Drawn to Adventure – First Impressions
Roll-and-write games, or any other type of [ ]-and-write games, have been coming out in droves, but the simplicity and mechanical allure of the genre certainly suggest why they’re so popular.
Originally included in the Merchants Cove Kickstarter fulfillment, the latest such small-box game is Drawn to Adventure from Final Frontier Games. Designed by Keith Piggott with art by Mihajlo Dimitrievski, it’s a campaign-driven roll-and-write game for 2-4 players.
Across six hex-grid maps, players will wield their dry-erase markers with poise and flair as they draft dice, move meeples, complete quests, battle bosses, and engage in other fantasy-based alliteration.
What It Does
What’s in this saucy cartographer’s vision of a place laden with strife and burdened with glory?
Well, there are six maps. And players will traverse three of them over the course of a campaign. Each realm presents its own challenges. And its own treasures. Get coins, gold bars, and precious jewels. But to earn any of those fortunes, players will need to fight the evil monsters and devious bosses. Not to mention fulfill all of those finicky quests that lie dormant, waiting for some bold adventurer to come and seize their moment.
Once the villainous ruin and the rewards have been extracted from one realm, players move on to the other. In between maps, the table will all tabulate their tallies to test out who’s vying for the most vigorous victory. (I was honestly just going for some more alliteration, but it feels super V for Vendetta right now. I might get Hugo Weaving to do some voiceover work for my articles…)
When the third map has been depleted of its danger and robbed of its resources (okay, fine, I’ll stop), then players will determine who the victor is after counting up all of the points from the three realms.
This time the pen is not mightier than the sword. The pen is the sword! So wield it well and see if you’re the most Drawn to Adventure!
How It Does It
Drawn to Adventure utilizes a dice drafting action system in which players, starting with the first player, select dice from the pool that’s rolled each round. The chosen dice are then used for several different actions: movement between hexes, fulfillment of quest requirements, and action storage for future turns.
Movement, though, is initially restricted. Hexes on the map must be unlocked by completing quests. Only then can you move to those locations. Quests require different die results and either demand that players expend one, two, or three icons. And bosses are simply more difficult “quests” for players to overcome.
Dice can be used right away or they can be stored for later use. Five of the six die results are used in quests, but the sixth result—potions—are the resource that players store most frequently to reroll and manipulate dice rolls.
When quests are completed, players will slowly start to level up their characters, gaining abilities that create strong options when completing quests, moving, or a combination of the two. The more a character levels up, the more their abilities can start to chain together.
Players move from map to map, slowly crossing off hex locations, moving through cleared spaces, and gaining treasures. Each new map will likely be approached in a more bold and decisive fashion as variable player powers open up new pathways and methods of quest fulfillment.
And with scoring, like other [ ]-and-write games (I’m thinking of Welcome To), a player will get higher point totals when they get successive trophies of a similar type. This means that how one navigates the map will also depend on what rewards are sought after.
Why You Might Like It
Drawn to Adventure condenses an entire epic journey of kingdom-roaming, quest-completing, and boss-slaying into a few spiral-bound pages full of dry-erase marker splotches and treasure hoards.
The prolific artwork of The Mico gives depth and character to a fantasy realm full of danger and opportunity. The quirky heroes aren’t just superficially, interesting, though. Each one’s set of skill create a different approach to combat and allow for player ingenuity to emerge.
Why You Might Not
Just as the condensed design helps Drawn to Adventure collapse a whole arc of quest and combat into a small roll-and-write booklet, it also hampers the game by naturally reducing the tension and memorable qualities of an extended campaign. Boss fights don’t feel particularly meaningful and progress happens fast enough that you don’t dwell in the moment for victory or defeat.
If you’re feeling deeply familiar with the roll-and-write genre, then you may be a harsher critic of this game and what it’s doing. I’m ignorant enough of its contemporaries that I appreciated what it set out to do.
Final Thoughts
Alex beat me to the punch on getting out some content on the game, but he brings up some salient points that I also felt while playing Drawn to Adventure.
It is a longer game than you’d expect for what it is. A two-player game will run between 45-75 minutes and some of that involves the stages of scoring between maps before you progress to the next location. For a roll-and-write of this nature, that feels a little long in the tooth. Around 45 minutes would be preferred but it is more likely to last a full hour. And that’s not going to bother some players. But if I had to weigh playing this versus a game of Escape the Dark Sector in 30 minutes before getting a headstart on a bigger game, it would be difficult to choose Drawn to Adventure in that scenario.
Also, in a campaign-styled game that features bosses, I was hoping for more tension and reward regarding the fighting in this game. Boss battles are rather lackluster. They are simply harder quests rather than singular events. The “bosses” in this game are the other players, to be honest, and your conflict with them will last the whole game in the vein of point-chasing. Again, it won’t bother everyone, but in a fantasy-driven setting, the scope of the narrative or memorable battles along the way appear more as flat plot points in the timeline instead of unique challenges.
However, to end on a positive note, I did still enjoy this game. I’m relatively new to [ ]-and-write games so I don’t have too much to compare the mechanisms to. Here’s what I liked: the variable player powers central to each character create chained movements and actions that are satisfying to unlock as the game progresses. Combining a clever movement with a symbol-conversion power to reach and complete a quest before another player is rewarding. Slowly creating an engine of action manipulation and turn optimization enables players to “overwhelm” the limitations of the game’s rules and perform strong maneuvers on the map. That’s awesome.
It’s like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion-lite. Kinda. Maybe not, but kinda. A larger story is compressed and hydraulically smashed into a surprisingly small package. And the artwork gives flavor and nuance to a hex-grid full of possibility.
I’d be interested in playing more and determining how much shelf-life exists in this roll-and-write adventure!
If you want to check out Drawn to Adventure, you can visit Creative Games Studio or read what the community thinks on BoardGameGeek.
Have you played Drawn to Adventure? What other roll-and-write games do you like?
Let us know in the comments and give a recommendation for other games of which to share our first impressions.