We played Roll Player this afternoon for the first time since the Fiends & Familiars expansion hit Kickstarter a long, long time ago. We played with everything including Fiends & Familiars and I am happy to report that it is, by and large, better for its inclusion.
Monsters and Minions felt essential in that it provided an entirely new way to spend your action in the market phase via the hunt. This provided some relief from bum draws at the market, but more importantly offered layer upon layer of additional interest with respect to how you choose to spec and outfit your hero, and how you chase your victory points.
Fiends and Familiars feels like a lesser offering in a way, but no less essential. The bulk of the material just fleshes out the game with more of just about everything, but the titular Fiends and Familiars, and a sneaky new āCall to Adventureā card really shake things up. In a nutshell:
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Familiars offer a seventh stat row to fill out, with up to 5 points for hitting its range and colour requirements. Nice! But they also add a seventh attribute action (familiar action) that is unique to the player using it. Finally, a little added asymmetry beyond the scoring goals!
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Fiends come in the form of a little deck of gremlins that hang out on the 3rd initiative card (in a 2P game) and can really make a player think twice about taking those juicy high-value dice. If a player collects a fiend, they receive various passive (and persistent!) blights until they can otherwise be removed, and the little buggers stack! These guys are a monkey wrench in best laid plans and are an outstanding new addition to the game.
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Call to Adventure is a single card that really shakes up the game. It feels like it was created to simultaneously tighten up the decision space, speed up the early game, and to account and tune for the new expansion. Basically this card gets seeded into the market deck at a specific point, and until drawn, players select two dice at a time from the initiative phase (but may still only take a single attribute action). Once the card has appeared, players go back to rolling and selecting a single die per turn. It canāt be overstated how great this little addition is.
I have one minor gripe so far, and itās that the game doesnāt feel aggressive enough with regard to the level 1 minions and market cards eliminated pre-game. Both of us went at the minion deck pretty hard and never reached the level 2 creeps, which meant my partner was able to mop up all the adventure tokens late game without a fuss. This trivialized my early hustle to get that hidden info and plan ahead. Acknowledging that playing fighty-swordy meant we spent less time in the market, we still barely tapped into the level 2 gear by game end. Iāll be monitoring this over the next few plays to see if maybe we should cut even more out, but it was just one game, after all.
All in all, Roll Player feels complete with this expansion, and its never been lacking in terms of overall content, so if this was Keith Matejka closing the door on the game, heās ended it in one hell of a fine stateā¦ and with enough content to literally never play the same game twice.
[EDIT] I forgot the split-colour dice! Theyāre great and compliment the colourless dice added in M&M beautifully.
