Just under a year ago, an enjoyable take-off of the classic board game HeroQuest was released. Called Arcane Quest 2 (Free), it offered up a single-player take on the concept, putting you in control of four different characters as they made their way through dungeons. It introduced a few new elements to make it more than just a copy, while retaining most of the core that made the original board game so much fun to play. The production values weren’t the best, and without multiplayer it was missing a key part of the HeroQuest experience, but it nevertheless proved to be a pretty enjoyable turn-based RPG. This year sees a return to the series, not with a follow-up, but rather with a spin-off. Arcane Quest Adventures (Free) uses similar core mechanics to the previous game, but focuses on providing a solo hero adventure. In some ways, it’s better than the last game, but in others, it falls well short.

Like the last game, Arcane Quest Adventures is a turn-based RPG heavily inspired by the board game HeroQuest. You’ll navigate dungeons, search rooms and objects for treasure, battle monsters using special dice, and so on. The first big difference in this game is that instead of controlling a party, you’re only using one hero. You can hire a mercenary to follow along if you like, but you’re on your own for the most part. The next thing you’ll notice is that rather than restricting itself to various arrangements on the same board, Arcane Quest Adventures spans multiple boards of varying shapes and appearances.

The flow of the game is a bit different, too. You’ll start from a hub area that contains a number of portals. You’ll only have one open to you at first, and you’ll have to beat it to open up the next one. Jumping into a portal brings you to an outdoor zone which contains shops, some treasure, a handful of enemies, and most importantly, entrances to dungeons. The boss of the area will be found in one of those dungeons, so you’ll have to explore them until you find the deadly monster. Kill it, and you can go back to the hub and head through the next portal. Even if you don’t find a boss in a dungeon, clearing it can earn you valuable experience points, treasure, and a gold bonus, so you never feel like you’ve wasted time.

I enjoy the way the game balances its rewards. You’ll never really have enough gold to buy all the equipment you’ll want, unless you choose to buy it through IAPs or grind it out. Thus, gold and equipment are scarce commodities, which means it always feels good when you find some. On the other hand, consumable items are very common, but your hard inventory limit on such tools means you can’t stockpile them. The game encourages you to make regular use of them rather than saving them for a rainy day that will never come. There’s a nice balance between these two types of treasure, with common stuff typically welcome because you know you’re going to use it soon, and rarer stuff feeling valuable because you’ll always need it. You’re going to want to search every possible location, basically.

The game’s turn-based nature sometimes gets in the way of that work, though. Just as in the last game, you can move a set number of squares and take one action on each turn. So once you’ve attacked, for example, you’ll have to wait until your next turn to search, even if you have the movement points to sidle up next to a box or what-have-you. However, in the previous game, you had four characters at your disposal, so it was pretty easy to do what you needed to do and still have actions left for searching. Here, your character is on his or her own, so clearing out a room can sometimes feel tiresome. Given the value of the potential spoils, however, you really feel obligated to be thorough.

That feeling occasionally extends to the combat, particularly when several enemies gang up on you. Early on, taking down enemies is a pretty quick process, but as you get further in, you’ll find yourself missing or whittling off smaller chunks with each hit thanks to the appearance of monsters with higher defense ratings. Battles drag on as you take your turn, do no damage, watch three enemies take each of their own turns doing no damage, then throwing it back to you, where you hit one of them for a single point of damage, and so on. It gets better as you unlock new abilities, but for a good portion of the game, there isn’t a great deal of strategy to consider while you’re fighting. The game offers an option to skip dice rolls and have characters take fast turns, and I strongly recommend you turn it on as soon as you’ve satisfied your curiosity about how the mechanics play out.

The way battles work is that each participant has two sets of dice. One set is for attacks, the other for defense. When you attack, you’ll roll those dice, and the number of swords that come up determines how many hits you inflict. The defender then rolls their dice, and the number of shields that come up is subtracted from the hits to determine total damage dealt. If there are equal or more shields when compared to swords, no damage is done. In the Arcane Quest games, dice come in different colors indicating how powerful they are. Equipment upgrades will either grant you more dice, or more powerful ones. Depending on the piece of gear, there might also be other effects that come into play, such as healing your character or inflicting stun on the enemy. You can also use special abilities or magic, depending on your character and their level.

It’s a decent enough system, but when reduced to a single-character party, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for interesting tactics. Even if you bring along a hired mercenary, you still can’t engage in the level of strategy the previous game allowed. Combat rarely elevates beyond standing next to the enemy and swinging (or spell-slinging) at each other until someone is dead, with the occasional turn spent to quaff a potion or two. I hate to say it, but it’s kind of dull. Which isn’t a deal-breaker, mind you. Lots of excellent games have terrible combat, even some of the best-selling ones. But if it’s not combat that it hangs its hat on, then it needs to be something else. That’s where Arcane Quest Adventures runs into some trouble. The story is nearly non-existent, and there aren’t any role-playing choices to be made. Character customization is non-existent, with level-ups granting you pre-determined bonuses. The equipment selection is largely of the sort where you need to reach a particular level to wear the next statistically-improved set of gear, so there aren’t any interesting decisions to make there, either.

Finding treasure is fun and rewards you for exploring the map completely, and that sense of exploration and discovery is probably the best thing the game has to offer. But even with a sort of perma-death in effect, there’s little risk in those explorations. As the game progresses, battles don’t so much become harder as they do longer. If you die, you’re kicked back to the hub with your progress in that particular portal lost, but whatever progress you’ve made in unlocking portals is saved. It’s a fairly light rap on the knuckles, and not much more than that. Arcane Quest Adventures does eventually get more difficult, especially if you fall behind on upgrading your equipment, but I’m not sure how many are going to be willing to stick with the game through its numb majority just to get to a little slice of something more exciting.

The last trick up its sleeve is the large number of playable characters. The free version restricts you to a small portion of the roster and serves up ads to monetize. If you paid to unlock heroes in the previous game, you can get a code from that game to unlock one of the two character packs for free here. Otherwise, it’s a meager $2.99 purchase to get both at once, giving you a total of 11 heroes to play as. Making a purchase removes the ads, and although you can always buy gold, you don’t need to. There’s a decent variety in characters here, with some a lot more fun to play as than others. Given what I’ve said about combat, you can probably guess that I would suggest the non-meatshield characters if you’re looking for more of a thrill. There’s just one problem with this set-up: you’re locked in to your character choice. The game only has one save file, so once you’ve selected your hero, you’re going to be using them for the whole game. Part of the fun of having a big roster of characters is in letting the player experiment. At least when you’re putting together a party, you have a chance to try four different characters at a time. Here, you’d have to play through 11 times to get a chance to use everyone.

Although it uses the same board game motif as Arcane Quest 2, it’s a little easier on the eyes thanks to its use of a variety of backgrounds. It’s still a bit hard to tell some enemies apart at a glance, and the whole thing is more functional than beautiful, but I can appreciate the improvements made here. Another improvement is in the game’s documentation. One of my criticisms of the last game is that it could be a bit bewildering for people who aren’t familiar with HeroQuest‘s mechanics already. Arcane Quest Adventures does a good job of explaining itself, with helpful tip screens that pop up when a player first encounters new mechanics. You can always go back and view them at your leisure, too. I also appreciate the “action mode", where the game skips the dice-rolling animations and speeds things up in general.

Arcane Quest Adventures is an alright game, and I certainly appreciate the advances it makes to the core gameplay of its predecessor. That said, it strips away a bit too much complexity in its goal of being easier to pick up and play. I think this concept could work, but if you’re going to have players use one character alone, each character needs to offer some interesting choices, whether it be through a healthy stock of special abilities, customization options, or something. Looking at it from another end, it’s still a little too involved to work as a pick-up-and-play game. Players are going to want to stick around to at least complete a full dungeon, so you’re already well out of the waters of being a brief bit of fun for people to fit into their day. Stuck somewhere in the middle, it feels more like a filler step on the way to its best features landing in Arcane Quest 3.