Year: 2024 | Players: 1-4 | Min: 30+ | Ages: 12+
This The Mandalorian: Adventures review was made after playing the game six times, with all games played at the two or three-player counts.
What is The Mandalorian: Adventures?
The Mandalorian: Adventures is a cooperative sci-fi adventure game in which you play through key moments from the first season of The Mandalorian TV series.
The Mandalorian: Adventures was designed by Corey Konieczka and Josh Beppler, and published by Unexpected Games.
Rules Overview
In The Mandalorian: Adventures, you play as characters like The Mandalorian and IG-11 as they work together to complete missions inspired by Season 1 of the show. Each mission involves navigating maps, managing threats, and achieving objectives.
Turn Structure
Each turn revolves around playing skill cards. These cards represent the characters’ abilities and have a strength value (ranging from 1 to 4) that determine how effective your actions will be. For example, playing a high-strength card in the Attack slot allows you to deal more damage, while placing a card in the Intel slot might help you investigate a threat or reposition an enemy. Some cards also have special abilities or strength bonuses that activate when played in specific action slots.
When you play a card, it is placed in one of the four action slots on the board, and the strength of all cards in a slot builds up over time. Exceeding certain thresholds in those slots can trigger crises or events; you need to carefully weigh your actions to minimize the risk of triggering those negative events.
1. Action Step
You must perform two different actions by playing skill cards to action slots. Available actions include:
- Move: Navigate spaces on the map.
- Attack: Deal damage to enemies within range.
- Intel: Reveal hidden threats or reposition enemies.
- Plan: Gain powerful planning cards to use later.
Some missions add unique action slots with special effects, giving you more options for playing your skill cards.
2. Event Step
For each action slot, you calculate the total strength of all cards and tokens, then resolve an event or crisis if the total reaches specific thresholds:
- 6+ Strength: Resolve a mission-specific crisis and an event card.
- 5 Strength: Resolve an event card only.
- 4 or Less: No crisis or event occurs.
3. Draw Step
Draw back up to four skill cards (or three in Veteran difficulty).
Winning and Losing
Each mission has a unique objective, such as escorting The Child or defeating specific enemies. You’ll win if you complete the objective and all players survive the last Event Step.
You’ll lose if a character is defeated or the mission’s failure condition is met.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- This shared action slot system is a very cool idea, and it works well here. It gives you something different to think about since you normally want to keep the strength levels down on each slot, but you also want to do the most with your two actions each turn. It makes you think strategically as a team so, hopefully, everyone gets to use their best cards at the right times. The system probably doesn’t make sense thematically, but it’s fun!
- Adding on to that first pro, I like that you have some control over when the enemies will attack. If you keep the action slots at a strength of four or lower, they don’t do anything. That’s not always easy to pull off, but I like that you can sometimes work together to keep the enemies in place while you move around them.
- It’s refreshing to have such straightforward rules in a game like this. These kinds of adventure board games are often pretty fiddly with complex systems, but The Mandalorian: Adventures keeps things simple. There’s a Guide deck that introduces new components and rules over time without overwhelming you, making it easy for even non-gamers to enjoy. Pretty much any Mandalorian fan can play this game, which was probably the designers’ goal.
- The Mandalorian: Adventures does the job of making you feel like you’re playing through the first season of the show. All the main episodes are there, with all the main characters, and the missions, objectives, and maps pull you right back into those key scenes from the series.
- Each character feels different to play thanks to their unique skill decks, and their best skills match their in-show abilities. Also, you get eight playable characters to choose from, which is more than you usually get in games like this.
- There’s a lot of content in this box. I’m not going to spoil anything here, but I will say that there are more missions after the main campaign and you can randomize each map to play the way you want to play.
- The comic-style mission introductions during the campaign are awesome, especially if you’ve seen the show. They got us excited to play through the episodes.
- This game is surprisingly quick to set up. It’s really all about putting the enemy tokens out on the map and then starting the mission. Setup only takes a couple of minutes.
- I also like that you don’t have to use the hidden traitor if your group isn’t into that. Some missions were designed for that mode, but the designer started creating co-op versions for them, which is awesome!
Cons
- I am starting to prefer these “maps in a book” style of games over large tile layouts, but the downside of that can be that you run out of room on spaces for multiple characters and items. That definitely happens in The Mandalorian: Adventures, forcing you to stack enemy tokens to save space. Not a huge deal, but a little annoying.
- You can have some nothing turns if you have a bad draw, especially early on in a mission. If you end up with a hand of low-strength cards, you can’t do much if you don’t have enemies around you.
- There are only four maps. The game does have high replay value, but I still feel like six maps should have been the minimum. It would have been easy to add more pages to the back of the book.
Final Thoughts
I had a great time playing through The Mandalorian: Adventures campaign (all two-player games), and we had fun playing through a couple more missions after that (both games at the three-player count). It’s a lot lighter than I thought it’d be, but that turned out to be a good thing. The action slot system is straightforward but unique and cool, and the game does the job of pulling you into the world of The Mandalorian.
I think The Mandalorian: Adventures is perfect for fans of the show who like light to light-medium cooperative board games. Also, if that action system seems cool to you, chances are you’re going to enjoy the game.
If someone asked me for a light, family-friendly adventure board game recommendation, The Mandalorian: Adventures would be one of the first games I’d mention, especially if they’re Star Wars fans.
The Mandalorian: Adventures Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
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