TDG: LA-1

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the discriminating gamer. You know, I was always under the impression that the phrases I'm sorry and I apologize meant the same thing. Apparently not at a funeral. Ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to go ahead and take a look at LA 1 from Trick or Treat Studios.

In LA 1 or Lawan as the French say from Trick or Treat Studios, one to five players take on the roles of private detectives as they attempt to crack cases, take down bad guys, and avoid the darkness. Now, this is a cyberpunk game from Richard Launius. Richard Launius, of course, developed other great games like Defenders of the Realm and Arkham Horror.

And in this game, as I say, you are you kind of take on the roles of these cyberpunk police detectives or private detectives rather in kind of this neo Los Angeles. Now, I'm not going to get into the weeds of how you play this game. There's other tutorials and that out there. I'm just going to tell you the basics of gameplay and what I think.

Now, the game board is a map of this new Los Angeles. You have the city of angels, which is the spires, which is kind of this almost heavenly place where the very wealthy and elites live and you need a passport to get up there. Uh you've got kind of basic LA. You've got the underworld and of course you got a black market and a place for your heat tokens.

Now, within each of these kind of general regions, you're going to have a couple of locations that you can go to. And each of these locations are stocked with cards. Now, there are also a number of token tiles next to the locations. Uh some of them are bonus tokens which are going to help you in all sorts of ways.

Some of them are clue tokens that you're going to use to help you actually solve some of these smaller cases along the way. Now, you can play this game in one-off scenarios, just kind of cracking individual cases, which is what the scenarios are. Or you can do a linked campaign here. Now, I've just played the individual scenarios.

I haven't played the linked campaign, so I'm not really going to comment on that. But I am going to look here if as I say the basics of gameplay. So, once you've selected a scenario, it'll give you certain starting conditions. You'll each select which uh investigators you want to be working for the Mason Doyle Detective Agency.

And uh the good people at Trick or Treat Studios also sent us the minis that we're using here in this uh game. They don't come with just the base game. So, uh you go ahead, you set all these things up according to your character sheet and the case file you are working. Now, basically, there's three phases in a game here.

And the first phase is the darkness. Now, you have a darkness track. You don't want that darkness track to get to the end. It's not good. Uh but essentially, every turn at the beginning of a turn, you're going to draw a card from the darkness deck. And this darkness deck is going to have all sorts of kooky events come into play and different things, and more often than not, it's going to move darkness up on the darkness track.

Again, you don't want a lot of darkness. Now, next you have the action phase. There are several things you can do. You can move from one location to another, but again, uh if you move to certain locations, there may be consequences for moving in there depending on where the decks of cards are in that location.

That can be very important. And again, you can't move to the city of angels unless you have a passport token, which is something else that you can gain along the way. You can choose to lay low. Now, during the course of the game, some uh conditions are going to force you to put your heat tokens in kind of the heat area.

You don't want heat tokens there. This is kind of the amount of uh your enemies and law enforcement that are kind of looking in on you, uh trying to crack down on you. So, ideally, you want to have as little there as possible, but you're going to have to put some in. So, if you do a lay low action, you can go ahead and reclaim one.

If you're in, I think the underground, you can actually reclaim two. Now, you can do a prepare action. Now, everybody has their own deck of cards, and they have kind of their starter cards. You'll be able to get more cards as the game goes, but you are going to be able to play these cards for various effects.

Well, you can take a prepare action to go ahead and actually uh draw some cards and also discard some cards, kind of making your deck a little stronger as you go along. Now, you can take a black market action. Now, you have the black market on the board, and it will have kind of three of these tiles on there.

Now, you have credits. This is essentially the money of the game. You can spend uh credits in order to purchase uh one of these uh tiles. Again, you can use those for various things in the game. Now, where you end your turn, what location you're in could be very important. So, you're going to look at the top card, and it's going to tell you kind of what skills you might have.

Well, if you don't have those skills, you can do a hot tip action, meaning you can take the top card from that deck, and you can put it on the bottom of the deck uh the deck, hoping that you get skills that maybe you're little better equipped to handle. Now, there are local skill cards on the board.

You can actually bribe a local contact in order to gain those skill cards and go ahead and put those into your hand. Now, some of the locations have actions. You can take advantage of those locations and oftentimes a lot of these locations will let you convert kind of one resource into another resource or they'll let you, as I say, reclaim heat.

There's different things that they will let you do on the board that you may want to take advantage of. You may also have special actions printed on cards or other locations that you can also take advantage of. Now, as I say, you may have bonus tokens and these bonus tokens all have various different things that you can do if you play them.

So, you can analyze a token in order to play the token and take advantage of whatever its its specific effect is. Now, finally, you have the investigation phase. And during the investigation phase, you can actually choose one of a few actions to do at that time. One of the things you can do is you can choose to advance a case.

Now, you over the course of the game, you will have other cards that come out that are kind of smaller cases you're working on and you put that kind of in an active case area. Well, usually, you're going to resolve these by putting clue tokens on them and you do that by advancing the case. If you advance the case, you spend clue tokens to solve some of these minor cases and gain whatever the reward is.

You can investigate your location. So, as I say, there are cards in every location. They may be on the light side or the dark side, depending on what the darkness card does. Uh but you can go ahead and you can take the the top card and you can try to interact with it. Now, a lot of times, what this card will call for is a certain number of certain skills.

Now, each player kind of is better in some skills than in others. That just means how many cards you'll have in your hand of that skill type or approximately relevant strengths. Well, you go ahead, you actually play those skill cards and then you actually have to draw a card from the fate deck and the fate deck may help you.

It may give you bonuses and allow you to draw more cards. Uh there's all sorts of things that may happen with the fate deck. But ideally, what you want to have happen is that fate deck will boost the number of the appropriate skill that you need so that you can resolve that investigation. Now, you can also fight the darkness.

Now, another currency you have in the game is karma tokens. Karma tokens will come out again. These are things that can be exchanged and location actions and what have you. Well, you can actually go ahead and spend two karma tokens to move cards that are in the darkness to the light side of their respective location.

Now, from time to time you'll be taking damage oftentimes in that investigation phase. When that happens, this will accrue and these damage cards will they'll go first two will be down, the third will be up, the next two down, third one up. I think the next one's down and then I think if you get more than that, I think you're eliminated.

I think you can come back as another character if I remember correctly. But, the face up damage cards can really do all sorts of funky things, limit hand size and other things. So, you want to get rid of these cards as much as you can. So, you can take during the investigate phase a rest action which will allow you to heal up some of that damage.

Now, the game can end in one of two ways. If the darkness token gets all the way to the end of the darkness track, then you have failed. You and your friends lose the game. But, if you are able to solve the case, crack the case, then you and your friends win. LA 1 We'll get back to the review in just a moment.

I want to take a minute to ask you to check out my other channel that is Cody Carlson, PhD where we talk about history, books on history, military history. I even post some of my lectures for my classes on there. Please check that out. Please subscribe to that channel. And now, back to the review. LA 1, this is a cyberpunk detective game.

And it's a very interesting game. Now, as I say, this comes to us from Richard Launius. And Richard Launius perhaps his most famous game is Arkham Horror the board game. And I got to tell you, as I was playing this game, uh you could tell. This had a very much an Arkham Horror feel. Now, obviously, this is not horror themed game, it's cyberpunk, but it still has that it's a very story driven game.

Like, when you go to those locations and you do the investigations, it's it's there's a real strong stories that go through here. And so, you know, you're of course trying to complete the main mission, but there's all these kind of side missions and side quests and other things you can do in the game.

So, it feels It It really feels like it's got Arkham Horror DNA here. Now, Richard Launius is not the only designer. I know Pete Schuries here. Um so, there's but but but the game feels very much like Arkham Horror. And that's a good thing, right? Now, I'll be blunt, Arkham Horror was never one of my absolute favorite games, but I always appreciated it.

And I always kind of liked what it did generally. And I like story games. I like games that tell stories and you go on side quests. I mean, it kind of feels like a like a almost like a video game, like an open world video game in some of those respects. I'm thinking like Red Dead Redemption or something.

So, there's really that that open world sense here. It's not I guess strictly speaking an open world game, but you do get a sense of that where where the stories take it. And it's great, too, because like sometimes when you read those cards, you actually give the card to the person to your left and they read it and you make decisions and then they of course tell you what the result of that is.

And And I really like games that do that. You know, I've played um Catan Starfarers recently. That had that kind of a system. Dead of Winter has that kind of a system. I really like that where you have somebody read you the advantage did that, too. But where somebody read you kind of the the story and you have to make decisions based on it.

I think that's always always been a lot of fun. Now, one thing, too, here about a lot of these stories is a lot of them are frankly hilarious. There's just some really funny things that come up. Uh my friends and I were laughing several times at some of just some of these crazy stories here. Uh but at its heart, this game is a cooperative race against time, right?

You're trying to beat the darkness descending. You're trying to get everything done. And it's not easy. It's not easy to get all the clues and be able to get all of the, you know, skill cards and things that you're going to need in order to pass this. You've got kind of leveling up that you're doing during the game.

And it's easy to kind of start just chasing the leveling up and kind of lose your eyes on the prize of what you're actually trying to accomplish with solving the case. Um but it's it's challenging. And it is fun. And my friends and I really kind of got a kick out of this game on a lot of different levels.

Like I said, it was very funny, but it's also pretty tense. And we kind of like that combination there. Now, I like this game. I thought it was a lot of fun. Ray loved it. Ray absolutely loved it. He is a huge Richard Lonius fan. And he thought this game was just the bee's knees, as the kids say. And so, while I like this game, I'm probably going to give it to Ray as soon as I'm finished with my review.

I think, as much as I like it, I think he'll like it a lot more. He'll appreciate it a lot more. On the Cody scale, I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to give LA 1 Lawan a 7.5 out of 10. I think it is really a fun game. And, you know, it reminds you of some of those the great Cyberpunk, you know, TV shows, Blade Runner or Altered Carbon.

It really reminded me of Altered Carbon. If you like that theme, I think you'll get a kick out of this one. Thank you once again, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us today on The Discriminating Gamer. As always, we'd ask you to please leave a comment here on YouTube, on Board Game Geek, on our Facebook page, on X.

We'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to hear what you have to say about these games or anything else you want to comment on. Please like this video and subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you do really like what we do here on The Discriminating Gamer, I would humbly ask you to check out my other channel, that is Cody Carlson, PhD, where we talk about history, military history, books on history, fun things like that.

I even post some of my lectures on that channel. Please check that out and subscribe. It would mean the world to me. And if you do really like what you see here, I would humbly ask you to click on the Super Thanks button and leave a tip. You know, I once knew a cannibal private detective. He loved grilling people.

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