The heroes I watched were brave, but still easily frightened. Smart, but still easily fooled. Rude, but somehow still friendly. I was invested in what I was watching because these heroes reminded me of me. And all I had to do once it was over was wait for the VHS to rewind and I could go on the adventure with those heroes once again. Search a pirate stash or bone pile in the room by rolling search dice. Goonies receive one item card no matter the outcome of the challenge, but draw a treasure card if they succeed. Mikey is successful in searching the Pirate Stash Bone dice faces are success, Flooded Token: Foes are not impacted by Flooded rooms, but any Goonie in a Flooded Room must spend 2 Wish Tokens instead of 1 for Upgrades and Teamwork. Adventure Action. These are used to remove Rubble tokens, Trapped Tokens, or activate Adventure specific actions.Data uses an Adventure Action to activate an Invention. Photo by Elizabeth MacAndrew.

Treasure Actions are actions listed on treasure cards. Follow the directions on the card and discard it. Adventure Actions

Reviews

Upgrading Dice: Players can upgrade a d6 or d8 with a Wish Token. For each Wish Token, a Die is replaced by one of the next highest value. The GM uses GM Tokens. a d12 cannot be upgraded.

Gain a GM Token. The GM can use tokens to upgrade dice, draw or play additional GM cards, defend, or perform an “End is Nigh” roll. This is the optimal scenario – a family playing an RPG-style game based around a movie that is a family favorite. The parents get to enjoy a classic story from their childhood and the kids get to enjoy it through play and excitement. Each Goonie has their own abilities specific to their character which helps them in different ways and there are enough Goonies included in the game that allow for the players to mix up who they play each time to make the game feel new and different each time (if they want to swap that is). The GM controls a set of enemies as well as a boss character, and these enemies are different for each of the adventures provided. The enemies are spawned and drawn by certain actions that happen during the game and are usually quite easy for the players to defeat, but the bosses are the real difficulty and main threat to the Goonies. These characters come with their own skills/abilities and come with more health too thus making them extremely difficult to deal with. Final Thoughts Similarly, the game is also objectively easier with more Goonie players since the GM only gets a single turn after every hero has gone. It’s not necessarily broken, but the game doesn’t scale very well in terms of its difficulty even if the fun remains the same regardless of player count. (The game comes with five playable Goonies but is not meant to played with more than four of them at a time.)

The Goonies: Never Say Die plays very much like a lite-version of a tabletop RPG. A large map is placed in the center and the GM populates the starting room. As characters move through and discover each new area, it's the GM's job to fill it with monsters, traps, and obstacles based on the Adventure Guide. In the early missions, games come down to simple move, fight, and search mechanics, with players not really knowing the end goal until a certain event is triggered. As the story progresses, the game adds new mechanics and obstacles that The Goonies must overcome. Setup the Starting Room and only the Starting Room (it will be the room with the Start Token). Place any Tokens that go in the room and Passages going from the Room. An Unexplored Token goes in each connected by a passage room.