PATHFINDER BEGINNER BOX
IPaizo t says a lot about Pathfinder that its pared-down, rules-light beginners’ box probably has more complexity and content than a lot of full RPG releases. It probably says even more that, as a tool for getting new players on board with the game’s actionpacked fantasy adventures, it’s a roaring success.
The boxed set is built to give a gaming group everything they need to get a game going, ranging from a set of fancy dice – colour-coded to give you a chance of distinguishing the d8 from the d10 – through to pregenerated characters. Where many other kits pride themselves on being about as minimalist as they can be, the Pathfinder team have gleefully leant in to all the props and tools that make their game stand out.
This means that alongside the traditional rule booklets and intro adventure, you get a decently sized map and an absolute pile of cardboard tokens to play around with. If nothing else, these do a wonderful job of adding a bit of extra value to the package and are something you can keep using once you’ve left the realm of beginner boxes far behind you.
Of course, the juice of any RPG product lies not in the accessories but in the game itself. Here, Pathfinder does pretty much exactly what it sets out to do by providing
fantasy adventures that crack up the complexity and customisability when compared to the other big players on the market.
The sheer size of even the barebones rulebooks that come in the set – which come in at about 170 pages if you stick them together - can be a shade intimidating. However, while there is doubtlessly a lot of complicated stuff going on during a game, the introductory adventure that comes packaged with them does a surprisingly solid job of ramping you and your players up into the more fiddly aspects of the game.
If the idea of Pathfinder’s depth has always been tempting, but the hurdle of reading through the concrete slab of a core rulebook keeps you from taking the plunge, the Beginner Box is a wonderful way to get on board.
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PLAY IT?
YES
15-20m 1-5 8+ £15 are cards that you probably need in some way, so luckily you’ll be able to chat it out with the other players… oh wait, you can’t.
Tranquillity is played entirely silently, with discussion only allowed during certain key moments – like laying the important start card, which comes with a discard tax of eight cards – and then it’s only to agree how many cards each person is throwing away. It’s a clever system that will make you think back to games like The Mind, or Just One, but with less of the looking-at-oneanother-to-say-don’t-lay-that-I’vegot-it about it. While it’s missing a little social something there, it makes up for it with a decent solo experience. Somehow it’s simply more infuriating to not get the right cards in hand when you’re by yourself, and the suboptimal choices really hurt when you’ve got no one else to blame. A good card game but it may have been more aptly named ‘Inner Seething’.