R is for Roll Player

By Thunderworks Games

I saw the expansion for this game on Kickstarter with two days left and thought the game looked neat, but didn’t want to go all-in on for something we had never played yet (if it was available). So we tracked down a copy of the base game at Abu Games and brought it home that very afternoon to try out. We liked it. So we backed the expansions. They arrived just in time for this challenge.

Players: 1-4

Time: 60-90 minutes

Ages: 10+

Theme: Fantasy Character Creation (+Combat with expansion)

Mechanics: Dice Drafting, Card Drafting

In the base game of Roll Player, the goal is to create a great adventuring hero. You’re given a race, a class, a backstory, and an alignment to attempt to satisfy. You can also equip your hero with gear and useful skills. Satisfying your character goals give you reputation points, and the hero with the most points at the end wins. You don’t actually embark on any adventures with these characters… Unless you have the 2^nd expansion, Monsters and Minions.

In Monsters and Minions, you can chose to go on hunts and fight minions in place of buying skills/equipment. At the end of the game, all heroes must fight a big bad (think kraken or demon or chimera). Your chances of defeating the end boss increase as you defeat minions throughout the game, as the first three minions defeated grant clues as to the boss’ weaknesses.

In the third expansion, Fiends and Familiars, there are fiends that mess with the dice and give you disadvantages (which may cause you to think twice before taking the most powerful dice when it’s your turn to choose). There are also, you guessed it, familiars for your characters with an extra set of needs to satisfy for reputation points.

We enjoy fitting all of the pieces together to make our characters. There are LOTS of races, classes, backgrounds and alignments, which make for lots of replayability. We saw that they had another game on Kickstarter recently (which we did not back because we are trying to save some money *cough*) that you can bring roll player-built characters into and play actual dungeon-crawling adventures). Expansions make the setup longer and the game longer, but also make it more varied and are pretty well-balanced (scores with and without the expansions are fairly similar).

We give the base game alone a 9/10. It’s excellent and we enjoy it. My dad played and he liked it , too. The expansions give the game a bit of bloat, dropping our rating to an 8/10. Not saying they aren’t worth picking up—just that they make an already complex game and add more complexity—with so many different things to manage and consider, it is no longer a quickie to pull out for a lazy afternoon.