Reaping the Rewards: ‘Adventure Party: The Role-Playing Party Game’
How well do you know your fellow adventurers? This party game will put you to the test!
In “Reaping the Rewards,” I review the finished product from a crowdfunding campaign. Adventure Party was originally funded on Kickstarter in June 2023, and was delivered to backers in spring and summer of 2024. This review is adapted from my Kickstarter Tabletop Alert, updated to reflect the finished components.
What Is Adventure Party?
Adventure Party: The Role-Playing Party Game is a cooperative role-playing party game (uh, as the title says) for 3 to 8 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 20 to 60 minutes to play. It retails for $39.99 and is available in stores or directly from Smirk & Dagger Games. Although the game is recommended for 14 and up, I think kids who love telling stories — especially if they have any familiarity with the traditional swords-and-sorcery role-playing worlds — can join in.
Adventure Party was designed by David Smith and Travis Winstead of Winsmith Games and published by Smirk & Dagger Games, with illustrations by Grafit Studio and graphic art by Curt Covert.
Adventure Party components. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Adventure Party Components
Here’s what comes in the box:
— 12 Character screens
— 8 20-sided dice
— 49 Magic Item cards
— 32 Adventure cards
— 6 Scene Transition cards
— GM stand
— 43 XP tokens (in 1, 5, and 10 denominations)
— 50 Personal Glory tokens (in 1, 2, and 5 denominations)
— 8 Valor tokens
— Character Sheet pad
— Soundtrack and Turn Order guide
The screen has tips for the die rolls, and some details about your character. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The character screens are small tri-fold screens that have a character portrait on the outside, and then some player aids on the inside — a reminder of what your roll could mean, and some skills and items that your character can use. They’re used to hide your die roll from other players, though you’ll need to hold them in place if you’re going to roll the die against them or it’ll just knock them over.
Let’s get personal — use a character sheet! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The character sheets are optional, but they let you personalize your character a bit — give yourself a name, your motivation for adventuring, and circle some traits. Are you calm or aggressive? Humble or boastful? There’s also space to record your most epic success and your most bitter failure, along with the date and score for that game.
A few examples of item cards. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The magic item cards include things like the Hammer of Smashiness, the Horn of Summoning, and the Armlet of Blasting. Each one has an illustration and a brief description of what it can do. Role-playing fans may notice that there aren’t any stats on these (or on the character screens) — but you’ll see why. These items are more for the narrative flavor rather than adding or subtracting specific values from a die roll. One nice touch is that many of them have descriptions that may help you come up with stories when things go wrong, too.
Adventures cards have a large image on one side, and a smaller version of the image paired with the story on the other. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The adventure cards are oversized cards, each with a short description of a scenario and sometimes a few optional setup instructions. There’s also a nice illustration to help set the scene. The GM stand is a little cardboard dragon standee used to display the adventure card on the table.
Colorful dice! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The dice are standard sized, translucent, 20-sided dice in 8 different colors.
PocketBard lets you add sound effects to your story. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The soundtrack guide is a single large cardstock sheet: one side includes a turn order summary that can be used as a player aid, but most of the card includes suggestions for using the free PocketBard app to play both ambient sounds and special effects. They all use the “Fantasy Essentials” and “Seafaring” sound libraries, which are free, though PocketBard also has more libraries that can be purchased. For instance, for the “Fight Inn” scene, the recommended soundscape is “Town” with the “Combat” setting at about 1/4. The app also includes on-demand sound effects, so my kid enjoyed adding shouts and crashes during a fight, splashes when people fell into the sea, and so on.
How to Play Adventure Party
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to score experience points (XP) as a party by correctly guessing each other’s rolls. You can play either a single adventure or up to three, depending on the number of players and length of game desired.
Setup
Give each player a character screen, a die, two magic item cards, and a valor token. Everyone rolls their die, and whoever rolls highest will serve as the first Guess Master (GM). Optionally, you can also give everyone a character sheet to fill out — this isn’t necessary, but can give people more of a personalized version of the character, as well as providing a space to write down their “most memorable deeds.”
Put the item deck, XP tokens, and glory tokens nearby as a supply. If playing more than one adventure, shuffle the transition cards and keep them handy.
The stand is placed in front of the starting GM for the adventure. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Gameplay
The GM draws the first adventure card and reads it aloud, and then places it in the stand so everyone can see the image (and can reference the story as needed). The player to their left will be the first active player.
The active player chooses one of their item cards, and then describes a plan for what they will do, using the selected item and any additional skills their character has. The plan should describe what they’re attempting to do and their desired outcome — though keep in mind even success should not end the scene because there are more players. You can’t kill the monster outright, but you could deal a heavy blow.
A 19 — that’s almost a perfect result! Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
The active player rolls the die behind their screen, and then describes the results of their attempt based on the die roll. In case you’re not familiar with role-playing games, a “1” is an epic failure, the worst possible outcome, and a “20” is a critical hit, where everything you did goes right. In the middle, a 9 is just barely a failure, and a 10 is just barely a success. In Adventure Party, note that with a “1” none of the players can be killed (though you can be injured), and a “20” can’t end the scenario entirely because everyone needs to have a turn.
Once per game, you may spend your valor token to reroll the die.
Once you’ve described the results, the GM may ask one clarifying question, allowing you to elaborate with some additional details. Then, all players secretly set their dice behind their screens to indicate what they think the active player rolled.
When everyone has set their guess, reveal the GM’s guess and the active player’s roll. The GM’s guess earns XP for the party as a whole: you earn 5 XP if the guess is exactly correct, subtracting one point for each number away from the actual roll. So if the actual roll was a 13 and the GM guessed 15, they would earn 3 XP. (If you’re more than 5 away from the roll, you earn 0 XP.) Place XP in a common pool for the whole party.
Then, reveal the rest of the guesses. The rest of the players can earn glory points for themselves: 2 glory if your guess was correct, and 1 glory if you were 1 away.
Then, the player who just completed their action becomes the new GM, and it’s the next player’s turn to describe a plan and roll their die. The last active player (who was also the first GM for this adventure) gets to wrap up the adventure — this is when it’s okay to slay the dragon.
If desired, you can play another adventure — the full game is 3 scenarios for 3–6 players, or 2 scenarios for 7–8 players. Re-roll to pick the starting GM for the next adventure, discard the used items and draw new ones for everyone, and then the new GM draws a transition card to help fill in the story to the next adventure.
Game End
The game ends when all adventures are completed. Add up all of the XP earned and compare it to the chart to see how your party ranks, from Embarrassing to Legendary. The player with the most glory gets to announce the ranking, and then tell everyone how your party will be remembered for all time.
A few examples of characters. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
Tavern Rules
The finished game includes a quick start page on the front of the rulebook that uses “Tavern Rules,” and makes it a competitive game instead of cooperative. It’s fairly similar in structure, except that everyone just earns personal glory points for guessing within 2 of the actual roll. The adventurer earns glory equal to the highest amount earned by any of the guessers, and you just play one full round where everyone has had a chance to be the GM.
Adventure Party is GeekDad Approved!
Why You Should Play Adventure Party
There’s a team-based party game from 2019 called Wavelength (which I backed on Kickstarter); you take turns giving clues so your teammates can make a guess — via a cleverly engineered dial — where the needle falls on the scale. You draw a card at random that tells you the two ends of the scale, so it could be something like “hot” to “cold” or it could be something harder like “not a sandwich” to “sandwich.” There’s a bunch of different cards, and the fun comes from the challenge of figuring out what sort of clue to give your teammates so they’ll turn the dial to 64% on a scale from “round” to “pointy.” (Bert’s head? A dull pencil?) It’s fun to see how everyone interprets your clue, and there’s a particularly satisfying feeling of triumph when somebody nails the guess exactly right.
Adventure Party has some similar vibes, where the scale is always “failure” to “success” with a range of 1 to 20, but instead of giving just a phrase or a word, you get to tell the story of your encounter with a kraken or an undead dinosaur. How do you indicate the subtle differences between rolling a 14 and a 15? The ends of the spectrum can be pretty easy to identify from the story, but when you have a middling failure or a middling success, it gets a lot trickier. Unlike an actual RPG where epic fails are to be avoided whenever possible, in Adventure Party it gives you an opportunity to tell a really funny story.
One of the things that surprised me most was how close we were able to get with our guesses. In the times I’ve played so far, we’ve had quite a few that were right on the nose, and many more that were just 1 away. (Though we did have some complete misses as well.) Everyone gets a chance to guess — the GM earns XP and the other players earn glory — so that keeps everyone engaged and thinking about it. The clarifying question can also be really useful and helps the player understand a little bit about how the GM is thinking about their story and vice versa.
I mentioned that it does help to have some familiarity with RPGs, but it’s not required. I’m more RPG-adjacent myself, and I feel like I know a good bit about the main concepts, but not a lot of the specifics. The little character screens give you some pointers if you need help: for instance, you know the Druid can shape-shift into animals, but you don’t need to know anything about what’s required to cast it or what the restrictions are. Basically, if you’ve read or watched or played just about anything with a fantasy setting, you can probably imagine enough to figure out your role in the narrative.
The story-telling itself is a pretty key ingredient, though, and that’s what I think could make or break the game for your group. While you don’t all have to be amazing fabulists, there’s a difference between saying “I shoot my bow at the kraken but missed” and “I take aim with my Bow of 100 Arrows, picking just the right moment to hit the tentacle wrapped around the mast, but just as I release the string, a wave crashes over the side of the boat and my arm swings wide, sending the shots into the open sea.” Both can get the job done, and give your GM a chance to guess your roll, but the game really shines when everyone’s tales are fun to listen to. My players had a mix of experience levels with RPGs and it seemed to work well, with some stories more elaborate than others. As with many things, you can get better with practice, too — and I imagine that those who play a lot of games together will improve their ability to guess the number rolled.
Oof, a 3! Well, this should make for a good story. Photo: Jonathan H. Liu
One of the fun things about Adventure Party is that low rolls can actually be a good thing. Sure, in an actual RPG you want to roll well on all of your actions, but low rolls in this game can help you tell a fun story — and are sometimes easier to guess! For instance, there was one story where I tried to use my Charm of Giant Growth to enlarge an arrow that one of my fellow adventurers had shot at an attacking kraken. But I rolled poorly … so in my story, the charm enlarged the kraken instead, with disastrous results.
I really enjoyed the prototype of Adventure Party, but it only had three adventure cards in it, so it’s really fun to see a much wider variety of potential scenes, and it also has a few more character options, too. I think it’s a nice blend of role-playing and party game, and could serve as a nice entry point for people new to role-playing. My 11-year-old plays a lot of games but hadn’t really played RPGs back when I had the prototype, so it was fun to see her exercising her improv muscles to describe her portions of the story. Now she’s joined a D&D club at school, and I like to think that games like Adventure Party were good practice for describing her actions. If your group loves telling stories and you like the RPG setting, it’s definitely worth checking out.
To order a copy of Adventure Party, visit the Smirk & Dagger website!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.