interact with give the game a lot of depth. I went through the first four or five scenarios pretty quickly once I got my pledge and then put it aside to play other games. Returning to the game, I decided I wanted to finish the campaign and played the remaining scenarios in short order. When I started again, I couldn't remember some of the names and their relationship to me (the title cards gradually reminded me of this). So this is a game that's probably best played regularly until you've finished the 11-episode campaign (plus a recurring side quest that can be played after a certain point in the adventure). Rushing through the game starts to feel tedious, and the three-month wait between sessions can cause you to miss out on the finer details of the world and story arc.

 In the end, I have two small complaints, one mechanical and one stylistic. Mechanically, my gripe is that combat and skill checks are too similar. Fights last up to three rounds and sometimes have modifier cards that do something (often bad for you) to tweak enemies, but fighting an ogre, gnoll, or dragon isn't all that different mechanically from one another or from performing different skill checks. I was still having a ton of fun with the game and was stressing out when I was calculating how hard I was going to get hit because I couldn't place enough dice, but I didn't want to waste a card this turn because I didn't have enough bonus action tokens to manipulate new dice that I would draw.

 Stylistically, I had some difficulty trying to distinguish some of the colors on player tablets, maps, and skill checks. The blue and purple colors were hard for me to distinguish. Since some maps had a dark background and others had a light background, the appearance also changed, which was a little confusing to me at first. I have a mild form of color blindness, so not everyone may have this problem.

CONCLUSIONS

 Roll Player Adventures was ahead of Solomon Kane in my picks for the best game of 2021 when I started the campaign. And even now, there's still a battle between the two, and Chronicles of Drunagor (which I first played in 2022) is also in the mix. Roll Player Adventures is a very solid option for those looking for an RPG in a box, especially if story and world building are more important than tactical combat.

 Overall rating: 4.5/5 stars. Roll Player Adventures provides players with interesting choices as they progress through a fantastic story, with exciting puzzles and dice manipulation in a deep and vivid world.

USEFUL LINKS

Roll Player Adventures on BGG

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/254708/roll-player-adventures

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