Dark Venture

Dark Venture had the honour of opening my 2020, while somewhere in the background Ioannis Prodromos was laughing because I had played a semi-co-op piece of rubbish. Thankfully, it has a decent PvP mode—and that was basically why I had sniped it on Kickstarter. It is not its only positive, obviously, but it is certainly its most convincing one.

The idea is to keep the footprint small, using cards and a few markers or trackers. In practice, though, the game spreads out an adventure comparable to Sword & Sorcery in inspiration and scale: countless things move around the map, and you constantly have to remember or write down who is what. Instead of feeling like I am exploring a fantasy RPG, I often feel like I am doing its accounting.

The scoring is completely yolo as well. One player may have to cross the map, fight two monsters, hit a particular item that is one in thirty in the deck, and then travel somewhere else for 4 VP, while another takes two breaths and grabs 6. Of course, you do not play games like this chiefly to see who won; you play them to mess with the other players. At least Dark Venture delivers there, with brutal combat and endless respawns.

I would not recommend it easily. Still, since solo fantasy RPGs are hardly countless, it may be worth a look for someone specifically hungry for that kind of thing and willing to endure its paperwork. At the first opportunity, I will hand it to the BLTG Solo Expert—yes, Marcel, I mean you—for a second opinion.