Player Elimination

I’m sitting at a desk. I’m looking over my notes scribbled lawlessly during several incursions into a Nazi castle. I’m wrangling with many thoughts trying to formulate an angle. But there’s only one way to launch this V2 rocket.

Reichbusters is a misfire.

This is a cooperative dungeon crawler where the dungeon is a Third Reich hideout and the orcs are Wehrmacht troopers alongside twisted mutations and bio-mechanized wizardry. In short, it’s Wolfenstein, which means it’s hip.

Reichbusters certainly nails appearances. There’s a ton of quality miniatures, tiles highlighting fantastic locations full of detail, and a cohesive graphic design that spits darkness in your face.

But that wonderful essence struggles to reach beyond the surface. I love the concept of sneaking around, worrying about creating too much noise and splitting the difference between avoiding or unloading on patrols. The problem is that the fantastic bits are either shallow or buried under so much cruft it’s like apple-bobbing into a 7-layer cake full of tacks and rusty nails.

“Oy, I lost my eye in layer six! Oy, I’m playing Reichbusters!”

Let’s examine that concept of stealth. Noise in this game is a unifying concept as it forms the entire arc of play. You sneak about the castle attempting to wear out the tip-toes of your standard issue combat boots. Then the alarm goes off and the undulating CasaFan smells of poo.

To get there is just as messy as the end state. Noise dice are rolled when performing certain actions; by certain I mean almost everything. Sure, firing a Thompson submachine gun in close quarters is of similar volume to the pit at a Morbid Angel concert. But opening a door? How about grabbing a medical kit off the floor? Picking your nose?

True, the noise mechanism doesn’t just represent decibels but also the degree to which a nearby patrol may become alert from your actions. Sure, and I’d be amenable to that if the constant rolling wasn’t quite so obnoxious. The repetitive nature of these rolls is problematic because the process is convoluted.

You roll noise alongside your pool of attack dice. Then if you have at least one success you flip a noise card. The card will then typically have you re-roll a noise die or two, varying the already swingy results courtesy of exploding dice. Finally, after going from dice to card to dice again, you look back at the card and check a target number to see if enemies spawn.

Before the alarm is raised these reinforcements are Space Hulk-like blips that push through doorways and defend choke points. Some of the time these will enter your line of sight immediately and you will have to flip a spawn card. These spawn cards list different letters depending on the strength of the patrol token as there are three varieties. You then take those letters and reference a card utilized by the specific scenario you are playing to determine which miniatures to plop down on the table.

There is certainly some joy to be found here. Sneaking around, biting your nails as you fidget with your weapon tokens trying to decide whether to unload with a machine gun or stick with your weaker knife – it’s entertaining and captures the basics of its storytelling goals despite the extra effort.

But this is not the entirety of the noise system. Running in thematic parallel but in mechanical perpendicularity, a separate process exists for tracking enemy alert levels and the base’s alarm status.

In the pre-alarm state enemies can be suspicious, alert, or entirely idle. This is progressed in steps as you move into a protagonist’s field of view. But this mechanism is entirely a visual representation. If you rat-a-tat-tat with your MG and cut up four troopers – even if the targets are in direct line of sight of a non-alerted enemy – you will escape unnoticed, at least as far as the alarm is concerned. Now the noise check will likely spawn more blips slowing your progress ahead but the actual alarm doesn’t move forward.

Those blips have 99 problems but my dude ain’t one.

Noise also extends to other parts of the system in a similarly rough and unfocused manner. For instance, there are a wealth of neat items you can pick up seeded directly on the map during setup or occasionally dropped by enemies. These are slick tools like disguise kits, helmets, grenades, and even the alien Vril-tech, although oddly you can’t find even a single new firearm.

Nevertheless, the problem is that picking each of these up costs a precious action as well as triggering a noise roll. The action is really the larger cost but the noise further cements that you’re better leaving all of the goods behind and just focusing on the task at hand. This feels off as you end a mission with neat little packages strewn all about the map and just out of reach.

All of this is indicative of the game’s problem of presenting overwrought sub-systems that lack unification. It feels sloppy and in desperate need of an accomplished developer. The pace does speed up a tad once your jimmies are weathered and you’ve played a few games, yet it still doesn’t pass the sniff test.

But let’s get back to your turn because that all happened in the middle of it.

You can perform two basic actions such as moving or shooting, but in the design’s finest moment you can take advantage of your character’s asymmetric deck to play an unlimited amount of action cards out of your hand. Tossing out four or five in unison and burning down an entire wing of the castle is utterly awesome.

There will be instances where you hurl a grenade and kill ten guards who were entirely too stupid to spread out. Yes, the AI running the foes lacks any sense of nuance and lives in the cushioned space between predictable and obvious, but those moments of intense drama where you rattle off an uptempo surge of carnage are damn satisfying. This game’s cinematic qualities are without a doubt its greatest appeal.

Unfortunately those scenes only occur a couple of times per game and must be rationed. A bulk of the strategy is indeed deciding when to go Super Saiyan and blow apart Hitler’s finest.

Reality quickly sets in as your turn finishes. Now it’s time for those pesky Huns to act. Early in the assault this isn’t a big deal. You move a few miniatures, roll some defense dice to resolve attacks and shuffle around alert levels.

Once the alarm has sounded this is as tedious as performing maintenance on a Panzer IV. You will be moving over 20 miniatures tile by tile and then grouping them into attacks after every single player activates. Calling it a slog would be kind.

Often there will be a conga-line of foes stretching far to the corners of the map as they attempt pursuit. You know very well those rearguards won’t likely make it to your position but you must move them anyway just in case.

All of this is difficult to swallow when games like Gears of War tackled more vibrant AI with less hassle many years prior.

It does feel so much better to grab two handfuls of enemies off the board instead of plopping down wound tokens, but the cost is severe as the game begins to sag when it should be reaching crescendo.

The bruises don’t stop there. This is a system full of keywords. In truth, this is a lesser issue because you will internalize many of the abilities upon repeated play the learning curve levels off. However it presents a formidable obstacle in the early going, you know that time when the squad of participants you assembled is ready to take a first impression and etch it into stone. This is not a fast paced game, which edges close to a cardinal sin for its genre, but it can become drudgery when you’re constantly dividing your attention between rulebook, cards, and board.

Some will certainly dig this escapade. I found myself smiling at times and really engaged with the card play. There’s something very zen about lighting up a big hulking Nazi Frankenstein.

I also adore the sense of discovery. Without heaps of flavor text or the en vogue narrative booklet, Reichbusters spits out evocative scenes like an MG42.

Supporting this is a wide variety of enemies, an incredible amount for a core box. This does steepen the learning curve as each has individual abilities but it’s worth the pain.

There’s also a really solid system of generating random missions – called Raids – through a seeded card system. The results are evocative and interesting, even if the mission goal selection could use a few more options. I’m even tempted to state this scenario generation system is the best way to play, outdoing the six-mission campaign by a healthy margin.

Zooming in, the best exploration element are the features. These square cards are set in specific rooms and boast illustrations on their backs which match the tile aesthetics. You reveal them when you gain line of sight and are hit with a surprise.

So when you head into the medical ward you flip that covered corpse card which may result in finding some unused supplies, or perhaps a more nasty discovery such as a cluster of zombies.

These cards come from a subset of shuffled options. You’re never quite sure of what lurks underneath and they’re fully expandable from future products. I find this idea so delightful I wish I could take it into a much smoother game.

Reichbusters isn’t smooth. It’s a messy tentacled monstrosity with a plethora of sub-parts twisted together like a knotted octopus. Interactions and rules are occasionally absent or don’t make sense, and even worse the pacing is occasionally laborious.

This design doesn’t appreciably fit into a space concerned with quality or lasting appeal. It’s a throwback to the past, in both culture and system, where it has taken from others and warped that spirit into a messy abomination.

Everything here should have been geared towards that stealth concept and simplified until it really nailed its thematic points. There’s a compelling notion of asymmetric states of play as the enemy awareness oscillates, but it’s not implemented in a noteworthy fashion. Those seeking such an effort would be better off tracking down the indie titles V-Commandos, Hour of Glory, or Seal Team Flix.

Veteran designer Jake Thornton simply missed the mark. It’s interesting that this one went in the completely opposite direction of his previous work, Dwarf King’s Hold, a game which lacked richness and vitality. That one was so streamlined and bare bones that I struggled to connect with any of it. Reichbusters is very much the opposite. This one doesn’t know when to stop or hold back, burying it’s most excellent elements under a wealth of stuff.

You can sense my anger bleeding through words and sentences and paragraphs. Mostly because there are some excellent concepts here wed to an anchor. The game doesn’t struggle with attaining fun – in fact it can be a downright hoot at its peak – it just requires a degree of effort to get there that the best in class do not.

If you enjoy what I’m doing at Player Elimination and want to support my efforts, please consider dropping off a tip at my Ko-Fi.

In racing there’s a combination of raw competition and unfettered velocity that aligns perfectly with the emotional components of gaming. What is racing but an extended victory point track which competitors plummet along in peril of collision? It’s the most visceral counting of points we can fathom.

Yet this formula rarely transcends average.

There’s a baseline level of success something like Thunder Alley, Formula De, and Daytona 500 reach. I’m fond of all of those games for different reasons, but none of them really carve out a cavity in my heart. The only racing design that’s managed to achieve a status of special is Flamme Rouge, which is a difficult game to discuss when comparing to these other motorsport titles.

But here I am, performing my best impression of Yoda, to tell you that “there is another.”

Rallyman GT is a re-imagining of the classic Rallyman. While that previous design focused on rallycross time trials, the GT take is a closed circuit multiplayer affair. It’s pure speed, wheel to wheel, thundering around corners and looking for the smallest opening to explode past your competition.

The magic here is the dice system. It’s best to think of it as one step beyond Formula De, as it sacrifices an ounce of simplicity for a gallon of depth. This is still direct and intuitive enough to play with a family, but it offers an opportunity to harness strategy which overtakes the element of luck.

So let’s try to explain this without leaving you utterly confused. That’s a challenge when painting a picture with words, as the system is quirky and unique.

First of all there’s a die for each of the six gears your car can shift through. Each die shows the gear number on four faces and hazard symbols on the remaining two. To move a space along the track, you take one of these dice and roll them. The die you choose must be the gear you are currently in, or one gear higher or lower.

So if you begin your turn in fourth gear you may progress one space using the ‘3’, ‘4’, or ‘5’ die. Then you can keep moving, using an additional die in each space. So you start in 4th, move one space by shifting down to 3rd, then move another space by dropping even lower to 2nd. You could go down to one and slide yet another space if you want to drive like a grandma.

The catch is that you can only use each die once. So you can’t use the ‘4’ die to move forward, then the ‘3’ die, then back to the ‘4’ since you already used it earlier this turn.

I feel ya, realistically this makes no sense. But it’s a restriction that bolts the simple “one space, one die” concept to a strategic engine that forces worthwhile contemplation.

Yet more nuance: you can downshift more than one die by including red brake dice. So if you start in 4th you can move forward one space by using the ‘2’ die and a red brake die. There is inherent risk here that escalates the harder you brake and the farther you move in a turn.

This manifests through the rolling of the dice. You can choose to be careful and move one space at a time, rolling each die as you propel forward and stopping just before you lose control. A spinout – and possible damage – is triggered if you roll three caution symbols during a single turn.

I can see that Ricky Bobby glint in your eye and the touch of crazy; you want to push it and take on more risk for a little more benefit, yeah?

Instead of rolling a single die at a time you can pre-plan your entire turn and roll a fistful of those six-sided suckers. As long as you don’t roll three or more total hazards you’re swell, shake and bake my friend. But if you do, then you suffer a loss of control and will miss a turn or two righting your vehicle. This is terrible and can actually cause a nearly instant loss in a very short race.

The benefit to this more risky maneuver – called a “Flat Out” – is that you earn focus tokens for taking this risk. These chits are spent later to lock in dice and auto succeed when rolling individually. This does form a weird curve to play where you perform more risky maneuvers early on and then make lengthier plays with reduced risk, by spending tokens, late in the race. Unfortunately this does present as a bit backwards and it’s one of the largest structural flaws in the game as it can tamper unceremoniously with the ideal arc.

In practice, what you will do is plan your whole move at the beginning of your turn regardless of how you will roll. This internal cognitive exercise manifests externally as you lay the dice out on the track and think through your options. You need to carefully manage your gears as there are several points of consideration.

First, you can only take corners at a certain speed. This means you must decelerate as you hit turns, possibly hard. There are preferred pathways through the sharpest corners as well, giving you a push to get there first and possibly block following traffic.

The second aspect is that you cannot pass a car unless you are in at least the same gear. So if a car is up ahead on the track in 5th, you can’t even move alongside them horizontally unless you are in 5th or 6th yourself. This results in an even greater strategic component as you can effectively block cars in lower gear by pushing your metallic beast to its limits and taking larger risks.

In a recent four player race I saw the leader end in a safe spot near the end of the first lap. However, he made a crucial mistake of stopping his movement in 1st using each of the lower gear dice to move a bit further. In the next turn a player really squeezed every ounce of performance out of their machine and made it one space past him, ending their own turn in 4th. This means the previous leader doesn’t get to go as they were up next, unable to accelerate enough to reach 4th gear with only a single space between them.

This is rough and mean as hell. It’s like rubbing dirt, salt, broken glass, and urine in the dude’s wound (can you even rub urine?). It’s also entirely fallout from player interaction and is a situation engineered by the participants themselves. At a zoomed in level it can appear awkward having a ‘skip a turn’ mechanism in a racing game. You may ask questions like “So, what’s my driver doing if they’re not actually moving for this entire turn? The car’s not stationary, right?”

The right way to view this abstraction is from a macro level. Rallyman GT compresses a race that could be up to an entire day (see ‘Les Mans’), to a 60-90 minute feat of cardboard. It works well enough in play that these moments achieve a level of intensity and brinksmanship that far outweighs any momentary hiccups in dynamism. They’re also entirely preventable, so don’t drive like a drunk pangolin.

A final quality of this dice system to manage is initiative. I hinted at this in my earlier example, but cars move each turn from highest to lowest gear. This is not a technical point but a real consideration you must make as you approach a pack of cars blocking your way. You will want to time your tempo correctly to move after a pack which is forming a barricade, otherwise you could lose a turn and be chompin’ on a brick.

Managing your turn-to-turn dice usage is full of considerations due this intricate yet easy to express system. It also offers the game’s biggest challenges. For one, a player could reasonably spend a good five minutes really puzzling out their turn. There is a legitimate opportunity here to arrest momentum, which can be disastrous to this genre of game. Don’t be that dunder, think ahead and be ready for the dice.

There’s also this really odd side effect that you can move farther in a turn by downshifting aggressively. Huh? Yeah, huh.

Say you begin your turn in 6th. If you stay at this top gear you can move forward by using the following dice combination: ‘6’, coast, coast. Coast dice allow you to maintain your current gear and there’s only two of them, so use them wisely.

You could alternatively move an extra space by downshifting to 5th to move forward a space, then moving in 6th followed by the two coast dice. Remember, one space is one die so this is a four space move as opposed to the previous three space move.

Weird. But it gets weirder.

The most optimal move for distance is to downshift even further. Drop from 6th to 2nd using the maximum three brake dice, then you can move forward using 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and the two coast dice. That’s seven total spaces. Now, this is ‘hella risky’ – that’s the official quantified degree of risk – but it’s incentivized if you need to make up ground.

Rallyman GT knows this makes no sense but the game really refrains from layering on complexity or extra rules, in this case to its detriment. It attempts to solve the problem by offering track layouts with many curves, forcing deceleration. This does curb the most egregious uses of the downshifting for distance, but it’s not something that is altogether snuffed out.

This disturbs me philosophically, but in actuality it’s something that synthesizes with the strategy well enough, and is seen infrequently enough, that the nagging issues of realism fade quite readily. Some have moved to house rule it by providing extra distance at top gear, but I’ve felt no such urge. In terms of side effects, this is akin to a headache or runny nose as opposed to bleeding from your rectum or losing all sexual desire.

The final issue I want to touch on is the lack of a catchup mechanism. This isn’t toddler bastards riding around in Little Tikes – this is playing for keeps. If you spinout or make a fatal mistake and fall behind, you’re going to have a rough go gaining ground. It will require risk and certainly some luck. If the leader never makes a mistake and doesn’t roll poorly, they will likely win. This is accurate from a simulation perspective, but it can be aggravating if you have a serious crash halfway through a race. No one wants to go through the motions for 45 minutes and Rallyman GT will occasionally force that upon you.

So this sucker has some real warts. We can’t minimize these issues or sweep them into the closet.

Yet I still love this game. Absolutely I do.

This is because of that flawed yet dynamic movement system. By plotting moves with dice mapped to gears, the game nearly perfectly expresses its fiction through its mechanisms. I get a very clear picture of how my vehicle is taking that corner or burning around the Viper who’s maintained pole position for 9/10ths of the race. Rallyman GT is a strong orator, a storyteller who conveys the feeling of the race moment to moment with all the highs and lows of a dramatic play.

Pace can suffer, but moving through those dice a gear at a time really feels as though you are accelerating and whipping through a crisp wind with flared nostrils.

How a game feels and what the mechanics convey is the single most important aspect of the hobby. Rallyman has it where it counts as it feels like nothing that came before it and manages to get so many things right despite getting a few major things wrong.

The many ways in which you can manipulate your movement path provides for such a great long-term payout. There’s a real skill curvature here that is exceptional for the weight of the game. Better players will consistently win, despite the ingrained element of luck.

I haven’t even spoke about the solo mode. This is a completely different style of competition as you’re tracking your ending gear each turn on a notepad – or with the free companion app. The higher the gear you end in the less time is used, which is key as this is a time trial which mimics the original Rallyman style of play.

As a robust game system, this succeeds as a solitaire experience. Unlike many games which challenge you to beat your best time, racing’s DNA is made up entirely of this concept. It doesn’t feel slapped on or an afterthought, rather it feels a distinct style of game that the system was designed around initially. What’s more surprising is that the competitive mode works so damn well.

Things are really ratcheted up when you extend this lonely style of play to the popular online leagues. There, you are presented with new tracks to puzzle over each month and submit your personal scores to be ranked alongside a large number of racers. It adds a rich quality to the time trial method and can be very rewarding.

I’ve engaged Rallyman GT in both solitaire and multiplayer modes. I find the thrills of competitive head to head jousting the most dynamic and fulfilling, but I’ve not shied away from running multiple circuits all by my lonesome.

This thing brings the heat at all player counts. It offers a central system that captures some of the most atmospheric elements of motorsport, and it does so with such little effort that it’s difficult to fathom. The fender may be dented and it’s missing some paint, but it’s compelling in a way few racing designs ever accomplish. Vroom, vroom, ramblers.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

If you enjoy what I’m doing at Player Elimination and want to support my efforts, please consider dropping off a tip at my Ko-Fi.

There is no denying we have a morbid fascination with war and destruction. We turn it into entertainment at every opportunity with films like 1917 and games like Tank Duel. Yet, just as much as we love blowing something up we love putting it together too. Titles like Civilization and Tiny Towns pull in the numbers like Cherokee street on ‘Tamale Thursdays’.

Catacombs Cubes slots right into the lighter spectrum of this genre. At first blush it’s an odd departure for Elzra, publisher of the outstanding dexterity dungeon crawler that shares a similar namesake as this town builder. There’s an attempt at unifying the themes by centralizing a faux dexterity element of constructing edifices with 3D polyominoes. It’s more a cognitive spatial challenge than a physical one, however, as there’s no time pressure or requirement to build your construction in one go.

But at a high level you can really reduce this game to some very simple concepts. You take turns drafting from a randomized allotment of pieces in a race to build one of several blueprints from a public offer. The tension arises from someone sneaking in and nabbing that basilica before you can claim it. Since building a structure requires you turn in all of your pieces, extra shapes are wasted and a clear indicator of your failure as a Doozer.

Building the pieces out of the Tetris shapes is certainly fun and has a minor toyetic quality. This ties in rather well to the overall light nature of the game as it’s punching slightly above family weight. There is a subtle feeling that the design is torn in two directions, wanting to offer greater strategic variety while also attempting to appeal to a wide range of participants. This is where the bulk of its struggles exist.

We see this where complication is introduced. Drafting pieces is done via seeded die roll. The last player in the round rolls the bundle of chunky wooden dice and then pairs them up by color. This offers groups of polyominoes you can draft, which have variable values depending on the structures in play and participants’ existing store of shapes. This last player can then strategically swap two dice to mix up the draft a bit, which can occasionally be significant but also occasionally feels superfluous.

The touch of complication arises when we start to get into the alternate vectors of point scoring. Sometimes a die won’t show a shape, instead it depicts a little tower with a black square. This means you can take one of the smallest cubes from the supply and place it towards a shared public construction on the palace space. This is thematically a selfless act but it rewards you with forward movement along a track offering a few resources or victory points.

Another symbol on the dice is a blue hammer. This is neat as it allows you to chisel away at a piece in your warehouse to produce a smaller shape. Interesting.

None of this is too complex and it’s easy to initially grok. But let’s move on to when you complete a structure.

After finishing a building you flip it over, changing from the 3D isometric view to a colorful Denis Martynets illustration. It’s cute how the artwork mimics the shape of your completed building which is a clever touch. But let’s not get distracted.

You then must place this square tile in the central grid, another layer to the puzzle. Colored triangles on the outside edges link up with other adjacent buildings and offer you rewards. There are five different options, including a trio of coins that offer interesting bonus actions.

But wait, there’s more.

These coins come in three colors. If you forego spending them for their special power you can instead compete for the majority in each of the three variations at game’s end. This can be a solid way to rack up some bonus points and provides an interesting alternate vector to simply completing buildings.

OR, maybe you just want to spend the coins to take extra actions on your turn such as drafting more pieces or building additional blueprints. They do that too.

Now all of this isn’t crazy. This game is just a touch above family weight as I mentioned earlier. The challenge is that all of this is conveyed through a decent amount of iconography. Again, it’s not too much but it’s close, and you will be referring to the back of the manual often in your early days.

That conflicted core rears its head in a few other aspects. The most awkward is the division between a player’s construction yard and warehouse. The construction yard is where the vast majority of pieces go. This is where you will build from and spend willy nilly like you just received your first paycheck out of college.

However, through the use of gray coins you can move shapes from your construction yard to your warehouse. This offers a nice benefit of allowing you to save pieces in between builds. Instead of losing all of your extra polyominoes, any unused bits in your warehouse remain. Nice, except you probably should have just wasted the extra piece or two and saved the gray coin for end game scoring. Maybe.

There’s some additional functionality here with an optional more aggressive variant that allows players to occasionally take a piece from your construction yard, however this act is rare and probably not worth bracing for.

So we do have a decent amount of strategic options here which is appreciated. You can tell the game has a pretty malleable core engine and these nodules slapped atop do not feel too egregious. Where the identity stumbles for me is in its lack of totally committing. There’s this odd quality where the scoring value of structures is comprised entirely by the number of square segments it contains.

This raw number feels unnecessarily uniform because it’s clear early on that some buildings are more difficult to fabricate. Ones that contain hanging sections or columns with no grounded foundation are hammered together with a more rare subset of polyominoes. I’d definitely give designer Aron West the benefit of the doubt that the math here holds up and everything is balanced, but it can feel a bit odd at times. It’s hard to shake this feeling that the scoring system craves more nuance.

Complication and depth of play arises from those extraneous bits – coins, palace building, dice seeding, and tile placement – instead of pushing the boundaries of its core mechanism. I would have loved to see it double down on its central concept in this regard.

And this wish is flirted with when delving into the first expansion, Monuments. This expansion is nearly mandatory as it offers a new style of structure to build. These tiles offer significant rewards at the cost of additional blocks. What this does is offer nuance to the efficiency puzzle of the game and further complicate the drafting of pieces. There’s also only a single monument available so there’s risk with the longer lead time of someone else sliding in and plucking the tile out from under you.

Alright, so I’ve spent a lot of words needling this design and perhaps coming across as somewhat negative. While I think there’s a bit of conflict at the core of it all, I do need to follow through and convey the quality of fun here. Catacombs Cubes is definitely fun.

It’s breezy enough to quickly hammer out a game in an hour or less. It doesn’t waste your time and it allows diversity in strategic pursuits. I find the spatial element more engaging than Tiny Towns and there’s a decent amount of decision space here to explore.

This is one of those games where despite it’s overall simplicity, I’ve spent a fair share of time contemplating my choices and considering what I should have done differently.

There’s also this excellent quality where the physical piecing together of a building conveys a thematic touch that’s easy to dig. It goes a step beyond simply laying tiles and captures a solid amount of physical interaction, which pairs well with its otherwise Euro-style resource management.

Catacombs Cubes is a solid entry in the genre. It’s really a separate construct than its peers, playing in an entirely different manner. The pairing of cute with a formidable decision space is enticing and it’s hard not to appreciate fiddling with the wonderful bits.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

If you enjoy what I’m doing at Player Elimination and want to support my efforts, please consider dropping off a tip at my Ko-Fi.

The post-apocalyptic genre is perhaps my favorite of genres. Among my top films are Fury Road and Children of Men, and among my top novels are The Road and Blood Meridian. My point is that Posthuman Saga is exactly the type of game I stand up for. It’s the type of thing that should directly appeal and have my heart in knots.

But Posthuman Saga doesn’t do this.

This is the sequel to Mighty Boards’ 2015 release Posthuman, which is a game I know nothing about. This is a very interesting one on its own merits though. Unfortunately it’s one that operates in a category with lots of baggage and it doesn’t care about our preconceived notions or expectations; it does things its own way.

A critical element for my enjoyment of this genre is narrative. I want some kind of arc and a glut of drama. Posthuman Saga’s narrative is mostly provided in bits of scripted paragraphs read at the beginning of rounds. Characters are presented with branching choices and alternate story resolutions that provide a resource bonus or penalty which filters back to the main game.

The paragraph booklet feels disjointed from the primary system, tacked on and attempting to satisfy that requirement of story. This is completely opposite of a recent 2019 release that’s won me over called Dark Venture. That game is all about procedurally generated narrative and stitching together gonzo storylines. What we have here is less concerned with the bizarre and more with thought.

So if Posthuman Saga is not focused on unpredictable story what is it concerned with? Strategy. Yes, it’s a surprising twist – although perhaps less so if you’re familiar with designer Gordon Calleja – but this is a Euro-style adventure game that actually takes a foreign road for post-apocalyptic designs by wrapping the decision space around control.

And it’s entirely about that control. As you’re moving around a personal board attempting to accomplish objectives you’re given a large amount of authorial sway. You bid for and then draft tiles which are placed in your surroundings, injecting this weird yet satisfying sub-game. Players can’t mess with what you’re doing directly as all of the interaction is drafting or selection based, with a dose of racing to complete your goals and earn bonus victory points.

There’s a lot going on here and it all hangs together within the scope of those design goals. Your character persists as a sort of engine, performing actions each round as you push out your map and gather resources. You can’t progress unless you have food to persist, so your action selection is a mix of slower maintenance and rushed sprinting towards the finish line.

You will gain in power and stats as play unfolds. There’s an RPG element to managing your particular avatar. There’s neat equipment to be found and a really stellar mutation system that provides the strongest narrative spark. There’s a definite momentum to your character’s evolution as a warped and gnarled sack of cells and I delight in observing it escalate.

Unfortunately there is a pretty excessive amount of fiddliness. You have tokens stacked upon tokens, pegs moving about your board, stacks of tiles, multiple bags to draw from, many different types of cards, and about another half-dozen things to position and tinker with. It’s as busy physically as it is mentally, for better or for worse.

But let’s get back to that sense of control. It really oozes out of each aspect of play. Even combating enemies happens solely at your dispensation. By choosing the encounter action you will engage a randomly drawn adversary and move to a little zoomed in Final Fantasy style combat. This is where things get a touch spicy.

The conflict system is card based as you select one option from your deck and receive a second draw at random. Your combat deck contains a mix of results as cards dictates your success at both ranged and melee phases. Since ranged occurs before close combat there is a visual sense of what’s happening as you build up the scene in your mind. This synergizes surprisingly well with the puzzly aspect of spending resources for extra oomph from your weapons. Like the rest of Posthuman Saga, you have a great deal of control here limited mostly by your personal economy and what equipment you’ve scrounged. You can mitigate poor luck by pushing yourself or with strong preparation.

And the payout of previous decisions also occurs in this system as you can purchase new cards to upgrade your deck. This shift in deck composition allows you to push the odds in your favor and tackle the more difficult level two encounters late in the game. It’s wonderful to run into a giant mutated glutton and slap down your freshly acquired card to headshot the poor bastard.

There’s a message tucked away in this design that I can’t help but appreciate. While the world may have gone to hell and society has degraded, as humans we are still empowered. We still have a say in our personal story and we will fight tooth and nail to enact our will. There’s a degree of hope baked into the DNA that’s alien to the type of stories this genre tells. That’s a refreshing take, particularly in our modern culture where cynicism is elevated.

So it’s no surprise that the feel of this game is extraordinarily unique due to this focus on strategy and control. This is a very thoughtful game with many facets and a number of vectors that integrate with skilled play. It’s a design that strays far from resolution centered on the whims of fate, refocusing everything on the player and their mastery of its depths.

I found this personally startling and incongruent with my own desires for this style of game. The good news is that there’s definitely an audience and it may be you. I’ve seen players dive headlong into the terrain tile auction and really glob on to the action card system. There are multiple aspects of the game you can focus on and victors in my plays have not pursued the exact same systems or processes.

I was also pleased with the inclusion of a solitaire mode. This functions similarly to regular play, however, it provides a more overt sense of tension due to a pretty aggressive timer. You can work to extend the length of play and avoid defeat, but this requires careful calculation and pushing yourself and your resources at the appropriate time. Since the main mode of play is solitary in some sense, I found the game didn’t lose much and gained a nice edge which proved entertaining.

This is a mechanically rich game for sure, and it’s given an even greater jolt with the Resistance expansion. Everything is sort of beefed up, including a new third level of enemies that are full of nasty surprises. I found the new followers and mutation die particularly exciting among all of the inclusions. The base game certainly contains enough content to satisfy, but those wanting the maximum amount of scope to explore will likely want to include these new elements right away.

Overall my relationship with Posthuman Saga is a weird one. While I adore Calleja’s previous design, Vengeance, this one didn’t quite give me what I wanted. However, what it did provide was a very deep and strategic landscape that differs from anything I’ve played before. There’s no denying it’s a more intellectual than dramatic affair. This mix will likely draw a dedicated fan-base and establish this design as a boundary shifting release. Those desiring a really varied mechanistic post-apocalyptic title may have finally found their love.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

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I always thought Wormtongue was misunderstood. During his appearances in the Lord of the Rings he gets shafted by Tolkien, often described as a serpent. He had performed Saruman’s bidding by working to weaken King Theoden of Rohan; his motivation being his love of Eowyn, the king’s niece.

Maybe he was a sycophant and manipulator, but he did it all for love, baby.

Now the Wormtongues, the Unferths, and the Little Fingers get their day. You get to crawl out from your rock and leap into a new shadow, this one cast by a throne not long for this world.

I’m talking about A War of Whispers.

This is an area control game where you don’t own any pieces. The various armies scattered across the fictional setting don’t represent you and yours, rather they’re pawns to be manipulated and twisted in the name of your bidding. This is seedy coercion by way of worker placement.

You read that correctly: worker placement. It doesn’t really feel like one of those types of games though. This isn’t Agricola. You place your little agent pawns – dudes representing your various henchmen poisoning the noble’s ear – around the circular board to occupy council positions of each faction. These positions segregate absolute control of the nations by breaking their agency down into micro actions.

So if you want to move the lion people’s armies you need to occupy their Sheriff office. If you’d rather control where their troops are recruited then seize the Marshall position and so on.

There are some tricks here. Most of these agents will stick around. It’s not a typical worker placement game where the spots are cleared each round. Instead, each player pulls back only a single agent but places two. This leads to an ever tightening grip and greater contention in the latter portion of the four round game. And this one moves quick as hell so that sensation of strangling sneaks up on you rapidly in the 60 minute playtime.

Additionally, if any seat is empty after everyone has placed then the first occupied seat next in order gets to execute its actions. This elicits a push your luck element where maybe I position my worker an office or two down the line, hoping no one else takes the Sheriff space I really wanted. This is clever and creates some early tension as risky placement is encouraged.

So be it.

So what’s the point of all of this? Yes, Wormtongue gets Eowyn but what do you get? Well, you get points silly. Because of course.

How your points are determined is the interesting bit. At the start of play you’re dealt random allegiances to each of the factions. Some houses you favor more directly, receiving a bounty of points for each stronghold they possess at game’s end. Others you’re ambivalent towards and one specifically you actually lose points for their success.

So with a random shuffle we already have underhanded motivations overlapping. This is all secret because I don’t know which nations you favor and which you conspire against. I have to deduce this from your actions on the board. Yes, it’s all starting to come together.

This is the central accomplishment of A War of Whispers: it succinctly captures layers of scheming and manipulation with absolutely no waste. It’s a 60 minute area control game that achieves some of the devious plotting and crooked angling of Imperial.

And it works. It works at four players and it works with three even better. It just bustles along with a group that’s not overly susceptible to analytical hesitance.

Deluxe version shown. Admittedly, not extremely deluxe.

As I said, the element of worker placement doesn’t feel so. You’re not grabbing one cube to convert to another, you’re seizing positions of strength so that you can control where the blue or red people will attack. Since you’re never afforded total control it feels as though you’re acting within the scope of a background adviser, giving the nation a nudge in a certain direction as you try to untangle the puppet strings. This ability to convey such atmosphere and emotion to the participants is exemplary and what makes this design appealing.

And yet that sensation of skirting so close to greatness is ultimately fuel for disappointment. This game, while certainly worthy of attention, is not the smashing success it could have been. It’s not the thundering hooves of Rohirrim that it desperately wants to be. This is because it’s too streamlined. Every rough edge is sanded off and the semblances of personality peeking above the surface remain just flitters of what could have been.

The main mechanism of hidden alliances is the first culprit. There’s clearly a problem here that the game must reconcile – what if two of three players randomly receive the same point multiplier for their highest amount? Or even their lowest? Their completely randomly allocated alliance will have them working in tandem, certain participants scoring bushels of points by merely riding along in the backseat. Meanwhile you could be on the other side of it, your primary nation battered about like a poor pinata bleeding sweet innards.

So they ease off the gas and provide a life preserver. Now you can swap the position of two of your face-down faction tokens at the end of a round. The penalty here is that they’re flipped face-up so everyone can see.

And so what?

This does matter, sure, but it’s minimal. The bigger issue is that the main forces at the heart of the game now allow you to skirt any investment. So why work at all?

This philosophy of how it intersects the players performance with their motivations is far weaker than the more overt and audacious system found in Pax Pamir. War of Whispers is unable to pull off the same effectiveness because it minimizes the repercussions and streamlines the process of flip-flopping.

Now, the designer has offered an interesting house rule – found online and not in the rulebook – of rewarding a bonus point for each token that remains unchanged. This is not only recommended but necessary in my view. There needs to be an incentive to work with the hand you’ve been dealt otherwise you run the risk of a loafer securing that which they did not earn.

The muted sensation continues in one of the game’s strongest moments. Each faction has a space which awards faction specific cards. These are played from your hand to trigger some pretty wild effects such as placing armies in each of that nation’s empty borders or perhaps executing a daring raid across the entire board. Even these are reigned in, however, as every single card for a specific faction is mostly identical. The strongest effect on each is unique, but the cost of these is so high that you will only see them executed once or twice per game. The drama here is shades of gray when it should be technicolor.

I mentioned investment earlier. This game struggles with that concept. If you’ve noticed I’ve referred to the factions by both their color and animal signet in my writing. This is because they don’t have a name. They’re all but faceless, given what little personality they possess by some truly excellent illustrations, but it’s not enough.

Wormtongue’s betrayal is so harsh and bitter because it’s personal. Betrayal is an intimate act and A War of Whispers is about as intimate as kissing your Grandma. It sacrifices any sense of boldness in favor of complete playability and a miniscule time requirement.

This works, as a game, that is if you consider a game a set of mechanisms to be twisted and bopped. As an experience this title suffers because it doesn’t pull you in, content to move along at breakneck speed like a J.J. Abrams film. Sure, everyone’s quietly content but no one is standing on their seat and declaring A War of Whispers their true love.

We’ve been given a very competent and fun design. This game works and is smooth. It accomplishes the unthinkable in presenting a worker placement game that doesn’t feel at all like worker placement. It has a few delightful moments scattered throughout but it’s ultimately just a very solid and slightly meek experience. I’d be happy at any moment to play this one again, but when I leave the table my face won’t be flush and my tongue won’t be primed with an unforgettable story.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

If you enjoy what I’m doing at Player Elimination and want to support my efforts, please consider dropping off a tip at my Ko-Fi.