Rescuing Robin Hood play and review (review copy provided)

0:00 Hey everybody, this is Mike with the Onestop Co-op Shop. And today I'm playing Rescuing Robin Hood, a one to five player push your luck deck builder. A disclaimer that I got a review copy of this one. And if you like the content on the OneTop Co-op Shop, consider supporting us through Patreon. Get early access to our videos and exclusive videos every month you can't see anywhere else. You can also listen to our podcast for reviews and design discussions or join the conversation and say hi on our Discord. So Rescuing Robin Hood is again for one to five players. They do have a true solo variant, but I don't love it as often happens with these kind of games. So I'm just going to threehand the game. I do think it's slightly more interesting kind of the interactions between characters at higher player counts. So, even though I've mostly played this one solo and two-player, I figured a three-hand play would be fun. And the basic scope of the game is each player gets two of these characters from the Robin Hood stories, and they pick one of them to be their main character. And then they start out with a completely random set of eight starter cards. And they're going to go through a series of battles, five rounds total. And each round, you're going to draw four cards and use their stats.

0:58 You've got I think it's wits, stealth. Let me check this. Yeah, wit, stealth, brawn, and jolliness. Jolliness is a wild. Basically, you total each of these things together for your character using these tracks here. And then you are fighting guards. These are the sheriff of Nottingham soldiers, and they are guarding sets of more powerful bronze, silver, and gold villagers. And basically what you're trying to do with the other players is defeat as many of these guards as possible. And if you can defeat an entire row, then you get to rescue the villagers and they get added to your deck. Deck builder again. And you can use them to be more successful in future combats, especially the climactic fifth round combat where you have to take Noddingham Castle and then potentially defeat the sheriff, but mainly rescue Robin Hood. That's the name of the game. Now, to figure out how many guards are in play and how many villagers they're guarding and of what value. So, here we got bronze and silver. You draw these random cards from a big bunch of them for days one and two. I'm going to have the exact same type of stuff for day one and two.

1:56 You'll sometimes have a bonus as well. So here each of us is going to get plus three brawn, which is nice. And then I have another card for three and four and another card for five. So that kind of tells us how to set things up. Guards will come from a blue deck, which is weaker. They're going to have defenses in each of the three main values. Again, jolliness is a wild. You don't use it on its own. Uh for these guards, the blue guards values go from one to five. And for each group of guards, I only know the rightmost one. So you're going to see this like a push your luck kind of random element to it. and yeah, we'll see how it goes. So, let's just jump into the first round. It's pretty straightforward game. I'm going to total all of my ability powers. So, Maid Marion, uh, she has six wits on her own. Wow, there's a lot of wits. 11 14 16 blue and then two minus one a single stealth. That doesn't seem very good. And then gosh, minus one there as well.

2:41 Five brawn, but plus three from the scenario card. And four jolly, which again is the sort of wild one. And additionally, some characters, including sometimes your main character, will have icons like this, which gives us a bonus. In this case, it's a prayer token. There are three types of these. Uh, the horses, scouting, let you flip over some of the guards so you know what you're up against. Cookery lets you add two to one of your stats. And prayer lets you move guards around or for two prayer hands, you can discard a guard entirely, like a really tough one. So, that's it for Maid Marion's crew. Will Scarlet's got a lot of horses, and he's good at stealth. And okay, this so far this worked out well. I made Marion got a lot of blue characters randomly because again these uh starter decks are not keyed to the leaders. It is totally random. But four 6 10 12 15 stealth. Heck yeah. Uh five wit and six oh no plus three nine brawn.

3:32 Oh wow. Zero jolliness. That's pretty weird. But yeah, again two scouting tokens. And finally, Little John is supposed to be good at Brun, although apparently only Lance his dog is helping him out with that. So that's 13. Braun with the plus three. Uh, nine wits. Interesting. Two stealth. So only uh Will Scarlet got like all the stealth and three jolliness. Then he's got two prayer hands, which again would let him move two guards from one uh area to another or would just discard a guard entirely, which seems like probably the way to go. By the way, sorry my voice sounds a little bit weird if you're noticing that. Uh it is the end of the school year and I've been talking a lot, but I'll get to rest a lot soon. Uh so yeah, here we go. So the first round, we'll start with Maid Marion. And on each player's turn, they get to make up to two attacks, each with a different aspect, each with a different type of attack. So, Made Marion could make here probably a Witz attack and then a Bronn attack, but you couldn't make like two wits attacks. Before you attack, you or any other player, so any player can use tokens to affect the battle. Again, the prayer hands are going to let us move guards or discard one for two. And you can combine with another player. So, like Little John could use one and Maid Marion could use one to discard somebody. Additionally, before you attack, but it does have to be before.

4:42 Very important. You can only the current player can spend jolliness and increase any one of their tracks if they think they might need more. But let's go through how the three attacks work. Three each slightly different, although they're all push your luck. Here, we'll use this row as a example. So, for wits, you look at the first person's wits and you face that. You have to equal or exceed it. So, here I've got 16 versus four. That would be enough. And then after I defeat that guy, I flip the next one. I see what their wits is. I flip the next person. I see what their wits is. And I can stop whenever I want. But if the total of blue exceeds my width, so if I push too far, right, and try to confront too many guards, I waste it all and I do nothing. If I don't do that, if I stop early, uh, when, you know, I haven't pushed myself too far, then I defeat all the guards that were flipped. And anytime after a combat, uh, there is nobody at the right end of a row, you flip the rightmost person. You'll get more information. And again, each of these is one to five. So the average I think they said in the rule book is like 3.3. So slightly weighted towards the higher end. So that's how wits works. Uh stealth is similar. You pick a row. And for stealth, you point to any number of enemies. They could be anywhere. But again, you flip them all face up, you add up their total, and if it's equal to or less. So stealth is kind of like an all at once thing, but it's more targeted, which is great, especially with Will having horses because then he can reveal people and kill them. And then brawn finally is kind of the same as wits in that you just like keep on going right to left. But the big thing for Braraw is you just flip everybody over and you have to beat every single one of them. So it is an all orno final

6:14 combat. Now after a player's turn is done, this is really important. All their jolliness gets passed to the next player and all of their might, their brawn gets passed to the next player. So, the only thing that gets quote unquote lost is uh wits and stealth, which does bring up the interesting option here. I could have made Marian do like a stealth attack first just for that single guy and then do her uh maybe big wits thing. So, this one, by the way, is six guards guarding a silver. Oh, wait. And a bronze. I was about to say, why is this uh row so strong with not that much of a reward? So, I should have another person there. Okay, there we go. So, you had six guards guarding a bronze and silver. Over here, I got four and three, both guarding bronzes. This one's just a little bit easier. Then over here, the big one, I've got nine people guarding two silvers. And again, silvers are clearly going to be better than bronze on average. So, look at the initial values. I mean, a one blue, a one width, it would probably be a waste to use Marian 16 on those guys. Now, here it might not be so bad. Four people. So, on average, there's going to be like three plus, I don't know, 10 or so. So, 13. So, she should actually be a little bit above. Whereas here are a much better row, but she might be wasting. You know what? I am I'm going to try my idea. I'm going to do a single stealth attack. I can point to any people in a single row. I'm going to point to this guy. He's defeated because one is one. And it zeros out. Again, you don't pass your stealth. You don't pass your wits. And that's one of our two attacks for the round. And I immediately reveal this guy. Ah, he's a six blue H.

7:43 I could move him or just discard him with two hands because he's kind of terrible in general. Or could I still beat this? I mean, if these average out, 4 * 3.3 is like 12. So that's like 18. So if she uses all her jolliness to go to 20, she'd be pretty safe. I could also move him to a different row, but let's go for it. Okay, so and she can stop, of course. So she's going to go to 20 wits. So we'll start fighting here. So we got a six, seven. That's good. We can keep going. 10. Okay, we can keep going. Uh 16. Okay, so now I got to make the choice. If I go for it and it's a five or six, then I waste the entire attack. What are the chances when I just had two sixes? I bet it's going to be a four or less. I bet it's Oh, it's only one. Okay, cool. So, that was 7 10 11 17. My 20 was enough, but I did use up all my jolliness and that zeros out. But we have rescued both of these people.

8:39 Put them to the side. We get to as a group decide who drast each one in a second. That's it for Maid Marion. She can still use her prayer hand on somebody else. And she's going to pass her eight remaining brawn onto Will, who's now at 17 brawn, 15 stealth, zero jolliness, but he's got some horses to uh target some attacks. And what seems to make most sense to me is maybe to do like a big stealth attack and a little blue attack if I can find like a weak spot to target that. And then again, give all my brawn to Little John maybe. Although, if you like just, you know, pull all your brawn together, then you might not be able to defeat as many groups because you might want to like target easier groups with smaller brun values. Let's see. For my horses, um, yeah, what if I reveal some from the giant stack, right? And see what we got.

9:26 Okay, so I'll spend each horse lets you flip over two guards, and you can do it anywhere. All right, let's do the very last one. Oh, that's a low stealth. I like that. And let's do this one. Okay, let's do another horse. Now, I could split these. It doesn't have to all be for Oh, that's a great flip, too. All right, stealth is looking good here. Um, you know, with that being the case, maybe I can stop with this one and find out. I don't know more info here. Let's Let's uh let's do like this guy. Sure. But now for my actual first attack, will Scarlet's going to do stealth. So, he's got 15. So, let's see. That's three, four, eight, 10. So, I should be able to do like one more random guy and be okay theoretically. Let's do the second to last guy here. All right. Don't be a six. Don't be a six. We're good. So, that's two 4 8 9 12 and then because this guy's there. All right. Oh, nice weak one. All right. So, that's it for stealth. So, Will could do a 17 brawn, but then he'd be throwing away the five wit, which seems like a bad idea.

10:32 Although I mean the best little John's going to be able to do is a Braraw attack and a Witz attack. So he doesn't necessarily need a billion brawn. So maybe Will uses a 17 brawn and tries to go for something. I mean these guys are five. So well, but anything that's left goes to uh Little John. So I don't necessarily want to use like the most possible, but I mean yeah, this one seems okay. So we're going for a Braraw attack here. So two uh seven. That's not great. 10 12. That wasn't too bad. So we rescue this guy and that leaves us with what was it? 12. So leaves us with five to pass along, but the five wits is lost. All right. So that gets us to 18 for Little John. Actually, he's pretty good. And nine wits. Okay, I've got an idea because we still got these three prayer hands. Let's try to like consolidate the low blues. So let's use a prayer hand to move this guy over there. And we do get to flip this over immediately. Oh, that's a pretty high brun value. What do you mean? He's got 18, right? We should be fine. So then for my last two prayer hands, just to kind of guarantee stuff, I'm going to just throw away this unseen person who had high values. That was good. And then for his first attack, Lil John's going to do a nine wit here. Yep. Six. So we're good. Then an 18 brawn here. 10 13. Okay. So we did rescue everybody.

11:46 And by the way, that uh tends to happen in our games. Uh the first two days we usually get everybody. It gets a lot hairier in day three and four and then incredibly hard sometimes in day five. Although, just to note, if you want, they do have these challenge cards to like earn more points and kind of add little special rules to each round. So, if you're finding the game easy, like we do at least in the first several days, you can use those. All right, but we got the max people possible, which is six, two per player. And now we technically in turn order, but you can like pass and do whatever you want. We get to draft them. Okay, so we've got Will clearly is best at green. Oh, these guys are kind of good at everything. This is weird. Uh Will is clearly best at green and horses. Uh, Marian's best at blue and I guess Little John's best at red, but they're kind of all good at everything. And these guys are kind of all mixed in good at everything. Well, let's say Will Scarlet can have the horse guy. Uh, Little John already had a lot of prayer hands, so maybe he can get this. Well, they're the worst at red. So, Made Marion can get them here. We'll just kind of divide this up. Um, I'm going to do two each. You don't technically have to, but I think it kind of makes sense.

12:50 Uh, Made Marion can also have that. Higher blue. Uh, here Thomas or sorry, Will Scarlet can have them. And then some high red and that seems fine. Okay, so there we go. And these newly rescued villagers go with the ones you just played in your discard pile. So you're not going to use them right away. Instead, we play day two with the other four cards from our starting set of eight random cards. All right. And now Will Scarlet's going to be first. And let's go again. And remember, we're using the same day card for day two. We're going to have the same numbers here, although of course it'll be different cards. And we still get plus three brawn. They also tell you to shuffle the guards after each day, so you could get the same ones again. The I guess the 3.3 is maintained as the average that way. All right. And our enemies are set up. Let's see what we got. So Will's got 10 stealth this time.

13:36 Uh five wit and seven 10 bun. That's right. With plus three bonus and three jolly miss this time. And he's got a cookery and his regular stealth. cookery can be used before any players's attack to give them plus two to one of the core stats. It's also the only token that'll stick around if you don't use it. It flips to this side. It becomes me and you can use it in future turn to give somebody plus one jolliness. Uh whereas all the rest of these, like if I didn't use the scouting, it would just go away afterwards. And meanwhile, John over here has got n Oh, sorry. I didn't zero these out. He's got nine brawn plus three, so 12, four wit, three stealth. Not looking great, John. and three jolliness. Oh, but a lot of tokens. Wow. Two horses and a cooking and a prayer. All right. And finally, Marion still has a really high uh wit. 13, four stealth, eight brawn with the bonus, and two jolliness. And we got hands, and two cooking. All right. So, Will's up first.

14:34 We've got three horses to go around total. Although, he's only got 10 stealth unless we use some cooking and some jolliness. Let's maybe look to the leftmost pile first. Again, that first guy isn't too tough for stealth. So, let's use a horse and maybe we'll like Oh god, maybe we'll skip a few. Okay, don't love any of those people. Maybe let's use another scouting over here on the big pile and kind of see what's going on. Oh, that's good for stealth and not so much. Actually, notice some pretty low blue values. Let's use our last horse to just fill in the gaps here. Okay. Yeah, that's not like terrible for somebody to go in with their wits. Well, you know, right off the bat, I'm not loving this 435 guy. Let's go ahead and use double prayer hands. That's all of the ones we have this time to get rid of him. Let's see. Will's got 10 brawn, but I mean, he's got five width. I don't want to throw that away. Oh, here. Let's actually go ahead and do his first attack here. Just kill these two guys. Pretty straightforward. I mean, he's got 10 stealth, but we have four cookery between all of us and three jolly. So, we could boost that a ton. What if he goes for this? So, three. So, he's got seven left. On average, that'll be enough. But to be a little safer, we want to go to like nine. So, let's save the cookery for now and just use two of his jolliness to go to um 12, right?

15:48 Then he's going to target all these people with stealth. And that's nine. So, we had 12. Okay, we didn't spend any extra, but we did save Cesily. And he's going to pass one jolliness and 10 brawn on to Little John. And he still got a food. So, one jolliness, 10 Bronn. So, Little John's at 22 Braraw. Wow. I'm thinking, yeah, let's have Little John use his three stealth to auto kill this guy and waste the wits because I think I'm going to do a brawn attack. Oh man, that guy was only a one. And then I think I should go do an attack cuz yes, he'll pass the rest of his bra to Maid Marion, but I mean 22 is ridiculous. We shouldn't save that for one row. How likely are we to win here? Seven plus like an average of what would it be like 14 15. So that is like 22. So he might beat it all by himself. But also these people have low width values. She's made Mary and might be able to do some damage over here. What do we got? 10. So maybe like 17 total. And the wit values are worse overall. So yeah. Okay. Let's let's do a combat here. I'm not going to spend anything extra. So that's four of this brawling. Uh nine 15. Oh god. 21.

16:56 So we beat him, but we used up all but one of our brawn. That's not great. Yeah. So what is he actually passing to her? Four jolliness and one brun. So, we're bronze at only nine. Her jolliness is at six, but we do have four cookeries to go around and she's got 13 uh wit. Hm. Just trying to figure out if I can actually beat both these things this round. I was going to try to beat this with width. Is that realistic? She's got 13 to start. We got nine jolliness and four cookery. So, she could go as high as what is that? Uh 19 + 8 27. Um although we don't need to do that. So six and then like seven each on average. So that's looking at like 20. Okay, let's go to 21 to be a little safer. So I'm gonna She's at 13. I'm going to spend all her six jobs to go to 19 and then have her use her cookery to go to 21. So 21 here, man. Maybe I should go a little higher. I don't know. So that's six. 11. That's right. She can stop whenever she wants with wits. 12. That feels better already. Uh 16. So only a six would kill us. Nope. We're good. So, we got both of them and that leaves her with well, we could do stealth, but no.

18:04 Uh nine brawn plus potentially plus six more from the cookery to beat this. So, that'd be a 15 max, which should be more than enough. In fact, so much more than enough that I probably don't need to use the cookery. Well, I've got eight without any cookery. Sorry, nine minus one eight. So, it's probably enough for these two, but then I need like another four or five. Let's I mean it's only one jolliness in the future which probably won't matter. Let's just use all of it to be safe. So that gives us a 15. Okay. So one five 71. Okay. I wasted two of the cookies but it's fine. We did kill them all again. And let's see if they're a bit more focused this time. All right. I see two sixes in stealth. One with a horse. That'll be Wills. And then let's do ah these are again kind of mixing everything. Let's do uh this guy to Little John and then maybe her as well and these two to Maid Marion. Okay.

19:02 Then before we go on to day three and four, we actually get to do a little bit of culling in our deck. So how it works is we've got however many people we rescued plus our starting eight. This is a Maid Marian's deck and we get to keep exactly eight of them. So we basically go back to our original eightsiz deck. So usually it just makes perfect sense to keep all of your new people because they tend to be better. And then let's keep for Maid Mary and her really good wit people, right? Just to kind of focus in our strategy a bit. Yeah, I don't know how often she'll do stealth. So maybe's okay. That's six. Uh this guy seems good. That's seven. And then do I want a prayer hand or cookery? Sure. Let's get that guy for eight. Now these four still help us out. They go into Sherwood Forest and like at the end of the game when we're fighting the number of people that we rescued in general helps us, but for now they just kind of go away. So that's it for Maid Marion.

19:50 is going to shuffle these up and this will be her eight cards that are used for day three and four. Ooh, any remaining wit is passed on to the next player. Interesting. So, wits is going to act like brawn for this round. Okay, Will Scarlet, our stealth boy. Clearly those amazing ones. And then, you know, again, the silvers and bronzes. I like having more horses for him, right? So, that's five. Both these 42s seem really good. That's seven. And then maybe this guy for higher red and green. So, that's eight. Okay. And then little John, I mean, he can kind of do whatever he wants. Yeah. I mean, the question, let me let me look at what his bronzes and Oh, he got only bronzes. Uh, what they kind of worked out to. Oh, so they're pretty even. I was going to see like if you wanted to go more green or more blue. I mean, I guess more blue would kind of work here because of the day three and four power. So, that being the case, let's get him the big reds and maybe some big blues as well, especially blues that don't have any green. She's only a one jolliness, but two horses really lets you target yourself pretty well. Uh, I'm kind of torn. Well, that guy's awesome if I'm going for blue and red, but okay. Yeah, you know what? Why not? All right, so that's eight for him. Now, of course, if we had one fewer villagers, if we had done more poorly in days one and two, then we would have fewer to call and choose from. All right, so now we're going here, and you'll notice, oh my god, 10. So, we've got these red cards. Now, these have values ranging from I think two is as low as they go, but they go up to nine. So, their average is like 5.5 or something like

21:21 that. So, yeah, pretty nasty. Pretty nasty. So, let me set these up and get our starting values. We'll see how we're doing. All right. So, Little John's going to start first. And yeah, he got kind of a mixed bag of stuff, but remember, he can pass his wits on in this day and the next day. So, he should probably do like a little stealth attack. And then he's got 15 broad. He's got a ton of jolliness. Eight. And he's got one horse and one prayer hand. Main Marion coming up next. Got 20 uh wits, 11 stealth, and zero. One minus one, zero broad. Interesting. And six jolly. And she's got cookery. And Will, I might have uh hyperfocused him maybe a little too successfully. He's got 20 stealth and 10 brawn and one jolliness and just horses forever. Three horses. So yeah. Now, the big nut we definitely want to crack without a doubt is this one cuz it's two gold characters. Look how strong they are. But it's 10 reds, which is going to take a big group effort. No way any of us can get through that individually. So, I think I really want to use my horses and like some stealth play to try to uh cut that down. So, let's start out with the little John's.

22:26 One horse. Let's just actually do them in order this time. Okay. So, those values are not great. Although, if we can get rid of him, the uh the brawn is not too bad. Okay. Then Will's got three more horses. So, let's just keep going, I guess. Okay, another one. Should I just do it all? We are getting some nice stealth options here. Not that little John can take like great advantage of them. Okay, Will's got one horse left. Should I just lock in all of it? Yeah, why not? Why not? Okay, so we're going to know very little. Oh man. Okay, these are weird values. Got a single prayer hand, so I could like move somebody within this row. We got an idea. Let's use this prayer hand on this last guy here. So, he's only got a two blue. And let's see, that guy's guarding a gold as well. Those guys going to save. Let's put them here. And then for Lil John's first attack. Oh no, Witz gets saved.

23:12 That's right. I don't have to use Wits yet. Well, then my whole smart plan there kind of went away. Well, it's okay. Maybe Lil John can do a brawn attack with his 15 first here. Actually, Braun gets passed. Why not just have him do a Bronn attack here? This guy's only a bronze, though. Do I even care? Cuz as you're going to see, we do like a final calling where we actually just call our decks down to a four people only. So, getting bronze doesn't really help us that much. All right. So, let's go and do a brrawn attack here. So, he's got 15. So, three like on average this will be like 12. Oh, so he has like barely enough. And any leftover gets passed. So, be a little more cautious. Let's bump his brawn up to 19 with half his jolliness. Seems a little smarter. Oh god. Yes. Okay. 9 12 15. Okay. So, 15 would have been enough. But now he'll just pass the bra along. So, not a big deal. And we've got Oh, that guy's only silver. Whoops. So, yeah, he passes his four brun to made Marion. Oh, and she had zero. That's great. I guess she'll just keep passing it to Will. Okay, now I'm gonna pass my wit. So, I just want to do a stealth attack for four. How about this? Let's bump it up to five.

24:13 And then I can kill this guy's got really high other values. And I mean, this guy's kind of annoying if I want to go with brawn or something. All right, so they're both dead. And then Little John's passing five wits and three jolliness. Three jolliness, five wits. Okay, so she's at 25, nine jolliness. All we've got left is cookery, by the way. She's also got 11 stealth, so we got to use that. And she's going to pass her wits along. Although, crud. Will Scarlet has great stealth and great brawn. So, really, ideally, I kind of want to zero out Made Marian's wits because I don't think Will's going to have time to attack with it. So, 25. What's our total here? 9 17 19 23 28 plus some unknown value that could be up to nine. I mean, she could do stealth first, but I'd kind of rather her weaken one of the other groups to give Will Scarlet a chance to get it. Mainly this one over here. So, she's got 11 stealth. These guys go Oh, except for like this guy's are red, but the rest of these are blue. So, let's maybe say she'll do these three for stealth on average. That should be okay.

25:22 All right, so she's going to do a stealth attack here. And that's 811. Boom. Okay, perfect. That was as close as I wanted to be. But now that group's a lot weaker. And now, how much jolliness and cooking does she want to spend to get her uh wits from 25 to what she might actually need it to be? What's the value again? 9 17 19 23 28. So, on average, this is like a five, but I probably want to treat it like at least a six or a seven. So, let's say 35 just to be like extra safe. So, that means she needs 10 more. O, that'll be all but one of her jolliness and the cookery. That gets her to 35. So, unless there's an eight or nine, we're okay. Okay, we're fine. All right, so we did get the two golds. Heck yeah. Oh, and any remaining wits is passed on. and crud. So, well, never mind. He's not going to use it. So, yeah, I forget what it was. I think she had like three left or something. But Will's fine, but she is going to pass her four and one to him.

26:08 Four gets us to 14. And oh god, he only has two jolliness. Okay, but he's got 20 stealth and then 14 brawn. Might be able to go all the way here. Um 14 brawn. So, that's enough no matter what. So, let's just go ahead and say that. Okay, eight. We got this Pantalon. By the way, a lot of their names are like puns and stuff and then they have like a whole entire little booklet that like talks through who the characters are in little jokey ways. So, if you like puns, if you like sort of silliness, you might enjoy this. My kids have found some of the names pretty funny. And it's with that we get to the big thing. Let's go ahead and boost stealth to 22 and see if we have enough. Oh god, this guy's a seven. Okay, that's fine. Seven, 10, 14. Uhoh. 16. Yay. 21. Yay. All right. Wow, we got everybody. Usually that does not happen in round two. All right, so let's see.

26:54 So, we got our three go. Wait, did I get everybody? Oh, interesting. Yeah, three player. There's only five. So, sorry. Different player kinds of different stuff going on. Um, so we definitely want the three golds. I mean, we can add them to the deck and then like not actually keep them. All right. Well, will Scarlet should have Cassandra clearly. And I guess Made Marion should have Catherine. And then maybe Little John get Emma because remember he was also going for blue in his previous deck. And then these ones might not matter much, but that's actually looks pretty good for Little John. And this guy I can guarantee we're not going to keep. In fact, I think we just send him to Shwood Forest now. Now we don't have to waste our time calling in later. All right, and we got one more day before we do the big climactic battle. Let's get that set up. And we are all set up. Made Marion definitely got the max or the most of her blue last round. So she's only got 14 this time. Four stealth, six brawn, seven jolly, but look, four prayer hands. Nobody else got any, but that's enough to straight up just destroy two nasty red guards, for example. Will's got two horses this time, so nothing crazy. Uh, but he's got seven wits. Not bad, especially when we're sharing. Uh 20 stealth. Heck yeah.

27:56 And 11 brawn and five gallant. That's not bad. Then little John is going to be a little bit lower because as we knew would happen, he got his hyard with two horses, but not much else. So he's got only six uh wit, only two stealth. Wait, is that really right? Yeah, only two stealth and 15 brawn. The brun is pretty solid. Plus some jolliness and two cookery as well as the horses. All right, we've got the same setup where we're sharing wits. We've got uh two gold guys here, one over there. We know we want to get them, but we'll see if we can grab the other people, too. All right, so Marion's going to pass everything along. Uh, Little Jon has a lot of red and basically no stealth. So, what makes sense is to set up Little Jon for a pretty strong wits and brawn attack at the end. So, Marion should probably do like a little stealth attack and then maybe try to knock through one of the smaller rows by herself with wits. Let's maybe start working over here first where like a little stealth or wits attack could really help. Oh, and this one's really low width. So, let's use our force horse. Our first horse. Okay, that's pretty low wit value and stealth values. Interesting. Let's use one more horse. That might be enough. I just want to like see if I can stealth anybody before I do the wits attack. Okay, so let's stop there. Let's not use the other two horses yet. I'm going to have Maid Marion do both her attacks here. So, first her wits or sorry, her stealth attack for four.

29:12 She'll take down these two guys. All right, so let's go and use her. Is 14 wits enough? Five. So that'll be on average like seven more. Okay, so yeah, one, four, five. Flip over the first one. Oh. Oh no. Okay, she's gonna stop. I think she has to stop, right? I hate this leaving one card. It's stupid. But four, five, 11. She only has three left and she can't like add in cookery or add in jolliness. Now I guess I should have gone higher. So she'll stop there. Now she does get to pass along her three remaining wits to Will. So that'll help a little bit. Let's see if she could have. No. Whoa. Oh yeah, she definitely could not have beaten that guy. Now, you know, I think we could just spend two hands right now to throw that guy away. Let's do that. So, we immediately rescue this guy. I think that's how it works because I don't think it would be tactically advisable, even though that guy wasn't too strong, to like waste an entire next player's attack on him.

30:03 Well, how bad was he? He's only bad at red. Um, yeah, let's let's do the thing I did. So, maid still got two hands. She's passing six brawn and seven jolly. Six brawn gets him to 17. Seven jelly. This gets him to 12. Wow, he's got very high values for everything. Is that right? Everything is 10 or higher. Go Will. All right. Again, made Marian's got two hands if needed. So, what do I want to do here? What do I want to do? So, remember I wanted to pass along Brawn and Witz to Little John. That's going to happen naturally, but certainly we want to use Will's Stealth effectively. And Little John's still got two horses. Let's try to leverage that. We definitely want to do it here, right? All right. So, let's go and use both horses. Uh, I don't know. Let's actually do like the Well, no. Let's try to like set up a good line. So, let's do two here. Oh, very low blues. I like that.

30:52 And actually kind of low stealth, too. And let's do two more for the other horse. Okay. So, Will's got 20 stealth. So, if we focus on the weaker guys, that's 257, which means 13. We can probably do like two more. Take a chance. Let's try it. Let's not boost at all. So, I'm doing these guys and these guys. 11 13 16 18. Yay, we're good. That nine scared me. Okay, so that's his first attack and it zeros out even though he didn't use it all. All right, he can probably Can he beat here? He's got 10 blue. I mean, he's got a ton of jolly. What's Little John going to want to do? He's going to want to do blue here, I think. Oh, I forgot this guy. Should we do the blue here? Got 10 blue. Sure. Let's see how it goes. Six. Okay, so we're still giving four to Little John. Although, that's right. That's the It's the bronze. Why do I even care? So, Lil John's getting so much. 4 17 12. Oh my god. So, he's up to 10 blue.

31:49 17 red puts him to what? Uh, he's already at 15, so 32. And then 12 jolliness gets him to 17. All right. Oh, and gez, I forgot that made Marian saw two of those prey hands. And we still got two cookery. I don't think we'll need that. We're kind of kicking butt. Like I said, I've mostly played with two characters. I think I am realizing that higher player counts might be a little bit easier. Maybe these challenge cards would make more sense. So, you know, sorry I didn't use them, but so it goes. And you'll see the final battle is still usually hard as heck, so none of this might matter too much. All right, so our big ones, we don't really care, but let's even get the stealth away from there just to not be distracted. So 32 and 10. Now, we can't to do two red attacks. So we got to go, what do we need here for blue? Um because I'm sure the 32 will be enough over there. Well, let's check eight. So even if all three of these were like sevens, that would still be more than enough. They could all be eight and it would still be enough. So let's just go. So 32 brarawn versus 8 10 17 25. Get out of here. Save the two golds. So then um let's use all of our 17 jolliness to get to 27 wits.

32:53 Not going to use this. Oh, might as well use these though. Let's just throw away this guy. He was only a three. Okay. And then Yeah. Jeez. Destroyed. Okay. Awesome. And these get converted to me. So we'll have two extra jolliness. Whoops. Uh, two extra jolly next next round. Man, that was a lot easier than my day three and four usually goes. Okay. Uh, who wants what? Augustine can go to Little John, obviously. Um, huh. Do I want to give both of these to Maid Marion? Cuz this guy's great for Will Scarlet. Sure, these can go both go to Maid Marion. And then, I mean, I'll send him to Will, but we're not going to use him. So, now we're going to take each of their decks and just pick their favorite four and all the rest go to the rescued pile to help us out later. So, this shouldn't be too hard. Uh, these are Little John's. We'll definitely take the two golds and then probably the silver.

33:41 I mean, it is probably wasting the three green. That's the only thing. Let's see if there's any bronzes we like better. So, this guy's basically plus two plus two. So, he's like an 82. He's like 10. Whereas this guy's like 73 minus 112. Although, we might not use the green, but he's also a horse. I mean, that is really good. Yeah, I guess he makes sense. Okay. So, if I'm going like blue, I think this guy's actually the best cuz all of them are probably going to waste some points with those green things. Okay, that's my final four for Little John. So, I just like literally don't have to even shuffle. I just draw those four cards. You get to guarantee what you get in the final round. Okay, as for Will. Okay, he only has one gold. Interesting. So, let's see. I assume I want to keep the silvers. Let's see which ones I like best. No, just like quickly skim through the bronzes. I mean, he's great. She might waste me, too. Um, could just have horses for days. How do the values here kind of compare? So that's 4 10 12 4 8 12, but it's less likely that I'll use the four blue here. Although I'll also have her, so I'll have a like some blue and she does have more green.

34:47 Okay, let's go like that. And I can't imagine there are any bronzes that are going to compete. Nah. I made Marion I think got like the most golds, didn't she? Yeah, she's got three gold, so she's definitely keeping all of them. Interesting. She is going to probably be doing some stealth then. Okay, let's look at our two silvers. Oh, man. Two prayers is just crazy. We just saw that. That'll give her four prayers, actually. Yeah, we're cool with that. We're cool with that. All right, so Made Marion has 30 wits. I like that. And then 13 each of Braun and Stealth. Only two J jolliness. We don't really have much jolliness. And she has four prayer hands. And then, yeah, Little John has two more. So, we can just throw away three people. We've got a horse. I think we've got six horses total. Love that. Will's got his own 30. 30 stealth, but only six wit. That'll be a dump. And uh 16 brawn. Not bad. And three jolly and four horses. And then Little John's got 14 wit, seven stealth, 27 brawn. That's his big one. I just realized I used a bronze. Interesting. And two jolliness.

35:46 But we've got three cookery plus two uh me plus the two hands and the horse that I already added to the totals before. And we get to pick which of them go first. But first, let me show you what's different about this day. So, we've got Oh, crud. Everyone gets plus three jies. I don't even see that. All right, I'll just bump everything up. That'll certainly help out. But yeah, we're storing the castle. So, we have to fight these rows in order. So, we can't like jump back and forth. Now, we can use abilities on them like look at them with horses, move them, or throw them away with the prayers. But, we got to defeat this row before we do that one. We got to defeat this row before we do that one, etc. So, the first row gets this special card, Nottingham Castle. It is a 24, and you can't throw it away with prayers. You just got to fight it. But when you defeat it, you get plus one jolly for every three villagers in Sherwood Forest. All of the extras that we saved and called from our deck, including our starting cards. So, we got to spend 24, but we'll get a big chunk of it back. Okay. And we can't see what the rightmost person is until we've defeated the castle. So, we got to kill this row first. Then, we got to kill this row. These seven red guards, by the way. Then, we got to kill this row. And that's enough to win the game. If you get this third row, then you rescue Robin Hood. Yay. He's out of chains. And then he can optionally optionally try to take down the sheriff for like a bonus quest uh super victory. So he's got uh what is it? Five blue, six red. He's a 121 1212 himself. And here's the thing.

37:03 If we had not rescued some people, now we rescued everyone because clearly the game went our way, but if we had not rescued people, he would get plus three to each of his stats for every single imprisoned villager that was left. Now, we have never beaten him. Uh, but again, I've been mostly playing two-player and I think three player might uh just be the trick. But the big thing is Robin Hood joins whoever that last player is that defeated the final thing. He adds 8886 to their stuff and he lets them do a third attack which can be a type of attack they've already done. So, pretty cool stuff. All right, let's get to it. Kind of think I want Little John to go last cuz he's going to like do a giant beat stick like brawn attack probably, right? And Marion is already guaranteed with her 30 blue to be able to destroy the castle. So, let's go with her first. Now, let's use some horses to see what's going on. So, we've got six horses.

37:50 That's 12 cards total. And there are like 32 cards. We can see a decent number of them. Oh, and three of them are already revealed, of course. All right. So, let's horse who's behind. See if her blue is going to go well or how much she needs. That guy kind of sucks. Oh, she does have 13 stealth. That's great. Okay. All right. Let's use another horse. And I'm just going to keep on seeing what's going on here. Okay. more stealth targets. So, she's just going to do like stealth and then blue. And if we pump her up enough, she should be able to kill this entire first row herself, I think. Let's stealth one more time. We can leave that last guy as a secret. Oh, this is great. Okay, so she can stealth the heck. I want to specifically get the ones who have higher blue. So, she has 13 stealth to start. And stealth can target anybody. Remember, she doesn't have to kill the castle first. So, four um seven nine.

38:39 Should I look at the last guy with one more horse? Sure. because I don't want to like waste her attacks. Okay. So, I'll use a horse for this guy and we'll figure out who the other one's going to be. I don't know. Let's do the first guy over here. Okay. All right. So, I want stealth. She has 13 stealth without bumping it at all. So, that's four 7 9 13 because I don't really care about this guy. He's equal in blue and Okay. So, let's do that. So, that's four, six, eight, uh, nine. Wait, did I count wrong? No, that's 11. That's 11 13. Okay, so that zero's out of stealth for a first attack. Oh man, this worked out better than I thought it would. Uh, she has exactly 30 wits, so I don't even have to use any of her jolliness yet. Wow. Okay, so we destroy defeat the castle, defeat these guys, and we get plus one Johnny's for every three villagers in Shwood, which in higher player counts is a lot. So, one, two, three, four, five, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

39:34 Remember, this is all of our eight card starting decks. That's already 24 cards plus all the extras we saved and didn't use. So 11 takes her jolliness to 16. Love it. So she's passing, remember, we don't pass out wits anymore. She's passing 13 brawn and 16 jolliness. Um 13 brawn. 16 jolliness. Okay. And we still got two more horses. And Will's pretty much going to have to do stealth and brawn. I mean like his Well, I guess he could use his wits just to save more for Little John. We've got these two big groups left. Hm. All right. Let's use one of our last two horses. Man, how would we run out of horses so fast? Thought they would last forever. Okay, that's good to know. That nine guy is terrible. That's right. Little John is mainly doing stealth. I mean, he's got 30. How much can he already defeat? 13, 18, 20. Okay, well, if we get rid of that nine guy, it should be easy. So, sure. Let's Let's use two jolliness to get our wits to eight and then do a two wits attack or sorry, eight wits attack to kill both of them. Then I've got 30 stealth. Seven with like five on average. Oh, is that total waste? Seven.

40:39 Seven. Yeah, I mean I I should just do it crud. Unfortunately, I probably should have done more. Seven. Uh 11 18 27. Never mind. That was not as bad. So, all my stealth is gone, but I'm passing little John. 29 brawn and 20 uh jelly. Seems like it should be enough. 29 brawn. Oh my gosh. And 20 jollyess. Oh, and I forgot. He's got he's got two more jolliness from the me. might as well use. Well, I got to decide what I want to use the cookery on, but he's got that. Anyway, I'm just bringing everything over. We still got six prayer hands. Good lord. Wow. Yeah, easier with three players in two. So, I do want to like save some big attack. I mean, it's going to be brawn, right? To go against the prince or sorry, the sheriff at the end. So, Little John should probably do like maybe try to beat these guys with just wits and stealth and then go crazy with um Brawn. So, with that in mind, let's use our last horse.

41:33 And I guess it doesn't matter too much. Let's do the first two. Oh god. Oh, they're all bad at brawn. Well, shoot. Let's do them with brawn. I think the brawn remains for Robin Hood's extra attack that can be any type. That That's not entirely clear in the rules, but it would make sense, right? So, yeah, let's do a brawn attack here to see how it goes. So, that's 6 10 17 21 29. Right. So, we've rescued Robin Hood. We spent 29, bro. We get eight back. So, we really spent 21. Then Robin Hood bumps all of our other stats by eight and our jolliness by six. And we can do another attack, which could be Brawn again, which clearly we're going to want it to be. But let's do blue first. So, you guys rid as many people as we can. And since we have no way to look at anybody anymore, let's just use all of our hands to throw away the last three reds before the sheriff. They weren't even too tougher in blue. Oh well. All right. So, we're going to do a blue attack. get as far as we can. And let's actually bump this up to the max because brawn is like all or nothing. The blue we can stop.

42:35 So, got 32. So, 54. Well, let's stop there actually and save the cookery. I didn't realize how much uh wits we had. Man, why is this so much easier? I feel like I'm cheating or something. All right. So, three, seven, 9, 14, 20, 22, 27, 31, 43. We didn't even need to use our prawn. All right. Yay. We defeated the sheriff. You know, thinking about it, it does make sense that two-player would be a lot harder because you have such a limited number of attacks, only four, and it's not that many fewer enemies. So you can kind of like direct your attacks a little better and like get the right tool for the job a little better with higher player counts. So that's something to be aware of. But hey, let's uh let that take me into my review portion. And yeah, I think this game is fun. My kids have really enjoyed it. I've had a fun time with it. I do think it's best with multiplayer, just kind of everyone being able to set out the guards at the same time. You know, add up their stuff at the same time. The game moves a lot faster. Or you can try the true solo mode. Again, it didn't float my boat that much, but you might enjoy it. Yes, this is a very straightforward game.

43:42 There is a ton of luck involved. Like sometimes you're just going to get all the wrong guards or you won't get the characters that go that well with your values or you'll get like a little bit of everything and you'll by nature waste it. Some of the days feel easier than others. Like this one gives you plus three brawn and yes it has higher values of guards but I don't think it's that much higher than the other game uh cards would have. So the balance, the luck, the swinginess that might bother some people but as you saw unless you're playing at two-player I think usually the game is pretty straightforward which is why they have these cards. Let's look at some of these. Deep fog scouting tokens reveal one less card than normal where frier truck is hungry. Cookery tokens give one less than normal. Each sheriff guard is plus one brarawn. Prayer tokens cannot remove guard spins can only shift them. So you see like it kind of changes up what you can use or how your tools function. And you get to choose if you like want to keep the card or even like push your luck more and take another challenge card to try to get the highest score possible. So certainly if you're finding the game easier with more characters at higher player counts, you're going to have tools to make it like work for you. But yeah, in the end the game is fun. Like you can see the characters aren't that unique and different. Like yes, you are deck building, but you're not really building combos apart from points, you know, and like getting higher numbers, but it's fun to get higher numbers and to beat tougher and tougher people and to get like more and more guards defeated. Also, let's face it, the gameplay is fairly repetitive. You do the same thing twice, then you do the same thing twice again, then you have a slightly different thing. So, if you aren't into kind of that core thing of adding up your numbers and taking that gut shot and like, do I want to attack here or not? and uh the push your luck aspect, I don't think this game is going to fly that well for people. But if you do enjoy simple deck building, if you do

45:12 enjoy just like kind of a quick family game that lets you beat up some guards and rescue Robin Hood, if you like punny names like Earnest Lee, you know, it's kind of like a silly uh light-hearted deck builder push your luck romp, I think that rescuing Robin Hood might be for you. Thanks for watching everybody, and a special thank you to our biggest Patreon supporters, Jay. William F, Steve Ren, Pedra Lucas, Nick Ski, Miles, Wayne Scott, and Casey W.