On your turn you can either take a specialist action or a hero action. Specialists are friendly creatures that can perform a specific action for you. And the hero is you. When you perform a hero action you must first move, and then you can visit a location and perform the action depicted on it, fight a monster or investigate a location. In the introduction you do this by turning over a chip, but you can also play 6 chapters where you read the stories from a storybook and can make choices that have all kinds of different consequences for the game. You can also get missions in this game, and when you complete them you can hand them in at a location for the rewards.
Combat is simple in Now or Never, but with a twist. You have four slots for attacks, which you can upgrade during the game. During a battle you roll a D4, and that determines which attack you perform. In addition, you have four slots for permanent bonuses that always apply to a battle. Monsters only have an HP value, an attack value, and a reward when you defeat them. By upgrading these slots you can make your character strong for battles. And if you win a battle, you often gain experience, which you can use to unlock those stronger attacks. Each character has a unique set of attacks. But this is only one of the pillars of the game.
You are also given an empty village board at the start of the game, on which you can build buildings for villagers to live in. You will need this for the production of goods, which you need to pay for those buildings, for example. And you can sell goods for money, with which you can, for example, buy specialists. You also sometimes need goods for mission cards and always for orders. You will also be adventuring around the board a lot to visit the different locations where you can trade resources, lives, coins, mission cards, experience, orders and other aspects of the game for each other in certain proportions.
So you can specialize in fighting monsters, in researching locations, in building buildings, in populating your village, in attracting specialists, or in making mission cards and/or orders. But you already feel it coming, you are never going to be good at doing everything, you will have to make choices...
After six rounds the game is over. You then have to throw away all your money and all your resources, and then it is checked how good the engine you have built is. You then produce again (just like every round), and you can then sell your produced resources for money. Each coin then translates into a victory point, which you add to your other victory points from buildings, missions and orders to determine the winner. You can play a chapter separately or knit it together in a campaign, where your reputation is also tracked during the entire campaign. You can also play underground on the back of the board, and finally a solo mode is also included.
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