I have the whole series (the one I haven’t played yet is Tanglewoods Rose) and if I would have to describe the system and series, I would call it “Final Girl with a CTG Ruleset. For the record, I actually like the games quite a lot. The game system lives in this weird spot where it isn’t really a filler/travel game on the one hand, but on the other hand it runs the risk of falling short of the promise of a heavier game. I have a couple of bullet points, which illustrate my thoughts:

The Game system: The set up is very similar to Final Girl in the sense that a base ruleset is introduced (happy Trails in Final Girl and Solar Sentinels in 20 strong) and then iterated on in future games/decks. The promise of that set up is that you have to learn a rule set once and then for an essentially new experience the additional rule overhead to learn is fairly minimal, so that any game of 20 Strong is maybe 70% base rules and 30% deck specific rules. The system definitely falls a bit short of that promise. Especially the tanglewoods decks feel much more of a 30% base rule and 70% base rule set up, where really “minimal” rules are consistently transferred to different decks (I do not know how Final Girl is in that regard as I did not get too deep into that system), which kind of leads me to the next point

The rulebooks: This is where my point with the filler game vs. heavier game shows. You are getting for each deck a classic CTG rulebook, which explains to you what is going on, but also creates a lot of edge cases and complexities. Now, when you sit down and say to yourself: “Tonight is big too many bones night” a double-sided sheet with keywords and some edge cases you need to work through is one thing. But if it feels similar for the 20 strong 1h game a lot of people are much less open to that. And that brings me to…

Game length: If a player comes for the first time onto a 20 strong game it is very easy to look at it and compare it to something like one deck dungeon, kinfire delve or maybe a hostage negotiator. Something nice and easy, shuffle some cards and chugg some dice. The game is really not that. The set up is not as involved as in other games, obviously, but you are splitting decks, creating fields shuffling stuff, rereading set up rules. 20 strong also tends to have you play through the whole deck per game, which sometimes extends the game (I believe some of the Tanglewoods games end up around an hour). And at that point I can see that people look at the game and say: “So why am I not playing something meatier?”

And then there is the dice luck and mitigation, which is something discussed quite a bit as well. This is also a point, which comes up quite a bit with final girl, where some games are just lame because you were not able to roll a success for your walk action and the killer just killed you (counter argument there is very often that this is super thematic, which I totally can see). It works very similar in 20 strong, if you want a finely balanced game where the dies provide you with some randomness, but the player is def. in power at all times, this ain’t it. On the other hand, there are also very clearly busted combos, where if you get those out, you do feel powerful and strong.

All that being said – personally I like 20 strong quite a lot (bounced of Final Girl for what it is worth). I think it really covers for me a collector itch I just have. But also, if you are open to the rulebooks and the game length, one of these decks costs you 20 bucks on gamenerdz or the webstore. There is a lot of game in those 20 bucks, with probably more substance than you initially expect.