GeekDad: Catching Up on Campaign Games

I have been a bit delinquent in my game reviews lately. There are a number of reasons, but a lot of it has to do with how my gaming habits and tastes have shifted over the past couple of years, often prompted by the pandemic. I went from hosting big game nights to kludging together videoconferencing solutions and playing games on Tabletop Simulator. My in-person game nights started and stopped and started again as the threat levels fell and rose because of vaccines and new variants.

By last year, things had started settling more or less into a routine. Instead of big game nights with a couple tables going at a time, I had more frequent, smaller groups. I finally got rid of an extra table that had basically just become an inefficient storage space, because I’m not sure if I’ll be comfortable hosting such a large group at a time anytime soon. While I’ve seen the return of some old faces and some new ones have joined, there are a lot of folks that I haven’t seen again in person since things shut down.

But though I do miss having a revolving door of lots of different people coming through to play games, the smaller, more consistent groups have allowed for something else that has traditionally been harder for me: longer campaign games. It’s been years since my group of five played through all of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and during that era I generally didn’t take on any other campaigns, because I couldn’t fit multiple ongoing campaigns and still play through all the games I was trying to review with lots of different people. But with the same folks coming week after week, it made more sense to try some games that take weeks or months to complete, and I’ve found that I really enjoy the experience.

I spent a good chunk of 2021 playing through The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine online with two other friends, and we made it through the entire mission book. After that, my son joined us as we played through a massive mega-campaign of The 7th Continent, a pulp-adventure game that I’d backed way back in 2015. I had played through a few of the curses (each scenario is centered on a particular curse), and had received the expansion in 2019 but never got a chance to play it. We decided to take on just about all of the curses at once (this may have been a bit foolish) and made it through in about six months—it was an epic adventure filled with a lot of fun memories. Then we played through Gen7, a game from Plaid Hat that never took off the way Dead of Winter did, but I like it: it’s about a colony ship on a long journey, and you are the 7th generation of colonists on board. Strange things start happening, and you have to investigate those on top of just keeping the ship from falling apart.

I’ve since started a few more campaigns with my various small gaming groups. With one friend, I’m finally diving into the Apocrypha Adventure Card Game—I had played through some of it back when it came out, but then set it aside to finish Pathfinder, with plans to move to this next. Alas, that particular group had to disband due to scheduling conflicts and we never got back to it. I’m still not terribly fond of the horror genre, but I like the way the game functions and it’s interesting to see the parts that overlap with Pathfinder as well as the ways it diverges.

In December, I started playing Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar with my youngest kid and two friends. It’s a legacy game—that is, you permanently change the game as you play, opening up envelopes and boxes, adding stickers to the board, and tearing up cards—that loosely follows the plot of the various Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films. You’ll see a lot of familiar characters come and go over the course of the 10-game campaign, and as you play you’ll unlock more dinosaurs, build out the island by adding roads and barriers, and realize that it was just never a great idea to bring tourists to an island filled with partially-fenced-in carnivores.

I’ve also started playing Frosthaven (provided by Cephalofair), a legacy game that’s the follow-up to Gloomhaven. The gameplay is very similar to the original, but there are some new twists. The biggest is that in addition to the world map where you run around pursuing scenarios, there is also a map of the Frosthaven outpost, where you’ll have the ability to construct and upgrade buildings and defenses, buy and trade items, and encounter other time-based events. I actually did not get to play through all of Gloomhaven at the time (it’s still on my shelf, waiting for me to get back to it) but I’m really digging Frosthaven so far and figure I may return to the others later.

With two of my kids and one friend, we’ve started playing Lands of Galzyr, which I wrote about during its crowdfunding campaign in 2021. While it is a campaign game because your characters retain items and missions from one game to the next, and completing a mission often unlocks the next step of a mission, it’s not a campaign with a defined end—each time you play, the month advances, but you can just continue playing as long as you want. Eventually you’ll start repeating stories but I’ve seen estimates that you should be able to play for about a “year” (in-game time) before that happens.

But wait—there’s more! Renegade Games sent me a copy of Artisans of Splendent Vale. It’s a legacy game about four young artisans—a tailor, an apothecary, a stonemason, and an artificer, and while it does have some battle scenes that are dungeon-crawl-ish, one of the neat features is that each character has a novel-sized book. You read through the narratives together, and each character’s dialogue is only printed in their own book. My three kids were interested in this one so we’re planning to play it together, though the bulk of it will have to wait until my oldest is back home from college for the summer. We started our adventure when she was home for a weekend and I’m eager to see where this one goes.

Of course, I’m hoping to write up a lot of these once I get a little bit further into the campaign to give you a more detailed look at them, but they’re tricky to do. I want to play enough to get a good feel for it before I review it, but at the same time I don’t want to spoil things for those who may want to play it themselves. In the meantime, I’m still trying to make room for the other games in the queue. Aside from the changes in my gaming groups and the games I’ve been playing, the pandemic has definitely affected my motivation to write to some extent.

Even though I have several ongoing campaigns, this taste of them has me hungry for more! I’ve got several other games on the shelves that I haven’t gotten to yet, or started but didn’t finish, and while it may be unrealistic to get through all of them, I think there’s a good chance we’ll try to tackle some more after we’re done with these current games. Stay tuned!

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