In my journey to play anything that’s not a euro, I’ve tried a few narrative heavy campaign games and I’ve at least learned that I don’t know these kinds of games really do much for me. And also to not trust anyone in boardgames who claims a game has good writing or a good story. The thing that really kills these games for me are the narratives, because they doesn’t feel focused or developed enough to get me invested in, well, anything. And I wonder how much of this is because the narratives need to be kept somewhat breezy and light for an environment with multiple players, or how much these are trying to bank on that “emergent narrative” aspect of boardgaming to get you invested in the stories. But since I’m not really into the whole role-playing and imagining my own narrative thing for now (I feel like if I wanted to do that I should be playing tabletop RPGs instead), the narratives are too shallow and the mechanics divorced from the narrative are not interesting enough by themselves.
I guess I really do want something more mechanically complex or more gamey (I feel I’m inevitably just going to fall back to euros). I don’t really mind having played these though. It was interesting to see how the idea of narrative heavy boardgames works. I think mechanically these games are actually okay ideas for something designs to propel you through a narrative, they just need a better story and writing to make that narrative something you actually want to see as a reward for playing through the mechanics. This just might be something videogames do better (unless you want to play TTRPGs).
There are a few other games I want to check out that thankfully are more like regular board games, but I think I’ll be exploring stuff with Tabletop Simulator more going forward. Just saves money and physical space.
The three narrative games I tried:
Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood.
Summary
You alternate between reading a story book with some light CYOA elements and a “boss battle” where you fight one or several big monsters on a board. This is the one that’s most like just reading a straight story book between battles, but despite integrating CYOA decision points not a lot of the decisions in the story feel meaningful. You are funneled into one of two story paths every chapter regardless of what you choose and your decisions mainly seem to affect what bonuses you get before combat. But most of all, the story isn’t very good. After setting up what seemed like the main event to put an adventure into motion, it kind of forgets that ever happened and you meander through lots of random adventures. It introduces characters but they have little presence in the moment-to-moment storytelling and aren’t really developed in any way so it’s hard to get interested in any of it. Which made it really weird when it spent a few paragraphs talking about how attractive one of the characters are and how everyone found them really attractive.
The combat is fine (uses a card based system like Gloomhaven), but the decision making feels a little too straightforward. For what should be a large number of possible things you can do with your hand of cards, the choice of what to do each turn feels obvious (whichever one lets you run up and attack easiest). This could be because I was playing as two full characters and two simplified characters (simple characters have less actions to choose from but buffed stats/skills to compensate), so I might come back to this and try a full party of full characters. Mercifully this game also provides abbreviated story summaries if you just want to skip to the battles.
ISS Vanguard
Summary
This integrates the story directly into the gameplay more than Oathsworn. As you do things in the game, whether it’s part of exploring a planet or managing your spaceship, you will be instructed to check a CYOA narrative logbook to read story contextualizing your actions and affecting gameplay. It’s got a lot of interesting ideas. Each player plays one of the space ship’s departments (security, science, engineering, recon) and you build a selection of dice that represent your competency at certain types of skills that will be required when moving on and exploring planets.
So you’ve got dice that have faces for mining, for studying aliens, for physical strength, and a whole host of other things. When you go explore a planet you can do some recon work and figure out what kinds of activities a planet will require and you equip your squad with the right crewmembers, dice, and equipment to roll for whatever challenges the planet will represent. As you explore the planet and succeed/fail at actions, you’ll read different narrative logs in the logbook that tell you what happens, which can open new paths on the planet, introduce global effects, or change your objective. I don’t know if it’s a deep game, but it is neat and the breeziness of the system makes it easy to alternate between gameplay and reading the logbook.
You’ve also this thing called the ship phase where your space ship is represented by a big old binder with card sleeve pages, and you are using that binder to represent what is on your ship, what crewmembers are working on what activities, and so on. It’s kind of like busy work, but as a physical process it’s cool to play with.
My main issue with ISS Vanguard is that it’s a longform campaign game and, once again, the overarching narrative has been too generic if you’re familiar at all with sci-fi tropes. Now that I’ve typed this all up I kind of want to revisit it though, just to explore some planets. But I wouldn’t look forward to working around the restraints on what I can do placed upon me by the overarching story, and the penalties for avoiding doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin
Summary
An open-world-ish adventure game where you move your figure around a map made of large cards, each representing a place in the world. As you move around you place more map cards, slowly growing this world through which you can freely travel back and forth.
This game feels more CYOA book with board game mechanics than a board game with a story, but not necessarily in a bad way. Every one of those map cards represents a place in the world and you’ve got a big Exploration Journal book that has a section for each of those locations. For whatever place you’re on, you can open the book and explore that location, going through a CYOA adventure there. There’s a choice matrix you’re filling out to track long term progression through the story, so you get access to different stories as you revisit places to reflect where you are in the game. There are also global event cards and what not that also give overall quest goals and events relevant to whatever chapter of the game you’re on.
There’s a really weird and abstract combat and diplomacy system where you’re playing cards and trying to physically connect and link chains of symbols between the various cards to activate any effect. It makes sense the more you play with it, but it’s such a weird thing. It’s not like you’re playing a card to attack the monster, you’re trying to play a card with a Red Damage Cube icon that lines up with the Aggression stat icon on the last card played so you can add one Red Damage Cube to the enemy, but you also want the new card you played to have a Courage stat icon so you can play this other card that has a Draw One Card effect that attaches to Courage stat icons. Or you can play another card that has a time-delayed effect of adding 2 Red Damage Cubes after a turn has passed, but only if you do not link another card to it because the stat icons are placed in a position such that if you were to line up a new card to them, the new card would be placed on top of of the existing card’s effect text, nullifying its ability.
But hey, maybe if you’re going to make a big Dark Souls-wannabe fantasy game, maybe don’t have me just running errands for a generic narcissistic king and with his generic family drama for the first 15 hours of the game. I’ve tapped out because I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last. It’s got an interesting world, but I wish the story itself was interesting. It’s also another one where the game has characters, but there’s not enough development of those characters to make me care about them. Maybe that much writing would pull you too out of the game if you’re playing with a group, but without it everything feels too lightly touched on. Especially the titular villains, the Kings of Ruin, one of whom finally appeared but there’s like little story interaction with it at all. It just adds a game mechanic. Felt very anti-climactic.
