What do River Valley Glassworks, Lands of Galzyr, and Everdell all have in common? Besides being crowdfunded, they’re all games with anthropomorphic animals living their best lives. That theme sometimes can feel a little tired.
But what about cat archaeologists exploring an ancient pyramid and fighting various Anubis-like mummies? That’s a little different and that’s the theme of Run! Run! Run! by Bruno Cathala and Anthony Perone, illustrated by Camille Chaussy, and published by 25th Century Games.
The game is for 1-4 players, ages eight and up, and plays in about 30 minutes.
Gameplay Overview:
Every player in Run! Run! Run! starts with three to six room tiles based on the player count, a random Catventurer tile, as well as five torch tokens in a common pool. Each of these heroes has a different power triggered by a symbol on the combat die (but more on that later).
Every player’s turn starts with rolling one mummy die. The mummy die first adds a heart to the top mummy tile which spawns a mummy when it’s full. The second is it advances all mummies one space towards the vault. If any mummy reaches the vault, the players lose.
After resolving the mummy die, players can take one of three different actions.
Cooperate is an action where every other player may choose to join you in your room and you draw one of the three regroup tokens and then get their bonus.
The most complicated of these is Explore which has the player placing a tile from their hand onto the board obeying two rules: the tile must join onto an existing path without blocking off any open doorways and you must be able to move your Catventurer onto the tile you just placed. You can also opt only to move as well.
Once you place the tile, you must move there. The first three movement points are free but after that, for each space moved, a tile gets discarded from the draw deck, moving through mummies as needed (they’re harmless, right?).
If the room you just entered is dark, you’ll have to add a torch to light your way. If you’re out of torches, add a heart to the top mummy tile, awakening the mummy if its card is filled. If all the mummies are active, they all move one space towards the Pharoh’s vault.
You can gain five more torches by placing three tiles with the same symbols all touching in one corner and placing a torch mechanism token over that spot. If you have three different symbol tiles touching, you gain a door mechanism. You need to unlock three to five of these, depending on the difficulty level, to trigger the final boss.
If you placed a sarcophagus tile, take a token and look at it. These give you bonuses to use immediately or save for later. These tokens can also be discarded to move you to any room in the pyramid.
All mummies when awakened get placed at the furthest spot in the pyramid from the Pharoh’s Vault.
The last action is Fight, which is needed to defeat the mummies before they reach the Pharoh’s Vault. You can move like you’re exploring and then discard one or more tiles summing the number of exits shown on them and take that many dice to roll. The dice results will either be hits, your Catventurer’s special ability, drawing a room tile, or luring a mummy away (you can go too). You may discard a torch token to reroll.
Once a mummy is defeated, its tile goes to the bottom of the deck, possibly to rise again. But once the final mummy is up and at ‘em, no new mummies may join the fray.
The players win if they can defeat all the Mummies before any of them reach Pharoh’s Vault.
Game Experience:
Like always, the production from 25th Century Games is fantastic with nice thick cardboard tiles, solid artwork, and fun meeples, and it all fits in a nice small box.
But don’t let that box size or the cute art fool you—there’s a lot going on within the few actions you can take. Run!, Run! Run! is more involved than it looks while simultaneously being more complicated than it seems.
Starting with the seemingly easy tile placement: the nuance of not being able to block exits while also needing to align tiles a specific way makes it far more challenging than Carcassone where only aligning the edges counts. Hexes, for me, seem to be harder to plan ahead with than squares but maybe I’m just not acute with obtuse angles.
Each turn you’re trying to balance finishing your objective of placing tiles to unlock door mechanisms while also trying to get more torches so your tile supply doesn’t dwindle away.
With combat using tiles, you’ll sometimes need to tell the mummy you’ll “be right back” while you place a sarcophagus and hope you get something useful. Placing them, early on, is great for the boon but at a cost of those rooms not having any exits. And each turn that passes increases the chance of mummies appearing and/or advancing.
Even on the easiest difficulty, I feel like I lose more than I win (which several folks on the BGQ Discord (rudely) say is how most games I play end). But every game was tense and down to the wire. I always felt like I had a chance before either running out of tiles or not being able to defeat a mummy before it reached the Vault. And, for me, that’s one of the strengths of the game but it might turn off kids/families.
You can’t lure the boss mummies away, so you have to get through their defense before they make it back to the vault. And that becomes part of your strategy—do you make one long path with short offsets to unlock doors and gain torches or do you opt for a sprawling maze of short passageways? The long path seems like the obvious choice but placing the tiles is challenging and then getting back on track without discarding a bunch more tiles had me often continuing working on one of the offshoots.
Each Catventurer also has a different power when they roll a “?” on the combat dice. One of them does more damage, one gains a tile, another a torch, and the last gets a Sarcophagus token. All are good, but that last one seems like the best one followed by an extra tile since tiles are used to gain more dice. At first, I thought the extra damage was the cat’s pajamas, but after a few plays, that’s probably the third best, and while I never have enough torches, torch cat feels like hard mode.
The small differences between the mummies and cats aside, the biggest variable in each play is the luck of the tile draw and roll of the dice. And, besides discarding torch tokens, there’s no dice luck mitigation, so dice luck can make the game swingy. In terms of replay value, I don’t think every game needs to have 300+ variations of heroes and villains available (*glances over at Cthulhu Death May Die*) and if you’re the type of gamer with a relatively large collection, the short playing time makes it a great filler or night-cap game a few times per year.
I appreciate how the cooperation action, where you get a boon, is also in solo mode which can be played two-handed or as a single adventurer. The only thing that solo play loses is the limited communication of describing your tiles to your tablemates.
Final Thoughts:
So where does Run! Run! Run! land? It’s not as cozy as Carcassone nor as violent as Zombicide. Run! Run! Run! is a cute and thinky tile-laying game with lots of dice rolling. This relatively challenging co-op will make you fret over every tile draw and die roll. It’s tense without feeling oppressive and I’ve been engaged with every play.
Final Score: 3.5 Stars – Run! Run! Run! is a deceptively thinky and challenging cooperative game hiding behind cute cats and undead dogs.
Hits:
• Tense gameplay
• Simple yet thinky mechanics
• Great production in a small box
Misses
• More complicated than it seems
• Luck can make the game swingy
• Loss rate may be a bit high for families
