Designed by: Cédrick Chaboussit
In Glow, your lead your merry band of intrepid companions across a misty landscape, and when your band is complete, the game ends!
In brief, there’s four ways to score ‘shards of light’ (otherwise known as points) in Glow: with the band you put together, with your progress on the map, and if you also gather more fireflies than companions you get a ten-point/shard bonus.
But that’s three ways, you say. Okay, the fourth is marginally harder to explain, but it happens a lot during the game. You begin with a single adventurer card, representing yourself, and you add another companion from the meeting board during each of the game’s eight rounds. But as well as adding a companion, you also add more small dice to the two large dice you begin the game with: each companion card comes with (usually) at least one, often more. Everyone rolls their dice at the same time and then activates as many companions as they can: each companion has an activation at the bottom of the card, demanding certain dice results (the dice represent the elements) in return for certain card results. If you can activate them – they’re not always good – you must. The same dice can activate multiple cards!
So what do these activations do? Well, as hinted above, sometimes they simply get you points. Sometimes they’ll give you free re-rolls, or firefly tokens, or footprint tokens. Sometimes they’ll kill your companion off – oops!
Once all your companions who can activate have done so, players can then use the same dice results to move the little marker representing your band across the map. If you reach a camping spot, you can move your campsite there: the location of your campsite scores you points at the end of the game. Then all the small companion dice are returned to the meeting board, in the space that matches the symbol on them, ready to be claimed again when the new companions come out in the next round.
Outside of some extra fripperies such as using footprint tokens for movement or occasionally the map demand you don’t have a certain element to move, that’s pretty much the game, which continues until all there are no more companions to be claimed: after the 8th round.
There's really very little interaction at all. There is a companion (a crow called Kaar) who throws a spanner in the works with a cursed die, but that's about as rough as it gets, unless you count the slings and arrows of unfortunate dice rolls.
Low - a lot of the game is played at the same time by all players (activating cards and moving).
Companions are mostly rewarding, but they don't tend to combine with each other as in some games: Glow is simpler than that, with the upside that it's quick and breezy, but the downside being that choices occasionally feel a little arbitrary.
The board is double-sided, offering two different maps (and modes of movement!) and the companion cards are shuffled before every game. We're not convinced Glow will feel hugely different between plays, although if you look at it as a fun dice-chucker with a side order of strategy (rather than the other way around) you won't be complaining.
Sam says
It's probably more a complexity 2 once you know the game, because it's pretty straightforward: gathering companions, moving on the map, scoring. The fact the dice can activate more than one card (but a card can't be activated by the same die more than once) means that it can get a bit fiddly, especially toward the end, as multiple dice activate multiple cards and you need to choose the best order to do so. Allied to that is a sense that you are to a large degree at the mercy of fate: unless you're lucky enough to have re-roll tokens, there's not a lot you can do to mitigate a bad roll, and so Glow ends up feeling a bit like a game of mostly-luck that has stretched itself out into a slightly protracted set of systems. I'm not a huge fan of the heads-down, everyone-does-their-stuff way of playing games unless it's something super-simple (for example, Take it Easy) so Glow isn't something I'd seek out. But's breezy enough, and has some satisfying moments to it when things come together.