A few days ago, a board game gave me a peculiar sensation. It's something I get from Jackbox games, the later Marvel films, or the midway of a sad carnival: the horrible feeling that this is a fun-like experience. It feels like I should be having fun here, so I must be having fun... but it isn't fun. It's just fun-like. I'm only vaguely aware of the youtuber Mr. Beast, but his face is the face of this emotion; a manic grin with dead eyes. The synthetic echo of joy, with something malignant and inhuman just under the surface.
The board game was HEXplore It: The Forests of Adrimon. At friend's request, we played it for five miserable hours. And now, you're going to hear about it.
HEXplore It® is a cooperative hero building adventure board game toolkit.
Enter a realm teeming with fantasy creatures, heroes, and villains.
Players select their hero by combining several character options: Role, Race, Aspect and Trait. Your Role is your hero's profession while your Race is your heritage and species. Aspects and Traits are optional and are found in our Hero Chest and Expansions.
These combinations drive your hero's strengths, weaknesses, and defines your unique special abilities. Discover fun synergies and enjoy creating entirely different combinations.
The Simplification Trap
So you want a game that feels like X but without Y.
OSR games are a perfect example. You want a game that feels like [old-school D&D], but without [OD&D's editorial gaps / AD&D's overly complex, verbose, or badly edited systems / this game's design flaw] etc. Sometimes, that means your game is OD&D With One Thing I Hate Fixed, or B/X With Better Layout. Sometimes, it's the GLOG. And that's all fine. Even if you disagree with Y, someone (even if it's just the author) says that it produces X.
And some tradeoffs are worth it. You want a food that feels like [fresh pasta] but is shelf-stable and requires minimal preparation? [Dried pasta] isn't quite as good but the tradeoff may be worth the convenience.
HEXplore It apparently wants to create an experience that feels like [4E/5E style character creation, levelling up, an exploration hex crawl, tactical combat, and a save-the-world quest] but without [the complexity, time commitment, and a GM]. D&D without all that tedious mucking about doing D&D.
It fails.
To be clear, there are some board games that perfectly replicate the experience of playing a large, fiddly, complex board game. No substitute is required; the game does what it says it does. It produces the intended sensation. This isn't a post complaining about complex board games. It's a post complaining about a game that sets out to do X but without Y, and fails spectacularly.
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| Boardgamegeek |
Character Creation
Character creation consists of a basic race + class + trait combo. As most of the players were new, and to speed up the process, these were assigned randomly.
Races and Classes, from the basic view, feel like 5E inspired. The 5E Druid is split into a Thorn Whipping Damage-Dealer Class and a Wilderness Explorer + Group Buff class. Pre-built builds, pre-defined powers. Nothing new or particularly exciting.
Traits provided a rare direct incentive. Every time you do X, tick up a track. Every time the track fills, mark a rank, and maybe do something else. Stats and Skills are pre-set, adjusted slightly by Race. And that's it.
The result isn't really a character. There's no life. Just the semblance of life. A shell of an RPG character. Not quite an arbitrary token, but not alive either. A shadow.
As far as satisfying players, it fails on the Synergistic Optimization front (as there are very limited options), the Build Your Unique Original Character front (as the characters are flat, meaningless, background-less, detached from reality, and on dry erase boards), and the OSR Quick Heroism front (as generating a character is surprisingly tedious, despite involving almost no randomness). It is the worst of all possible worlds. The pre-generated heroes from Heroquest or Mansions of Madness do a better job of providing players with hooks for non-mechanical choices and conversation.
Frequent stat upgrades means constantly redoing the math on your sheet. It's not complicated, it's just tedious, and the limited powers are still complex. The whole game is full of text, keywords, conditional statements, and lots of choices that aren't really choices. Once you understand the mechanics, you realize there are basically four options in any combat, and on any given round one of them will be obviously optimal. It's rock paper scissor, where scissors ticks down an Energy pool.
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GM-Less?
HEXploreIt is allegedly Game Master-less. Everyone can play a character; all the usual GM actions are performed by dice rolls, decks of cards, and lookup tables.
Yet, in practice, unless your group is very good at memorizing, the group rolls dice and calls out the results. After the first few exploration attempts, we were able to speed up this process, but it took two hours to approach anything like quick resolution of even basic game mechanics, as these rolls are interrupted by other game activities and subsystems.
There are quick reference cards for some actions / functions but a) they look identical from a distance, b) they're dense as heck, and c) there's only one per table, meaning it's constantly getting passed around, put under other reference cards, etc. And they never seemed to have all the information you wanted on them.
There's only one copy of the rulebook. At one point, all the players were on their phones looking at the wiki. The D&D-like-experience-but-less-complicated game has a wiki!
You also need one player to manage the Battle Mat, which tracks enemy Health, Energy, and Special Abilities, group resources, the overall game doomsday clock (which can move up or down), etc, etc. I mean, look at it! This player will probably also do the rolls for the random monster attacks and abilities. They probably understand the rules.
That person is, effectively, a GM. A GM without power, without rulings, without control, merely a blind agent of uncaring rules. Aware of the suffering around the table but unable to do anything about it. All the tedious tracking of a GM's role (while also running a character), but without the incentives or the joy.
Also, since both the effect and target of monster attacks are randomized, there are no real tactics beyond resource management. A player can choose to Defend on their turn, but that only affects their incoming damage, not the group's (or so it seems). You can't really tank or position or block or hide or do anything that makes D&D combat genuinely interesting.
In our group, the person who wanted to play the game and the person who was managing the tracking sheet were getting snippy with each other, and with the rest of the table, bringing a "disgruntled teacher at the end of a long day" energy by the end of the night. "No, on a critical success on Explore you get 2 gold and a chance to roll for a Essence Vine. Or is it an Infused Seed? No, not the purple die, the blue one. Where's it gone? Here it is. A six? Ok, you can spend 1 Energy or 1 Health to roll again or..."
That's the vibe of this game. Management of resources that are intended to feel like something (Food, Health, Energy, Gold,... Vines, Seeds, Hearts of the Forest, Healing Consumable Items, etc.) but, at the of the day, are just numbers on a dry erase board. They go up, they go down, they don't matter. Nobody cares. None of these characters are real. They're just dry erase smudges moving around a randomly generated forest, fighting randomly generated enemies, in pursuit of four randomly generated artifacts, which are in three randomly generated pieces in randomly generated locations, and which can be used to defeat a prewritten Big Evil Boss. Clue doesn't feel like a real murder mystery and this doesn't feel like real exploration.
Simpler?
The basic rulebook is thicker and denser than OD&D, by a considerable margin. That's not counting all the rules on the cards, the bosses, etc. If you stripped it all out, I think it'd be at least a 5E PHB sized book.
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| Coopgestalt |
The healer ("Floromancer") was run by a person who'd played the game before, and is otherwise reasonably intelligent. They made several brave attempts to understand their Healing Ray power. What, for example, do the 3/6/9/12 above the grid to the right of the power mean?
Let's break it down. Keywords are in blue. Definitions (added by me) are blue and in brackets.
You may use this Mastery during the Movement phase to harness the sun's power. Raise [heal, but if overhealed, grant temp HP/Energy for the turn] each hero's Health or Energy (your choice) by 3 for this Game Turn. In combat, Healing Ray creates 2 plus one third Molecular Barrier rank motes that last until they are consumed or combat ends. Anytime a target suffers Health damage, you may choose to consume one or more motes to Heal that target's Health equal to half Healing Ray rank (minimum of 1). At rank 7, you may also use Arrow of Light this round.
Actually, let's not break it down, lest this author break down. Any game designer who writes "Healing Ray creates 2 plus one third Molecular Barrier rank motes" and says "yup, that looks good" needs to be force-fed back issues of Pyramid (the GURPS magazine) until they burst.
Sure, dividing by 3 (and round down) is easy, but in HEXplore It you're constantly adjusting your numbers for one reason or another. Oh, and the player drew a Race that set their starting Healing Ray value to 0, which meant they couldn't use it at all at first, which just felt bizarre. And what is a 'molecule' to a floral forest druid?
The point of your board game is to make a less complicated version of D&D, and you invented this? THIS is what you've handed a player at a BOARD GAME NIGHT?! A player who may have enjoyed INTOXICATING BEVERAGES and GREASY SNACK FOODS?!? A player who may have worked a full day before arriving to a PURPORTED EVENING OF FUN AND MERRIMENT WITH FRIENDS?!!
If you have played this game and enjoyed even a tiny part of it, you are living in Plato's cave. You can run an RPG! It does what you want! You're sucking gravy from the tablecloth while the whole feast is laid out in front of you! Just do it! Or, if you liked the procedural exploration, resource management , and limited combat options, there are video games! JRPGs solve this decades ago!
Evocative?
The art and flavour text, where present, feels very sanitized and corporate. There's no real danger or real mythology here. It's polished, accessible, and fit for purpose; the stylistic equivalent of Landlord Greige. Hasbro-compatible worldbuilding. The game doesn't challenge the reader, adopt a position, reveal a worldview, or simulate reality. The world exists to enable the game mechanics. It exists only when the heroes interact with it. The flavour in the rulebook largely comes from keywords.
The lack of evocative writing and the abundance of clear but bland art serves only to stifle and flatten the imagination, like an animated digital battlemap. The power of the human mind swamped by vulgar visibility and clarity. Most of the game was spent staring at the utility side of the character sheet. You didn't dare flip it over to look at the illustration because of the dry erase writing. The hex board is just a vague suggestion of forests, mountains, and roads to nowhere. I don't think the normal monster cards had art; if they did, we were too busy grappling with the mechanics to see them.
Several aspects of the game are clearly utility-focused. Sometimes, they're genuinely good. They have to be; the game is so complex that anything less than ideal information design would result in total collapse. The designers had to make it clear or the game simply wouldn't function. But this is the clarity of overengineering, not of streamlining. This is six colour-coded dials that you have to monitor instead of one automatic switch.
The world is tile based. It feels as real as the island in Settlers of Catan. Without photographs, there's no way to put away the game and restart it later. It's not a setting. It's just some tiles.
Challenging?
The difficulty of the game can be adjusted. Winning too easily? Make the game harder by increasing some of the numbers! Granular difficulty, of course, means alternate and verbose rules. How do you know if the game is too easy, or if you're just managing resources well? Is it apparent after ten miserable hours? Twenty?
The clear visibility of the difficulty rating reveals that any perceived system mastery is hollow. Any victories feel even thinner and less meaningful because the "Easy Mode" dial is visible. There's no GM to tweak combat, invent houserules, or provide non-combat / resource management challenges. Even AD&D tournament modules had more going on than this game.
After 5 hours, we'd largely grasped the nature of the game. The mechanics switched from confusing to boring. Once the mystery was revealed, optimal strategies began to form. The two powers granted to each characters were revealed as shallow. This can absolutely happen in an RPG, but the reality of the imagined world keeps things fresh.
Random encounters are worst kind: resources depletion. You fight a Giant Fox. It feels exactly like fighting a Giant Statue or an Mind-Wiped Horde or whatever else. Just moving resources around. All the stupidity of 5E's prewritten random encounters, none of the opportunities for joy.
Moments of Joy?
Candy Land is what I'd call a minimum viable board game. It's a board with a track. Players take turns drawing a card with a colour on it and advancing their token to the next square of that colour. The only moments of joy come from a series of unlucky draws or a series of lucky draws. Replace drawing cards with rolling 1d6, and getting 2 sixes or 2 ones in a row. That's the only type of story Candy Land can create.
That kind of story that was available in HEXplore It. For five hours. Of a RPG-like game.
If I ever ran a session that felt like this game of HEXplore It, I'd give up GMing forever.
Sure, there was some satisfaction in finally understanding a build and levelling it up, but since level ups were effectively purely random, and getting a proper synergy to work took the full five hours, I'd hardly count it as joy. If you like combat-as-a-sport or build synergies, there are other, better games available, either on the RPG side, the mechanics side, or the complexity side.
The Magic Circle
RPGs work by creating a shared imaginary world. D&D didn't take off because it had wargame rules for Hobbits and Orcs. It took off because someone, in an early game, said "I want to talk to the Troll" or "I throw a rock at the trap" or "I tie my rope to..."
That nameless ur-player chose to interact with the world as a world, using real-world logic, and got results that no mechanics could hope to encompass. Sure, wargamers could try to get into the mindset of a Napoelonic general or a piratical sea-captain, but that was just fluff around the mechanics. But the cunning plan was the game. It is the game.
If HEXplore It understood that, they'd probably implement a resource called Clever Plans. You'd roll the Clever Plans die and see if you rolled equal or below your Clever Plans Rank. If you did, you could generate 1 Food or deal 1 Damage or... look, you get the idea. I can feel my bile rising as I'm writing. It's awful. It's endless that, while pretending it's not.
The underlying reality of an RPG allows players and the GM to make rulings about how things should work. Can you drink a potion and still make an attack in OD&D? Well, the rules don't say. Combat rounds are 1 minute long, so maybe? But wait, you're using a shield and a sword. Are you going to drop one to use a potion? The ruling might be wrong, or right, or get fixed later, but it's easy to make in the moment.
In a board game, reality does not matter. The rules are the sole mediator of interactions. Can you sell items in settlements in HEXplore It? Maybe? We didn't find rules for it (beyond selling food, oddly). Can you trade items between characters, and if so, when? That took ten minutes to look up. Even positive reviewers are baffled by the game's choices, and strive to articulate their dissatisfaction.
A Better Game
In five hours, a reasonably competent DM of an OSR game could take new players through character generation and run a satisfying session. I know, because I did it a few days ago. That session had some truly excellent moments that made everyone laugh and will probably enter the canon of great all-time game moments. In fact, for all my session reports, most games were 4 hours, some were 5, and a rare few went to 6.
With a medium-heavy game (D&D 3.5 - 5E, Pathfinder, etc.), a GM could at least generate characters and run a basic starting adventure. With the average storygame, you could get through an entire arc. With the average 'zine concept game, an entire game and a callout post. At least two rounds of Fiasco. An entire Crokinole tournament. A Magic the Gathering draft with playoffs. Two games of Root with completely new players. A double feature of Nixon in China and Mosè in Egitto!
But in five hours, we'd barely accomplished anything in HexploreIt. It was an hour before I felt like I'd made a meaningful decision, and even that was only the first of many resource-management choices. And two of the players had played the game before! Agony! Dismay! Wrath!
Final Notes
Critic John Kula, writing twenty years after [The Campaign for North Africa's] publication, noted that development of a game this size was solely driven by player feedback. "So why produce a game which is unplayable? Well apparently the feedback responses that governed Jim Dunnigan and SPI indicated that gamers wanted such monster games. And true to the old curse, gamers got what they asked for. This is likely the single biggest difficulty with reader feedback — everyone knows what they want, but few know what they need."
-The Campaign for North Africa, Wikipedia
HEXplore It has art! Cardboard! Miniatures! Playesting, balancing, life-improving design choices. Custom dice! Its the height of pre-tariff board game ambition. And yet, it embodies a fundamental emptiness, a failure to truly understand what it attempts to imitate.
In short, that even the finest passages you steal are of no service to you; for the poverty of your own language prevents their assimilating; so that they lie on the surface like lumps of marl on a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize!
-The Critic, Act 1, Scene 1
It is a thing to back on Kickstarter, to own, to unbox, to dream about using, and to never use. It can sit on you shelf and promise joy. Let it sit there. Or, like the miser who buried his gold, throw it away and pretend it's on your shelf. Your friends will thank you.
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