Revenant: A Jump Into the Voidfall Universe!
Transcript
we've got Revenant on the table this is the latest game from mine clash and I'm going to say it this might be a a mine Clash game that won't completely melt my brain yeah this one is definitely more in the medium level especially when you compare it to its cousin Game Void fall which came out last year Revenant is set in the same universe although it is a very different game as far as what you're doing mechanically thematically a lot of it does carry over in void fall all of these voidborn ships started coming out of these Rifts and you know attacking these planets and your job is to fight back against them in a 4X Style game this game Zooms in the action to one specific ship and it's supporting Fleet and that is what's the name of the ship that is the Revenant that is the uh the world ship you want or Colony ship however you want to call it and your goal is to uh escape the voidborn that sounds kind of familiar it does feel a little bit like Battlestar Galactica for those who have played that game but this is a purely competitive game even though you are kind of working together to mitigate the threat of the voidborn you are ultimately trying to be the one that scores the most points by doing the best job in the game and by supporting the houses that have the most power on the board which is something we'll talk about but don't get me wrong it really doesn't no part of this feels Cooperative no no no even though you are because even as you are protecting the the fleet as you are protecting the Revenant you are protecting your asset asss while also trying to expose the
houses that your opponents are allying with so you have this very much a back and forth in the game of like who's going up which tracks you want those houses to maybe fail while you want others to succeed so yeah it's always going to be a game where things are going downhill you're just trying to make sure it goes downhill for other players faster than you yeah let we'll expand upon what Ryan just said by showing you what here is on the table we've got the main board we've got this board over here which is going to sort of your influence with all of the different factions this is going to keep track of a few things but mainly it's going to tell you very well might I add the structure of the game Flow and everything but right here we have sort of that big ship the Revenant with all these other ships imagine any science fiction movie you've ever seen with a bunch of ships are about to jump into hyperspace and go to their next location that is literally what's happening in this game you're trying to clean up your current location as best as possible before you jump and then jump because you want to jump because ultimately by the end of the game if you jump in the last round you're going to be able to colonize you get to where you're trying to get but all these ships from the void are coming out and making that quite a bit more difficult yeah and we have set up a game in the middle of progress so this is after one full round so this is what the board looks like in a two-player game after one full round now as you're seeing the board and as you're seeing the components just know this is a prototype in very flux in fact it's in so much flux that they actually reached out to to us and said we know there's some UI issues we're still cleaning up there's some graphic design there's even
some rules that they're still working on so anything we say in this video if it's not final you know that's why take take it with a grain of salt but I mean for the of theame for the most part though we'll be able to give you an idea and understanding of the core of what's going on in this game and the one thing we haven't said is that it's largely a worker placement game all of these different ships out here and we've got a number of them we've got Ark ships we've got fighters we've we've got drop ships we've got the Revenant we've even got our own little frig in our own color you're going to be taking one of your two Cadets or your captain and placing them out in one of those so for instance I could go to this fighter right here and use this fighter on my turn the fighter is going to do a specific thing the worker placement spots are more like the Revenant and the Ark ships when you go to an arc ship you can use one of the two actions on there there's planets out here you can use the drop ships or your frig to go those planets and then of course the fighters or your frigs can also be used to take out some of these void ships yeah a lot of the game is mitigation David mentioned a key thing earlier when we're talking about this like jump this warp jump that you can do and you can trigger that in the game and you have to spend a lot of resources you can go to the Revenant trigger an action that's going to let you jump forward and if you see over here there are two of these cards these are basically sonar cards they call them but they're paths they're where you're going to end up what is the situation going to look like so if you are lucky enough to be able to go there spend the resources trigger that hyper jump you get to choose what
the setup is kind of going to look like if you do not jump however which it can be hard to do we didn't we didn't and if you don't you start to get into a situation like this where more and more voidborne keep coming out of the riffs so it's definitely a game about not just mitigating but also trying to build up to those jumps and choosing when to jump however there's so much that goes into uh what you're deciding to do on your turn because like David said a lot of the actions of some of these smaller things you can go to the planets you can fight the other creatur uh the voidborn ships whatever you can go to the Revenant all of that's great for helping you kind of clear uh what's going on around you but you're also motivated by the cards that you're playing and there are a number of these different cards that you can gain over the course of the game some of these are going to improve your crew so that when you go out and take actions you get a better version of the action some are going to improve your frig so you get a better version of your frig but all of these things that you're doing even that the jump a lot of it costs resources and so you're kind of weighing the needs of the Revenant versus your need to get out there and get resources from places that's a big key decision for sure you're going to be collecting resources from a number of the different locations particularly going to some of these planets with drop ships all of this is built around this structure of the game you're going to go through four different rounds and each round is split up into these different phases which are very nicely graphically represented here you'll see this first phase you skip the actual first phase in the first round but this phase is where you take all your actions it connects up to here and you just do all of these
things this represents placing those characters a lot of the things that we just discussed then after everyone's done that you're moving on to the next phase you go through this and it effectively very nicely and cleanly for a game that looks this complicated it very cleanly walks you through step by step everything you have to do yeah definitely and it kind of shows you what you need to be aware of and what you need to be prepared for because if you'll notice here yeah we do our actions then we do a little refresh phase but then all of the voidborn that are out on the board get to attack and this is another really key part in the game yeah as you take actions another deciding factor based on the actions you're taking during this phase is this step right here which is gaining influence with these different like houses that are out on the board each of these Arc ships and the Freighters and even some of these little civilian ships that can come out are all tied into these different factions the more ships they have out on the board the higher their power the higher you're up on that track the more points you're going to get get so you want to take actions for specific houses because you want to climb up those tracks and have them be the most power but this is I think a really key thing when the voidborn attack damage is mitigated by the player that's in that zone or the next closest player so if there's a sector that has a lot of ships that you're wanting to protect you want to make sure that you're the one in that space that you're controlling the voidborn in that sector so that you can make sure the damage is assigned where you want it to go conversely your opponent can just sneak into those sectors and then make sure that the house that you're highest with they can assign the damage to those house ships first and plummet they can
drop from three down to zero in one voidborn phase uh if there's a little bit of collusion amongst the players I think that's where the game really semi-competitive because you are trying to protect the uh Revenant but also that can be very mean yeah you definitely want to protect the ships with which you have the most influence and try to destroy the other ones for example these three ships are going to divy up three damage now I could potentially be the one because I'm here but if I was over here Ryan is going to be the one that controls it because he's closer to it now this is an interesting case there is just one ship so it's going to be taking all the damage but if it was in this and there's multiple ships Ryan might want to take out this yellow one instead of this one if I'm higher on the yellow track and he's higher on this one yeah and also it's it's a huge part of the game because as these ships get destroyed not only is that losing power you're losing access to actions if the fighters get destroyed your ability to fight back against the voidborn is less if the drop ships get destroyed you can't really explore the planets anymore and if the ark ships these big ships get destroyed you're literally losing entire actions from the game now ships can be purchased back there's certain actions and places you can go some of the planets give you an action to redeploy these ships back out and again that is another strategic decision because as you're bringing these ships out you're increasing the power of that house house so if there's a juicy action that was eliminated and you really want to bring that Arc ship back it might be giving a power to a house that other players are beating you in and so there are so many
different levers that you're looking at as you're making these decisions in the game yeah and one of the thing that you have to kind of weigh on your mind as you're making all those decisions is there's something called corruption out all over the board it's going to be signified by these little markers on the backs of some ships at the beginning of the game some of the ships start with that but throughout all the different phases corruption will be added here and there and when you go to a ship that has corruption you take corruption and even on your player board there's areas where you have these bonus actions at the end of your turn after you place and take the main action you can actually take one of these bonus actions but if there's corruption above it you can't take that action on top of that you see here this is also tied to where we collect our resources I can't hold resources in this area where I have corruption so as you take more and more corruption you're going to very much limit what you can do with your bonus actions even how many resources you can hold now there is actions to take to remove corruption and there's a benefit to that whenever you remove corruption from the board or your player board you're going to put this on this void residue card once you have three it gives you a thing there's these hidden influence cards so in addition to going up the influence tracks there's going to be a number of things throughout the game this is one of them that allows you to take a hidden influence card this gives me this influence here I haven't shown Ryan what it is but at the end of the game the points you score from this board are going to be based on the power plus your total influence which is where you are on that track plus these cards so let's talk about the actions just
briefly because there are so many different actions we're not going to go through every action but a lot of the actions are about gaining resources there's a lot of spaces you could go to Res to get resources and then using those resources some of these actions allow you to convert them some of these actions allow you to fight back against the voidborn some of them allow you to deal with that corruption like David mentioned some of them repair so you can take the damage off of ships some of them interact with these cards they allow you to draw more Improvement cards or play more Improvement cards out in front of you and as you play these cards your boards become more and more asymmetric now they do start off slightly asymmetric at the beginning of the game you are given a role like for example my captain is a scientist and that comes with a few things it comes with two hidden objectives these are some point cards that can get you up to 18 points per card if you do some very specific things over the course of the game but it also gives you some starting abilities and then some abilities you can gain as you level up your captain so you are starting from a little bit of an asymmetric point but as you level up your captain as you play those equipment cards to your frigate and as you play these training cards down to your crew you're becoming more and more and more asymmetric getting more abilities and more access to things that will really change the game yeah and even that slight asymmetry at the beginning is significantly different across both players the powers eles may not be as rich as what your board ends up being but for instance he's a scientist that gives him a few benefits like an extra resource when he goes to certain locations mine too is giving me an extra
resource it improves my movement but it's when I'm landing on planets I'm the Scout so I want to go on planets as much as possible and then I have another ability here that if I use this ability that sort of triggers it the more planets I'm on the moment I use it the better for me yeah and playing into the powers of your cap of your uh little crew board over here is huge and again a big part of the game is utilizing these cards and these cards are slightly multi-use you can uh some actions require you to pay by discarding these cards there's something like removing corruption requires you to discard these cards uh but for the most part you're going to want to get them out on your board to kind of feed into these combos like if you're going heavy combat you can get some equipment cards that let you take out two or three different ships in one action instead of just one or maybe it lets you move farther when you drop on a planet maybe you get some extra bonuses So based on the cards that you're given and what your situation looks like you are kind of benefiting yourself to go into a certain strategy of course that strategy is also changed Again by these different actions that are out on the board and which houses you're trying to gain power with because there might be like some of these houses have combat actions and so if you're doing heavy combat you're wanting to maybe go up that track a little bit farther too so I guess what I'm trying to say is there are so many different things that influence the decision and I think that's what gives it that iconic uh mind Clash twist even though the game like explaining the game is not the hardest but you do have a lot of options on your turn yeah overall you really want to be focused on this influence
board there are points to be scored elsewhere like we said those hidden objectives can score some pretty significant points this is the core to it though so all the things that you want to be doing should serve your purpose is there now you can sort of coattail with other people you're both up a track so you're both have an incentive to sort of protect those ships keep the power up things like that so there is going to be a lot of that particularly like in a four-player game there's obviously going to be some people benefiting from some of those factions having the most power possible the other thing that's going to be sort of distracting a player like me is like Ryan said those cards because you're going to look at these cards and go oh that'll be fun like I have autoc cannons which was an equipment card so the all the equipment cards go here the training cards are going to go under your Cadet but this autoc cannons said during my main action if I move my frig it's going to where it ends destroy one of the Void ships in there for free so like you can do some things on your board if you're not necessarily often taking sort of the actions to take out ships you might have a card like this that helps you just take them out for free when you're doing potentially other things yeah now I will talk a little bit briefly about that Cooperative aspect because there is a benefit to everybody in Saving the Revenant because the Revenant can take damage like everything else any damage in a sector that can't be dealt so if everything else is dealt full damage all the remaining damage passes over to the Revenant and fills up these slots there's a stack of damage tokens over here and uh we have them kind of in a stack but you'll be able to kind of see
what's coming in a full game but if the Revenant is ever damaged or destroyed it's not ever removed from the board but you have to take the tile and then resolve it so in this case all players are going to lose three energy so if you have a couple players that have a pretty big energy Supply you kind of want to look across the table we let the Reven be destroyed right now let me my energy first it's destroyed and then you'll be revealing more of these throughout the game so there is a benefit to everybody but it might be such that you're looking at that and saying I don't care if the Revenant gets damaged right now everyone else is going to lose three energy I don't have any energy so I'm good right in fact you might be encouraged to let it take damage you know it doesn't seem like the right thing to do the right thing you know yeah it does feel almost a little Cooperative at times I I'm guessing and we've only played this at two but my guess is at four players there's going to be potentially a little cooperation amongst some of the players at the table not necessarily all of the players because if someone's doing well two players might go oh yeah let's do this take out you know I might say to someone else oh take out that ship uh when you're assigning your damage over there because that's Ryan and he's way up on high on that track right yeah and that uh ship can take three damage the fourth damage blows it up they can all take different amounts of damage that is a really core part of the game going up those tracks the other core part of the game the one thing I want to mention that is really important is is that hyperspace jump and being the one that chooses that hyperspace jump because you're deciding how many ships are coming out you're deciding the arrangement of where these different planets are going to be and the very
last round as you progress through all these different rounds when you get to the end the final hyperspace jump is to a colony and that's the ultimate thematic goal is escaping to a colony and there will be two of these Colony cards out all game like you you kind of see what they're going to be and when you get to the end of the game whoever does the last hyperspace jump gets to choose which colony you go to and that's actually going to increase the House's power that's labeled on that card by one more so having that last touch having that ability to like bump it up it's it's a way to even get it above the normal Max so that could be really key being the last one to do that hyperspace jump for sure and it's not just the last round that is important like we said earlier and I want to stress it again if you don't jump then you don't do this whole section down here but instead you're going to roll a die and randomly add quantities of more of these void ships out to the board and it puts you in a very bad situation because effectively when you jump if you were able to jump every round you're effectively getting to a new board that almost feels like a fresh game start state with fewer void ships so you kind of have things a little bit managed obviously what we did here we didn't do that and it feels quite quite overwhelming right now with all of these enemy ships yeah and there's a big part too enemy ships are going to spawn wherever these Rift tokens are if there's at least one in there so if you can't manage to clear them all out and you know the rift is going to spawn you really really want to consider using your action to jump like that once all
these ships get destroyed you're going to be in a really tight spot as players so you are you're doing that for a couple different rounds there's there's four total rounds in the game and then you're scoring and like David said don't underestimate this is where you're going to get a huge chunk of your scoring every single one of these is going to score and you're going to get your value times the power at the top that's significant everything else you're getting points for even these hidden agendas uh aren't going to give you a ton of points some of your equipment give you points leveling up your captain gives you points some of your resources give you points you're going to lose points for corruption so you are paying attention to all these different things but this is definitely if you're teaching the game this is the core like this is significant when it comes to scoring that's number one I would say number two might be the hidden agendas if you're able to pull them off you can get what if you're able to do all three on both cards you're able to do that the other thing I want to point out that's important that has nothing to do with scoring is this turn order track it's called a tactics track and there's various things you're going to be doing in the game for instance like when you destroy enemy ships and stuff like you get to go up on the tactics there's a couple spaces here that just let you go up three on the tactics and some of these bonus actions let you go up and stuff yeah as you do that you're going to be able to get bonuses on the way up and if you get high enough when when it resets at the end of the round you go back down and you get some bonuses on the way back down not only that it does determine or at Le whoever is in first place they're determined whether they want to be first player or not so it's a turn order track as well and this only resets if you jump so if you don't jump so that's another thing too is like if you're low on this maybe you want to
wait till you're in the 11 or 12 to jump and then whatever but yeah whoever's highest here gets to control the ships if there's a tie so being higher in the tactics order means maybe you get to make some of the decisions here and also you get to decide who's going to be first player and it's not as simple saying well of course it's going to be me it might be you if there's a juicy Planet out there that you want to explore you know there's an action that you want to be guaranteed to take but going last and being able to see what all the other players do over here and then kind of making your decisions after the fact can be really powerful as well yeah it was pretty significant in our first round of this game that we set up here I was behind Ryan on that track and I was over here so when he was determining what happened here we were both the same distance away from it he broke the tie same with this one he broke the tie and then of course he's closer to these so he was deciding how the damage was divvied up on literally all of those sections and this is where you're looking you're seeing where's where's my opponent ahead of me I want to make sure those ships get destroyed first and he did a good job of that it's so yeah there's there is a lot going on but I think David was key on the mark this board right here when you first look at it it's just full of icons but once you take a minute to parse it it makes the entire rest of the game so much easier because you really are just like okay doing this step you follow the arrow we're doing all of this for the voidborn okay it's a lot of steps but it's done in a very specific way that makes a lot of sense to you if you imagine that as like Ryan said it does look overwhelming at first but if you look at that and think to yourself okay they've just taken what is effectively is the player Aid and turned it into a
board so it actually makes it a more living organic part of the game experience as opposed to just having a card next to you and I think it does really go a long way to help you walk your way through it once you understand the icons you're like okay all we have to do is follow the step yeah it's yeah it's very well Illustrated like the fact that whenever you come down to one of the hyperspace that shows you okay if this token is flipped meaning somebody triggered it do it do it otherwise don't do it and just move on to the next step like that's really smart uh the way that they've designed this and of course all your in-game scoring is on here all of the uh different tracks here what you can do with some of the ships is all printed there so it really yeah you're right this is like a giant sized player EXA but that is Revenant if you have any questions about it please make them in the comments below we'll get down there and talk to you as much as you'd like to about the game until next time though make sure everyone has fun at the table and we'll see you then