Oltréé shows its genealogy in its cheekbones. Now working with co-designer John Grümph, this is Antoine Bauza’s third take on the besieged fortress, completing an arc that began with Ghost Stories and continued with Last Bastion. Like those titles, Oltréé is about weighing odds and uprooting danger, working cooperatively to turn the tide. Unlike them, the siege has been more or less broken before your arrival on the scene. Those anticipating a stiff challenge need not apply.

Rangers on patrol.

Which isn’t to say you won’t lose. Tasked with maintaining a crumbling fortress in a beleaguered satrapy on the edge of a fallen empire, your handful of rangers are faced with problems aplenty. The setting is fantastical, although in a low-key way; there are giants and suspicious huts and the occasional walking corpse, but most problems are solved with a sword or some book work, not a fireball spell. It feels like something out of myth, a much-embellished tale from a tradition that’s less Arthurian and more Carolingian.

The hitch is that the outcome depends on, well, nothing you’re going to do. Oltréé isn’t the sort of game you play to make decisions. To be sure, there are plenty of threats out there. From the very beginning, the fortress is ringed with dangers, mostly in the form of encounter cards that threaten to spill over into real trouble. By marching your rangers out into the countryside, you flip these cards and resolve them. Dice will be rolled, resources will be expended, wounds will be taken. Regardless of the specifics, the encounter is resolved. Your ranger might return battered or with some extra treasure, but either way they will return triumphant. Despite some bruises and bumps, the effect is to defang the wilds of the satrapy. You aren’t so much rangers facing untold peril as janitors sweeping out the cobwebs in the corner.

Each ranger has their own ability… although it might not stick around.

In place of Ghost Stories and Last Bastion’s trademark difficulty, Oltréé swaps them for a storybook, both tonally and literally. Each session walks players through a single chronicle, a series of event cards that are flipped one by one like the pages of a book. There are quite a few of these — six chronicles in the base game, three in the expansion, and a promo floating around somewhere — and most provide their own standees or other components to add variety to the journey.

These are the highlight of Oltréé. There are multiple types of events, but the best is when you get to flip a page in the chronicle. Where one sees you shutting demonic portals, others might be about placating a local dragon, or fending off hordes of vermin, or preparing to venture into the underground.

Of course, Bauza and Grümph have only provided so many modes of interaction. Regardless of the details, you’ll be rolling dice and gathering resources and grumbling about how many actions it takes to journey from one part of the satrapy to another. Like everything else in this game, the chronicles don’t provide choices so much as obvious priorities that must be completed in order to shore up your odds of victory. Above all, Oltréé is a game that erects cairns along its intended path. You’re free to deviate from that path in some fit of free will or suicidal implosion, but doing so never makes sense from a gameplay perspective. It’s far easier and wiser to let the game ride your shoulder like some guiding angel.

Still, the chronicles provide the tendons that bind the game’s skeleton together, and they’re pleasant enough to flip through. The effect is not unlike reading a short comic, one that requires you to while away a few minutes in between each turn of the pages, and whose conclusion judges you on how you spent the downtime. It’s difficult to lose the game, properly speaking; more often than not, “losing” means receiving a less-than-stellar evaluation at the game’s end.

Take that, foul corpse-man!

Despite all that, Oltréé has an undeniable charm to it. I remember complaining about the uncompromising difficulty of Ghost Stories back in the day. Now Bauza has gone the other way entirely, crafting a game that isn’t always winnable, but that doesn’t bother to make its players carry the weight of any decision whatsoever, regardless of the outcome. In a way, the rangers come across as distant nobles. If they fail to protect the satrapy from this month’s undead uprising, they can always retire to their estates elsewhere.

Somehow, though, that’s part of the game’s storybook ease. My nine-year-old claps her hands when we get to turn the page of the chronicle, but doesn’t get frustrated when a roll fouls. In many cases, it doesn’t even matter; either way, we’ve solved the encounter that was causing consternation in the region. There are little trackers along the side of the fortress for prestige and defense, and the game ends in premature failure if these fall to zero. Theoretically, that is. I’ve only seen it happen once despite playing the game ten times. I can’t help but wonder if these were concessions, tracks to maximize for their top-end bonuses rather than prevent from zeroing. Perhaps Bauza would have preferred to just tell us a story, to let us flip through a chronicle and receive an ending based on our performance (or rather, how the rolls shook out), only he was overruled by the exigencies of modern game design. “What do you mean, you can’t lose?” some imagined publishing executive bellowed in that pitch meeting. “Add some way to lose, right now. Right now, while I’m watching.”

Of course, that didn’t happen. More likely, Oltréé’s flimsiness is the byproduct of received wisdom gone awry. The game required some way to lose because board games require ways to lose, so bottoming out the prestige and defense tracks became an early defeat. Oltréé would have worked better had it leaned into the idea that you can’t lose at all, only win in flimsier and more disappointing ways. It wants to tell us a story. Ten stories, across two boxes and a promo deck, all of them charming and interesting. I wish it had been bold enough to simply tell those stories, to weave them into its gameplay, and not worry so much about conceding to the legacy of Pandemic.

The best part of Oltréé is the stories it tells.

Because when played that way, in those moments when it’s all story, the sunlight shines through the gray. I happen to like Oltréé. It’s an affection that exists very much in spite of its best efforts. It isn’t a good whack-a-mole game, but it tills its ground with moles. It isn’t a good dice game, but it fills your palm with wooden cubes. It isn’t even a good story game — it buries its tale beneath too many molehills and dice for that.

But I like it. I like its charming landscapes and its colorful heroes. I like its Carolingian remoteness and its protagonists who feel like they might shrug and go home. I like its chronicles. Above all else, the chronicles. There’s a seed in here that could have blossomed into something green and sturdy and heavy with fruit. It didn’t blossom, not like that. But it could have. Perhaps, if Oltréé were one of its chronicles, its final evaluation would award one of its lesser endings. That seems suitable to me. “And the satrapy went on, not dying but not thriving, and all those who visited it reported that it was a pleasant enough place, unrefined and crumbling and a little too eager to please, but that they thought back on their time in that fortress and its ring of villages fondly all the same.”

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Complimentary copies of Oltréé and Oltréé: Undead & Alive were provided.