“So should I add the herb or not?”
“OK, so wizard strength is 3, I haven’t used my die turn, rolled a 10 with my runestones, dwarf strength is 8, used a witch’s brew on the 5 so that’s a 10, warrior is strength 6, I can use the helm if you turn that 2 upside down so that’s 2 times 5 that’s 10, also add the 3 herb, ranger is 2 times 4 with the witch’s brew, plus we have the shield dwarves that’s 4. Cool.”
“Yeah, my gut feeling is that I should use the herbs.”
“Now for the dragon. Triple 10. Hm. I guess that can happen. That’s 58 plus 3 times 10 that’s 88. I don’t think we need to add our stuff.”
“What a waste of a perfectly good herb.”
Legends of Andor is a fantasy campaign game, covering the adventures of four very very likely heroes – the warrior, the wizard, the archer, and the dwarf (who is also a warrior, but shorter). The setting is your usual high fantasy, very clichéd good vs ultimate evil world-shattering battles. At first glance you might think this game is some sort of a dungeon crawler since there are some light RPG elements in the game, every hero has their inventory, can level up strength (which is your battle value) and willpower (which is basically your health). But what Legends of Andor really is is a very intricate puzzle game, with fantasy elements sprinkled on it as a layer of theme.
It’s a campaign game, so there is an overarching story, split into five scenarios, or legends, as the game calls them. These scenarios are run by the so-called legend deck – a deck of cards you are supposed to read when the time marker reaches certain points. The basic mechanism within the legends is that there are enemies (differing in strength, willpower, and speed), and they are slowly moving up to a castle that you need to defend. You can move your heroes, get stuff, roll your dice, and potentially defeat the monsters. That’s the core game.
Time is probably the most crucial element in the game, there is a limited amount of actions you can do each day, once all the heroes are done with their turns and are sleeping, the monsters move closer, and a new day dawns. It’s at this point when you might be instructed to read a new legend card that advances the story. In every scenario, there are pre-determined twists (oh no, the dark wizard suddenly appeared, place him on the board), and some are randomized (you might get the witch’s aid in one game, while in the next, if you ever replay it, the dwarves will help you out). In every legend, you have to defend your castle, and you get additional goals, either from the start of the scenario or at a certain point in the legend deck. Your goals range from simple ones like finding a witch in the fog or collecting herbs to ones of earth-shattering significance, like slaying the Final Adversary.
Reclaimer: this is our review based on our experience with the base game, the three official bonus legends, and The Star Shield expansion.
The Good
The aesthetics of the game are great. The artwork on the board is absolutely beautiful, everything looks like it’s hand-painted, you can discover tiny little details you missed before on the map even after days of playing the game. The board is double-sided, legend 4 takes place in the dwarven mines, which is also beautifully done, especially considering that it depicts a dark cave, so you would expect it to be boring, but somehow it’s not. Putting the artwork aside, the production design is great overall, it feels like opening a toy box, you can find dozens of cute little items and tokens and accessories. There is even a miniature guard tower and one big boss figure. I love the cardboard standees, they are very clear and readable, and I love how the publisher did not feel the need to include hordes of ugly grey plastic minis and double the price of the game.
There are four classes in the base game, wizard, archer, warrior, dwarf, and it is amazing how the creator managed to distinguish them simply based on the very limited combat characteristics. The game mechanics are very closely tied to the theme in this aspect.
- The wizard always rolls with only one die, but he has a special move to turn it upside down. So it’s always at least a 4. You can also collect special runestones in the game, if you get three different ones, you get to roll with a black die, which has values from 6 to 12. Now, technically, everyone could get a runestone, but it makes much more sense for the wizard to carry them from a math perspective, and it also works thematically.
- The ranger can roll more dice than anyone else and can attack from adjacent fields, but she has to decide when she wants to stop, and only the last die counts in the battle. Which means she is very nimble, but not the strongest.
- The dwarf can increase his base strength much more efficiently than the rest, but only in the dwarven hall.
- The warrior’s special move is that he can increase willpower effectively, which means he can get the maximum dice count easily, which means buying a helmet is very cost-effective with him, which means the dice he rolls will occasionally be added together, making him a potentially strong but much more volatile force. OK, this last one is not that perfect.
Oh, and the heroes come in both genders. There are separate standees and hero sheets. It doesn’t make any difference, but I do like the option.
The story is clichéd and corny and silly but it works. There are impending dooms closing in, an evil wizard, monsters, troubles in the dwarven mines, etc. At the time of writing this review, I’ve played this game three times, so sadly I can’t really remember how it feels not knowing what will happen exactly or how the story ends, but the first time you are experiencing it, it is truly exciting.
That being said, the replayability is surprisingly good for a game with predetermined stories. The overall math behind the engine is robust, the finales are always very close – every legend ends with an incredible bang, a huge boss fight that feels truly epic. And even with completely random monster placements, like in Legend 3, the game somehow manages to always feel like you might just have a chance of winning this. Never easy, never impossible.
And then there is the micro-math, the one deciding the fate of one battle round. For us, it was really satisfying to count our potential total damage before a big boss fight, talking about probabilities, deciding if it’s worth buying a helmet or some additional strength points, if it really is the best to give the runestones to the wizard, etc. See, as a default, you roll all the dice in a battle, and the maximum is your battle strength. But you can buy a helmet, and then, the dice with identical values are added up. So if you roll 4, 4, 6, your value without a helmet is 6, with a helmet, it’s 8. So the question is: with three dice, would you rather buy a fix plus strength or a helmet?
Well, I am going to document it here so you don’t have to. This is all basic case, no witch’s brew, no wizard to turn your dice, and the statistics we use is the mean of the dice rolls. Which is not necessarily the best idea, you really won’t fight that much in the game. So the results are: one die: 3.5 (obviously, same with helmet), two dice without a helmet: 4.47, two dice with a helmet: 5.06 (difference 0.58) three dice without a helmet: 4.96, three dice with a helmet: 6.31 (difference: 1.35), four dice without a helmet: 5.24, four dice with helmet: 7.53 (difference: 2.28). So now we know. The answer is: it depends.
The winning options are constantly changing, even though 4 out of the 5 legends is on the exact same map, there are always the seemingly small nuances, like the mission is to pick up some herbs on the other side of the map, or find someone in the fog, but they change the whole course of the game. The game world and the whole experience feels grandiose, and the fact that it’s a 3-game series only adds to the epicness.
The game is incredibly fast to learn, the full rulebook is only 4 pages long. Those are packed pages, granted, but technically, you don’t even have to read it, only if you can’t remember something. The intro manual you have to read before the first game is even lighter.
Now, the game comes with five legend decks, five levels, if you will, and personally, I think that’s plenty enough, but you can also download extra legends from the official site, or download fan-made ones, or if you are truly hardcore, make your own. There is also a small expansion called Star Shield which is basically an extra legend with dozens of variations.
And this brings me to my final good point of the game, it does feel like you are reading legends of times past. Especially in the expansion, there is a comic strip introduction there which outright says that the chronicles are unreliable, we don’t really know what happened. Hence the replayability. Some sources claim that the heroes faced a fire demon, others claim it was an evil mist all along. I feel like this kind of storytelling is unique when it comes to board games.
The Bad
The worst thing about Andor is how incredibly fiddly it is. 25% of the game time is easily spent on getting familiar with new rule snippets or putting stuff on board.
Let’s start with the first one, the rules. See, the game starts very gently, true. It tells you that you can move one tile for one hour, or fight something for one hour, and there are free actions like purchasing items or trading with other heroes. Fine. But then it stops every five minutes to explain a new rule. Oh, you can also fight together, oh, these are the fog tokens, this is how you uncover them, did I mention you also have these types of enemies, oh, now, see, that’s an event card, and this is the witch, and that is the dragon, etc, etc. Learning the game for the first time is delightful, true, but if you return to it, and just want to refresh your memory, and have a go, you have to go through these tedious steps to get a real sense of what is going on. You also probably have to play the first legend, which is basically a tutorial. I don’t think I have ever seen a proper tutorial level in a board game before, and it’s weird because people who need a tutorial probably won’t enjoy a game like this. There is no one comprehensive summary of the rules, some are on the quick intro manual, some are in the rules reference book, others pop up on cards. Oh, and if you turn to the rear side of the game board: be prepared for completely different rules and concepts.
I think the game wanted to make it easier to learn its rules and accidentally made it harder and then the test players said that it’s confusing so they tried to make it even easier which made it even harder. It’s really weird. The concepts are not so complicated. And this is not a casual game. Write a 10-page rulebook, ask players to read it before the first playthrough. Add sections that they should only read at the specific legends. That way 1) you would have a comprehensive rule summary 2) you could cut down on the number of cards required for each legend. I mean, the game is almost 10 years old, so I doubt my suggestions will make a difference, but I’m still documenting them.
Now to the second part, the putting stuff on the board. Even if you are familiar with all the rules, every other turn you do have to stop for a long period of time and place new stuff as described by the legend card. Roll dice to determine positions of enemies or items, and let me tell you, finding the numbered tiles is not as easy as it sounds. You would think that adjacent numbers are next to each other, but not always. You essentially have to know where each tile is (numbered up until 84) to avoid spending a lot of time each round.
I mentioned before that the game feels like a toy box, but there are so many unnecessary toys it hurts. The worst offender is probably the introductory game, there are seven large cardboard tiles with stuff like congrats you moved here now take a gold, and you use them precisely once and take them off and put them in the box. But there are other cases like the parchments where they wanted to randomize the numbers 8, 10, 11, …, and instead of coming up with a clever way to do that with regular dice or other game elements, they included the parchment tokens with these numbers printed on them. The game itself works with very simple concepts: heroes / enemies are on one of the tiles, they have strength, willpower, a number of dice, and they can move at a certain speed. But it feels like, for every different scenario, the game came up with a way to include extra game elements just to do randomize these very simple concepts, . One scenario uses these square-shaped tokens that you put on the time track and as you uncover them you place the monsters based on the tokens, but no other legend uses them, usually they are on the legend card. The Star Shield expansion is especially terrible on this front, you open the box and there are really cool stuff like a siege tower or a catapult in there, but you won’t even use them in most of your games.
One other issue we had with the game is how disconnected the gameplay and the theme are. Couple of examples:
- The most jarring example is how time works. Every day, the heroes do their hero things for a certain amount of hours, and then there is a new day, we move the monsters, refresh items, etc, and move the narrator. Depending on the legend cards, something new can happen, you get a new clue about your final adversary, or new monsters appear somewhere. However, you also move the narrator, if you kill a monster. So you kill a monster that is about to storm the castle, and as a result, two black wolves appear on the other side of the map. Had you not killed that one monster, they would have appeared one day later. What ends up happening (a constant acceleration of danger, foes appearing near and far, doom closing in) is great, and always exciting. Why and how it happens makes zero sense thematically.
- As a result of the previous point, and also due to the tight math of the engine, every single game we played ended up with us fighting the big bad on the other side of the map, while a horde of enemies was clearly descending upon the poor undefended castle. Without this time advancing mechanism, players would be able to just stay at the castle, grind up, kill everything (it’s not difficult to defeat monsters in this game), and then move on to the boss. But now players always have to take a leap of faith and attack the boss as a desperate last-minute option. I actually do love how the game makes sure you can’t optimize the fun out of it, but thematically, it’s the weirdest thing ever.
- Your characters reset every legend, you don’t bring the loot and strength. I understand that mechanically it would be a nightmare to balance, but thematically, it’s not satisfying.
You might have noticed a pattern in the previous point: game mechanics have a strong priority over theme here. Nothing exists because they add thematic value, it’s all about dressing up the game mechanics they want to add. So how shall I put it? It’s a German game. You know how that terrible stereotype exists that Germans are humorless and dry and straightfaced people? I’m not saying it’s true, but if it were, calling this game German would be a perfect description. Seriously though, it’s a very humorless game. Takes itself very seriously, but not in the usual way, when something is unaware of how silly it is but assumes it’s not, no, Legends of Andor is a serious game, there is no time for fun and games in this game.
We do not think the game scales very well, you do need four characters on higher difficulties. Precisely three things scale with char number: how many things can enter the castle without you losing, witch’s brew cost, and final boss strength, nothing else.
Oh, and the final level with the you-know-what: too difficult. The game before that was no cake-walk, and we did have to replay some levels, but on the second run, once you realize what the trick is, everything is doable. On the last game, we had to carefully pre-plan everything, take into account stuff like OK, so on turn 5, one of the … will be destroyed so we can’t go that way, but on turn 7, there is a chance he will … so we need to … before that and even then we had to be lucky with the legend card draws. It. Is. Hard. If you and your friends beat it easily and you feel the need to boast on boardgamegeek: you either missed a rule, or you cheated.
The Co-Op
The game is very very co-op, so co-op that in fact, it might actually hurt people. This is not the game when you can just quietly sit and let other people take sub-optimal steps, you have to let your inner alpha out. You have to plan very very carefully, in detail, not just in broad strategy, what each and every one of you does. The game is so tight there is really no room for error. Well, some levels come with an easy mode, but we wouldn’t know how that works.
You kinda decide as a group what to do with your four guys – at least that is how we played. If you are just focused on your character, there is a chance the game will be very boring. There are levels when you can escort farmers back into the castle, and you simply must do that in order to have a chance at winning. But whoever is escorting the farmers can not attack monsters, so two or three rounds of that person will be spent moving up and down on a predetermined route while the others are involved in all sorts of crazy adventures.
The Recommendation
Recommending this game is actually very easy. If you are a person who:
- likes fantasy;
- is into math, genuinely enjoys talking about probability of dice rolls, rolling one more vs rolling one by one, etc;
- after reading the first draft of this review notices how I wrote “probability of dice” would make a joke that it should be “probability of dice rolls” because the “probability of dice” is 1;
- does not hate mental arithmetic;
- likes power playing, finding ways to beat the game consistently;
- enjoys planning 3-4 rounds ahead;
- actually likes learning new rules for a new game, because you are going to do that a lot here;
then this game is definitely for you. I know it was definitely for us, three times so far and counting.
If you are one of those cool kids who are cool and all and you are into board games a bit but only into the fun and exciting ones, then nope, I think you should avoid Andor at all costs.
Info
| Release Year | 2012 |
| Genre | Puzzle, Strategy |
| Difficulty | Extreme |
| Number of Players | 2 to 4 |
| Length | 2 hours per Legend |
Rating
| Overall | Great |
| Story | Good |
| Co-Operation | Great |