The Mandalorian: Adventures review — Risk mitigation for gunslingers

The Mandalorian: Adventures from Unexpected Games and designed by Corey Konieczka is a lightweight cooperative adventure game set during the events of the first season of the hit Disney show, The Mandalorian. It’s easy to learn, has a great theme, and plays relatively fast. But is it fun? You’ll have to keep reading… or ya know, skip to the end.

In The Mandalorian: Adventures, you and up to 3 other players will embark on a campaign that roughly follows the events of the first season of The Mandalorian, becoming the iconic characters from the show and telling your version of the story. Let’s start with the campaign. I was quite surprised when I got into the box to see that there are only four missions in the campaign. Rather than a big campaign that you play once over dozens of hours, the campaign in Mandalorian: Adventures is kind of a pseudo-legacy game mixed with an extended tutorial. New mechanics, playable characters, and enemy abilities are rolled out throughout the campaign, leading to the final version of the game that is more of a sandbox adventure. Once you’re through the campaign, you can play any mission with any character and mix in Mercenary Missions to change things up. 

The Mercenary Missions can be combined with any of the maps to change the setup, objective, and rules of the game. Instead of fighting Moff Gideon in the town square, maybe you are dodging a Mudhorn while trying to track down an egg for a Jawa. With the four missions included, you get 16 different missions and map combinations to play through. Some of the mercenary missions also feature hidden traitor mechanics to add another layer of excitement.

Campaigns and sandboxes are all well and good, but you want to actually play the game and have fun, right? Gameplay in Mandalorian: Adventures is simple, fast, and oddly, safe. Safe? Let me explain. There are four possible actions to take on your turn: Move, Attack, Intel, and Plan. Actions are taken by playing a card to one of those action columns on the board. If your card has a 3 on it and you want to move, you move 3 spaces. On your turn, you get to take two actions, but they have to be different actions, and then it goes to the next person. However, the numbers on the cards serve a dual purpose. If at any time the total on the cards in any column is 5 or higher, the enemies activate. If you hit 5 exactly, they will do a normal activation. If you go over 5, you get an extra effect depending on the mission, and then the normal activation as well. Poor planning or going in too aggressively is very dangerous. The enemies can pile on quickly and wipe you out easily if you’re not careful. In practice, that means players are going to try to do everything possible to always hit 5 and not go over. It’s not too hard to manage and means the mission effect hardly ever goes off. I can see how this mechanic prevents the players from just blasting every enemy off the map before they get to activate, but it feels out of sync with the theme. The Mandalorian is a gunslinger. He’s quick on the draw and isn’t afraid to get into a fight. Playing Mandalorian: Adventures feels less like a gunfight and more like risk management. 

That may seem like a harsh criticism, but I still think it’s a fun game. Notably, the speed of gameplay and simplicity of the mechanics make it a great family game night game. You just need to know what you’re in for before you pick this game up. It’s not a gunslinging adventure, it’s a puzzle. Besides the risk management puzzle, there are a few other things that bounce off the theme a bit as well. Notably, the default attack range for melee and ranged attacks is 1 space. There are cards introduced during the campaign that will give you the occasional real ranged attack, but it feels a lot more like chess than a gun fight. 

If you're a solo player, the game includes rules for solo play. Essentially you shuffle two character decks together and just play normally from there. It works pretty well, but can lead to times when you can't activate the character you want because you just aren't drawing the right cards. The numbers and risk mitigation puzzle actually work better as a solo game in my opinion where you can ponder over the best way to proceed without other players wanting the action to pick up. I'm not a big fan of solo board games, so I wouldn't pick this up for the solo mode, but if you're into that kind of thing, it works pretty well. You can also easily just play multi-handed if that's more your style.

The components for the game are a bit of a mixed bag. The mission boards are in a spiral-bound book that makes setup a breeze. The colors and artwork are vibrant with clear icons. The player characters are standees while all of the enemies are tokens. The cardboard is of decent quality and seems like it will hold up fine. The card quality is disappointing. They are quite thin and damage easily while shuffling. Pretty much all of my cards have warped as well, so they don’t sit flat. The box insert is completely worthless if you store your games sideways, but functional if you keep the box flat. The insert is made of recycled cardboard rather than plastic, which is a nice touch for the environmentally conscious. 

At the end of the day, I think Mandalorian: Adventures is a fun game if you like puzzly strategy games and are a fan of Star Wars. It may not be the high-stakes gunfight that I wanted, but I can see it continuing to hit the table at family game night. That said, if you’re not really into Star Wars, I’m not sure this game does anything exceptional that would win you over.