Sword and Sorcery: Immortal Souls

Slay many bad guys and make a few choices.

In this fantasy dungeon basher up to four players take the roles of long dead heroes who have been revived to stop a threat that, at least initially, involves gremlins, bandits and orcs? Guess the general populace got really weak and overweight or something. The campaign has seven quests of which one is optional / will be skipped based on choices and each mission takes a bit of setup time, getting all the cards and the map tiles and what goes on them ready.

After that, its all the good guys do things then all the bad guys might do things and then time ticks on. The time thing is driven by an event deck which determines what spawns where and any thing extra that happens while also serving as a time limit, and combat is done with customized dice for the game with some interesting rules like, holding majority on the tile is instantly and extra hit, focusing an attack is an extra hit, and knockout/knockdown is freaking amazing.

Bad guys only activate if the encounter card says so, which is good because otherwise you will get wiped out easy especially early on but does have the odd effect of some guys just standing around doing nothing sometimes and most of your gold will be spent "sharpening" your gear per mission so that you can still use the better "polished" side of the item card instead of the not so great basic side.

Leveling up is done through spending souls (of enemies you've killed) and getting killed makes you lose levels and turn into a ghost who needs to wander back to a shrine to respawn basically. There's a bit of a learning curve to it but overall I think its better than the D&D adventure system games where the bad guys ALWAYS get the drop on you and you are usually rushing to just flip tiles (but its a faster setup). Here you can rush if you want, or tactically clear the map. Thumbs up!