Having not played games in person for a year my younger brother spent much of Christmas diving into the back catalogue and pulling games that haven’t hit the table in years. One such game was The Adventurers, the first ever game I was sent as a review copy from AEG way back when I first started this blog.
In The Adventurers, each player takes control of a treasure hunter trying to escape a cursed temple with a pile of loot. The more loot you grab the slower you move. The game is essentially a push your luck game as you try to make it out before the giant boulder crushes you and the player who gets out with the most treasure wins.
While I reviewed the game fairly favourably back in the day, it just doesn’t really hold up in the modern board game space. The game is basically a series of mini games, there's some memory match, some dice rolling and a lot of push your luck. But at the end of the day your choices are, in general, move a space or take a treasure card and once you have a lot of treasure cards you don’t really want to draw any more so your turn largely comes down to just moving forward.
Yes the game has that tension of “Will I be crushed by the boulder?” or “Will the rope bridge snap under the weight of all the gold I’m carrying?” but you have very little control over that, it’s in the hands of the dice and you either make it out or you don’t. And given that the attrition rate for adventurers is pretty high, the best strategy is to collect as little treasure as possible and make it out, which is of course less fun than grabbing tons of loot.
I’ve had a lot of fun with The Adventurers and the Indiana Jones theme doesn’t hurt, but it’s not one I need to return to and for family friendly adventure there are better options out there nowadays.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, Santa gave to me, 11 piles of ill gotten gold...
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