A bit of a surprise this one. I backed the base game as a long time Thorgal comics fan and Portal Games admirer. I didn’t really have a clue what the game was about. I assumed it was your classic choose your own adventure overland crawl, Thorgal styles. However, I’d say its more a Robinson Crusoe meets Unsettled style of co-op puzzle.
You take the role of Thorgal, his family, lovers or friends – its 1-4 co-op but for solo you play dual-handed with no real changes. Every hero has a different asymmetric power, varied progression tracks and starting gear; each plays quite a bit differently.
The game mechanics feature a clever action selection track, that evolves throughout play and rewards clever sequencing of actions. You take four actions each round, draw an event card and set up for the next round.
Journeying, attacking enemies and receiving wounds all share a cunning polyomino mechanic that makes these skill checks interesting. Not just in the sense of a spatial puzzle but also in terms of how you balance rewards versus wounds, and a kind of push your luck element where you want to avoid running out of room placing tiles too greedily.
Each scenario is discrete and episodic with quest specific rules making each adventure a very different conundrum to solve. All have multiple paths to victory.. and defeat. Overall its an intriguing efficiency puzzle coupled with a very Thorgal narrative.
Torkan’s Temple
Taken by slavers, Thorgal liberates his fellow prisoners.
With the help of disgruntled merchants, Thorgal smuggles a payload of lunar rocks into the foundations of the unholy temple and burns it to the ground.
Appreciate the write-up. I took a long look at this while it was crowdfunding, but ultimately wasn’t sure if the game would live up to the IP, and sort of guessed that I would be comfortable waiting for some reviews and maybe looking for a secondhand copy.
This looks much better than I thought it would - thanks for the photos and the description - “Unsettled” is a favorite of mine and this makes me want to play this game!
would you say it is less punishing than Robinson Crusoe? Is there more wiggle-room to have fun, or does it need to be played as a pure efficiency puzzle. Unsettled still felt more like a puzzle than an adventure, but did not punish you as much for wandering off a bit.
Less punishing than Robinson Crusoe but still an efficiency puzzle.
In Thorgal, each scenario is very different, comes with distinct rules with its own branching narrative. If you stop to smell too many roses you will invariably run out of time. Every episode gives you interactions that allow you to “upgrade” various actions – if you don’t upgrade, you will not have enough “power” to win but if you upgrade too much, you won’t have enough turns to complete on time.
Matching the right character to the scenario also helps – but you probably won’t know what works well until your first pass through a scenario. I like to play thematically. I read the intro, choose some characters that match the story in my head and make decisions I think they might make. Mostly I perish in the last round
With the children rescued, Thorgal trusts the shepherd with their escape. Betrayed, captured and paraded through the village, Thorgal and Tjall are then sunk to the bottom of the lake with stones tied to their feet.
We were on the fence about this one and ultimately didn’t go for it. But neither of us was familiar with the IP either.
Glad to hear it turned out well! We do own Unsettled and Robinson Crusoe and while we like those sort of games they aren’t generally what we reach for, so they also don’t make it to our table very often. I have the recently released giant book of scenarios for Robinson Crusoe too, which makes for more than enough of this style of game for us. Probably best that we passed.
But always good to know when designers put out something worthwhile. More names to keep my eyes on.
