Pre-amble

I feel I should preface this review with a caveat before I even begin. I'm not a hardcore boardgamer by any stretch, I don't enjoy many of them and don't play a lot either. Anything overly complex or tactical tends to turn me off, so my review probably won't be especially useful from that angle as I don't tend to read too deeply into that aspect. None of the people I've played the game with (three times now) were either. My favourite boardgame of all is Games Workshop's venerable Talisman (which is due a fourth edition late this year), so in many ways it was the yardstick against which I judge any fantasy boardgame.

I've been a big fan on Rich Burlew's webcomic The Order of the Stick for a while now, a tale of inept adventurers questing together in a fantasy world, replete with roleplaying in-jokes and fourth-wall breaking humour.

We'd been looking for a Talisman-like game to play, having no copy of our own and with it being out of print making it unavailable for a reasonable price. So when I'd heard of the Order of the Stick game, I checked out the details on APE Games' site, then looked out for reviews and discussion. In short, a purchase decision was made in favour of the product and I ordered it.

This is a fairly long review, if you don't feel like reading the whole skip to the conclusion and pros and cons at the end for a summary judgement. And click the hyperlinks which have nice pictures of cards and other samples from the game.

First Impressions

The cover of the box has some great Rich Burlew art on it, and proclaims this to be "an epic card-based boardgame of comedic fantasy for 2-6 players". On the back of the box it adds the following:

"Why just read about foolish and incompetent adventurers when you can be one yourself? Dive head first into the world of the inexplicably popular fantasy gaming webcomic. Take on the role of one of the six daring adventurers as you explore each room of the mysterious Dungeon of Dorukan in this hilarious satire of the fantasy genre. But beware, for the evil undead sorceror Xykon awaits you at the bottom of the dungeon, and he has nothing better to do than focus on wiping the floor with your sorry butt."

My first impression upon opening the box was unfortunately a bad one; I found the flimsy plastic packaging was damaged. As soon as I took all the cards out of their packaging, they'd spill into the space underneath it, so I had to repair it myself with tape. Anyway, relatively minor concern.

There's a fair few bits inside and it's quite a big box, though it could probably have been handled by a smaller one quite easily. Contents include: a short 8-page comic which gives you a quickstart of the rules; a longer 32-page booklet with the full rules; two 12-sided dice; glass counters; plastic bases for the cards representing characters; big pieces of card for the dungeon rooms; and a shed-load of smaller cards for everything else.

First thing that strikes you is the number of cards (501 in all); it's a card-based game which includes cardstock figures representing your characters. The dungeon is built up from cards representing the room and stairs. There's a special set of room-cards for the endgame, Xykon's Lair. Your "character sheet" is a card with a bit of blurb about the character, a Wounds track (which is what the glass beads are for) and areas to indicate where to stack your stuff. Which comprises of your Schticks (ie powers/Feats/abilities) and Loot (treasure). Gaining "levels" is represented by the accumulation of new Schticks, and when you kill things you get Loot (but look out for Traps). Both contribute to winning the game, and Loot is vital for getting help from other players, amongst other things. Lastly there's the Battle Cards (which I often call the Adventure Deck after Talisman, though their use is nothing like...). These are the monsters (like the Beige Dragon and the Demon Roaches) you put into play for the fights, and Screw This! cards which are for metagaming.

Playing the game

This is a dungeon-crawling, card-based board game where you explore rooms, kill monsters and take their stuff, helping and hindering the other players along the way. I'm going to break this section up into subheadings to help with understanding what goes on. There's a number of unusual things in how play works, at least compared to the simplicity that is Talisman. Not least because all the "opposition" comes from the other players.

Object of the game

Ultimately you win by grabbing the most Loot, beefing yourself up with as many Schticks as you can, killing Xykon (the boss-man at the bottom of the dungeon) and getting out the dungeon before the place falls down around your ears. All these activities earn you Bragging Rights at the end of the game, a series of points you total, and the player with the highest score wins.

Setup

The setup rules are the only bit of the rulebook you absolutely must read before playing, and it's just one page. First up you set up the game, putting the dungeon entrance card, and a stairs card.You build the dungeon up in a modular fashion as you go, so it's never the same twice. All the cardstocks go on the entrance, whether they're being played by human players or not. You pick out the cards for the endgame (Xykon's Lair and the encounters therein), putting the rest of them aside. Then you pick characters. You're supposed to randomly pick a character card (which has your character sheet on it), then fish out their chosen three of their four starting Schticks and draw three Loot cards. Finally everyone rolls a die and the person with the highest goes first (then play goes clockwise after that) and you're ready to begin.

You decide what kind of game you want to play, from "Short Game" to "The Weekend Killer", which determines the how many levels there are and the minimum conditions to enter the final level.

Flow of play

Movement in the game is based on a fixed allowance, and you have to stop whenever you enter an unexplored area (which also triggers a battle - more in a bit) or exhaust your movement for that turn. With only two players this means the game can progress pretty slowly, since every player can only go so far without opening up a new room. Each level has a maximum of eight rooms on it, and players can "look for stairs" at the beginning or end of their movement (but not both). Some rooms have special effects which are applied to the battles you fight in them, sometimes in favour of the players, more often than not making their life harder. There's a few entertaining ones like the Lemonade Stand which heals the Wounds of the first player who lands there. Then the poor enterprising kid gets eaten by monsters...

The heart of the game is in battle. Every player has a hand of seven battle cards, a mixture of monsters and Screw This! meta-gaming cards. When you enter an unexplored space or empty room, you trigger a battle. The dungeon level and room card immediately influence how many cards the other players have to play in creating the encounter. Yes, your fights are created by the other players, which adds another level on which to co-operate and compete at the same time. Some monster cards increase the size of the battle (meaning you need more cards from the others), and more importantly certain cards are boosted by certain others, making the fight tougher. So people being canny and playing monsters that support each other can make a fight really hard, or people being nice using their weaker monsters or non-supporting ones can make it easier. Later in the game there's also considerations of whether to give someone a tough monster you know they'll beat easily and get more Loot than you're prepared to allow them to.

Fights are essentially you choosing a Schtick to use against the monster, asking for whatever assistance you can afford (paying other players with Loot), then rolling the dice and comparing against the fixed target number of the monster. There's more complications to it, you have an Attack and Defense value, and can't move and Attack on the same turn (at least for the first battle of your turn), but that's the core of it. Generally if you beat the target number you win, roll equal you draw or lose and you get "hit" and lose a Wound point (moving your marker down one). Some Schticks are basically "get out of fight free" defensive ones, where a win is a draw, but they give you a hefty bonus to the number. Schticks are a mixture of "always on" types and more powerful ones that have to be flipped and only recover when you rest (ie voluntarily miss a go - you also heal a Wound).

The bit that really makes the game interesting for me, and makes you feel like you're actually playing with other people not just alongside them is assistance. With Loot cards you can "buy" the support of other players, providing they agree to the trade. They add directly to your roll making you more likely to succeed. There's a whole tactical subgame going on there with Loot economy trading between the players, the more you ask for assistance the more you're helping them to win the game. Yet at the same time without assistance the game is pretty hard, especially early on. Elan in particular depends on being asked for assistance, without it his player is really going to struggle to get on. His "Bard Song" Schtick gets pretty useful once boosted a few times, making his assistance good value. The only limitation on assistance is that the person you're asking for help has to be on the same dungeon level as you. Forge too far ahead alone, or straggle behind and things get tougher.

When you win battles you get XP equal to the value of the monster card you just beat (a series of red X's tells you how much - a few have none) and Loot equal to the gold coin symbols on it. XP you trade for new Schticks - levelling up basically, and they count towards your score at the end. Three red X's will get you a new Schtick from your personal deck (each character has their own mostly-unique Schticks). You also get Loot, though you're limited in how much you can pick up in any one turn. These you save for your score at the end, use ("equip") for bonuses, discard for a special effect and trade with other players for assistance. A proportion of Loot cards are Traps, which stop it being an unalloyed good.

Endgame

There are minimum Loot and Schtick conditions to enter the final level, the endgame with Xykon. This comprises of a series of special dungeon cards, and battle cards for each room. These tend to feature tougher than normal monsters, and one of them is Xykon himself. These are normally pretty big battles, which with supporting cards and those boosting battle size can end up with stacks of 10 or more monsters. Which can either be some fraught dice-rolling and cashing in of Loot for assistance, or a triviality depending on how long people have been turtling around the upper levels. The battle with Xykon is the only one in which people can't refuse to give assistance if they ask it. Once the bony-assed one is dead. Play immediately stops while the final chapter is enacted. All the monsters still in play vanish and the dungeon starts to collapse, a room being removed from the lowest level and furthest edge from the stairs on each player's turn. No one gets "left behind", anyone in a room that collapses is bumped along to one that isn't automatically. At this stage it's a race to the entrance, the faster you get out the more points you get for exiting. Last one out gets no points for the close.

On Reflection/Comments

I've played the game through three times now, enough to get a good feel for how it all works. The first game was only two-player and has some dynamics and issues of its own, but the other two were with four and five players and much better and more representative of what works and doesn't.

The good...

The first thing that has to be said about this game, it's got that "Order of the Stick feel" coming out of its pores in buckets. That might be a good or a bad thing depending on how much you like the comic. From the artwork on the box and cards to the quickstart comic and even the rulebook, there's Rich Burlew's instantly-recognisable style everywhere. Then the descriptions on the cards and tone of the books are all what you'd expect from the comic. A lot of the cards are pretty funny the first time you read them, every single Battle Card, Loot card, Schtick and other has it's own "panel" with a little joke in it. That's quite a lot of work that's gone into making this.

The encounters are a lot of fun, given they're pretty unpredictable and dependent entirely on what the other players want to give you. There's a lot of variety in the monsters and what they are supported by, along with special abilities and such. In bigger battles you also tend to get to place monsters for yourself which is very different from any other game I've played. Adds yet another layer of variability and interest to the proceedings.

The thing I really liked about this game is that it's possible to play both co-operatively and competitively, often at the same time and on different levels. There's four main sources of this phenomenon: how you play your Battle cards, asking for and giving assistance, use of Screw This! cards and of course attacking other players. You can give people easy or hard battles, which might also tie into whether or not you want them to ask the other players (or yourself) for assistance. You might choose to not to ask the player who seems to be doing the best for assistance, spreading Loot around to the others in the hopes it might slow them down. Same goes for giving easy battles to those lagging behind, and harder ones to those streaking ahead. Screw This! cards stir things up even more, some of them grant boons to yourself or other players, others stiff them and slow them down. We had very little player vs player antagonism in my games, though I'd imagine more competitive groups might have more.

Something that really aids replayability is the characters. Specifically that they're all different enough to have differing "optimum" strategies. You can't play Vaarsuvius the same way you'd play Roy, not without suffering badly. V doesn't have the close combat schticks to allow him/her to melee his/her way through the game. Which means you get a different play experience with each character you play. That coupled with the randomness of the dungeon gives quite a bit of replay value.

...and the bad

My biggest complaint about this game is that it runs slow. It's slow to get started, and it can easily take the first hour for new people to get familiar with the flow of play. I've played three purportedly "short" games that should last 2-3 hours of only 3 levels + Xykon's Lair and none have been under five hours. In some ways that's not so much of a problem, initially it doesn't feel like it's dragging, and the cards are entertaining when revealed, but towards the last hour or so it does get a bit tiresome. Which is one of the sources of time drag; every time someone gets a new card of any kind, they tend to read it there and then, and have a little giggle at it. This is particularly marked when someone triggers a battle, which lets remember is almost all the time. Everyone has to have a look to see if they've got supporting cards for what came before, whether they want to make this an easy or tough encounter, how close their character is and so whether they might benefit, whether they want to use a Screw This! card and on and on.

Maybe that'll reduce as people become more familiar, but every turn is quite reading-intensive. I've seen some mods that cut down time by turning the Battle Deck into a stack of cards people just draw from when they trigger a battle, but that would reduce the difficulty and indeed fun a little. Chances of having supported monsters on the lower levels is greatly reduced.

Something which compunds the slowness of the game is competitiveness. There's a note about it in the rulebook, but the more competitive and antagonistic you play, the slower the game will be. Especially if there's player vs player battles and retaliation. That can cause the game to grind to a halt as those players spend their whole time shuttling back and forth between their feud and the dungeon entrance (where you recover all your wounds and unflip all your Schticks). It also means others might be avoiding resting (since you're especially vulnerable when you do so). Struck me as completely pointless (unless you're playing Belkar, I guess) slowing the game down and potentially ruining everyone else's fun and souring the atmosphere.

One minor quibble about battles is that the order you fight monsters can be confusing. There's "henchman" cards that automatically go to the bottom of the stack, but otherwise the rules aren't terribly clear about how you go about battles. If you just take them in the order they're placed, support cards can be taken out of the battle before they've even provided any benefit. A particularly troublesome one is Xykon. If he's at the top of a stack, once he's dead they all run away so that's a load of fighting missed out on. We might need to go back and read that again, surely he's supposed to go to the bottom. Though if he does, all the monsters that were supposed to be supporting him don't provide any benefit if you've whittled your way through them.

The other big complaint is the near-absence of balance between the characters you play. Haley is the best character bar none, Vaarsuvius is probably the worst. Haley has the best schtick combo in the game which makes her better than Roy in melee at the start of the game. If she gets a few levels under her belt, that disparity can worsen. She's also got several schticks which allow her to get more Loot than anyone else, look through the dropped piles and choose what she wants, get XP for disarming traps and lastly there are more Loot cards with her face on than anyone else. If no one is asking for assistance, the game is very hard as Elan. Conversely if everyone is cashing in on the bargain of your help with Bard Song, the Loot will pour in. Though you end up spending a fair amount for assistance because you lack anything directly useful against monsters. All the good stuff Vaarsuvius has is flippable, meaning you get one shot then have to rest to use it again. We've not played with Belkar, but most of his Schticks are more useful against other players than monsters.

The presence of someone playing Elan will tend to encourage more co-operation if his player is canny, whereas I suspect the presence of Belkar will encourage more antagonism. Anyone reliant on ranged Schticks (ie Vaarsuvius) gets a rough deal on Loot since other players will be running in to snatch what you just won. That means people tend not to bother with ranged attacks if they have a choice.

Lastly a minor one: packaging. I was really quite disappointed by the cheap and flimsy packaging inside the box which was already cracked and torn when I received the product. It was in stark contrast to the high production values in the contents themselves.

Conclusion

I've given the game 5 for style and 4 for substance. Top marks for visuals, artwork and general cool. Only gets a 4 for substance due to the balancing issues and slowness of play which do detract a little from an otherwise solid game and the cheap and cheerfulness on the contents side of things, even if the cards are lovingly detailed.

Here's the short version of the above, in a series of bullets and right at the end for those who don't want to read the whole way through. Or recap what they've just read.

Pros

*Authentic and evocative "Order of the Stick feel"

*High production values

*Battles are a lot of fun, with a good deal of variety and difficulty

*Scope for both co-operative and competitive play, often at the same time

*Feel like you're actually playing together, not just waiting for your turn to do stuff

*Variety of characters improves replay value

Cons

*Plays slow

*Reading-intensive

*Bit of a learning curve to get going

*Order of battles can be confusing

*Competitive play really slows game down

*Characters poorly balanced