Tabletop gaming with the charm of Paper Mario!
At PAX East this year, I was able to swing by the Armor Games Studios booth and check out their game, Baladins. Baladins is all the fun of a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons with all the charm of Paper Mario. You can also play with up to four of your friends and they don’t even have to come to your house. They can play on the comforts of their own couch. Let’s get right into Baladins.
Baladins put the control in your hands and allows you to play the “choose your own adventure game” the way you want to. There are quite a few characters to pick from and for the demo; I believe I picked the Pyro. He was a cool feline that wore pants and gloves. We need to look our best when we save Gatherac from a time controlling dragon.
Each play session lasts seven weeks but they’re in-game weeks. What I mean is when you run out of movement tokens or action tokens, the turn ends as well as a week. If you’re playing with friends, each player gets a turn during the week and all kinds of things can happen. You could be tasked with going to the castle to find the princess or go to the mountains to find minerals. Whatever the task may be, you will have to roll a dice to see if something good happens or something bad.
I really like the fact that Baladins allows you to play your way and make your own choices like a “choose your own adventure” book. The world is massive so you will have to think on your feet to cover it all in seven weeks. When the time ends, you restart but you will have the knowledge you picked up from the last playthrough. That being said, your stats reset because getting to keep high values would make things a little unfair in the long run. In the demo, I accrued a very high destruction value and seemed to love rolling the number eleven on various dice rolls.
You will find all kinds of items during your journey but be careful because you can use them. You might be given a magic potion for a quest and think you need to use it. If you use it and it wasn’t the right time, you’re out of luck for said quest. It’s not like I did that during the demo or anything. (Cough cough) You could also run into all kinds of colorful characters in the world and you never know what they might ask you to do. You might hear singing in the woods and find an ogre. The ogre wants to sing but doesn’t have anyone to sing to and that’s where you come in. It’s quests and missions like this that make Baladins fun and interesting. You just never know where the story is going to go next. It really feels like replay value and playing, as different characters will really change the story from one playthrough to the next.