The Dungeons and Dragons board games have so far focused on co-op adventures where you work with your friends to fight through a dungeon. In Chaostle, from Chivalry Games, you create a force of adventurers who want to kill everything they see in order to get to the center of the board. Three paths weave across the three-dimensional board, complete with staircases to move you up and down the levels. The higher you go, the trickier the path becomes, but the fewer spaces you have to move.

Of course, the other players are trying to get to the center ahead of you, and they will try to destroy your adventurers to do so. The only way to level up your characters is to win in battle, and you're always juggling the need to fight vs. the need to move forward. Chaostle is simple to learn, but it's quickly becoming one of my favorite board games.

Getting ahead

In Chaostle, each roll of the game's dice means something. If you roll a three, you get to roll again. If you roll a one or a two, you get to bring another one of your characters onto the board. If you roll a five, you'll need to roll for a fate, a set of circumstances that could either dramatically help or hinder your forward progress. Each roll also tells your character how many spaces he can move ahead, and to win you'll need to always be moving forward, fighting through the forces of the other players.

You choose how many characters each player controls; the more characters on the board, the longer the game takes. Each of the 16 included characters has a sheet detailing their abilities and skills, and each one of these can be leveled up to make them more effective in movement or combat. The only ways to increase your stats are to roll well when dealing with a fate, or to kill another character on the board. Dead characters go back to their starting positions, and you get to place a peg on your character card that makes one attribute more powerful.

This is where the strategy comes in. Check out the character card above . Do you want to give your character an extra space to move each turn? Boost his hit points? Raise his ability to soak up damage? You can also boost the damage and range of different attacks. You have a lot of freedom to build a character that fits your playing style, and the selection of characters to build your army is varied and interesting. You can be an archer, you can be a skeleton, you can be a unicorn, and you can be a dragon. Each one is built to excel in different areas, so choose wisely.

The game's length is adjustable by changing the number of players, and the number of characters each player can bring into the game. The board is split into four quadrants, and if you play with only two people you can limit the game to the first two sections to decrease the amount of space you need to traverse.

It's also a good idea to keep the number of players at even numbers in order to make sure the fights are evenly spread across the board; each starting position has the characters moving either clockwise or counter-clockwise, and that makes for a lonely game for the first few rounds if you're playing with three players. One player won't hit resistance until they're halfway around the board, while the other two players may be fighting almost instantly. Playing with four players takes away this uneven aspect of the game.

I also think we need to talk about the fates, because no other aspect of the game has proven to be controversial. But man, people hate the fates when we play.

Talking with the designer

When you roll a five, you must roll a single die again, and that determines whether you earn a bonus from the happiness list or whether you're going to suffer something from the doom selections.

The fates are listed on two reference cards, and they range from a few free levels for your weapons to a character being lost to an "instant win" of the entire game. Fates can dramatically change the course of the game, for good or ill.

"The fates seemed balanced during play testing when everyone rolled on par with the odds, and a lot of thought was put into the placement where the more chaotic fates were less likely to come up," Mark Jacobs of Chivalry Games told Ars.

"Then I started encountering cases where people were having unlucky streaks and rolling non-stop doom fates, and were not enjoying the game as a result. I listened to their responses and recently provided improved fate reference sheets that have received very positive feedback," he added. You can find the new sheets on the official game page, and the new fates will soon be packaged into the game. If you buy the game after reading this review, you may already get them.

Our solution has been simpler: we just play without them.

Why this game is so good

The movement and combat systems all make sense and are easy to master, and the game effectively combines strategy with luck. By choosing to move or to increase your character's power through battle, and by picking your characters well to create a well-rounded team, you have great control over whether you win or lose. It's fun to decide whether or not you should move up to the higher levels of the castle in order to scoot ahead, but if you get stuck with bad dice rolls it may be hard to make the jumps necessary to move to your destination. If you level up your movement bonus, that makes things easier. There's a lot to balance while playing.

I've played games where I made a break for the center of the board, and I've also created teams of tanks that existed only to slice through the other players and send them back to their starting positions. Once you understand the rules, you can play a game in around an hour, but if you want to make larger teams, games can last much longer. This is an attractive game with a great board, wonderful miniatures, and it mixes roleplaying with strategy and simple rules in a way that's fun and light, with plenty of room for tricky moves.

I'm in love, and it's entered my weekly gaming rotation. The game sells for $70 on the official site, but it's worth every penny.