Review of Goblin Quest!
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Age target for Goblin Quest, depends on the players
Goblin Quest is rules lite and the mechanics only require players to be able to recognize numbers up to 6, so it is pretty accessible for many young players to understand the gameplay.
When it comes to the content, this can also be very accessible to young players, you just need to watch for your particular group. The game is built on you cycling through characters because they are getting taken out, in hilarious ways, throughout the adventure. At the beginning of the book, it states that it’s made for everyone to enjoy and notes that it can be adjusted – saying your goblin was disheartned or got tired and needs a break or got scared and ran away can be alternatives to them getting un-alived. There’s also no foul language, but it does warn, however, that the word “bums” may be used on occasion.
Goblin Quest is something that I’m OK trying out with my 6yo as long as we aren’t getting graphic with how our characters are leaving the scene. I would recommend to evaluate for your particular kid; if you think they would be OK with some cartoony slap-stick comedy, that’s a great tone to run the game with for them.
Setting for Goblin Quest, beautiful chaos
Goblin Quest has a GREAT setting build up in terms of leaving it up to the players and just kind of feeding bits of ideas their way to do with as they please. There’s some structure to the goblin world – there’s a heirarchy in their society and some conflicts going on and maybe some wizards telling them what to do, but… goblins are short lived and anything outside their personal bubble is pretty much a rumor and fragmented oral history passed through this year’s four or five generations, so… it is made to all change at suggestion.
Your particular adventures within this chaotic and largely unknown world can then have a lot of variety and lend well to modular games that don’t need a whole campaign and overworld situation to track. You could be trying to win a cooking contest, sneaking into the human camp to steal their MacGuffin before the next day’s battle, or searching the nearby caves for a dragon because no one would mess with you if you were riding a dragon! It’s meant to be random and to fit what you all want to do that particular session, and that’s great.
Your character(s) in Goblin Quest
In Goblin Quest, you don’t have just one character, you have a whole cluster of characters! This is because… they will inevitably perish due to some form of shenanigans gone wrong and need to be replaced by another sibling or cousin from their group so you can keep playing.
To create your group of Goblins, you’ll define your Clutch with a family name and a particular charactistic and item that they all share. Then, with each goblin you play from that Clutch, they’ll also get a name and particular characteristic to make them unique.
This means that for the character you currently play, you’ll have a couple traits and an item that you’re tracking, and the rest is their personality!
For my sample one, the Clutch’s characteristic was that they smelled, but I had each one after that smell different. One smelled stinky, one smelled like pepper, one smelled like flowers (which the other goblins found disgusting), and one smelled everything they could put under their nose. Cycling through them was VERY funny too… Stinky got knocked out from accidentally smelling his own BO, and, when that happened, it was like… oh… so sad… and Pepper sneezed in.
It’s easy to manage as you play, and it also ends up being pretty fun to try out a new spin on the base concept for your Clutch.
Mechanics in Goblin Quest, rules lite and fun
Aside from the character swapping mechanics, Goblin Quest revolves around a d6 dicepool. You earn dice for your dicepool by using an item, utilizing one of their characteristics, etc.
However… this isn’t a dicepool pick the highest… it is a dicepool where you have to apply ALL results!
So, if you roll 3 dice and get 1 success and 2 “Bad Things”, you get your success… but you also need to apply introduce some mischief to the scene and give -2 modifier to the next roll as a penalty. There can be a bit of strategy to how many fails you’re willing to introduce… or you can just kind of roll with it and have fun watching your characters fail into an awesome story.
There is also a staged plan mechanic that I really enjoyed throughout the game.
When you figure out what your quest is going to be, you need to come up with a multistep plan on how to get from where you are to your goal. This breaks the session into three phases or mini-quests within your bigger quest, and the number of successes you need to earn to pass each phase increases… and so does the number of random misfortunes that occur during that phase.
By phase three of your plan, you’ve put so much work into this and there’s so many things going wrong and you need to find the thing you came here for!! But it’s also been built up at this point to show players that it’s OK for their characters to get taken out and replaced, and they’ve all had an opportunity to learn how to play the game in the previous phases. The mechanics create a progression in intensity and excitement, and they introduce it only when players should be more ready to handle it.
Overall thoughts on Goblin Quest
I really liked reading and getting to try out Goblin Quest. It does creative and purposeful work with simple mechanics and provides an exciting game that doesn’t take itself too seriously… but is just serious enough to be a mildly coherant journey that matches the energy and imagination of my kid. It is faced-paced, full of humor, sprinkled with wonderful plot ideas, and, overall, is a fun game.
Find a copy of Goblin Quest
You can find a copy of Goblin Quest on DriveThruRPG, Indie Press Revolution, and itchio!
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