Daniel (@dungeondive) takes a first look at Jack D’s Adventure of D Second Edition, freshly delivered from Kickstarter, and places it at the far mechanical end of the card-adventure spectrum, the opposite pole from a choose-your-own-adventure book. At its core it is a race: power up your character across a random 4×3 grid of twelve double-sided location cards (a basic side and an underlined advanced side) until you can enter the Tower of Death and defeat the ancient evil inside.
The heart of the design is the diceless Power deck. Each turn you draw six cards that are simultaneously your hit points, your movement (discard one per step), your test totals and, once defeated, your items: a red wolf’s card flips to become red fur. Play a card matching the challenge’s stat and you heal one, drawing back into hand to keep the turn going. Stats slide under the character card and rotate up to eight, and over a dozen characters each carry a unique skill, with the skill cards doubling as fairy dust on their backs.
Daniel loves the multi-use cards and open-information planning but finds the solo timer (five rounds at expert) brutally tight and not much fun yet. He thinks the game shines competitively at three, a thinking player’s Runebound or Talisman. Complaints: thin card stock that begs for sleeves, after which nothing fits back in the box he likes, and a wish for a little more narrative text.
Adventure of D asks you to plan a whole turn with open information and no dice. Is that precision what you want from a small-box adventure, or do you miss the chaos?