Adventure board game
An adventure board game is a board game in which a player plays as a unique individual character that improves through gameplay.[1] This improvement is commonly reflected in terms of increasing character attributes, but also in receiving new abilities or equipment.
History
1970s
Adventure board games often integrate various
1980s
The genre saw a particular boom in the 1980s, when its key subgenres had been codified by three major releases of the decade:[2]: 306
- Competitive fantasy adventure games, codified by Dungeon! and particularly Games Workshop's Talisman (1983),
- Cooperative investigative adventure games, pioneered by Chaosium's Arkham Horror (1987), and
- Cooperative fantasy adventure games, a combination of the other two directions, first produced in GW and Milton Bradley Company's HeroQuest (1989).
1990s
In the 1990s, both adventure board games and tabletop RPGs saw a sharp decline in popularity in the wake of the collectible card game boom and bust.[2]: 307
2000s
Fantasy Flight Games has brought all three subgenres back into the market with their Runebound (2004), the second edition of Arkham Horror (2005), and Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2006), respectively. Other companies published their own takes on the genre, such as Atlas Games' card-based Dungeoneer (2003) and Pegasus Spiele's Return of the Heroes (2003), which was one of the earliest examples of the genre to employ eurogame mechanics — something Fantasy Flight Games also embraced in their own later games.[2]: 307
2010s
In the 2010s, the adventure board game genre had returned to its roots when
Notes
- ^ a b Applecline, Shannon (September 2007), "Worlds of Adventure", Knucklebones, 2 (5): 88–92
- ^ ISBN 978-1-61317-084-7.