Light the Lamp – A Trick Shot 2nd Edition Review

On June 12th, 2019, I was sitting in an end seat on the third row of a high school auditorium. It was incredibly dark and eerily quiet as a group of toddlers shuffled out onto the stage and prepared to begin their ballet performance. Just as the lights fired up and the first notes began playing, I pumped my fist in the air and nearly leapt out of my seat.

Alex Pietrangelo had just scored what would be the game winning goal in game seven of the 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs. Just a couple of hours later, the St. Louis Blues would win their first Stanley cup in 53 years of existence.

The only non-living thing I cherish more than NHL hockey are board games. And film. Probably literature too.

Trick Shot from Wolff Designa was something I couldn’t commit to on its first go around. I am certainly the mark for this ice hockey board game, but it was somewhat costly, particularly for the painted miniatures option, and I wasn’t enamored with the cartoonish guise. I also was uncertain of Artyom Nichipurov’s design ethos as I found Guardians of Atlantis unfulfilling in my brief encounter.

Then Trick Shot arrived alongside an ample degree of praise. Joel Eddy liked it. Mark Bigney wouldn’t stop talking about it. I felt like a cretin for giving it the cold shoulder. I wouldn’t repeat this mistake and suited up for the 2nd edition Kickstarter campaign; painted miniatures and all. I was prepared to lose a few teeth if that’s what it takes.

The thing about sports tabletop games is that they bear a lot in common with miniatures skirmish designs. They focus on positioning and board control. Pace tends to be similarly snappy in order to convey the dynamism of these fast-moving activities. Risk taking blends with tension to produce a dramatic experience.

Trick Shot indulges in this perspective. It captures the standard beats found in the definitive genre titles such as Blitz Bowl, Battleball, and Techno Bowl. All of these focus the action on a point of interest – the ball carrier – and utilize quick activations to simulate speed.

Of all the notable sports tabletop releases, Trick Shot parallels Blood Bowl most strongly. This is because the heart of the game is a sharp push-your-luck dice system. Each turn a player activates one of their skaters to perform a single action, such as moving along the square grid, passing the puck to a teammate, or shooting it on net. Nothing here is particularly complex and this is a definite notch below Techno Bowl in mechanical density.

With each action you must roll to determine success. It gets a touch tricky here, as movement automatically occurs; you’re simply rolling to see if your turn ends and play passes to your opponent. Shooting, however, hinges on a non-failure die result. There’s more nuance and exceptions when you dig into some of the more layered actions, but again, it’s never overly cumbersome.

After performing an action, you add a die to your pool and can then take another action with a different skater. You can theoretically keep going indefinitely. That won’t happen, however, as each die added to your pool increases the likelihood of rolling an “X” and failing the action, thus turning over activation to your opponent. This is a thoughtful game. The inability to activate the same skater twice in a row, and the ever-increasing odds of failure, make for a difficult timing consideration when planning out how to interleave your actions for the turn and achieve the most progress. It often forces you to stretch your possession and push harder than you’d like, incentivizing risk-taking.

Eventually you’re rolling a large pool and it’s looking pretty grim. You’re sitting on the edge of your seat and beads of sweat are beginning to form under your Joffa bucket. Stamina offers some breathing room. You can spend this limited resource to re-roll dice. Unfortunately, the only way to refresh your stamina is to conduct a line change, effectively passing and ending your turn before you roll a failure.

But you won’t want to pass your turn. You will see the climax of the play hanging in the air, just waiting for you to execute two more actions so you can pick the top corner of the goal. If you perform a line change now your opponent will get to activate and likely strip you of the puck and seize possession. But if you press on and bust with no stamina remaining, hardship will cascade and your next activation will similarly be hindered.

This dice system is great. Full stop. It’s the essence of Trick Shot and the reason to play the game.

Pushing your players to the brink feels appropriately grueling. I can hear the labored breathing of my forwards as the coach on the bench is screaming their lungs out wanting to get fresh skates on the ice. This is the moment the game leans into the drama of sport, allowing you to risk it all and find that extra gear. It also allows you to crash into a wall and be crushed by hubris.

While the dice system is the big thing, there are many little supporting details worth praising. The fight mechanism has just the right amount of oomph and appropriate rarity. Player special abilities are neat and mostly interesting, injecting a wrinkle into the tactical decision making. The arena rules are terrific. They offer a global rule change that can lead to entirely new playstyles and really changeup the experience. Sometimes these rule alterations are goofy, such as when passes can’t be re-rolled. This can give way to a sloppy dynamic. I find this endearing as it presents a new challenge. The real benefit is that it works wonders to really overcome the repetitive structure of play that otherwise may set in over multiple sessions. Trick Shot doesn’t require this variability, but it does seem to thrive on it.

The overall product is also terrific. I’m not swooning over the cartoon illustrations, but the miniature sculpts benefit with immense character. The approach of modeling different positions by size is also fantastic and helps push an obvious comparison to the classic Ice Hockey NES video game. This is also one of the best offerings of prepainted miniatures I’ve come across.

For all of these reasons, I find myself really impressed. I wish that was it. I wish the buzzer would sound and we could head to the locker-room with a warm sense of satisfaction in my gut. We can’t because there’s something else. There is a lingering sense of disappointment that wafts from this game like a Mitch Marner playoff jersey.

I’m talking about its mechanical foundation, which is that of a positional abstract. In reality, this is less Warcry and more DVONN. It’s not Frostgrave. It’s TZAAR.

This is most obvious in the artificial constraints peppered throughout. Movement in this game is only in a straight or diagonal line. You can’t move two spaces forward and one space to the left, for instance. You can only pass in these perfectly straight lines as well, so a player may be wide open and not far away at all, and you will have to spend another activation getting them into position to receive the pass. Same with shooting and finding the open lane.

It certainly works. The system feeds off these restricted patterns and produces interesting tactical situations as a result. The design work is solid from a technical perspective.

The problem is that throughout play when butting up against these limitations it can produce a jolting sensation that dissipates immersion. There are moments during the action where the momentum stalls and my mind shifts from constructing a narrative model of ice hockey to a less vibrant abstract form. When the setting begins to melt the game becomes less interesting, unable to harness its motif for meaningful gain.

This contrasts sharply with Techno Bowl, a game I’d place as the near-ideal sports tabletop design. When Techno Bowl diverges from simulating its sport – which happens often – it appeals to flourishes that capture the 8-bit video game backdrop. It leans into unpredictable plays and special abilities that wreck formations with over-the-top maneuvers.

When Trick Shot breaks from realism it espouses rigid restraint. It begs careful consideration with multiple planned moves in advance. The cognitive experience is more that of a puzzle, with spurts of exciting risk-taking. While I need to reiterate that the gameplay functions well within its own design parameters, this puzzle-like tactical foundation does not strongly capture the chaos and intensity of this free-flowing sport. Hockey is more like jamming with improvisation and less like charting notes. In the thick of it, everything is instinct and emotion. Trick Shot only embraces these qualities momentarily, and it seems to escape the larger tone of play.

Besides dampening thematic considerations, this approach can also slow down play considerably. It is easy to over-analyze and construct an elongated action sequence in your head prior to execution. The rulebook recognizes this possible pitfall, urging players to make quick decisions. It really would have benefitted from a real-time clock, such as that found in 6: Siege or Space Hulk. This would have spurred quick decision making. It also would result in potential misplays which would provide a wild and unpredictable board state, ushering it farther away from its abstract roots.

This foundation built atop constraint crops up all over. It’s unorthodox that you can’t move the puck carrier if an opponent is next to you. It’s odd that every failed poke check results in a penalty or a fight. Not being able to perform a slapshot unless you’re outside the blue-line is weird. And it’s unsatisfying that you can’t possibly score if your opponent has possession of the puck with one time segment left on the clock, effectively leading to situations where the game is clearly over before its officially ended.

There are clever details such as allowing for reaction movement with certain die results, effectively mimicking the real-time flow of play. How the game handles offsides and clearing the zone is smart. Penalties are modeled well, and the overall time and stamina systems blend astutely with possession. I also greatly appreciate how the score typically falls in a realistic range.

There’s so much to praise in this game, really. I find it a pleasurable experience with a central dice system that is wholly compelling. But the incongruent details chaff like an uncomfortable jersey. They cause just enough consternation to restrict the game’s ceiling, pulling it down a tier. Instead of achieving a status commensurate to the NHL, it’s relegated to the equivalent of the Kontinental Hockey League. This isn’t damning, it’s just unfortunate.

 

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