I'll be keepin' an eye out for your next game, Alexander. I've played Quests over Coffee several times and did enjoy it. It's gettin' shelved for now, as I have many other games to play, but I'll be keeping it. 🙂
Sorry ya didn't like it, Z, as you were anticipating it positively. It does lack depth ("largely pointless"), for sure. If Cursed Castle falls flat for ya, it'll become a 'Series' you don't need to bother looking at in the future. 🙂
It's not so much a lack of depth (I enjoy very light games, e.g. A Gentle Rain, which has no depth I know of), but a lack of sense, a lack of direction. Your choices amount to a) the order with which you attempt quests and b) pre- and post-roll mitigations by spending resources. None of these choices interest me per se.
When you fulfill a quest, you get stuff that doesn't feel rewarding on a basal level. A useless and crappy item most of the time, or additional resources to restore the ones you may have spent or lost. At the end of the game, you have just rolled 3d6 ten times (+ re-rolls) and count how many of these turned into beating an arbitrary threshold. It just doesn't feel very enticing for me overall.
This is a personal take on it. As I said, this is a solo party game. You are supposed to look at the funny picture, have a laugh, roll to see which outcome you end up with, and laugh again. And that's about it. I don't feel interested in it. I need a sense of progression or a sense of usefulness, the impression that what I do actually has a meaning within the game.
Take Crypt of Chaos, for instance. Totally dumb game, a pure luckfest. Still, I like it for what it is, because you get to explore stuff, and your character grows in power, so in the end, you feel that you "did" something, even though you just went through the mentions while pretending you knew better than a random guess.
A less personal take on it is that I felt the rulebook was lacking, which, given the game's simplicity, is absolutely a shame. I never could figure out properly the #,#,# special condition. Is it triggered as soon as you get one of these results? Or only if you get all of them? The rules are ambiguous. And the shop card. Are you supposed to draw it randomly? Can you purchase an item marked for trade? A game that simple should not let you puzzling over the rules.
End game (perfect win, my items counterbalance the quest I failed - special thought to JW here):
The storing solution. Unsleeved, it's a perfect fit, with the special compartment holding the dice and wooden tokens:
Ironically, I have used the VHS to store sleeves.
OK, I totally disliked it. I felt it was largely pointless, the humor didn't score with me (I stopped paying attention to the pictures quickly enough), and it seems that the latter is the main selling point of the game. I would much rather play again Minecraft Explorers which I tried out yesterday. Probably just as light and luck-driven, but cheaper, and it holds in a deckbox even sleeved.
I'll probably sell it, if such a thing can be sold. If the Cursed Castle isn't better, this will be the end of my experiences with Gabe Barrett designs/published products (I sold both The Last Stronghold and The Forgotten Road, and Hunted: Kobayashi Tower as well).
I got it as well and I must say, the box totally bugs me. I think it's ugly, it looks frail, the cards are swinging hard within it, and you can't sleeve them. I was never fond of VHS and they remind me too much of the inescapable obsolescence of our consuming goods so the 'nostalgic' feeling of having game in it doesn't work either.
P.S. I forgot to mention I love the last sentence on the back of the 'box' - "Will you partake in this marketing ploy thinly veiled as a call to adventure?" 😄
I haven't played it yet, JW, but all I know about the letter Q, is that in English, every word that starts with a Q is followed by the letter U. However, I suspect that trivial fact is irrelevant in this game. 🙂
To pile up on the trivia: the English words in qu betray a Latin origin, usually mediated through French (squirrell, squire, quiet, question, quest, quality, etc.), as was discussed in the video you once shared with us.
One notable exception to that rule is queen and the fact that it is spelled with qu- is just a pure oddity.
Hello! Thank you for trying the game out and giving it your honest take. Hopefully some of my other games (mostly free) may fit your game preferences!
Sorry ya didn't like it, Z, as you were anticipating it positively. It does lack depth ("largely pointless"), for sure. If Cursed Castle falls flat for ya, it'll become a 'Series' you don't need to bother looking at in the future. 🙂
Promise kept! I played the game!
Set-up (I played as much vanilla as possible):
End game (perfect win, my items counterbalance the quest I failed - special thought to JW here):
The storing solution. Unsleeved, it's a perfect fit, with the special compartment holding the dice and wooden tokens:
Ironically, I have used the VHS to store sleeves.
OK, I totally disliked it. I felt it was largely pointless, the humor didn't score with me (I stopped paying attention to the pictures quickly enough), and it seems that the latter is the main selling point of the game. I would much rather play again Minecraft Explorers which I tried out yesterday. Probably just as light and luck-driven, but cheaper, and it holds in a deckbox even sleeved.
I'll probably sell it, if such a thing can be sold. If the Cursed Castle isn't better, this will be the end of my experiences with Gabe Barrett designs/published products (I sold both The Last Stronghold and The Forgotten Road, and Hunted: Kobayashi Tower as well).
I got it as well and I must say, the box totally bugs me. I think it's ugly, it looks frail, the cards are swinging hard within it, and you can't sleeve them. I was never fond of VHS and they remind me too much of the inescapable obsolescence of our consuming goods so the 'nostalgic' feeling of having game in it doesn't work either.
It looks great and I am now even more excited to get mine! And I will play it, I promise!
P.S. I forgot to mention I love the last sentence on the back of the 'box' - "Will you partake in this marketing ploy thinly veiled as a call to adventure?" 😄
I just played this last week (the print and play version), when I got to the "Q" on Alphabet St.