Fantasy (and sci-fi) month rolls on with Mage Knight and Adventurous. My wife and I both thought we'd played Mage Knight before but we had no logged plays so we'll just call these both new to us.
When Mage Knight came out in 2011, it was one of the first fantasy themed games to use euro mechanisms. In the 15 years since, many more euro games have employed more diverse themes, including fantasy. Still, getting to play as a fantasy character, explore a map, and have battles while employing deck building and hand management sounds pretty cool. Our experience was mixed though. On the one hand, we probably should have been more aggresive, engaging in battles and taking wounds to get fame because we had a hard time leveling up. Being under leveled kept our hand size, armor, command tokens, and deck building limited. Getting enough movement and combat skills in hand was difficult, which made us hesitant to engage in battles (though sometimes we just couldn't win them given the cards available). In any deckbuilder, there is an element of luck to how your cards come out, though modifying your deck can help with that. But we also had a hard time getting enough movement and influence together to buy new cards. It's obvious there are a lot of interesting choices and combo options in the card play. We just had a hard time expanding our options to see more of those choices and combos. We'd both like to give it another try and see if we can have more success in combat and/or card purchases but it wasn't quite what we were hoping for.
Adventurous is a delightful route building puzzle. You start with your ship, 12 route cards, and five marvels. Every turn you draw two route cards and place them in such a way that you have a continuous route and can place a marvel out by having the available encounter symbols that match the marvel's requirement (and none that it doesn't allow). You score points for visible route sections and visible encounters, as long as your under the visible limit for each. As you can imagine, it plays very quickly and has three additional difficulty levels to use as you get better at the game. The art is lovely and evocative of a maritime voyage. This is one I see us getting out when we've got an itch to play something quick but just a bit thinky.
