Preamble
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.
