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We, Mithra and Boog, stood overlooking the valley before us. Our settlement was depending upon it's heroes. We are the brave, the bold, **Checks Keywords** the cunning, the inquisitive. It is up to us to find food, build shelter, and discover something that will keep this damn chill off of us when the wind is blowing in from the west. “I believe the answers we seek lie in this direction” proclaims Boog, gesturing off to the south. Boldly striding forward, Boog loses his footing on the loose shale, tumbles down the incline, ending his fall with a sickening crack as his foot twists under him. The valley shakes with a thunderous bellow of “Fuck!!!”
This just in: Expletives are confirmed to have been invented before the discovery of fire. Rumors of something called a wheel shouted down as heresy.
When I first opened StoneSaga, my initial though was “What I have gotten myself into?” I pulled out the 120+ plus page rulebook followed by a Codex Book that looked of equal size and dozens of different chits with small icons in the corners and different shapes and colors in the front and it all looked, frankly, a bit overwhelming. Thankfully, Stonesaga begins with a tutorial to help you over that feeling.
The Tutorial mission definitely gives Baby's First Adventure vibes. It gives you a taste of what you can do by spoon feeding it to you in the most basic of ways and slowly walking you through all of the primary actions. So much so, that the player aid cards that show what actions you can do during the day phase led us to completing challenges before they even came out organically as part of the mission. By the time what had finished, we had a firm grasp on the basic actions of the game and it took about 3 hours. And the thing is, even with the hand holding/basic nature of the tutorial adventure, me and my gaming partner spent the next day texting back and forth with thoughts on how we should progress and what we should focus on along with a fair amount of “I think we did this bit wrong, we should double check.” And, to be fair to StoneSaga, the error we did make was extremely minor (it was in regards to when boosts expire), so props to teaching portion of the game for being so thorough.
“We have learned much from our initial adventures” stated Boog. “The Valley has opened before us and we have more to discover. Come, let us set forth once again.” Boog loses his footing on the loose shale, tumbles down the incline, ending his fall with a sickening crack as his foot twists under him. The valley shakes with a thunderous bellow of “Fuck!!!”
Yep, both of our initial adventures had the same auspicious start, which was hilarious. If the tutorial was Baby's First Adventure then our second session was Toddler's First Steps. Again, I'm not saying this in a bad way. There was plenty of us putting to use the things we learned in the tutorial while we proceeded forward and learned deeper, more complex actions and the ramifications of those actions. It was at this point that I found out there was a downloadable app for Stonesaga that handles the rulebook, the lore guide and includes a Character Name Generator. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you need a name generator, you might not have the level of commitment needed to fully enjoy StoneSaga. This play also accented how amazing the game trays are. You may be thinking “Uh, yea, they hold stuff....great.” No, they are truly used in the playing of the actual game, with them holding the tracks for Unrest, Activity, Population, and Lore. When the game starts spreading across the table, as games tend to do, you really appreciate how much is kept contained inside the trays.
We also experimented with simultaneous play in order to speed up the sessions. I was happy to find this actually addressed in the rulebook since it was something that we naturally gravitated towards. When one person was crafting, another could Scavenge. Of course, as it is a co-op we always checked with the other person to make sure we didn't end up short on Food or Water at the end of a day phase. Since actions like hunting, fishing, or mining involve playing a quick (and usually very interesting) mini-game, it allowed us to trim off a fair amount of session time, with the second mission taking about 2 hours...and we extended it out a bit to play around with the crafting and carefully choosing what buildings we wanted in our Outpost.
What I love about founding an Outpost is that you shape the society by what you do...and I know that sounds obvious but you literally do this by what order you decide to progress and the choices of upgrades you make. The sense of community is even reinforced by the fact that all characters can contribute the Energy needed in order to found a settlement.
It's at this point where I will leave the adventures of Boog and Mithra to fade into Legend...because that is exactly what happens to deceased characters in Stonesaga. In the before times, the death of a character meant “Game Over.” In Stonesaga, it is part of the circle of life, with their adventures recorded on the cave walls of the world and the characters are added to a Legendary Deck that you can delve into later. You learn from what they accomplished, their items/weapons can be passed down, and a new generation of characters pick up the mantle (or in Mithra's case, a trusty fishing spear) to continue onward.(Which, by the way, makes adding new players to your campaign very easy: Just roll up a new character and add them to your quest with the existing characters).
There is so much that makes Stonesaga more than “You hunt, I'll gather and let's huddle together for warmth.” If you choose to work in the same area as another character, you can freely exchange food and water....but, you will add Depletion tokens to the area, making it harder (a.k.a. You have to spend more energy) to find the items you are looking for. Moving from area to area requires you to draw Journey Cards, which can lead to interesting encounters and misfortune...like slipping on some shale and taking a major injury (also known as “Pulling a Boog”).
Stonesaga does have a few mechanics that I don't normally care for. It has limited storage space (Ugh!) and Breakable Weapons (Double Ugh!). Ok, the limited storage space on the character's is done is such a cool way that I can almost overlook how much I normally dislike it. Each character has a bag and you have to physically fit the tokens for those items into the bag-shaped area. And the game knows players hate limited storage space and adds buildings/items that you can build in an Outpost for you to store resources you gather. As for Breakable Weapons, well, I guess a game that focuses so highly on crafting wants to give you plenty of reasons to craft new weapons....I just wish it would give you a way to recover at least some of the items needed to create them when they break. What I really dislike is the hard limit on what you can carry over from adventure to adventure, which is limited to five Items for each character and five resources. I mean, we built entire Outposts, you would think we could store and carry over a few extra resources from generation to generation.
There are definitely shades of Kingdom Death Monster and Gloomhaven found in Stonesaga. I just wish it “got cooler” faster. It takes many multi-hour adventures to even scratch the surface of Stonesaga and we felt the slow, deliberate pace was a bit too much of “Crawl before you can walk” when we really wanted to be stretching our legs.
Gaze upon the cave walls and remember the sacrifice and heroics of Boog And Mithra. Stonesaga remembers. Someday, Pepperidge Farms will likely remember. And to anyone beginning an adventure into Stonesaga: The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
A review copy of this release was provided by the publisher. Therewillbe.games would like to thank them for their support.
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