The Hungry Gamer Reviews Firesiege
Transcript
Ooh, that looks tasty. Welcome folks to the Hungry Gamer is back with another game review. And today we're talking about Fire Siege from Dear Game Studio designed by Martino Chasquiera and Michelle Pablo Granocchia. And I do apologize for mispronouncing those names. And before I get started, thank you to Dear Game Studios for sending me this copy so I can make this video. Also, I'll point out that it does have some deluxe bits. And those are noticeable here with the walls and the fire and a few other things here and there. And they also did send me this play mat. And currently this is the aftermath of a defeat that I just had playing this game.
Now, with that being said, what this game is is this is a game where you are trying to defend your city from the encroaching army of bugs, kind of zerg-like critters that are moving their way up these paths and basically trying to kill you and everything else. And you are doing your best to stop it. And to do that you will have your various heroes. We have one here and one here. Either. And what's going to happen is you're moving through trying to accomplish different objectives. And as you complete those objectives, you'll be flipping over these banners. If you ever flip over all the banners, you will win the game. And if any bad guys get to the middle, you will lose the game. Now, with that being said, if you are not interested in how this game is played and want to jump ahead to my final thoughts, then you would go to the time stamp on the screen right now. For those of us still here, let's talk about how this game is played. So, at its core this is just a action selection game. All games are action selection. But at its core what's going to happen is each player is on their turn will slide these out of the way here.
Going to draw three tiles out of their bag. And you'll notice that there is a black side and a white side. The white side is generally better for you. That's not true. The white side's always better for you, and the black side's always better for the bad guys. But, what happens is you as you're playing, you will actually be placing them on your player board like this. So, all the other players around the table can see the other side of whatever it is that you have drawn. And then, they will be able to give you some guidance, not telling you exactly what the other side says, but give you some guidance and say, "Ah, you know, if you pick this one here that I'm looking at, that's going to be really bad for us." Or, you know, taking that one and perhaps this is the side they say. They might say, "You know what? That's not too bad of a thing that we have to deal with." And so, maybe you pick that first. Cuz what happens is, when you pick your tile, let's say I decide to do this one right here, the first thing that's going to happen is you'll do what's on the white side. So, in this case, I would advance one of these tracks of by two. Whatever, I'll just say I did that one.
And I would either create or seal a breach. And those are these things here. So, there's a breach right here, suddenly you can move like that. Or perhaps I could seal it. And there's actually an expansion that you can get that lets you have a little magic bombs that you can set off then as well. Then, after I did that, I would flip it over, and I would do what's on the other side. So, in this case, I would get to do what's called a Valkyrie action, and I'll talk about those in a bit. And I would advance one of the in-game trigger tracks, and I'll show you that in a minute. Other things might be you roll this die, do what's on it, reduce tracks, or you might draw a bad guy AI activation card. Now, I'm going to zoom out and let's talk about some of these other things. In addition to that, one of the other symbols you might see will send you up on this track or down on this track. And what's going to happen is every so often, this track will activate, and if you're on this side, the mercenary that's going to show up and fight for you will do the good thing. But, if you're on this side, they'll do the bad thing. You can kind of always see what it's going to be as you're cycling through this deck.
I mentioned there's a track that you can go up on, that's this over here. And as you go around big bad guys will come out and if you get to the end, the game will end and you draw more of these AI cards. Now, I mentioned these AI cards and what they can do. And so, what will happen is you will have something like one of these. First, you would do the top, which in this green case it's saying add one of these guys to the green nest region, which would be right here at the beginning. Well, this one's saying add a red one, but only if the nest is still active. And so, this green nest I had destroyed, so there wouldn't be So, if the red one was also destroyed, I wouldn't add one. And then everything's going to move up that track. And that's according to their speed, so this guy would move one, two. And these guys would move one, two and so on and so on.
And there's a whole bunch of different things that might happen as you go through there. I'll also point out that if you add the expansion, that is actually you may also wind up getting fire added and drawing more cards. As you can see here, you might activate this track over there and so on. And for the most part the monster's just going to move around. If you ever have three of the screel, the small bugs in one space, they will turn into a big queen bug, which is harder to kill. Now, I mentioned there's the valcoon action. And so, when those come up and that is this little helmet symbol here, there's a few things that you can do. You can do a move and then you look over here on your track. In this case, I was at five, so I could move my guys a total of five. I'm going to just move the fire out of the way. So, maybe I would go one.
So, maybe I'd go one and two. And we'll pretend that there's a breach there and three. And then I'll bring some guys and go four, five. And so, I brought one of those guys with me. He didn't quite get there, but maybe I had an archer and that would make more sense. And you can divide it up however you want. Another thing you can do is a recruit. And so, you'll look at this track here, and you'll see how many guys you get to recruit, and you get to recruit one there in the Citadel. This one here gives you a bonus when you attack. And this is energy that you'll be able to use to activate your character abilities if you if you have evolved them. If you haven't evolved them, if you have five energy, you can spend five and evolve them. There's other ways they evolve as well. They're unique to each character. I won't get into that.
But you can also do an attack. And I'll just do something very simple here. I'll put a screel there and my guy there. And you're going to have your attack value. And your attack value, so in this case I have one. But if I had evolved him, it would be three. So we'll pretend that I have one. Now if say I had the archer, which comes in the expansion, next to him, I would get plus one power, so I'd be two to his constitution value of one, and each soldier you have there adds one as well. So in this case, I would be one, two, three. Then you roll the die and you take in this case, my strength would remain at three. I would kill this guy, and I rolled a shield, so I would take no backlash.
Now let's just say I rolled this one. Then someone in the region would take a damage. It could be me, or I could kill the warrior there. It could have been this, which gives me plus two strength, and I should note that also you get to add in any strength bonus you on your track there. And the shield, as I said, means there's no backlash. So let's just say I rolled this. I would have defeated him, and then I would take a damage. So maybe I take the damage right there, but had I rolled that shield, I would have defeated him, and no damage would be taken. Then there's also these big bosses that you might find. And each of them has their own card, which has some kind of effect when they come out. In this case, all those tracks would go down. He's going to be worth one banner if I defeat him, and his toughness value is three. So, to defeat him, I need to get a three on all my rolls. So, again, let's just say I was like this, which is one, two, and my track is all the way up here at plus two, so I have three strength.
Excuse me, I have four strength, five, six strength. I would have defeated him. I could flip over a banner. He goes away, and we are off to the races. And broadly speaking, that's how this game works. As I said, you're going to get to flip over banners by accomplishing these goals here, which in this case is destroy all these cocoons, which I didn't really talk about, but destroy those, and destroy the nests, you get banners. And then when you defeat the big bosses, sometimes you will get banners as well. But broadly speaking, that's how this game works. So, with that said, what do I like about this game? First thing is centaurs. I didn't know I needed a game that was all centaurs in my life, but here we are. I don't know. I I find the just different world, even though you don't get a ton of story, I find it refreshing. I really enjoy it.
And it's just it's kind of weird and kind of cool, and yeah, I'm here for it. I really, really like that. Also, I love that it is a pretty small box. I have in the one box, I have the Ballad of Fire expansion all in there, no problem whatsoever. I can probably get more in there. I don't know how big the new expansions are going to be, but I could probably get those in there as well. And part of that is because of the screen printed meeples. I really like screen printed meeples. They look nice. And more importantly, they look deluxe. It looks like this is a deluxe game. And it helps that I have the playmat, but completely unnecessary to have that playmat. So, I really, really like that. Along with that, speaking of the Centaurs, I like how they play differently. Now, to be fair, you have to upgrade them before you are able to have them play differently, but it's kind of neat how they all upgrade the upgrade in different ways and all of that. And just the little tiny powers that they have are really interesting and really fun and really clever, especially because most of their powers or possibly upgrading them, you have to use that shared resource of the energy.
So, all of that I think really, really works well. Also, I appreciate it's a pretty darn simple to run AI. Bad guys are following their paths, they're going to do a thing. There's a couple that will go through breaches, but for most part, they're just going to do what they do. And I really like how easy it is to operate them, but also at the same time, they're constantly doing different things depending on what tiles you're playing what cards you can pull. So, all of that I think works really, really well. I really enjoy that. Speaking of different things, the core gameplay is always going to be the same. You are defending the Citadel and trying to flip all your banners by accomplishing goals, but there are enough objectives, especially when you add the Battle of Fire, to where you always have different ways to do it. It's constantly new things are coming out, and then the big monsters are coming out and they're going to flip banners as well. And the big monsters also operate just differently enough that it keeps it interesting, so I like the way all of that works. Now, getting to the main thing is the tile drawing and the action selection.
It is really clever. I mean, taking aside the idea that is kind of central in this game that basically you're stopping alpha players because no one knows everything. No one knows what you have on your side of the tile, and you don't know what's on the reverse. And you're allowed to talk about it, and that's cool. The idea of Oh, wait, if you play that, we're going to lose. Or Oh, if you could play that one first, that would be better. That I think is very, very clever in itself. Now, I don't usually have an issue with alpha players in games, but that's just the group of people that I play with. But, even that aside, even if we are ignoring the discussion and just talking about solo play, or even if you just didn't discuss at all, it's really cool the way the tiles work. I really like that even if you can look at both sides of them, you still have this decision tree to make of well, if I take this hit first, I can do this. Then I can deal with this thing and I can deal with this thing. And yeah, something bad's going to happen to the opposite side of this, but if I do this one first, I have a good chance of being able to accomplish this banner, and so on. It's really interesting the way that works. And because the AI is so simple, what's going to happen to you doesn't take long.
And not for nothing, sometimes on the bad side of the tile, you get something good as well. So, I really think the core mechanic is unique and more importantly, it is fun. And also, it accomplishes the goal of it's hard to alpha game when this is all that you have. Next thing I'll say is in the core game and then the Battle of Fire, they have little campaigns that you can go through, which is basically just a series of scenarios and you kind of were picking what setup you're going to have next. And and that's kind of cool. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that uh later on, but I appreciate it has this thematic setup that you can go through and play through multiple campaigns. And for the most part, you're going to even if you're losing, you're going to play through most of them anyway. But, it is neat to kind of make those choices thematically what you're going to do and then see that played out with the objectives as well. I think that works really, really well. Next thing I'm going to say is the Battle of Fire adds something that I think is necessary. It adds the fire mechanic. And it It adds magic bombs, which are cool, and these other kind of little cocoon thingies, whatever, and more objectives. All of that's great. But, it adds this But, it adds this fire mechanic where sometimes stuff's going to set on fire. And fire is bad, and you can lose by fire. But, you can also start spending your actions to put fire out. And as you collect the fire, you can use that fire to do cool stuff.
Great. Just great. And it is needed, I think. I think you absolutely need that in the game to kind of keep it fresh and keep it moving. So, really like the way the fire works. Last two things I'll say is the game is a challenge. It is not easy. At the same time, this is not one of those co-op games that is just punishingly difficult. It's definitely not that way. It is winnable, but it is a challenge. And easy easy, if you want to make it a little harder, a little easier. That's not a problem whatsoever. And the last thing I'll say is I like the kind of team leveling you're doing with the tracks. You're going up on these tracks, which means, oh, we can move more guys, or you're going to fight a little better, or you're going to recruit more guys, or you're just going to have energy to use your hero powers.
I love that that's a shared resource across all of the heroes. That's great, because it means more cooperation. It means more discussion, because pretty much every time people have their three tiles, those tracks are going to move. And that to me really really makes the game sing in the way that where you have to all work together on this, or you're going to be in trouble. You can't just prioritize this turn for me. I'm going to go up and have a really strong attack on this one thing, and we're going to be good on fighting, but oh, now we know when else can move. And so, I think all of that really works quite well. So, with that being said, what are my quibbles with the game? First thing is talking about those scenarios.
I wish there was a little more stakes to them. And I've I've only played through the Ballad of Fire which is just three games and you're going to play three games and you're going to play through all three. That's what's going to happen. And you either kind of win or you lose. I wish there was a little more to it where you win choice A, you take this into the next game or you you lose choice A, this is going to happen. And so I wish that was kind of going on. So I think other than the interesting setups, the scenarios could have a little [clears throat] bit more going on. Next thing as I already mentioned, I think you absolutely need to get the Ballad of Fire expansion. I don't think you're going to be satisfied with just the core game. I think having the fire in there is so good. It's so interesting. Along with that, the extra character is really nice to have. Now with that being said, I also think that it'd be nice to have a little more bad guy variety. There's some variety in the bosses for sure. But otherwise there's just the little little curly guys and the big queen curly guys and they don't do a lot other than move. So it'd be nice to have a little more variety there. There. And the last thing I'll say and
[sighs]
this is only for like the card counting types. I wonder if at some point if you play this enough, you're not just memorizing what's on the back of the tiles. Now I don't actually know. I should have stopped and like laid them out. I don't know if the tiles in each of the bags, each of the player character tiles, if they're different or if they're all the same it's just a player set for each. So I I don't know about that. But I do wonder if maybe the card counting types and that's not a pejorative, just the people who have that kind of brain, that kind of focus. I do wonder if maybe over time you're just not going to know what's on the back of this tile. Oh, this one has three Valkyrie actions so I know on the back that is a go up the danger track twice or whatever it may be.
But, there you have it, folks. That is Fire Siege. Doing some unique stuff. This is the kind of game that I enjoy. I love a co-op. I love a tower defense. I love how the different quests that you're doing. And I think it lands pretty well. I think there's a few things that that I want to see. But, there's more expansions coming, so I bet some of that's going to be coming in that. But, overall, a really enjoyable play. Really cool stuff. I cannot tell you how cool that tile mechanic is. I really think that's really cool. And initially, I was going to say I think you really want to have multiple players around the table for this. And I do stand by that. I think it might play best at two plus, but even as I've been talking this through, that tile mechanic is so neat. It's also really satisfying to do it solo. So, a very clever game that's doing some different stuff and I think is worth checking out if you are into co-op games. So, there you have it, folks. As always, if I've made any mistakes in the rules overview, please let me know in the comments with the timestamps so I can get that and clean up the subtitles.
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