Paizo has worked to expand the reach of its flagship Pathfinder tabletop role-playing game with the 2019 cooperative Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and the 2018 Pathfinder: Kingmaker and 2021 Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous CRPGs. Now, the company is hoping to find new audiences with Pathfinder Quest, a cooperative adventure board game that arrives on BackerKit today.
“I have long wanted to have Paizo kind of branch out and spread its wings a bit beyond just roleplaying games,” Paizo director of games Jason Bulmahn told Polygon in a Zoom call. “Pathfinder and Starfinder have been big successes for us, but I think as a company we have a lot more to offer.”
The mechanics of Pathfinder Quest will feel familiar to Pathfinder veterans and players of adventure board games like Gloomhaven and Descent, as players control characters and navigate them around maps constructed from tiles while fighting monsters based on scenarios contained in an adventure book. Pathfinder Quest includes 12 adventures that each take about an hour to 90 minutes to complete and a book of 400 noncombat challenges that represent key decisions players make throughout their journey, from how they approach opening a chest to how they interact with a stray dog.
“Beyond the immediate consequences of choice, there’s a campaign sheet where you record some of the bigger things that happen. Did you save that mill from burning down entirely or did you not quite put out all the fire?” Paizo lead designer Joe Pasini told Polygon. “There’s a sealed letter. Do you open it and read it or do you leave it sealed and just deliver it? … Maybe in that same adventure, even several adventures later, you’re going to find out something different will happen because of the choice you made earlier on.”
While it uses the classes, ancestries, and setting of Pathfinder, Pathfinder Quest is designed to be accessible to players without any TTRPG experience. The recent Dungeons & Dragons starter set Heroes of the Borderlands has a similar goal, but Pathfinder Quest offers a distinct, fully cooperative gameplay experience rather than a simplified version of Pathfinder, so it can still provide a challenge to veteran players.
“We tried to meet in the middle where both board gamers who aren’t really familiar with Pathfinder and Pathfinder fans who aren’t big board gamers are going to find something to enjoy and immediately latch onto,” Bulhman said.
A key part of that was ditching the d20 in favor of having players roll special 6-sided dice. Four of the sides have pips representing a number of successes, and players will add them together and compare the total to the challenge’s difficulty to determine the result. A side with a skull allows an enemy to use their special ability, while one with a star gives a class-specific ability, like allowing a cleric to heal or a rogue to move. Character skills can shift the balance by ignoring skulls or adding stars.
“The d20 is a fun die for a narrative adventure role-playing game. It offers a broad swath of outcomes,” Bulmahn said. “When it comes to a board game, I wanted something that mathematically had a bit more of a bounded outcome. … It allows you to tailor a gameplay experience that is not as swingy and you can really dial in where you want the challenge to be.”
Characters will level up after every adventure, starting with the first one, which serves as a tutorial. Some equipment will be awarded automatically to ensure the group is ready for the next challenge, but other items can be discovered throughout the branching narrative. Every level offers the choice of class cards to represent new features, though you can also choose one of Pathfinder’s iconic characters if you want to hop right in without making any decisions.
“I think the game does a wonderful job of hitting that sweet spot between the simplicity and randomization of dungeon crawlers like HeroQuest and the complexity and two-hour setup of Gloomhaven,” Paizo marketing & media manager Rue Dickey told Polygon.
Pathfinder Quest is set in Darkmoon Vale, one of the first settings developed for the world of Golarion.
“It’s meant to be a place that you can easily step into and learn about our world one step at a time,” Bulmahn said. “You are new adventurers, you just arrived in town, and some problems start happening and you get drawn into these problems. It’s not required that you understand the nearly 20-year history of the Pathfinder campaign setting to play this game.”
While there are 12 adventures included in Pathfinder Quest, players will only play through eight of them depending on their choices. Bulmahn tried to be coy about how they were encouraging replayability in a narrative game, but the reveal of a time dragon miniature provides a pretty big clue.
“Let’s just say at the end of your playthrough you’ll be given the opportunity to go back and do things differently,” he said. “It’s actually part of the story that this is a thing that can happen, so we kind of encourage you to metagame and use that knowledge to your advantage to try and get a better outcome.”
Time is also a resource. A cardboard time tracker dial shaped like an hourglass ticks down as players fight, explore, and complete other tasks.
“There are benefits and drawbacks to going fast,” Bulmahn says. “Out of combat, you can spend time to heal and get yourself back up to full combat readiness, but that might come with other consequences.”
Pathfinder Quest will launch with the four core classes of rogue, cleric, fighter, and wizard, with oracle unlocking as a crowdfunding stretch goal. The base ancestries are dwarf, elf, gnome, goblin, halfling, and human, though more could be unlocked. The standard edition contains cardboard pawns for every monster and character in the game, along with 17 double-sided map tiles and more than 100 tokens representing locations, objects, and hazards. The deluxe version includes miniatures for the four iconic characters, plus the time dragon.
The crowdfunding campaign is mostly designed to determine how many versions of the game to produce and what players are interested in. There will be plenty more miniatures to unlock, all of which fit onto a standard grid so they can be easily used in a Pathfinder TTRPG session. Paizo is also partnering with miniature maker Titan Forge to get the STL files for every creature in the game that can be used for 3D printing at home or through a print-on-demand service.
“If this [crowdfunding campaign] does what I think it’s going to do, you’re definitely going to see some expansions,” Bulmahn said. “If we did a different adventure story, we could just release a new challenge book and a new adventure book and use the components in the box to tell a different story. We might want to include new item cards and maybe some other new cards as well, but we can expand this game without having to recreate the entire box every time.”
Paizo is targeting spring 2026 for fulfillment of orders. The standard version of the game will be available through retailers.
