Base price: $23.
1+ players.
Play time: ~60 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 1 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Backstories: The Emerald Wedding Anniversary was provided by Lucky Duck Games.

This is the next game in the Backstories series, after Alone Under the Ice. They’re not narratively connected, however, so if you’d like just that review, check it out here!

Sometimes I let y’all drive my reviews a little bit. I think it’s fun! There’s always going to be a backlog and there are too many games in one year for me to review anyways, so I end up not always having a good sense of what games I should review next except for Kickstarter preview deadlines and the occasional Gen Con releases or PAXU / Essen stuff. So, sometimes, this means that I’ll just go through my analytics and see what people are looking at. Lately, it’s been a spike for some of the game hubs that I’ve been working on for the past month or so. I’m excited to have them as landing pages for the site, and some of y’all have been really hitting the Puzzle and Mystery Games Hub. To that end, here’s another puzzle / mystery game for y’all. I try not to check the analytics too often, though; that’s an easy way to drive yourself nuts. Let’s check out the latest game in the Backstories series!

In Backstories: The Emerald Wedding Anniversary, you find yourself in the role of Agent Nyx, going up against the evil General Darcosa and a stolen hard drive with nuclear codes. It’s a goober. You want it. You’ll have to use all your secret spy gadgets and training if you want to get in and get out alive, however. As with the previous Backstories adventure, the “how to play” of it all is simple: you treat the game like a point-and-click adventure. You’ll have a handful of actions and tools at your disposal, and to use one, flip over the card and place the action on the back to see how you interact with that situation. Sometimes you might gain an item or flip a card or see an entirely new card number to grab. Sometimes you might die. Don’t do that last one. As you progress, you’ll move between scenes and get deeper into the situation to see if Agent Nyx will be able to save the day. Just remember; you’re not any kind of 00, and you do not have a license to kill. Can you get in, get the goober, and get out again alive?

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Overall, I really enjoyed Backstories: The Emerald Wedding Anniversary! I think, first and foremost, it’s significantly goofier than Alone Under the Ice, to the point that it got me to actually chuckle a few times. As a noted Roger Moore, James Bond fan, I do kind of prefer my spy adventures to be a bit on the sillier side. Silly gadgets, silly situations, bonking a dude off of a toilet seat; the standard stuff. Here, I think the writing was on the strong side, and it made the game enjoyable to play in occasionally unexpected ways. A game that surprises and delights is generally what we’re looking for over here, and I also appreciate that they managed to do so while still keeping the game at a pretty solid, say, PG-13 rating? Maybe PG? I’m not a parent, but I think this was a relatively tame adventure. You don’t need to necessarily inject gritty realism into everything to make it entertaining, and some things can just be light and goofy. I’d point at Spy Kids as an example, but the first one had so much body horror that it freaked me out as a kid. Whoops!

This time around, it did seem like they iterated on the formula in a few ways that kept things interesting. For one, certain items could be used in situations that wouldn’t give you text, but would instead just give you a number to pull out of the deck to follow up. It means that the backs of the cards are stuffed, but everything works with everything else seamlessly. It’s pretty impressive! I think this and Crime Zoom both do a great job replicating that point-and-click adventure feeling. There are some humorous things that play with the formula as well (I think one puzzle’s solution tells you, the character / player, to draw a specific card, which breaks the fourth wall in a way that I think is goofy but acceptable), and I like seeing folks have fun within their format. It makes the game feel more like a game and less like a slog. The other standards of the Backstories series come back here, with multiple endings and multiple ways to accomplish things, but they’ve added this new and interesting “comic book”-style format where you can immediately branch off of a card and perform an action in some cases. It’s neat. I do wish it were a bit easier to get the cards out of the deck without having to look at a bunch of them, but I think that’s just the cost of doing business, here.

Oh! One more thing that they added that I really liked were transparent cards, allowing you to effectively wear certain things or add equipment as needed. It’s a really cool feature that’s used exactly twice in the game, which feels like a wild underutilization of a neat concept. Oh well. The Emerald Wedding Anniversary did, on the whole, feel more experimental than Alone Under the Ice, but I kind of like that? I hope that The Blaze, should it end up stateside, is also experimenting with the formula in different ways. They don’t all always work, but I think that it keeps the format fresh and gets players excited to dive in (or potentially dive in again and see if they can get a better ending). I do appreciate that you don’t have to destroy anything to play this, as well, so I may see if any of my friends want to explore this and see what endings they get. Or it might end up in the “great games for a Secret Santa” section of my brain. Both are important! If you like a narrative puzzle adventure, you enjoy some spycraft, or you just want to have a point-and-click adventure in a low-tech format, I think Backstories: The Emerald Wedding Anniversary is a super-fun entry to try out! Definitely a fan of the series.

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