Game 1: Apocrypha Adventure Card Game: The World (Taking the Plunge)
Game 2: Apocrypha Adventure Card Game: The World (Shirts and Skins)
Game 3: Apocrypha Adventure Card Game: The World (Faust Company)
Enthusiasm: ❤️❤️🖤🖤
- Apocrypha is a revision of Lone Shark Game’s previous adventure card game, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Major differences include the setting (modern horror), reworking of the dice system around d6s instead of RPG dice, non-linear campaign, and simplified character progression. They have taken many of their learnings and brought them forward to this game.
- The non-linear campaign approach, combined with the simplified character progression, leads to mission difficulty and character growth being hard to measure. For example, Taking the Plunge being the first mission listed in the book really doesn’t help.
- Even though LSG worked with some published authors, the plots aren’t well fleshed out. For PACG, it kind of works out because the games are based upon pre-existing Pathfinder Adventure Paths, so details are readily available, but for Apocrypha, the plots suffer as a result (although the non-linearity really doesn’t help here either).
- Skill tests can be extremely difficult, due to the restriction of only keeping 3d6 to hit the target skill numbers (generally). Some of the skill targets hit the low 20s, meaning that players need very specific cards to hit them, even with natural 6s. This, combined with the simplified character progression, removes the ability for the players to min/max characters to throw ridiculous numbers of dice (which is probably the goal, admittedly).
- The iconography around when card abilities can be triggered is interesting, but takes a fair amount of practice before it’s second nature.