Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

Wanting to have a solo game to play too, fg bought himself the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game last week and brought it over this afternoon.

The game is rather daunting, and has almost 500 cards in the basic set - fg bought a couple more expansion packs, which meant we had over 500 cards. Fortunately the game box was design to help organise the different sets of cards, and the rules actually come with a "map" of which cards go into which slots.

The game itself is not too difficult once you get the basic mechanics. It plays rather like a mapless dungeoncrawl, or a role-playing game without the role-playing. A campaign consists of several scenarios, each of which consists of a few scenes; each scene comes with a randomised deck of encounters and treasures, which the characters go through as they "explore" each locale. The make-up of each deck has some relation to the locale: a civilised locale will have more ally cards for example, while a dungeon locale will have more treasures and monsters.

The characters may choose to stick together or split up to explore the locales. While sticking together is the safest, there is a clock running - if your party does not "close" all the locales and eliminate the boss villain in 30 turns, you lose the scenario.

Winning a scenario allows your characters to upgrade, and they also get to keep some of the treasures they gain along the way.

We played a campaign through and a scenario in a second campaign, and kept our characters. This is a rather fun beer & pretzel game which we will most likely play again soon.