Adventure Land

Adventure Land is a simple adventure game for families, where players move their adventures across a landscape of forests, mountains and cities, collecting things on the way – and doing battle with Fog Monsters!

The board shows the landscape in question, made up of a grid defined by letters and numbers. Each player has a set of adventurers in their own colour, and these are placed at the top left of the board. During the game you can choose to move either two of your adventurers (as far as you like in one direction) or move one adventurer twice, but they must always move either rightwards, or downwards – they cannot ever go up or left. At the start of each player’s turn two cards are flipped revealing either swords, herbs, companions, gold, or fog monsters. If you stop on a square that has anything but the latter on it, you gain the item in question – swords, herbs and gold go into your supply, whereas companions will now travel with you.

If you stop on a square containing a fog monster, you must do battle: your combat score is the amount of adventurers on the square plus the value of any herb tiles you choose to add. You can discard swords in order to roll dice as well – as long as the total equals or exceeds the monsters combat score, you defeat it and claim the points. You can re-roll or manipulate rolled dice by discarding gold.

The game comes with three different ‘adventures’ that all have a variation on the above, but essentially function in a very similar way. Apart from a deadly sprite that moves up and down the river, the main thing to bear in mind is how quickly to move your adventurers – the fog monsters gather in the south, but you don’t want to rush their and miss out on goodies to be found in the north… Play continues until both the swords and companions have run out, then scores are totalled.