The forest is in danger, not only with wildfires and landslides, but also howler grems intent on destruction. As new Scouts, you are charged with a mission to drive off the grems and protect your homes!
What Is Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands?
Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands is a legacy-style campaign game for 1 to 4 players, ages 12 and up, and takes about 60 to 90 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $49 for a copy of the game, $99 for the deluxe version (with plastic miniatures), or $199 for the elite upgrade that includes several more bonus items. The campaign page says 12 and up, but since it’s a cooperative game you can probably go a bit younger if you’re playing with your kids; I played with my 10-year-old and she really enjoyed it.
Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands was designed by Kevin Wilson and published by Incredible Dream, with art direction by Katarzyna Bekus.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands Components
Note: My review is based on a prototype copy, so it is subject to change and does not reflect final component quality. The prototype only included enough materials to demo the beginning of the game, and the finished copy will have a lot more included.
Here’s what the finished game will include (though things are still subject to change!):
- Encounter booklet
- Monty’s Star Chart
- Nikkit’s Notes booklet
- 2 Double-sided Map boards
- 6 Scout standees
- 6 Scout sheets
- 25 Movement tokens, including:
- 23 Stride tokens
- Cowen Charge token
- Vane Flight Shortcut token
- 40 Resource tokens (10 Food, 10 Mineral, 10 Plant, and 10 Tech)
- 4 Boundary Area envelopes, each containing:
- Introduction Letter and sticker
- Mission cards
- Special cards
- Encounter tokens
- Night tokens
- Cutscene envelopes
The components in my photo are for the Maze Forest portion of the game but there will be quite a bit more, with four locations to explore in the final game.
There are six animal scout characters, each with a character sheet that shows their stride tokens, backpack spaces, and special ability. The illustrations in the game are a lot of fun and give the animals a lot of personality. The board itself has a watercolor look to it, and instead of a marked grid or hex spaces, it just has some large colored shapes representing the different terrain types.
In the finished game, the scouts will be acrylic standees rather than the round cardboard tokens seen in my photos. The deluxe edition replaces the standees with plastic miniatures, and also changes the stride tokens to acrylic rather than cardboard.
How to Play Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands
You can download a draft of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to complete 4 missions together without letting any of the hazards get out of control.
Setup
Set up the map board by mixing up all of the location’s tokens and placing them on the marked spaces. (In the Maze Forest, there are red and blue tokens, corresponding to land spaces and water spaces.) Place resources on all of the resource spawning points. Place the night tokens for the location into a cup or bag and mix them up.
Set any special cards for the location face-up near the board. Shuffle the mission cards and draw one to place face-up. (The first game will start with the “Reckoning” mission face-up.) When you begin the game, the mission deck will only have the four starting cards, but as you play you will add more mission cards to the deck.
You always use 4 scout character regardless of the number of players, and they start at the four corners of the board. Give each character its stride tokens (and any special tokens, if applicable).
Gameplay
The four characters play in clockwise order. Each turn, the scout creates a path using their stride tokens, starting from their current location and then making a chain of them touching each other. Some of the stride tokens are colored to match specific terrain types, in which case those tokens must overlap at least a small bit of the corresponding terrain. If they overlap or touch encounter tokens, then you reveal them and resolve them, and then continue your movement. Once your path is done, you move the scout token to the end of the path, touching the last stride token. (There are some additional rules about sliding around other scouts and some of the characters have special movement abilities, but that’s the basic gist.)
There’s a number of different encounters: some generate resources, which you can pick up if you have room in your backpack. Some allow you to spend resources for certain things. For instance, in the Maze Forest there are two hazards that will constantly be growing: a forest fire and a landslide. You can give resources to the appropriate characters to help reduce these hazards by removing tokens.
There are also some landmarks on the board—three when you start in the Maze Forest—and each of these has an ability if you end your turn there, from drawing additional mission cards to refilling resource spawn points.
After each character has taken a turn, you draw night tokens from the cup—usually 3, but the presence of grems on the map makes you draw more. Hazards are placed in the corresponding hazard area, touching existing hazard tokens (or the letter icon if it is empty). If you’re ever unable to fit a token within its area, then the players lose because the hazard has gotten out of control.
There are also moon tokens—these are just a “nothing happens” and are returned to the cup (though Nikkit’s ability lets her keep them for a special effect). And there are howlers—the robotic-looking wolves that are causing the chaos in the forest. Howlers must be placed on an empty statue space on the board, and can be defeated if the requisite number of scouts are touching it at the same time. If you don’t have any empty statues when a Howler is drawn, you lose because you’ve been overrun.
Some tokens—both encounter tokens and night tokens—have a 3-digit number on them. When these are encountered or drawn from the cup, you read that entry in the encounter booklet, which will have a short story bit and explain what the token does.
When you complete a mission, you draw a new one from the deck. There are also some additional ways to draw more missions so that you have more options on what to work with. Mission cards may also have a special effect when completed, including unlocking cutscenes that progress the overarching story.
Game End
If you complete four missions, you win! There are also a few ways to lose: if the hazards outgrow their boundaries or any scout token every touches a hazard token, or if you don’t have a space to place a howler when it’s drawn, then you lose.
You then get to mark your progress on the chart—your score if you won, or half your score if you lost. As you mark spaces on the chart, you’ll reach spaces that give you various bonuses, including a couple that have encounter numbers.
Why You Should Play Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands
In case you aren’t already familiar with the concept of legacy games, I’ll begin with that. In a legacy game, some components will be permanently altered as you play the game, though how things are altered can differ from game to game, from placing stickers to writing on things to tearing up cards. In some (like Risk: Legacy, the first of the genre), your copy of the game will be uniquely yours by the end, based on the decisions you and the other players make (thus the “legacy” name of the genre); other games (like Zombie Kidz Evolution) let you make your way through a campaign but everyone eventually ends up at the same destination, so your copy will be altered in pretty much the same way as everyone else’s.
Since I’ve only gotten to play the beginning demo of Boundless Stride so far, I don’t know yet which type of legacy game this will be, though I’m leaning toward the latter—that you might unlock specific story bits in a different order from another group, but eventually there’s probably one throughline—you’ll find all of the stickers to add to the maps, plot all of the constellations, and so on. There doesn’t seem to be anything permanently destroyed, but there are plenty of stickers to add—some go on the map board, some go on cards, and some … I haven’t learned where they go yet.
There are some encounters where you’ll learn constellations (stored in Nikkit’s Notes), and the encounter book will tell you when you can start marking those constellations on your star chart. Once you’ve completed a constellation, you get to read an entry in the encounter book.
When you first begin the game, there are only four mission cards in the deck. But as you make progress, you’ll add more to the deck, so each time you play you’ll get more variety—and several of the mission cards are linked to additional entries in the encounter book, so the story unfolds over the course of many sessions. Some missions are removed from the deck after you complete them because they unlocked a new portion of the story and won’t happen again.
The game’s primary mechanic is the movement using stride tokens, and it’s an unusual approach that I haven’t seen used much. The board doesn’t have a grid or spaces, but just looks like a big map with some different colors representing terrains, and your movement is much more freeform than in games with hexes. You just line up your stride tokens so they make a chain, and then move yourself to the end of the line. Each of the scout characters has a different mix of tokens—wild tokens can be used anywhere, but the colored tokens have to be placed so they’re matching at least a portion of the terrain underneath them. So even though most of the characters have four tokens, depending on where you’re traveling, you might only use three. Paige the tortoise only has three tokens, but they’re all wild, which means she is slow but consistent. Meanwhile, Cowen the bighorn ram has a special charge movement that goes extra far in a straight line—but only if it touches mountains somewhere. So in the mountains Cowen is especially speedy, but if you stray too far from the mountains then he’s a lot slower.
The movement can be a little fiddly—it’s easy to bump tokens as you’re placing them and then everything just nudges around, so you do have to be okay with a bit of fudge factor here (especially playing with younger kids). If you want things to be precise, and to be able to say definitively whether somebody can move to a particular place, then you might get frustrated when not every player is careful about placing their stride tokens. The rulebook seems to encourage a bit of leeway, telling you to just make a judgment call if you’re not sure a stride token is touching the right terrain type—it’s probably fine.
On the first map, the three dangers you’re managing are a wildfire, a landslide, and the howler grems, all of which may appear when you draw night tokens. I like the way that the wildfire and landslide spread within their regions—it forms obstacles that you can’t pass through, and it also threatens to end the game—if you don’t remove tokens and they spread outside the indicated regions, you lose. For each hazard, there are three characters that will help you combat them if you can find them and give them the right resource. Once you know where they are, you can visit them multiple times, and a good portion of the game is managing these threats and figuring out which scouts are best poised to reach those helpers. The grems are a different story—they require multiple scouts to coordinate and meet up to defeat them, and the longer you ignore them the more night tokens you have to draw.
But putting out fires—literal and metaphorical—isn’t your primary goal. Those are just the things you have to manage so you don’t lose the game. Your long-term goal is to finish the four missions, which often require delivering resources to specific landmarks. That means you’ll need to decide how to spend those valuable resources: do you give them to the spark-spotter to put out that raging fire, or do you deliver them to the Hatchery to accomplish a mission? Where will you get more resources if you’ve spent them to deal with hazards? There are also some watcher birds where you can spend a resource to draw a new mission card, so that you have multiple missions to choose from at a time … but, again, that’s costing you scarce resources that could be used to fulfill a mission.
The story entries in the encounter book are a mix of mysterious and funny, and my kids and I really enjoyed them. We’ve run into forgetful bears, cryptic stags, and star-watching birds. The illustrations of the various animals are great and look like something out of a kids’ book—beavers wearing hard hats, foxes and rabbits with firefighting gear, fish wearing masks and snorkels (for some unknown reason). It’s a world that has a lot of possibilities and I’m really looking forward to the finished game so I can explore it more fully with my kids.
One small gripe I have is that you always play with four scouts regardless of player count. Having seen how the game plays out, I understand why you need four scouts on the board and can’t cut it down. With two players, you just each control two scouts, but with three it just feels a little strange because there’s that one extra. You either just collectively control it, or one player controls two of them, but it takes away a little bit of the feeling of making independent decisions and can tend toward the coop-by-committee feeling, which I know can bother some players. Still, it’s not a major complaint, just something that I noticed.
Although my demos were with a prototype that had unfinished components, my recent experience with Kinfire Chronicles from the same publisher gives me confidence that Incredible Dream can deliver a great finished product, and even these basic laser-printed sheets and hand-cut scout tokens were enough to spark our imaginations. If you have a consistent gaming group—whether your kids or your friends—who like the idea of exploring a world of talking animals and strange technology, I highly recommend taking a look at Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Boundless Stride: Into the Denlands Kickstarter page!
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
To subscribe to GeekDad’s tabletop gaming coverage, please copy this link and add it to your RSS reader.
Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
