Semi Final thoughts on the product

When I bought the game The Forests of Adrimon in 2019 directly from the company, the reviews on bgg were very positive. However it proved impossible for me to set it up, tried various times. In hindsight, I missed the solo/quickplay rules, nobody knew back then, there were no videos clearly showcasing them (nowadays there is Canje’s -

Then in 2023 the Campaign book Fall of the Ancients (FotA) became available for backing. Everybody was still raving on Klik's  Madness (KM), a book campaign for vol 1, the Valley of the Dead King. It also offered all board game products made up to now. I got the book (oh and if you do, do yourself a favor and buy the LCD tuck-box!) thinking it would streamline the experience. I was wrong.

The book very clearly said play vol2 first, we’re just referencing stuff.  Disheartened, back to Adrimon I went, and this time decided to get serious. For starters, I needed  a clear step-by-step instruction for true solo, not the scattered nonsense from the original books. An actually usable iconography section. And consistent rules.

After studying the books for some time, I noticed “something roguelite” in the book, a so-called Valor system. And what it meant. A quick beer felt calculation revealed that the maximum attainable points would be theoretically 34 but in practice much lower, say 20. The boon system went to 60 points and beyond. This clearly proved that attaining any points would require anyone to play aka buy the other volumes as well. There were only 6 points to gain for Adrimon. The other volumes (4 by then, 3 of which with expansions) would each only award 6 points as well (and some only 4 even). I made a list. Between starter difficulty and epic there was… nothing?!. It seemed like a veiled scam, to receive a product that was designed to be incomplete and have a useless system that you can’t use on its own.

My suspicions only were confirmed when analysing the Optional Circumstances table (sb.36). It has many problems: typos, mistake indicators that cards were in Return to, but were in core, and vice versa. Red flag, again a kick in the butt for not getting the Return to expansion.

Finally, re-reading the campaign, the team Mariucci & Sons wrote you should start with volume 1. That volume seemed much simpler, but more on that later. But wrote that vol2 was equally good to start – a blatant lie. People without learning the system with vol1 will fail trying vol2, one or two persons on the planet might, but the majority – never.

This led to the hypothesis that the team was evil and has intent of misleading. I’m sure even intolerant fanboys will see the logic here. But I was wrong again.

See, there is often a very thin line between malevolence and incompetence. Further investigations showed that even after re-releases, vol1 and vol2 had never been changed, a 100% reprint. Including the by then known mistakes.

Asking around revealed that nobody sees it as a priority to waste time on re-releasing, the prominent view being “nothing is perfect” so fuck off. If you expected TLC on previously conceived babies, this is a brood mother.

Mariucci has a one-track mind, producing as much as possible, at the expense of, well, everything else, including testing his creations. Bgg is full of excuses that placard texts have mistakes, some parts don’t work together, hasn’t thought about it and so on.

Rules are not corrected in older versions. They are put in the next volume. Or next book. Whatever is next. Rules get forgotten, were in older volume, gone now. There is nobody in charge of rules in the team, rules kind of hang there in the air (confirmed on their own Discord).

Good to know then. This is unacceptable by any standard. To have rules anywhere on a placard, storybook, rulebook, some cheat sheet, or perhaps an older volume’s rulebook, or newer one, it’s unpredictable and a huge warning that how the team organizes it (or the lack thereof, rather) as a ruleset this is a broken system. Huge time sink. The “design your own rules on the spot” adage does not work for the majority of people, nor the customers. Even with an RPG background myself I’m usually stumped at vagaries that could be valid reasoning either way. The box says BOARDGAME, literally, not “toolset”. I want rules.

People should be warned against buying anything except vol 1, and only after mastering it buy more. Logically vol 1 is the “business card” of the company, and should be expected to be carefully crafted and taken care of with the highest priority – any errata published, integrated in a digital version, which is common practice among just about every other board game publishing company. To state the team is small is no excuse. Sales must go before everything else.

The best the team could come up with was replacement cards that actually had art, but without touching the rulebook. As if they were no longer capable. It wouldn’t be the first time, but in small teams you usually have 1 art person and 1 systems person. The systems person can make a boring game, the art person can’t even produce a game system, together they are gold – for example Arydia (Cody and Ira – everyone loves Cody, I dislike him and love Ira lol). The project fails if either one leaves, a clear example being Zerywia. It seems Hexplorit system is the same.

So, where is the gold?

The system HexploreIt, ignoring the lame puns, is basically a set of random variables with 4 outcomes (critical success, success, failure, critical failure), and these random variables are chained. So any outcome leads to distinct other random variables. The next game state follows from the choices the party made (Movement phase), what the global game state thinks of you (Skill phase), and then either Circumstance followed by Event phase, or just a (different) Event phase. This limited randomness and staggered triggers generates an inherently stable, coherent, reactive world with a global arc. The gold is that no other game system does this.

So what to do?

• With this in mind – ignoring peripheral but nice systems like Destinations/Quests, bosses, encounters, role/race/aspect addons that are not the gold but the fluff – it’s clear to see rules being the stillborn child. Ruleset needs outside attention. You know the team’s position, maybe a revision will eventually come, after all the books have been written, and the sixth volume is released along with the expansions, but that won’t be before 2035. In the mean time, every player wants one single source of truth and nobody has succeeded yet.
• Either vol1 and vol2 have sans serif poorly written rulebooks that are unnecessarily daunting and off-putting to most board gamers. The fanbase doesn’t understand why everyone isn’t buying HexploreIt, they forget that not everyone has the same RPG background as a DM, or those that do, wish for a board game to be an actual freaking board game and not a system. Hexploreit is in dire need of a tutorial that is user friendly, and actually fun.
• There are many parts – I can only speak about FoA, but have seen posts about other volumes – that are underdeveloped or broken. Fanboys of HI before lashing, hear me out first please.
  • Sentinels are too passive, certainly not matching the thematic description.
  • Circumstance references assume the original setup method and do not take the thematic table into account (nor the later developed leaflet “Blind” and “Hard” versions),
  • the thematic table needs a rewrite so it can actually work with FoA base only.
  • Fragments/Destination relation is missed by many players.
  • Circumstance setup is Single Tiered, and can kill you regardless of skill.
  • The inverted difficulty: halfway the game becomes too easy, food is no longer a problem, and encounters (part of Circumstances) have become meaningless. The inverted difficulty during a run – too hard, becoming too boring – is a design problem.
  • Nobody wants placards (except bosses perhaps). Other placard rules should be in a properly indexed book, with a complete index. Foa indexes rb/sb for one, have a 50% chance of actually mentioning something (the table of contents in the front is more useful).
  • True solo is mentioned, but never applied. The 2 fragment issue on hidden powers cards for example. Every rule should encompass both true solo and multi-hero cases. The main reason being that the actual buyers are mostly solo board gamers, that in turn may introduce others, but primarily are solo gamers.
  • The premise of “a toolbox” also fails, because no notation method is provided. No scoring is invented, so while you can mix and match ingredients, there is no way to replicate that recipe. Each session is ephemeral. Some people are fine with that. But we also live in a day and age where scoring of some sort can be expected. Especially given the roguelite nature of HI it is good manners to take the next generation of gamers into consideration. At least, a finely tuned achievement system, things to unlock.
  • You can’t treat the game as an entry for non-RPG folk. The abilities are too complex, the game machinations are hard to “see”, it’s unnecessarily hard to read the game state. You can’t expect non-RPG folk to house rule and enjoy that.
  • Product information on gamefound is white lies, and intentionally vague. Complementary for example, the encounter box is complementary to the base game. The LCD is complementary to the website – but any one of the two is essential (or you would have to eject cards from the base game that reference those outside cards). Reprints are straight copies from the previous design.

Nobody told me this. I blame influencers for their white lies, not a single of the above was ever mentioned by anyone on youTube. And each of the above would have been for me an easy to avoid product I want to have nothing with.

I spent roughly 2 months in trying to make sense of the moving parts. And I have made good progress in presenting material in a didactic manner, minimizing any necessary house ruling, minimizing agency at setup. I created a fine-tuned scoring system that should be motivating for new players to pick it up again. The next time you play you do not have to scratch your head with what tools again you were supposed to work – everything, including the next goal – is laid out for you. You unbox and can immediately start. In the end, you defeat Adrimon, even if you suck at the game but tick off enough boxes to gain boons from the higher scores. Which is ultimately the reward any buyer should receive.

Just because HI is a unique, brilliant system, it doesn’t mean I will invest my money any further into a company with such deviating values. But I can promise that any proceeds from this work will go toward financing the purchase of vol.1 – if it never happens, the conclusion will be that nobody values this work, and I will sell my HI products and move on. If there is enough demand so I can buy it, I will make a roguelite Resettable campaign tutorial document just like I did for FoA. With achievements of its own. Time will tell.

Woerden, 2024-6-29 Kos Petoussis