Posted in: Board Games, Games | Tagged: Dresden Files, entertainment, Evil Hat, games, Jim Butcher, Paul Blackthorne

Game Night – Playing The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

I've been seeing a lot of Kickstarter projects for novel related games. There is the Mistborn game based on the Cosmere universe by Brandon Sanderson which shipping soon, a deck of cards featuring art from The Name of the Wind, from the Kingkiller Chronicles from Patrick Rothfuss that is going on now and the cooperative card game based on the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. And it amazes me how well some of these do. The Rothfuss cards kickstarter has been up for 3 days and has over $250,000 pledges with their goal being $25,000.

These projects are kind of an interesting mix in that they provide unique art based on these novel series which may be the reason fans pledge, but you really don't know how well the game is designed or will play. Is it an overly complicated system that will take too long to learn or a game so simple you get bored with it after one try? You take that risk to support the author / work. Once you have the game, you have to try it out though… which is what I did last night with four friends as we played the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game.

The game is meant to be played with three to five people. Among my group of friends I knew at least three others who have read all of the books in the series, which is not necessary to play the game, but it definitely enhances it. I invited them, another friend who had watched the SYFY adaptation of the novels that starred Paul Blackthorne and his wife who had never heard of the books. Of the seven invited, five showed up which was perfect. We got some pizza and watched a 12-minute Youtube video that explains the rules (linked at the bottom of the article). The mechanics of the game appear to be a bit over complicated and I saw a few people go glassy-eyed during the instructions. This was still a good choice to do as once we got to actually playing, almost everyone knew what they were doing relatively quickly.

Things you notice when you first get the game out of the box is the art work. The art on all the cards is great. Very remeniscent of the Dresden Files comics from Dynamite Entertainment… and if you read the books and haven't read the comics, you really should as they are co-written by Butcher, are canon and are a lot of fun to read… the game is based on the novels and the characters. You play as one of the characters from the series: Harry Dresden, Karrin Murphy, Michael Carpenter, Susan Rodriguez, etc. There are five player decks that come with the game and expansion packs that include other character like Thomas Raith, Sanya and Harry's dog Mouse. Each players deck comes with a Talent and Stunt card and a series of action cards broken into attack, investigate, overcome and advantage cards. Each of these card can be used to take on specific book cards during the game. The art work for the cards is very cool looking and often pulled from specific scenes in the novels

Once each of the players have chosen their character deck, one person has to play as Harry, you then choose which book you want to play. This is one of the things that I think make the book unique. There are sixteen novels in the Dresden Files series and as of right now the first six or eight have decks available. You play your character against the events and bad guys from one of the novels. For someone who has never read the books, the game plays just fine without that knowledge, but if you have read the book then it enhances the experience and is a bit more immersive when you play. We ended up playing three games last night, taking on the first three novels in the series: Storm Front, Fool Moon and Grave Peril.

Once you've chosen the book to play, you put the showdown card for the back on the top left, the you shuffle the twelve book cards and spread them out on two rows of six. Then players take turns trying to eliminate those cards by attacking the villains, investigating the mysteries, overcoming obstacles and taking advantages when they can. Each players action costs Fate points which you start with anywhere from 8 to 13 depending on how difficult you want the game to be. Fate points work like mana from other game systems, each action costs so many fate points and a big part of the game is managing those points. There are also dice involved and on some cards the number of fate points, attack damage, clues, etc can change based on the role of a dice. These dice are six-sided by just have a +, – or blank on them meaning up one, down one or no effect.

In the image above, the red cards are the bad guys you need to take out and the little red tokens are the hits you place on them until you've hit them enough to take them out. The green cards are the mysteries and the green tokens are clues you stack until solved. The yellow cards are the obstacles that cause negative effects, like everything costing an extra fate point, until they are removed and the purple cards are advantage cards that do a beneficial action when taken off the board. You work from left to right, with each card able to affect a certain range. If your attack is a range of two you can only go after a bad guy in the first two slots of a row… etc. Once a card is dealt with it goes into either the book discard pile or if it's a solved case it goes there. Since you are working together to beat the book, the group wins if there are more solved cases than bad guys left on the board when the game is over.

The video suggested you play the first hand with cards face up to help get the feel for the game. That helped a lot. Being able to see what everyone had and figure out how we could work together made it possible to plan our strategy. Normally you're supposed to play with cards hidden and you can't tell other players what you have or point values. It took us a little while to do the first game, not too long, but we did need to figure out certain things like how the two different rows worked and how some cards are tied together… for example there are bad guys you can't attack until a certain mystery is solved, this is all part of the story aspect of the game. You can't attack the toad man until you know who the toad man is.

We finished the first game and everyone was eager to do another. A good sign as we did have a few back-up games in case this one sucked. Everyone switched up with characters we were playing and played the second novel. The game went faster and much more smoothly. Where the first game took maybe 40 minutes, the second was probably 30. And once that game was finished, the person who had talked about being tired earlier was the first to suggest playing a third time. That game was slightly faster than the others. I think had we not gotten a late start to the evening we might've played a fourth.

The game seems complicated, but once you start playing it makes quick sense. Each component adds something to the game. Where I originally thought having the dice aspect was overkill, it actually adds a randomness to some of the moves. With the multiple books you can play against, the multiple player decks you can choose, etc… this is a game that could be a lot of fun to play over and over again without it feeling repetitive. It's also set up to expand as they adapt other novels into the game or add other characters in future expansions and the box is set up for the expansion and for easy organization.

One of the expansion packs includes a character from a completely different comic series, Hank Walker Alias: Ra. I'm not familiar with the character, but it interesting to think of bringing other Urban Fantasy characters into the game… and as an author of a line of Urban Fantasy books (Lucius Fogg Mysteries), I may just have to look into making up a set of player cards for Jimmy Doyle or Lucius Fogg just so I can play as my own characters… yeah, I can be that type of nerd sometimes.

Overall, the Dresden File Cooperative Card game lives up to the hype, Evil Hat Production has put together a really nice game with beautiful art and with a design that makes it a game you can play quickly and multiple times without getting bored. The players who knew the novels really got into seeing the art that pertains to the story and those who didn't seems eager now to read the books. I'll probably take the game with me for the next game night once I get the Mistborn game in the mail.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!