Game Review - 'Quest - Awakening of Meliora'

Tonight I tried a card game called "Quest: Awakening of Meliora". ( boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14… ) It's meant as single-player, though it also has a co-op mode. You are one of four heroes trying to do something glorious before running out of HP or encounter cards. There's a fan of 1-3-5-7 encounters face-down, with three distinct backs for the Meltwood, Shadow Caves and Crystal Something regions. You play the 1, then veer off to one encounter each of the next rows, then start over once you reach the top, so you have some control over which type of region to go to next.

Each round, you turn over an Event card, then the Encounter. The events are a mix of location-themed cards, generic ones, and five unique ones for your character. For instance I played as a Tarzan-like guy who had been magically merged with his T-rex pet, giving him the power to shapeshift. The events for him were things like "Growing Pains: take 1 damage" and "Far From Home: if you haven't gained X or Y yet, lose a boon." So, themed for the character. Some events I saw were "Single-Track Mind" (hindered me somewhat) and "Lore Journal" (a way to temporarily boost Intellect). The encounters play out with a dice system. You roll 5d6 and the dice get "locked in" to certain markings on the encounter or your card. Eg. a killer bat could be beaten with 2 Combat power, but gained 1 Combat each time a 1 appeared, and locked those dice in so they were unavailable to empower hero cards.

To win you have to win a quest. Two characters have a personal quest: basically "find and overcome all your dark and mysterious past cards", and "reach level 7". Otherwise you can find and complete quests like "beat a bunch of crystal encounters either all violently or all non-violently", or "actually beat that shadow dragon violently when it's super difficult to beat that way". Whether you beat each encounter is very random, a matter of whether it captures all your dice before you get enough bonuses to defeat it, and the difficulty automatically ramps up by raising the enemies' stats for each complete fan of cards. Come to think of it there's very little meaningful decision-making, which strikes me as a deal-breaker, but the concept of encountering various adventures in specific terrains with a bit of backstory and having character themes is a good one. The idea of a single-player option also interests me.