Roleplaying tabletop games are going through a bit of a renaissance right now. Gone are the days where the only decent options are Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. Nowadays you can find a wide range of tabletop RPGs with a significant amount of diversity. One of the latest independent tabletop creations is Awoken, a roleplaying board game by Last Hold Games.
Awoken: Worlds Apart is an ambitious independent roleplaying game that utilizes a board with the typical amount of imagination that a game of this nature requires. When building characters, players will actually be playing as themselves, essentially making Awoken an “Isekai” for a Western fantasy adventure. The players on Earth get teleported to a world full of magic, which is brought to life via impressive art and entertaining storytelling.
The base game comes with an impressive amount of components in the box, making it a fantastic all-in-one package. Those who back the project will be receiving goodies such as tokens, dice, many booklets, maps, and over 400 cards. The components are all of good quality too, with neat dice, great art, and detailed maps. The character sheets are thorough and are without holes, making the game’s various mechanics work well.
Players will need to get used to these character sheets, as there is a lot of information on them. This game isn’t quite beginner friendly, and there are certainly RPG’s that are easier to recommend to new players. Still, for those who are willing to take the time to get to know everything that Awoken has going on, there is a lot to enjoy here. The game’s ten classes lead to a diverse amount of ways to enjoy the game. They are all familiar and fairly archetypical, but the number of skills and abilities present make them stand out from their counterparts in other role-playing games.
Awoken has a few mechanics that make it stand out from its peers. It takes the advantage system that is common in the genre and turns them into slight and strong advantages. The game also replaces weight management with a nifty inventory grid. How much a player can hold is as simple as their cards physically fitting in the grid. The cards come in mini, normal, and tarot sizes, making the inventory management a creative affair for adventurers. The battle system is both familiar and creative, using colored cubes to indicate conditions and directions. Finally, skill trees and magic allow for all classes to play how they want, letting the players decide how they want to grow.
While the strength of tabletop storytelling relies on everyone involved, Awoken does a fine job at making its scenarios easy to enjoy. For the DM, everything is lined out clearly, making them easy to understand set of rules work well with the game’s stories. We got to play a sort of demo of Awoken with three special scenarios, and all three of them are well written with plenty of opportunity for creative freedom. Each scenario is a couple of hours of fun, and Awoken’s final edition promises to be full of stories for adventurers to traverse. The game will be split into four “Seasons” each of with promises to have around 40 hours of content. If this promise is fulfilled, there will be a lot of value for Awoken fans.
You can secure yourself a copy of Awoken on Kickstarter now.
