Gameplay Overview
Explore your story. Choose your path. Discover your destiny. In Destinies (by @luckyduckgames) you play a character on a narrative rich journey, exploring locations on a growing map, talking with game characters and completing skill tests to perform actions. You character has a hidden story intertwined with the scenario story and two possible outcomes in the story’s conclusion. Your task is to explore the world, discover the mystery of your two possible destinies and ultimately choose which path to take.
This is an extremely rich story driven game that has you moving around and itneracting with locations and people, very similar to Chronicles of Crime (another game by @luckyduckgames), however you now have skills that you can improve throughout the game to increase your abilities to perform tasks.
Each turn you move to explore on location, then interact with any of the characters or points of interest on that location card. The app will provide you with some story then some choices. Talk with people, explore areas/items. Some interactions will require a skill test (strength to break into a house, knowledge to persuade an individual, etc). Skill tests have you roll dice and compare your outcome with your skill rating. You alwasy have two dice, but can temporarily gain purple dice to help improve your chances of success.
Each skill has tokens on the track that can move up and down the track with experience and items gained throughout the game. Move as many as your can to increase your chances of success in skill tests.
Items can help you with skill tests using their special ability. However they can also be used in certain situations, like having a torch to walk through a dark forest will bypass the need for a dexterity skill test to walk through the dark.
Explore the map to learn more about the story and what you need to do to fullfill your destiny. A wonderfully rich narrative driven game that I am excited to talk about more in our next post.
Thoughts
I was able to squeeze in a rare solo game. I NEVER play solo games. In fact I have only once played a solo game of Under Falling Skies. However, I felt this game might be too dark for the kids so I gave it a shot. The kids found the set up so interesting they ended up playing with me any way as we all shared tasks using the same character for the opening scenario. It was a little dark but most of it went over their head.
I’ll start off by saying I wasn’t a huge fan of Chronicles of Crime (a game that shares a lot of the same DNA as Destinies). I didn’t dislike it, I just wanted more. I felt very railroaded in CoC. I felt I was just going around scanning things here and there a reading the story. I understood there were some decision points regarding timing and who you talk with, but I still felt there wasn’t much decision making and I was just following along a choose your own adventure like story book.
Destinies gave me what I wanted from Chronicles of Crime. More decisions. More actual “game” and less “scan and read”. In CoC you scanned evvvvvvrything. But here you scan only what makes sense, so it’s less often. There is more interactions with characters/locations without needing the camera scanner. So it felt more like a “game”.
The skill tests are the highlight of Destinies and how you improve your skills with experience is a beautiful mechanism I would like to see in more games. The use of items for skill based abilites as well as using them to completely bypass skill tests is fantastic too.
Overall I felt Destinies gave me more game and I love it. On top of this, the story aspect is stellar so far and the components are superb (I can’t believe the low price point of this game – they must be losing money on this game!). The replayability is higher than CoC, because you have several characters you can play and each has two destiny story endings to explore. However like most story games it’s replayability is limited. Mind you, you will defintiely get your moneys worth at this price point. Buy it!