The Long Road to the Tomb of Annihilation

I've had a super bad case of the D&D blues the past couple months. I started jonesing for a game and the first thing I did was search up playing dungeons and dragons alone. It's not nearly as pathetic as it sounds. There were several interesting options including something called Endless RPG, A book dedicated to soloing D&D,  and an advertising heavy site called RPGBOT that has basically an advanced text adventure using D&D Mechanics. Ok, maybe that does sound a bit pathetic.

The obvious answer from an MMO perspective is to load up good old DDO or Neverwinter, but I'm feeling a bit burnt out on both to be honest. So many hours on DDO . . .

Next I went to Roll20 and found an interesting link to a Discord server that promised a Westmarch style world with multiple pick up games throughout the day where DMs post games and players sign up on an ad hoc basis. It was exactly what it promised, but what I found out is that my life doesn't necessarily promote picking up and playing for 3 to 4 hours on an ad hoc basis, so I left the server just after creating a character.

Several weeks later I had completely forgotten about my D&D quest, until just a few days ago when my attentions had turned to the subject of "What games can I play as a lizardman?" popped into my head.  Yes, these are the thoughts that pop into my head. Steam Curator had a list for me, but that's when I remembered . . . oh yeah! D&D!

And that's when I stumbled upon a game I wanted to get so many years ago called, "Tales from Candlekeep - Tomb of Annihilation."

What a lovely Yuan-ti with a flaming sword of doom. BRING IT!

You see, it's a 15 buck turn-based game that is basically the videogame version of the boardgame that costs around 60-75 bucks on Amazon. So I sprung!

Basically you play as a pre-generated (boo!) group of heroes going through the jungles of Chult in turn-based fashion, unveiling new tiles of the board one-by-one. I would have loved to have rolled up my own lizardman ranger beastmaster instead of a lizardman paladin, but c'est la vie..

. . . and you can play as a lizardman!

Gotta say that for a $15 game, it's pretty solid so far -- if you have the tolerance for all that comes bundled with turn-based games -- and that's usually time and patience.

Most of the missions involve kill quests, but others involve things like finding the exit before the dreaded death curse hits your party . . . though the really cool moments come when you find a big boss.

A six-armed ape! Yes please!

I actually bought the hard-cover Tomb of Annihilation back when I was playing D&D all the time before coronavirus killed the fun. My plan was to run the group through it, but all of that kinda . . . you know . . . fizzled out.

Anyway, it's cool to see encounters I had read about in the book being played out in the game. I dig it. Unfortunately, it does suffer from repetitiveness. I haven't seen much as far as tile-variation. It all has kind of the same look to it, and that's getting a bit boring, but I do love the exploration of the campaign map and the crafting system for improving your characters. Pretty neat systems.

Ahh, Nanny Pupu! It's good to meet you!

I don't think it'll fully scratch that D&D itch, but missions are typically pretty quick, something I can pick up and put down easily, and it hasn't been too bad working through the campaign map so far. 

All in all, this feels very much like a fun little distraction until I beat the game, then I'll probably be done with it -- never to return -- like so many other single player games that are out there. You know what I'm saying?

Happy Dueling!