Co-operative games are prone to a number of design issues that competitive games easily side-step: over-reliance on RNG, inert economies, tension through attrition, ease of min/maxing, etc. The flavorful chaos wrought by player opponents is not easily replicable by cards and cubes, which is why many co-operative games tend to feel more like complicated jigsaw puzzles rather than organic, mutable systems. That isn’t to say there aren’t riveting co-op experiences to be had around the table; in fact, there are plenty. Space Alert is a boisterous, real-time programming game that really gets your blood pumping. Descent and Fury Of Dracula have all but one player co-operating against a mastermind or villain, so the narrative tension is still player-derived. Kingdom Death: Monster has a surplus of agonizing group decisions that affect the way the story plays out in dramatic and unpredictable ways. I bring up these examples because Legends Of Andor has nothing so fancy. In fact, it is very much in the vein of the social puzzle co-operative games that are prone to all the issues I just listed off. And yet it is great. Not due to massive groundbreaking innovations or game-changing gimmicks that flip established mechanics on their head, no, Legends Of Andor is great through sheer artfulness, which is not something that can be said about very many games.
Legends Of Andor is a fantasy adventure game somewhere between tower defense and dungeon crawl. Each game, players take on the roles of heroes and make their way through a different “Legend,” which tasks the players with all sorts of heroic objectives such as destroying monsters, rescuing villagers, protecting the castle, exploring foggy riverbeds, drinking from wells, doing math, etc. Each Legend is quite unique — I won’t go into the details of any of them in particular — but I will say the first legend is one of the best tutorials of any game I’ve ever played. It gets the game rolling in an engaging manner, and by its end everyone at the table will know exactly what their options are and how to think about their objectives strategically. One of the most impressive things about the game is the amount of diversity the designer was able to put into the legends without ever subverting the core systems in a way that you have to repeatedly jump into the rule-book mid-game. You will rarely be doing the same thing twice in Legends Of Andor, but the game is so intuitive that even when you’re doing something for the first time you will instinctually just know how to do it.
Mechanical simplicity is one of the game’s greatest assets. Players have only two stats: “Strength”, which is your base value for combat rolls, and “Will Power”, which acts as your health and also determines the amount of dice you roll in combat. Turns are simple, too. Most of the time, players only have two options: move or fight. That’s it. Moving to a well lets you drink from it and recover some Will Power, moving to spaces with tokens or bonuses allows you to utilize them, moving to a merchant lets you buy items and equipment, and so forth. Many of the movement restrictions common in games like this are totally done away with. You can freely move through monsters and move as many spaces as you want at a time. The only limitation on the latter is a time track which limits you to 10 hours per day, with each space of movement taking up an hour (as does every round of combat, which we’ll get to in a moment). Once you’re out of time, you take no more turns that day and must wait for the other players to run out as well. When that happens the game takes its turn, moving monsters and triggering events, before the next day starts afresh. This purposeful separation of concerns works WONDERS for minimizing admin time, and I have no idea why more games aren’t structured this way. As a consequence, the game’s cadence is practically perfect. Player turns flow smoothly into each other with no interruptions, and only at the end of each day does the game kick into action and change state, often dramatically.
Combat is also quick and simple: roll the amount of dice determined by your will power and add your strength. The monster does the same. Whomever’s combat value is lower deducts the difference from their will power. This goes on until one side runs out of will power or the player chooses to stop. Remember, each combat round costs an hour which can add up quickly. Players can fight monsters simultaneously to add their dice rolls and strength, but must both spend the time to do so. This creates a constant risk/reward assessment that is tantalizing in its clarity. Gang up on monsters to make victory a certainty or take the risk to have one player fight them on their own to save time? Even the very act of defeating a monster is a risk because it pushes a pawn called the “Narrator” forward a space on its track, which essentially acts as the game timer. This Narrator triggers various story events and progresses the player toward the end of each legend, BUT if the players have not completed the necessary objectives by the time the Narrator reaches the end of its track they LOSE THE GAME. Since the Narrator also moves forward a space at the end of each day, you don’t exactly have a lot of time in Legends Of Andor. This creates a heck of an efficiency puzzle that is surprisingly exciting. There are plenty of advantages to destroying monsters — gold, will power bonuses, protecting the castle to prevent an early defeat — but the challenge lies in only fighting when absolutely necessary. This creates some wonderfully thematic table talk as passions rise to the surface while discussing strategies for dealing with the threat of defeat.
Another thing I love about Legends Of Andor is that the tools to succeed are always staring you right in the face. It’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to utilize them. Equipment for purchase lets you do all sorts of awesome stuff: land devastating blows on your opponents, move spaces for free, negate unwanted event cards, modify your combat rolls in much more exciting ways than simple plus ones, trade items from all the way across the board using a pet falcon (my favorite), and more. Unlike many other games featuring fantasy combat every single piece of equipment is useful, and they are all useful in a unique manner. There is no bloat in this game AT ALL. It’s extremely impressive. Even the individual hero powers that at first seem simple to the point of uselessness will likely end up saving you from destruction at some point. The tightness of the design is even more impressive when you consider how completely different each of the legends are. Every story event is tuned for maximum tension and always lands well within the realm of narrative sensibility. Even the small flourishes of RNG are tastefully applied and rarely interfere with the reward of careful planning.
The game is bursting with smart design touches that remove restrictions and improve clarity. Players in the same space can freely exchange gear, enemies move along preset paths and never initiate combat so there’s no need to look up rules on their behaviors, all items and equipment cost the same amount of money, so on and so forth. The end result of these reductions and simplifications is splendid: players spend all of their cognitive energy thinking about the game state and the tactical puzzle it presents and NOT about rules. I cannot emphasize how important that is. The magic moment of any game is when the rules disappear and you are just IN IT. Legends Of Andor‘s gorgeous board art and components certainly don’t hurt, either. Even without plastic miniatures, the game is visually quite striking.
Now, none of this is to say that Legends Of Andor is perfect, because it ain’t. Sometimes all that stands between victory and defeat is the luck of the dice, which is fine until against all odds you make 5 ridiculously bad rolls in a row despite planning for every contingency. But a bigger issue than that is that losses in general tend to feel pretty anti-climactic. More than once my group has gotten 90% of the way through a legend, calculated out the final couple of rounds, realized victory is impossible, and immediately lost interest in seeing it through. Sometimes this is because we killed one too many enemies and we’re going to run out of time no matter what we do, other times it’s because our heroes and equipment load outs are not strong enough to take on the boss due to mismanagement of funds. Even when the first 90% of a game is a blast, a wonky final tenth is enough to bitter the experience, if only slightly. I will say, though, that this has NEVER made me not want to play the game again. If anything, it just made me look forward to playing better in the early rounds next time. Regardless, a few bitter notes in an otherwise sumptuous meal are easily forgivable.
A common complaint I hear about Legends Of Andor is that it’s a dry Euro masquerading as Ameritrash. I find this argument humorously untenable. This game is one of the most exciting co-operative fantasy games I’ve ever played. Just because smack-bad-guys-with-big-sword isn’t a recipe for victory and you have to actually plan ahead a bit to do well does not make the game dry. People also cite the game’s lack of modularity and overly curated content as a flaw. If you have understood anything I’ve said so far in this review then it should be no surprise to you that I find this statement ridiculous. The game’s lack of modularity and carefully curated content is one of the main reasons WHY the game is so good. This is ART. Craftsmanship on this level should be applauded, not derided! It would be one thing if the design interfered with player agency and forced you down a narrow path of dull decisions that practically made themselves, but it unequivocally does not.
There’s a lot more I could say about Legends Of Andor in regards to elements I enjoyed of the individual legends, but I don’t think it’s necessary. The core systems here are rock solid and amazingly intuitive regardless of the game scenario. Every time I’ve played it, whether with friends or family, has felt like an adventure, and no less of one than in games with twice as many rules. If I taught a class on board games this would be one of my go-to case studies for co-operative design. Not because it’s a masterpiece (it isn’t), but because it’s such a clear stepping stone toward many games that could be. Let’s just hope some ambitious young designers out there are paying attention.
Legends Of Andor gets a rating of FOUR out of FIVE, indicating it is RECOMMENDED.