The Dungeons & Dragons board games have so far focused on co-op adventures where you work with your friends to fight through a dungeon.

In Chaostle, from Chivalry Games, you create a force of adventurers who want to kill everything they see in order to get to the center of the board. Three paths weave across the three-dimensional board, complete with staircases to move you up and down the levels. The higher you go, the trickier the path becomes, but the fewer spaces you have to move.

Of course, the other players are trying to get to the center ahead of you, and they will try to destroy your adventurers to do so. The only way to level up your characters is to win in battle, and you’re always juggling the need to fight vs. the need to move forward. Chaostle is simple to learn, but it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite board games.

In Chaostle, each roll of the game’s dice means something. If you roll a three, you get to roll again. If you roll a one or a two, you get to bring another one of your characters onto the board. If you roll a five, you’ll need to roll for a fate, a set of circumstances that could either dramatically help or hinder your forward progress. Each roll also tells your character how many spaces he can move ahead, and to win you’ll need to always be moving forward, fighting through the forces of the other players.

You choose how many characters each player controls; the more characters on the board, the longer the game takes. Each of the 16 included characters has a sheet detailing their abilities and skills, and each one of these can be leveled up to make them more effective in movement or combat. The only ways to increase your stats are to roll well when dealing with a fate, or to kill another character on the board. Dead characters go back to their starting positions, and you get to place a peg on your character card that makes one attribute more powerful.

This is where the strategy comes in. Check out the character card above. Do you want to give your character an extra space to move each turn? Boost his hit points? Raise his ability to soak up damage? You can also boost the damage and range of different attacks. You have a lot of freedom to build a character that fits your playing style, and the selection of characters to build your army is varied and interesting. You can be an archer, you can be a skeleton, you can be a unicorn and you can be a dragon. Each one is built to excel in different areas, so choose wisely.

The game’s length is adjustable by changing the number of players, and the number of characters each player can bring into the game. The board is split into four quadrants, and if you play with only two people you can limit the game to the first two sections to decrease the amount of space you need to traverse.

It’s also a good idea to keep the number of players at even numbers in order to make sure the fights are evenly spread across the board; each starting position has the characters moving either clockwise or counter-clockwise, and that makes for a lonely game for the first few rounds if you’re playing with three players. One player won’t hit resistance until they’re halfway around the board, while the other two players may be fighting almost instantly. Playing with four players takes away this uneven aspect of the game.

I also think we need to talk about the fates, because no other aspect of the game has proven to be controversial. But man, people hate the fates when we play.

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