In “The Adventures of Robin Hood” we get to experience the well-known stories from the other side, literally. A companion book leads us through a total of seven chapters of co-operative adventures in Sherwood Forest. The game board looks like an advent calendar, with numbered tiles you can pop out to reveal guards, castle gates or cave entrances. The numbers indicate which page of the book players need to read and let us have conversations with the villagers. Players draw discs and cubes from a communal bag to decide turn order, events and opponents’ actions, all of which works effortlessly. The innovative movement mechanic allows for a free exploration of the game’s world, which is full of hidden secrets and dangers.

“The Adventures of Robin Hood” uses the telling of the story to introduce players to the rules of the game in a natural way. The changeable game board, in conjunction with the companion book, keeps adding a range of possibilities for the players and offers a novel playing experience. What we found particularly successful was that if we failed a quest because we ran out of time, we could try again and experience a different variant of the story with new twists and turns.