Skip to main content

Robinson Crusoe Review

crusoe-1

Mostly, I’m not a big fan of co-operative games. Games suffer terribly without the unpredictability and skill of human opposition, and the whole genre sometimes looks like a collection of semi-functional attempts to solve this big, blaring problem.

But there are a very few that make my grade. And I’ve noticed they tend to have certain things in common: they allow plenty of scope of individual player decision making in the face of the group, offer some sort of simple AI-like mechanics that make it look like the game is reacting to your decisions and have a deep well of variety to add to the narrative and keep things unpredictable.

But the most important quality of all is balancing the need for transparent mechanics that allow for strategic decisions with a strong wind of chance to make sure the game doesn’t become a mere logic puzzle. Lean too far in the former direction and you might as well be solving co-operative Su-doku with your friends. Too far in the latter and you might as well co-operatively shoot craps. It’s a hard, hard proportion to get right and none of the co-ops I’ve played so far, even my favourites, have quite got it right. Until I played Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe doesn’t so much nail that balance as drive it through the wall and into a water main. At heart it’s a worker placement game, albeit one with an unusually strong emergent theme for the genre, with all the heavy decision making that implies. Your picks from the bamboozling plethora of options you’re offered every turn will shape the game and nearly always determine your success or failure. Yet skimming across the top of these hard choices is a playful breeze of chance that can, if allowed, turn itself into a hurricane of destruction.

Each player has a specific character with a raft of special abilities and two placement pawns which, each turn, can be assigned to activities like exploration, hunting or gathering resources. Some activities require only a single pawn, others can have one, two or sometimes more and this affects the success rate. Shove enough pawns into the activity and you’re guaranteed success. Fall short and you’ll end up dicing for it, possibly failing or triggering a linked – and usually undesirable – event.

It’s a quite wonderful mechanic. At a stroke, it puts the amount of chaos the players are prepared to endure into their own hands while at the same time offering a series of meaty and difficult decision every round while also enriching the narrative. It also has an unexpected knock-on effect when it comes to group decision making: if there is disagreement, players can still get what they want done if they’re prepared to take a chance.

This injects some inter-player tension that might recur later in the game, and reduces the boss player problem that plagues co-ops as a genre. So does the imponderable random factors that dance around your decisions. These factors do not, however, eliminate the problem, and the possibility of an alpha-dog player arising to direct the game for the other participants remains a black mark against the title for me.

The whole thing is smug with other neat little rules flourishes, interlocking to provide a quirky, absorbing experience. Another favourite is the way events can come back to haunt the players. If, while exploring, you draw a card that tells you you’ve sustained a head injury, you take damage, mark your character’s head with a wound token and shuffle the card back into the main event deck. Draw it again and you suffer recurring headaches causing more problems.

The weight comes from a classic set-up of too much to do in too little time. Characters need food to survive from the off, but they’ll need other things too as the game progresses. Shelter from the weather, tools and inventions to make life easier. To do most of these, and to work toward victory, you’ll need to spend time gathering resources first. You can’t do it all, sacrifices will have to be made and characters will suffer through a simple but effective rule stating that any shortfall in resource requirements must be paid in wounds. If anyone accumulates enough to die, it’s game over.

crusoe-2

Winning is hard, and requires practice and skill, but is far impossible. The difficulty level, again, feels just about pitch perfect. Every game feels like a fresh take at a puzzle, but one in which the parameters change subtly, demanding fresh insight, granting a new narrative and keeping things from getting dry and stale.

The inventive mechanics tie up into a game that gives you not only a satisfying balance between strategy and chaos, but which tells a detailed narrative. You’ll pick a scenario at the start of each game, ranging from a standard rescue from a desert island to a bizarre quasi-horror quest to burn out cannibal villages on the isle. There are six in total, widely varied and each playing significantly differently from the others in a rules-light way by tying in different effects to icons on cards, tiles and chits.

But there are also five fat decks of cards, the main event deck, three lots of events for different activities and the wonderful mystery deck, which ensure that no two games are remotely similar. In one, you might be constantly threatened by wild beasts running amok into and through the camp, another might be filled with vicious booby traps left by mysterious previous residents. There’s unseasonable weather to deal with, flotsam from the shipwreck to discover, fires, cliffs, earthquakes and much, much more.

Of course, you pay for it in complexity. You can’t get all that strategy, all that detail, all that variety on a simple rules framework. But it’s not so bad as it might first appear after a trawl through the dreadful rulebook. A lot of the heavy lifting is farmed out to cards, tiles and a seemingly endless parade of tiny icons and with few examples, it takes a while to see how it all locks together. And there’s a lot of wood and card to shuffle about during setup and every turn. But once you’ve got it, games run surprisingly quickly: the two hour play time on the box is not only plausible, but occasionally generous.

Humble pie is rarely tasty, but sometimes you just have to eat a slice. On the basis of rules and reviews I got the impression with was a cumbersome game that did little to solve the inherent problems of the genre, merely one that communicated a convincing theme. The theme is certainly there, the game remains constrained by the inherent problems of the genre and play can be fiddly to administrate. But the poor rulebook hid a wealth of clever mechanics and careful balances that make this one of the few quality co-operative games I’ve enjoyed.

Pandemic Review

pandemic box

Pandemic was the co-operative game that launched a thousand flabby imitators. The genre became fashionable and designers and publishers started churning out identikit games to satisfy the kind of uncritical, rabid demand that only glaze-eyed, obsessed nerds can muster. Most were awful, and the few co-op games that really satisfied did so by breaking the mold and doing something different. And in the morass, Pandemic went out of print and kind of sank out of sight.

But now its back in a spanking new edition. New art furnishes the board and cards, and the wooden disease cubes have been replaced by transparent plastic in suitably lurid colours. The gameplay, aside from a couple of new role cards, has hardly changed. And we’re here to see if we can remember just why playing Pandemic made the co-operative model so appealing in the first place.

Each player gets a random special role such as scientist or dispatcher, and the team must pool skills and resources to travel the world attempting to cure four lethal diseases that have somehow arisen simultaneously to plague humanity. How this happened is not explained. Neither is why the governments of the globe have seen fit to fund no more than four individuals to fight this crisis. But this is a European-style game after all, so we’ll forgive that and get down to business.

The meat of the game is that players travel from city to city, trying to accumulate a set of matching coloured cards to find a cure for the disease of the same hue, while firefighting outbreaks by curing groups of infected individuals in places they pass through. It’s full of the sorts of checks and balances you’ve seen a hundred times before: the tug between accumulating or spending cards, a limited action pool with tons to do, co-ordinating board positions to swap resources.

Where Pandemic really takes off is its chillingly realistic disease model. If too much infection accumulates in one place, it spreads, increasing the amount of disease in adjacent cities. Which may, in turn, trigger the malady in that city to burst and splatter over its neighbours and so on, in a repulsively virulent chain reaction.

That’s bad enough, but naturally the game goes to considerably length to make this as likely as possible. Normally, each turn, a few cities get extra disease by flipping cards off the top of the infection deck. But the other deck, the player deck, is loaded with horrible epidemic cards. Draw one of these and the discarded infection cards get put back into the main deck. But here’s the kicker: you don’t shuffle them back in, but shuffle them and put them on the top so all the cities already diseased are in line to get another dose all over again.

These linked mechanics are what really sets Pandemic apart from its many imitators. They all share the basic concept of a situation that gradually gets more and more out of control as the players struggle to contain it. But in Pandemic, the problem doesn’t simply rise at a relatively gradual rate, it can suddenly and unexpectedly explode. The situation can transform from one of relative stability to utter chaos in the space of a single turn. And that means every card draw carries with it the delightful aroma of seat-edge terror.

pandemic cubes of luridity

You might imagine this would suck all the strategy out of the game, but it doesn’t. The fact that infections go back on top of the draw pile means card counting can make a big difference. As can doing your level best to ensure that cities don’t accumulate enough disease to cause an outbreak or, if that’s just not possible, at least make sure that adjacent spaces aren’t in a situation to kick each other off and spread like wildfire.

But then again, while player decisions do make a difference, it’s here that the game starts to fall foul of the problems that bedevil the genre. If the decks are loaded against you, you’re stuffed no matter how skillfully you co-ordinate your globetrotting mercy missions. Some people don’t mind this, but personally I find the idea that you might have lost before you’ve ever drawn a card rather off-putting.

Worse, the strategy isn’t really deep enough to avoid the dreaded alpha-dog syndrome in which the most experienced or skillful player just bosses the others around. And they agree to playing second fiddle because it’s in the groups shared interest to take the best option and thus the collective win. It’s an all too common situation in co-ops, and nothing is more guaranteed to suck all the fun and cleverly wrought tension of the game. Pandemic offers a feeble sop in the form of individual roles with their own powers, but it doesn’t really help.

Some of the more complex and varied co-operatives that came after managed to overcome these inherent problems basically by throwing in detail, variety and dice. When you’ve got a bigger number of interlinked decks, more decision points and the mechanics between them are mediated by un-stackable, random dice it gets harder both to see an unarguably “best” choice at any given point, or to believe that the starting situation is predestined for failure.

Pandemic, though, is a European style game through and through and that means it’s at pains to be as simple and quick as possible. And it is: it’s easy enough that my eight-year old could play it with me, and games play to conclusion in less than ninety minutes, sometimes much less once you’ve practiced with the administrative overhead of the game.

That is, of course, a sword that cuts both ways. While stripping back the mechanics means the game struggles to overcome the inertia inherent in the co-operative model, it does make it wonderfully accessible. And in happy coincidence, many of those people who might easily be turned off a board game due to perceived inaccessibility are also delighted by the idea of playing a non-competitive game.

And that’s Pandemic’s saving grace. It’s possibly the ultimate family game, easy to get into, difficult to beat and free from the acrimony that unfortunately creeps in to competitive gaming even in the most loving families. It’s even slightly educational, thanks to that clever chain infection mechanic and the geographically accurate board. If you’re gaming with gamers, and in it for the long haul, pick another co-operative game. For any other situation Pandemic is the original, and still the best.

Battle Beyond Space Out Now, You Should Buy It

Some six or seven years ago, my good friend (and Christ look-a-like) Frank Branham showed me a prototype for a board game that he designed called Battle Beyond Space. It was inspired by The Last Starfighter and Starcrash, and it had bits salvaged from the old TSR Buck Rogers game as well as lava rock asteroids. The game was awesome, a fun space shoot ’em up with a cool squadron movement mechanic and plenty of total mayhem. We’ve played it off and on over the years, and now it’s finally been released to the general public by none other than Z-Man Games. I tell ya, that Zev Shlasinger is a man of impeccable taste. Looks like the discounters are selling it for about $32.

It’s a great beer-and-pretzels style dogfight game and the production looks outstanding- the illustrations are right on the money in terms of capturing the tone and atmosphere of it. Also, my name is in the thanks section…printed in Comic Sans. It’s the only Comic Sans in the whole game. I really should demand a complementary copy as reparations.

Anyway, I am totally shilling for this game and for my pal. Don’t be like old Bill Abner, who failed to buy a copy at Gen Con. Right after meeting Frank. How rude!