Review of Brotherhood Of The Coast

Blurb from the publisher: 'Agents, glad to see you all made it back from Hollywood in one piece. Come in, come in, take your seats. The Agency has gathered ample information to provide you with an introductory brief of your next assignment. We've nicknamed your next mission Brotherhood of the Coast.

Brotherhood of the Coast is the seventh expansion for T.I.M.E Stories, sending you and your fellow players to the 1600s Carribbean, during the age of piracy!'

What you get: Your USD 29,99 or equivalent will buy you Brotherhood of the Coast, the seventh expansion for the T.I.M.E Stories game line, the hybrid boardgame/RPG/PC adventure made for tabletop gaming. The adventure can be played within 90 minutes by two to four players. The product contains a player mat with six locations, as well as 188 cards in five distinct decks; the basic game is needed in order to play this scenario.

Spoiler warning: each scenario of T.I.M.E Stories, just like any RPG adventure, is very likely to be played once only to fruition, even though this will happen in more than one run. As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the scenario, parts of it might be revealed while discussing its strong and less strong points. This will not make the scenario unplayable, mind you, nor any less enjoyable. If you enjoy surprises however, you might want to stop reading now.

The strong points: With its 188 cards, Brotherhood of the Coast comes out as 27% bigger than Lumen Fidei, one of the biggest scenarios in the series. There is tons of content here, and I am not only talking about the new exotic locale. To start with, some locations are composed of eight parts, harkening back to some of the first missions which filled their locations with things to do and explore. From its introduction already., the scenario makes it abundantly clear that it will be more about the universe's overarching plot than about solving the temporal incident of the week. The mission is definitely not linear, and players will have hard decisions to take at times, without having necessarily all the data they would have liked at their disposal. The backstory progresses in strides. There are numerous potential endings, depending on your decisions, even though some are tougher to unlock than others. This however does not mean that the era and the nominal scenario get the middle child treatment. You have to obtain a ship, find a crew, travel from location to location and meaningfully interact with the locals. There's discussions and choices, canons and swashbuckling. You won't need to explore everything to finish the scenario, yet I am certain that many amongst us will give it a second or even a third go in order to fully enjoy the scenery.

When it comes to the mechanics, Brotherhood of the Coast adds the concept of locations within locations, with their dedicated decks, while remaining a bigger sandbox compared to the previous adventures. The players will explore, be it peacefully or aggressively, Port Royal, San Juan and Tortuga, while searching for the Terra Incognita. You are now allowed to transfer some items from one run to the next, mitigating one of the game's most common issues, having to pointlessly repeat aspects of a run that you shouldn't have needed to. New rules cover sailing and naval combat. The former is reminiscent of the encounters rules seen in A Prophecy of Dragons, namely in that a random card is drawn when a ship sails. There are both useless and useful encounters, in that you can test your skills, fight ships through a process not that dissimilar to standard combat, explore locations etc. There is quite some combat in the game, a large chunk of it however is avoidable. The puzzles are enjoyable. Some are straightforward, while others stretch through more than one cards and steps. Unless you get a certain sequence of actions right, the last one would require some real world thinking and guesstimation, lest you stumble into what looks like a dead end that can only be solved by brute force. As with all other scenarios, I strongly recommend taking notes and checking each card carefully for all sorts of visual cues and details

I liked the ending and the questions it leaves open. It is a cliffhanger alright! Some might find it underwhelming, during the playtest however the final revelation prompted a wave of 'Again? What is going on here? ' with everybody wishing to try the next installment immediately. The next adventure in the campaign will be released in February 2019. That is three months away. Patience.

The adventure can be played independently, it should be however obvious by now that it is as deeply enmeshed with the campaign's backstory, that a group playing it out of order (or just giving it a go to find out what T.I.M.E stories really is) will not enjoy it as thoroughly. The cubes, the slime, the conflict between the Elois and the Syans, all these have nothing to do with the Caribbean of the golden age of piracy.

The game offers additional material in the form of QR codes, both of which are glimpses of the next adventure, 'Madame' at NT 1673, taking place in Versailles. One of them also alters the way things start on that adventure. Isn't that exciting?

The choice of characters is good when it comes to their number (six). Four of them are men and two are women. I strongly recommend to have one or two characters which are strong in combat. There are many points in the scenario where fighting is the way out or might be the better option.

As usual, the art is of a very high standard. The campaign continues on the premise of providing a different visual identity to its episodes, even though the work of Pascal Quidault who has worked on every single set in the series is recognizable irrespective of style. This time the iconography is not unlike what one would expect in a book for young adults. Some of them are fully coloured, while others are going for different shades of only a couple of colours. The results are solid, especially when the two styles are combined on the fronts and backs of cards.

The weak points: There will be death. There will be restarts. There will be some frustration about one thing or another forcing you for a reset. This isn't unique to this scenario, yet it is felt a bit more strongly.

There are certain situations, especially near the end, where the players are effectively asked to perform against the way of thinking that the game requires. This does not make the scenario unsolvable, it does however hamper its flow and introduces puzzles that can be solved by brute force, even though some guesstimation will help. I can see what the designers were thinking, in reality however the premise doesn't work. Groups who do not enjoy blind puzzles and which feel that they get penalized for getting too much inside the game's mindset might be annoyed.

Being the newest scenario out there, Brotherhood of the Coast is not covered yet by the FAQ. There are times however that you will need to houserule a thing or two in order to correct omissions and the suboptimal presentation of an otherwise good design. I enjoy the concept of T.I.M.E Stories otherwise I wouldn't have kept returning to its adventures. Yet each adventure should have received an editorial TLC of a higher magnitude. The rules of the whole series are simply too fast and too loose, and the typos and omissions left and right do not make things better.

The additional material that the QR codes in the game lead to is very welcome. On the other hand, and in contrast to other games which advertise their interactions with an app like Mansions of Madness (Second Edition), I would have enjoyed all the material, including the additional backstory, to be found in the game box. It is unlikely that an such inclusion would have altered the game's price.

There is absolutely no way a group will finish this adventure in 90 minutes as advertised. Two hours and a half, or even slightly less, if you are taking your time, is far more likely. I suggest you devote a full gaming session to it.

No need for me to repeat the issues of sleeving the 70 x 120 mm cards (a pain in the ass when it comes to finding the right sleeves). I wish the game had opted for 80 x 120 mm, a size that is both bigger (cooler aesthetics!) and easier to sleeve. Unfortunately, it's too late for that.

Conclusion: Brotherhood of the Coast demonstrates that T.I.M.E Stories follows a well-designed plan. Against the backdrop of the Carribean, the real world conflict for the future of the agency continues unabated. I am looking forward to the next installment; I haven't been in the Versailles for a long time.

For more info on Brotherhood of the Coast and T.I.M.E Stories overall, visit Space Cowboys at http://www.spacecowboys.fr or Asmodee at http://www.asmodeena.com.

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