I’ve never really got into the whole Dungeons & Dragons thing or those games with heaps of detailed miniatures—too much overhead for me—but I do like the idea of fantasy-themed gaming. I’ve long been a fan of Talisman, which is sort of off-the-peg characters in a D&D world. It’s quick and easy to play, perhaps a bit too lightweight. I dipped a toe in Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, but that was a way too heavyweight for my tastes. If only there was something in between…
Restless might be the ticket, described as ‘a fantasy adventure game where you and up to three other players lose yourselves in a vast open world brimming with dangers, treasures, and excitement.’
This 1–4 player game, with an estimated play time of 45 minutes per player/2 hours in total, can be found on Gamefound, and is due to appear next November. It’s Restless Design’s first game, and it does look pretty. Interestingly, its designers say, ‘We’re three psychologists with a passion for board games.’ I wonder how their background has influenced the game.
Restless is primarily cooperative with an optional blush of competition, but it might be more accurate to say it’s individual adventuring, until the time comes for everyone to deal with end-chapter bosses together. The whole game is split into three chapters, each with beefier baddies and more fraught encounters, but apart from that, it’s a lot of doing the same thing—which isn’t necessarily bad, if you want a cosy ramble around a fantasy world. On that point of cosiness, while you do have a health level, when that reaches zero, you merely spend a turn in the local hospital rather than being killed outright.
Game Play
In the base game, you play as a character from one of four species, Verdents (huge, tree-like creatures, wise and strong), Shroomlings (mushroom-ish critters, blessed with good fortune), Merfolk (clever and arrogant) and Gnomes (small but sturdy), roaming the fantasy land of Everion.
Your character is initially not particularly powerful, but as you explore, you can discover weapons and other artefacts, adding to your strength, intellect, luck, and so on. The game has nicely organised player boards (at the bottom of the picture above) to hold the weapon, ability, companion, etc. cards as well as displaying your current stats.
A round starts with rolling the ‘die of doom’ (this game has a lot of dice!), which determines how far along the ‘doom tracker’ you move—indicating how close you are to the end of the chapter, and the meeting with its big bad.
Everion, represented by the central map shown in the image above, is split into several regions, each with different treasures and hazards, and after updating the doom tracker, you can optionally move into a different region, bearing in mind that if you choose to move a long distance, you risk exhausting yourself and lose health points.
Next, you’ll have an encounter, which will either be an ‘event’ (based on rolls of a pair of dice) or an ‘adventure’ (a number given to you as the result of a prior event); either way, this number translates to an entry in a truly huge adventure book. Another player reads the relevant paragraphs, which might lead to you gaining something (more dice rolls) or battle (guess what, more dice). I may joke about the number of dice, but everything’s very clearly explained in the adventure book or on encounter cards—which dice you need to use and how to interpret the rolled values.
After this comes the trading phase, swapping cards with other players in the same region as your meeple, or spending resources in shops if you’re within the region’s city. Finally, you ‘rest’ and gain a health point.
Once all players have performed those steps, the next turn starts.
When the ‘doom tracker’ has reached the end, it’s time to battle the chapter’s boss. This is similar to combat with other enemies, except that this guy is bigger and badder, so you’ll need the abilities of all players in the game to defeat it.
And that’s pretty much the game, vastly simplified.
In solo play, you read your own events from the adventure book, trying carefully not to look ahead. The competitive element of the game is simply whoever ends up with most reputation points. It sort of feels both of these were something of an afterthought.
An Adventures in the Dark expansion is available, introducing a new character type, the Shadewalker, another adventure book and more cards to encounter, as well as more dangerous variants of the bosses from the base game. Although a player mat is included, the expansion isn’t intended to add a fifth player to the game.
Impressions
The game is pretty, with nicely illustrated cards and robust dual layer player mats. The adventure books are large and contain an awful lot of events to encounter, which should allow for a high degree of replayability. One criticism I do have of the books is that they are so large and merely ring-bound (at least in the current pre-release form), meaning they’re difficult to manage and undoubtedly prone to wear. Since each region of the game has its own part of the core book, I feel it would have been better to split it into a number of smaller books (like Vantage’s multiple books).
I mentioned at the top of the article that I’ve played a lot of Talisman, mainly the 4th edition, with a gazillion available expansions. Restless does look a bit like a more grown-up version of Talisman, with everything just a bit more complex. The other difference is that Restless is cooperative, and Talisman isn’t known for cooperative play, at least in the 4th edition (though there are the Lightbearers ending in the Blood Moon expansion, and Cult of the Damned in the Cataclysm).
Gloomhaven is too much for me, but Restless sits somewhere between that and Talisman, and might be my next dip in the fantasy gaming water.
You can find out much more about the game on its Gamefound page, along with playthrough videos and a rule book.
Note: this is based on preview information, and the final game may differ.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
