If you’re looking for a strategy game, this one has it all! Adventure, mysticism, companionship, herbs, swords, battles…this is s a great beginning strategy game for young board game players.
It’s can also be fairly complex with three different Adventure Scenarios to satisfy even the most seasoned board gamer!
Each scenario indicates how points are earned and scored. Each is slightly different and they get progressively more complex with more ways to earn points. It’s a really cool mechanism for providing versatility within a single game!
The STORY of Adventure Land is this: King Agamis is Lord over his diverse kingdom of rich cities, vast forests and rugged mountain ranges. The land is fertile, the river is full of gold, and the mountains provide ore for tools and weapons, but dangers lurk beneath the fog along the riverbank.
The game board is essentially a coordinate grid (think Battleship) with different terrain types spread out. The game begins by drawing 7 cards, each of which shows coordinates for a certain type of resource. Those resources are initially placed on the board, as well as adventurers for each player in the top left corner.
In addition to resource cards, there is a WATER SPRITE and FOG CREATURE cards.
On each turn, players take two actions:
- Draw 2 cards and place the applicable resources
- Move 2 adventurers
- Move 1 adventurer as far as he can go twice OR
- Move 2 adventurers once each
The BIG CATCH about player movement in this game is that adventurers can ONLY move to the right and down so plan your moves carefully! Players may only move toward the castle and never turn back.
The Water Sprite travels the river, throwing adventurers off their quest. Each time a piece of gold is placed in the river, the water sprite moves from its current location to the new gold. Any adventurers in the path of the water sprite are removed from the board and the game completely. Collecting gold is important, but be careful and quick!
When fog creature cards are drawn from the deck during the 1st phase of each player’s turn, a fog creature token is placed on the game board. Players CANNOT pass through a fog creature, instead they must battle it by gathering companions (each worth 1 point) and using swords (each sword used allows the player to roll one dice, the total dice roll = battle strength and can be added to companion strength, etc.). Herbs and gold may also be used to add to battle strength.
If an adventurer has enough strength to defeat the fog creature, he takes the token and gets the victory points on the token. If he is defeated by the fog creature, his adventurer is lost and goes back in the game box.
The game ends when either the companions AND swords have all been collected OR none of the adventurers can move.
Points are counted based on the Adventure Scenario, and a winner is declared!
This is a really fun, fairly quick strategy game with lots of great gameschooling applications! The best and most unique is the coordinate/ordered pairs practice. Players have an opportunity every turn to identify an ordered pair on the coordinate plain, and it’s way more fun than boring dots on a piece of graph paper!
I will never again have to teach any of my kids how to find coordinates on a graph…this game is going to teach it for me in a fun, adventure-filled way!
Thanks to HABA for sharing another fantastic educational game with us!
