Pathfinder Adventures
Pathfinder Adventures brings Paizo’s Pathfinder setting to phones and tablets by way of a campaign-focused card game. Instead of controlling a single character on a grid, you build a party of heroes and solve encounters with decks, dice rolls, and careful resource management. It aims to capture the feel of a tabletop dungeon crawl while keeping the pace and structure of a digital CCG RPG.
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Publisher: Obsidian Entertainment Playerbase: Low Type: CCG RPG Release Date: September 8, 2016 (Mobile) Pros: +Faithful digital take on the Pathfinder card game. +Lots of reasons to replay campaigns. +Surprisingly deep tactical decision-making. +Excellent onboarding and tutorial flow. Cons: -Lacks online PvP. -Little to no music during play. -Occasional bugs, including crashes. |
Pathfinder Adventures Overview
Pathfinder Adventures is a digital card game interpretation of Paizo’s Pathfinder universe, itself well known as a refinement of Dungeons and Dragons v3.5 rules. The core loop blends tabletop-style role-playing with collectible card game structure: you recruit heroes, each with their own stats, powers, and personal deck, then take them through story campaigns where nearly every action is represented by a card play and a dice check.
Campaigns are divided into locations, and your party spreads out to explore them. At each location, heroes reveal encounters that can be dangerous banes (monsters, traps, harmful effects) or helpful boons (equipment, allies, spells, upgrades). Success usually comes down to a dice roll modified by your character’s skills and the cards you commit, so timing matters. Since a hero’s deck functions as their endurance, burning through cards too quickly can be as lethal as taking a bad hit, and managing hand size, discards, and reshuffles becomes part of the strategy.
Progression is driven by improving your decks with better loot and smarter card mixes, then tackling the same adventures again under different difficulty settings and randomized setups. For players who prefer a shared tabletop vibe, there is also a local cooperative option using Pass/Play, which lets two people share a device and coordinate a party together. New campaigns can be unlocked with in-game currency, giving the experience a longer-term structure beyond a single run.
Pathfinder Adventures Key Features:
- Pathfinder on Phones and Tablets – Paizo’s Pathfinder arrives as a mobile-friendly digital CCG adaptation with a campaign-driven structure.
- Hero and Deck Management – collect different heroes, each defined by unique powers, dice skills, and a personal deck that shapes how they play.
- Card Play Plus Dice Checks – encounters are resolved through dice rolls that you can enhance, protect, or gamble on by spending the right cards at the right time.
- Designed for Replays – campaigns include randomness and multiple difficulty options, encouraging repeated runs and experimentation.
- Easy to Learn, Hard to Master – a strong tutorial explains the rules clearly, which is important given how many systems are in play.
Pathfinder Adventures Screenshots
Pathfinder Adventures Featured Video
Pathfinder Adventures Review
Pathfinder Adventures succeeds most when you approach it as a careful, campaign-based card RPG rather than a competitive CCG. It is built around party composition, risk management, and long-term deck improvement, and it captures a lot of what makes tabletop sessions satisfying, namely building a team, adapting to bad draws, and squeezing value out of limited resources.
Campaign structure and pacing
Each scenario has you racing against a countdown, represented by turns and location decks, while trying to close out objectives before you run out of time or cards. The structure creates a steady tension: do you spend good cards early to secure an important check, or save them for the unknown threats deeper in the location? Because heroes can split up to cover more ground, the game encourages planning and coordination, especially when a single character cannot reliably handle every type of check.
Combat, checks, and moment-to-moment decisions
Most encounters boil down to a check, usually with dice, and then a decision about what to commit from your hand. The best moments come from reading the situation correctly, stacking the right bonuses, and turning a risky roll into a reliable success. The flip side is that the game can feel punishing when the draw is uncooperative, since the difference between a clean win and a messy scramble is often a small handful of cards.
The “deck as life” concept is also one of the design’s strongest ideas. It makes every card meaningful, not just the flashy ones. Burning cards for bonuses is powerful, but it also shortens your runway. That tradeoff creates a distinct type of tension compared to many mobile RPGs, where healing and resources often refill freely.
Heroes and deckbuilding depth
Heroes are not just cosmetic choices. Their stats, dice proficiencies, and special rules push you toward different builds and different approaches to problem solving. Over time you are effectively tuning multiple decks at once, deciding who should carry which tools, and how your party covers weaknesses. That multi-deck management is a big part of the “very deep gameplay” appeal, and it is also why the tutorial is so important. Without a guided introduction, it would be easy to bounce off the rules density.
Co-op and social features
The game includes Pass/Play for cooperative runs, which fits the tabletop roots nicely and can be genuinely fun with a friend. However, the lack of online PvP (and broadly limited online competition features) means players who want head-to-head card battling will need to look elsewhere. Pathfinder Adventures is more about beating scenarios than outplaying other humans in a ranked ladder.
Presentation and technical issues
The interface does a decent job of translating a complex tabletop-inspired ruleset to a touchscreen, but it can still feel busy when multiple effects are stacking. Sound is also a weak point. With no music during gameplay, long sessions can feel oddly quiet unless you provide your own background audio.
On the technical side, stability issues can still intrude. Bugs and occasional crashes are the kind of problems that hurt a campaign game more than a quick-match title, since a failure at the wrong moment can disrupt a run and break immersion.
Who it is for
Pathfinder Adventures is best suited to players who enjoy campaign progression, tactical resource decisions, and a rules-forward card system that resembles tabletop play. If you are looking for a Pathfinder-flavored experience that feels like a structured dungeon crawl in card form, it delivers. If your priority is competitive PvP or a highly polished audiovisual package, its limitations are hard to ignore.
Pathfinder Adventures Links
Pathfinder Adventures Official Site
Pathfinder Adventures Google Play
Pathfinder Adventures iTunes App Store
Pathfinder Adventures Forums [Official]
Pathfinder Adventures Requirements
Minimum Requirements:
Operating System: Android 4.0.3 and up / iOS 7.1 or later.
Pathfinder Adventures Music & Soundtrack
Coming soon!
Pathfinder Adventures Additional Information
Developer(s): Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher(s): Obsidian Entertainment
Platform(s): Android, iOS, PC
Game Engine: Unity
Tablet Release Date: April 28, 2016
Mobile Release Date: September 8, 2016
PC Release Date: TBD
Development History / Background:
Pathfinder Adventures is a CCG RPG created and released by Obsidian Entertainment, the Irvine, California studio known for its role-playing games. It adapts Mike Selinker’s Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, which itself translates Paizo Inc.’s Pathfinder RPG ruleset (a well known evolution of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5) into a card-driven format. The Unity-powered digital version first arrived on Android tablets and iPads in April 2016. A wider mobile launch followed in September 2016, with a PC edition planned to come later.