Crossroads

Crossroads is a Biblically-based, tile-laying, cooperative game where 1-4 players encounter challenges, trying to gain enough resources to be triumphant in a story. The overture box comes with four stories, one each based on the Biblical stories Deborah and Barak, David and Goliath, the Seven Seals, and Joseph and his dream coat. An expansion available from BoardGameGeek in July 2011 has the story of resettling Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. 100 stories are planned in total. A game turn in Crossroads starts with rolling dice to determine how many tiles you'll have available to lay on the grid board during your turn, and how many spaces (tiles and challenge cards being the spaces) you can move your traveler disk. When you end your movement on a challenge card, the card may have something it does in the game right away. Either way, you'll want to "face" the challenge. This can include needing have have stats at a certain level (others on the same space can add their stats to yours), giving up a resource you've gained during the game, rolling dice and adding to them based on various criteria, and more. Each player also has a number prayer cards which will help in facing challenges. Players can use some prayers only on themselves, while others may be used on any traveler. Each story is a little different in the way it plays. What you need to do to gather resources and what you need to do with them once you do can be different, as well as what it is that's pushing you along. Since this is a cooperative game, the players are facing the board rather than each other. The thing that there are facing in each game is represented by a lion playing piece that travels the board effecting players in one way or another. How the lion moves about and what it does to a traveler when it finds one is different (and themed appropriately) in each story. The game's re-playability comes in the random, face-down layout of challenge cards, that you only put out 7 of the 9 challenge cards a story has when you play (leaving a mystery two out of each session), and that you can pick which prayer cards you will have with you before each session. The publishers were involved in Anachronism, so the cards have excellent, historically-accurate artwork, and the game is very true to the Bible, while being nondenominational and not preachy. The game is more about the setting and the stories, which is interesting as a gamer, and/or useful as a Christian. The components are like those you're used to getting in a quality Euro-style game. The cards are not shuffled, so the publisher has made them thick and sturdy. The tiles are a standard thickness and have a good coating. And again, the art is fantastic.