Soul Raiders Opened Up - Was it Worth the Wait?

0:00 it was July 2021 that's roughly three and a half years ago that we did a uh Kickstarter preview for a game called Soul Raiders well it is now January 20125 and it just got delivered and I got to tell you I'd kind of forgotten about it yeah uh as a brief reminder this is kind of a unique uh it's not a Dungeon Crawl it's not a point Adventure but it's somewhere a very narrative s of experience there is some little Miniatures but it's not what you'd think in terms of like tactical combat or anything like that um no very much more like that point and click adventure style like seventh I called it like seventh continent light like that kind of I would say it's like focus on exploration kind of thing seventh continent meets maybe some other type of game not splendor but it is designed by Mark Andre which is wild because you'd never think if you looked at this game and went oh is this designed by Mark no one no one is saying that uh and speaking of the game you can see it right here I'm going to open it up first of all it's a giant book we're going to we'll put up some pictures but it's a giant book actually has a kind of rounded Edge like a book and this is the grimoire Edition collector edition sort of extra nice version of the game magnetic flap of course always a big fan of that uh I'm going to open this thing up it's insane look at that art look at that piece of artwork I mean it's

1:30 ridiculous I will say uh now we just got this so we haven't played it again but I did play the Prototype when we were doing the content and I remember finding it very unique I liked it quite a bit because it takes that experience of sort of a fantasy adventure and makes it incredibly accessible and sort of the Simplicity is a very elegant system with the way you're playing your cards but you got the rule book which isn't too overwhelming you know it's pretty no I mean it's a lot of examples which is always good to have yeah it's got oh it's got a ton of visual examples like right off the bat it talks about the card system somewhere right here it talks and like gives examples here are the things you could do here's how you could use these cards to do them really cool system I don't even know this is probably some sort of just looks like a l book and it's uh a it's a Mark Andre Universe they're calling it so I wonder oh yeah that's actually something I didn't remember from when we did the content they called this Soul Raiders is a game by Mark on that uses the running quest game system so it seems like maybe there will be more than just this one maybe depends on if this is sucess this is kevos that we're looking at here oh is that the part of the world maybe nice hard cover book The the production again is insane kind of off the charts this is the game board now you have this out it has some events here it's going to track your what they call V which is your health points around the outside edge and then you're going to draw four cards at the beginning but as you lose VT

3:00 throughout the game you're drawing few and fewer cards which is kind of one of the weird things about the game is because it makes it feel more challenging and more challenging because at the beginning you're like when you TI when you use your cards to do something you might use three of the cards combining the numbers to do a big thing but then you have one card left or you could do four little things in a round with each of the cards if you're drawing two it's tough It's like these are the two cards you have that is the game board your characters here this thing I will pull out so we can open it up and show you this is everything has a nice texture to it too but this is just a simple thing that has all the Miniatures and all the characters I can't quite remember they all have like a few different versions there's a standard version there's an invisible version then they've got these purple versions I don't remember everything and then there's these portals because you can actually go through portals in certain it looks like it gives each character a deck box too yeah those are empty right now but there are character Decks that are specific to each character and then you can actually level up yeah you can pull those out there because there's actually the player boards underneath it is packed in there pretty tightly six different characters six different playable characters little uh boxes for the I think the potions and something else like looks like maybe where you'll keep your cards throughout the game you've got this campaign notebook so one thing I didn't really pick up on when we did the content that as I was reading the rules it sounds like this almost has a

4:32 Rog like aspect where you want to play through it multiple times there are three chapters M and you can play through each of the three chapters which a pretty robust experience we'll open up one of these in a second but you can they have all these tracking sheets for each time you play through so you can get more and do more and see more definitely experience God style you might want to take different choices and explore different ways cuz you're never going to be able to do all the things for sure the player boards oh yeah the player boards are fair really simplistic this is a player board they're cool looking they didn't go dual air on the player boards no there was there's nothing that really goes on them you kind of play your cards off to the right keep your deck here and then there's these uh tokens that you can put under here and then each character has effectively a bonus to a few different skills so as you come across things like this tinkering skill to unlock something they'd have a plus one they plus two and then we have the three different chapters and then what are these those are the boxes that hold the cars oh my gosh and you can open that's a lot of cards I've cracked open I think this one with the cards yes you did you must have cuz this one is not but these are all action cards enemy cards as a reminder this is what the cards look like for one of the characters and you're always able to use the number on the top so if you have a challenge that you're facing that says this takes a five you can disregard the rest of the card and just use you know that that would be five but if I'm doing a movement action I'm also going to do this so if I'm using five to move or if I needed something say like that c

6:03 you know required 12 I'd have five here but then a plus two for each action card so that's another four times two so you can see how combining these cards lets you do some of the things you need to those bigger numbers and then what are these all items here I don't know like I don't remember seeing a lot of other cards oh artifacts Ally cards yeah there's probably some spoilers here I'm not going to look through these too much but it definitely looks like these are things that you're going to be getting yeah they're numbered on the back oh that's what goes in that other one is your numbered card so probably going to tell you when to draw these specific allies and stuff and then in the bottom here we have chapter one chapter 2 chapter 3 uh I'll show chapter one here a little bit no spoilers here no there won't be any spoilers um but there's a couple envelopes have no idea what those are um in our prototype we literally had I think nine of these sheet yeah this is a lot more and all of the art work when you're in an area looks like this it's kind of this isometric or not necessarily looks like that point and click style very Scenic where you're like oh we could go here and so for example like I was saying you find yourself here and it's going to take eight movement to go visit location 9 because you're going down a bunch of steps but just to go through this door it costs four movement and there's a lot of information here that I won't go into detail but like if it's a greenen arrow and you're fighting things here you could quickly just just use eight to move if it's green you can run away but if it's not if it's one of these arrows

7:34 they'll actually come with you because when you engage the enemies they kind of sit in front of your player Space the game is really wild because um and we did content if you want to take a look at it it's a pretty decent video that explains the game pretty thoroughly but players when you're playing this with a bunch of people at the table everyone can kind of go off and do their own thing that's the that's the cool part to me the I could go into the two area and Ryan could go to the n splitting up yeah you each draw your own cards and you've got your own little it might not be a great idea um but it requires a lot of communication because we all on that main board share things like threat and our our Vite is a shared thing it's not per character so if Ryan goes somewhere and our threat goes up and it's while something is happening to me where something happens you know a number of monsters come out based on our Threat Level whatever he just did raised our threat so now I'm facing more monsters all of a sudden yeah and you can even see just even from showing that one brief one or whatever David's putting up with pictures here you can kind of already see that this is a game where you're making choices and that is a big reason why they have that replayability baked in because every time you go through one of those paths you could be encountering a more paths and more paths and making different decisions on the course of the game that's why I kind of compared it to seventh continent earlier because you just start off and you're like we could go in four different directions and then you might never even see what happens on the other three directions which which is what's going to encourage you to kind of go back and play it again and say okay well let's go left this time and go down a whole maybe

9:06 even different Arc than what we had the first time yeah and like we said we haven't played this Edition we just got it but I wanted to do a video because I got to tell you this showed up late last night and I wouldn't shut up about it to Elicia I was like I couldn't get over how well this is presented like even on the spine of the box where it looks like the spine of the book would be there's like a little cloth strip like a real binding and I don't know if that was just for show or if they had to do that because of how they did this yeah I uh you said can I show you some pictures of this game and I looked down I had like 14 notifications so yeah I got to see quite was very exciting it's also massive and I'll put up a picture with a size comparison I brought out weather machine and put it beside it and it made weather machine look like a cute little game in terms of the size of the box now that we're kind of showing you it all I mean like it's as big as you are like look at that thing I mean it is cool now you can kind of better see that spine too yeah uh and the fact that they have this and that everything kind of stays well it's all everything is in boxes and everything is has Lids so nothing is going to get really shuffled around inside there yeah uh really really nice production we will get this played and try to get maybe some more content up on it um I don't know that we'll do a playr because it might spoil it's going to be a lot of reading too and it's like a lot of reading and exploring it might not be exactly an exciting watch uh but we'll get it played and let you know what we think about it after we get a little more time with it but if you have any more questions about it at all right now please make them in the comments below we'll get down there and answer whatever we can until next time make sure

10:37 everyone has fun at the table and we'll see you then