This Roll and Write is HUGE (and strange) | TEND Review

What a weird board game. It's big, it's expensive, it's unconventional, and it's almost great. Tend is what you call a fliin right. If you're unfamiliar with board game jargon, it's an offshoot of rolling rights, which are themselves a genre of board games derived from Yatsi. This genre exploded somewhere around 2018ish with the popularity of games like Welcome to, Railroad Inc., and Gong Clever.

General gist is you roll a bunch of dice and then fill in the results onto a sheet. Your options constrict the further you go and create a sense of pressure and tension, often asking you to make tough decisions because every space you fill in has upsides and downsides and you never know what options will be available in the future.

Flipping rights replace the randomizer. Instead of dice, you have a deck of cards which allow for a different possibility space, but the core idea remains the same. And here's the thing. This is the size of a regular rolling, right? And this this is the result of an industry that's going through something.

In your non-a box of 10, you will receive one pad of A4 sheets, more pads of different A4 sheets, six sets of color markers that are also stamps, a bucket of dice of different size and color, a neoprene playmat, various sizes of cards, a bunch of lotto scratches, and even a metal coin to scratch them with.

Shrill gold, your job is to do all the manual labor to set up infrastructure on a newly colonized planet for the Zenith Corporation. They sound lovely. One of your sheets is used to perform the various actions in the game, like planting crops, building pens, and enclosing farm animals, fishing in the lake, chopping some trees, and excavating in the mines.

The other sheet is where you'll dump surplus resources, either to earn various badges or to play a Tetris game in the cargo manifest. both of which will earn you Zenith points, which are like regular victory points, but instead of winning, you graciously donate your victory to your boss, Steven Zenith.

If you take a closer look at either of these sheets, you will start to notice that your eyes are bleeding. Don't worry, that's a common side effect of working for Zenith. It will eventually go away on its own as you get used to the absurd array of spaces you can cross out and color in. Instead, let's pivot to the action cards on this playmat.

To keep things simple, there are four actions in the game. Fish, mine, chop, and the aonomous tend. Each round, you'll deal out five cards that will display some of these actions. You can select any two and then one by one perform them. Mine and chop are pretty simple. You scratch off a space on the appropriate location on the lot of scratcher going top down or sideways each time you do it.

If you reveal a resource, you get that resource. Soon as you get a resource intended, you have to spend it somewhere. At the beginning of the game, there's a wild number of things you want to invest in to get your engine going. If you want to raise animals, they will need a pen, so you could spend wood or rocks to draw that pen in your farm.

If you like fishing, you should repair the bridge that gives you access to river fishing, a more lucrative angling spot. And then each action also has upgraded tools. Fill the required resources to upgrade them. And now every time I perform a mine action, my pickaxe is so nice, I can pick twice. But eventually, you'll reach a point where you've mostly got all the upgrades and infrastructure you'll ever need, and the great resource dump will begin.

That's where the badges and the cargo manifest come in. To secure yourself a badge, which is just a flat reward of Zenith points, you'll need to fill in any two of the free rows of a given badge. These are always specialized, meaning that if you're good at tending and you're getting a lot of crops, you will probably not struggle to fill in the plant badge.

Otherwise, each resource can be converted into a corresponding Tetris shape as per this chart. That's where you uncheave the stamp side of your marker and stamp the shape wherever you like. Sounds too simple to be true. And it is. Each type of good belongs to a color. For example, fish are blue because water is blue and fish are made out of water.

That's science. Each space you fill in in this manifest is a zenith point. But some brackets don't want certain color goods, meaning zero points for those. And the middle bracket always desires a particular good, meaning two points per space. To complicate matters further, you cannot place two goods of the same color next to each other.

They all have to be distinct. But also, you get a bonus action if you fill in a row. And suddenly, this becomes a really big headache, which leaves us with fishing and tending. So, please cast your eyes to this tiny box. Each time you take a fishing action, roll two dice and trace the results on this chart, unless you unlocked one of the other fishing spots.

In that case, use those two dice there. Wherever the dice values intersect, that's what you've just fished, which could be an award-winning 10 kilos of tasty, tasty nothing. M I know what I'm having for dinner. Well, that does not seem fair. No, but that's cuz you haven't upgraded your rod doers. Fun fact, rod doofus is the name I used to dance under.

Fishing pole upgrades increase the area where you can fish from and lure upgrades also let you catch a bonus fish from that area. Tending is maybe the most involved mechanism with the action itself offering you three different things you can do. One, you can till soil which you will need for two, planting crops.

Simply place a dye you can fit onto your tilt soil and then you can free water plants upticking one dye and every dye adjacent to that dye. Dice also automatically uptick themselves at the beginning of every round. And that includes animal dice that you housed in your pens. Whenever a dye has a white filling, you get that resource and then the crops will often die and need to be replanted.

Whereas animal dice reset and can be reused infinitely because pets live forever. Talking of forever because I know this is board game internet tend will immediately wrankle some people with its nonforeverness. What about the markers drying out? What about the sheets being used up? What do you lotto when there's no more lotto to scrotto?

And hey, you know, normally I'd be like, don't be so uptight. Unscroto yourself. The game comes with so many spares you'd seriously struggle to use these up. And I'm sure they'll sell refills if you somehow manage it. Or you can use the app that simulates the scratches for you. But if I spent so much money on a game that lets me interact with these silly but very much fun toys, I feel like it goes against the spirit of the entire thing.

So, talking of money, I'm just going to say it. This is a really expensive game. I paid $140 for it on crowdfunding, and after the tariff hike, this will probably end up being more. And at that price, the impermanence is a valid concern. It's just that this again, valid concern, is not really what's interesting about Tend.

With every ounce of its being, and there are a lot of ounces, Tend wants to subvert its genre. Whilst Roland rights have had a pretty big popularity boom more than half a decade ago, the absolute deluge of follow-up releases all but guaranteed its early demise. They were cheap to print and people were looking for more and more publishers gave very quickly.

Rolling right became like a curse word, but not one of the cool ones like or or stained tur juggler from ass town, but more like when your semi-distant relative says something at your nana's birthday and the entire room dips into a slightly milder tone of [clears throat] temporary discomfort. You brought a rolling ride to game night.

Ah, yeah. Cool. It's uh perfect. If we have some time left at the end of the game, we're actually going to play. It feels like everything in this genre has been done already. People have turned Roland rights into heavy hero games, into Twilight Imperium. There's been wacky, there's been big, there's been complicated and maybe a hundred different slick ones.

10 does some of that, but what it really wants to do is provide a different reason to play a role and write by manipulating what makes them satisfying. Let's take another look at these action cards. You'll notice that just above this round selection, there are two cards that look slightly different.

Just like regular cards, they provide you with a possible action. But then there's a potential bonus you can piggy back onto as long as you meet a requested condition. For example, when you select this action, you'll get this skull thing resource as long as you've tilled enough soil. Taking this action gives you a purple voucher thing if you've upgraded one of your tools.

Crucially, you see that these cards will enter the action card circulation one turn in advance. Okay, so basically I've got a round to till a bunch of soil if I want the mud skull or even two rounds because I could spend my next round's actions to reach this condition. Some conditions will ask you to reach levels in mining and chopping, and you reach them by mining and chopping, although you need to reveal shaded spaces with your scratcher to actually level up, which will net you an additional resource.

Each Lotto card has a random distribution. So, there's definitely an amount of tension and yes, unpredictability that imbuss the scratcher mechanism. But working towards these bonus conditions isn't just worthwhile. Even if you're not guaranteed to get them in time, it's probably the core pillar of strategy intend that will guide you towards one of the many axes of strategy.

During the next round, both new cards will become options and three more cards will be dealt out from the action deck. When that round is done, they will go into the discard together with all the other cards and two more cards will come out. But uh there's only one card left here, meaning we have to reshuffle the discard and these cards will keep reemerging and keep granting you that bonus because once you've reached that condition, you've reached it forever.

Contrasted to a regular roll or flip and right, you usually have no choice in action. You simply generate a random result and choose where you want to fill it in here. Not only do you get to choose what you do and tense action selection is broad enough that most rounds all actions are available, but you can specialize in particular directions guaranteeing return rewards.

The appeal of a rolling ride is that it's like one of those one-around bandit machines in casinos. You get the same emotional response as you do when you gamble. You basically chuck coins into the thing and you're hoping for a biscuit each time you roll. Except in rolling rides, it never costs coins.

You just spin, spin, spin, and hopefully reward. 10 tugs at different emotional hooks, much more akin to point salad games. Because you can never actually keep the resources you generate. You'll often end up in situations that one reward triggers another reward triggers another reward triggers another reward which triggers another bonus.

Ah yeah. AND THAT TRIGGERS ANOTHER REWARD. AMAZING. And because it's so gigantically big in scope, you feel like there's an endless playground. You are the ball inside of the pinball machine and there is no hole at the bottom. This emotional tuning extends further into some strategies feeling almost like punishment.

Setting up plants and animals requires investment tilled soil and fences. How very British a lotment of you tend which means you're spending those crucial early game resources for what feels like no return. It doesn't bounce into anything. no combo. Once the infrastructure is there, growing plants and especially animals is a constant return on investment.

But to get those fences and whatnot going, I need to do some mining or chopping, but also I've got neighbor demands to fulfill. And for that, I need to do fishing. But fishing is risky. So, I need to upgrade my rod first. It's a classic Eurogame satisfaction engine with a million different directions to pull your heartstrings into.

In my first games of 10, I was smitten. It was like playing an Uve Rosenberg design, but with the addition of fun activities like scratching off rewards and stamping things. And you know what? Raise your hand if you don't enjoy stamping. I dare you, you animal. And the setup of the game is basically doing this and then doing this and then setting up free decks of cards.

It takes 5 minutes and you're in resource conversion bliss. What's not to love? Well, I did bring up Uve Rosenberg, so I guess it's time to unleash the litany of minor criticisms that individually don't ruin the game, but put them all together, and it diminishes the experience, especially in comparison to other cheaper existing games.

Let's talk about tense setting, which frankly just doesn't work. And I mean really doesn't work. Conceptually, artistically, even on a meta level, it's weird. First, let's talk pragmatics because it's what matters most. A game with a lot of different resources needs a lot of different icons because this is a resource conversion game set on an alien planet, you got to make those resources weird, right?

For example, if you complete a row in a badge, you get a ribbon resource, which you can chuck straight into your cargo manifest. Because what are you going to do with ribbons and plaques? We just got our plaque for reaching a 100,000 subscribers. Yay. Thank you everybody. Uh you know where we hung it in the L above the toilet paper because it would be embarrassing to have it on display anywhere else.

And now our guests can consider the life choices that we made as they're having a tinkle. It's a win-win. Where was I? This does not look like a ribbon. It looks like a ketchup bottle. If you keep chopping trees, you'll run into a techno jar of purple liquid with a tap. Is this tree sap? Why does it look radioactive?

What do I call it? What is this fish? And what is THIS FISH? WHAT DO WE CALL ANY OF THIS? And you know, there is an element of this that is good because what would you do as a colonist on an alien planet? Name everything, right? Except most humans are terrible at naming things, which is how we end up with places called New South Wales.

Embarrassing for the English, not the Welsh. They had nothing to do with that. They're cool. So, there is an element of this that is emergent and funny, but it's also frustrating because there's so many things. And on your first game, everything isn't just hard to name, it's hard to identify. It's hard to place in your brain box to know where it belongs.

Is this a rock? What action do I do to obtain it? So overwhelming for no good reason. Second, this is a game about working for a corporation coming from publisher Roman numeral 4 Studio. And the vibe is, well, they certainly don't come across as indie. Their marketing budget must be second only to Chip Theory games because they chuck money at everything.

Facebook ads, board game personalities, expensive promotional videos, but they're also very We have a foosball table in our lobby. So, I just I don't know. It's weird coming from this company. Do you know what I mean? Like, imagine if Wayand Utani, and I'm not I'm not saying that this publisher is like Wayand Utani, but imagine if Wayan Utani made an ironic board game about colonizing planets.

It just doesn't track, does it? There's also an issue with flow. The game has this nagging habit of constantly interrupting you. This is again a semi good thing because it stems from that satisfying resource bounce where one bonus turns into another bonus and then activates all the pleasure centers in your brain.

But towards game end, tend becomes very thinky and that resource bounce keeps increasing to an annoying level. I don't think I've played a game like this where I got another resource and I genuinely felt like not now game. I'm still dealing with five other things you threw at me, which is the opposite of how you want to feel in a resource conversion game.

The moments I live for in the genre are when you're just teetering on the edge, pushing everything you've got, and then you think you can't MAKE IT, BUT AHA, YOU FORGOT ABOUT SOME MINOR THING AND TURNS out it's just what you needed. They need to bottle this sensation and it does happen intent. But you also get the inverse of that.

The deluge of the unneeded unwanted interrupting resources that disrupt the flow of your brain waves. I'm known for sometimes making left field comparisons of two games. So for once, I am very confident this isn't one of those. It is remarkable how similar Tend is to a longtime audience favorite Uve Rosenberg's uh Lotto card destroying a feast for Odin.

Both have 7,000 different resources. In both, you convert those resources into Tetris shapes that you fit into a box for points. In both, those Tetris shapes have adjacency restrictions based on their color. Both have strategy groups that you specialize in. Both begin with very small actions that give you a couple of things, but as the game progresses, they balloon into an avalanche of combinations, and both are games about farming.

They're obviously not the same game. There's enough significant differences, but I just can't help noticing how unfavorably 10 compares to A Feast for Odin. All the issues I've described already, icon clarity and fun with bonus flow, feast gracefully dodges, but also more. A feast for Orodin is best with its first expansion, Norwegians integrated.

And together, you'd think this would be quite an expensive purchase, and it is, except it's actually significantly cheaper than Tend. But what version of Tend? The regular retail version of tent, which I didn't even know what it would look like when I wrote this review, costs only £80, which is just a little bit more than a feast for Odin by itself.

But it doesn't have most things that actually make 10 fun. It does not have a single one of these stamp markers. And if you want the full set for six players, which is the player count that this game goes up to, [laughter] it's £44, which then makes it significantly more expensive than a feast for Odin and Norwegians combined together.

You can probably get away with it a little bit cheaper if you buy the retail version. You do not need six sets of these markers because playing this with six players would be an absolute nightmare. In fact, the marketing material for 10 suggests that you could combining multiple copies of 10, play it with 12 people or 18 people.

Let me tell you something. If you play this with anything more than four, I don't want to do this, but I will call the cops on you because whilst you do play simultaneously with all the other players, there's just so much analysis paralysis because of that resource constant drip drip drip drip drip feeding.

Uh people get lost in their turns. So with two players, you know, or even just by yourself, this is perfectly salvageable. But with anything more, it becomes this bloated, hoggish experience. And also, it just takes up so much space on your table. It's not okay. You can't play this with more than two.

The Tetris puzzle intend is just not fun. The placement of things never feels strategic or satisfying because you don't actually have time to think about it. The rule that resources must be spent immediately just gets in the way. Feast lets you sit with it and puzzle it out. And that's more satisfying because there's also good reason for it because Feast's Tetris puzzle feels more purposeful.

It unlocks income progression and bonus resources, meaning it cycles back into the game. 10 does a little of that with these bonus actions you get for filling in an entire row, but it feels tacked on and it mostly just flattens out at the top. But the biggest comparison culprit is 10's action selection system.

I hate praise on it earlier, but I have to admit that its promise didn't shake out how I wanted because of how prescriptive it feels. The secret at being better at this game is that you follow what these action color bonuses ask you to achieve. The more conditions you can fulfill, the more bonuses you'll get, which will elevate you into competent point scoring.

And this prescriptiveness just feels weird in a sandbox game, especially when it once again flattens out at the top. Tend is not a particularly deep game, even though it dresses and styles like one. It has enough complexity to be not just your average roller, right? But its strategic varieties are sparse and boil down to finding the right time to break away from upgrades into dumping resources into badges and your cargo manifest.

If you do it too early, you've hamstrung yourself. If you do it too late, all those surplus resources are wasted. None of which is to say that Tend is a bad game. In fact, I think it's a significant improvement over every other game from Roman numeral 4 Studio that I've played. And yes, it compares poorly to a feast frozen.

But then again, many games do, just maybe not that directly. So hey, if you want to spend 140 xenith bucks for whatever version you want to get to have fun with stamps and scratches, I mean, it's only company script. Who cares, right? You won't go terribly wrong. You won't have a bad time. But if you like me would rather spend your time playing the best rather than the rest.

Well, Ten's been here all along in the form of very suspicious looking Vikings. If you enjoyed this board game review, you might like to know that we are entirely independent board game reviewers. And the way that works is that we don't take any publisher sponsorships. We don't accept review copies.

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