Over time we have been developing our enjoyment of role playing games as well as board games. By Order of the Queen is a board game that blends them together in a light cooperative game with tons of flavor. There definitely isn’t nearly as much freedom as in a role playing game, but the game sends you on missions with fun flavor text to guide you down different paths depending on if you succeed or fail. With each players intrepid group of heroes and some dice rolls they will try to protect the land!
The goal of the game is to satisfy three of the queen’s orders,while forces of evil are always pushing down on the country. Each round only one player can work towards satisfying the queen’s order, as the other players do other tasks and defend from monster attacks. On each turn you have four different actions - although one of them won’t be terribly common.
The choices you have for your turn are the Queen’s Order, Questing, fighting monsters, and fighting the nemesis. The last one is uncommon because the nemesis doesn’t arrive until later in the game. Be thankful he doesn’t arrive until later because all of the big bad guys are hard to kill and do lots of damage at the end of the round. All the players have a hand of heroes used to fight monsters and do the different quests. Depending on what task you take on your turn you want different heroes - and some of them are even more loyal to you giving you extra abilities if you use one of those types of heroes.
Depending on what heroes you send along to either fight monsters or satisfy certain quests you are generally always look for high numbers on your rolls. Each monster will have certain numbers you need to hit and you need to get successes which are 5s and 6s when you go questing. Sometimes a lot of luck can be frustrating in a game as it can negate any chance of success. This game however didn’t feel overly difficult to win so it just added to the action to see if the players could roll well instead of deflating them if they rolled poorly.
We really enjoyed the fun narrative text you got while you went through all of the different quests. The art style is also great as well with lots of cute animals both real and fictional. Admittedly I’m a little bias towards cooperative games as I like working together and make group decisions but By the Order of the Queen is lots of fun with just the right amount of luck to make it a leisurely experience instead of a stressful one.