Drillers - Board Game Review - Shaft Ain't Big Enough For Four!
Transcript
Hi everyone. I'm the broken melee. Win or lose, I'm going to be honest with you. And a bit late to this party, I know, but I don't get to go to Gen Con. American conventions are kind of out of my reach for the most part. And this one has been out for a few months. A lot of other people have talked about it, but I don't subscribe to this whole concept that the second a game passes the one two month barrier, suddenly we must all forget about it and never talk about it again. I mean, come on. Half of the games I've been got on my shelf behind me are from like a decade ago and I'm still talking about them now. But this is Drillers from CGE. So, check game editions. So, I mean, yeah, you know what they you know them by now. I mean, lost of SETI, Whisper Wood, you know, Underfalling Skies, you know, you name it. They've got some belters out there and you know in this year we've got Drillers as well as Kingdom Come Deliverance which hopefully I'll be able to look at that one. I have pre-ordered it but you know it's going to be a bit of a beast so you have to bear with me on that one. But Drillers was one that I had my eye on because it was sort of going to fit into that kind of light/midweight category. be smooth, look nice, have a fun little theme about it, and basically steer away from the ultra heavy side that well, I mean, they've been focusing more on heavy games lately, but these days I think we could do with a few more sort of like quicker, lighter, more, you know, just more interesting fair, shall we say?
I beg to differ.
So, Drillers is kind of a mini deck builder, shall we say? You have a deck of starter cards which you ideally want to get rid of as time goes on. But what you're essentially doing is controlling a mech. This mech will start at the top of the board on the surface. And there are multiple levels in the mine where you basically go to get gems or cubes in this case. I guess cubes are worth more than gems and bring them up to the surface. Sell them off for a profit. Use that profit to buy cards and upgrade your mech in various ways. Rinse repeat until the mine has effectively collapsed in upon itself. and then see who's got the most victory points as a result of collecting good gems, as you know, building a really cool mech or just excavating a lot of the mine in the first place.
Players start off with a selection of starter cards. Each of them has negative victory points, so you ideally want to trash these out of the game as you go forth. But they have the basics for you, typically drill and arrow icons. Drills are how you collect gems, excavate the mine, dig deeper, and the movement is how you move up and down. You basically have a mine shaft with multiple levels where your dr your mech has to move up and down in order to get to the places where those gems are. They are multi-use cards, so you can pay the fuel cost, which is tracked on your board, to play the card for its effect, or you can bin the card to gain fuel for whatever it's worth. You know, in this case, free. So, it will actually give you fuel. or you can essentially hang on to it till the next round. You can hang on to one card for free or you can pay extra fuel to hang on to multiple cards. You will then draw three new cards after you've done your turn regardless of how many you kept behind. So you could set yourself up for a really big turn for example and the next player will take their turn and kind of rinse repeat. So, your playerboard has the ability to track the different icons that you have, as well as your fuel, as well as storage capacity for your drones, for your gems, and your eventual sort of progress through the mine. When you excavate the mine, more gems will be released into the different mine shafts. And the tiles themselves, where are victory points and can give you a bonus, go on top of your board and basically go along in one big line that can get you achievements for points or trigger the end of the game.
As soon as it reaches the end, then somebody triggers the mine collapse. And you ideally want to get out of the mine because you'll lose victory points if you're still stuck down there. You know, you've just built up a really nice mech. No one wants to see it crushed anytime soon.
Why was I programmed to feel pain?
So, the actions that you can do involve moving your mech up and down to the various levels, excavating the mine itself, where you effectively release more gems. So, you're digging into the wall, here comes a bunch of gems. You can dig deeper into the mine of which you have some randomized different like level cards where as soon as you have the amount of drill icons to dig deeper, you follow it through it reveals and this area might have an effect. So we got like a very cold chill out zone. We've got a jackpot section. Uh we've got the squeeze where it's a bit too tight for multiple mechs. We've got a sort of toys and rust area. So you know there's basically a few of them and you select them at random and they will be there for the course of the game. You can drill deeper. As I said, these new drill icons as well, and they function kind of in a similar way to the excavation tiles. They just don't give you gems. But of course, eventually you're going to want to upgrade your mech and you've only got so much fuel.
So once you've done as much as you can down here, if you end your turn back up on the surface, you're able to get rid of cards for money, but the and you know, and sell your gems for money, of which you've got a tracker on here. But the main couple of things you're likely to do is repairing and upgrading. So repairing involves basically repair is the equivalent of trash in a deck builder. You get rid of the card itself. It's gone. Happy days. And you know that's negative victory points out of the out out of the way. It's a card that you don't want to be drawing out of your deck and it will replenish itself if you do it out of your hand. So it can actually be quite a good idea. But then you've got all these other cards that you can go for. So I've been playing this solo. That's why it's all kind of all over the table. But you have got various different decks with all these different upgrade cards set up into shops by category. So some are better for movement, some are better for drill, some are weird wacky technology and the like. Some are even permanent effects that you put in front of you. They don't even go into your deck. And you can pay money to upgrade your deck with these.
So it's a mini deck builder, but it's not quite a mass. It's not like the minion. This is more closer to like a I suppose closer in a sense to lost runes of iron act. The idea is is that when you buy a card, you'll have it available next turn, which is always good, but it's more that you don't really have a big deck of cards. You're talking like 10 or fewer cards, you know, for most of the game. And it's, you know, it keeps things fairly small, fairly tight. Other little tidbits include upgrading your actual board so you can hold more fuel, hold more gems as you go through, and upgra and getting the use of drones. These drones can basically be used while you're down in the mines to send it up and sell a gem or buy a card. You know, sometimes you don't want to hit have that tempo hit for going all the way back up to the surface and doing a full reset. It's good if you just need to free up a little bit of space, get a tiny bit of cash or, you know, just do that one little thing or maybe a card took your fancy and you really want it now for where you are. You can send the drone up to go and get it. Nice, very handy little tool. As I said, players will continue in this fashion until one player has filled up their entire top row with progress tiles. There is an overflow section for gems where you've sold too many of the same color. As soon as you either fill up to the end of your board or those two bits meet, the mine collapses. Total up your victory points.
And of course, the one with the most.
Of course,
check game editions are no stranger to making a game look good. And this is no exception either. I mean, I like the little tweak with the logo where they've got a minor hat and a mustache on the guy look like the face logo. I think that's quite a nice little gimmick. But the, you know, the box cover looks cool. The production quality is really solid. I mean, you're not like you haven't got loads of re-wood and wooden pieces here, but you've got, you know, decent thick cardboard. You've got very easy to follow graphic design. You've got a little mech. And for the most part, it's mainly a case that you've got these, you know, nice dual layer boards, which, yes, you use those little sticky things to put down, but honestly, I actually kind of find those fine. You know, I mean, it doesn't take much effort to put them together, and it's a good cost-effective way to give you a dual layer board, so why not? But also, the main thing is that you've got pretty good card stock with these. I mean, it is quite a, you know, it's taken me a fair bit of pressure in order to, you know, bend these to some extent. I actually would say that even though this is technically a deck builder, you probably don't actually need to sleeve these cards, per se. You get a little standy where basically you put your deck in the front there, so you can always see the top card. I like that. But, you know, for the most part, you don't need to handle your deck and you've only got to draw free cards from it and, you know, play around with them. But, I'll probably sleeve this. But, you could actually, I think, get away with it. And the artwork very good, very good colorful, striking artwork. I mean, even just this stuff I've got on the table now, you know, is already pretty vibrant. And if you see some of the photos I'm putting up at the moment, particularly the last Instagram post I put up for Drillers. Oh, blam me.
Yeah, you can create some very good shots with the artwork for this game. It's just a nice production all round. Not entirely uh perfect though. There are a little there is one little problem I do have and it mainly arises with these cubes, you know. I mean, I get why you couldn't give us gem pieces. Although, it's kind of ironic that a game that actually has you harvest gems doesn't use those little plastic gems that you see in most euros, but okay, you got to use cubes. They sit in your board very nice and they're translucent. They're pretty. The problem is the color differentiation. Uh, blue, fine, not a problem. Red, fine, not a problem. the brown ones, the gray ones, yes, gray, really, not brown. Fineish, you know, they're not too bad. The problem I have though is the yellow and the green. The yellow and the green are just too damn similar, you know, and as I hold them up in front of me, I mean, if I squint, I can clearly see one is yellow and one is more green, but they're the translucent type cubes. So, you know, yellow and green tend to come out very similarly with this. And if you're in bad lighting or if it's quite bright where you are, you're going to find that players are going to struggle at a distance to tell the yellow and the greens apart. And every game somebody gets it wrong. You know, even if it's just a passing glance, like, "Oh, I'll grab that. Oh, wait, no, that's the green one. I need a yellow one." It's like it always happens to the point where I'm actually tempted to see if I can find an upgrade for this where obviously you need cubes cuz they got to sit in your board, but there must be better cubes out there where I can at least distinguish the yellow and the green a bit more. And you know, I'm
surprised this didn't really come up as a a potential issue. But there's a lot of gems out there. We could have maybe avoided green um or we could just like I say, not have done them translucent. I would have been perfectly fine if they weren't translucent and they just stood out a bit more. But it's a it's a small annoyance, but it's one thing you are going to have to bear in mind, particularly if anybody's color blind when it comes to green and yellow. But other than that, it's a pretty solid production. The rules to this game, oh man, they're silky smooth. I mean, this is one of the silkiest games I've played in a long time. The rule book is very big font with pictorial examples for what's going on. It's not hard to get through this in a very short space of time. So it like I literally just set it up for you know a two-player you know dummy game and it barely took any time for me to read this rule book get the gist of the game and with the assistance of the player raid just get started and have a little play around. The player raids are not the best. I will say though, we've had some belters for something like Arnac and SETI. These ones are good. I mean, you do have the effects on one side with, you know, starting resources and four card stuff.
You know, that's good. That I like. The bit where it kind of falters a little bit is the turn sequence bit because it it has the different phases fine, but it doesn't include everything you need to know about how bits of these work. And there's one or two things that are in the game that aren't explained kind of at all on these aids. You know, it misses out a few little key bits which you kind of have to commit to memory and it's a little bit too vague on some of these bits. I mean, some of it it gets right, but it's just not quite comprehensive enough. And I feel like maybe we could have expanded this a little bit. I mean, say they're not bad player aids, and I certainly will take a player raid over no player aid, but yeah, it's just not quite as good as the Seti and the Arnac ones we've had in the past. that's basically like going up against 10 out of 10 style uh you know player raids. So let's give them a little break. But yeah, just a couple of like minor glimpses there. But other than that, the graphic design is very easy to follow on the tiles, on the cards.
Everything makes sense. The iconography is very easy to distinguish what's fuel, what's drills, what's movement, etc. Your player board is easy to follow. It's got like important little like free actions that you can do. Every bit is just very clean. You know, nobody is asking a lot of questions during this game. FAQs are minimal at best. There's a few at the end of the book to cover some scenarios, but honestly, most people kind of get the gist of this game pretty damn quick and just get on with it. So, it won't take long to teach. It won't get lot take lot for people to sort of get into it. And if you're into heavy games, this is going to be an absolute breeze for you to learn. But even for those who aren't into a lot of games, I think they will pick this up pretty damn quick as a nice little not maybe not an intro to deck building, but certainly it could be one of their first ones. You know, maybe one of their next step deck builders. It's light enough for that purpose. So gameplay perspective, it is relatively light. Um close to midweight, but I'd say it's more on the upper echelon of light. You know, you're basically getting cards, playing them mostly to drill and move.
Occasionally they'll have other effects, but it's mostly drill, move, and I suppose repair is probably the next most common one. And upgrading cards, move up and down, collect gems, sell them off. I mean, rinse, repeat. We know how mining works. So, it's not like it's a, you know, a particularly complex game arc. But I really do enjoy like the flow of this game. I like how you just come on deciding, well, what do I fancy doing now? Do I want to excavate and get some like points in these tiles? Cuz you can flip these tiles over, sacrifice a couple of victory points, but they get you a bonus. And of course they progress you and potentially get you achievements so they are useful. But then they're, you know, chucking out gems which other people can go and grab before you do. So you're kind of keeping a slight eye on people thinking, well, uh, maybe I don't want to excavate the corridor whilst there's two mechs right behind me who are basically just going to go, you know, and just look and nab all the gems that you've just done. You know, are you in a position where you think, you know what, I'll dig down to the next tile.
It's worth a lot of points, but again, it opens the floor up for other people. And it's very much an efficiency puzzle of how often you go up and down to surface because surfacing is still useful. You got to sell your stuff for money. You got to buy new cards. You got to do all sorts there. But if you just constantly keep going down, up, down, up, down, up, you're not getting enough done. So, you're trying to survive down in the shuffle as long as possible before you go back up, do a massive reset, and then get back down and rinse, repeat. It's, you know, a fun little puzzle to do. I love the card system. I like having this little stand with your deck there. So, you haven't got like a face down deck in front of you. You always know the next card that's coming up. This is very good for something like repair, for example, because you can repair out your hand, your discard pile, or the top card of your deck. When you do it in other deck builders, you're always like, I don't want to do the top card of my deck. That's too risky. Here, you at least know it is. I mean, it's like, oh, you know what? I don't fancy the mining arm anymore. Cool. That's the one I repair. Out you go. we'll get something else. And you know, just quite a nice little thing there. And it just, like I say, it just keeps it nice and hidden, you know, from other players, but it's you could say it's a little gimmicky, but I quite like it. I mean, it's it's better than having the deck face down with the top card revealed where everybody can see it. This one is basically saying, "Well, I know that next turn that one of my cards I'm in the drawer has got the free drills on it." Okay, good to know. I could use that. you don't want the other players to know that you've got that because obviously they're not going to just give you a bunch of gems for you to drill out. So, it's a nice little change to the norm, shall we say. Um, I love the
card system. I like multi-use cards and I like this, you know, concept of, you know, having a deck of cards with multi-use singing. Do I use that for fuel? Do I keep it handy? Do I set myself up for a bigger turn? Do I play it? In which case, how much fuel do I have left before I need to think about actually getting out of here? And the upgrades are very cool as well. I mean, there's not a ton of them. I think this game could use a bit more variety in the decks. I mean, yeah, go figure that a CG game benefits from an expansion in the early days, but [clears throat] you know, they are there's enough there to keep you entertained. And you don't tend to buy out all the cards. You know, they can be quite expensive at times, and you're only going to do so many upgrades before the game ends. But yeah, maybe they could be used a few more. But it's great to upgrade your mech because all these cards feel potent. You know, there's very few cards that I've come across where I'm like, "That doesn't seem that good." But then they're priced appropriately. You know, if I want, you know, a laser cutter. It's only worth seven bucks. That's relatively cheap, but it can give me a decent amount of fuel, but it's reasonably pricey on the fuel bit, but it does a repair and two drills. It's not bad. It's a pretty decent card. You know, I could do with it. But then you've got like an ATM drone. It's only worth three bucks. It doesn't really do much for you. It gives you one movement icon, but it refreshes a drone and gives you seven bucks. very handy if you want to invest in your deck a lot in the future. And to be fair, in my last solo game, this was one of the MVPs. But then it's really good when you get some of the uh like funky technology ones. Some of your tiles that you excavate can allow you to buy more really interesting tech and then you get
like, you know, super heavy drills, atomic dislocators, rocket engine pro, and my all-time MVP favorite, the anti-gravity drive. Oop, sorry. [snorts]
Stop it.
There's quite a few ways you can approach the game in that respect as well. I mean, do you get a bunch of cards that are good for giving you loads of fuel so you can spend ages down there? Do you focus more on movement? Do you focus more on drill? Are you going to go more for collecting gems and selling them off? Or you going to concentrate on excavation more than anything else to sort of rush the game with all those achievement tiles and stuff? There's and there's just a lot of little quirks that you can tailor yourself to to make you a little bit different from other players. Not crazy different. We're not talking asymmetric factions or anything like that here, but just enough, you know, just enough to say, "Yeah, I had a bit of a thing going with all this fuel and all these drones, whereas you were basically just carving up everything in sight." You know, there's a nice little bit of variation there. There's not a great deal of interaction, but it's not bare bones. It's not like non-existent because you're not directly affecting people's mechs, but because everybody shares the same mine shaft when you excavate the tunnels in order to kick out gems, when you go down to another level, the fact that other people can nick gems off you, there is an element of competition between players and even like rushing for the achievements that is a first come first serve and the end of the game is triggered by a player. So, you got to be mindful of that. So, this is definitely not like, you know, a ton of interaction, but it's not like I don't care what the other players are doing. I am still interested to know whether somebody could come and usurp what I'm doing, nick the gems I'm thinking of grabbing, or whether it's like, you know what, you're kind of all go about to go to the surface. You're kind of out of fuel. Now's a good time for me to keep drilling and go down and nick lots of cool stuff. So, you know, I like the
fact that it's not entirely a multiplayer solitaire. Now, there are a couple of limitations on the game that are definitely worth mentioning. Now, I already mentioned the replay value from the decks there. There's not a lot of different cards in the shops, but you don't upgrade your cards that often, but you are going to rinse repeat a few of these cards. And certainly, I think from a variety perspective, in the future, we could stand to see a little bit more. I don't think it's as bad as some people have said where they go, "Oh, this game's got no replay value whatsoever." It's like, no, it's got some replay value in it, but you are eventually going to see those cards come up. It's not like the deck of cards is this big and are all unique. But I think we've been a little bit spoiled by games lately where there is like a monumental deck of unique cards, which is all great. I love that. But, you know, realistically, how many do you need? The main limitation this game has though, player count. Yeah, this game does not scale particularly well when it comes to the game length. Because it's 30 minutes a player, which is not entirely inaccurate. That's actually a reasonable good approximation of the time, but this is a relatively light game, reasonably midweight. It shouldn't take longer than 2 hours. I mean, 2 hours is too long for this game. It really should be a 60 to 90 minute affair. That's that's as much as the game, I think, warrants, you know, and most of the time with two to three players, in fact, I'd say all the time with two to three players, you're going to get it within that 60 to 90 minute time limit. Four players, though, with two hours at least, that's that's too much. It's outstaying its welcome.
And the biggest issue is not necessarily how long it takes. It's the downtime. Players can have turns that take a long time. you know, they got a lot of shenanigans going on. All the stuff to do with the cards, they've saved up for a massive turn and then they go to the surface and that's a whole extra phase that they get to do that no one else does. Nothing is simultaneous in this game. And I think maybe there should have been some way to incorporate that, but it does mean that you could be sat around waiting a long time for somebody to hurry up and take their turn. And obviously this problem is exponentially increased when you add more players. It's a factor that the downtime in four players is just too much. It really does great a bit to the point where I'm not sure I want to play this with four ever again unless I know everybody there randoms and at a convention. No, I would probably cap the game at three. I just think four is too many at the moment cuz it adds 30 minutes a player. But those extra 30 minutes you don't get to benefit from. They are all devoted to that other player, not you. So they, you know, they're going to be spending that extra 30 minutes of time that you're sat at the table doing their thing. You don't get any extra benefit. And the game doesn't necessarily get that. I mean, you get a little bit more competition for the different areas and stuff because nothing, you know, the mine shaft is set up in essentially the same way, but I don't think the added competition for more players warrants the, you know, extra downtime. And given that you've got three other players acting that could totally sort of change
up what's going on in the mine shaft at a particular time. It could also add a little bit to the chaos factor and you don't want that in a game with a decent amount of downtime. So that is a problem. It is solved a little bit though by the solo mode. The solo mode in this is really really solid. I'm just going to chuck the stuff off here. But basically each playerboard has a difficulty bot modifier on the back. So this is the easy bot, right? So level one. Um there are others level one, two, three, and four. And this is a very good way to play the game. You do exactly the same as you normally do, right? Your thing is exactly as it should be. The bot is super simple. You take their starter deck. You don't do any reshuffleling. You don't do any upgrading or anything with the resources and stuff. All that happens is basically you flip a card and it tells you based on how much fuel cost it has how many icons it gets. And it will have drills.
It will always collect like a diff the most valuable resource there. and it may move down into the shaft usually when it's on the surface, but it's got a priority chart for what it goes for. Same for all the bots. It's just that the difficulty increases what it gets for the different cards. And all you basically have to do is go right, wherever it is, it most of the time it's like, right, it's got this many drill icons. It will take that gem. It will take that gem. It will stack them along here. And the more gems that they get, the more powerful they become. And they may move up or down, and they may excavate from time to time. That's it. I mean, that's all you've got to do. I mean, if I get a two, for example, here on the first bit and they're on the surface, it's like, right, they drill twice. Uh, there's no gems available. So, they take this tile and they'll put it on top of their board. Great. Uh, they take the most valuable resource. There isn't. There isn't one there.
Fine. They just take a gray from the uh supply and they move their mech down to the lowest level. Job done. That's their turn. I mean, their turns are that fast once you get the gist of what they're doing. It's only a couple of pages in the rule book. It's a very straightforward system. very easy to pilot and you get the same feel out of the game as if you would for a two-player. I mean, it's a little bit different because the the bot can harvest up gems a bit more often than say another player would, but you it has to compensate that because it doesn't score points for various other things and it doesn't do anything with the upgrades and stuff. You play it on easy mode, you will you have to be like completely inept at this game to lose to the easy bot. I mean, this is basically how to play solo mode, you know, with the easy bot. But when you start ranking up the difficulty does get pretty tricky at times. You know, you will get a challenge rating at some point in the difficulty rating. It's just a case of which one you're comfortable with.
Super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
Playing it solo is very quick. It's a speedy setup. It's I mean, the game is not that particularly long setup anyway, but the solo mode, poof, straight out. You can play it 30 minutes. If you know what you're doing, you could be that quick. I would say 45 minutes probably likely, but it's a quick game that you can get out and get a similar feel to a two-player game. Two-player works very well. You know, just two of you going up and down. The turns will come back around. You won't have too much downtime. It just the game gets steadily worse with three and then more so with four. And god forbid they ever think of trying to make this five. So, one thing I would probably expect from an expansion in the future is that they need to think very hard about not only bolstering up the decks, which is very easy to do. They could, hell, they could just do that as a mini expansion if need be, but you know, it's a bit like their other games. You know, Arnac needed a little bit of differentiation between players, so they threw in the asymmetric boards. SETI needed the scanning action to be a little bit better, as well as shortening the game with that whole five round structure. The first expansion did that mostly. And now this one basically needs to bolster the decks and fix the downtime issue. They need to find a way to make this game a bit more streamlined and a little bit more fast flowing with four players than it currently is. Now, I'm sure there's got to be a way they do it. One house rule I might suggest is that the uh phase where you do all the surfacing stuff is done while the other player is taking their turn. You might occasionally overlap, but for the most part, you should be fine.
Wibbly wobbly timy wimy.
Continuity be damned. The section had a bit of file corruption, so uh yeah, need to re-record it. So, summary and verdict on Drillers. Overall, it's a really solid game. It's silky smooth. The rules are very straightforward. The rule book that gets you into the game pretty quickly, and if you're teaching it, you're going to get into it like super fast. Most people who have played this sort of game with a little bit of deck building, a little bit of, you know, action point selection are going to get into it just fine. So, it's a very good game for, you know, lighter gamers to get into, but it's not, you know, completely devoid of any depth. There's still a decent amount of thinking you got to do, a bit of planning, lots of uh, you know, decisions to make with upgrading the cards and, you know, choosing how you're going to customize your mech, when you're going to go up, when you're going to go down, like in terms of going up and down the mine, that is. And it's, you know, it's a really solid affair. Not without a couple of caveats though, that do hurt this game. Firstly, I mentioned the replay value is decent, but it's decent up to a point. It can get a little repetitive after a while if you keep playing it too often over like a short space of time. It's one of those games you kind of want to bring out once, take a little break, bring it out again, take a little break, bring it out again, and you'll have a good time. But I think because the decks of the shops are a little bit on the small side and because of the very nature of the game, you know, I think if you try playing this like, you know, 10 times in the space of a week or something, you're going to notice that repetition set in. The other problem this game has is the player scaling. As mentioned, this game has
very diminishing returns. When you up the player count, at its peak, it's at one and two players. That I mean, that is pretty much the gold standard for this. You know, if you want to play this solo or just play it with your spouse, then this is a really solid one to go for. But when you get it up to three, two things start to happen. Firstly, the downtime. The downtime like exponentially goes up. You got to wait for more people to take their turns, dig juggle around their action points. Um, you know, deal with the whole phase that they have to do when other people don't have to do that maybe on their turn. So, it's, you know, a little bit annoying, but it also increases the chaos factor. You know, if you're not the sort of person that likes people to get in your way constantly, this game might irk you a little bit because when you're going up and down in the mine shaft, you're thinking, "Right, well, on my next turn, I'm going to grab these gems. They're there. Yeah, I can grab that tile, drill down. That'll be great." And then by the time it gets round to your turn, they've already done that. And you can't really predict what they're going to do because it's quite easy to, you know, get a lot of stuff done at times. So, you can't really plan, oh yeah, those two are blatantly going to go up to the surface.
I'm in the clear here. It's like, nah, they could literally just come and usurp you at a moment's notice. This gets worse in four players. Four players, the downtime goes to stupid levels and that chaos factor is going to go up and then some. So, I actually don't recommend you play this with four. It's one game that I'm not going to want to bring out with four. One of the player colors might as well just never get put in the game. And blime me, I'm glad they didn't go to five. That would have been insane. So, you know, it sounds like I'm ragging on it, but not exactly. The game really does sing at one to two players. And certainly that is the best scenario you're going to get. Just don't consider this one, I don't think, if you're going to play this multiplayer, like in the sense that you're always going to play this with four players cuz you're not getting the best experience. And for me, chances are I'm mostly going to play it solo and free players because I don't often get games to the table with two. I certainly don't want to bring out with four. So note the player scale and rating for this game. It is quite like swingy, but overall I think I'm going to give this one an 8 out of 10 on the basis of that player scale in Caval. I think it's still a solid game, but I think these problems do stop it being a distinction level one. You know, great.
It's still a seal of approval. I still recommend it and I could say that it could go to distinction levels for solo and two player potentially, but free player it definitely does drop a bit. And for four player, it drops a lot. And when you average the lot together, it kind of means that I can't really recommend it as a distinction level game. But I can still say it's really solid. Silky smooth, looks the part, nice easy rules, good decision making, you know, good theme. It's just a a decent solid game all around just with those caveats, which could be fixed in an expansion, which sadly seems to be CG's kind of shick at the moment. You know, they make a really solid game, but usually needs one thing to be fixed in an expansion. Seti, Arnac, yeah, need go down the list. This one's no different. An expansion could fix a couple of these problems and hopefully down the line they will. But for now, 8 out of 10.
Great game, solid game. Just depends how many you intend to play it with.
This is why Superman works alone.
So that's it for me on this episode of The Broken Even. If you like what you see, please thumb up on YouTube and thumb up on board game when they both go live. Check out the rest of my content. I have reviewed a lot from CGE Seti the expansion, Lost Runes of Iron expansions, and under Falling Skies. Yeah, you name it, I've reviewed it from them. So, by all means, check out all that content and let me know your thoughts on the game. Do you agree, disagree, what you think? Well, especially on the player scaling front. Do you agree with me that high players doesn't work? Do you not mind? Have you played the solo? You know, by all means, let me know your thoughts. So, take care. Remember, it's only a game. And I'll see you on the next Broken Mele video. So, bye for now.