Firesiege: A Feralis Story - TCbH Review
Transcript
Folks, long-time watchers of the channel know that I'm a big fan of cooperative games with Spirit Island being one of my all-time faves, but also recent releases like Fate of the Fellowship or Moon Crabs excellent Leviathan Wilds getting a lot of attention. But one area left criminally unexplored is a really great cooperative tower defense. And while Deer Games is recently released and soon to be reprinted Fire Siege doesn't have quite all the elements of what I want from a true tower defense game, nonetheless it ends up being one of the most exciting, albeit a little bit messy, cooperative games I've played this year. Centaurs. You're centaurs, which sure, Fire Siege carries the A Faralis subtitle of which I know virtually nothing about, but the bold choice of making this a vaguely Mustafarian world centered on centaurs fighting against bug lizards. It's a bold choice I can get behind. You and each player are represented by a hero pawn
who is tasked with protecting the citadel at the heart of the city. If a single screel, the aforementioned bug lizards, makes it to the citadel along any of their three color-coded paths, you lose. It's up to you to place and position soldier units to block movement and lend their strength to your battles or to repair or add breaches to the walls in the city, potentially increasing your own mobility, but also inviting shorter paths for the screel to march to the center. And just generally navigate the onslaught such that you earn six banners through various accomplishments, partially randomized during setup, to win the game before time runs out. On your turn, you pick one of the three action tokens available to you, drawn and replenished from a personal blind bag. Key to this is that you resolve first the side facing you, then flip and resolve the back, with one being a positive side and the other being mostly shades of different bad stuff. And when drawn, you only know the side facing you. So, do you pick the side where you know the good stuff you can do, or is the risk of bad stuff critical enough that you pick a known quantity of bad stuff, and you'll figure out how to best utilize the good stuff when you get there? In either case, you resolve both, draw a new token from the bag, then it's the next player's turn.
This dual-sided action system is really novel, and at first sounded kind of bananas to me, but the more I played it, the more I warmed up to it. The information that you're able to glean just from looking at your side, and the accountability, the reliability of both good or bad, but not both information, is really interesting. It makes for a cool decision space, especially in this type of game. It also helps to mitigate the ever-looming issue of quarterbacking in cooperative games, but there is one element of it that I'm still not sold on. Instead being face up on the table, they're standing in a slot where the backs face the other players who are given a surprisingly large amount of latitude to consult you on which to choose, so long as it's not explicit, but thereby enters a weird semi-social element of this otherwise tight mechanical structure. I don't hate it, but it is clunky. On the one hand, having the tiles face up on the table would invite more quarterbacking, which is something that we don't want, but on the other, having to dance around explicit information a lot, are you going medium fast or fast fast like Gloomhaven, is just goofy. For now, I'm content to just accept that it's a goofy element to a game that I otherwise like that doesn't have a good way to have its cake and eat it, too. Of note, in solo, you do play with these face up, and can just pay a resource to flip them to the other side. Speaking of, resources,
stats, things. Another highlight is how players take their actions and both personally and globally level up. On your turn, the thing that you're most often going to do, or at least that you most often want to be granted, is actions designated by the little helmet symbols on the good side of the card, which can be move units, recruit units, or start a battle where there are friendly and enemy units in the same space. Those three actions correspond to the energy track, which you increase or a number of different game effects. Green represents how many movement points you can spend per action on hero or soldier units. The blue is how many units that you recruit in a single action, always going to the center citadel. Then purple is a spendable resource that you can use to goose an attack action, which in general, you pick the zone where the fight takes place, add up strength of heroes and one for every soldier present, and every archer in neighboring spaces. Archers come from the simultaneously released expansion, which I highly recommend including off the bat. Then roll the dice, which either adds some strength, blocks the normally one retaliatory damage, or adds an extra retaliation.
You kill the screel that's present. If you kill a warlord, which is one of these big daddies with their awesome meeple that are periodically released upon the board based off of kind of the the cooperative timing structure in the game. Well, killing them actually grants you one of the banner points. And if you're at a spawn point, you can potentially even destroy their nest as long as you cleared everything else out first, slowing them down and again scoring valuable points to end the game. Overall, it's a really tightly paced game with a lot of replayability, particularly because of the goal cards that you randomize at the beginning of the game, some of them coming with their own little mini games, not just objectives, but actually changing a little bit of the rules or structures or special actions in there, creating some different dynamic flavor. But importantly, every game you'll have options to get more than the six banners that you need, so you have the opportunity to adapt and improvise. You assess the situation and get reactive, be on your toes, which is something I really like in a co-op. Your character themselves could be a bit more interesting. They don't inherently have any special powers, but you can always accomplish a personal feat tied to that character or spend five of their magic resource, the fourth stat your team shares, to flip them over, healing your character full and now granting them a personal passive ability and activatable effect at the cost of two of that special magic resource. This feels
really great when you do it. You manage to fulfill your character's goal and they become their true selves. But given the rich history and lineage of cooperative games and just games in general before this, I'm surprised that they don't inherently have some off-the-bat passive power that just gives them a little bit of personality and identity to really start the game with, which brings me to some odds and ends. Visually, Fire Siege is a lot to take in. Don't get me wrong, it's cool looking and I really appreciate the bold attempt at something original in a fantasy setting, but it's very maximalist and the board gets cluttered really quick. And while it didn't visually impede our strategizing as much as I thought it would at first, manipulating pieces will inevitably involve knocking out of whack.
Speaking of which, those expansion archers, good luck getting them to not topple forward. Hilarious, but annoying, too. And while I sympathize that English is not the publisher's first language, the rulebook translation in this first printing is pretty trash with spelling mistakes, confusing, sometimes squishy wording. It's not great. Fortunately, two elements are set to change in the new printing and I've been playing with the still in testing rules the publisher shared with me. First, the upcoming horde card is always face up. This is the card that dictates what lane enemies advance or spawn, sometimes activated by the bad stuff on the back of your action tiles, or otherwise by the horde time are creeping forward also due to bad stuff on the back of these tiles. Generally resolving these horde cards or adding warlord bosses to the board and taking toward an alternative loss condition for the game. Having the horde card face up allows you to anticipate and mitigate disaster without fully having it under wraps. And especially with the horde cards from the expansion that introduced fire, a sort of minor threat, but also resolves the next horde card underneath, you aren't fully left without surprises.
The other thing is that any dice roll, whether from battle or the horde dice, which again can come from the bad effects on action tiles and either advances the horde track or subtracts the mercenary support, cool other small system that tugs between boons and banes when activated depending on current level of support. Point is, when a dice is rolled, you can spend a magic point to reroll it. These changes are simple, elegant, and I can't imagine playing without either of them. Part of what makes a cooperative game good is the balance between the fog of war, the lack of information out there, and what you can assess, what you can anticipate, and how you logistically prepare for that. As for tower defense, well, this is really base defense. It doesn't have the kind of proactive automation that you can do that I really associate with the best and most iconic tower defense video games out there, certainly. But, I also recognize that this game already has a lot of systems going on that having some of those included might crowd out others. The system is already pretty load-bearing, but if those could be included in the future, that'd be kind of cool. Which kind of represents my feelings in general. Fire Siege is really good. It kind of feels like if the design philosophy of early 2000's Fantasy Flight Games had continued, but with the hindsight and wisdom of the decades of cooperative gaming in between, aside from character powers.
But, it's bold and original in some ways that make it less accessible, but certainly not less strategic or fun. It's a bit funky, it's a bit messy, but it taps into something that I really like and isn't particularly long to play or difficult to teach. Solidly in the midway zone with lots of visual personality and replayability. It's imperfect, but I'm a fan. And that's our review. But, let me know, what is your favorite little bit messy, but still great game that you're just a huge fan of? Put it in the comments below, and as always, thanks for watching, thanks for supporting, thanks for doing the things that help us grow. Your likes, comments, subscribes, checking out our Patreon, and sharing these videos goes a huge way to help this channel thrive. But, above all else, thanks for being such a great community. You know that I've been Jack for The Cardboard Herald.