There are times where I enjoy a strategic, engine builder of sort and then there are times where I am in the mood for something a bit more casual. While I don’t have a ton of experience with narrative games, I have played and enjoyed “Destinies” and “Legacy of Dragonholt”. Similar to “Dungeons & Dragons”, the story in games like these usually leads the characters through some kind of peril accompanied by skill checks. I would say that “Lands of Galzyr” falls into this category as players will be leading characters from one adventure to another trying to earn prestige as they go. It’s also on the cuter side to boot…you’ll see what I mean. Special thanks to Ville over at Snowdale Design for providing a press copy for review purposes.
1-4 Players, Ages 14+, Average Playtime = 1-2.5 Hours
Setup & Prep Overview
It’s worth mentioning that setup may vary as it’s possible to continue a playthrough from one session to another. To sum up the start of a brand new game, players will choose one adventurer each as well as an adventure to cooperatively or competitively embark on…yes, you can play the game either or. Each player gets an adventure board that tracks gold, skills, and inventory.
Then there’s the cards…dear goodness the cards. Items, companions, adventurer status, quest, global status, local status, event, location…there’s a lot of cards. The game will have you set up a vault, library, quest slots, and character save slots using card holders and dividers. Cards typically have a number on them and you’ll pull those cards as required by the game.
There’s a double-sided board depicting season changes and a calendar / day board that tracks events and end-game similar to the way “Frostpunk: The Board Game” does it. You’ll also need a device capable of browsing the web in order to access the online Book of Adventures. This website doesn’t track progression, it just pulls the stories (scenes) from an extensive library as needed. There’s a downloadable book should you want to play even when you don’t have access to the Internet. Based on the starting global status card’s listed month, the app will randomly generate your starting day (Monday-Sunday).
There’s about 4-5 pages of information and setup prep work so I’ll kindly refer you to the rulebook for nitty gritty details. Be sure to read the welcome letter (a separate sheet) as it contains setup information that needs to be done before you even get to the rulebook, more on that later.
Rulebook: https://snowdaledesign.fi/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/LoG-Rulebook-EN-V1.0.pdf
Welcome Letter: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/247274/lands-galzyr-welcoming-letter-english
Book of Adventures: https://stories.daimyria.fi/
Gameplay Overview
The game takes place over a series of rounds and in each round, each player goes once in clockwise order. This continues until the day token reaches the end of game token (use a random unused timer token) on the calendar tracker. In competitive mode, players use the Discord global status card to determine game length and in cooperative mode, players use the Harmony global status card to determine the same.
A round consists of two phases:
1. Adventure Phase – Each player, once and in clockwise order, moves their figure up to two spaces on the board and then resolves a scene from the Book of Adventures. Scenes can come from a variety of places…the space the player is on, a quest card, an adventurer status card, a companion card, event card, and local status card. Scenes will depict a number and you’ll use the website or book to look up what happens next.
Outside of moving and resolving a scene, players can trade with other players (gold & items) and pick up quests assuming there is one at their current location to accept. There will always be three quests available on the board at all times. Players are limited to a maximum of three quests each.
2. Calendar Phase – Advance to the next day.
While adventuring, players will often be required to perform skill checks. Each player has a wheel on their character board depicting six attributes. At the beginning of the game, some skills will be accompanied by skill marks to show that the character has those skills. Each character starts with a specific set of skill marks, having no more than four total. However, players will have opportunities during the game to swap out skill marks and move them around. Each skill can have up to two marks.
During a skill check, players will always roll 5 dice. They start with five black basic dice (there’s one of each skill on the die faces), but can optionally substitute colored dice for black dice if they have marks in those skills. A player with two marks in orange (might) can swap two black dice for two orange dice. Orange dice, you guessed it, favor might on its faces by making them a double success. Colored dice also depict icons adjacent to its color on the wheel. Therefore, orange dice also contain icons for thievery and survival.
The website will typically ask you how many successes you got or what kind you got, and go from there like a choose your own adventure book.
Rounds continue until the endgame is reached. Players will compare prestige in a competitive game and combine prestige in a cooperative game. It is possible to save your game and play again for another in-game week (give or take depending on player count) using the same characters and items you had when you finished the last game. Of course, you can always reset the game and start anew. There are detailed instructions in the rulebook for both cases.
The above is a high-level overview and doesn’t cover everything found in the rulebook, but should give you an idea as to how the game is played.
The Review
Aidalee and I play “Dungeons & Dragons” for different reasons. She plays it for the stories that can be weaved. I play it to min-max my character. To her pleasant surprise and to my very slight dismay, this game is about story telling. Your character doesn’t improve and level up, but they do receive various companions, items, and other things along the way. Some people play games like this to watch their character get stronger while others simply enjoy the ride. “Lands of Galzyr” is casual enough to where I don’t mind the heavy emphasis on storytelling.
Speaking of storytelling, I was surprised to learn that this game doesn’t have the same format as “Destinies”. Where the adventures in “Destinies” have a clear-cut plot and ending explorable within a small open world environment, “Lands of Galzyr” doesn’t have a definitive ending. While there is an overarching story going on, it’s not required that you participate. Rather, this game is all about embarking on a series of mini-adventures. Players go in, play for X in-game days (based on player count) for some kind of mini-adventure or two, and are encouraged to pick up where they left off the next time around for more adventures. The gameplay loop ends up being several mini-adventures played over the course of several sessions until you run out of adventures or are tired of the game. The back of the box boasts 400 branching stories and 480 cards, so you probably won’t run out of adventures for a good while.
The rulebook gave me pause, in fact I had to re-read it several times and even then had to watch a video to help me understand how the game was set up. For example, step 4 of setup says to place the global status cards face-up within everyone’s view and to read them to see how they affect setup. It also says to choose whether to play competitively or cooperatively. It does not mention which starting month to pick and why, and to pick Harmony for co-op and Discord for competitive. Eventually the rulebook gets to the SPECIFIC Discord and Harmony cards under the Game End section, five pages later. The bit about the starting month is in the welcome letter (you roll a d12) and not mentioned anywhere in the rulebook. I don’t like it when rulebooks assume you know what the rules are (and where to find them) before you actually get to them. This all could have been organized better in my opinion. Luckily, the developer seems to be answering questions over on BoardGameGeek, which is great.
Once you get going though, you’re in for a wild ride. The game is both cute and charming, chalk full of engaging scenes that’ll make you think about your choices. Then there are the dice. You can reroll everything if you don’t like your initial roll, but you have to keep that second roll. I’m glad that there’s at least some dice mitigation there, though you’ll find items and companions much more helpful in modifying results. I love the tags…that is, cards have certain teal keyword tags that can be used in certain situations. Having the teal “sly” tag might open up more dialog options for the player in certain situations. Having brown or purple “fight” tags, as another example, might help you modify dice or guarantee successes.
There’s also the matter of timed cards, which I understand the concept but hate feeling rushed. Some cards, when acquired, are only active for a limited period of time. You track their resolution / exit via two matching tokens…one on the card and one on the calendar tracker. As someone who likes to min-max, it’s always hard to see myself losing abilities and cards (even though new ones were typically right around the corner). I keep having to reminding myself, “it’s just part of the story…it’s just part of the story.” I do not like that they expire at session end, so if you just acquire a 4-turn buff, you resolve it when the session / game is over and before the new month begins. As a house rule, we decided to keep these in play for the next month (using a new agreed upon timer expiration date) so as not to cheapen our hard-earned rewards.
I scoured online to find the best deals in the US, but couldn’t find many copies of the game surprisingly. My local game store is selling their last copy for about $100.00. The official website is selling the game along with various add-ons. The base game, plus shipping, runs about $115.00 after the US currency conversion. The price is going to be a bit off-putting to the casual gamer family, which is a shame considering the game is perfect for that kind of market. I hope the developers can find a way to make this game a bit more readily available to the masses because I can see kids everywhere loving this title. There was a scene or two that did depict NPC death and injuries, so this is not all family-friendly fluff. Parental guidance is recommended.
While you can play the game competitively, we prefer to play cooperatively. We liked the situations / scenes where you can include a partner. In such a case, a partner can provide the active player skill marks, items, companions, adventurer statuses, gold, and tags to help them out. The downside is that you both have to be on the same space which never happened in our playthrough. Time was so limited that we were focused on our own quests. Still, it’s possible to tag along on someone else’s quest line and do scenes pertaining to wherever you are.
Despite my rocky start with the rules, we both loved this game. Yes, I prefer the min-max play-style, but sometimes I want to take my thinking cap off and have a good laugh. There are no lose conditions, so I didn’t mind it as much when horrible things happened. The ever-evolving stories effecting one another kept me coming back for more and I suspect they’ll do the same to you. I feel like the game would have benefited from an explanation as to why cards were setup the way they were initially. Some purple quests cards were put into the quest deck and others into the library…once I realized that the ones in the library were follow-ups to said quests, it made more sense. It wasn’t until I played this game that everything “clicked”.
I wanted to spoil so much here as there were some really tense, exciting, and laugh out loud moments. Aidalee was like a kid in a candy store, reading my scenes using different voices and getting excited over the animal pictures / descriptors. You can play solo, but will have to read the secret turquoise text that only the storyteller should see…don’t worry it doesn’t ruin anything. This text typically breaks the fourth wall explaining gameplay mechanics. We both didn’t care for the min-maxing so we MAY house-rule and just add a new skill mark of our choice after say, 3 or 4 sessions to show some character growth. Don’t be afraid to use your imagination, this game sure didn’t and we love it.
Box Quote: You’ll come for the cuteness and stay for the stories, and vice versa.
Official website: https://snowdaledesign.fi/boardgames/lands-of-galzyr/
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Score: 9/10 (Outstanding)
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