Cysmic Board Game Review

0:00 Hello. Welcome back to the channel and this is a channel where we give you reviews. I don't do unboxings, but we know we're not going to do any more playthroughs because I can't be bothered. We generally like to talk a lot of bollocks about tabletop gaming in general. But today we are going to be talking about probably the biggest game that we have ever laid eyes on. We're going to be talking about Kin Seismec. And in this game you will be placing your gazers on the map. We'll be trying to build the parts of your colony ship that will allow you to leave a world that is falling apart. Sound familiar? And hopefully win the game. So in this video we're going to be giving you a very very very very very very brief overview of the rules, we'll tell you what we do like, what we don't like. We'll come back and we'll tell you whether or not Seismec is worth your time and bother today and in the future. So remember if you know what subscribe into this channel, hit the like button, all that YouTube [ __ ] We'll see you after this.

1:04 Bollocks. So Seismec. How do you play this game? So Seismec is a kind of like dudes on a map game, a card driven dudes on a map game for one to six players. The box says it takes 20 minutes per player. How do you feel about that Pinocchio? And the designer says it takes between 10 to 12 rounds to complete the game, right? So you're set the board up. There's a double-sided board like Survive: Escape from Atlantis, that sort of thing. On the lower tier you've got all these spaces that are going to appear when the world is destroyed and then you'll populate the board with something like 154 [ __ ] different tiles and then you'll end up with like a completed board, right? You'll put your colony ship out onto a space in one of the six different What's not quadrant, is it?

1:52 It's like a Whatever the sixth version of a quadrant is. If there's a smart ass out there, could you please tell me what a quadrant is with six quadrants? And then you put some of your units in spaces next to it, yeah? You can't put your units in a space where there's a mountain, and you can't put them in a space where there's a mech, and you can't put them in a space where there's already somebody else. Well, there's not going to be somebody else at the beginning of the game in that space, is there? But later on, right? There's also tunnels on the board. These tunnels are adjacent, a bit like in Sci-Fi, right? You've got the mech and turret spaces in the center of the board, right? Insofar as your player area is concerned, you're going to get a player board, you're going to get a construction board, and what you're going to be trying to do essentially is try to have battles where you could take opponents' troops, stick them in your prison, and then swap them for the blueprints, and then you're going to construct the blueprints, which are going to allow you to put different parts into your colony ship. Once your colony ship is complete, you can [ __ ] off and win the game, right? So, you're going to have a deck of 10 command cards. Every player is going to have an identical deck, and on your turn, you or burn a card, and then you're going to play a card, right? You do this five times, and then you will rinse, wash, and repeat until somebody has built a colony ship and won the game. There's no points in this game. That is the only stipulation in winning a game, right?

3:08 So, first thing you're going to do is you're going to be able to reclaim a command card. Sometimes when the board is destroyed, it will reveal a relic token. If you pass over a relic token or land on it, you're going to be able to take a relic card. You can use these for their special abilities, or you can trade them in to take a command card that you've already played or burned back into your hand, yeah? Then what you're going to do, you're going to burn a command card, you're going to put a command card face down so nobody else can see it, and then you're going to play a command card on top of it and do what it says from top to bottom, right? There's tactic cards, and then there's unit cards, yeah? Play a unit card, this usually corresponds to moving one of your units. There's different types of units. There's soldiers, which are the grunts. They have got the engage ability. They're the only ones that can enter a space to initiate combat. There's the speakers. These are going to be gravitating towards habitats, taking control of these habitats by putting flags on them. And if you do this, you're going to increase your influence.

4:00 Influence goes up in tiers, right? The more influence you got, the more troops you can build, and the more laurium you can have. Laurium is basically a currency in the game. You're going to be spending this to construct [ __ ] So, you might end up playing the minor card. You'll be able to move the minor a certain number of spaces. Then you will be able to mine laurium. You'll take the amount of laurium crystals, and you stick it on your board, yeah? We already told you what a speaker does. We already told you what the soldier does. And then you can play the recruit card. This allows you to put more units on the board. This is all dependent on influence. The more influence you got, the more points you got to get units on the board, right? You can use the upgrade action. You'll see that you've got a couple of vehicles. You've got the harvester, and then you've got like some mech gazer. You can turn a miner into a harvester, and you can turn a soldier into one of these super duper mechs.

4:50 Super duper mechs can fly around the board. They can go across mountains and lakes and [ __ ] And they're a little bit harder as well, yeah? So, you can move your colony ship. If you move your colony ship, then the space that it moved from is destroyed. Strangely enough, this wasn't actually mentioned in the rule book. I only caught it because I watched a video somewhere. And yeah, for some reason, they left it out of the rule book. And playing this card also allows you to launch your colony ship if you have done all the stuff you need to do, right? So, also, you'll see around the board, there's like an edge rim, yeah? There's different colored arrows. The different colored arrows are all adjacent to each other. So, you can move from this side of the map all the way over to this side of the map, and it's considered adjacent, right? So, if one of your units with the engage ability moves into a space with an opposing unit, those units are locked here. They can't move out of the space until all the other opposing units are destroyed, yeah? And when you play the battle card, you will be able to initiate all of your combats because combats don't start until you play the battle card, yeah? So, the way that combat works is that the player that has the little maple leaf thing, what was it? An explosion, I don't know, on their miniature, they will get first strike.

5:58 You take strike die and all of the dice that is listed on unit card, you roll them. You will have to roll a number that is greater than the health value of the unit you're trying to do over. If you do that, then you will destroy the unit. But, if you don't, you can play discovery cards. Discovery cards are cards that you will collect throughout the game through various means, and you'll see that there are three different ways of using this card. You've got a battle modifier on the top right-hand corner. You've got the text stuff that you can do, like special ability, and then you've got something else at the bottom that I can't remember what it is, but it's like an icon that lets you trade in for something or stick a flag on a habitat or something like that. So, you'll also have to take into account the green die that the defender has rolled. This may alter your dice, and then they get chance to play a discovery card. You'll go back and forth with the discovery cards until one player has passed, and then if you destroyed all the units, then happy days, you win the battle. You take the miniature into your prison, and then you can use the negotiation card to trade that in for a blueprint. You'll turn your little blueprint token over, and then you can construct that by spending a certain amount of lorium. You can do a manual construction or robotic construction. You'll move the little token across, and then you are 1/5 or 6th or whatever the way towards constructing your colony ship, right?

7:10 You can also do a cyber attack in a way of getting blueprints. You have to be next to the player's colony ship, and you'll see that there's a cyber attack value. You'll roll a die, and you can play discovery cards, and it's sort of like a mini combat thing. And if you manage to do a cyber attack, you'll nick the blueprint of the player that you were next to, right? So, once you are done constructing your colony ship, you can play the colony ship command card, and this will give you the evacuate action that we've already talked about, yeah? You will have to have moved all of your remaining units back to your colony ship, but you can take a chance if you want. You can roll the humanity die, and this will tell you how many units you can leave behind, yeah? Yeah, if you do this, you're a bit of an ass, yeah? And there's like a legacy thing in this where you can note down how much of a bastard you were. Not that we've ever used it. And yeah, if you are the first player to launch a colony ship successfully, then you will be the winner of Seize the Market. Right, we like that Seize the Market.

8:05 So, the first thing that we really, really like about this is that this is such an ambitious project that really, by rights, should never have seen the light of day. It's absolutely [ __ ] immense, yeah? When this turned up on my doorstep, I couldn't believe it. It was like a sort of platter of stuff, yeah? The box is so big, you've got these different sections that slide out of the box, yeah? And it's just full to the brim of plastic and cards, and it's probably the biggest game we've ever seen in my relatively short life, yeah? So, how the geezer managed to have an idea, follow through all the different hurdles and problems and nightmares and frustrations that that inevitably presents is one of the craziest things that I could imagine somebody having a go through, yeah? So, you can't help but give kudos to geezer that created this and actually managed to make it a physical thing. So, second thing that we really like about this is that the player card burner card mechanism does actually present you with some agonizing choices. Not in the beginning, but because you're going to have 10 cards to mess about with, yeah? But when you get down to like, say, six or even four cards, yeah? You're going to be thinking, "Fucking hell, things have changed over there. Maybe I should hold back on the battle card instead of burning it. Or maybe I should do something with my colony ship." Because colony ships destroy everything in their paths. If somebody gets too close to you, pull that cyber attack. Instead of burning that colony card that you thought you weren't going to use that round, that actually becomes really, really useful. We also forgot to mention

9:37 something about the Tremor jet. Every time a little Tremor icon appears on a card, you can be moving a stack of tokens closer towards this big pool. If it ever hits that area, then you will draw a token from a bag and it will completely annihilate a whole row, maybe up to three or four different tiles in a row, destroying everything that doesn't have the early warning ability, right? So, that is devastating, yeah? But, you do actually sort of start thinking, "Oh, [ __ ] I should have burned that card." And where the game changes so much on the field of play, you do really have to try and not really think ahead because that's kind of impossible in this game, yeah? But, at least hold something back just in case an unforeseen opportunity presents itself, yeah? So, final thing that we really like about Seismic is that whilst the map is absolutely enormous, yeah? It's always going to be more or less accessible and that's to do with the fact you've got this wrap-around system, yeah? You move your troops off of the board, they're going to appear in the relative color and arrows on the other side of the board.

10:38 Or, in fact, in any of the different or quadrants, was it? What was it? I can't remember. Did you tell me? So, you might feel like you're constricted by these legs and rivers, but you can always come off the board and circumnavigate them in some way, yeah? Because even though the world is completely destroyed, you're always going to be able to navigate around that, even if it means not worrying too much about climate change, right? So, that we like about Seismic. So, first thing that we don't like about Seismic is I couldn't fit this on my [ __ ] table. My table isn't small. It's like 5 and 1/2 ft by 3 and 1/2 ft and I literally could not get everything onto the table, yeah? And I'm not even talking about the recess part of the table. I left the leaves on the table and I still couldn't fit it on the table, yeah? I had to bring in like a little mini table and I even had some components sat on the box because the box is that big. And when this happens, when you haven't got enough room to put your command cards in front of your player board, and you haven't got enough room on the table to have everything where it's supposed to be, that really does get under my skin and kind of pisses me off in a sense, yeah, because I'm not entirely sure how big a table you need to have to fit all of the components on. It's going to have to be a [ __ ] 10-ft by 15-ft snooker table, right? And it's so big, it's unwieldy, and at the end of the day, completely impractical for most people, yeah. So, the next thing that we don't like about this game is that on the box it says 20 minutes per player, and that is a

12:10 complete and utter [ __ ] lie, yeah. Aside from the ball ache that I experienced from the setup, it took me 2 hours to set this [ __ ] thing up. You're playing five command cards in a round, and the designer is saying that you should be completing a game within 10 to 12 rounds, yeah. It took us 2 hours to get 3/4 of the way through one round. And I'll tell you why that is. That is because not only is each player playing a command card and going from top to bottom, which may in itself be three or four different actions, but you've also got the opportunity to play a [ __ ] bonus action, yeah, which we didn't mention in the rules overview because I can't [ __ ] remember everything in a 61-page rulebook. So, you might be taking four, five, maybe even six actions, and there's one action that you reactivate another figure as if you're playing the command card. So, you're going to go through that again. So, you might be playing two cards in one round, and if you multiply this by six players, the amount of downtime in this game is absolutely insufferable. I was thinking maybe this would work best at two players, but then the board's going to be far too open, yeah. You're going to be so far away from the other players.

13:19 There's going to be so many places to go where you can't get caught. You're just going to end up having this cat and mouse type thing, which in my limited experience of two-player is it just didn't work at all. Yeah, so yeah, 20 minutes per player, utter [ __ ] It's more like, I don't know, I wouldn't really like to say, yeah. It's more like 1 hour per player, right? It's an all day experience at the end of the day. So, final thing that we don't like about this game is that there's nothing in here that we haven't really seen before, yeah. It's like the game has pinched loads and loads of different mechanisms from other games and then stuck them into a box that you could house 17 asylum seekers in. As I was planning it, I wrote down some of the games that I noticed were basically ripped off. So, you got Galactic Cruise, right? In Galactic Cruise, you're going to be building sections of your spacecraft and La Boca, you're going to be building sections of your spacecraft in this.

14:11 You've got Survive Escape from Atlantis, yeah? You've got the tiles you're going to be taking off and there's going to be something underneath them. Funny old thing, you're going to be doing the same thing with this. You've got Survive, yeah? You've got the mix and all that sort of thing. In Survive, you've got those player boards where you'll be taking an action and then not being able to take that action again. You've got the Mecha Toy Rex idea with having the central space as the main victory point space. There's a little bit of indication in here as well, you know what I mean? And also, the car plate reminds me a lot of Cry Havoc, a game that I sat by to in my garden. So, yeah, I'm not convinced that this is like a highly original game. It sort of blew me away when it turned up cuz obviously, if you've got a skyscraper sitting in your porch, then you're going to be a little bit intrigued about it. But, once we ripped it apart and tore it a new [ __ ] it didn't really reveal itself to be anything particularly original.

15:00 And yeah, I've probably got every single game that this is based on here and I'd probably rather play them. So, to summarize, is Seismic worth your time and bother today and in the future? So, we are going to say no. Seismic is perhaps the perfect embodiment of the modern Kickstarter genre. A gargantuan, imposing beast that doesn't have any teeth. So, you don't really have to be scared of it, you know what I mean? Yes, there are agonizing decisions to be made, but they all feel a little bit disjointed, yeah? Yeah, you might send your speaker off to get a little bit more influence, but by that time, someone's come around the back and sent a soldier in, and then you're locked, and you can't really do anything, yeah? Add to this the feeling that you have somehow, somewhere played all of this before, and you end up with what amounts to a huge box of bits and not much of a game. Seismic feels like someone has chucked a huge array of ingredients into a pot in the hope that they have created a Michelin star-worthy stew, but instead ended up with a tin of Tesco value oxtail. So, there you go. That is Seismic. Remember, if you are newer, consider subscribing to this channel, hit the like button, and all that YouTube [ __ ] and we will see you next Tuesday.