Advert: This game was loaned by Gravy Boat Games via the UK Board Game Review Circle. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.

Welcome, weary travellers! Come in, sit down and relax with a lovely tankard of ale while you wait for the rest of your party – soon it’ll be time to rally and head out on a quest. But for now, we DRINK!

👥 2 to 4 players (up to 6 with the expansion)
⌛  10 to 30 minutes
🧠 18 years+

Gameplay overview:

Playing Gather Your Party is so simple, you can do it pished! Everyone starts with 5 cards from the Go Drinking deck, and there’s 4 quest cards in the centre of the table. On your turn, you can spend 2 action points however you like to:

• Play a Patron or Event card from your hand (1 point). Patron cards belong to different adventurer classes (ranger, barbarian, etc) and have different abilities when played, such as giving opponents drinks or ‘healing’ your own drinks.

• Draw a card from the Go Drinking deck (1 point), which is full of more drinks and actions!

• Complete a face up quest card (2 points). To complete a card you need the right party members (drink cards) in front of you, which get discarded when they leave the tavern for a quest. Quests also have bonus rewards that resolve when you complete them.

The first player to get 4 reputation points from completed quests wins! Alternatively, players who hit 4 drinks are too trolleyed to quest on and are eliminated, so you can win by being the last player standing.

Our first impressions:

• Gather Your Party brings the classic fantasy adventurer & tavern concepts together in a new and interesting way. We like the simple but fitting designs of the different Patron cards with their various goblets and tankards – especially the superpowered Legendary Patrons!

there’s usually a mental bar fight between playing the powers you want and playing the Patrons you need for quests – especially when you can only have 4 Patrons in play.

• Each adventurer class has three different ‘tiers’, and their powers are similar but increase in strength: e.g., a Barbarian tier 1 forces you to take a drink, tier 2 forces you AND everyone else to take a drink, and tier 3 forces everyone else to get a drink. We liked how there’s usually a mental bar fight between playing the powers you want and playing the Patrons you need for quests – especially when you can only have 4 Patrons in play.

• As with many player elimination games, there’s potential for ganging up to occur – Matt says he felt very ganged up on when he was playing with me and his mum! When you only need 4 drinks to be eliminated, you can get knocked out quite quickly without being able to do anything about it. This is just part of the fun, but it could be frustrating for some. The games are quick so you aren’t left out for long.

• We like that the rulebook was thorough but didn’t click with the order – there was a lot of glossary style detail for different cards upfront, before getting to the overarching set up and gameplay, and our brains prefer it the other way around.

• We played this at 2 and 3 players, and it definitely worked better at 3 players – although maybe this is because Matt and I have fully transitioned from party animals to boring farts! It would be ideal to play with a group of friends.

• We would have preferred the drink tokens, which were silver plastic tokens with ‘1’ on them, to have a more thematic design.

Final thoughts:

Gather Your Party is an ideal option to kick off a games night with friends or take to the pub.  You can even play with real drinks (there’s a set-up variant for this)!

Gather Your Party is a fun party game that gives very light D&D tavern vibes. It isn’t a game we’d play at home, but it’s an ideal option to kick off a games night with friends or take to the pub.  You can even play with real drinks (there’s a set up variant for this)! Just be careful you don’t get so trollied you can’t go on your quests!