Daniel (@dungeondive) bought Oltree on impulse days after learning it existed, having caught it on a Dice Tower top-ten of co-ops from a reviewer whose judgement he trusts — and, he admits freely, because it is gorgeous. Antoine Bauza’s name on the box helps: Ghost Stories is a favourite, and Oltree reads to him as Ghost Stories crossed with Legends of Andor, with much of the art by Vincent Dutrait.
The Empire has fallen and the Rangers still patrol. Characters are deliberately thin — a health bar, one power, one die toward a skill test — and he recommends three or four of them, having found two genuinely punishing. Your fortress rings eight regions, and buildings you raise there add dice to the four test types; the chunky custom dice score on fives and sixes, with a third success face you can buy for a point of health.
Almost everything else is decks of bad news: assignments, a page-turning Chronicle story deck, incidences laid face-down three per region, problems that smother the villages’ benefits, and events. An adversity die decides which one fires each turn.
His one real caveat is the complaint he’s heard from others and concedes: on a first run you may not deduce what the Chronicle actually wants until it’s too late to build for it. He guessed right and won. Losing to that wouldn’t spoil his evening; he knows it would spoil some.
Oltree can be lost to a final challenge you had no fair way to anticipate on a first playthrough. Daniel shrugs — he had fun up to the loss. Where’s your line on that?