Frostpunk | Review | With Mike

0:00 welcome to five and five from the One Stop Co-op shop where I discuss five key elements of a game in about five minutes I'm Michael Kelly and today I'm looking at frostpunk a survival game for one to four players and disclaimer that I was sent to review copy of this one I enjoyed playing frostpunk back when it was on Kickstarter but it was really difficult to win did that change at all in the final release let's find out and get to the list

0:28 so my number five point is a con and that's focusing on the Cooperative options in the game so the game builds itself as one to four player co-op but uh it's actually more like games like dawn of the Zed's Third Edition which I love but which is kind of like a solo game where you just sort of divide things up so yes they give you these advisor sheets to kind of give each player an idea of things to focus on like they're in charge of the healing or they're in charge of the food but I don't know I don't feel like that's too interesting you also each get an advisor card but they are super expensive to use so I don't see them getting played too often and you can only choose one a turn so it doesn't really matter that each of the players has their own unique one and then finally players each have their own deck of Civilian cards and these at least are interesting but they're one-time use you don't get any more throughout the game if you're playing two to four player so you know once they're gone that's kind of it and besides that you just share and divide up action so you can discuss things and for some groups that'll be fine for me especially two player it's certainly not a problem but if you're looking looking for a game that gives interesting mechanics that kind of force or encourage cooperation you're not really going to find it here now my number four is a pro with uh some caveats and that's the variety in the gameplay so they get the negatives out of the way first you have uh the same basic assortment of buildings each game which can make your build up sometimes seem a bit samey you also have many of the same laws available each game so those options tend to repeat and also even though it seems like there's a ton of scenarios in the scenario book the majority of them are just riffs on like the main core survival scenario let's get to the positives which I think pushed us to a

1:58 pro first of all you've got a different assortment of tech cards to upgrade each game a ton of morning cards you're going to draw a random one at the start of each round which will give you different moral dilemmas and also put other cards in your dusk deck speaking of the dusk deck how those cards come out and which cards go in there even if the laws already mentioned you have different ones you use each game and even when you use the same laws you'll get different effects ongoing from them in the event deck and then a big thing that I really appreciate is they have these different societies at different difficulty levels that will really drastically change like your worker allotment and your starting resources and that'll force you to do uh different things with your strategy my number three is also a pro and that's the build up in the game which I think is uh something that the best survival games all have in common and that's the idea that you start out with almost nothing on the board you're barely making ends meet but the game does a nice job of letting you slowly get more powerful master your environment but you also run out of resources as things go you need to scout for more and as you earn more resources and more ways to get coal and to how's your people the environment keeps on getting colder keeps on becoming tougher to feed yourself and divert sickness and all that kind of stuff so basically like all the great survival games I think frostpunk hits a nice balance of giving you upgrades that you feel awesome but ratcheting up the tension to match over and over again to the game it never feels easy then going to my number two which is a mix are the moral dilemmas and sort of the oppressiveness of the game so as I mentioned the start of each round you draw these morning cards and they offer you you generally different kind of like ethical choices and besides

3:28 having an interesting emergent narrative they also give you like I said these moral choices and usually if you do like the nice thing it sort of costs more or a challenge to you in some way but it generally rewards you in the future because you have a very Robinson cruso-ish thing where when you make one choice a card will come up and do something based on that later and I think these mechanics help greatly with the World building and like the sort of desperate theme they're going for here while also forcing you to make hard choices but that's also where the negative comes in at least it's going to for some players you'll see your people getting sick and dying like children passing away and your hope will fade and your discontent will grow and it could be just really challenging really tough especially when you're playing on harder difficulty settings when you're first learning the game but I am going to end on a pro for my number one which is the worker placement and how it combines with heat so in the game you have a very limited number of Citizen meeples and like most uh survival games where you have actions you never have enough to do everything you want to you can gather resources you can activate to buildings you can explore more of the map and already the limitations on the worker placement is what you would expect from good work replacement it is challenging it is uh tough to decide where to prioritize things and easy to not cover everything but a really cool additional element here is the idea of heated actions so you can spend coal to fire up your generator and it's going to make certain actions and certain building types or certain things near or far from the generator heated or not and the more you take actions that are not heated the sicker you get the more people you're

4:58 going to have die horribly and it's kind of the core unique mechanic of the game but it's a really cool addition onto the basic worker placement formula and makes things really interesting and challenging overall I think you might enjoy frostpunk if you like other survival games with really tight Resource Management things like Robinson Crusoe come to mind you'll also enjoy it best if you're going to either play it Solo or if your group doesn't mind kind of discussion Co-op instead of actually having different defined roles but on the other hand you might want avoid this one if you don't want something that sprawls over your table that takes a decently long time and is kind of tough to learn at first and also you might want to avoid it if you don't like potential depression and doom and gloom this is a harsh challenging and morally gray type of game and if you want to see a full playthrough check out the video I posted yesterday good gaming and I'll see you at the next stop