Advert: We were loaned a prototype of this game for review purposes. All thoughts are our own.

Editor’s note: This review has been updated after playing an updated prototype.

The Goblin Queen is up to no good, the magical artefact is missing, and the world of Labrynthia is under threat! It’s time to grab your party, rally up, and take charge of your own Questiny!

Key stats

1 to 4 players | 1 to 2 hours

Publisher: Questiny Games
Designer: Leon Simmonds
Artist: Flintica, Hope Garrity, Hope Christofferson

Categories: Fantasy, Adventure
Key mechanics: Cooperative, Roll and move, 

Gameplay overview

Questiny is a co-operative fantasy game where you and your fellow heroes move across the board, navigating moving labyrinths, triggering perilous traps and battling fearsome foes. To win, retrieve the stolen magical artefact from the Goblin Queen and thwart her plans to rule the land! But watch out, because if heroes get captured by enemies too many times, or all heroes end up captured at the same time, you lose!

The stolen magical artefact has been hidden away in a Dark Tower at the other end of the board. All you have to do is get there, grab the artifact, and get it back home in one piece. On your turn, roll to determine your max movement – you can end your movement early but must move at least 1 space – then trigger the action on the square where you stop. There are a variety of actions, from finding gold to buying potions to drawing an event card. Action squares are also how you can rotate the Labyrinth and rotate the axes – inflicting damage on anyone underneath them! Some spaces hold a T-tile – these are either Treasure (yay!) or Traps (nay!) but you’ll only find out which one it is when someone lands on it and flips it over!

Obviously the Goblin Queen isn’t going to make it easy – her and her enemy besties WILL try to stop you. After all players have moved, it’s the enemies’ turn. Minor enemies move towards the nearest player, but Major enemies stalk towards a specific player who had the misfortune of being chosen as their ‘prey’. And, like players, enemies trigger the space they end movement on (so you always hope they land on a trap!).

If you land on a space with a baddie (or if they land on your space), movement stops immediately and it’s time to battle! The instigating character/enemy chooses the stat they wish to use: magic, strength, cunning or dexterity. Each stat is assigned a dice, ranging from a D4 to a D12, and each character has different strengths/weaknesses. The attacker rolls first, then the defender, and whoever has the highest result (taking into account any additional abilities and modifiers) wins! The losing character loses a health point, gives a gold to the victor, and retreats 6 steps from whence they came – if this means landing on another opponent’s space, another battle commences!

When an enemy runs out of health, they are defeated and removed from the board, but a token is on the Shadow Moon dial to indicate when new enemies will spawn. But if you lose all your health, you’re captured by the enemy until (if!) you can escape  – and remember, too many captures and the heroes lose the game!

At the round end, the Dagger on the Shadow Moon dial is rotated one phase. If it now points to a dark moon phase, additional character and enemy abilities are triggered for the next round (and these are usually bad for the heroes!). If it is also now pointing at a token (placed when an enemy was defeated), new enemies spawn to replace all previously defeated enemies (not just the enemy that triggered the token! ARGH!).

As soon as a player reaches the dark tower, they open it and grab the magical artifact from inside. But unfortunately for them, a Big Boss enemy was waiting in the tower, and now they’ll be chasing the heroes down to get the artifact back. Not only that, all active enemies now target the player carrying the artifact as well. If a player is ever defeated in battle whilst holding the artefact, the enemy grabs it and players have to defeat them in battle to get it back. This counts towards your captures, so it’s best to avoid it if you can!

So, to fulfill your Questiny, all you gotta do is take the labyrinth, get to the Dark Tower, kill baddies, grab the artefact, go home to victory, have a nice cold pint (of mead) and wait for it all to blow over. All in a day’s work for a hero like you!

Our first impressions

When I first saw Questiny, it was the moving elements of the labyrinth and axes that hooked me in and had me saying “I MUST play this game!” Since then we’ve been lucky enough to experience a designer-led demo and play 2 prototype iterations (including this latest version with the fancy components!), and so far every game has been different and we’ve had an absolute blast! It’s what I’d call an ‘experience’ game – a game you’d plan a whole evening around. From the theme and art to the interactive elements, you and your fellow players are in for a good time when you play, especially if you throw yourselves into the part.

Speaking of which, we love the hand-drawn art used throughout the game – it’s brilliant and so in keeping with the theme. The moving elements – rotating the labyrinth and swinging the axes – are so fun, especially if you time it right to foil an enemy! Enemies getting to trigger spaces is also fun – the glee we have when they trigger a trap instead of us!

If you’re someone who balks at a roll-and-move, never fear! The movement uses a modified die with only 5s, 6s and a 7 on the faces, meaning less frustrating rolls – no 1s here! Plus you still have the choice to end your movement early, which reduces the potential frustration even more and opens up more tactical choices. Personally we like the roll-and-move mechanic and think it adds a nostalgic call back to the older games that inspired Questiny.

There’s lots of narrative touches in the game, for example the heroes have fleshed out backstories (I LOVE that you can play as a badass unicorn btw!), and there’s (sometimes humorous!) flavour text on the hero/enemy event cards. All of this, combined with glorious art, draws you into the adventure and adds to the immersion. And while it’s not essential to roleplay at all, you could certainly throw yourselves into the spirit of the characters if you wanted.

The characters with their fleshed out backstories (I LOVE that you can be a badass unicorn!) and thematic flavour text and glorious art all add to the immersive adventure.

The base game is fairly straightforward rules-wise, so it could work with older kids/teens (there’s nothing overly inappropriate, but a couple of the cards may not be to some parents’ tastes). Keeping track of stat modifiers is the trickiest bit to get used to because you can have them across various places – character cards, legendary items, cards (it’s probably easier for people who DnD a lot, but I don’t).

The difficulty scales well depending on player size – mainly this is with the number of enemies that you can have in play: 2 in a 2-player game, 3 in a 3-player game, 4 in a 4-player game (with reduced starting health for heroes!). The rulebook also suggests various ways to modify the difficulty depending on the group, for example how many items you can hold, starting health and how many hero captures mean defeat.

The Kickstarter campaign will also include an expansion, which includes a short-play scenario that sees the heroes trying to stop the enemies from lighting 3 torches across the map as part of a demonic ritual. Interestingly, players have the option to play this scenario co-operatively (players are all heroes) or player-versus-player (some players control enemies! While this expansion is undergoing tweaking, we were very impressed with it so far. It inverts the premise of the base game – instead of heroes on a mission and the enemies getting in the way, in the expansion it’s the other way around – so it feels very different to play. It also demonstrates that Questiny can introduce additional scenarios in future to add variability, if wanted – even fan scenarios!

Finally, I want to acknowledge how much thought and effort has gone into developing Questiny. From the thorough rule book, to the instructional videos on the website, to the diagrams on the game box telling you how to put things away. It’s clear so much heart has gone into the game, and all that passion has paid off. Leon has gone above and beyond to make sure you have the best Questiny experience, and it really shows.

Final thoughts:

Questiny’s light but immersive experience makes for a great game night headliner that feels both familiar and novel.

Inspired by old skool games like Ghost Castle, Questiny successfully evokes a wonderful feeling of nostalgic fantasy both in its table presence and gameplay. Its light but immersive experience makes Questiny a great game night headliner that feels both familiar and novel. We had so much fun throwing ourselves into the adventure, and we can’t wait to see the final version.

The Kickstarter goes live on 1st September 2026, and you can find it here!