“Six trainhoppers hop aboard a ghost train and must work together to escape.”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/340325/vagrantsong
Playing Time: 45-120 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Boss Battler
Designer: Matt Carter, Justin Gibbs, Kyle Rowan
Players: 2-4 Players
You and your fellow players are hobos on the train and you’ve discovered to your chagrin that your train is haunted. Apparently, very haunted, as defeating one ghost will lead to summoning the next. To defeat them, players will need to help the ghosts rediscover their humanity, with a mix of ‘combat’ and scrounging for whatever tools or clues they can find on the train with them. Every ghost is a different puzzle to solve, and as the players progress through their campaign, their heroes will get better tools to take on more challenging foes.
I’m not going to lie – the real winner is the wonderfully imagined setting. I’m not the biggest fan of the ‘boss battler’ genre – a usually overbloated genre that tries to replace clean mechanics with selling loads of plastic miniatures – but Vagrantsong is an exception. To some degree this is because the focus is on simplicity but to be honest, it’s really the theme and cartoony aesthetic that’s the real hero here.
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