20 Strong: Tanglewoods Gold Review
I’ve played a lot of small-box solo games that promise a big adventure, but Tanglewoods Gold actually pulls it off. It’s tight, tense, and surprisingly thematic for a game that mostly runs on dice and cards.
If you haven’t checked out our review of 20 Strong: Tanglewoods Red we highly recommend doing so as it touches on a few of the core 20 Strong mechanics we don’t talk about here.
This time around, your goal isn’t just to wander the forest looking for an exit. Instead, you are hunting down and defeating three specific foes: Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear. Tracking them down gives the whole experience a bit more personality and direction. It’s not just “clear the deck” — it’s “find the bears and survive long enough to take them down.” How you get the bears into the play area in the first place I’ll leave up to you, but the tension it creates is pretty impressive.
The Tanglewoods Gold deck is pretty clever – you draw map cards based on your stats and choose one to play. It will have a number of directions on it; you’ll then draw cards from the main deck, attempting to find the correct directions on those cards to match your map card. Here’s the catch: some of those cards have ambush effects that trigger immediately when revealed — even if you don’t end up choosing them to satisfy your map card (as you don’t have to assign everything you draw). So digging deeper for a specific card is risky.
Once the map card is finished, you’ll need to deal with the cards you have drawn. Not every encounter has to be a fight, either. If you’ve collected enough gold, you can bribe certain enemies instead of battling them. It’s a useful escape valve when your dice pool is looking thin — though you don’t get the benefits you would from defeating them outright. That decision often feels painful in the best possible way.
Like other Tanglewoods decks, the cards have both a daytime and nighttime side. The shift between the two subtly changes how encounters play out, with the night side generally being harder and more impactful on your turn-to-turn decisions. I really enjoy the day-night cycle introduced in Tanglewoods, and it makes each game feel so much different.
Combat itself sticks to the clean 20 Strong system: your dice are your stamina. Every roll is a commitment. Spend too many and you won’t last. Spend too few and you’ll fail the encounter. It’s simple, but it constantly forces meaningful decisions.
What I appreciate most is how focused the design feels. Setup is quick. Turns move fast. But you’re always forced to make hard decisions. So often, your choice comes down to, “Which of these options hurts me least!?” There’s luck — absolutely — and sometimes the dice will betray you. But the push-your-luck card draws, the bribe-or-battle decisions, and the looming bear showdown give the game a strong sense of momentum.
Working through Tanglewoods Gold was such a pleasant experience, and while the general formula remains the same, it feels wildly different than our playthrough of Tanglewoods Red. With more heroes to play as and a bunch of unique features – map cards, direction cards, the three bears – this is an easy recommendation, and will provide hours of entertainment!
Article By Adam
