Whether you take on the role of a reluctant warrior, a mistress of the arcane, of a fallen noble, you will need to embrace your strengths and communicate with your comrades in order to succeed. Explore Zanziar and work your way through the story – defeating enemies along the way, and winning (or losing) as a team.

What Is It?

Cooperative – Players work together to succeed

Campaign / Scenario – Play through scenarios in a branching story; each scenario has special rules, enemies, and so on

Action Points – Players set their action points each round and must spend them to attack, defend, draw cards, take special actions, and more. Some cards will also allow them to get more action points

Asymmetric Characters – Each character has a unique deck and some unique actions on their player boards. They have to understand their specific set of cards/skills in order to manage their action points wisely

Hand Management – Players only get so many cards (dependent on player count) each round. They must play wisely, and manage them alongside their available action points. If they take wounds or earn fatigue, they lose space for useful cards until they can play/remove those from their hand

Upgrades / Deck Construction – Each campaign has an item deck available. Players can earn upgraded cards to improve their deck/actions.

Who Is It For?

  • 1 to 4 Players – Personally, I like it best at 2. With more players, you get to see more characters/decks, and have a wider variety of actions, but with less players, you have a bigger hand of cards.
  • Ages 13 & Up – There’s quite a bit of upfront rules, it can be a bit to learn as you first try the phase flow
  • Fans of mid-weight cooperative games
  • Fans of asymmetry and deck/hand management

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Nice art for the characters/enemies
  • Components – Good quality across everything; love the dual layer boards
  • Symbology is clear
  • Wound/Fatigue system is unique/interesting – multi-use of cards for characters versus enemies
  • Variety in scenarios and characters
  • Upgrading cards is fun and adds more variety
  • Interactive – Players can plan out turns round to round to make the best use of the cards they drew
  • Enemy Activation is interesting in how enemies will do different things depending on the response card, and will not always just attack but engage, disengage, and more; players can try to plan around the possibilities, which is neat

CONS

  • Though interesting, the enemy phase does sometimes feel a little long/clunky
  • Wish the box had an insert/better way to organize things
  • I didn’t love the layout of the rules; Phase details were split into different sections, so I had a hard time in my first read-through
  • A lot of luck involved with the response cards; I wish they didn’t have such a wide range of possible values – However, the deck does have a Low-Variance deck, with less variability (Small letters in the lower left corner) which can help with that

Final Thoughts

Overall, I thought this game had some interesting and unique elements, and I liked the general flow of the game.

I think that your team’s success really depends on knowing your deck and your strengths, but it is also vital to understand what other’s can do so that you can properly assist each other and work off of each other. That said, I think I prefer the game at a lower player count, because I much prefer having a larger hand size to work with.

The game definitely has some difficulty especially with the luck of the draw at times, but it’s a game where you can build more of a strategy around your deck(s) the more that you play.

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 6/10

Designer – Nikolas Lundström Patrakka
Artist – Jamie Noble-Frier
Publisher – Dragon Dawn Productions
MSRP – €55,00
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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