In 2007, Paizo Publishing lost the license for Dragon and Dungeon magazine. In response, they created Pathfinder, monthly releases that would make up six-part adventure paths along with new monsters and other game issues. I received the first adventure path, Rise of the Runelords. While I loved the art and the ideas, I found I was done with D&D 3.X rules, so parted ways. In 2013, Paizo apparently decided to win me back with the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game.

The Components

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game comes in a large box. Inside are almost 500 cards, with 110 of these in the first adventure path. There's also the rule book and a set of dice familiar to role-players (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, but no d20). The plastic inset looks good for holding and separating the cards, with room for many expansions.

The Basics

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (PACG) is a deck-builder card game for up to four (or six) players, with some nods to its RPG roots. Each player takes a hero, one of the Pathfinder iconics. Each character has character card where the familiar stats of strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma are rated in terms of a die. Valeros the fighter gets a d10 for his strength, but his wisdom is only a d4. Additionally, characters have a few skills, specialized uses of their stats. For melee, Valeros will roll his strength die plus 3, for diplomacy he has his charisma die plus 2.

The card also lists what goes into the starting deck. This will be some combination of the boons:

• Weapons- used by characters for melee or ranged combat
• Armor- used to reduce damage
• Spells- attack, defense, and utility for spellcasters
• Allies- Provide bonuses to certain checks, or allow exploration
• Items- A wide open category, ranging from thieves tools to potions to magic items, these can provide bonuses to checks, automatic success, or other unique benefits
• Blessings- Invoking the gods to provide extra dice for a check, or granting extra explorations. The main method characters have for assisting other

The character sheet, free from Paizo.com, duplicates the information on the character cards. Besides the stats and skills and the deck contents differentiating characters, each character also has unique powers. Valeros gets to return weapons to his deck instead of discarding them; Kyra the cleric can convert any divine spell into a cure. These powers are further fleshed out after the third adventure, when characters pick one of two roles.

On a typical turn, a character will explore a location. If the card is a boon, they can try to acquire it. The checks will name one or more stats and skills. The warhammer in the image above is a Strength Melee 6. A character would pick up their strength die and roll, trying to score 6 or higher. Since Valeros has the melee skill, he can use that instead, rolling a d10+3.

Besides boons, there are also banes: monsters and barriers. Monsters usually force a combat check- strength, or something dictated by a card played (Valeros would play a weapon, getting his melee skill plus dice based on the weapon, while a wizard would use an attack spell). Barriers represent traps, hazards, and locked chests, each with their own rules for defeating.

For these checks, cards are often used to augment the roll. A card can be:

• Revealed- shown, then returned to the hand
• Discarded- put into the characters discard pile
• Recharged- returned to the bottom of the character's deck (most spells will have a check made after use- if successful, the spell is recharged, and if failed, the spell is discarded)
• Buried- placed under the character sheet, no longer available in the scenario
• Banished- Sent back to the box

The goal of each scenario is close down locations and defeat a villain. The side goal is to pick up useful boons to replace cards in your deck.

Gameplay

The scenario is the basic format of a session. A number of linked scenarios make up an adventure, and linked adventures will make up an adventure path. A scenario card will dictate what locations are used, with one location per character, plus two. The scenario also has the villain, henchman, any special rules, and the scenario reward.

Each location deck is built from a combination of boons and banes. The villain and the henchmen are shuffled and added to the locations. Each characters goes to a location and can explore, flipping cards over from the deck. When a henchman is located and defeated, the character has a chance to close the location permanently. If the villain is encountered, characters at other locations can attempt to temporarily close their location. After the encounter, the villain attempts to flee to another location. If all locations are closed (permanently or temporarily), the players win.

The players can lose in one of two ways. A character's deck represents their health. If they take damage, they have to discard cards from their hand, and they must draw back to their hand limit at the end of each turn. If a character needs to draw and doesn't have enough cards, they die. If everyone dies, that's a loss.

The other way is the blessing deck. This 30 card deck serves as the timer, with one card being flipped over each turn. The deck doesn't get bigger with more players, so larger groups are under a time constraint. However, they also have more options in cards and ways to help each other.

And helping each other does happen. Valeros adds a d4 to the combat roll of anyone at his location; Harsk the ranger can add a d4 to the combat roll of someone at a different location. Characters can hand off items to other characters at their location, and after a scenario, items can be passed around freely as everyone rebuilds their deck. Blessings can be applied to any check, at any location. In the last scenario my group played, we knew where the villain, a young black dragon, was hiding. My character, Valeros, was going to fight it. Before I did, one character passed me an amulet that would make me immune to the dragon's acid. Another gave me an item to boost my combat check. When I went into combat, everyone played a blessing on me. I needed a 12 to defeat the dragon; once everything was added in, I was rolling 11 dice, which totaled to 48!

Expansion

Since PACG bears the name of a monthly subscription product, it should come as no surprise that there are many add-ons to buy.

First up is the Character Add-on Pack. This adds four more characters to the base set's seven. There are also cards, usable by anyone, but that work well with the new characters. Most importantly, the pack adds additional henchman so up to six people can play instead of four.

Next is the rest of the adventure path. The base set has Perils of the Lost Coast, a three scenario adventure that serves as an introduction to the game. It also has the box for Burnt Offerings, the first adventure in the Rise of the Runelords adventure path. Once Perils of the Lost Coast is completed, the Burnt Offerings box is opened and the cards are shuffled into the decks. Burnt Offerings provides five more scenarios.

There are five more adventures, each sold separately. Each contains 110 more cards and five more scenarios. As the characters go through the adventures, they'll gain better cards and earn rewards in the form of skill boosts, new powers, and additional card slots.

While it may sound like the game will start to get unwieldy with the influx of cards, there's a mechanic for that. Starting with the third adventure, boons and banes with the Basic trait that are banished are instead removed from the game. It's not an instant process, but over time the weakest monsters and the worst treasures will move out.

For those looking for more beyond the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, there are plenty of fan-made scenarios online. And Paizo is putting out more base sets. Skull and Shackles, a pirate-themed adventure path that introduces ships, has its final chapter coming out in February. May will see another base set released, Wrath of the Righteous, which will have the first d20 for PACG.

Although each adventure path is independent, characters can be used in different ones. A Skull and Shackles character is fully compatible with the Rise of the Runelords path. There are a few things that won't carry over; a bonus with ships will be worthless in the first path. Paizo anticipated these crossover when PACG came out. For example, some cards allow a craft skill check to acquire. This skill is not known by any of the Runelord heroes, but some Skull and Shackles characters possess it.

Pros

For me, that PACG can accommodate six players is huge. So many publishers seem to think I can't have more than four friends, so any game that lets my whole group play gets a thumbs up.

The art work is very nice. The characters are the iconic portraits done by Wayne Reynolds, one of my favorite artists. Items can be a little plain, but they do illustrate the difference between a long sword and a +1 long sword.

The game may not do anything for dedicated role-players, but it's been a big hit with my group of fledgling board gamers dipping their toes into RPGs. Several commented that this was a good substitute for our D&D game, with less to keep track of. Supplementing this is Adventure Guide, a fan created booklet providing prologues and epilogues to each scenario, expanding on the brief descriptions from the scenario cards.

The basic mechanics are pretty easy. Our first game was slow as people settled in. The second game, everyone seemed comfortable with what they could do and how things worked. By the third, mechanics had been adopted into our table chatter ("I'll discard your paper plate." "I'm going to banish the chocolate pringles- who thought those were a good idea?")

The game scales well. It can be played with one to six characters. For my group, if someone couldn't make it, we'd just set up one fewer locations and could play on.

The level of difficulty seems about right. For my group, the first two scenarios came down to the wire. The third, we got lucky in finding henchman, but none of us thought it was easy. We tried another deck-builder last month where it seemed like we were getting beaten down from the start. PACG is tense, but we always feel like we can win.

There is a lot of replay potential. After my group finishes, we could play through the entire path again, five of us using brand new characters. And each character feels different. The sorcerer and wizard both use arcane spells, but one is charisma based, the other intelligence, so they'll be good at different encounters. Their powers and deck compositions will be very different.

Cons

The game could be repetitive. At its base, it's flipping a card and rolling dice. However, I think the influx of new cards keeps things from being stale. Also, each adventure has a scenario that goes outside the regular "Kill the henchman and villains." Burnt Offerings has one scenario without a villain, and instead the characters need to find allies.

Some of the rules are a little confusing. I still need to go back to the rule book when we encounter a villain. The first printing had a lot of mistakes and unclear cards, resulting in a large FAQ. I believe most of these changes and clarifications are incorporated in the second printing, but that creates a new problem. The first printing was done in China, the second in US. One of the printings is longer than the other, so mixing versions can look odd.

Still, it's not complex. Some might dismiss it as too easy or too simple.

The price feels a little steep. The base set is $60, with 8 scenarios that are supposed to run 1.5 hours (ours have leaned closer to 2, with the first game taking quite a bit longer, the third we blew through in just over an hour), so that's 12 hours of game time. Each additional adventure is another $20, with 5 more scenarios for an addition 7.5 hours. It is a bunch better rate of return than going out to the movies, but I can understand someone balking at the idea "Here's this great game, it's just going to cost you $160 to play the whole thing."

Overall

Once this game showed up on my radar, I was intrigued. After I opened the box, I knew I was going to like it. It's been a hit with my group, including us scheduling an extra session to play it some more. I picked up Skull and Shackles because I know we'll move on to that when we finish Runelords, and I'm planning to subscribe to the release of Wrath of the Righteous.

I'd recommend it to anyone who likes cards and rolling dice, particularly the lapsed D&D/Pathfinder players who can't manage a 3+ hour game session, but can fit in a 90 minute card game.