Fantastic Beasts: Perilous Pursuit – USAOpoly – Review

December 28, 2019

104

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Fantastic Beasts: Perilous Pursuit is a dice game where players attempt to get the right rolls to wrangle a series of monstrous creatures from the Fantastic Beasts movies.

Joseph Summa

MeepleGamers

 7/10

Publisher: USAOpoly

Designer: Kami Mandell

Game Type: Cooperative Play

Game Type: Dice Rolling

Game Type: Hand Mangement

Game Type: Variable Player Powers

Initial Year of Release: 2018

Age Range: 8+

Expected Playtime: 45-60

Number of Players: 2-4

Theme and What is it?

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 9/10

Fantastic Beasts: Perilous Pursuit is a dice game where players attempt to get the right rolls to wrangle a series of monstrous creatures from the Fantastic Beasts movies. Fans of these Harry Potter supplemental films will enjoy the thematic elements of this simple cooperative game.

Gameplay Mechanics

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 8/10

Fantastic Beasts has a Yahtzee style rolling mechanic. The active player rolls the dice and can reroll any they wish up to twice more saving only results they are happy with until the final roll gives their final result. Players must get enough symbols of the same type to place the first strip into their player board. This makes the ability for that column “ready”. Then the next time (or with additional dice on the same roll) that player can “set” the ability with its top piece. Once an ability is ready and set the next die of that type allows the player to use that action.

The possible actions are Shield against creature attacks, advance the pursuit of the beast once, distract the beast to lower its attack dice, draw a special ability card, or advance the pursuit three times. After each player turn, the beast rolls to attack players with a special set of abilities on each different monster. After chasing down the beast enough to stuff it back into the suitcase, players will lose some of their prepared abilities and start the chase for another creature. Unless that was the last one, we call that a WIN!

Initial Impressions

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 9/10

I love the Harry Potter world and have never found anything to dislike about it. Perilous Pursuits gives me the opportunity to take my enjoyment of the movies and mix it with my enjoyment of playing games. This is a good type of game to make cooperative as dice rolls are not always fair to each player. We have to work together to deal with any surprising results and use our special cards at the key times to overcome the challenges.

Game Build Quality

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 9/10

Fantastic Beasts brings quality inset player boards, simple punchout tiles, and gorgeous cardstock monster cards. The dice are well crafted and unique to the game. This is a very well constructed game.

Artistic Direction

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 10/10

The artwork is straight out of the Fantastic Beasts movie series. Each creature has been featured at some moment during the movie and the image is directly from the big screen. There are loads of different creatures to capture in various difficulty ratings.

Fun Factor

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 6/10

Fantastic Beasts has all the enjoyment of a good dice rolling game attempting to maximize what you accomplish during a turn. It has some luck mitigation powers within the special cards. It has unique player profiles that are good at different actions. Everything you will need for a short cooperative game is contained within this box.

Age Range & Weight

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 10/10

8+ is a perfectly fair rating. The difficulty of learning Fantastic Beasts is nearly non-existent. This is a fun for all ages sort of game. It isn’t going to offer an extremely difficult strategic experience or anything like that. But it is going to offer meaningful choices to the players as they attempt to keep the beast going towards the suitcase and not breaking free to rampage in the wild.

Conclusions

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 7/10

If you are not a fan of Harry Potter and the Fantastic Beasts series you would need to be a fan of cooperative dice rolling games to get the full enjoyment of this experience. If you are a fan, you wont have any trouble being pleased with the results of Perilous Pursuit.