So, further, and more cohesive, HEXplore It: Forests of Adrimon thoughts. My friends wound up beating the game a few hours after I left, which put the total active playtime at around 8 hours. Lol. Significantly longer than the 1-3 hours the box suggests. But we did a bunch of things wrong and had right at the cap of players, so tons of added chaos and confusion. But that said, I do think it’s a game best played by a lot of people who are down to learn the extensive rules before getting started.
So, for those who didn’t read @tomchick’s delightful review of the original HEXplore It volume, Valley of the Dead King, it’s basically a boardgame-ified RPG campaign using the classic “hexcrawl” style – bop around a large, initially incomplete world map with your party of adventurers, discovering quests and baddies 'neath the stairs of every hex you cross, till you power up enough to Go Do The Thing.
In this case, the heroes are assembled from a Race, Role (class), and – optionally, if you sprung for the Expansion – Trait. The races determine minor stat bonuses, give a small power, and set your daily food usage; the roles set your baseline stats and give you a handful of more potent powers; and the trait gives an unusual extra power that slowly gets stronger if you can manage to get its weird conditional into play.
Stats basically fall into 3 categories: your Abilities (Attack, Defend, and 2 powers), Skills (Explore, Navigate, and Survival), and Vitals (Health and Energy), each of which can be slowly increased by stealing gear upgrades in town (more on that in a sec), buying them outright at a Workshop you can eventually build, or picking up random Power Ups from completing quests and defeating monsters/bosses.
You bop around an increasingly randomly generated hex tile map (reaching the edge of the map plops down a new random tile), rolling your movement skills each turn to see if you find gold, food, and your way in general. The map is littered with endless little interactive widgets: bosses, “Mindwiped” cities (which can only be raided via daring die-rolls), a floating ethereal druid grove where you can only spend three separate currencies harvested from nature itself, and more, many of them randomly added by the “Destination” deck (similar to VotDK’s Quests), where Fragments of great legendary artifacts are stashed, locked behind these various skill challenges and fights. Each turn, you also potentially face a randomly drawn/chosen Circumstance – anything from picking up an ally or useful item to facing a fight or deadly challenge – if you elected not to Move Carefully, which severely cuts into your speed.
And you need that speed. Eventually, you’ll need to build up enough power and a large enough stash of artifacts and bought/stolen gear to face down againt the evil Magi herself, Adrimon, at her acropolis covering one of the map’s towns. And you’d better hurry, cuz, her own power is growing each turn, generating nasty baddies that camp out on the holy sites where artifacts can be forged from collected Fragments, sending out lieutenants to stalk the lands, slowly gaining control of some helpful entities, and even eventually mindwiping heroes (if her power grows higher than one of your Skills, you crit fail every roll with it. If she overwhelms all three, you’re effectively dead). If her power gets strong enough, she’ll just teleport to wherever you are and kick your ass herself, dammit.
As you might guess based on the number of paragraphs it took me to summarize, there’s a lot of shit going on here, and it’s all interlocked. Even simple rules (increase the Fate Tracker by 1, marking a hex-side on the battle mat, each turn; when you hit six, increase the overall Fate Cycle – and Adrimon’s power – by 1) are quickly complicated (some Fragments and Power Ups increase the Tracker, too. Oh, so can bad failures while raiding mindwiped cities. That item you picked up also increases it on a trigger of some sort; don’t forget that. Oh, and once the Cycle hits 5, don’t forget to immediately do this effect, and start rolling each turn for this other effect. And when it hits 10. . . ).
So for six dudes, some distracted by the trials of cooking delicious food for the rest, only one of whom had ever even heard of the game before, it was a lot to take in. Each character seems deceptively simple till you see all the interlocking math and calculations, as raising one power increases the duration of another, which then goes on to enable a secondary effect on a third power, which, when used, also lets you use the first one simultaneously for free so long as both their ranks are high enough. . .
That said, I really did love the constantly scribbled note-taking absurdity of it. By the night’s end, hands were stained black with dry erase ink (don’t worry, most game components are dry-erasable!) and the entire living room was a chaotic maze of trackers, rules placards, character sheets, collected items, and the enormous, winding serpentine insanity of our hand-crafted version of the game map.
Realizing now we played a few rules wrong (which I count as a win given the dozens that we got right), I also see that our challenge was noticeably diminished and several eminent threats were held at bay much too long. By rolling in some expansion content (the extra classes and races and traits) but not others (the extra bosses, extra tricks for the villain, etc.), I also made things too easy. And, as Tom noted, the sheer adaptive firepower of a 6-man team is really more than most of the threats you’ll face can handle once the players get their feet under them and aren’t scrabbling around Mindwiped cities every turn in a desperate search for food and enough Skill Upgrades to avoid being Mindwiped themselves.
But man, if I could get a 4-man team to play this (optional fifth if we want someone to play the Fury of Dracula-esque “control the villain” optional mode from the expansion), with all rules followed and all content added? I think this might be on our rotation for a long, long time.
At least, that’s what I’m guessing it means when the host just went to the website and ordered the 4-pack of both volumes and their respective expansions at 3AM when our first match wrapped up for good.
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