Daniel (@dungeondive) went looking on Amazon for a fantasy adventure game he could simply buy — no crowdfunder, no hoops, no waiting — and came back with Pegasus Spiele’s The Dwarves: Big Box, around $55 and based on a novel series by Markus Heitz he knew nothing about. It is not a top ten game, he says, but it packs a great deal into a normal-sized box.
The shape will be familiar to anyone who has played Legends of Andor or Defenders of the Realm: cooperative threat management, simpler than either, and the simplicity is what he admires. Five books’ worth of saga cards give you scenarios you can play in any order; orcs, trolls and Alfar spawn at numbered gates and march on Black Saddle, corrupting hexes as they go. Everything resolves on a d6 pool — four, five or six to hit, depending on what you are swinging at — with almost no way to mitigate a cold streak until gear arrives.
The standout is the dwarven council track, a political tug-of-war humming away beneath the quests, handing out bonuses or penalties as the party’s standing shifts. The complaints are all component-level: the meeples are too tall, too easy to knock over, and they bury the hex names a fast game needs you to find quickly. He would replace them with cubes.
Would swapping the meeples for cubes fix this game for you, or do you want the toys on the table regardless?