20 Strong: Tanglewoods Red Review
20 Strong from Chip Theory Games is a franchise I’ve always had interest in, but continued to tell myself, “I don’t play solo games.” Fast forward to mid-2025 and I found myself sitting at my gaming table late at night playing through Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs. Alone. That experience made me more willing to try solo game experiences, and when Chip Theory Games offered to send over their latest 20 Strong release, Tanglewoods Red, I decided this was a great time to jump into another, well loved, franchise.
In 20 Strong: Tangelwoods Red, you will be moving through a deck of forest cards and encountering enemies and merchants along the way. Depending on how you roll, you might be exploring the forest at night, or perhaps have a slightly easier experience during the day. There are really cool mechanics here where the number of dice you roll to determine one thing – i.e the forest card exploration for example – then becomes the number of items you can draw when visiting a merchant. Gold can be earned throughout your adventure and spent on various things, many of which can be wildly helpful as you explore the forest.
As you move through the forest – with some choices by the players – you’ll begin rolling all those lovely dice and trying to take down enemies. For me, I found 20 Strong to have a really great dice mechanic, how they are used, when you should use them, etc. The more you play, the more you learn, and the more critical and thoughtful you can be with how you use your dice. This extends to enemy activations as well. You’ll always have a scout line of cards to see what enemies are lurking in the shadows, and you might want to plan your dice use based on their special abilities. For example, when fighting the Wevill, he gets extra stats for each exhausted (used) yellow die – so you might want to plan around that.
Playing through Tanglewoods Red was pretty quick, but I definitely failed a few times. There are times when the dice aren’t going to be in your favour, and while you can mitigate some bad dice throws with Fable cards and items, sometimes it just doesn’t work out and you lose. This game is fairly quick, though, which means getting started again is a breeze, and more often than not when I did fail, I instantly got back on the pony and tried again. When you do succeed though, especially in the face of almost certain disaster, it’s such a great feeling.
There is also a decent amount of variety in this game. How the forest cards come out will always be a bit random, and the paths you choose through the forest will also likely always be different. Different character cards also provide different bonuses; to that end, how you approach a game is definitely heavily influenced by the character you choose. This base Red box has a number of great characters to choose from, and will provide hours of gameplay!
Chip Theory Games sent over additional sets in the Tanglewoods series, and putting them together can create a campaign that we most definitely will do and review. My first foray into 20 Strong has been an incredible experience, and I cannot wait to play more. I don’t love playing games alone, but with my wife or a friend playing another 20 Strong game at the same table, I can see this being something I do quite a bit in the future!
Article By Adam
