The Hungry Gamer Previews Pathfinder Quest

0:00 Oo, that looks tasty. Welcome folks to the Hungry Gamer is back with another crowdfunding preview and today we're talking about Pathfinder Quest published by Piso and designed by Jason Bullman and Joe Pacini. I do apologize if I mispronounced those names. Now, what this game is is an adventure/dungeoncrawl game of dice chucking and leveling up set in the world of Pathfinder, which is traditionally a role playing game. They're on their second edition now, and they have several video games as well. And this is, I believe, their first foray into the cooperative board game space. That might be wrong, but the first one that I've seriously played.

0:45 Though I will point I also did a review of the Pathfinder Elemental Stones a little while back. Now before I get started, let me just note that everything that you see here is still technically in the prototype phase and is subject to change. And because of that, please make sure you turn on your Clay on subtitles because if I make any mistakes in the rules overview or anything changes, that is where you'll find those corrections. Additionally, I'll point out that I've chosen to use all of the standees here. You'll note that as you can see these are standes, but that is not very cool to look at from above. So, I've laid them down like so. However, I will point out that the core edition of the game will come with miniatures for the heroes and a giant dragon miniature as well. And last thing I'll say before I jump in is what I'm going to show you is just an example of how combat and exploration might work.

1:36 and I'm gonna do my very best to minimize any spoilers that you might see in the game. So, with all of that said, if you are not interested in how this game is played, just want to jump into my final thoughts, then you want to go to the timestamp on the screen right now. For those of us still here, let's talk about how this game is played. First of all, it's important to note that you will always play with four characters, no matter how many people are actually playing the game. You'll see here I have the rogue, the fighter, the cleric, and the wizard right here. Though, for this example, I'm only going to use the fighter and the wizard to kind of demonstrate how combat works. You'll also see I have two skeletons and three skeleton archers out there. But before I can get to that, let's talk about the characters themselves. You can either start with some pre-made characters, or you can create your own.

2:23 The pre-made characters are the kind of iconic characters from the Pathfinder world, or you can do your own generated character. And if you're doing that, you're going to do by selecting three things. First, you will select your race. And you'll see there are two different versions of all these different races that you have here as you can kind of see like so. And all of them also have their own unique stande as you can see like so. Then you're going to pick their class. And I already mentioned the four core ones. There are some potential stretch goals that I've gotten to see and play with, but the publishers asked for us kind of not to highlight those just in case they don't get unlocked. So then you'll pick your class and you'll see we have two of them kind of right here. As I said, the fighter and the wizard. And you'll see you'll kind of have a core stat sheet, but as you go through the game and as you're leveling up, you will be flipping them over and eventually getting new cards all the way up until at the end of the game, you will have leveled yourself up to level eight. And it is a big difference as you get to there. Then the next thing that you're going to pick is you are going to pick your ancestry. And depending on which race you've picked, you'll have different options of things that you can get. For example, add two dice to your nature rules as a human.

3:35 And you can kind of see a whole bunch there. You also you have a kind of static ability up there. And then another ability down at the bottom based on your background. And you'll see there are quite a lot of those that you can select from as well. Then the next thing you do is you will select your starting ability. And for your abilities, as you level up, and you're going to level up at the end of every adventure, as you level up, you get choices. And as you start the game, for example, for the fighter, I started the game with these two abilities always, but I had the choice of taking either one of these two abilities. And for this, we'll just say I took this vicious swing. And it was the same thing for the wizard, though. The wizard wound up getting more things as they have a bunch of different spells that they're going to have. They actually start with four cards. And as you go through, each level will tell you select one of these two cards or two of these four cards and so on and so on.

4:30 And the last thing you're going to do is you're going to get your starting weapons like so. Then you'll go into the story book. You'll get your story. It'll give you a little bit of information. And then you're going to jump right in. And then either you're going to jump in, you'll have combat, or you'll have exploration. Now, I have this set up here to demonstrate combat right away. And one of the things to remember is as you go through each adventure, you'll be tracking your time. And various things in the story will tell you to take time, but in general combat will simply take one time for the entire combat. So you'll take up your time, you'll select the initiative cards, and you'll go ahead and shuffle those up. And this will be the order of combat. And so as we flip over, we see we have our fighter going first. Now, both you and the enemies are always going to get three actions per turn. You can take an action to simply move a space or you can take an action to do an attack. Now, if we take a look here, I could simply do some attacks with my weapon. And my weapon right here tells me that for one action, if I hit, I can do one damage.

5:37 And the way the way attacking works is with a weapon or with a spell, you're going to look at the enemy card and see what what the number of successes you need to hit are. In this case, I need two. I look here for an attack. I roll three dice and I have two successes. So I would do one damage to the enemy. I take a look at the card. I see that is enemy A. And I would put my one damage right there like so. But and then maybe I want to take my third action and do another attack. Well, I take a look right here. And I see the second time I do an attack, I only get to roll two dice as you kind of get a little more tired. So I roll my two dice and again I would do one more damage. However, you also have, as I mentioned, a bunch of different feats that you're going to get. So, perhaps instead of just doing my first attack, I decide I want to do a vicious swing instead. So, it's going to take both of my actions, but I'll roll all three of my dice. And since I hit, I would do my one damage. And then, in this case, I'm level one, I would do one more for a total of two damage.

6:36 If I get to six, I would have defeated the bad guy. It's also important to note if you take a look that a lot of abilities will have things that you can use a star for. So if you roll a star, you can activate that ability as well. Then you would draw the next card. In this case, it's an enemy's card. You'll notice it says A, C, and E. And this enemy right here, it's very small here, but is an A enemy. And so enemies are and so the enemy cards are either A, C, and E, or B, D, and F. So there will be two different activations of enemies every given round. When the enemy goes, as I said, just like you, they're going to get three actions. And for that, we simply look at what they have here. In this case, attack a character in this space. If it couldn't do that, it would move towards the nearest character. And then down here are its effects. So, just like with you, it first attack, it'll roll three dice.

7:26 And it did. It has five successes. I would compare it to my defense, which is three, and I would be hit. Though, you'll note that every character has a once per round ability right here. And in this case, I could remove one success, which would bring it down to four, which would still hit me. So, I probably wouldn't do that. I take a look, and I'm going to take one damage. Though, again, perhaps I use something like this here, a shield block, and I could avoid that damage. Now, you also note I rolled a skull right here, and that does, and that means it would activate whatever ability it has on the bottom of his card. In this case, cleave. deals one damage to a different character in that space. Then after all of the A enemies go, which would also, I will note, include these skeleton archers here, which might be moving and shooting, then we'd go on to the next card, eventually getting to my wizard, who would do its abilities, and so on and so on. I'm not going to try to dig into all the different abilities because they are numerous.

8:23 And so, you'll go through and eventually hopefully you will win. However, there's a little bit more to it. Often you'll have these combat encounters that you can go and you can deal with. And so what might happen with those? We'll just place one. Oh, I don't know. Right here. And I'll put this bad guy right here. And let's just say that at the start, Valeros here took his action to walk down here. You'll notice he can because of the lines there. And I would interact with this. And so I would go to the rule book and I would look and see what it says. And it says push the wagon that had an enemy, athletics three. And if I have an athletics result of three or more, I would go to the challenge book here, it would tell me what entry to look at and it would tell me what happened. Then there would be other entries for different effects. But and the way skill checks work are you'll look at your character. So Valeros happens to have athletics of three, meaning I would roll three dice.

9:14 However, his background gives him farm hand. So I'm actually rolling five dice. And as I said, it's let's just say it wanted a total of three. I got it. I would go to the challenge book and it says you push the wagon into an adjacent foe and do five damage. So I push it there, destroyed him. Good for me. And then it'll tell you to remove the token or not remove the token. And that's generally basically how combat is going to work. Different enemies have different AIs and different things they can do, and there are different levels of complexity of combat actions you can take, but in general, that's how it's going to work. Then when combat is over or before combat has started, you will often have out on the board these different tokens. As I mentioned before, like with combat, but flip to the exploration side and they are also things that you're going to be able to interact with. And so you'll go to the token and in the book it will tell you what you are looking at. It will give you a description and it will tell you what skill or skills you can use to try to get a result on that exploration item. It's important to note that you are always allowed to read all the information to everybody and tell them what abilities you can use before you attempt it. So you have that knowledge going in, though you don't know what's going to happen. And in general, every single one's going to have two or three results which go anywhere from a moderate success to a full success down to a failure or even a super failure, whatever it may be. And that is the core of how the game works.

10:45 However, it's important to note that every different adventure is going to have anywhere between four and eight different encounters. And an encounter might just be explore all the things. It might be you're kind of moving around and you're traveling. You'll get different locations that you're adding onto the map, going different places, exploring different areas, encountering different combat as you move through each adventure, as you're trying to save this town of Falcons Hollow. But as you go through, I will point out that you are going to be finding lots of stuff. And by lots of stuff, I mean lots of stuff. There are a ton of items that you will find. And in here, you're going to find things like potions. You're going to find quest items. For example, at one point, I found some silverware that happened to be useful with one part of the story. I'm not going to say any more than that. And as you go through, depending on what you do, and often depending on how well you succeeded at these events, and now this is a minor spoiler, so close your eyes if you don't want to see this, I'll tell you when to open them again. You're going to be getting various keywords that you'll be writing onto your adventure record. And as you go through, these different keywords are going to matter throughout the game. You can open your eyes now if you had them closed. And those are going to determine things that happen later on in the story. Sometimes they're going to be good for you. Sometimes they're going to be bad for you. And all of them will matter to the story and your success in the overall campaign in some way. And the other thing I'll point out is as you're going through, you have their character record sheet and it has a bunch of achievements that you can go through. And if you do enough of them, you get to kind of read something else.

12:15 But that's pretty much where I'm going to stop. I'll point out that there are lots of different regions that you can go to. Here's just a some of the some of the different tiles that you have here. But all in all, you're going to wind up playing eight different scenarios to get through the entire story. Though, there are several times where you're going to get to choose from a branch. you can go to choice A or choice B. So, even though you're only going to play eight, there's actually 12 different scenarios that you could experience. As I said, that is the broad as spoiler-free as I can make it overview of this game. So, what do I like about this game? The first thing is I spent a lot of time before I got into actual board games playing Pathfinder. I enjoy the world and the art is good just like the art in well Pathfinder is good art. In fact, I enjoyed the lore enough that I read many of the books. There was actually used to be a local con out here that I used to go to and play.

13:14 Pathfinder Society is organized play and they would often give us copies of the books and stuff. And so I like the world and this game fits right into it. But it's kind of cool that it's off kind of in the boonies. And so it's not this worldchanging event. It's world changing for this village, but it's kind of off in the side, which is actually kind of cool. And I really do kind of enjoy that. The next thing I'll say is the character progression is quite good. You really do feel like you're starting out pretty powerful, but you really ramp up as you go. And the bad guys ramp up, too. So, in some ways, as with all these games, you know, the bad guys get stronger, you get stronger, whatever. But it does feel like you're a little bit ahead of the curve most times, and that's really, really satisfying and fun. I'll also say that the characters play quite differently. Yes, there are times when it just becomes kind of a scrum, and you're just kind of fighting and doing stuff, but all of them have different niches that they are good at and they do stand out as you're going through and that's just always great to me. Next thing I'll say is it's easy to learn. It's like, I don't know, a 10-page rule book, and then you can pretty much just jump right into the game, and it teaches you some stuff as you go along. Very, very easy to learn, very easy to play. So, uh, the next thing is, I should have mentioned this earlier, but the abilities that you get as you play through the game are also really fun. There's some really cool things. One of the early spells that the wizard can get is this frost breath, which let you hit multiple enemies in your space. Though, later on, you can

14:45 unlock an ability. I'm not going to spoil it, but it can unlock an ability to do it in another space that does some damage, but then takes away actions or there's ways you can move people around. And so, there's a lot of clever abilities in there that you get and you're able to unlock. I particularly like the once per round abilities every character has. Sometimes they're more situational than others, like Valeros, the fighter, I should say, can raise his shield and kind of reduce one success off of something while the wizard can just kind of do one damage to something. But I love that it has these very simple, very useful once per round abilities. So even if you feel like, ah, I had to move everywhere, you're still kind of doing something that's interesting. I do really like that. But I think probably the best part of this light adventure dungeon crawl are the challenges. That whole book of challenges that I did not open cuz I don't want to spoil anything, but the way that you find a thing, you get to read about it, get some nice little fluff text, and then you know exactly how it is for you to succeed. So you can get the best person there. I didn't talk too much about how time works, but outside of combat, when you take time, everyone can move wherever they want and do one thing. So it allows you to kind of stack who's going where to do your best job to succeed at something. And you can take your time, but if you're taking your time, you're taking your time, which might be bad down the road.

16:03 But beyond that, the things that they do are really, really satisfying. Sometimes you just find something. Sometimes it's just lore. Sometimes it's an item. Sometimes you skip an entire encounter in the game and it even tells you that which is great. The one time I did it, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I skipped a whole thing. This is awesome." And then when you take into account the combat encounters, it's even better. I love that you get to interact with the environment. I love that the example that I made up is, oh, you can push this wagon one way and smash something. That is awesome. I love how that works. And again, you know roughly what you're going to have to do. Sometimes you don't know how it'll turn out. You got to go to the challenge book. But all of that is really, really satisfying. And I played through half the way through the campaign and I did a jump to the end because I realized I don't actually have the time to play through the whole thing, but I played a lot of hours of this and it's really, really satisfying as you're going through. And I did not come close to halfway through the challenge book. Not even close. There's so much stuff I haven't discovered. So, I really really like that. Next thing I'll say is it's a pretty solid story. It's engaging. You know, this is not a massive story like a Madara, but there's good solid storytelling here. And I appreciate that, especially with the branching narratives go. There's not a ton. You'll do one thing and then you'll kind of make a choice, then you'll come back to a scenario that you're always going to do, then you kind of branch off again.

17:34 And I love I love it when games do that because for me to get the whole thing I need to go through again and I will want to go through again because of these other story bits that are there. And I really really like that when you combine that with they're fast scenarios. Now I was playing solo but there's no reason you can't do a scenario in an hour at all. Just cook right through. There's not a ton of stuff in the box that because it's a pretty light game. So it's pretty easy to set up, pretty easy to put away. There's not a ton of tiles out there. You're not using a ton of space on the board. Very rarely do you actually have to have a whole map set up. Love how fast and economical it is, I guess I should say. And last couple things I want to mention is I mentioned that there's the exploration and the combat, but it does a really good job of balancing the two. You never feel like you're just fight fight fight fight fight fight fight fight fight fight fight until you get kind of that fight fatigue because it is a light dice chucking game but you always have something in the middle that lets you kind of think and breathe and it does a very good job of managing the amount of times that you're fighting the amount of times you're doing the exploration. Then the last thing I want to say from just kind of the the core rule book that you can get is I think they call it the rule of cool which is basically there's all these different bonuses that you can get and it'll say oh someone has disability they get it but as you're creating your characters it very clearly says in the book if you feel like your character could do this thing then please do it.

18:59 It's not you cheating the game. It's not a house rule. It's literally in the game. And I love that they did that. I just thought that was just fantastic. Next thing I'll say is I didn't show any of the stretch goal stuff, but the stretch goal stuff that I saw and messed with is good. It is unique. It adds to the gameplay. It's not just fluff. And so I'm really I really really like that. And the last thing I'll say is, and I don't know how to put this other than I'll say replay secrets. There are some very cool replay mechanics in here, and they are secrets. and I'm not going to spoil them other than to say they're really cool and I love the way they did it. So, what are my quibbles with the game? The first thing is you always got to play four characters and they're pretty light and easy to play for the most part, but as you get through the game, it does start to stack up to where like, oh my gosh, I have so many things, all these different abilities. I have to figure it out for all these different characters. It does weigh down a little bit towards the end of the game. On that note, in my opinion, not all abilities are created equal. There were some abilities that I thought were going to be great that I just didn't use. I just didn't find them useful. Maybe it's my play style and your mileage may vary, but like with any RPG, I guess some spells are better than others. Some abilities are better than others. So, I guess that's true to playing an RPG game, but I don't know that they're all created equal. Next thing I'll say is it was probably three scenarios before the fighting really got interesting. And by that, I mean those skull abilities that

20:30 the bad guys have. A lot of them are just they do an extra damage or something like that. And it took a while before they started doing stuff that felt dangerous and cool and made me start thinking about tactics and moving around, not just getting into a scrum. And for me, it was a little longer than I would have liked it to be before I felt like we're past a tutorial kind of combat. Next thing I'll say is it's a very it's a light game. It's a heavy light game or a light medium game. And so just keep that in mind if you're a big dungeon crawl person like I am. It's a lighter game that you're gonna get out there. It's very close to beer and pretzels. Next thing I'll say is, and again, this isn't necessarily bad. And even in the press kit that they sent me, they say that this is supposed to be a light or low medium difficulty game. And that is true. It doesn't really feel like you're getting really challenged until later in the game. So, if you're someone that's like, "No, I want dark and hard and gonna die all the time." This is not that game. you were probably going to win this game. Most scenarios is just light, fun, and quick.

21:32 Now, then I'm going to get to the only two things that I think might change, and I really hope they do. The first one is the iconography for the ABC of the different bad guys is so small. I had to pick it up every single time. I have bad eyes, but because I have bad eyes, I have these really thick glasses and I am not a person that has to do this look far away or anything as I get older because they're so bad. I can just see stuff and every time I had to pick these things up and I'm looking close back and forth and it's really hard to see the ABCD and I really am hoping that that gets made larger. And the last thing I the only other thing I'll say about the kind of production here is the dice are unique dice, custom dice.

22:23 They're kind of boring, right? They got pips on them. Eh, like give me something a little cooler. Make the skull look cooler. Make the star look cooler. And now that I have a feeling might be something that's going to be changed or maybe there's a deluxe component, but you know, I'm I'm quibbling here, but that's what I like to do. But that's it, folks. Overall, I think this is a fun game. Like, I will not lie. I had a hard time stopping. I was just playing and playing through every night. I went back. I was like told my wife, "Sorry, I got to go do this thing." And I was long past having a vibe for this game and I was still playing. I finally said, "Wait a minute. I no really, I cannot spend two weeks playing this game. I got to skip ahead and I got to go." And I felt the loss of doing that. And so to me, that's really, really cool when a game can do that. that I wanted to keep playing and I want to experience the different characters that I didn't play other than just kind of experimenting with. But there you have it folks. This is a game that if you like the Pathfinder world and you are looking for a light dice chucker that's got some pretty interesting story, then this is probably the game for you. Especially because it's not going to take up a lot of space on your shelf. It is not a big box. And so I really really like that.

23:31 But there you have it folks. As always, if you found this video interesting, please like, subscribe, share, maybe become a channel member. As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a wonderful, wonderful day.