Indiana Jones: Sands of Adventure - Review

Sands of adventure

👥 2-4

⏳ 45 minutes

🧠 8+

🤠 Overview 🤠

In this Cooperative strategy and quick card playing game players must work together to help Indana Jones rescue the Ark of the Covenant before it falls into the wrong hands. Search Ancient Tanis, all while building up your hand, resources and strength ready for the pivotal moment which could strike at any time.

When the sand timer suddenly flips it triggers the race for survival and to the Ark. Battle against Colonel Dietrich, Major Toht and Dr René Belloq.

🐍 Gameplay 🐍

Gameplay is really simple and the rules are easy to learn. The game is played in three rounds, each round consists of two phases and its own rival to face, regardless of whether you defeated the previous one or not.

In the first phase, you take it in turns to move your character to one of the tiles in the communal play area and reap its rewards, be that drawing cards, upgrading cards, gaining power tokens or playing cards. However, each tile also comes at a cost - the roll of either one, or two die, of which the outcome could be to move the villain by the resulting amount of crosses, or to add in the depicted amount of gems into the sand timer.

*This continues until the sand timer flips or there are no more gems to add in which case you would manually flip the timer.*

This then triggers the 2nd phase of a round where you take turns to play as many of your cards as you possibly can to attack the villain and hopefully defeat him. The next player does not begin their attack turn until the current player is finished completely and draws a new card to their hand.

- if a player draws a snake to their hand they must roll the snake attack dice until it lands on the safety symbol, again the next player cannot begin until this has finished.

During this round you must be quick and collected because the sands run out quickly and you need to try and get through everyone as fast as possible to deal as much damage as possible.

If you defeat the villain in time you move on to the next round unscathed, if you do not succeed a penalty is taken with you into the next round ready for your new villain.

🥋 Attacks and Cards 🥋

- There are lots of cards in the deck and they serve as a kind of matching game when they are played, you can only play one that has a matching symbol or colour on it. The upgrade cards will contain either multiple symbols, or colours to allow for better matching opportunities to arise.

- Attacks can only come from the character cards not the artifact cards which makes it quite tricky to actually do enough damage to the villains, you really need to find a way to burn through the deck.

- We found the most useful power token to be the "play any card" token, allowing us to emit the matching rule during the timed phase of the rounds.

💭 Final thoughts and opinions 💭

We have played this game 3 times now, the concept is really fun and we like the idea of racing the timer in a 2nd phase while in the first we are building up resources.

We have tried a couple of different techniques with it, including trying to burn through the deck to get as many character cards out as possible enabling us to attack, or to try and attack as and when during the collection phases a bit more, but each time we have failed to defeat more than 1 villain.

Every time you perform an action you are having to add gems to the timer causing it to quickly fill and tip, starting the timed phase. This means we either haven't caused enough damage during the collection phase, or collected enough cards to cause enough damage by the time the timer tips.

Either way, I feel like the game is a bit too unbalanced in regards to building up your resources, compared to how fast the timer flips, not allowing for enough damage to actually be able to be done in most cases.

Whether we have just been truly unlucky or it really is the case for others too, I'd love to know, drop me a comment below with your thoughts.