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So, I grabbed my two boys who are pretty close to the age of The Goonies and played through that scenario again. This time with me as the GM and them as The Goonies. We had a blast! The stories are great and keep the players immersed in the Goonies world and into their chosen characters. The certain events and actions that can happen during the game are written out simply as instructions for the players, but the GM always has the choice to act out and make a story out of them if they wish to make it more immersive and “D&D-like”. This is however fully optional depending on how each group of players wish to play through the game. Similarly, the game is also objectively easier with more Goonie players since the GM only gets a single turn after every hero has gone. It’s not necessarily broken, but the game doesn’t scale very well in terms of its difficulty even if the fun remains the same regardless of player count. (The game comes with five playable Goonies but is not meant to played with more than four of them at a time.)
When I realized it was essentially an “RPG in a Box” I had conflicting thoughts. The veteran RPG player voice said, “That’s it? You don’t even level up your character.” But, at the same time that little 80’s kid voice said “Yeah, but what did you expect it to be? It was fun!” As the GM I could throw obstacles in their path and not feel like I was piling on them unfairly yet still create challenges that required them to strategize. Final Score: 4 Stars – The Goonies: Never Say Die is a light but tense adventure game with great artwork and exceptional theme integration that will surely satisfy people who grew up wishing they could go on a treasure hunt with their favorite group of fictional friends. The movie on my screen was 1985’s The Goonies, one of the many relics from my childhood now being reborn to rake in bundles of nostalgia-fueled cash. This latest form of rebirth is in the new game The Goonies: Never Say Die and from the moment I looked at the cover I was hopeful that playing it would make me feel the same way watching the movie once did. Each Goonie has their own abilities specific to their character which helps them in different ways and there are enough Goonies included in the game that allow for the players to mix up who they play each time to make the game feel new and different each time (if they want to swap that is). The GM controls a set of enemies as well as a boss character, and these enemies are different for each of the adventures provided. The enemies are spawned and drawn by certain actions that happen during the game and are usually quite easy for the players to defeat, but the bosses are the real difficulty and main threat to the Goonies. These characters come with their own skills/abilities and come with more health too thus making them extremely difficult to deal with. Final ThoughtsOn my first playthrough I did it solo. None of my family have the same love for The Goonies that I do. So, I thought I’d step through a game to see how it played. The game plays very simply and is easy to understand. It’s a Dungeon Crawl game which makes perfect sense. You move from room to room, searching for “rich stuff” encountering hazards (pit traps and cave-ins) and creatures (mostly bats and rats). Defeat them and move on to the next room. Prospero Hall games are known for quality production value and game design that captures the spirit of the story. Funko Games delivers that once again in this game.
The game is an adventure game that allows for 2-5 players with the age range of 12+. The play time shown on the box is 50 minutes although it’ll definitely take you longer to play on your first few playthroughs just to be able to learn the gameplay and to allow for set-up time as the map has a different set-up for each adventure/story. Overall, I’d have to say the time to play would roughly be anywhere between 1.5-2 hours depending on the players understanding of the rules. D&D, But Not Really..The heroes I watched were brave, but still easily frightened. Smart, but still easily fooled. Rude, but somehow still friendly. I was invested in what I was watching because these heroes reminded me of me. And all I had to do once it was over was wait for the VHS to rewind and I could go on the adventure with those heroes once again. At the start of the game, the GM will use their secret adventure guide to prepare the board depending on which scenario is being played. Whenever a Goonie enters a room during the game, the GM will have to populate the room with new items to search through or spawn specific enemies. The GM will also reveal secret information only if certain events are triggered by actions the Goonies take. (Succeeding at a type of skill test, for instance.) Players will be rolling a lot of dice during their Goonies adventure. Each of the kids and Sloth (no playable teenagers in the base game) have their own abilities and strengths which help everyone move on to the next goal. Dice are rolled to resolve conflicts and everyone has tokens (Wishes) that can be turned in to increase their chances.
For the Goonies, choosing which member of your team to send off alone into potential danger is where much of the game’s tension lies. If a new room shows a few searchable items, it’s best to send Mikey in because he’s the best at searching, but if he gets trapped in there alone with an enemy, he’s in a lot of trouble. (This happened in a game I played where Mikey’s room didn’t even have a proper exit and his team was way on the other side of the board. I actually uttered the words, “Guess I’ll just have to sacrifice Mikey for the good of the team.” It felt like a depressing deleted scene from the movie.)No matter which side of the game you control, the best part of The Goonies: Never Say Die is easily the way the theme is implemented. Obviously, the specific powers and artwork contribute to that, but I found the light gameplay and pseudo-danger of the secretive GM to underscore exactly the feelings that the movie was meant to evoke. But why was it fun? It was fun because it told the story of the movie and added just enough complexity to make it interesting but not bogged down in rules. It’s a family RPG in a Box. It also allows the game to stay streamlined and light on rules while still creating the moments of wonder that the movie is most remembered for. It’s not a perfect game—not by a longshot—and many gamers might find it too simplistic or, considering it’s one versus all, not tactical enough.
One of the ways the theme is tied into the mechanics is in the distribution of each character’s skills. For example, Sloth is the best at fighting enemies, but not good at dexterity or searching. (Although Sloth did pull off that impressive rope swing in the movie, so I actually think he’s more dexterous than the designers give him credit for.) Mikey, on the other hand, is the best Goonie at searching but very weak in combat. The Goonies start each adventure with a basic goal that typically involves finding a specific room or item, but they will have limited information on how to achieve this and not know which direction will lead them to their destination. After we got rolling, I could see all the fun details and mechanics that represent the movie so well. In the second scenario the players encounter the Bone Organ. To play it correctly they have to get at least one success on one die of each type. This is where the Teenager characters do have a small part. The Teenagers can be used as either a one-time use to get an extra die based on their character’s ability (Brand is Strength, Andy is Dexterity, Stef is Search) or as an automatic success in certain situations. In the movie, Andy was the one to play the organ, so if her card is still available she can count as one of the successes. There is a pit trap with many nostalgic property based games that look enticing but fall flat once you play. The nostalgia isn’t a pirate’s treasure hoard but just a bunch of counterfeit fifty dollar bills. In other words, it is superficially that property but once the gameplay is examined it could be any other game. The Goonies Never Say Die is not that. The treasure is in the details and you should explore those unknown tunnels with kids to discover it.
Reviews
The game plays a lot like how D&D plays in terms of having a GM (Games master) and having a bunch of stories and adventures that the rest of the players travers through in the aim to defeat a final boss or get to a specific goal. The main difference though would be the fact that this game is a lot more structured out for you already and there is a limited amount of things that both the players and the GM can do. Now this may put some people off if you’re more of a die-hard adventure board gamer and can’t deal with the limitations of such a game, but to the others who don’t mind this at all, this is a great introduction to adventure games and D&D as a genre. There’s loads of player interaction throughout making it fun and different with each group of players, and with each adventure/level of the game there is a story to follow alongside it making players fully immersed into the world of the Goonies and thus make their decisions within the game seem more dire and important. So, crank up some Cyndi Lauper, rip open a Baby Ruth, and let’s gather around the game table for The Goonies: Never Say Die, designed by the team at Prospero Hall. Gameplay Overview:
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