Venture Party is a fun and simple, 3-7 player, hand management game. Fantasy themes and RPG tropes are turned on their heads in this game full of clumsy and unfortunately ill-fated heroes. The land is ripe with opportunity, and only one Venture Party will come out on top. Will it be yours?
However, there is one catch: none of your characters in Venture Party are very skilled; whenever they try to help, they get themselves killed (Unintentional rhyme - score!)
Venture Party is a fast, easy, and hilarious hand management game. Every turn you build up your party of unfortunate heroes only to sacrifice them for the good of the team. Your job, as leader of your Venture Party is to decide which character is putting their life on the line for the team.
Venture Party is wholly unique in the sense that every character you play will most assuredly die!
The goal is to end the game with the highest score, adding the total of your remaining Hero Power Levels and your Loot Tokens. The game begins by dealing 2 Character Cards and 1 Loot Token to every player. On each turn, you draw one party member and play one party member. The game ends when the deck runs out and everyone tallies up their score.
TL;DR: You draw one card and play one card each round. You want to end with the highest cards. Oh yeah! And each loot adds one to your score!
Think of it like this: You must have the highest hand at the end of the game, so you build up your party. But you also want to stay on the offensive, thus you have a character make a move. Your characters are not smart, so they may help you out, but they also horribly maim themselves in the process! Ultimately, you lose a party member but also (hopefully) gain something. Your Mounted Rogue (Level 2) could come back with an arrow in his head, yet he could return with 2 stolen loot snatched from another player. Or maybe you get into a dilemma where you don't want to risk your Level 12 Necromancer, forcing you to play your Level 3 Nihilistic Druid, ensuring you forget all your loot somewhere on the dungeon floor. That's part of the strategy of Venture Party, simple yet strategic.
When playtesting, it was hard to keep the game true to it's roots: simplicity.
People were constantly trying to add more and more rules, ultimately complicating the game instead of enriching the experience for everyone. Since players seemed to really want to customize the game the instructions include a House Rules section. So if you decide that the loot rules need to change, that everyone can roleplay their dying character, or even make people named Catherine always go first; you can just simply add those rules to your House Rules in the official rules booklet.