Thames & Kosmos 691746 Kosmos: The Liberation of Rietburg World of Andor, Co-op Game, 2-4 Players, Ages 10+ , Brown

I have not played any of the other games in the Andor series so this if my first trip into the lore and fantasy theme of this universe. What I’ve encountered is an immensely replayable game with fast turnaround time, easy setup, varied difficulty settings and an interesting set of 6 characters all with varied powers and abilities. This is a cooperative game with a castle under siege by hordes of monsters and a progressing game timer that brings the dragon Tarok closer each time a Narrative card is drawn to ending the game.I’ve played games at 1, 2, and 4 player counts and found each time things work and scale well to that amount of players. This is not marketed as a solo game but I enjoy it a lot this way, the game has easy to grasp rules and an easy to manage player hand of cards and options allows you to play multiple heroes. So for any solo gamers this is one that while not marketed this way works well if you control multiple heroes. The same is true at the 2 player count, as the game has scalable difficulty levels we found the hardest setting needed us to each play 2 heroes to be able to win. At the beginner and normal difficulties controlling 1 character each works fine.There are six zones in the small game board that are randomly populated by either face up or face down cards according to the shuffled Narrative deck. These Narrative cards serve up a small bit of flavor text and are mostly instruments just to tell you where to place newly drawn cards. At each zone is a task, and so out of the 6 randomly drawn takes the heroes need complete 4 of them in order to win, otherwise when the Narrative deck runs out Tarok the dragon swoops in and claims victory. A zone must be cleared of all monster or item cards before the task card can be revealed and read, and later to accomplish that task you must move back to that space once its requirements are met.As one of the 6 unique characters you’ll be playing one of their cards on your turn, each card having several possibilities for actions you can take; an attack, movement, collection, or special power ability. I’ve found I really enjoy playing with Kheela and her Water Spirit as probably my favorite of them all, she can add a 2x modifier to your attack at a location or can instead support to all players during a group battle. Chada, another character, has a fun double arrow attack that is a great partner and probably my second favorite. Seeing how certain characters can work together is important for tackling the hardest difficulty working together to clear tasks and battling the toughest monsters together is the only way to win.You won’t always win, but that is the beauty of a game like this you will never play quite the same game twice, and with such a fast setup time you can easily reshuffle and be on your way to trying again. The play time is nearly exact, although your beginning or teaching games might run a bit longer until you become familiar with most of the cards. I didn’t encounter any confusing or contradictory rules and enjoy the discovery aspect of tasks each time to be interesting and fun. There can be some difficult combinations that come up and make for challenging gameplay which I appreciate and enjoy.