Friar Tuck in Danger is the eagerly anticipated expansion for Michael Menzel’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. You need the original game to play, and the expansion is really designed to be played after you've completed all the story and quests in the base game. That's because the set up for Friar Tuck in Danger involves swapping out several of the tiles from the original game.
Of course, there's a lot more in this substantial expansion than a couple of sheets of substitute tiles. There are, for example, two more boards to add to the left of the eight connecting boards of the original game - so Friar Tuck in Danger increases the playing size by another 25%. There's a new storybook to play through, tho' it's a paperback rather than the hardback book that comes in the core game. In addition, there are two new figures... Tho' the Sheriff of Nottingham's men feature in the original game, the Sheriff himself doesn't appear on the board. In Friar Tuck in Danger, however, we get a Sheriff figure. No spoilers but you can expect to see him moving from his Castle location to frustrate the plans of Robin and his Merry Men. And, of course, we get a figure for Friar Tuck. He's not a player character tho': Friar Tuck only moves when he's adjacent to another player character, including adjacent to the path that character moves through. This means tho' that any assistance provided by Friar Tuck is potentially available to all the players.
As with The Adventures of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck in Danger is a fully cooperative family-level bag-building adventure game for 2-4 players. The various missions in the book involve moving your characters between locations and interacting with them by flipping the tiles to which you move. You'll usually be offered options in the book for the questions you ask of folk you interact with, and the different answers they give you take you along branching paths. As aficionados of the original game will know, you're up against a game timer so this is at least in part a puzzle optimisation game as players need to make the best use of their actions.
Kosmos has again put together a great package but for us the standout feature of Friar Tuck in Danger is the quality of the storybook. Obviously it's the book that sets out the game's missions and challenges but it also provides the scene-setting narrative. It scores so highly in our view because it is so well written: players genuinely feel like they are taking part in a storybook adventure rather than padding through mere flavour text filler. Credit here then to author, designer and artist Michael Menzel but also to Nicky Thomas-Davies and Pamela Evans who have again done such a fantastic job with the English translation from its original German.
Fans of the original game will need little prompting to add this expansion and continue their adventures. If you don't yet have a copy of The Adventures of Robin Hood, get both.
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