Comanauts.

Comanauts builds on the mechanical foundation of the 2018 title Stuffed Fables, using a similar framework with a more involved and more adult-oriented story, with spectacular artwork and a high-quality ‘adventure book’ that guides players through the story. It’s a shame that gameplay is so convoluted and the rules so poorly written; I am not sure I’ve ever had a more frustrating experience trying to decipher how to play a game, especially when it came to looking for named components or getting answers to specific game situations.

Comanauts players work together to try to solve the game’s core mystery of what happened to Martin, a scientist who may have been about to prevent the end of the world when a lab accident (perhaps not an accident) left him in a coma. The players will explore his psyche and go through events from his past, real or imagined, to try to figure out what happened to him and how to prevent the approaching cataclysm. Each player gets an avatar with a few unique skills and items, and can play up to three over the course of the game before the players lose with the death of the third one. Gameplay unfolds like a Choose Your Own Adventure game* as players move to a new area, explore a small map, uncovering clues, facing challenges, and usually fighting enemies before they achieve some exit condition and leave for the next place.

* There is an actual Choose Your Own Adventure Game, and I have had it for months, but we’ve never played it because it isn’t quick and requires multiple sessions to play a story to completion. I’ll get to it eventually … I think.

It is unfortunate that the Comanauts designers married some good writing and narrative game structure with some truly dismal mechanics decisions. On each turn, a player draws five dice from the game’s common dice bag; dice come in eight colors, and specific colors apply to specific tasks. Black dice power hostile characters when they appear. White dice give you light bulb tokens you can use to reroll dice or to use your character’s unique power. The other dice may apply to certain skill tests … but if you happen to run into a clue that requires you to roll a yellow die to see if you succeed or fail, and you didn’t draw a yellow die in that round, tough luck. It’s just dumb – it’s pointlessly random and will do nothing but frustrate players. Arkham Horror handles these tests in a much smarter fashion, giving players a fair chance to pass such tests without making it too easy.

The game’s combat system is also a failure pretty much from start to finish. Enemies generate either when you hit a certain space on the map and fail a test or when you’ve drawn too many black dice during your turns on that page, after which, you will probably get your asses handed to you, because there isn’t a great way to defend yourself beforehand, and defeating enemies outright is difficult. You have to draw the right colors of dice (purple dice are wild, which helps a little), and then usually roll two of them for a high enough total to vanquish one hostile character – and those enemies come in threes. You can store one die on your card for defensive purposes, but if you roll against an attack and fail, not only do you take damage but you lose that die, so if you get attacked by all three enemies in a round, and you fail the first test, you’ll lose all three of your health tokens and die. It’s just not a well thought-out system, and while the game does give you the backup of two additional avatars to churn through in a game, discarding a character and setting up a new one is not play, it’s administration.

I lost count of the number of times I had to go back to the rulebook for the explanation of something, which absolutely kills my enjoyment of a game. Some of this was as simple as the adventure book saying we should take a specific avatar from the supply and put it on the board, without telling us what the avatar looked like (none of them have names on the cutouts). Some questions were more involved – when we escaped from the Noir scene with a new avatar we’d rescued, does that avatar come with us, since she came in the base game with a card of her own and special skills? Does she join our gang, so to speak? Even simple questions like when dice are ‘discarded’ and when they’re returned to the bag aren’t adequately answered in the rulebook. I can only think the designers assumed Comanauts players would already be familiar with the mechanics because they’d played Stuffed Fables, but I have only seen the earlier game without ever actually playing it, so I was at a loss from start to finish here – and finish is pushing it, as we gave up after over an hour that probably had us just 60% of the way through the scenario.

There’s a campaign mode here as well that would let you follow the storyline through multiple scenarios, but that’s for folks who grasp the core gameplay here far better than my daughter and I did. Unfortunately this one’s not a keeper, a shame given Asmodee and Plaid Hat’s history of strong titles.