Townsfolk Tussle

This is a boss battler dressed as a cartoon, ruffians squaring off against one big bad across a campaign, and the art is genuinely doing a lot of heavy lifting, it looks like it wandered off an early cartoon and landed on a game table. Mechanically it’s a semicooperative fight, everyone’s nominally on the same team but there’s enough take-that in the event deck that the coop framing gets stretched thin more than once.

Where it lost me a little is the swinginess. I like games that are willing to let dice decide things, that’s part of the appeal of a boss battler, but a few of our sessions came down to a single roll going one specific way with almost nothing we could have done to mitigate it beforehand. That’s a harsher version of randomness than something like Too Many Bones runs, and Too Many Bones is already not a low-luck game. When a run goes well it’s exactly what I want from this genre, driving into the ruffian, dodging back, the theming showing up in every little rule. When it goes badly it feels like the dice made the decision for you an hour before the fight actually ended.

Setup between phases dragged more than I expected going in, and the low starting health means an early bad stretch can put you on the back foot for the whole session with not much room to claw back, which edges toward the runaway-loss version of a snowball rather than the runaway-win one, you’re not watching someone pull ahead so much as watching the table collectively fall behind a boss that isn’t slowing down for anyone. I liked my time with it, three plays in, but I don’t think it’s earned a permanent shelf spot the way some other coop boss fights have. It’s a fine choice for a group that wants theme and doesn’t mind the dice getting the final word more often than feels fair.