Last night, I played Soul Raiders with M and A. As I often do, I forgot to take photos of the game while we were playing it. My usual reaction is to just not write an essay about it.
Shuba watches the game carefully, to make sure that none of us break the rules.
Then I looked at a couple of pictures that M had taken of my cat Shuba as he lounged on top of the gaming table. I realized I could use an old picture, take a couple of new ones, and have something to present.
Jiku examines the game box before reluctantly giving it his approval based on the artwork alone. I got the Kickstarter Deluxe edition. It’s a big box! The game was designed by Marc André, best known among board gamers as the designer of Splendor. But Soul Raiders doesn’t resemble Splendor in any particular way.Soul Raiders belongs to a genre that can be loosely called “D&D in a box”. It’s a co-op game in which the players try to accomplish a task while being attacked by monsters, gaining benefits, and engaging with the story.This is the player board for my character, Adonis. The different characters have different starting and advancement decks, and their ability cards emphasize different things. For example, M’s character’s deck had cards that helped the group, or allowed her to avoid encounters. A’s deck was more focused on combat. Prior to last night, I’d played through Chapter 1 solo and gained a couple of extra advancement cards, as you can see in a picture below.The players share a common pool of hit points (“Vitae”), represented by the hearts in the outside track of this board; each time the marker goes entirely around the track, the players become Exhausted and draw fewer cards from their deck each round. The lower middle of the board has a Threat track; as threat goes up, monster attacks and other negative effects grow stronger. The card spaces towards the left are for chapter-specific effects.The game is organized into Chapters, plus a Prologue. Last night was not the first time we played the game; we started with Chapter 0. It was a comparatively uninteresting experience, which was why it was months and a chain of circumstances before we tried Chapter 1 as a group. Based on our experience, I’d advise skipping the Prologue and going straight into Chapter 1, which is far more interesting. I’ve fanned the location cards for these chapters so you can get an idea of their variety (40 locations for Chapter 1).The game is all about the locations. For the most part (the two-card tableau at the top is an exception) the artwork on these cards don’t form a continuous piece. However, the art can provide clues as to what choices to make. The icons you see indicate effects when a Hero enters, stays, takes actions, tries to leave, and so on.The deluxe version of Soul Raiders comes with miniatures. There’s more than one version of each character’s miniatures, with different colors of plastic indicating the character’s state. For example, here Shuba examines the mini for Maider, M’s character. The translucent plastic indicates that Maider is presently Invisible (to monsters in the game, not to Shuba) and therefore is less likely to be attacked.As you interact with locations, by far the most frequent event is to be attacked by groups of monsters. Each monster has its own properties, indicated by an icon in the upper left corner of the card. Shuba helpfully points out that the two monsters on the right have an icon that indicates that they must be defeated first, before any of the other monsters in the group.Given the increasing level of danger within a chapter, it’s not practical to visit every single location in a single playthrough. The game is designed so that you can either progress between chapters, or “grind” a given chapter repeatedly to explore all its options. If you get too familiar with a chapter, there are alternative locations for each chapter that add variety to the experience.This is my own printout of the game’s campaign sheet; the originals are higher quality. You can see the record of the cards we added to our decks and the story elements we found. In last night’s game we found major discoveries 2, 4, and 9 which carry over from chapter to chapter.
We had fun, and hope to play the game again. When we do, we’ll decide whether to replay Chapter 1 to see some alternative paths, or move on to Chapter 2.
