This last weekend Wayne Grelle (Inferno on the PEG forums) invited us over to his house to play Fortune and Glory: The Cliffhanger Game. As the name implies, it’s a game of cliffhanger movie pulp action as the players (as adventurers) race around the board uncovering ancient artifacts to gain fortune and glory. Along the way each adventurer encounters dangers that, if they overcome them, also grant them glory. The dangers are overcome by making tests against the adventurer’s skills. If you fail at overcoming a danger, you flip the danger card over to the “cliffhanger†side. This is where the adventurer stays until his next turn when he tries to overcome the cliffhanger. The Glory gained from dangers is used as currency to buy gear and allies. There are also event cards in the game that help the adventurer along the way. The easiest way to get these is if you roll a ‘1’ during the initiative or movement phase. The adventurer that reaches 15 Fortune and gets to his home city first, wins the game.
Wayne’s family (Michelle, his wife; Nick, his son; and Bea, Nick’s girlfriend) had already played the games many times. Mike and I were newbies. Fortunately the game is pretty easy to pick up and soon we were both globetrotting in search of artifacts. Each adventurer’s turn goes very fast and we quickly learned how important Event cards, Gear, and Allies are to overcome the various dangers encountered while artifact hunting. A few of the Event cards can be used to undermine the other adventurers as well. There’s nothing like having an adventurer (that is not you) turn in his artifact only to find out it’s a fake. This happened to me as I turned my only artifact of the game. Wayne hit me with an Event card that made it worthless. (Curse you Wayne!) Bea won the game and I ended up with not a single Fame point.
Then we played again. This game went completely different from the first game. Bea’s dice went stone cold and she struggled the entire game to overcome dangers and recover artifacts. Everyone else was doing their globetrotting best to gain Fortune and Glory. As the game drew to an end, Nick and Mike were neck-and-neck. Both had enough Fortune to win and both were sitting on their home city at the end of the turn. It turned out that Nick had one more Fortune that Mike and that was enough to win the game.
A couple of other things to mention about this game is that is has both a competitive and cooperative game mode. You can also play teams in the competitive mode. Eight total players can play which makes the game great for large groups.
Chaos Steve