Revenant - Kickstarter Overview

hi everyone my name is Monique and today I'm going to be showing you how to play a game that is currently on Kickstarter called Revenant designed by Alan Kirby and published by mindclash games who are helping sponsor this video in this game players take on the role of rival Admirals who are escorting a fleet through hostile space sectors after a cataclysm known as void fall has threatened all of humanity in an attempt to transport and protect the Revenant players must compete to defend against voidborn assaults and Forge alliances with the great houses this is a competitive worker placement game for one to four players that is set in the void fall universe and so today I'm going to be showing you how to play it but before I begin I do need to mention that everything that you see here is considered a prototype copy of the game which means things are subject to change in the future for more information regarding the game I've included a link to their campaign in the description below lastly if you enjoy content like this and would like to see more in the future please consider subscribing and with that we are ready to begin so if you please yerk your attention to the of the table we're all set up here for a two-player game of revenant welcome to the void fall universe and so like I was mentioning in this game players take on the role of Admirals who are escorting a fleet of ships which includes the Revenant a ship which houses the Empire's data banks after an awful event that happened in the universe and over the course of four rounds players will be sending their crew members to the various ships that are positioned around the board in order to take actions and gain influence with the seven great houses which is going to be a majority of the points that you'll earn throughout the game in addition to gaining influence players will need to acquire and manage their resources attack and defend against the enemy voidborn ships and work towards completing a hidden agenda card which will also score you points at the end of the game and so the game is played over the course of four rounds and each round consists of five phases starting with the soar phase for the first round of the game this phase is skipped which means after setup you'll go directly to the actions phase which is where a majority of the game takes place now this is technically a worker placement game and so each player has two boards one that represents their frig which starts the game in the middle sector as well as a crew board which holds all three of your crew members which are your workers in the game so during the actions phase starting with your first player and going clockwise on your turn you'll choose one of your three crew members to send out onto a ship location in order to take its action now of your three crew members two of them can be customized by playing Improvement cards in order to train them and your third one is considered to be your captain which will have an asymmetric ability depending on which board you choose to play when sending out a crew member you can send them to any unoccupied ship on the board including your own frig but not any of your opponent's frig now in this game there are three main types of ships and each of these ships belong to one of these seven Great houses now like I was mentioning earlier influence is going to be where a majority of your points comes from at the start of the game each of these seven Great houses will start with a power of two and the power level always represents the number of ships they have on the board over the course of the game players will have the ability to add additional ships to the board increasing the faction's power and enemy ships will attack and sometimes destroy their ships making them lose power and at the end of the game players will calculate the amount of influence they have in each house which will be their position on the corresponding influence track plus any hidden influence cards that players will be collecting throughout the game and then they'll multiply their influence by the power level of that house which means your main goal will be to gather as much influence as possible in a few of the great houses while also increasing the power of their house in order to maximize your points and so on your turn when sending out a crew member you'll first gain an influence in the house that owns the ship which in this case is the yellow house and all of these seven Great houses have names as well as symbols that correspond to them then you'll resolve the ship's action but before you do you'll also have the option to move the ship into an adjacent sector which might be important depending on the type of action you'll be resolving but this can be done before or after the action has been taken now if the chosen ship has a corruption marker on it such as this one you gain a corruption token and anytime you to gain these you must immediately assign it to an available space on your frigate board and any slots with a corruption token on it are considered to be inactive which means from now on you can no longer choose its action for a bonus action and you can no longer use these spaces in order to store and use the resources that might already be there in addition at the end of the game each corruption token you have left on your board is going to score you netive -2 points so managing these is going to be very important but fortunately there are ways for you to remove them as you'll see as for the various ship actions first we have the fighter ships which allow you to destroy one voidborn that is in the same sector later in the round players will resolve a breach phase in which all of the enemy voidborn ships will attack the ships in their sector possibly destroying them and so assigning a crew member to a fighter ship allows you to remove a voidborn ship removing a voidborn ship also allows you to advance one space on the tactics track and advancing on the tactics track can be quite powerful because not only does this track break ties but also whoever is furthest along on the track gets to decide who the first player is going into the next round players will also gain rewards for advancing on this track and so in this game there are four main types of resources that we will be collecting and spending one of which are materials which you gain from the supply for reaching the corresponding thresholds along this track in addition whenever you reach the eight space here you'll draw a certain number of hidden influence cards from the deck depending on the level of your captain which will make sense later but just so you know these hidden influence cards correspond to each of these seven houses and whenever you get to draw these cards you'll always get to choose one and you'll be keeping it a secret because at the end of the game you'll reveal all of your influence cards and you'll add them to the amount of influence that you already have on the corresponding track and if you reach the 11 space then you gain an influence in a house of your choice and we'll talk about the tactics track again a little bit more later but also keep in mind that at some point in the game your position on the track will reset and that is how all of the fighter ships are resolved next we have drop ships which have this sort of a square like shape when resolving their action drop ships allow you to land on the planet card that is in its sector and as you'll see the combination of Planet cards as well as other components will change around the board from round to round so it's important to remember that you can always move move the ship before or after resolving the action which might make it possible for you to get the drop ship into position before landing on a planet card because you may only land on a planet card that is currently unoccupied the first player to land on a planet gains its Discovery data Cube and anytime you gain these cubes you're going to place it on your Discovery data card and as soon as you've collected three of them then you discard all the cubes back into the supply and you get to draw a hidden influence card as for the planets each planet card shows two different actions one of which is a mining action which gains you resources in addition to an action specific to the card as well as an action that requires you to gain a corruption token if you choose to take it but when landing on a planet you may only resolve one of the two actions but that's essentially how the drop ship works and similarly players also have their own personal frigate which you can assign a crew member to but when assigning a crew member there you can choose to either attack a voidborn just like a fighter or you can land on an adjacent planet similar to a drop ship but in this case I would have to move into a sector that has a planet adjacent to me or the thing that makes your frig special is you have a third option and that is adding one absorber to the sector that your frig is in and so as an example if I were to move into this adjacent sector I could add an absorber to this sector and during the breach phase each absorber cancels out and enemy ships attack in addition placing absorbers is one of the main ways in which you can collect energy tokens and so anytime I place one of these out I gain an energy and when gaining resources you can place them in any available space that does not have a corruption token and since you don't gain influence for assigning to your own frig instead you get to draw hidden influence cards so you still gain influence you just won't progress up on a track and speaking of the tracks the first player to reach any of the spaces that can obain tokens either gains the token or places the token out onto the board depending what it is and in the case of absorbers the player that puts out these absorbers onto the board does not gain energy for doing so and that's essentially how your own personal frig works now the larger ship that's in each of these sectors are called ark ships and each house only owns one when sending a crew member to an ark ship after gaining an influence in the house that controls it you'll choose between the two actions that's listed there some actions such as on these ships will just gain you resources in the form of energy Materials Science as well as neutronium some actions such as on this ship allow you to advance on the tactics track or destroy two voidborn ships anywhere on the board and some actions particularly on this ship allow you to play Improvement cards and so in this game there are three types of improvement cards and in order to play an improvement card you'll first have to pay its cost cost in resources which is listed at the top leftand corner of the card if the ship that you assigned your crew member to belongs to the house whose Banner is on the leftand corner of the card then you'll also get a resource discount now Improvement cards can be a really powerful part of the game because you can essentially use these to customize your ship as well as your crew members equipment cards are played to your frig board from left to right and they basically modify your frig actions the last two slots on your board here cost two energy in order for you to place a card there but you'll also gain an influence of your choice similarly training cards are placed under your crew board assigned to one of your two customizable crew members and these cards modify the ability of the specific crew member whenever you send that crew member out onto the board an example this training card says after the main action I can gain one resource of my choice if there are no voidborn in the same sector as the ship you used and after a planet action I gain one resource in advance on the tactics Track by one so as you can see you're going to want to try to find powerful combinations in order to customize your workers now the last type of improvement cards are support cards and they provide you with a one-time benefit however after resolving the card you'll place it face down in a pile because at the end of the game each of your improvement cards will score you additional points for playing them and the other action on this Arc ship allows you to spend three science resources in order to increase inrease the level of your captain now each player's crew board is asymmetric depending on the role that you're playing and so as an example the two boards that I have here are the commander as well as the Scout board and each board is double-sided so whenever you play each player can decide for themselves which side of the board to use now you're going to want to increase your captain level because depending on the level of your captain it'll dictate the number of improvement cards that you get to draw during the sonar phase at the start of each round in addition anytime you you draw hidden influence cards you'll draw a number of them depending on your captain level and so at the start of the game you'll only be drawing one but as you increase your level you'll draw more and more and out of all of those cards you'll only get to keep one which means the higher the level the more control you have in deciding which of the houses you actually gain influence in and you'll also unlock your own asymmetric ability which in the case of the Scout board allows me to land on planets that already contain a ship and again these benefits get stronger the more you level up and so as you can see these Ark ships are going to be very popular locations for sending your crew members to now the final ship that you can choose to send your crew member to is the Revenant which has two different locations to choose from and they are the deploy action that allows you to spend one of each type of resource in order to deploy a new ship out onto the board and these ships are taken from the supply so anytime a ship is destroyed they get returned back into the supply they don't leave the game but when adding a new ship to the board you can choose to add them to any sector as long as you don't go over the maximum allowed which is five ships per sector and again anytime you add a new ship to the board you're also going to increase the power of the house that owns it which increases the multiplier for their influence and the other action is the hyper jump action which is a very important action in the game because each round players will collectively have the option to hyper jump and leave all of these voidborn enemies behind and at the end of that jump the board will have a new configuration of pieces including enemy ships Planet cards as well as Rift tokens now at the start of the round two sonar cards will be laid out face up and these are basically going to be the options for placing the components onto the board in the next round and so the player who chooses to take the hyper jump action can spend three neutronium resources in order to discard one of these son our cards which basically means you get to choose the layout of the board for the next round it's also the only way to activate the hyper jump phase which I'll talk about in a second but that's essentially it those are all of the different types of ships that you'll see in the game and so once you've assigned a crew member and you've gained an influence in that house and you finished resolving your action then before ending your turn you can choose to take one bonus action out of all the options that are still available on your frig board which means it cannot have a corrupted token on it and these options include things such as gaining a resource of your choice or advancing one space on the tactics track some actions allow you to play an improvement card from your hand or in the case of this action this allows you to remove up to two corrupted tokens from the board but in order to do so you must spend one neutronium and discard an improvement card from your hand for each corrupted token one action allows you to move your frig on the board up to two times and in the case of this specific action this allows you to activate any actions in your play area that have that symbol each player starts the game with an asymmetric ability that they can activate on their crew board but you'll also have the opportunity to gain more by playing equipment and training cards then once You' finished resolving a bonus action play continues to the next player who will then place out one of their crew members and play continues this way until all players have placed out all three of their crew members then players move into the recall phase where we'll do a little bit of cleanup taking back all of our workers in addition during this phase the player who is highest on the tactics track also gets to choose who the first player will be in the next round and afterwards players will move into the breach phase where starting in sector one each of the voidborn ships will attack during this phase you'll resolve each sector one at a time and each voidborn ship deals one damage however each absorber in the same sector will absorb one damage so once you've calculated the total damage dealt in the sector the player whose frigate is closest to the sector you're resolving gets to distribute the damage amongst all the ships there now obviously the board State during this phase in the round will look completely different because by this point players will have taken a lot of actions and moved ships around the board but in general anytime you need to assign a damage token to a ship and there are no more spaces available that ship is removed from the board and you would decrease the corresponding houses Power by one and any excess damage in a sector gets dealt to the Revenant instead and if the Revenant has no more spaces then we would resolve the lowest damage card which would affect all players then once all damage is dealt in a sector then you'll check for corruption and so if there's both a rift token as well as at least one void born in the same sector the resolving player must add a corrupted token to one of the ships there but again you can never add corruption to or attack a player's frig you would then remove all absorbers from the sector and You' continue resolving all of the sectors in numerical order and lastly if during the round a player took the hyper jump action then you'd end the round by resolving a hyper jump phase during this phase the entire fleet is going to hyper jump leaving all of these voidborn enemies and planets behind so in resolving this phase you'll basically discard all of the voidborn tokens the planet cards as well as the rift tokens in addition during this phase any players who have reached the eight or 11 spot spot on the tactics track also gains the corresponding benefits then all players must reset their tactics counters and the level that you reset to depends on the level of your captain then once that's done you'll start a new round in the sonar phase where if you resolved a hyper jump last round you'll then set up the board according to the sonar card that the player chose and if a hyper jump phase was not resolved in the previous round then instead you'll roll the sonar die depending on player count which basically just adds additional voidborn uh units to the board and at the start of the fourth round instead of placing out two sonar cards you'll place out two Colony cards which will increase a house's influence at the end of the game in addition during the actions phase of the fourth round at the end of any of their turns players May reveal their hidden agenda card in order to score them as long as the conditions are true on the board and once you finished resolving the breach phase then the game will end and players go into endgame scoring at the end of the game players will still have the opportunity to draw additional hidden influence cards and gain influence depending on how far they are up on the tactics track then players will reveal all of their hidden influence cards and they'll calculate their total influence by multiplying it by the power of the respective house and you'll do this for all seven of the great houses you'll also add the points from your hidden agenda you'll score two points for each of your played equipment and training cards and one point for each of your played support cards cards you'll also score one point for each Captain advancement and one point for every four resource tokens left on your frig board and finally each corruption still on your frig board at the end of the game will be negative -2 victory points and at that point Whoever has the most victory points wins and that's essentially how you play Revenant now again this game is currently on Kickstarter so for more information I've included a link to their campaign in the description below otherwise if you have any questions about anything that you saw here please feel free to leave me a comment down below and I'll try to get get back to you as soon as possible thank you all so much for watching the video I really hope it was helpful if you enjoy content like this and would like to see more in the future please consider subscribing thank you bye [Music]