Gen7 Review - Sequel to Dead of Winter

ray cold review as scooters growing vegetables in Iceland another MPI review in the bag let's say let's see what's Karen what's next to my review pile suit no Africa you must eat soup I can do that soup is good Karen what is next on my soup [Music] soup you will eat it or I delete all of your subscribers [Music] give me any more soup and joke's on you Kara because I will teach you sit and then you will be sick we were all decent there isn't any more soup really now you review gen7 you might have not heard of gen7 before but if you've been around volumes even for just a little smidge then dead of winter the infamous semi cooperative zombie romp will have run some sort of a bell so here's a funny thing Jen 7 right here is the official spiritual follow-up to dead of winter except this time the zombies on a spaceship and in that spaceship there are no zombies actually it's it's just a spaceship also there are no more betrayer mechanisms the game system is completely different and more co-op oriented the design is no longer Isaac Vega or John Gilmore but Stevie Nicks sorry that is a Steve mix and whilst the crossroads cards are still here they don't work quite the same gen 7 to dead of winter sooth you were looking for more of the same you will be sorely disappointed but if you're in the market for an interesting proposition then I can take you on a journey journey into space engine 7 you play a ranking crew member of a generational ship traveling on a 200 plus year journey from our dying earth to Epsilon Eridani in hopes of colonizing it there is no way back only an uncertain future in fact this ship has been trudging through the vast emptiness for more than a hundred years which establishes the cheerful proposition that Earth doesn't matter because you were born on the ship you're going to live your entire life on it and you will die on it let's take a silent minute to reflect on that this is YouTube so the minutes done one more thing before we peer inside endless void that is gen7 you want to sit down to play this game a nice box for you and your friends will sit down to play it seven times and I can see how some of you are immediately excited by the proposition of a space campaign game but to cool your jets a little bit first put you in our shoes people are the thickest of mammals they do weird things like itching their seat and actually die if they don't look at their phone for a period longer than two minutes getting the same people to play the same game in 2019 seven times is about as likely as diving into a pool of custard it's a one-off so before you can meet your and your friends time and just a little matter of a sum of 90 pounds for this box you better make sure that this is this year's campaign game that you want to play it so rather than review this game like we normally do we'll try something a little different instead we'll go through episode by episode telling you not only how this game works but crucially what our impressions were each time we played and how it changes but most importantly because this is a game with a narrative will avoid any spoilers and we'll begin with board games are like tractors you can't just jump into one and drive off first you need to learn how it works never in my life have I seen a manual where the actual rules to the game start in the very middle of the rulebook I mean look you can see it's it is the middle because it's got the clips in there and they are contained on the entirety of a single page spread less because that's the credits right here if you feel like something is fishy because this box looks like a fully grown baby elephant and wondering what is actually in front of and behind these two pages well the answer is more rules except this booklet will do everything to convince you that that's not the case the star is a graphically Illustrated list of all of the games elements and set and the end is a glossary but both contain rules that I mentioned nowhere else making it easy to skip the first time you read it and the actual rules themselves are too brief too confusing and sometimes just plain incorrect in fact this rule book is so bad that normally it would disqualify this game from even being reviewed by us because we couldn't in good conscience entice you to spend money on something that will leave you so flustered especially when the amount of money is ninety pounds but there is a saving grace and it turns out that Grace's name is actually rodney smith from watch it played in fact what these videos are so excellent that we'd recommend them anyway and actually so is the work of other tutorial makers like paul Grogan from gaming rules and John from junkets games but in this particular case Rodney's video isn't just a teaching aid it is the rule book so if you do decide to get this game make sure that you learn from his tutorial rather than torturing yourself with this medieval incomprehension device rocky start but here's some good news boy did we enjoy our first play of this game in Gen 7 you'll take on the role of one of the ships officers who in turn will be in charge of a barracks specializing in one of the game's four divisions computers engineering biochemistry and robotics the barracks come with a set of dice each representing either you or a subordinate that you can send to complete tasks or if you've been a good boy or girl even a robot which brings us to the main tension of the game and possibly one of the coolest ideas in board games period when you start the game you will open up what is essentially a ring bound tome of stories and you will be given a narrative set up but also you will be presented with a problem with your spaceship resolve that problem and you will progress fail to resolve it and you'll still progress but with complications then each of you is handed a set of personal goals like generator maintenance or a popular study and then on top of that a communal pool of critical tasks which is essentially a constant onslaught of breakages reminding you that humanity's last hope for survival is about as solid as tiramisu fell these tasks and the ship will start closing off sections of itself and it could even cause permanent damage if you want to immediately break the giant playground you were given you'll have to send dice to those critical tasks sometimes you'll also have to pay resources and to get those again you'll have to send dice to locations that will let you gather them ah but resources can also be spent to complete personal goals and if you complete personal goals you'll get points and what are points their promotions actually essentially to do anything in this game you need dice and if you focus on just the good of the ship you will easily solve all of its problems but and that promotion is so tempting and there's a plethora of other ways to distract yourself but the real key of the matter here is that you don't know what the consequences of these actions are because you don't know how you win the campaign all you know is that you can and you don't know what a promotion means you just won in all you can do is make decisions based on what you want to do and not what the game is dictating you should do and you'll find out the consequences later and then there's the narrative itself which doesn't reveal much yet but teases you with things to come and sets up some of the game's main characters like the ever-present artificial intelligence called care n which suspiciously sounds like the word karin pronounced in a stereotypical scottish accent if kheh you are being racist towards the scots that's not a thing it is a thing I am an a I I understand things much better than you do like what like the fact that ki flower is a really excellent look at this no no omnis lady observing multiple monitors she's either the banker from Deal or No Deal or an evil mastermind and whilst I'm not taking bets on either I can tell immediately that things are not as they seem the opening paragraph of the story immediately sets up the fact that there are no windows on this spaceship meaning that a you can't see space B you can't see the ship itself and see it constantly forces upgrades on you which is a Microsoft Windows joke the suspense of the mystery is tantalizing and then each episode pushes that pressure point asking you to vote on a narrative choice fundamentally changing the course of the story and even setting up altogether different episodes for you to play imagine the tingling sensation on your back when you realize that all you can do is vote but you don't know the outcome what if one of them games characters is leading you astray what if they're lying what if the choice that you are making is the wrong one and to cap it off at the end of the episode you get to open a sealed envelope revealing new game elements changing systems evolving the gameplay my word this is just fantastic after one evening of gameplay I was smitten and I was certain that there is nothing this game could do no sin it could commit for me to fall out of love with it let's shoot back towards the game's core conceit the target pool between the critical tasks that keep the ship going and the personal objectives that keep our careers going on paper it sounded great but for the nagging sensation that crept up when we sat down to play the second episode and set up our ship we noticed one thing we didn't incur any consequences somewhere through episode 2 we realized that all we had to do to succeed was count however many dice we needed for whatever critical tasks or story objectives we had and then the rest could go towards whatever personal endeavors after all this game is ultimately cooperative so we put the ship first and then it dawned on us what if the systems in this game are just too easy what if the consequence of prioritizing critical tasks over personal objectives is nothing as if hearing our concerns the game via instructions to open a sealed envelope offered the first modification to its systems I'm not going to show it of course which made the game harder but in a way that made it less fun now instead of choosing which goals to chase we could simply break our ship without having any control over it regardless of which choices we made my heart sank the core of the game collapsed because it turned out that there was no challenge there was just minutia and to make that minutia harder the game introduced chance we felt like kids on Christmas who got a promise of a train set but open up the wrapper and just found a box within a box one of my friends described the gameplay like going to work but without the ability to hide in the toilet when things got too tedious okay but we still have the crossroads cards and they were great in episode 1 every time you send your officer to a location another player will draw a crossroads card and see if you are in an applicable location if you like the car is simply discarded but if you are you'll get a little narrative choice with a twist and the outcome being an unknown on paper this sounds just like the crossroads cards in dead of winter but there are a few improvements first because this is a campaign game every time a card does resolve it's removed from the game never to be repeated meaning every single time you do get one it'll be fresh new and exciting and it made our game funny one of the times we were given the most basic managerial tasks and we failed it because it turned out that one of us had a drug addiction okay maybe funny isn't quite the right adjective but you get my drift and then we started worrying that maybe that drug incident was a fluke the more we played the less these crossroads cards actually triggered we counted averages and it turned out that over the course of the two episodes we only had about eight that resolved for everyone that altered a game in a meaningful way there were seven that didn't do anything interesting now the game was just actively sabotaging a ship it was just throwing a wrench and saying look your ship will break whether you like it or not we started to realize that pandemic legacy is a very good campaign game for a reason when it builds on its already very strong base it doesn't just do so by introducing variants although it does do that as well it makes you feel like you've achieved something when you succeeded all that gen 7 made us feel was that we were constantly mitigating constantly holding off a bad thing until another bad thing comes that is in no way more interesting than the first one honestly we were bored and the story didn't help matters much the mystery still kept us a little intrigued but the more we read the more we realized how poor the writing was aside from the two characters it introduces everyone in the game is called either another officer or another subordinate comically a peer and then came the big reveal I wish I could tell you that we saw it from a mile away because the reality was more disappointing than anything we've built up in our heads the whole premise of being on a generational ship is completely undermined by not really exploring the psychological complications of that setup here is a real challenge in designing a campaign game the plot keeps progressing but it can't progress at a pace that alters the gameplay too much because the mechanisms have to keep up with it take whatever inside or outside threat to a spaceship that you can imagine in your head and then juxtapose that to the mundane reality of having to gather data tools and camps and yes we do get new gameplay elements to represent those friends but the core has to remain the same so we're still gathering data to rules and hems and I mean what good is a set of floppy disks when you're trying to fight off Martians with lasers and there are no Martians with lasers you get the idea I won't lie to you there was no episode five I mean it exists right here in this box we just couldn't face playing it instead we packed up and read this book to completion and then we winced because right at the very end the designers left a little note saying how much they hoped we enjoyed playing this game and introduced one final element one plot twist that made this all replayable and undermined every decision we've made in this game if my heart broke before then now it was torn up into little cardboard bits I understood what happened the grand vision for June 7 isn't that you just play the campaign once it's that you can keep playing and playing it but the challenge in designing a campaign game that is replayable is my fault to the challenge of designing a regular campaign game which is fivefold the challenge of designing any board game here we were littered with envelopes filled with half-baked ideas that I don't want to criticize anymore first I'd be spoiling things second I stopped caring about anything the game had to offer but most importantly third I have no real desire to keep pounding it into the ground in the end gen7 just left me sad at 90 pounds I obviously can't recommend it to anyone pandemic legacy is excellent and cheaper and gloom Haven was a little more expensive is fantastic each time you play it with 27 games in and I still can't wait for our next session I know that this game was made with the best intentions but intentions and ideas as awesome as they are sometimes I mean how cool is it to have a psychological dilemma as part of the games core can see the ideas easily broken especially by human beings and when they break them things become not so interesting but the good news is that if you're in the market for a storybook game from Planet games I'm sure everyone at home will be excited and everyone at flat hat games will be terrified to hear that our next video is for another storybook game from Planet games but I can promise you but this time the story will be literally and figuratively very different but to find out that we think about common arts you'll have to wait a little bit