Full Disclosure – A copy of HerStory was provided by Underdog Games for review purposes
Introduction
March is Women’s History Month, and to celebrate both the month, and the 19th Amendment (granting women the right to vote in the USA), Underdog Games is selling their recently released board game HerStory, for $19.19 (US only, sorry fellow non-Americans).
I don’t know if it’s just me, but as soon as a game is billed as educational doubts creep into my mind. I blame the poorly made educational games I played as a kid in the mid 90’s (I have the same gut reaction to movie tie-in games too). HerStory is educational in that all the cards represent real women throughout history, and includes a small paragraph of what makes them notable.
How to Play
HerStory, designed by Nick Bently, Emerson Matsuuchi, and Danielle Reynolds is a 2 – 5 player set collection and card drafting game. In HerStory, players are authors and spend their turns researching, drafting, and completing chapters of a book chronicling the stories of remarkable women of History
On your turn, you take one of the three actions. When you research, you take a token depicting aspects of your research (reading, thinking, interviewing, and searching) from the main board and place it into your supply. When drafting a chapter of your book, you take a chapter card from the main board, and slot it into one of the two open spaces on your desk, reserving it for yourself, and scoring 2 points. The final action in the game is to complete a chapter, where you select a chapter card, either one you reserved previously, or, from the main board, and discard research tokens to fulfill the requirements of the chapter. Then you slot the completed chapter onto it’s space on your board and score the points in the top left corner (and earning 3 bonus points if you managed to fulfill the recipe exactly). Many characters have persistent research tokens that you can now use to finish future chapters.
HerStory ends when someone completes their 8th chapter. Players finish the round, ensuring that all players had an equal number of turns, then the player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
It’s been a long time since a “how to play” section was pretty much a single paragraph. HerStory defies expectations. The box is much larger than necessary, but the cover is striking. My partner was actually the one to receive the package from the courier, and she remarked that she loved HerStory‘s cover. It was the kind of game that if she saw it on a shelf at a store, she would stop in her tracks and pick it up.
The cover depicts 16 of the 120 women featured in the game, with wonderful portrait illustrations by Eunice Adeyi and Cristina Aguirre. Some gold foil on the cover surrounding the title is striking. Opening the box, the first thing I saw was an envelope with some special gifts. Postcards, bookmarks, and stickers to keep these influential women prominent in our lives. The game itself is composed of a monogrammed bag of thick tokens, a large, stitched edge neoprene mat to serve as the main board, 5 chunky pushpin score markers, and 120 large sized cards, each one depicting an illustration of a different woman on one side, and a short blub of who they were and what makes them notable on the back.
No expense was spared in this production. The cards and the rule book have a luxury linen finish, the cardboard chits are very thick and feel sturdy in your fingers. I’m not a fan of the faux leather monogrammed bag, I’ve never liked the way faux leather feels on my fingers, but it’s sized correctly; there isn’t a lot of empty space in that bag. The plastic insert is well-designed, in that it was successful as keeping all the components in their appropriate wells, even when the box is stored on its side, a feat not all game inserts manage to achieve.
I will say the box for HerStory is much bigger than necessary, each of the card wells in the insert has space for hundreds of more cards. I suspect this extra space is so Underdog Games can release expansion packs, highlighting even more women in the future. Assuming they continue to support this game in the future, the box might fill up, but at the time of this writing, it’s a bit bare. Some part of me always wants a game box to be as small as possible, but I can’t deny that HerStory is striking, and part of that comes from the full size box demanding space on the shelf, and showcasing its gorgeous illustrations.
I like the theme of writing a novel about women in history, having each player spend several turns researching to acquire the knowledge to write a chapter feels clever. Taking tokens that represent interviewing, reading, and thinking about each of the figures feels important, in that it’s important to put in the proper research when writing about famous people, especially in a world rife with misinformation. When you finish the game and collect all your chapters together behind the book cover that is on the back of your player aid, you feel like you’re holding something you’ve built. It seems a bit silly in that they’re only the cards you collected, but they represent the effort you spent on researching and learning about each figure. The rulebook suggests that at the end of the game, each player selects one of their cards, and reads the biography to the table.
The core gameplay loop is incredibly simple. You’re either ‘researching’ to take a token, or, spending those tokens to complete a card. There’s not a lot of space for strategic depth here, once you’ve played through a handful of turns, you’ll have tried everything available to you. From that point on, it’s just repeating the same core loop and trying to optimize based on the cards that are available to you. Some cards will offer powers that you can use all game, like persistent research icons, while others give you benefits throughout the game (like Wangari Maathai, who earns you extra points for completing lower valued chapters), and others are simply high valued cards, like the 8 point powerhouse that is Joyce Chen.
Many of the cards have special abilities, but the ones I wish I saw more of were the powers that offer persistent research symbols. In one game I got 2 different persistent benefits cards, then I was able to start completing cards by only spending a single token, leaving my opponents in the dust. My 8 cards to their 5 felt like a momentum that couldn’t be overcome. The variety of the cards is deep, in that there are 120 cards and in a 2 player game you’ll only see around 25 cards per game. I kind of wish that every card offered a single persistent benefit in addition to their text power, as that would help give the feeling of momentum as the game wears on. At the start of the game, spending 3 or 4 turns just getting tokens, then another turn to earn a single card is fine, then at the end of the game being able to complete chapters with a single token felt great, and I wish all players could experience that satisfaction.
Some will be disappointed with HerStory because of just how simple it is to play. But I think its simplicity is a strength, in that HerStory is incredibly accessible. Anyone can play this game, and it’s the kind of game that many people should play. The turns are fast and smooth, downtime is minimal, the components feel nice to hold. More importantly, it’s great for highlighting and teaching about influential women throughout history. Showcasing the great things these women have accomplished despite the barriers of being a woman is inspirational, and the kind of product that I want in my house. Frequently I would complete a chapter, place the card on my player board, then think to myself “Who even is Golda Meir?” I liked having the option to just turn the card over to discover what made her notable (She was the first and, so far, only female Prime Minister of Israel).
In conclusion, I want you to ask yourself, “what is the purpose of this game for me?” If you’re looking for a complex board game with lots of interlocking mechanisms, and a deep strategic well to plumb, HerStory isn’t going to fulfill that need for you. If you’re looking for an attractive, easy to play game full of inspirational figures that will simultaneously provide you with an activity to engage with, and teach you about some of the accomplishments of women throughout history, then I can’t recommend HerStory enough. I want my little girl growing up knowing there’s nothing she can’t do, and exposing her to the stories of strong, female role models is a great way to start.
A copy of Zaberias was provided by the designer for review purposes
Zaberias is the kind of game I wished I had as a kid. It presents itself as a fairly light tactical skirmish game where you throw yourself against an opponent. Considering just how much Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones I was playing on my GameBoy Advance back in the day, I’m sure 12-year-old Alex would have loved to get my hands on this game.
How to play
In Zaberias, each player takes control of one of the four factions, and places their map adjacent to the other players, then erects a single wooden building in the far corner of their map. The map has slots that allow you to stand the towers in, creating a nice 3D effect. The maps are identical in layout, the asymmetry from the factions comes from the units you can deploy.
At the start of the game, you’ll have 5 coins available to you. You can take as many actions as you want, and spend as many coins as you want to deploy units and upgrade cities, but you’ll only recover gold at the start of your turn based on the cities and number of gold mines you collect.
On your turn you can summon units to cities, upgrade cities, and activate the units that are on the board. Each city can summon creatures up to their level (a wood city can only summon the first tier wood creatures, while a gold city can summon any creature). Pay the coin cost on the back of the unit and place it in the same square as the city. If you want to upgrade a city, pay the cost of the new tier of city and replace the old city with one of the higher level. Each unit can only be activated once per turn, and activating a unit means moving and attacking (or attacking and then moving). Each unit has a movement value that lets them move orthogonally throughout the map, or, diagonally if they’re following a road.
Attacking has you comparing each of the units base ‘muscle value’, then rolling a number of dice to modify that value. The unit with the lower value at the end of the combat loses, and is removed from the board. Units can attack together to gang up on a bigger unit, should multiple friendly units be in range, but each unit can still only attack once.
The goal of Zaberias is to be the last tribe standing. You do this by eliminating your opponent’s units and taking over their castles. Once a player has no more units or castles on the board, they’re out of the game.
Review
Zaberias is a weird product. The current edition of the game is 4 triple layered cardboard squares, with a foam inset to hold the dice. It doesn’t come with a box or a paper rulebook, just, these four self-contained tribes in a bubble mailer. It might be a nitpick, but Zaberias stands out like a sore thumb amongst the boxes on my board game shelf. Each unit and tower is snuggly set in the cardboard, which can sometimes present a struggle for getting the pieces you want out. I do wonder what kind of longevity this product has, after only 3 times playing, a few of the cardboard piece were starting to bend at the point where you pry them out of their cardboard cage.
Learning how to play Zaberias is a struggle. The rulebook and FAQ do have all the answers to the questions that came up during game play, but finding those answers was surprisingly difficult. There are also a lot of edge case rules that make teaching the game to a newcomer, difficult. It’s the kind of game where if you’ve played it a lot, everything will feel second nature and obvious, but it’s hard to cover all the nuance in your first game. Rules like “units can only move orthogonally. Except on roads.” and “Ranged units can only attack orthogonally. Except on roads.” or “If you lose a combat, that unit is removed from the board. Except if you’re ranged, then nothing happens.” and “Units can only attack once per turn, but if you tie during an attack, you can choose to attack again, or, stand down.” Little exceptions to rules make the game harder to learn than it should be.
Most of the units have a special ability, that gives each of the races an asymmetric advantage, but their abilities are all listed on the back of the token. It’s really annoying to have to pick up each token and remind yourself of what each one can do. Again, if you’ve played Zaberias a lot, and you’re familiar with all the units, it’s not a problem. But for me, I got frustrated when I forgot to use a unit’s special ability, or when a unit could do something surprising, like keep defeated units under their token to get a +1 in their next combat, especially when I had plans to re-summon that unit in the next round.
I can’t recommend playing Zaberias at more than two players. It’s easy to get ganged up on, to have one player wipe out your defences, then another swoop in and take your castle. The player who waits until two others fight it out, then pick off the remaining units, is going to be in the best position. It feels like the game hinges on a few key battles, then when one player gets an advange over the other, it’s very hard to make a comeback, which in a 2 player game, is fine, as it’s over fairly quickly. But if you’ve been reduced to a single coin and a wooden tower in a 4 player game, you’re just waiting for someone to make the effort to come over to your corner of the board and finish you off. Not a fun experience. One nice thing about playing exclusively at 2 players is the ability to swap our races between each game.
Playing Zaberias was more fun than I expected it to be. Perhaps I’m jaded, but when I saw the emblems on the cover of each race stating “#1 best educational game for Kids 6+!”, and “Guaranteed fun!” I got a sinking feeling in my gut. You shouldn’t have to advertise that your game is going to be fun, that’s the point of the product! But overall, it’s a fairly good system. You move your units, control spaces on the board, and roll dice to resolve combats. This does seem like the kind of game that kids could get really into. A gateway into bigger skirmish games, like Warhammer and Battletech. I’m sure if I had Zaberias as a kid, I would have forced my mom to play with me a lot, it evokes the same feelings as the video games I was obsessed with at the time (the aforementioned Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem series).
Overall, I can tell that a lot of time, effort, thought, and love has gone into designing Zaberias. It seems like the kind of product that the designer has tinkered with over the years as his loved ones grew older. On the cover, it states that Zaberias was 15 years in the making. Looking at past iterations of the product, it looks like this 3rd edition has been scaled back, simplified and refined. I still think Zaberias could do with a bit more refining, sand off some of the rougher corner cases to make it easier for newcomers to approach, but doing so could sacrifice some of the depth, which begs the question, who is Zaberias for? I think Zaberias is a great gateway into bigger skirmish games and could do with a bit more refining. Kids will love it, and adults love playing with their kids. If you don’t have a kid in your life, I don’t think Zaberias will see much repeat play with adults, especially with those who are already inclined to explore bigger and more complex skirmish games that are already on the market.
Even if I have concerns about the production. I know 12-year-old me would have had a blast playing Zaberias. It might big a hit for you, or, it might just be the taste of tactical warfare that you needed to start looking at other skirmish games more seriously. On the other hand, if you don’t like direct combat and conquest games, Zaberias isn’t going to change your mind.
Full Disclosure: Cephalofair Games has provided me with a review copy of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
Introduction
I have a somewhat complicated relationship with Gloomhaven. Back in 2017 when I was only a year or two into playing board games, and didn’t have a regular friend group. I was attending a weekly open gaming event when I was asked if I was interested in joining a Gloomhaven campaign. A fellow who I’ll call Sloth had just received his Kickstarter copy of Gloomhaven, but had no one to play it with. Two others, Polar Bear and Owl, were also invited to join.
Cut to a week later, we gathered at Polar Bear’s house, and Sloth dropped the massive box of Gloomhaven on the table. Sloth had half-watched a rules video, and Polar Bear had partially read the rulebook, but none of us had a good gasp on how to play this behemoth. I poured over the rulebook and slowly cobbled everything together.
How to Play
For those who haven’t played Gloomhaven, here’s the rundown. Contained in the box is 21 pounds of cardboard. No joke. To start the game, each player will choose one of the 6 asymmetric starting classes. Gloomhaven is a campaign game with over 90 missions to explore. As you make choices in the narrative, you’ll unlock new locations and missions to undertake, all guided by a thick storybook. Each mission will tell you how to set the map up, generally combining a series of tiles to form the play area, and which enemies you’ll need for this mission. After a brief interlude for the story, the actual gameplay begins.
On each turn, players secretly choose two of the cards from their hand of cards to play during the round. Every card has a number in the centre that dictates your initiative value, which will dictate the order in which you’ll be able to take your turn. Gloomhaven is a cooperative game, and as such, you’re encouraged to collaborate with your teammates on achieving your goals. You can’t talk specifics, but you can say things like “I’m going to move kind of fast, and I can take out these two guys over here.” or “I’ll be sluggish, but I’m beelining for the treasure in the corner.”
Once all players have selected two cards, they reveal their cards and determine the player order. Each monster has a deck of tactics cards that will dictate and modify that monster’s skills and attacks for the round, one of those cards gets flipped up, and the monster’s initiative gets added into the mix. Then, in player order, everyone takes their turns.
Every player card in Gloomhaven has two halves to it, a top side and a bottom side. From the two cards you chose, you can use the top of one of the cards, and the bottom of the other card. You are not allowed to use two top side actions, nor can you use two bottom side actions. The top side of the cards generally have to do with attacking, while the bottom side generally deals with moving, but there are certainly exceptions to that rule.
One of the mechanics of the game is called ‘burning’ your cards. As you play cards, you place them into your discard pile. At the start of the round you can choose to either do a short rest, or a long rest. The short rest has you pick up all your discarded cards, randomly select one to be ‘burned’, then adding the rest of the cards back into your hand. When a card is burned, it’s placed off to the side, removed for the rest of the scenario. A long rest has you skip the entire action round, but allows you to heal 2 health, and you get to manually select a card to burn. If you run out of cards or health, you become exhausted and are out of the scenario. Many of your most powerful actions also force you to burn the card instead of placing it in the discard pile. Such is the price of power.
So what are you really trying to do here? Gloomhaven is a combat focused game, generally your goal will either be to route the enemy, or, reach a certain location on the map. Another wrinkle to the combat is that every attack gets modified by flipping a card from the attacking characters’ modification deck. This can do nothing, add or subtract one or two points of damage, or excitingly, double the damage, or disappointingly, null the damage entirely. But that’s the bare basics of the game, play cards 2 at a time, and try and achieve the objective set out in the start of each scenario.
Now don’t get me wrong, Gloomhaven is a complex game, with 14 conditions and status effects that can be inflicted, 6 elements that wax and wane, 28 different icons and 12 different types of cards available, the cognitive load that Gloomhaven presents can be absolutely brutal. Remembering every detail and how all the mechanics mesh together is no small feat. It’s very likely that you’ll get some amount of rules wrong, and I highly recommend you have someone who is very familiar with the game to lead you through your first couple missions.
My Experience
By the time Polar Bear, Owl, Sloth, and I chose to stop playing Gloomhaven, we had met weekly for 3 months. 12 seperate plays of Gloomhaven at 4 players each time, and I was fairly bitter about my overall experience. I was the one ‘running’ the game, administering all the enemies and their focuses, reminding everyone what each of the status effects do, updating the element board, adding and removing status chits from enemies, everything. The only part that I wasn’t involved with was setting up the game, as the others would have the scenario mostly set up before I arrived.
In addition to the mental load of running the game, I found myself frustrated with the other players. Owl had terrible analysis paralysis, with long stretches of time when they would just be staring at their hand of cards, Sloth was willing to burn their cards without discrimination then complain when they were exhausted out of the scenario, and Polar Bear would run by a mass of enemies to loot a chest, leaving the others to suffer their fate of getting pummled by the monsters. At the end of the 2 months, we had failed every first attempt at a mission, but succeeded in each subsequent attempt. Each play was in excess of 3 hours, and I just wasn’t having fun with Gloomhaven.
I felt frustrated in that as the brute, I wasn’t gaining experience when slaying enemies. I’d cleave down the monsters, only to have the Mindthief zip in and loot all the gold. Furthermore, I was jealous in that my friends were scooping up the gold and gaining experience at the same time, while I felt like I was taking all the hits and killing multiple enemies only to get a single exp point. I didn’t like that all my best cards also burned them, punishing me for doing the big cool action. Honestly, a big part of my frustrations came from my friends not supporting each other and choosing gold and exp the moment they felt we might not win a scenario. Maybe it was too much game for us and where we were in our gaming lives. I can’t speak for them, but I suspect they, too, were frustrated, and choosing to chase gold and exp at least gave them a short term goal that they could achieve. I left the group, and looking at the gameplay records for my friends, they did not continue their adventure after I left.
Late last year, Bigfoot invited me to revisit Gloomhaven. It was one of his favourite games, and he felt my incoherent ramblings weren’t giving the game a fair shake. So I bought the game on Steam, and we set off on another adventure. We played for 90 minutes, failing the first scenario to some ludicrously bad luck, but succeeded in the next missions. I slept on my feelings, but chose to refund the game the next day. Having a computer manage everything did help me enjoy the game more, but it highlighted one aspect that I didn’t like so much, and that’s the ‘burning cards’ mechanic. I was really annoyed that all my best and coolest abilities also meant burning the card out of my hand. It felt like I was being punished for doing the cool action, and that’s not what I want in a dungeon crawler.
Tied to that burning card mechanism, the missions didn’t give players much time to explore. There’s a treasure chest in the corner of the room, you need to make a concerted effort to do so. I felt punished for exploring, and considering how much I love discovery, choosing to move past the chest to win the scenario was utterly painful.
Epic Games gave Gloomhaven away for free in November 2021, and I picked it up there, but left it unplayed. Cephlophair Games recently sent me a copy of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion to review, and following a very successful first 2 missions, I couldn’t get Gloomhaven out of my head! I recently started the digital game up, and started playing two characters on my own, the Craigheart and the Brute. I was turned off at first, with the first mission feeling pretty hard, but overcoming the challenge felt good. I liked controlling two characters, having a unified strategy helped me cover my weaknesses, and I didn’t really have to worry of someone doing something that I didn’t want them to do. Considering I had lambasted Gloomhaven for years, I had to swallow my pride and admit that Gloomhaven was a pretty good game.
Perhaps part of my problem has to do with framing. I saw Gloomhaven as a dungeon crawling game, a genre of game that generally has you be a big damn hero, popping off cool abilities and scooping up treasure. In reality, it’s much closer to something like XCOM or Final Fantasy Tactics. A resource management battler, a risk assessment adventure. Each choice you make has the chance to go horribly awry, so you better have some backup plans. With that framing in mind, I begin to appreciate Gloomhaven more. It’s a tight, tough game, the joy and elation that comes from overcoming a seemingly impossible challenge. How each character synergies with themselves and with the other characters is immensely satisfying.
I’ve played a further 8 hours of Gloomhaven, and I’m starting to feel like I’m in an abusive relationship. When times are tough, they’re brutal. I had to replay a single mission 4 times because I kept running into an enemy that would shield for 2, then heal themselves for 4. I couldn’t generate enough damage to penetrate their shield and drain their 8 health, and when I had a narrow moment of opportunity to kill them, I’d pull a null. One mission in particular saw me pull 4 nulls between my two characters, leaving me to wallow in despair. But when I finally completed it, I was elated. When the times are good, they’re great.
I’m going to continue to play Gloomhaven. I’m excited to return and explore the character combos. I’ve spun up a 3rd character, a Spellweaver to help with some of the ranged damage that I needed assistance with. I’ve joined the Gloomhaven subreddit and have spent more time thinking about Gloomhaven in the past three weeks than I have in the past three years. It’s a brilliant game, a carefully crafted puzzle, and an immense challenge and achievement. It might not be for you, and that’s okay! Gloomhaven absolutely isn’t for everyone, but if you can find the joy in the 21 pounds of cardboard that comes in this massive red box, There’s enough game there to last you for years.
Humans are bad at randomness. That’s just a fact. The most salient example I can think of is that Apple had to make their shuffle feature less random on their early generations of iPods because of complaints that the randomization of songs didn’t feel random enough. It feels ironic that in order to make the playlist ‘feel’ more random, they actually had to make it less.
To take this a step further, video game developers have been ‘fudging’ the numbers for a long time. There are often hidden values and design tricks that are utilized to make the player feel like they’re successful, or to encourage more ‘barely survived’ moments, or to make the game feel more fair. Things like, the last portion of your health is actually much more than it appears to be in the health bar, or the first or last shots will always miss you, or in Civilization there is a value that keeps track of your combat losses, and will make your odds of winning your next combat slightly higher, to prevent a constant string of losses.
All these tricks make games feel more fun. In tabletop role-playing games, some DM/GMs will opt not to keep track of enemy hit points, but to just do what feels narratively best. If a player risked it all and did something awesome and pulled off the roll, then that’s the killing blow. So much more satisfying than a rogue who scratches the dragon’s toe that just so happens to be the final point of health. If a party is beating the hell of a boss that should be much more difficult (due to narrative importance), a DM can just, extend their HP until they feel the foe has served its purpose. There’s a whole discussion to be had about tabletop role-playing games about which is more important, mechanics or narrative, but I’m not equipped to facilitate that discussion.
All of these examples are ways that designers tweak systems to make games feel epic. The stories that we remember, well after the game session has ended, the memories that bring smiles to our faces when we reflect on these experiences, and the memories that keep bringing us back to games.
It brings to mind a question then, how can you create the awesome narrative moments, squeezing out a victory when all odds were stacked against you, in a board game? The very nature of a board game demands transparency. You can’t obfuscate the stakes when the players are also responsible for maintaining the system. The most obvious example I can think of come in the form of competition between players. There have been a few moments in board games where a clutch roll of the dice is the difference between victory and defeat. “The only way you can beat me, is if you roll four 6’s on this turn.”
“Damnit!”
But what about cooperative games? I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth and the balance of some of the missions feels off. One mission had flat out running through a cave, only for us to take the wrong fork at the end, and need to backtrack, but didn’t have enough time to do so. I think back to that mission and I actually can’t think of anything that we really could have done better, other than to have taken the correct fork at the end. Other missions we succeed with more than half of the remaining time. Neither of those scenarios feels good.
The best cooperative experiences are the ones that have you succeed by the skin of your teeth. I’m amazed at just how often I’ve won a game of Matt Leacock’s Pandemic on the last possible turn, or, in Tim Fower’s Burgle Bros, having a 50-50 shot of the last guard moving into my path and catching me red-handed just before I escape. Those moments are exciting, even when we lose, we loudly proclaim just how close to winning we were.
“Better luck next time, coppers!”
I know a lot of time, effort, and playtesting goes into modern board games and tweaking the balance to make it feel just right is a difficult challenge. Finding that sweet spot between a deterministic puzzle, and a random luck fest, is a feat in it’s own right. Generally a balance of randomness, and how much information a player has before they make their decisions seems to be key. In Now Boarding, players know where their passengers are spawning in from, but don’t see their destinations until the 15 second real time phase begins. You might have a perfect plan, but as soon as those cards flip up, you might just need to throw your plans to the wind. Having that imperfect information prevents players from ‘solving’ the game before the real-time phase begins. I suppse that is what seperates a game from a puzzle.
So what are the games that feel the most tense to you? What are your favourite cooperative games, and what is it about them that makes your heart sing? Let me know in the comments below!
I don’t own many train games. I never considered myself to be the kind of person who is enamoured with large vehicles like tanks, ships, or trains. But then in 2020, I discovered a game called Train Valley 2, and suddenly, I was hooked. 200 hours of gameplay later, I had 5 starred every level and my partner was making fun of my mid-life love of train awakening. Now when I see trains (which, to be fair, is incredibly infrequent due to the fact that I live on an island with no functioning rail system), I can’t deny I feel an excitement in my chest.
With that excitement in my chest, I find myself staring longingly at board games that feature gorgeous trains on the cover. Ultimate Railroads, Age of Steam, and the Iron Railseries to just name a few. So when Switch & Signal popped up for sale, I just couldn’t say no! After all, I barely own any train games!
How to Play
Switch & Signal is a cooperative game in which you are tasked with corralling speeding trains from their points of origin to cities to collect goods, then to the port to deliver the good. The board contains 4 different cities, each producing 2 goods of the associated colour, and 11 points around the board in which a train might appear. Players win if they can deliver all the goods to the port, but lose if you run out of departure cards.
The game starts with 8 signal discs and 26 switch discs on the board. At least one signal disc must be on each city at all times, leaving you with 4 extra signal discs to deploy as you wish. The switch discs mark which direction a train will move at any junction. All 9 trains start in the depot on the side of the board at the start of the game, and will be deployed as the game wears on.
Players are dealt 5 action cards, of which there are 3 different kinds. Signal setting, switch setting, and train movement. A turn always starts with a Departure card being drawn, which will either spawn a train and/or move all the trains of a colour on the board. The location in which a train spawns depends on the deployment dice, two little cubes that will ruin your day. Roll two dice, and place the train on the location matching the sum of those dice. Train movement is similar, in that it’s controlled by a cube that hates your guts. You roll the same coloured die for each train on the board, and move that train that number of spaces.
A train can only move through a signal location if the signal is green. If a train reaches a junction, it must move through the open route. Should your train run into a red light, you lose time tokens. If a train runs into another train’s rear, you lose time tokens. If two trains collide head on, you lose time tokens and the moving train is removed from the map. If you can’t deploy a train because a train already exists on that location, you lose time tokens.
So I just talked about time tokens a bunch, but what the heck are they? At the start of the game, there are 7 time tokens on the board. If you ever run out, you discard one of the departure cards to the box, then refill your time tokens. If you run out of departure cards, you lose the game.
Anyway, with train deployment out of the way, you’re finally able to take your turn. Playing a signal setting card allows you to move a single green disc, opening a new path for trains to travel, while closing the path left behind. Similarly, playing a switch setting card allows you to move a single switch disc, changing a direction a train would travel when it reaches that junction. The Train Movement card allows you to pick a single train and roll its die, moving it along the track. You can also discard two cards to do any of those three actions of your choice.
When you’re done your turn, you draw 5 cards, then the next player can take their turn, starting with drawing and resolving a departure card. Play continues until you win or lose!
Review
Switch & Signal starts slow. With 3 trains on the board (one of each colour), and no movement on turn one, you can almost hear the gears of the system creak and groan as the game slowly inches forward to leave the station. Players are tasked with picking up goods from the hub cities, and delivering them to the port. It’s pretty easy to get the first train to that city by adjusting the signals and switches as necessary.
By the third or fourth turn, things start to become a bit dramatic. A few more trains have spawned, perhaps a pair of trains have moved somewhat unexpectedly, and while your primary goal may be still to deliver that first good you picked up, a bottleneck is starting to develop. Two trains are approaching the same junction from different directions, and you don’t have enough signals to allow everything to move. The engine has built up speed now.
Plans will get changed, losses will get cut. You’ll deliver empty trains to the port just to get them off the board, you’ll risk collisions, hoping that a train only moves one or two spaces, so it comes to rest just behind the train waiting for a signal change before it can move into a city. You’ll juggle switches and signals, closing paths the moment a train crosses the threshold because that signal resource is required elsewhere. Everything is moving too fast now, and you’ll desperately lean on the brakes, lest everything crashes in a spectacularly horrible fashion.
Just as the bottlenecks get cleared, and the start to trains flow down a single track, the game will approach its end. The departure deck will be nearly empty, and you’ll need to step on the gas and take risks to get your trains delivered in time. Maybe that train you delivered empty in round 5 when you had too much on your plate means you just won’t have enough trains to deliver all the goods. Maybe if you had rolled a 10 instead of a 4 when deploying that last train, it would have been on the right side of the board, and you could have secured your victory. Alas, that’s the game.
Cooperative games have some unique challenges to overcome, like, how to avoid being a perfectly solvable puzzle, while not being totally and completely random. How to balance long term projects against short term goals. How to give players agency when their friends are bossing them around. I feel like Switch & Signal does a good job in offering competing objectives. It’s tempting to direct an empty train to the port city, instead of having it cross the entire country to get to a goods city, then back again. But when unexpected things happen, like a train failing to deploy because you left one train in a station somewhere, You’ll be glad you have a backup plan. Unless that backup plan is a black train barrelling down the tracks faster than you can keep up, and now it’s on a collision course with the plodding grey train!
Switch & Signal isn’t a complex or difficult game. After a handful of plays, you’ll know the basic strategies that should lead you to victory. If you happen to find yourself in a good position early in the game, then it behooves you to pass early and take extra cards into your hand. Once your hand is full of 10 cards, you’ll pretty much always be able to do anything you want to. With only 3 card types, the odds are that you’ll have at least 2 of each action, and, if you have a surplus of one type of action, discarding two literally lets you do whatever you want. I appreciate the flexibility, but once your hand of cards is full, the game is just to mitigate your luck.
Switch & Signal includes two maps to switch up your gameplay experience, but the level of discovery in this game is low. I do like that you can randomize the stations, so you don’t always have trains flowing in from the north, or, if you just hate the deployment dice, can use cardboard chits to randomize the train deployments. But the game is the same every time. I would love to see some expansions for Switch & Signal, just to shake up the experience a little bit.
I’ve mostly played Switch & Signal solo, which has been a really enjoyable experience. It’s fast to play, and the tensions I feel mid-game when I’m corralling several trains simultaneously is exciting. There’s a lot of luck, as all the train deployments and movements are decided by dice. “If only my grey dice rolled anything than a 3 this round!” or, “Deploy this black train to anything higher than a 4”, then rolling a 2 can leave you a bit disheartened. But overcoming these calculated risks is what makes the game fun. Including other players doesn’t change the game at all, other than each player has their own hand of cards.
Overall, Switch & Signal is a fast, fun, and easy to play cooperative game, with some lovely little train toys to play with. I like lighthearted games that give me space to just laugh and have fun with my friends. There’s a lot of luck, there’s a lot of flexibility, and there’s not much variability. Switch & Signal is a great game to use to introduce others into the wonderful world of cooperative games, or, to lull them into a false sense of security in thinking train-themed games are light and breezy, then suggest playing a cutthroat game like Age of Steam.
The risk I took was calculated. But man, I am bad at math
