Because it's fun, has some rather nice components, it's rather cheap, and it looks pretty on the shelf.

That's it, review over. Nice of you to come by, and remember the green thumb icon on your way out! Cheerio!

.
.
.

What? You're still here?

OK, even though I said all that needs to be said in a nutshell, I'll elaborate a little bit. I'll even put a picture of the game's cover, to give this review some class.



Gee, this really looks good. I have to do this more often. Do the guys who actually make those images get angry when someone just pastes them in the review? I hope not..oh where was I? Oh, right. Prophecy is a game most commonly compared to Talisman and Runebound. Not having the slightest idea what those games are like, I cannot really comment on that fact. However, having played my share of computer RPG games (and a little AD&D back in the silly days) I believe I am pretty well acquainted with the basic concept.

For the two of you who have just emerged from a cave, I'll elaborate. You choose a character, who is either a scantily-clad pile of muscles with the brain of a dodo, a half-senile bearded old man in a robe and a funny pointed hat, or some stage in between. Your character is initially pretty wimpy, but you will happily lead him on all sorts of adventures where he'll occasionally meat some nice people, but more commonly fight butt-ugly attrocities and amass a truckload of various shiny equipment. He will also gain experience, which interestingly enough will not make him wiser and prudent..er, but will make him fight better. In the end, your now-experienced hero will fight some uber-monster, kill it, gain "sword of awesome awesomeness" or something in that vein and live happily ever after.

Folks dig this concept. In fact, I do too. And Prophecy, well, it implements it pretty darn well.

I don't want to go into rule details, really. Z-Man (the publisher) has provided a downloadable pdf rulebook (just don't look at the "basic rules" one because there's a pun so lame it will put you in a coma), and Scott Nicholson has made a wonderful tutorial video of how this game plays. I'll just try to be brief and list out why I like this game and what things I think could have been made better.

I like the components. They are pretty and production values are high enough, especially considering the rather low price of the game. The artwork is cartoony and slightly tongue-in-cheek, which works rather nicely (bonus points for the mummy!.. you'll see what I mean, eventually). The layout of the board is really unorthodox, but it works (except for the fact that the seas are yellow for some reason; I guess Prophecy people have some plumbing issues). You have nice cardboard stand-ups for your characters, and you get some large heavy-cardboard character "cards" where you keep track of the usual maintenance stuff - health, magic (ok, ok, "will"), experience and gold. You also get heaps of small but nice-feeling cards. Mmm, smooth.

I like the way the gameplay, well.. plays. You have four basic types of movement, but it all boils down to "either move one space left or right, or pay to move somewhere further". The "adventures" are interesting, especially when you see them for the first time. The monsters are imaginative, their special "abilities" smoothly implemented and the fighting system is light enough so to not bog down the game. All in all it's a neat little package, with perfect balance of light micromanagement and quick turn execution.

I DON'T like the fact that the board very soon gets covered in cards. I know some compromises had to be made, but seriously, look at this picture I also conveniently stole from BGG gallery:



That's a LOT of cards. In fact it doesn't look like a game in play so much as it resembles someone just having a rather large sneeze while shuffling the cards. This leads to another gripe I have: there's too much information on the board. For some this is fun, I find it tedious, especially when there's new folks around. They will either painstakingly read each and every card which will delay the game for some time, or be intimidated and ask for something "lighter".

There's a workaround, though. I've made a few tweaks with the original rules, mostly that I place all the new cards face-down and force the players to actually come to the place to turn them over. This amplified the feeling of exploration and let everyone absorb all the new information in bite-sized chunks. It actually works so well I must wonder why the original rules don't use this mechanic. I also restricted the number of "skills" your character can buy with experience (and sometimes gold) in the middle-of-the-gameboard-offers from two to one. I know this cuts down available options significantly, but I'll take clearer presentation over messy game any day.

The final complaint I have is game length. I don't like games that can drag too long, and Prophecy can do that, especially if all the players are new and want to pump up their characters to insane levels and then pump them up some more before taking the final quest. What's worse, the game actually offers not one final baddy, but five (or ten, because you get two baddies for the price of one on each "ultimate" location), and the winner should either beat four of them, or you'll have to organize a giant communal whoopass in the end. This all sounds fun and exciting, but trust me, if you don't "save your game" a few times and play the game in shorter chunks it will get seriously exhausting. Fortunately, there's a "beat two baddies and win" endgame scenario and that one, while admittedly lamer, is more humane in the terms of game length.

What else? Well, a few expansions are on the way, I think three is the number, and personally I'm not really looking forward to them because it seems they will add more game length. What I'd really dig is some sort of mini-expansion with a bunch of new adventure cards and items. However, current information on this expansions is scarce, so perhaps they will offer just the thing I need, who knows.

And.. that's it. I like Prophecy, and you will too, if you dig light RPG stuff. It's a game for your non-gamer friends, a game where luck plays a big role, a game which you can play with beer and pretzels nearby, a game where a grown man can play a sword-wielding elf and not get (too) embarrassed.

'Tis a good game, really.

P.S. Oh, there are breasts in the game, too. Not a lot, four of them alltogether I think, and on creatures one wouldn't really put in the same sentence with the words "attractive" or "sexy", but still. Then again, legends say there were breasts in that dreadful "Last Unicorn" book/cartoon for the Barbie-generation and noone complained. And those breasts were odd-numbered, Total Recall style, which makes matters far worse if you ask me.

My problem with Prophecy, as with every questing adventure game I have played thus far is lack of replayability.

There are a couple expansions out there, but I don't think they are in English. Guess it wasn't successful enough here.

Kind of sad, because this is the best game of this type that I've played.

Huh? I've played this many times and continue to enjoy it greatly. Even after knowing every card well. But you don't play it for the "experience", like "wow, look at that surprising encounter". It's more like a race of efficiency, actually. Not a huge amount of player interaction (before the end anyway), but just enough to make it not multi player solitaire.

Thanks for the great write-up. Very entertaining!

Oh good god man, you're ruining the game!

The reason Prophecy is better than Talisman is that you can look around the board, decide what you want to do, and go do it, and you have the pressure of having to get there before your opponents do. If the adventure cards are all face-down, it seems like that would make it more of the passive "let's see what happens next" experience I dislike in Talisman.


If you're removing the old one when a new one is revealed, then this also reduces each skill's window of availability, which again reduces players' ability to plan ahead and move toward specific goals. ("I want that skill... to get it, I need 3 more gold..." or "to get it, I need to get over there...")

I do think the first-to-two-artifacts ending is the way to go, though.

Regarding your comment about players spending too much time pumping up their characters before going after the guardians, it seems like the best way to deal with that is to make earlier, riskier attacks on the guardians yourself. If you're playing to first-to-two-artifacts, then once you've got one, everyone else knows they're in trouble.

Maybe one way to shorten the game would be to have everyone start with one or two skills and/or one items, or more experience & gold. It looks like there are several threads on this in the Variants forum.

I can see the motivation for this, and wouldn't have any strong complaints against teaching new players this way. Might even make it more fun, especially since new players probably don't really know what they should be doing anyway. Rusty kind of beat me to the punch, but I would strenuously discourage people from playing this way after becoming familiar with the cards. There are a lot of cards you don't want to visit. Your turn is the basic currency in the game. You want to do something useful every turn. Losing health is not useful. And this really screws the magic users, who have a proportionally smaller number of encounters that are by default magic battles (it's been a while, I forget the term--it's not magic). The game already has plenty of randomness based on the when and where the cards show up. It really doesn't need more of having all encounters be blind. After you've played the game a few times, pretty much all cards are known, and seeing them does not add any time to the game. In fact I'd argue it shortens the game, since people can be actually advancing their position each turn, or at least trying to, rather than taking crap shots, which will certainly add turns to the game.


Eew. Me no likey. Again, the game needs choice. And it's usually not practical to choose between the two guilds that your character is affiliated with, because the opportunity cost of travel is usually significant. And, sometimes it's not worth it to trek over to a guild to buy just one skill, but it is to buy two, depending on the skills there. These are useful decisions that make the game interesting. We have learned to be efficient with the card presentation. And by we I mean me. My son isn't allowed to touch the cards.

Automatic Thumbs Up for the Total Recall reference.

Yep, I was mostly talking about playing with new folks when suggesting that variant.

When a newbie sees a board with 20+ various face-up cards on it, he's intimidated. When he sees a bunch of face-down cards, it's more like "Hmm...I wonder what is hidden there?" And I'll take the latter any day. Of course, once you are so familiar with the cards you know on a glance which do what, it's logical to switch to the original rules. but until then, I'll stick with this one.

Ditto for the skills. It's not just the fact there's really no place for having two open cards, but it makes the players read and remember ten things instead of five. Since a new player can hardly distinguish a good offer from a meh one, I'd rather restrict the choices for the sake of clarity. Again, at some point in the future when everyone had more then a few games under his belt, I'll play it regular-style.

P.S. Bear in mind there's also a language barrier problem. Be honest, if those cards were in german or french, which variant would you prefer?

Not true at all! Both expansions are being done by Z-Man games. Now...when they arrive is another guess all together

(Well, initially, it should only be like 13 or so, right? Ten skills, plus one adventure card in each of whichever terrain was drawn?)


Oh, wow, yeah, I didn't think of that.

(Now, wait a minute--according to wikipedia, Croatian and Czech are not the same language?? Well, I can fix that with a couple of edits...)

We play the english version.

I understand Czech as much as an average American understands Portuguese.