Would I go on a Tiny Epic Quest?

At this point, I have played three out of the five games in the Tiny Epic line. Ironically, two of them are the ones that I don't own, although I did play Tiny Epic Defender via PnP so you could say that I owned it that way.

As the name implies, one of the selling points of the line is that they come in small boxes. For me, small storage space and small footprint and relatively short playing time are all appealing.

But I still stand by my mantra that a small game or a short game still has to measure up. I will admit that I will give the game points for being good for it size but what I am really looking for is a game that's just plain good.

Tiny Epic Quest, at least at first blush, felt like it was definitely good for the size of the game and the length of the game but I'm not sure it's just plain good. Frankly, that's because it's a genre I don't play a lot of.

For some reason, I tend to think of Adventure Games, where you control a hero with stats exploring the countryside as a subsection of Dungeon Crawls, even though the other way around makes more sense. Adventure Games tend to have less discrete actions while some Dungeon Crawls have you play out every step.

Tiny Epic Quest has you send three heroes around a map made up of cards. They explore temples, learn magic and fight goblins. Each round has a day where you move around and a night where you have your adventures.

The mechanics for the night are pretty simple but interesting. The active player rolls the five dice that come with the game. Any goblin heads get passed around and give each person who gets one a point of damage. Any power symbols get passed around in the same way and give people power points. Magic raises the magic level, required for learning magic. And everyone gets to uses scrolls, torches and punches to further their adventures.

When it's your turn, you can choose to rest or roll the dice. So, the game ends up being a push-your-luck game with some resource management (hit points are a resource after all)

To be honest, when I think about it, it's kind of an odd central mechanism for an adventure game. At least in my very limited experience. And, intellectually, I can't help but wonder if it's a little too random. However, I did have fun when I played it and I would play it again.

My real question is: would I actually buy it?

That's actually a rather interesting question. On the one hand, I know that there are deeper and more interesting games about tramping around a magical land and exploring rules and fighting monsters. On the other hand, that's not the kind of game I play a lot and one that takes up a small spot on the game shelf and plays fairly quickly is desirable.

So, maybe.

My Tiny Epic Experiences at RinCon's July fundraiser

Two or three times a year, RinCon has fundraisers. Which basically means that, in addition to having a friendly local gaming convention in Tucson, we get a couple micro conventions. It's pretty awesome.

I hadn't been able to make the April or June fundraiser so I made sure that I went to the July one.

The guy in front of me in the registration line didn't come with a group either so I introduced myself and I ended up gaming with him for the rest of the morning and the afternoon. Luckily, he turned out to be a great guy. (Thanks, Craig)

He had both Tiny Epic Galaxy and Tiny Epic Quest. I had been very eager to try out Galaxies and I was willing to give Quest a try. Those two games ended up being the highlight of the fundraiser for me. Other folks sat down with us and played. I basically got my chair and everything else fell into place.

I got to play Tiny Epic Galaxies both with and without the expansion. I backed both and I'm glad I did. It is a slick design and the tiny part barely impacts function. I can understand why it is the best regarded of the Tiny Epic series.

In between Tiny Epic experiences, we got in a couple games of HUE. Every time I go to one of these events, I take the Pack O Games with me and I always seem to at least get HUE on the table.

At this point, I have played HUE with five or six different groups. And it keeps on getting better every time. The first time, I thought it was okay. Now, I think it's really good. This was the first group that really started using the poison cards and they worked better than I expected.

I didn't back Tiny Epic Quest since adventure games haven't been my style. (Although I have been coming to like them more, partially because the difference between them and RPGs has been shrinking for me) It was described to me as Zelda as a board game.

And boy, was it ever. I'm not much of a video game player but I could see enough at parallels with the Nintendo franchise that Tiny Epic Quest totally felt like Zelda to me. You travel across the map to explore temples and learn magic and fight goblins. Minimal for an adventure game but that minimalism actually created a lot of tension. So much to do with so little.

While I was leaving, I somehow got in a quick game of Cunning Folk which I did a _terrible_ job teaching. But I'd like to think the other players at least pretended to have fun.

It wasn't the start of RinCon for 2017 but it was the start for me and a jolly fun start it was.