The Fantasy Trip Legacy Edition Rulebook Reviews
May 1, 2019
This game is HUGE. There’s so much in the box that I could write 3 or 4 separate reviews. That’s why I decided to write a “Rulebook Reviews,” because there are multiple reviews all packed into one! Want to just read the part you are interested in? You can use the anchor links below!
- Melee Rulebook Review
- Wizards Rulebook Review
- Death Test Rulebook Review
- The Fantasy Trip Overall Review
Melee Rulebook Review
The first thing the box tells you to do is open up Melee and play this mini-game. So that is what I did! In Melee, you control a bunch of warriors and have them fight in a duel to see who is superior. You first are asked to build characters by assigning stat points into Strength and Dexterity and giving them weapons and armor. This is a really important decision because your characters have weapons that deal more damage if you have high strength. However, that means you’ll have low Dexterity. That is really bad because in order to hit something, you need to roll 3 dice and have the die roll be under or equal to your Dexterity. Thus, you need to have a high Dexterity. But that means you won’t be very strong so your hits will be even weaker! Also, since strength also determines the number of HP you have, (each strength is 1 HP) a very dextrous warrior will be very easy to kill. You can wear armor to help with this, but armor will lower your Dexterity even further and make you slower.
Organization – 5/5
How easy is it to look up a rule? Can you easily find the section you are looking for? Is the rulebook organized in a logical order so that everything makes sense during the first read-through?
The rulebook is organized extremely well, with a table of contents on the front of the book to let you access whichever rule you want. It also is organized very logically so that you have a decent idea of how to play after the first read-through. For an RPG, that’s really fantastic. I was able to glide through my first duel with very few problems because I used simple weapons and only 2 heroes. Later on, I added in crossbows and a 3V3 scenario. I had some trouble initially with some of these rules, but had very little difficulty finding them. Thus, I feel comfortable with a perfect score for Organization.
Clarity – 5/7
How easy is it to understand the rules? Is the rulebook needlessly complex or not detailed enough? Could the rules be interpreted in multiple valid ways? Were there plenty of examples and images?
The rules were easy to understand and I was able to play my first few games with almost no problems. I was very happy about that, since for something as complex as an RPG, that is often not the case! The charts such as the weapons and armor list were extremely helpful when building characters. Also, I want to give bonus points for this really awesome inclusion that made my life super easy:
It is these dry erase hero sheets. They are fantastic! I love shuffling them up and drawing random heroes for a battle. They are balanced among each-other very well and it is a lot of fun. This is a large part of why I was able to get games going very quickly right out of the box: instead of being bogged down by the details of character creation (though I’ll point out that character creation itself is ridiculously easy, and you can easily create a character for Melee within a minute or two if you know what you are doing) you can skip right to the meat of the game.
That being said, I had a couple of small complaints. There were a couple of times where the rules could have been more detailed, because I struggled to find the right information when I needed it. For example, for some reason I thought that Giants had damage reduction, and since this section was glossed over in the rulebook I ended up having to use the Fantasy Trip rulebook to find out things like that. Another case was finding out the nitty gritty details about crossbows (like whether they start each duel loaded or not, how rushing people with bows works, etc). Since it is an RPG, I think that the lack of examples and images was not necessarily a mark against it, but it could have been nice to have more of them. Overall though, a very strong rulebook.
Teaching the Game – 3/3
Does the rulebook help returning players to quickly relearn the game and explain it to others? Is it easy to determine any changes to the game based on player count? What about player aids?
Going along with the last couple of sections, Melee is easy to relearn quickly especially with table of contents. And I should mention one thing- the dry erase heroes are technically not included in Melee, but since I’m reviewing Melee in the context of The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition, I’m going to pretend that they are a part of Melee.
These outside aids go above and beyond what I would expect from an RPG mini-game designed to teach the basic combat rules. Not only does it go beyond what an introductory set should do, it gives you a complete and engaging mini-game that you can play almost immediately after opening it up. For that reason, I think that Melee deserves a high rulebook score.
Overall – 13/15
A score of 0-6 would be an unintelligible rulebook. A score of 7-9 is a rulebook that is mediocre and likely requires further research to learn all the rules, such as watching a how to play video. A score of 10-12 is a rulebook sufficient to stand on its own legs. A score of 13-15 is an excellent rulebook that has next to no issues and has admirable qualities that go above and beyond that add to the game, theme, or overall experience.
Melee hit the sweet spot of not to complicated but still fun and interesting. I felt pretty confident with my knowledge of the base combat, and had fun dueling my warriors against each-other. The aids included in the game go above and beyond what I was expecting in terms of learning and playing the game. A very solid rulebook!
Wizard Rulebook Review
Next up, the Legacy Edition recommended I take a look at Wizard. Wizard is a stand-alone game, but it also serves as an expansion to Melee as you can play them together to find out whether your warriors or wizards are stronger. Some interesting aspects of wizard duels include the fact that you have to pay for spells with HP. This makes the games very tactical and interesting, which makes Wizard several times more complicated than Melee in my opinion. Also, Wizards introduces the Intelligence Stat and spell list, which dictates what spells you can learn and use in a duel. Higher intelligence gives you access to better spells and allows you to learn more spells. Because Str and Dex are still very important, this makes character building even harder!
Organization – 4.5/5
How easy is it to look up a rule? Can you easily find the section you are looking for? Is the rulebook organized in a logical order so that everything makes sense during the first read-through?
Wizards comes with 2 rulebooks, one with a spell list and the other with a detailed rulebook. This was a good choice, and made it very easy for me to look up any details about spells I wanted to cast. That being said, the spell list would often times refer to the detailed rules, and flipping through the two rulebooks one after the other was a bit challenging at first. And because Wizard builds off of Melee, when I started doing the Death Test I would often be flipping between 3 or 4 different rulebooks. This started to get annoying, and so I definitely wonder if some more repetition between the booklets would make it easier to find what I was looking for. Also, there are 4 different types of spells, but they have sub-types as well. Finding out details about each sub-type was difficult at times and I feel that the booklet could have done a better job of showing which spell types were sub-types (perhaps by changing the font of the headings, or something like that).
Clarity – 4.5/7
How easy is it to understand the rules? Is the rulebook needlessly complex or not detailed enough? Could the rules be interpreted in multiple valid ways? Were there plenty of examples and images?
It was very tough to get started with Wizard because there weren’t any examples to go off of. While Melee came with some pre-set characters, there were not any pre-set characters for Wizard, even when I looked it up online. So I ended up recreating the characters from the example after some careful reverse engineering and guess-work.
That took a long time, especially given how many different spells there are. At first, it was very overwhelming, and the rules were not as easy to get through as Melee. I think that some preset characters to get you started would have gone a long way. Also, while this is not the fault of the writing but the complex interactions of spells, I thought that it was at times tough to understand the rules.
Perhaps I was simply spoiled by Melee, because after a while the rulebook started to make a lot of sense. At first I thought I must have been understanding something wrong, because Wizards seemed super broken. I was in for an awakening: after pitching 2 wizards against 3 warriors the warriors won pretty effortlessly.
So I decided to revise my strategy:
One of my favorite things about the rulebook was reading about the difference between images, illusions, and summoning. Basically, the idea is that you can summon a creature like a giant. These are extremely powerful, but cost a lot of strength to summon and maintain. So instead, you might want to summon an image: this giant would not be real. But it could potentially scare away a warrior temporarily. Finally, you can summon an illusion. An illusion is also not real, but it actually directly affects the mind of enemy characters. So if an enemy is hit by an illusion, they truly believe that they were hit, and are dealt appropriate damage. Enemies can attempt to disbelieve an illusion by taking an intelligence roll. But that’s the thing: they don’t know if it is an illusion or not. For all they know, it could just be an image and they are wasting their time.
Anyway, I bring that up because there are a ton of spells all with unique effects packed into this small box. Exploring all of them is quite fun, and takes a bit of creativity. Wizard takes a while to get used to, but once you do it is very rewarding.
Teaching the Game – 2.5/3
Does the rulebook help returning players to quickly relearn the game and explain it to others? Is it easy to determine any changes to the game based on player count? What about player aids?
Despite all the different spells in the game, if you take the time to create a couple of characters in advance each character knows a maximum of 8ish spells. This is much more manageable to remember, and makes it easy to pick up the game again. The spells also are fairly intuitive and make sense. That being said, creating a new wizard character definitely takes some skill and patience. Also, introducing new players to Wizard will take more time than melee, where you can practically start swinging swords within a few minutes. I think that some more thought into player aids may have been a good idea. All this being said, it isn’t totally fair to compare Wizard and Melee as Wizard is quite a bit more complex. For what it is, an introduction to magic in The Fantasy Trip within a mini-game, Wizard does a great job.
Overall – 11.5/15
A score of 0-6 would be an unintelligible rulebook. A score of 7-9 is a rulebook that is mediocre and likely requires further research to learn all the rules, such as watching a how to play video. A score of 10-12 is a rulebook sufficient to stand on its own legs. A score of 13-15 is an excellent rulebook that has next to no issues and has admirable qualities that go above and beyond that add to the game, theme, or overall experience.
Wizard is a really fantastic game to dig into. The rulebook is quite strong, especially considering that it covers basically all magic. That being said, playing the first game was quite tough as it required me to create wizard characters before I really knew what I was doing. I think that the rules could have been improved a bit by making it easier for a new player to get started.
Death Test Review
The Death Test is a pre-programmed adventure where you take your characters from Melee and Wizard and send them through a dungeon. Be warned that this review contains some spoilers (though I will try to avoid some of them). Do not take the Death Test lightly! I attempted it 3 times, and only won on the third try after creating a team of the strongest possible characters. Note that I am not reviewing Death Test 2, even though the second one seems to be even better than the first. That’s because I’m too scared to try it! I wrote a bit about my experience taking the Death Test on Twitter if you are interested:
After spending the morning creating characters, I *think* I'm ready for the death test. I tried to make them as broken as possible while not using too many stats. Check back later to see which adventurers will live or die! — Jorge Zhang (@supermojorge)
April 10, 2019Organization – 5/5
How easy is it to look up a rule? Can you easily find the section you are looking for? Is the rulebook organized in a logical order so that everything makes sense during the first read-through?
The Death Test works like this: you start at instruction 1, which gives you several different options. By selecting one of these options, you will be sent to a different instruction, say instruction 34. You continue this until you get to the end of the maze. You are encouraged to make a map of the dungeon on a piece of paper to help, which I did. This helped a lot in keeping track of the numbers. Anyway, this system worked extremely well for me. I didn’t find any inconsistencies in the dungeon, and it lets you go backwards or forwards. Overall, the organization was great!
Clarity – 5/7
How easy is it to understand the rules? Is the rulebook needlessly complex or not detailed enough? Could the rules be interpreted in multiple valid ways? Were there plenty of examples and images?
The options were pretty clear and I never was left wondering what to do. There were a couple of times where I thought of an option that was not listed as an official choice, but not having too many different choices was probably for the best. These choices were very interesting! I will always remember that time that I chose to open that chest…
Anyway, it was easy to understand what to do. Even though enemy generation was quite tedious, I understood how to do it. I think that some more detail in the rules would have helped a lot in terms of reducing the tedium. For example, in one of the rooms you have to fight some bears. I think it would have been nice to list the stats of the bears in the rules rather than having to look them up. Overall though, the Death Test was highly enjoyable (just insanely difficult!).
Teaching the Game – 2.5/3
Does the rulebook help returning players to quickly relearn the game and explain it to others? Is it easy to determine any changes to the game based on player count? What about player aids?
I think that it would be pretty easy to teach the Death Test, assuming that the players are familiar with Melee and Wizard. It’s possible to play this adventure multi-player, though the game recommends one person taking the role of the GM as there is definitely some work involved in making it a smooth experience. Multiple people controlling different characters is also feasible, and would be similar to any other roleplaying experience.
This being said, it would be nice to have a little bit more guidelines about what kind of characters you should bring in. I went in with four 32 stat characters and got demolished, and then brought in four 36 stat characters (and still got demolished). It was only until I brought in four 40 stat characters that I was able to make it through. One of my issues was the fact that I brought in 2 wizards and 2 warriors. I definitely think this was a mistake: because the Death Test is all about stamina, and you cannot heal wounds, wizards are ill-suited (at least to Death Test 1). Perhaps some heads up about this would have made it easier to prepare for what was a very difficult challenge?
Overall – 12.5/15
A score of 0-6 would be an unintelligible rulebook. A score of 7-9 is a rulebook that is mediocre and likely requires further research to learn all the rules, such as watching a how to play video. A score of 10-12 is a rulebook sufficient to stand on its own legs. A score of 13-15 is an excellent rulebook that has next to no issues and has admirable qualities that go above and beyond that add to the game, theme, or overall experience.
I absolutely adored playing through Death Test 1 and I plan on playing the sequel once I summon up the courage to. I had a good experience with understanding the rules behind the Death Test, which is impressive considering how old the original is. Some games can be timeless, like this one.
Legacy Edition Overall
Wow! That was a lot of writing. In the interest of keeping the rest of this massive review to a reasonable length, I thought I’d just touch on what else is in the box. This review already covered Melee, Wizard, and Death Test, which are all included. You get a 176 page In the Labyrinth rulebook that details further the world and how to create a campaign. You also get a 24-page combat adventure called Tollenkar’s Lair. You also get over 30 double-sided dry-erase mega-hexes that are very nice for building dungeons on the spot. And you get a lot more included as well! Considering everything included, the legacy edition provides fantastic value and sets you up for any roleplaying adventure. You can find it here.
For this post, I have a silly question for you. What would you do if you were a wizard that could summon giants? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for reading!