This looks really cool!
Are you playing two player, or two-handed?
Two player. We’re enjoying the very light competitive elements. Sort of a Legolas & Gimli feel this way. Trying to outdo one another for glory and gold, but always on the same side.
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I posted this also on BGG and Qt3, but in case any Mage Knight fans are here: I’m playing the famously big footprint game on two small tables (solo). I have a dining table but with Thanksgiving coming, I can’t leave games set up there. The first table is the main play area, 24 inches by 18 inches. Charlie (upper left, labradoodle) stands guard.
The rest of the game is on a second table, 20 inches by 13 inches.
This table uses five dashboards from other games. The three at the front of the table were made for LoTR: Journeys in Middle Earth, and the back two dashboards were made for Gloomhaven.
Side-by-side, I can play on the couch with room for wife while we watch TV:
The big issue will likely be fitting many tiles (I may have to remove some of the starting tiles as I proceed, and not leave my hand on the table) and finding space for more than two or three units.
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“Charlie’s weapons” 
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Just played my first game of Star Trek: Captain’s Chair. Played 2-player with my wife. The game is a fairly involved card game by WizKids. It plays 1 or 2 players only. It’s got a lot of moving parts, but we didn’t have any trouble getting into it. The rules are really clear with lots of pictures and examples. I loved it. I think this is definitely something to check out, especially if you are a Star Trek fan.
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Oooh I hope a video is coming soon.
Your sketches show quite some talent!
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Over the past couple days I got in some solo play of Dark Venture 2E with all the expansion content (characters, items, locations, quests) integrated into the base game (including CRAWL!content, but not playing in the new CRAWL! gamemode – that’ll be next, sometime). I had played 1E a fair bit, and I admire the game greatly as a cohesive, creative thing. (The official soundtrack continues to grow on me, but a session is long enough that it’s handy to have some unofficial stuff that’s suitably weird.) I enjoyed playing it and enjoyed writing about it in some detail, below.
Trading away (some) rules-puzzles for world-puzzles
The rules revisions in 2E definitely lighten/speed things up. I still occasionally get stuck in the weeds in combat, but it’s much faster to get Locations and Characters into the world, and in general you can access Items more readily. One might be tempted to say that the goal was to remove the inventory/hand-management “puzzley” stuff and foreground the “adventurey” stuff. But with all the expansion content in play, in my experience, the rules changes mainly serve to foreground a different kind of puzzle that’s baked right into the adventurey stuff. With more characters/items/locations the world feels more densely populated and richly textured. Between all the Quests cards, plus the flavortext and actions at all the locations, you can explore a lot of variety in your character’s motivations. It becomes an interesting, thematic puzzle to get the bits and pieces you randomly draw to fit together into a whole story or vignette of some kind in which the world reveals itself.
But now that the rules have lessened other burdens to more explicitly pose this challenge to the player, I find that Dark Venture’s unique setting leaps into sharper focus and becomes more accessible in roleplayer-ly gameplay. The world of Darkgrange is a brutish cauldron, bashed into shape by the huge fists of some mutated demigod, inscribed on all sides with insane, alien arcana, and bubbling over with curdled space-time that’s still squirming while it cooks. You control a specific Hero but you, dear player, are Special Agent 00⯑ and you have a license to get Weird with it. Read the fragmented lore, imagine the fragmented world, then force it into the form your will demands.
Bug or feature?
This doesn’t always go off without a hitch. In some of Daniel’s remarks on Dark Venture 1E he highlighted this with the remark that some 1E game sessions naturally had a good “seeding” of elements, and some felt more unbalanced or disjointed. The same is still true in 2E – perhaps “more true” since the streamlined rules provide you with world-bits at a faster rate, and perhaps “more-truer yet again” with the added diversity of the expansion content.
There’s also something about the pacing and turn structure that makes it a challenge to build out the world and your place in it. Heroic Quests are poised to serve as the major ‘beats’ of any story you might tell, but it’s not always easy to work towards completing them – you almost always need to get a little lucky with card-draws that help to assemble the world you need (often, it feels, at the last minute). If you try to tell a linear story in which events follow the order of play (“my character did the turn-1 activities followed by the turn-2 activities,” etc) it can feel very tenuous and contradictory.
Seeding seems difficult as a solution to house-rule here. (I think the CRAWL! mode may partially address this by imposing some order and expectation.)
How I’m playing it
A couple strategies are helping me have fun experiences. Some (all?) of these are not terribly innovative and may be applicable well beyond Dark Venture.
- More Options: The 2E start rules have you draw or select 1 Hero, then draw 4 Heroic Quest cards and keep 2. To provide more opportunities for thematic links, I draw 3 Heroes and 4 Heroic Quests and select a combination (1 Hero and 2 HQs) that seems cool. For example, last game I paired a Warlock character with an HQ that rewarded me with QPs for visiting specific locations and (thematically, but not mechanically) studying the arcane at each location. I am looking for more places to slip in options like this – e.g., maybe any time you’re told to draw n HQ cards, drawn n+1 or n*2 and keep n.
- Ret-Conning: Since simple linear storytelling doesn’t work great, don’t bother with it. Let events have time to breathe: don’t worry too much about ordering game-events in time until you’ve got something to work with. Sure, I selected the “run around the world and study the arcane” HQ card at setup, but there’s no way, thematically, that the quest wasn’t assigned to me by the Warlock NPC that I encountered in turn 3. Get Weird – a little temporal distortion never hurt nobody in Darkgrange.
- Hijack Follower Rolls: One turn I spent my last AP to get to a location with an NPC and wanted to fight/defeat them to gain a Quest-relevant item, but they were not, by default, aggressive to me. It would be a better scene if I didn’t stay there overnight and fight them in the AM, so I hijacked the follower roll rules to quickly work out a way of checking if I could offend the NPC and trigger them into battle. (I did.)
- Selectivity: Use whatever helps from flavortext and ignore the rest.
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Games played in Nov. 2025:
HeroQuest;
Mice and Mystics;
Talisman: Revised 4th Edition;
Dungeon Degenerates: Hand of Doom;
Talisman: The Magical Quest Game – 5th Edition;
Talisman (Third Edition);
Heroes of Barcadia;
Escape the Dark Castle;
Talisman Dice (Fanmade).
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I still haven’t played Dark Venture 2e with all the new stuff. I need to. It’s a game I think about often.
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Talisman Dice? I’m searching BGG, but can’t find anything about it.
What did you think? I own it but really haven’t played it.
Talisman Dice is a fanmade game. Quick and easy to play “while on the go”. I bring it in vacation. I found it on the Talisman fan group on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/497706903664022/permalink/8680968762004421/?
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I’m enjoying mice & mystics a lot. It’s surprisingly challenging- much more than its “family story game” vibes would suggest. I’ve played about ten games with it with a 50% win rate.
it’s very clearly inspired by classic dungeon crawlers like Heroquest, and is very narrative driven which is exactly the sort of game I enjoy.
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Earthborne Rangers
My Shaper has been on a tear through the Estian ruins of the Valley.
Initially bounced off the Ranger tramp onto the concrete – delivering cookies then “connecting” with nature and the stranger things trying to kill me was just too much suicidal empathy, even for my dungeon crawling tastes.
Still, I figured I’d kumbaya through a week of game time before handing in my conduit. Lucky 'cos things only start to cook around Day 5.
Now, nearly a month later, I’ve saved the Valley from the faceless biomelds munching on the good folk of Earthborne.
Huzzah 
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Just got delivered all of Plunderlust. I had fooled around with 7…7 the free mork borg card game and enjoyed it enough. Then geek gamer did a post. Then I got back into working on my own project very much inspired by 7…7 (and other card games). So now I need to dive deep!
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How have I never heard of this? I think I might have bought it just on the name alone!
Fight your way through derelict starships and stations as Raider crews plundering for survival.
Am barely resisting the impulse buy.
Is it any good?
Here is Geek Gamer’s Review:
I come from a background of MTG and deck design. I love deck builders/construction, and cards as a medium… the smell of a new deck does something to me. I recently am strongly considering getting into Flesh and Blood just because of my this desire but… I digress…
Honestly? I love it. For me the dice rolling and HP tracking (aka mork borg) is a little tedious BUT. I am a person who thought the design of the Tomb Raider TCG was brilliant, and this really hit home for me. I think the OSR multitudes of dice is a little bit of a turnoff for me, but the game sings IMO, and is very VERY solo able (like tomb raider TCG).
I’ll add that structurally, it is a HUGE inspiration for my own CCG. The juxtaposition of a deck of enemies/deck of loot/companions (also used in tomb raider ccg… you can probably sense a trend here) is very interesting. In some ways it reminds me of After the Virus in the sense that the enemies and good things are in the same deck, and show up as you draw them, so your deck construction is a tense balance of good and bad.
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