I recently started playing the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and, though I haven’t played it very long, I am intrigued by the design space it explores. In some ways it reminds me a bit of an MMO world, everything has a little bit of fluff, and they all interact to make a living world in a sort of fractally generated way (even if, at times, it’s somewhat chaotic or mixed up – but I don’t worry about that). Each card has a plot element associated with it, each location has a micro-story with mechanics to back it up, each scenario is the leg of an adventure with its own goals, and each adventure has an arc. While it certainly fits into the “role playing lite” segment of gaming, I’ve found it a nice reprieve from Descent with more of a focus on story, and less on the dungeon crawl.

Mechanically, I also find the game pretty sound. I was a bit worried going in that the combination of dice, player decks, location decks, and the blessing deck would get pretty chaotic and squash any meaning from player choice. However, after playing it, I found that they actually do a pretty good job of making choices matter (which, I believe, was one of the explicit design goals).

In my opinion, this mechanic is best epitomized by the blessing cards. Blessings allow a character to either boost a check (to help gain a boon or defeat a bane) or explore a location (to help find the villain and win the game). Since the game is on a timer (barring any manipulation, players only get 30 turns), every use of a blessing is a gamble; the players are effectively making a guess as to whether they will be time constrained (There is not enough time to get to the villain) or equipment constrained (We don’t have the weapons/spells/etc to defeat the villain even if we did find him). While the blessing cards epitomize this choice (because this is a choice made for the party), almost every other player card captures this, “If I recharge/discard this card, will I get something better to replace it?” “If I use this spell/weapon to defeat this monster, I won’t have it to defeat the next monster that might be worse.”

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the game – in many ways, I miss role-playing and this is one mechanism I have to try to get a group of people to the table for a regular gaming session. Maybe by building a regular gaming night with this, I can start to get a regular cadre of people together for a full role-playing game.