Claustrophobia 1692 | Board Game Preview | 2 Player Asymmetric Dungeon Crawler
Transcript
Hello everybody. My name is IA
and my name is Tyler. Together make up Cray, a couple that loves to play board games.
And today we'll be telling you about Claustrophobia 1692.
This game is designed by Croc and is published by Dere Games, who helps sponsor this video. Now,
everything you see in this video is still in prototype form, including the box. The final art will actually look something like this. But with all that said, it may be subject to change. And now, let's go to the table and give you an overview of how the game works. Claustrophobia 1692 is a two-player asymmetric combat game where one player controls a group of human warriors and the other commands the forces of hell deep in the shifting underground labyrinth. Now, this is scenario-driven game, so each session is built around a specific narrative and setup with its own objectives and win conditions that shape how the game plays out. Let's go over the general rules. The game is played over a series of rounds, each split into a human turn and an infernal turn. On the human side, everything starts with your dice. You roll a number of dice based on how many warriors you have. Then assign each dieice on an action line on their board. That placement determines their movement, combat strength, and defense for the round, but it also determines if you're drawing instinct cards or activating gifts your character may hold. Each character has a different board, meaning the action lines vary and provide variety of options you can access. Each character also has abilities, which are crucial in navigating through each of the scenarios. You'll need to familiarize yourself with all the characters and their abilities in order to develop the best strategy to move forward. Instant cards, again obtained through some abilities, can be used to adjust dice or trigger effects mid turn.
And depending on the scenario, the redeemer can bring in gifts which are tied to specific die values and give you more powerful targeted effects when you line them up correctly. After assigning dice and triggering any associated effects or abilities, you'll activate your warriors one at a time. Each one can move through the tunnels, explore new areas, and take on a variety of demons. In this scenario, try to reach the final tile where the fresh air is coming from. Exploration builds the map as you go, revealing new tiles. The infernal player deciding how these tiles are placed. So even as the human player is pushing forward, the infernal player is shaping the space around them. Additionally, some tiles will have features that may immediately impact the adventurer. Once every character has been activated, we'll move on to the infernal side. Let's take a look at the difference in the structure here. First, you roll your diabolary dice and assign them to the powers on your planning board.
You'll always roll at least three, but maybe more depending on your own planning and the conditions on the main board. Now, your planning board features a variety of spaces you can place these dice. Each of these spaces has requirements, so you're either triggering effects immediately or setting up for stronger turns later. These powers can give you more diaboly dice on future turns, generate materia primma, or unlock abilities tied to your trodites or demon, which is unique depending on the scenario. Then after assigning and activating your dice, you'll spend materia prior to summon units onto the board, placing them where they'll have the most impact. Whether that's cutting off movement, reinforcing a fight, or forcing humans into a bad position, you will need to follow the rules, ensuring you follow the tile occupation limit, the tile you're placing on has an unexplored opening, and it does not contain any enemy warriors. After that, you'll activate your forces and move into combat. When you attack, you'll first choose the opposing unit and roll dice based on your combat value. For each dieice with a value equal to or greater than the opposing unit's defense value, a hit occurs. For human characters, a hit means exhaustion of one of their dice abilities. The human player will allocate the hits for the character. The more hits a character takes, the fewer valuable options you'll have when placing your dice, and you'll lose your character once their board is filled with exhaustion tokens. On the Infernal side, you're dealing with a mix of
units. Trogodites go down quickly, only requiring one hit, and your hits carry over from one to the next, meaning you can take down a hoorde of them with one efficient attack. But stronger demons have their own boards and abilities with hits not carrying over to the other units if exceeded. And that's generally the turn structure. Positioning is key in this game. Where you place, move, and summon your units will be crucial to your own strategy based on the scenario you're taking on. You'll have to pay attention to the abilities of the characters, the tile limits for movement, and utilize your dice efficiently in order to outwit your opponent. Now, you'll keep playing, doing this, taking turns until the game end condition has been met, which is dictated by the specific scenario. At this point, a winner is determined.
You'll now decide if you wish to continue your adventures by taking on additional scenarios. Each scenario in this game will utilize a special setup for each of the sides using a set amount of characters with different gifts, tools, and abilities. How you strategize and approach your goal is up to you and the dice you roll. And that's Claustrophobia 19. No, 1692.
1692, baby. Let's go into some of the key features this game has. Where should we start?
Well, I think the obvious thing is people love miniatures, and there are miniatures in this game.
The little trogodites just hoarding the entire board, swarming all the humans.
What a pain in the butt they are.
Yeah, they are quite a pain in the butt.
Zoom in on butt. zoom in on their bets.
Beyond that, this is an asymmetric game where one side will take the humans and the other side will take
the demon spawn from hell.
Exactly.
Now, it's really interesting. This game is primarily driven through dice. Your programming, everything you're doing is through dice, but then your combat's through dice. There's so many dice involvement in this game. Uh, which makes it really interesting because for the human side, you're going to roll dice and you're going to assign those dice to abilities that you want to take. How much you want to move, how much you want to have for defense, how much you want to attack, for example. Uh, and in the beginning, it all feels pretty good because the world is your oyster. All your abilities, they're not exhausted. They're happy. You have so much flexibility. Oh, you rolled four different dice. Fantastic. You have so many options. Oh, you're drawing cards. But then hell comes down and all your abilities begin to shrink because you get exhausted. And now you're just hoping that you roll that two or a five because otherwise you're just going to stand there, defend, and hope for the best. Hope the trogodites don't run you over. Except meanwhile, as the trogdites, you are scheming and building up this engine that is able to slowly but surely wither down your opponents.
And then you poke and you poke and you poke until finally you're able to make a giant move and it feels really fantastic. And the interesting thing about this game too is that there are different scenarios that you can play through which gives you a different experience whether you're playing the humans or the demons and I find that quite fascinating and it gives a lot of variability to gameplay
and it's not just different enemies each of the scenarios. There's different conditions and what you'll be doing just feels different. One of the snarers, for example, you'll be working to fulfill a ritual, while the other side will try to kill your redeemer before he completes the ritual. So, there's kind of that tug and pull there. And then some of the times the board is going to be more developed, so you're doing less exploration. And some of the times exploration is a really key aspect of the game. Every scenario will look different. And that is something that leaves you adapting to different strategies and trying different things as you play. It also gives you a different lens on how you can play those characters or the humans or the demons because one minute you'll be going hard into the battling situations, but the next minute as the demons, you're actually going to be protecting and shielding uh your main character, your main boss guy. And that's fantastic because it's a little twist on what you sort of expect in this game. The flood of chocolateites.
Now, we briefly touched on combat. The way the combat works is if you roll a dieice and it equals or exceeds the value of the defense, that's a hit.
Now, like we mentioned earlier, hits to humans are really detrimental. They they not only take away your health and deteriorate your soul, but they take away your abilities. So, you're able to do less and you're really hoping for something in advance. where a lot of the hits for the other player, they're just elimination of all the swarms of troglodites and potentially taking that big bad down, too.
It's all about replenishing and sort of getting your demons back up when you when it's your turn.
Exactly. The last element of this game we'll talk about is simply the approachability of this game.
It's a dice chucker. That's really what it is when it comes down to it. But the game play really is about how can you strategically make those decisions and then the depth comes along with those solutions. So or the different scenarios. So the approachability is definitely there. Getting over the hurdle of like figuring out the strategy is the hard part. Mechanically though, pretty straightforward. It is. And you may be worried, well, what am I just waiting for the right dice roll? Is that the whole aspect of this game? Not quite. There is quite a lot of adaptability from both sides of what to do with those dice. And from the human side specifically, you can always use the cards in place of dice as well. Give you a little bit of flexibility. You can always save a card and [clears throat] wait for the right time to play that card so you can do the right thing that you want to do to get to the game end objective.
Exactly.
But in summary, Claustrophobia 1962 is an asymmetric head-to-head battle
where you'll roll dice, you'll aim for the scenario and condition and hope to outwit the other team. A lot of your strategy will come down to using your abilities really effectively because those are really key and using your monster board programming to make sure that you do the right thing at the right time to [clears throat] overwhelm the human forces.
And of course, as a dice chucker, expect a little bit of luck to be on your side to really pull through with the victory.
Will you do it? Will you find all the treasures of the underworld
or close it off? Depends on what you want to do.
Summon some demons. Mhm. Now,
this game is coming to crowdfunding. You can check out the link down below to learn much, much more about this game that we talked about today.
And if you have any questions,
leave them down in the comments below. If you found this video helpful though, make sure you hit that thumbs up button, hit that subscribe button if you're new here, cuz we love talking and teaching board games.
Now, for our question of the day today, if you could travel to the underworld, what would you do?
I would not. Let us know your answers down in the comments below. But until next time, we'll see you later.
Bye.