The capstone. Daniel (@dungeondive) sits down for his definitive Fallen Land 2nd Edition solo review and, in passing, reveals that the game is going to land on his upcoming top-10 adventure games of all time. Seventeen years of design (2005 → 2022), and it shows on the table.
He plays a long detailed mid-game state — the Brotherhood out of St George, Utah, against a ghost AI opponent — and uses it to demonstrate the game’s bones rather than just describe them. We see the armoured car and Bruce Lee’s nunchucks loadout, the linked-gear bonuses chaining four cards into a stacked combat advantage, the homemade BGG-published character/town sheet that absorbs the bookkeeping, and the strict house rule that if you forget a bonus you lose the bonus — managing your faction is part of the design, not a sideshow.
Two example turns walk through the new end-of-turn town-events phase from Descendants (a Protectorate event, a 40-town-health threshold trigger), a Plains encounter against cattle rustlers won on overwhelming combat and survival rolls, a resource takeover, and a bookkeeping-heavy mountain breakdown. Throughout, Daniel keeps returning to the same verdict: this is one of the finest adventure games ever made, the documentation is unmatched, and his criticisms barely qualify — fiddly bookkeeping (solved by the sheet), text-heavy cards (don’t play with six), and the small one of the criticisms is having to wear his glasses.
Daniel ends saying he can’t imagine the Dungeon Dive collection without Fallen Land 2nd Edition — a permanent-shelf game. Which game in your collection has crossed that line for you, where downsizing or a cull simply wouldn’t apply?