The following pictures contain content from the Arcs Expansion, during my webhost move, some photos were lost.
I like having control. If you’re already familiar with Arcs by Cole Wherle and Leder Games, that should tell you how this review is going to go.
In Arcs, Players are controlling space faring factions as they bump elbows with each other and vie for victory points. The core action selection mechanism is a twist on trick taking. Each chapter of the game deals each player 6 cards in 4 suits. Each suit has access to 2 or 3 different actions, and the numerical strength of the card is inversely related to the number of actions that card can provide.
Each round of the game starts with the player who has initiative. That player plays a lead card, and may choose to Declare and Ambition. The ambitions are how victory points are scored, and the ambition the lead player is allowed to declare is entirely based off the numerical value of the card. Declaring an ambition also reduces the numerical value of the card down to 0, which is quite important for the players who will be following.
The lead player takes however many actions that the card they played allows them to take, then the next player takes their turn. They can choose to Surpass (play a card of the same suit, but higher value), Copy (play a card face down to take a single action that the lead card has access to), or Pivot (play an off suit card, and take a single action that the card has access to. Any player can also play a second card face down to seize the initiative to go first next round, unless the initiative has already been seized this round. If initiative wasn’t seized, then whoever played the highest surpass card takes the initiative for the next round.
That’s the basic rules of how Arcs plays. I won’t really get into the details of what each action does, or battle, or the nuance of the ambition markers, because those aspects aren’t at the core of what I want to talk about. My experience with Arcs was a frustrating one. From the context above, you may have noticed that what you can do is almost entirely dependent on which cards you were dealt at the start of the round. I think everyone at our table every round said something to the effect of “This hand is awful!”. The ambitions you can declare are dependent on the cards you have, the actions you can play are dependent on the cards you have, if you’re void in a suit, the only way you can access those actions are if someone leads with a card of that suit, and you copy them, taking a single action.
A game of Arcs isn’t about doing what you want. Arcs doesn’t support players who have a grand strategy and goals that they want to accomplish. Arcs is about tactics, it’s about being opportunistic. Action efficiency means something entirely different in the context of Arcs, it’s not about how many actions you get. It’s about having that one or two REALLY GOOD actions that enable you to score an ambition. It’s about sneaking in to get a majority in the 11th hour, it’s about positioning yourself to have the chance to do things in the future. You need to be on your toes in Arcs.
And that’s all well and good, but ultimately, it’s not the type of game that I really enjoy. I mostly enjoy dice combat games like Eclipse. I like mean games like Food Chain Magnate, but I do not enjoy the feeling of being handcuffed. I don’t like being cut off from core actions entirely, just because I was dealt a hand of manoeuvre cards.
The last chapter of Arcs I played, I was dealt 5 manoeuvre cards. The actions available to the manoeuvre cards are to Move, or Influence. I felt entirely out of the game, because those to actions have absolutely nothing to do with the ambitions. And because I had 5 of the 7 manoeuvre cards, I was fairly certain that a manoeuvre card wouldn’t be lead. My whole round was a series of copy actions, taking a single action of whatever the lead card is. Unable to plan, unable to score, I felt dejected. Perhaps that hand of that calibre is an anomaly, but it cemented my thoughts that I prefer games where I can do the core actions of the game.
That last chapter ended in quite the upset, too. One player had a near monopoly on Fuel, so he put two tokens on the Tycoon ambition. The other two players manoeuvred and raided his cities, stealing nearly everything he had. On the final turn, one of the players took a single tax action, gaining a material, and the majority on both of the ambitions that were declared that round, and went from 7 points to winning the game entirely. The whole table was floored at the sudden change of fortunes. As I said above, opportunistic.
Make no mistake, Arcs is not a Bad Game. It’s just not a game for me. I prefer to have more control over what I can do, instead of putting my fate into the heart of the cards.
I do plan to embark on the campaign expansion with my friends. I look forward to what kind of crazy situations Cole Wherle has crafted for us. I don’t think it’ll change my mind and my preferences towards games that let me plan out a strategy. But with an updated mindset of what action economy means in the context of Arcs, I look forward to those great moments of upset and triumph.
At the time of writing this, I was also working on my Knarr review, and in that review I reflected on how my gaming tastes have pulled back from playing really heavy games. Then the opportunity to play Indonesia came up, and I was instantly excited. Splotter’s Food Chain Magnate has been my favourite game for years, yet it’s the only Splotter game I’ve ever played.
I dove into the rule book and was instantly dismayed. A text heavy black and white PDF from 2006. I was reminded of Iberian Gauge that I played recently, and how the rule book is a 2-page leaflet. The nice thing about Indonesia is that, like Food Chain Magnate, the actual rules are only 8 pages long, which is pretty bearable
Let’s set the stage. Indonesia is a game about getting rich. Yes, you’ll acquire companies, produce and ship goods, and even merge companies. But the goal of the game isn’t necessarily to sell the most items, the goal is to get the most money. The game is played over 3 eras, and each era consists of a number of years. Every year goes through 7 steps, which allows players to bid for turn order, merge existing companies, acquire new companies, improve their powers via research & development, operate all the companies they own, and finishing off with some city growth.
Indonesia is a big game, and I’m not going to list all the rules out right here, but the two big parts of the game is the mergers, and the operation phases. In the merging phase, any player can choose to merge any company, provided they have a sufficient merge skill, and have the capacity to take the company on (which is based off the slots’ skill, both skills are able to be improved during the R&D phase). The merge is a fascinating moment, because the minimum bid for a merge is the value of the good the company produces (Rice is 20, spice is 25, rubber is 30, oil is 40) multiplied by the total number of plantations of the two companies being merged. Then, bids must be increased in multiples equalling the number of plantations. As an example, if you’re merging two rice companies, one a size three and one a size 5, the starting big will be 8 times 20, so $160, and all bids must go up in multiples of 8, so $168, $176, $184, etc.
Any player who has an open slot can bid on this merger, which makes it a great way for players to steal opportunity from each other. The real challenge comes from how each player values the company. When someone wins the bid, they pay out the money to the now ex owners of the newly merged companies. In the above example, if the winning bid was $184, the player who had the company consisting of 3 rice plantations would get 3/8ths of the bid, so $69, and the player who owned the company consisting of 5 rice plantations would get the remaining $115. Obviously, winning a bid where you didn’t previously own one of the two companies proves to be a huge expense, but these companies also hold tremendous potential, as you’ll operate the whole thing during the next operation phase. This also has potential to be absolutely brutal, as when you pay out a huge sum of money to acquire a merged company, the next player can call a new merger on a new pair of companies, knowing that you are now cash poor.
The next big phase of the game is the operations phase, where each player chooses to operate one of their companies. Production companies produce one good for every plantation, then must sell as much as possible to cities around the board, earning money for each sale. Goods must travel by boat, and for every boat travel that happens, the owner of the shipping company gets $5 from the sale of that good. This is another potential for aggravating situations, as if a company can sell, it must sell, so if a player manages or orchestrate a lengthy chain of boats connecting a distant city to a plentiful plantation, it’s completely reasonable for the owner of the plantation to lose money on the sale as shipping fees drive the company into the red.
Splotter games are fairly infamous, and for good reason. Now, I’m not an expert on Splotter, I’ve only played 2 of their games, but what Food Chain Magnate and Indonesia share is a robust game system that tasks players with seeing through the opacity of the system to squeeze out a profit, and highly interactive gameplay. Everything every player does affects you in some way, and you need to be paying attention to what the other players can do, as if you’re not careful, someone will eat your lunch right out from under you. And in a game of Indonesia, a skilled player will absolutely steamroll novices.
Indonesia is a remarkable economic game. Published in 2006, playing it felt like a robust experience. Companies shifted ownership, all players had moments of being flush with cash, and being nearly destitute. None of us were experienced with the game, and we all grappled with how to play the game well. I suspect that none of us improving our expansion trait beyond the second level was a mistake, and we all struggled with how to value companies. It was fun to lock eyes with another player and perpetually increase the bid for the companies into nearly unfathomable heights. It was exciting when one player took over most of the shipping on the entire board for the final round, although it wasn’t enough to for that player to win. I can see Indonesia becoming one of our favourite economic games, as there were tones of player agency. Never did any of us feel like the game was being unfair, that something other than our own poor planning stymied our progress. We were the masters of our own destiny, the authors of our own demise.
It’s also surprisingly simple. As I said above, 8 pages of rules, and considering how deep and interesting the economy is in Indonesia, that’s a feat to be lauded. All the phases are pretty simple (except for mergers), and turns generally flow fairly quickly. Once our players had a plan in their heads, we didn’t stall on turns very often.
All that said, Indonesia is rough on the eyes. The cities are glass beads, the cards that tell each player where they can place a city at the start of each age are just little slips of paper. The plantation chits are too big for some of the small provinces, the lines on the map can be unclear in many places, and the font used on the map is nearly unreadable. The production of Indonesia leaves a lot to be desired. I’m no UI/UX designer, but there has to be so many ways that the user experience can be improved with Indonesia. Thankfully, a 3rd edition is on its way, with a fairly massive graphical overhaul. I can’t wait to see what the new edition looks like.
If you’ve played a Splotter game, you should kind of know what you’re getting into when you sit down to another one. A complex game of tight decisions, where mistakes are fatal. If you like Splotter games, you’ll probably like Indonesia. If you dislike what Splotter has done before, I doubt this will change your mind. As for me, I still prefer Food Chain Magnate. Part of that is surely familiarity, and the theme of fast food chains is infinitely more interesting in my estimation. My two gaming partners, on the other hand, said they would hands-down play Indonesia over Food Chain Magnate. Part of it is the novelty of a new system to explore and exploit, but another part of it is that it feels less punishing. The decisions you’re making are smaller in scope. The companies spawn in predetermined locations, you can’t shoot yourself in the foot too terribly, like a dumb restaurant placement in FCM does.
I enjoyed my play of Indonesia, and considering one of our gaming friends was absent during our play, we’ll likely play it again soon. I am curious to how different the game will feel with an extra player, and how our map will develop differently. There’s no scaling for player count, so I expect that we’ll all be poorer throughout the experience. Hopefully I find the replayability interesting, as there is no content discovery here. The only replayability comes from interacting with the game system, and forcing my opponents into less than ideal mergers and executing hostile takeovers.
That Time You Killed Me is an abstract strategy game for 2 players, designed by Peter C. Hayward and released in 2021. It’s kind of like chess, but with more murder. Murder by squishing. Squishy murder.
As the story goes, you’ve invented time travel! Yay! Except someone else is claiming that they also invented time travel. And they’re going to kill you to keep you silent. Unless you kill them first to silence their claims. Unfortunately, because time is all wibbly wobbly, there are several copies spread out amongst the timelines, so you’re gonna have to do a lot of murdering before the job is truly complete.
There are 3 zones of play, the past, the present, and the future. Each player starts with one pawn in each zone. The goal is to manoeuvre your pawns and push your opponent into the wall until you’re the last pawn standing on two of the three zones of time. Players can only focus on one zone at a time, and only one pawn be active during a turn. Each turn, a single active pawn can take two actions. Those actions include moving orthogonally in their current zone, or jumping forward and backward through time, popping up on other zones and creating copies of themselves.
That Time You Killed Me has 4 chapters in the box, and we have so far only played with a single chapter. The first box introduces seeds which can planted for an action. When a seed is planted, it grows over time. From a seed grows a pointy murder bush that is immovable and kills all who are pressed against it. Moving forward in time it blossoms into a mighty tree that is felled with the slightest touch and crushes anyone on the other side.
The other side of the creation coin, is un-creation. For an action, you can unplant a seed and remove the bush and tree from the next two timelines. With a limited number of seeds in the game, you may find yourself hording seeds on your side of the board to prevent your opponent from erecting a murder bush right in the path of future you. Time is fickle like that.
That Time You Killed Me has all the things that make an abstract strategy game great. The feeling of being smart when you lay a trap and lure an opponent in, the mental stress as you puzzle out several permutations before deciding on which one would be best to progress. But the game also greatly benefits from the fact that designer Peter C. Hayward is an actual author, and he flexes his narrative muscle to great effect here. That Time You Killed Me is a delight to behold, from the story and context given in the rule book, to just how the game has this emergent narrative as your clones fall backwards in time to suddenly squash an unsuspecting pawn.
Seriously, the narrative element is strong, and gives flavour to the entire game. I so enjoy this over other abstracts like Hive or Santorini where there is a theme, but it’s fairly pasted on. Here, the theme works with the mechanics, even if sometimes it’s a bit weird.
I’m incredibly excited to check out the other boxes to see what the game has in store for us. On one hand, it’s already fairly mind bendy when you are considering all the moves you can make on one board, plus the time travel element of jumping boards. Adding more complexity on top of 3d chess will make my brain hurt, but it’s a hurt that I’m so looking forward to.
The real challenge for me will be finding more opportunities to play two player games.
Apparently 2024 is the year that I dive into Valdimr Suchy games. In the last 6 months I’ve played Pulsar 2849, Praga Caput Regni,Evacuation, and now, Woodcraft gets added to that pile as well. With this experience, I’m starting to get a feel for Valdimr’s designs. Medium-heavy euros with tight a tight economy, and an interesting action selection mechanism, and Woodcraft fits that definition incredibly well.
Learning Woodcraft isn’t terrible. I used both the rule book and the Game in a Nutshell How to Play video. Between the two, it wasn’t hard getting started. There were a few non-intuitive things, like the helpers all have production on them, but production doesn’t produce during an income phase. We all expected that would have been the case just due to the terminology, but no. gaining production is completely separate from income. There are a few other tedious rules, such as when you plant wood into your pots, you can take a free cutting action. This isn’t represented anywhere on the boards in a helpful manner, and I completely missed the rule in my excursion to learn the game.
In Woodcraft, players take on forest sprites who love to build beautiful creations out of wood. During the game you’ll buy and sell lumber, grow your own trees, hire assistants, collect tools to store in your attic, improve your workshop, and fulfill contracts. With only 14 rounds (13 in a 4 player game), your real task is to make every action count.
The contacts to fulfill generally have various wood requirements (3 different types of wood in the game, represented by green, yellow, and brown dice), and each wood has a pip value requirement that has to be met exactly. To do this, you’ll probably use the saw to cut a die into two, maintaining the sum of the original die, splice scrap wood to increment the pip value, and even glue two dice together to form a larger die.
It’s surprisingly fun to cleave dice into two, or stitch them back together to fulfill the contracts. Many of the contracts reward you with various goodies, sometimes even including more dice. There’s a great feedback loop of spending money to get resources, using the resources to fulfill contracts, which give you more money. Money in this context is blueberries.
Generally for a first play, I try to dip my toes into every mechanic. That said, Woodcraft is the kind of game where there are 5 different things you want to do, but you only have time to focus on 1 or 2 of them. You cannot do everything in Woodcraft, and the winner is probably going to be the person who does their one thing the best. At the end of our first game, one player managed to earn 3 tools, despite the attic having like, 12 spots to hold tools. Perhaps the next time I play, I’ll really try to focus on the attic and see how well it goes.
Woodcraft feels like a solo game. The interaction comes from someone taking contracts or helper cards before you, claiming public objectives before you, and selecting actions on the action wheel. The further back the action is on the wheel, the better the benefits you’ll receive for taking that action. It’s frustrating when the player right before you takes the action you wanted, gets the bonus benefits for it, then moves it up into the segment of the action wheel that doesn’t give you any benefits for playing it. Beyond that, you’re pretty free to run your own game.
I made a critical blunder in the middle of the game that probably cost me 2 whole turns to fix (representing about 15% of my entire game), which put me squarely into last place. As with most of Suchy’s games, the economy is tight. Every blueberry can be used, and taking an inefficient action can cause a terrible bottleneck that you need to dig yourself out from.
There’s a definite puzzle in the game of Woodcraft, that action efficiency challenge has me wanting to go back and get better. It’s not really a game that you can appreciate at a single play. I feel like the more you understand the levers and consequences at play in this game system, the more you’ll be rewarded with those sweet, sweet chestnuts (Points. Chestnuts are points). And that’s really why this is a first impressions post and not a full review. I have thoughts on Woodcraft, conflicted feelings, but I know there’s a lot more depth to plumb. I just don’t know if I’m going to put forth that investment to get good and find the joy in this tight puzzle.
I’m writing this post as a first impression, mostly because I don’t actually know if I’m going to be returning to Voidfall or not. Not because it’s a bad game, quite the opposite. It’s a fantastic game that I really enjoyed, but the reality of my gaming life means that I may never play this game more than twice.
Let’s tell the story from the beginning. I did not back Voidfall on Kickstarter, Bigfoot did. Sci-fi heavy economic Euro games tend to be his jam. A few years ago at our first Cabin-con, he brought the Anachrony Infinity Box, which we spent an entire evening (from 8pm until 2am) unboxing, learning and playing the game. While it was a great game, and one I’ve always meant to return to, that experience remains the only play I’ve ever had of Anachrony.
In a bid to make getting Voidfall to the table easier, I volunteered to take Voidfall off Bigfoot’s hands to unbox, organize, and learn how to play ahead of time. Bigfoot has said before that he doesn’t enjoy the unboxing experience, and anything we could do to make it more likely to play the game he paid an arm and a leg for, is worth it.
Holy smokes that’s a lot of stuff
So Voidfall came home with me, and over 2 or 3 sessions I pulled everything out of the box and started familiarizing myself with all the components. The cardboard tokens were beautiful, they practically fell out of their sprues. Chef’s kiss. The GameTrayz insert on the very bottom tray, on the other hand, had a shattered corner. I’m not sure if Bigfoot will seek out a replacement, but it remains functional, although sharp.
My biggest frustration with setting up the game was assembling the resource wheels. Pushing the cardboard disks into the very tight plastic pegs gave me a fair amount of anxiety. Considering the long resource board has 10 holes in the centre, I was sure the cardboard would buckle under my pressure. But to my surprise and delight, it held strong! One more annoyance with those dials was that nowhere did it say to use the darker colour pegs on the science wheels. It wasn’t until I finished all 4 resource boards and started on the victory point boards did I realize that I didn’t have enough of the light grey pegs. So with a butter knife I managed to pry the light grey pegs off the bottom of the resource boards, then installed the dark grey pegs. Easy-Peasy.
Damn resource wheel
Assembling the houses wasn’t terrible in its own right. The decks of cards were fairly well organized, but because I didn’t know what all needed to be in each tray, I felt like I was guessing. For those who are curious, there’s 1 fallen house card, 6 technology cards (4 basic, 2 advanced), and 2 starting resource cards for each house. Some houses have different focus cards as well. Perhaps it was my own ignorance that made this process harder than it should have been, but here we are.
So with all the components unpacked and assembled, I repacked the box and started learning how to play. Gaming Rules! has a 1-hour long how-to-play video was excellent and meticulous. I ended up watching it twice, and by the end felt fairly confident in my ability to at least get us going.
On game day, we all arrived around 3:30 and pulled the lid off of Voidfall. Not wanting to waste time playing the tutorial (after all, if this was going to be our only play, we didn’t want it to be a pared down version of the game, and we weren’t confident in our ability to play the tutorial AND a full game in one day), we chose the mission that had the lowest conflict and complexity, and began setting up.
Setting up for our first game
I’ve read several times that while the iconography of the game is INTENSE, once you get into Voidfall and learn the language, the iconography really does become second nature. Everything makes sense, and there’s a pretty good cohesion between the icons. During setup, we quickly we realized the table we were playing on wasn’t big enough for everything, so we pulled a second table over to put the trays of miniatures on, giving more space to the Agenda board and the other main board that holds the player turn order and galactic event. We arbitrarily chose our houses (as the person who watched the rules video, I took the most complex house of the ones that were suggested), and with an iron grip on the Compendium, I talked everyone through the considerable setup.
One of the players was coming in cold, he knew next to nothing about Voidfall aside from the fact that we were playing it today. So I launched into the core concepts and side rules of the game. One part where I did deviate from the Gaming Rules! video is I did go through every focus card and agenda that was on the table. The Glossary book was invaluable at helping us really decipher what the iconography meant, and once we knew what some of the cards did, we became a lot more adept at figuring out what every icon meant and how to apply it to the game.
Actually Playing the Game
So, Voidfall. How does it play? We purposefully selected a low conflict map, but I wasn’t quite prepared for just how isolated each of us were. I took a fairly aggressive stance and pushed into my boarders, but none of us came next to each other until the very last turn. While that will be different in other scenarios, I can definitely say that our scenario was very multiplayer solitare. There were precious few moments where our actions affected anyone else at the table. Perhaps a technology card was taken a turn before someone else, or someone missed out on a specific agenda card, but that’s really about it.
My starting Agenda card
Voidfall is a very determinstic game. Nearly no information comes out during each cycle aside from the offer of agenda cards, which having the right ones is literally the difference between victory and defeat. I’m not against deterministic gameplay at all, but this does mean that at the start of each cycle, all players will spend 20 minutes just figuring our their actions for the cycle. That part isn’t bothersome because everyone is doing that at the same time, but midway through cycle 2 one of our players realized they miscounted their resources and had to reconsider the rest of their cycle, stalling them for an additional 30 minute. That stall did have me thinking that Voidfall would make an excellent solo game.
Each action in Voidfall is generally quite simple. The complexity and challenge comes in understanding the ramifications of each action you take. Because all the actions are tied to nearly every other mechanism, everything you do is consequential to your game. If you squander actions, you’ll be left in the dust. A game of Voidfall lasts for 3 cycles, each cycle gives players between 3 and 6 turns. Each turn, players can do at least 2 actions, with a 3rd and 4th action being available if you spend resources. Voidfall is a tight experience, you’ll constantly be calculating and recalculating the resources you have and the best way to convert those resources into victory points.
Hand of focus cards and agenda cards, sorted in the order that I want to play them.
At first I was quite enamoured with the production of the Galaxy Box. This huge cube containing dozens of plastic ships and seeing everything assembled on the table for the first time was exciting. What I really didn’t like was that come the end of the game, we literally ran out of guild tiles and had to use some suitable proxies. The corvette ships, the basic ship type, while looked great, were fiddly as all hell, trying to keep them balanced on the little plastic sticks. Again, come the end of the game, we stopped putting the ship on the stick and just used the plastic bases to move our cubes around the map. For a box that crowdfunded at over $200, I feel like these are really obvious problems that could have been resolved.. Perhaps 4 players isn’t the optimal player count, and if I were a solo-primary gamer, I’d instead be complaining that there’s too many components in the box, but alas, I am not a solo gamer.
There’s also a breathtaking amount of variability in Voidfall. The Compendium has a dozen specific scenarios for every player count and play mode, each with a different map layout, different fallen houses/techs available, different suggested houses, each one having a special ability and making you choose between two different starting techs and resources. Each one has dramatically different amounts of enemies and resources on the map, leading you into a myriad of different directions. I felt excited flipping through the book of scenarios, just imagining on how the subtle changes would dramatically affect how the game plays.
Thoughts after my first play
It’s obvious that Voidfall is a labour of love for the designers Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi. Everything feels thoughtful and interesting, and I can tell that every action has been considered and could be vital given the right circumstances. The part that bothers me is that isn’t that the game is just deterministic, but that that the actions the other players take really don’t affect anyone else’s game at all, aside from a missed tech or an agenda card being snaked. Nothing the other players did during the game mattered to me. Come the end of the 3rd cycle, we compared victory points to see who amassed the most points in each of our own individual solo games.
I feel forced to compare Voidfall to my #1 game of all time, Food Chain Magnate, which is also fully and wholly deterministic. There is absolutely nothing random in FCM, but every action from every player affects you and the board state. It’s a knife fight in a closet, everything you do matters to everyone else. I realize they are two very different games, and the scratch different itches. Talking to Bigfoot, the interaction of FCM is exactly what he doesn’t like about it. He hates that he can have a grand, superior strategy only for someone to ram a branch into his spokes.
Those voidborn don’t stand a chance
I think the key to enjoying Voidfall has to come with expectation management. Yes, there’s a big time investment in getting started, from preparing the box, learning the rules, and getting the game to the table. It’s a very special and satisfying game, provided you’re not looking for a big 4x experience. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, 4X is a genre of game that refers to 4 main characteristics that happen throughout the game. Explore the world, Expand your territory, Exploit the land/system for resources, Exterminate your enemies. I’d argue that Voidfall is a 2X game at best, Expand and Exploit. Yes, there is combat, but not really. And the whole board is laid our right from the start, there is no exploration during the game. This isn’t a grand space combat game, if you want that, look towards Eclipse. Instead, Voidfall is a grand strategy game for those who want to puzzle out their way through a tightly designed game, and not have anyone get in their way.
I suspect I’ll play Voidfall again, but I doubt it’ll be at 4 players. Having more players doesn’t expand the number of interactions or decisions that I get to make during the game, but each additional player is another opportunity of analysis paralysis to drag the playtime to untenable lengths. I do think Voidfall is a absolutely faboulous solo game, one that may rival the infamous Mage Knight as the heavy solo game of choice. Designers Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi seem keen on supporting the system, with monthly challenges and an expansion announced for early 2025.
Energy Production is for suckers
If you’re eager to get into the world of Voidfall, I’d recommend picking up the retail edition for $115. It doesn’t contain the plastic minitures for all the ships, but instead uses perfectly functional double layer ship tiles. They hold your power cubes perfectly, and even assist players with keeping the rules straight, as the non-basic ships have a reminder that they can only hold a single cube until the ship tech is upgraded.
I’m curious to see how my opioning will change after a few more plays. For now, I’m going to dig into the cooperative mode rules. If the regular competitve gameplay won’t give me the interaction I’m looking for, perhaps the coop mode will at least push me to engage with my fellow players.
I have very little experience with One vs. Many games. I’ve played Scotland Yard once, Betrayal at House on the Hill once, and Pandemic with the bio-terrorist expansion once. All of these experiences have been fine, but none of them have inspired a love for the genre for me. Bear backed the Beast Kickstarter, and has been eagerly anticipating its release, so, for this week’s game night, Beast was the game we played.
How to Play
Beast’s rulebook is deceptively thin, considering how much asymmetry the game holds. As a ‘1 vs many’ game, there are two halves of the conflict that need to be taught, as both sides need to know what powers and limitations the other has in order to effectively strategize.
With 6 different beasts, 6 different hunters, and 4 different contracts included in the game, there’s plenty of variety to choose from. We chose to follow the suggested first time set up with “The Great Cleansing” contract, with the Beast Fangrir being hunted by Helga and Assar. The gameplay is pretty simple, each of the characters has a set of ability cards, then, each player will draft 4 of the 16 action cards. Each card has a symbol in the centre, either red or blue, along with two potential actions at the bottom. The top action is what the heroes get to do if they play that card, while the bottom action is what the beast gets to do if they play that card.
The goal of the game is outlined on the contract, and for The Great Cleansing, the Beast had to kill two of the three villagers on the map. The hunters had to either survive until night of the third day, or, slay the beast.
The Beast is often “hidden”, with their figure on the map only denoting the Beast’s last known position. Whenever the beast moves, they play a direction card face down. If a hunter or villager manage to happen upon the Beast’s trail, the beast must put down a trail token. The Hunters have an ability to “search” a location, which, if the Beast is in that location, becomes revealed, and is now attackable. The Beast can become hidden again as soon as it moves from its spot.
Every round starts with the Beast taking their turn. Every player can play one or two cards on their turn, but only one card of each colour. No doubling up on red actions here! Around and around players take actions until someone passes. There is a rule stating that you cannot pass if someone has less action cards than you do. The round only ends once all players pass in succession.
After all players have passed, they enter the evening phase, where, both Beast and Hunters get to spend the grudges they earned during the day to unlock new abilities. Once all players have completed their evening phase, the morning begins with another action card draft. The game ends when either side of the conflict achieves their goal.
First Impressions
Asymmetric games are always difficult to grasp on the first play. Each character, Beast, and contract has their own nuances, and I can’t always foresee a character’s strengths or shortcomings and how they’ll play into the chosen scenario, so I’m always thankful when the game offers character suggestions for first time gamers to get into the experience quickly.
On the very first turn, I was able to deuce where the beast had moved to with 100% accuracy, moved into that spot, and hunted him successfully. This hit left Fangrir scared. He spent the rest of the round moving and attacking the bare minimum to accomplish his daily goal, then running away again, not leaving him exposed for a single turn.
At the start of the second day, Fangrir got a Beastly talent that allowed him to react to our Hunt card. When one of us played the Hunt card, he could spend a grudge to instantly move to an adjacent location, rendering one of our hunt cards worthless. There was one point during the second day when I was standing on the location and was 100% positive that I was on the same location as the Beast, but I didn’t have any cards with a Search ability, so, there was nothing I could do.
We chose to end the game after the second night, as it was getting quite late. It took us about 3 hours to set up, learn, and play through 2 full rounds of Beast. A lot of that length of play comes down to analysis paralysis. Both sides have a lot to consider on their turns, and when you’re staring at a hand of 8 cards trying to figure out which two you want to play, it can really slow you down. One of the games that Beast reminded me of was INIS, which is another drafting game. I imagine much like INIS, Beast gets better on repeat plays, when all players know what ability cards are available, and are more intimately familiar with both roles limitations and powers.
Bear was adamant that if we had continued into the third round, he would have taken the victory, but I’m not so sure. We needed to hit Fangrir 3 more times, while Fangrir needed to cross half the map and attack a villager. Between the two hunters, and Bears’ cautious nature, I don’t think he would have been able to pull it off without either running out of steam, or, getting pummled on the one turn he left himself vulnerable. It would really have come down to the cards that got drafted, and the reactions/items/beastly talents that would swing the game in either direction.
My big frustration with Beast came with the Beast’s hidden/reveal mechanic. I really disliked that all the Beast has to do to become hidden again is simply move, but for the hunters to find the Beast, they need to play a card with the “search” keyword. It was superbly annoying that I knew exactly where the beast was, I was standing right on top of it, but I just didn’t have a search card to play, leaving us at a weird stalemate. I feel that if I need to search to find the beast, then the beast should have a corresponding ‘hide’ keyword, or, I should be able to just attack a space that I think (or know) that they’re, and if I’m right, do damage to you, and if I’m wrong, get a punishment, like slay one of the pigs and give the Beast the corresponding grudge. Just, more freedom to actually progress toward the hunter win condition.
I don’t like games that handcuff you. The situation of “The goal of the game is to kill the beast, but you can only attack him if he’s revealed, and you only get one reveal card per round. Also, the Beast has a reaction card that nullifies that card once” really frustrated me. I suspect the reaction card to nullify the hunt card one time would be less powerful in a 4 player game, but it felt very swingy in our game, and I can only imagine would be pretty killer in a two player game.
I can really see how Beast rewards experience. The more we know what cards are in the deck, the better we can control the draft and what ability cards even get given to the beast, the better we can all find those crazy combos that make us feel powerful. I am really looking forward to learning what really makes those hunters different, and what surprises the other Beasts have in store for us. I also really wonder if that same mission would be harder or easier if we didn’t just follow the suggested Hunter setup. All things I’m excited to discover!
