Daniel (@dungeondive) is unusually blunt about Gordon Alfred’s Lost Ones, set in the Of Dreams & Shadows world: that parent game isn’t fantastic, and this one is okay rather than great — worth it at the roughly thirty dollars it was going for, and he’d recommend it harder for one specific reason he saves for the end.
What it really is, he argues, is interactive fiction wearing a board game’s clothes — a very rules-light cousin of The 7th Continent or Tainted Grail. Kidnapped by the Fae, you wake on tile one and look for a way home across 121 unique tiles, each with its own storybook page, connections printed along the edges so setup is trivial.
The system he genuinely likes is the ability cards, which are simultaneously your interaction currency and your hit points. You cannot engage every story hook on every tile, so the game is a running argument about what to leave unexplored. Meanwhile the Nightmare — a raven that enters play the first time you trip its icon — walks toward you, and a moon clock runs down.
His complaint is the box, and it’s not incidental: enormous wells for standees, empty space everywhere, the whole thing sized only to fit an adventure guide that could have been printed smaller. It fits perfectly in a Legends Untold box, and at that size he’d recommend it warmly.
Daniel would recommend this game more enthusiastically if the box were smaller. Has shelf footprint ever cost a game its place in your collection?