Rab over at Rab’s Geekly Digest has put together a little game to play with his five year old. Called Goblin quest it pits heroic knights and their retainers against hordes of evil monsters in search of adventure, fame and gold. Now the clear selling point of the game is it can be played with a five year old, a common theme I’m noticing these days. Just look at Gygax magazine or a host of games on RPG Now/Drive thru RPG. People really want to play RPG like games with their young children, are we the first generation to do this? Perhaps the generation of dads before us were too old when they started in the hobby and never went through the stage of being very young and wanting to play like us 30 some-things?
I digress, last Sunday night my eldest, Arthur, a 4.5 year old of reasonably sound mind and I decided to give the game a go. We were ably assisted by the dice losing Wilfy. Now the game is still in development and I guess it is fair to say is a labour of love, Rob has asked for feedback and emailing him would probably be the right way to do this. I don’t want this to be a full blown review post but a few fundamentals are worth exploring. It is rules light as you may expect and book keeping is at a minimum thanks to the use of descending collections of poly dice for combat and as a inbuilt health check. All well and good. Movement is by dice which we had to house rule out due to impatience on, well both our parts. We had no Knight and retinue but a hero adventurer and assisting dwarf and elf, they had the same stats as the knight and retinue though so we were testing Robs game as written.
EDIT: A few further points due to requests.
We liked and really enjoyed the game but we did alter it slightly to make it run faster, even given that we didn't get very far mainly because a good 15 minutes (spoiler alert!)was spent in anguish over the elfs death. Noooooooo!
Main take away pionts:
As a rule set it is quite seamless and easy to understand even for a 4 year old.
It could do with being faster but that may just be myself and Arthur. I'd be inclined to have one dice monsters and more of them. I may well try it that way next time.
It was lots of fun.
EDIT: A few further points due to requests.
We liked and really enjoyed the game but we did alter it slightly to make it run faster, even given that we didn't get very far mainly because a good 15 minutes (spoiler alert!)was spent in anguish over the elfs death. Noooooooo!
Main take away pionts:
As a rule set it is quite seamless and easy to understand even for a 4 year old.
It could do with being faster but that may just be myself and Arthur. I'd be inclined to have one dice monsters and more of them. I may well try it that way next time.
It was lots of fun.
The point of course is to have fun so without further ado I present our Goblin Quest Battle report.
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