Daniel (@dungeondive) reviews Wode Ridge, a review copy and the largest box yet in Gabe Barrett’s Hunted series of solo card games, each built on a borrowed genre. The original took Alien, Kobayashi Tower took Die Hard, North Pole took Christmas. This one is kids on bikes: Stranger Things filtered through E.T., with four children, an alien companion and a town full of supernatural trouble.
The system is press-your-luck resource management across time, health and energy dice. You draw action cards into a hunted row, spend icons to claim their benefits, and can hide to wipe the row clean at a cost in time. The twist here is double-sided cards — step through a portal and the whole deck flips to its darker, deadlier face. Location cards shuffled into the deck give you a mall, a cemetery, a government lab.
His favourite part is the evidence board. Clues arrive as Polaroid-style photos, pinned up and connected by yarn, and you slot them into columns by matching icons until a completed column sends you to the adventure book and eventually reveals which cryptid is stalking the town. His reservation is footprint: it eats far more table than the experience justifies. He still prefers Mining Colony 415, which does the same job smaller and adds a dexterity minigame.
Wode Ridge gives you a better puzzle than Mining Colony 415 but demands three times the table — where is your line between a game earning its footprint and a small experience in a big box?