Year: 2019 | Players: 2-4 | Minutes: 30 | Ages: 10+
This Roll for Adventure review was made after playing the game about 10 times. We were sent a copy of this game by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
What is Roll for Adventure?
Roll for Adventure is a fantasy dice game in which you play as heroes who are attempting to collect power stones before the Master of Shadows destroys your kingdom. Your goal is to complete a number of tasks by collectively placing your dice on different areas of the board.
Roll for Adventure was designed by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert, and it’s published by KOSMOS.
Rules Overview
In Roll for Adventure, everyone gets one hero board and some dice. You use your dice and your hero’s unique special ability throughout the game to fight the enemies that show up and to complete the tasks in the four realms of your kingdom.
On your turn, you’ll roll your dice, choose one of the numbers that you rolled, and then place one or more of those dice on one of the four realm boards or on an enemy card. You’ll then reroll your remaining dice, place some, and repeat the process until you’re out of dice. Example: You roll your five dice, you place two 1’s on the realm board that takes them, and then you reroll.
There are four double-sided realm boards, each with unique tasks that you can complete to get closer to victory. For example, the Forest board has you use 5’s and 6’s to complete the task. When you fully complete tasks, everyone who contributed to the task gets their dice back and you’ll usually get a power stone. Your goal is to get a certain number of power stones.
After you’ve placed all of your dice, you reveal the top enemy card and check its rank. If its rank is higher than the ranks of any enemies in play, those lower-ranked enemies attack the kingdom by either removing dice or doing damage to their respective areas. The revealed enemy is then placed next to one of the four boards and attacks the area (again, by either removing dice or doing damage to the area). When dice are removed from a realm by enemies, they are placed on the Vortex of Oblivion and can’t be retrieved until dice equaling 10 or higher are placed on the Vortex of Resurrection.
You’ll always include the basic enemies and the Master of Shadows (boss) in the deck, but you can choose to include one or more of the special enemies to make the game tougher. The Master of Shadows is a unique enemy who performs a three-stage attack and then gets shuffled back into the enemy deck.
You’ll beat Roll for Adventure if you get all of the power stones you need. You’ll lose if one of the four realms takes too much damage or if no one has any dice remaining at the beginning of any player’s turn (because the dice are still on the boards).
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- There are a surprising amount of tough decisions to make throughout each game of Roll for Adventure. Your main goal is to use your dice to complete those tasks, but you can’t just let the enemies sit there and do damage. Also, you can’t spread your dice around too much or you might have to wait a while to get them back. It’s not exactly brain-burning stuff, but there’s enough there to keep everyone engaged throughout the game.
- There is plenty of cooperation in this game. You’re always discussing and tweaking your team’s focus based on each dice roll, and it feels great when you’re able to get dice back to your teammates when you complete tasks.
- You only get one unique ability each, but that’s enough in this game. Your ability does make you feel like you bring something different to the table and each combination of characters changes your approach to the puzzle.
- This game also has a really cool push your luck element. You’re pretty much always taking chances since you’re relying on the dice, but sometimes you’ll take much bigger chances in hopes of getting bigger rewards. You want to get your dice back as quickly as possible to give you more options on future turns, but you also might want to take a chance on tougher tasks and trust that your future rolls and/or your teammates will help you out.
- There’s a really good amount of replay value here. Different teams of heroes, different board setups, and different mixes of enemies keeps the game feeling fresh.
- It’s really challenging, too. It’s pretty easy on the A-sides of the boards and without any of the special enemies, but add in just one special enemy and it gets tough to beat, making wins very satisfying.
- Those skull figures look really cool.
Cons
- Unsurprisingly, there is a pretty high luck factor in this dice game. It can be frustrating when you really need one number to complete a task and you just can’t roll it.
- Some heroes are definitely more powerful than others. That’s not a terrible thing in a co-op game, but it doesn’t feel great when you know that your teammates are going to be able to help the team more than you can. A couple of the heroes’ abilities are only useful once or twice a game, and they’re not even that powerful.
- This isn’t the most generic fantasy game I’ve played, but it’s still pretty generic. Even giving the heroes names would have pulled me into the theme a bit more.
Final Thoughts
As a family game and as a filler game, I think Roll for Adventure is pretty great. It’s always a good sign when my group loses a co-op and we want to jump right back in and try again, and that happened multiple times. It’s very easy to teach, games are quick, there’s plenty of tension throughout, and it requires a high amount of cooperation.
I think Roll for Adventure works well at all player counts, but I actually like it best as a two-player game. You get more dice to roll and there’s less downtime between turns, though the game is a bit tougher with just two heroes.
If you’re a fan of dice games and/or you’re looking for a challenging cooperative filler game, I definitely recommend checking out Roll for Adventure. If you don’t like high-luck games, you probably don’t want to get this one.
Roll for Adventure Links
BGG | Amazon | Cardhaus
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