I spent a few hours playing Expedition RPG card game with my kids today and I wanted to write up something longer than a tweet to share our experience. If you haven't heard of Expedition, it's along the lines of a more-or-less standard "fantasy" world with fantastic creatures and hardy adventurers, but without so many rules in in it. The mechanics for combat are very lightweight -- more like a LARP type system, but even more streamlined. The pretty cool "twist" to this is the use of a phone app (the app is available for both iOS and Android) to help mediate some of the storytelling and combat.
Players each get an adventurer card which lays out a very barebones personality ("hungry chef", "dutiful soldier", "fretful bard", etc) and six abilities in Magic, Music, Melee or Ranged. Each adventurer has 12 health points. These abilites are part of four decks of cards which are shuffled and dealt out. Depending on the adventure you play there are different ways of selecting the abilities. For our group which consisted of me, my 8 year old son, and my 6 year old daughter, we just took the appropriate number of cards off the top of the appropriate deck.
To be honest, we didn't get too far into the "roleplay" part of the game, but we did play two different scenarios: the introductory tutorial and the ever popular dungeon crawl. My daughter decided to be a fretful bard, my son was dutiful soldier, and I decided to be a hungry chef.
The best part about the combat system was the timer system for selecting your ability to play during a combat round. Each round, players shuffle and select three cards using the categories printed on the front of the cards. Then after the 10 second timer starts, players each have to pick the 1 card of the three they want to use and touch the screen of the phone to signal they've chosen their action. (If the timer expires before all players touch the screen, the party takes extra damage from the monster(s) they're fighting.) Boy the kids got super excited every time they had to pick a card. They didn't want that timer to go off!
After the party's actions are selected, each player rolls a d20, following the directions on each card to achieve a success or a failure. There are also critical successes and critical failures on each card - something that made my old nerdy gamer heart pitter-patter. After the party's actions have been resolved and accounted, the phone mediates the reactions from the monsters, assigning damage or activating a "surge" which enhances opponents the group is facing. It is a clever, fun and fast moving system: simple enough that my kids understand it and complex enough to make that 10 seconds you have to choose an action feel very short tactically. Once the opponents have been defeated (based on cues in the story as presented on the phone), the party may collect loot which offer adventurers special "any time" abilities and perks. There's also a short 3 minute video on YouTube which describes how all this works, if you want to watch that.
Both my kids enjoyed it a lot and are interested in playing again. I thought it was a lot of fun myself and it would be suitable for (older) kids to play alone, in a mixed group of adults and kids, or just a group of adults. You can write your own story scripts for use in the game, or just use the combat tools ala carte to tell your own stories/adventures if you wish. Overall, I would strongly recommend this game if you're looking for a fun way to "introduce" the concepts of a fantasy RPG to your kids, or you are looking for a fun diversion with your regular gaming group.
The company that made Expedition is currently running a "Cthulhu" themed horror expansion Kickstarter (which I backed). If you're more into horror RPG settings, have a look and support it! It's already fully funded, but they're trying to unlock stretch goals - and you can back the Kickstarter and get a copy of the current game as part of your rewards, so that seems like a win-win if you're interested in purchasing the game.