Cora Quest Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review CoraQuest, a dungeon crawler board game published by Bright Eye Games. CoraQuest is a family weight board game with streamlined rules and a kid-friendly theme.

Dungeon crawlers often have a toy factor to them with miniatures, terrain, and evocative art. They can also be relatively complex games to learn with a lot of edge cases and special situations based on the phase of the moon. Like any good parent, I’ve tried to introduce my son to different things and did so with dungeon crawlers with Jerry Hawthorne’s Mice and Mystics and Stuffed Fables. Those two games are, in my opinion, some of the best narrative-based dungeon crawlers for kids and are some of our best-shared gaming experiences together.

And that brings us to CoraQuest, designed by the father and daughter team of Dan and Cora Hughes, which was a family project during the early portions of COVID lockdowns in 2020. A neat twist to the game’s style was the art was crowdsourced from children from around the world. Full disclaimer/humble brag—my son drew a piece of art that made it into the game so I had some bias towards this title that you, the reader, should be aware of going into this review.

How does CoraQuest stack up to the heavyweights from Plaid Hat Games?

CoraQuest has one of the most streamlined rulesets I’ve ever seen in a dungeon crawler. Each their turn each player turn can take up to two full actions and as many free actions as they’d like.

Full actions are:

Free actions are using an item or revealing a dungeon tile. Free actions can interrupt full actions allowing players to move, reveal a new dungeon tile, and continue moving. For combat, each weapon lists a range and the die or dice that are rolled to hit. Additionally, each hero card