Companion Quest: Why This New Game Is A Must Have

You can’t do everything on your own. It’s nice to be self-sufficient, but some things are easier with friends. Like having a party. Or lifting a big sofa into your house. Or catching a demented cat who is meant to stay indoors recuperating but has escaped yet again. Or pushing a dead body off a cliff. Or gathering a bunch of weirdos who live in hedges to help you stop an idiot from opening a bunch of portals that drop evil monsters around like sprinkles on a cappuccino. Speaking of which…

Companion Quest from Ghostfire Games is a cooperative game for 1-4 players in which dice management is critical. Each player will pick a gnome and collect a party of companions along the way. Every companion has a unique ability that can alter dice rolls for the better.

Gu’Gu is opening portals all over the shop, letting in dangerous beasts: he must be stopped! You’ve got to complete 4 Quests to catch him, and there’s 12 Problems. Solving one will slow Gu’gu down, solve 2 at once to confuse him and force him back a step. Quests advance and problems are solved by dice placement, e.g. an odd number on a green die might move you one step in the quest.

As this is a dice management game there is a lot of luck involved in the rolls - but companions can go a long way to mitigating this, giving abilities such as + or - 2 to a die, or reroll 3 dice etc. The more companions the better. Choose wisely and you can seriously turn the odds in your favour. Each quest completed also gives an extra die to roll, increasing your chances of bagging the rolls you need. Component-wise, all is excellent. Fantastic art style, lovely big Quest and Problem cards (these latter are amazing to look at). The dice are vibrant, and choosing the ones to play is a bit like visiting a sweet shop.

I’ve had the pleasure of trying Companion Quest out, and the unvarnished truth is that it’s fantastic. Fair warning, though: this one looks family friendly and cute, but get your lucky underpants on, it’s a serious challenge. On normal difficulty, this game won’t hesitate to kick your teeth in. Your dice management capacity will be tested! You must balance moving forward on the Quest card with solving the limited number of Problems. First game, we ran out of Problems just after completing Quest 1. After that, Guu-Guu was free to leg it. We continued to regularly run out of Problems around the end of Quest 3, so the tension can really ratchet up - this is a good thing, and has led to some very close calls. I’ve been informed that easy difficulty will be tweaked for release to better align with the family friendly vibe. If you play with younger members of the fam, easy is definitely recommended.

I’ve enjoyed the surprisingly tough challenge because the mechanics are spot on. If you love dice management games, you simply can’t miss this. I suspect this will make big waves in 2025… This goes live on Kickstarter 4th March. Go here.

About the author:

Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here.