The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game: Helping Hands

Designer	Eric B. Vogel
Publisher	Evil Hat Productions
Players	1-5
Playtime	30 mins
Suggested Age	13 and up
Expansion For	The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game
Additional Info	208020/dresden-files-cooperative-card-game-helping-hands http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/208020/dresden-files-cooperative-card-game-helping-hands/forums/63

With new book decks Proven Guilty and White Night, you'll get even more variation in your options for play. As a pair of decks, these ones are particularly interesting in the Showdown, where you'll only get to spend Fate and roll for either Cases (in Proven Guilty) or Foes (in White Night). If you want to defeat your Foes or clear your Cases, you'll need to do so before you get to the respective Showdowns. And that's just the added challenge of the Showdowns for this deck — each one has its own new challenges, obstacles, and card interactions to give a different texture of play, as every scenario deck does.

But, you're probably most excited about the new character decks. And these ones are great! Both have an interesting relationship to the core game's Michael Carpenter deck.

Sanya's deck has a Hand of Hope Stunt that pulls a case close and adds clues to it — a kind of inverse of Michael's Stunt that knocks a foe far away and adds hits. It's that moment in the novel when Sanya shows up, helps an injured Harry get up on his feet, and says something Russian and profound that triggers a breakthrough on the case. And as the Knight of Hope, Sanya'sTalent offers a simple but powerful benefit of increased Fate Point payouts when discarding for fate, helping everyone on the team breathe just a bit easier.

Molly Carpenter's deck, meanwhile, mirrors her dad's in another way: like Michael's Talent, hers must be "readied" by a discard before it can be used. On a subsequent turn, you can flip the readied card back over to alter one of the dice you roll when you play a card. About half of Molly's cards involve a dice roll of one kind or another, so this is a powerful engine for optimizing your plays. But perhaps even more potent is her stunt, which lets you copy another player's currently-unused stunt! Need to double up on Harry's foe-finisher or Karrin's fate-harvester? Maybe summon an extra (if illusory) pack of werewolves to chew on injured foes, or get your Toe-Moss on to play the top card of your deck? Grasshopper is here to to help. Whatever your team can do, she can do — the power of a Talented Holomancer.

Speaking from personal experience, both decks are a ton of fun to play and add exciting new options and strategies as you take on your scenario of choice.