Adventure Land Review

As you may have read in our bios, we are located in the Quad Cities – right on the border of Iowa and Illinois. If you’ve never been to Iowa, you may not believe me when I say that we are home to a theme park called Adventureland. It has some sweet roller coasters, neat shows and games, and some seriously delicious funnel cake! As a band director in my every-day life, I take my band to perform there every year, and then spend the rest of the day playing in the park! (Admittedly, probably won’t happen this year…) But anyway, so how did my experience with a board game by the same name pan out? Keep reading to find out – and welcome to Adventure Land.

Adventure Land is a game of grid movement and area majority in which players are working to gather resources, recruit Companions, fight Fog Monsters, and amass enough VP to keep the realm safe from danger! To begin, setup the board and populate the starting tokens as described in the rulebook. Select one of the three provided adventure scenarios for your game. Each scenario has different objectives and goals to be completed throughout play, and add an element of variability to the game. Every player selects a color and receives a number of Adventurer meeples depending on the player count. The Adventurers are placed in the starting spaces along the top left corner of the board, and then the game is ready to begin!

Disclaimer: I do not intend to rehash the entire rulebook in this review, but rather provide a look into the basic ruleset and overall gameplay. For a complete look at the rules, find the game at your FLGS, online, or check it out on BGG. -L

Moving in turn order, players will perform 2 actions on their turns: Reveal 2 Terrain cards, and Move Adventurer(s). To start your turn, you first will draw 2 Terrain cards, and place the corresponding tokens onto the grid spaces indicated on the cards. The grid spaces are all associated with a coordinate – letters A-K running horizontally, and numbers 1-10 running vertically. So, say you draw a Terrain card that places a Sword token on D3 – you will then place a Sword token face-down in the 4th column (D), 3rd row down. After you have revealed both of your Terrain cards, it is time to Move Adventurer(s). During your Movement phase, you may either move 1 Adventurer in 2 directions, or move 2 Adventurers each in 1 direction. The movement rules are as follows: You may only move Adventurers to the right, or down. All Adventurers start in the upper left-hand corner of the board, and as the game progresses, will make their ways slowly towards the bottom right-hand corner of the board. You may never move an Adventurer to the left or upwards.

When moving, Adventurers may move as far to the right/downward as they want, and can hop over opponents in the process. At the end of your movement, if your Adventurer has landed on a space with a resource token, it is immediately claimed. Landing on a space with a Companion allows that Companion to travel together with your Adventurer in future moves. And finally, landing on a space with a Fog Monster means that you must fight said creature. To defeat a Fog Monster, your Adventurer must have a combat strength equal to or higher than the strength of that Fog Monster. Combat strength is determined by adding up Adventurers and resources – Companions add 1 additional strength, Sword tokens allow you to roll a d6 and add that result to your strength, and Herbs and Gold allow you to add a finite number of strength to your total. If you win the combat, the Fog Monster is removed, and those VP will count towards your end-game total. If you lose the combat, that Adventurer, along with any Companions/resources used for combat, are removed from the game.

Once the draw pile of Sword tokens AND Companions are empty, the game immediately ends. Final points are tallied depending on which adventure scenario was selected at the beginning of the game. The player with the most VP, as determined by the chosen scenario, is declared the winner!

Overall, how does Adventure Land hold up? For such a simple game (reveal cards, move meeples), there is a good amount of strategy involved. Since you are only allowed to move either to the right or downwards, you really have to think strategically. Moving too far too fast will strand your Adventurers in the bottom corner of the board, effectively removing you from gameplay. But moving too slowly means risking your opponents progressing faster than you and leaving you with no VP opportunities. It’s a delicate balance, and keeps all players on their toes.

My biggest issue with the game is that the gameplay gets a little monotonous after a while. Yes, there are strategic elements, but the simplicity of turns makes it feel like you’re just going through the motions. Along with that is the opportunity to meta-game while playing. Each type of resource only appears on certain terrain types on the board – Swords are only ever found in the mountain spaces, Companions only in the cities, etc. So it can be easy to just hang back until a resource you need manifests. It kind of turns into a waiting game at that point, and grinds the gameplay to a halt. I know it is a balance of risk/reward, but unless you have resources/Companions, you won’t be able to win battles against Fog Monsters. So you have to take time collecting those. If Adventurers had the ability to move in any direction, that would negate some of that waiting game. But it also would negate some of the strategy required by only moving in 2 directions. Just something to consider.

Let’s talk components for a minute. They’re great in this game. The board and the cards are large and the artwork is clear and thematic. All of the meeples and cardboard tokens are sturdy and are easy to manipulate. For being an ‘older’ game (2015, is that old?) the production quality is top-notch.

With everything said and done, how does Adventure Land hold up? I would say that I think it’s just ok. The movement rules add a unique strategic twist that I haven’t seen in other games, but the time it takes to gather resources and actually start earning VP makes the gameplay drag on too long for me. In theory, the concept is pretty neat. But in execution, it doesn’t quite succeed. It’s a decent game, just not one that I would pull out too often to play. Purple Phoenix Games gives it an adventurous 6 / 12.