RPG-style Board Games

[chaochou]

The closest board game I know to a traditional old-school RPG is the excellent League of Dungeoneers which features all the classic tropes of rolling up characters, rolling for GP, equipping and outfitting characters and so on. It has both overland travel and dungeon-crawling, random events, loads of equipment and loot to find, trade and sell, books of quests, random quest generators. You can basically ditch your GM with this game.

Pure dungeon crawlers I own and enjoy include Dungeons of Doria and Quest for the Lost Pixel. Very different games, but both strong on fun and on generating unpredictable situations each time you play.

More Euro-style would be Dungeon Alliance - where you draft a party, each with their own decks of action cards, and try to defeat a dungeon against a timer. The way the dungeon tiles and enemies work in this one reduce the sense of exploration and surprise at the monsters - in return you get to enjoy unexpected synergies in the action card deck you build.

 

[Dioltach]

I'll make a negative recommendation: "Journeys in Middle Earth". I wanted to like it. I really did. I played it several times with my friends, just to make sure.

But I hated it. You have a whole table-top board game, with tiles and cards and miniatures and dice... And none of that matters because the whole game is decided by the app. You spend half your time entering the dice roles, clicking on the results, reading what happens next. The entire table-top setup feels unnecessary.

 

[dbm]

Personally I generally avoid games which use apps. The only two I have seen make it worthwhile were the XCOM board game and Mansions of Madness.

But even then, I wouldn't buy these personally since the app might go out of support and then the game cannot be played (unless there is an open source version gifted by the vendor at the end of the formal support, or there is a community effort to make one).

 

[Dioltach]

A positive recommendation: Nemesis. It's perhaps a little removed from the more traditional "RPG" boardgames, but it feels very narrative, very cinematic. It's essentially "Alien". My character died in round three, but I watched my friends play for another hour and a half and wasn't bored for a moment.