Sixty Below - Board Game Review - It's A Little Nippy
Transcript
Peter, you left the flap open. It's
like a thousand degrees in here. Lois,
close the tent now. It's freezing.
Headline. Woman cold. Hi everyone. I'm the broken mele. Win or lose, I'm going to be honest with you. And today we got a little bit of a special one for you that I'm sure quite a bunch of you heavy gamers are interested to know about. This is 60 below. We're calling this not -60° not - 60° C or Fahrenheit or whatever it is you want. No, no, no. I'm calling this 60 below cuz that is the alternate name of this one. And honestly, it's the better name for it. But this is the new heavy euro from Alexander Fister and Peter Prince. I hope I got the name right there. basically a big heavy euro about going into the Antarctic, finding a meteorite, and setting up stations for the future. I mean, Vista is not normally the best when it comes to having a strong theme, per se, but when it comes to heavy Euro games, they're definitely going to be thinky. They're definitely going to have some uh little twists on the mechanics here and there, and they're going to be interesting card play. So, you know, this is what I'm interested to get out of this. But also, the publisher is kind of familiar with this one because this publisher alongside sort of DLP games had some hand in with Even for which is one of my favorite card tableau building games of all time. So, you know, definitely got some pedigree going here. And sadly, this box did suffer a little bit of damage. You know, it was uh
unfortunately I brought it home from Vienna when I was um introduced to a bunch of people there and it got slightly wine damaged in the box because uh the uh airport decided that one of my six wine bottles I bought back from Vienna was not going to stay intact for the trip. Typical airports. But uh thankfully the internal stayed all right, so I can at least show you this game even if the box is uh a little worse for wear.
And may God have mercy on your soul.
Right. It's quite a buck to get through, but I'm going to try and simplify this as much as I can. And essentially the game revolves around players building structures and stations and different tiles on this map that starts off in this kind of fashion where you set it up before the game with some unexplored areas and some main areas and the meteorite site. And then players will add tiles to this map by way of their own stations that they build. But they are also manipulating cards that they have in a kind of sort of mini deck building tableau building element. You have a starter deck first which consists of a few storm cards and a bunch of expedition cards. your board here, which is a double dual layer board setup. Basically has spaces for all the different structures that you can build, which I've only put a few on there just for illustration. It has space for these experts, which are these tiny little tiles here that you can buy, of which you have three different types, and they basically boost actions that you've done before. But then you also have spaces for cards. And you have some base buildings here that you can use. And you have some spaces for expedition cards.
So, the expedition cards in your deck are essentially cards which generate a little bit of energy, but mostly give you some ability. They might give you more icons for these experts. It might give you a a power you can trigger with the use of these radar tiles that kind of look a little bit like this. Or they may just grant some other cool effect. But you also have storm cards. Now, storm cards aren't necessarily bad. It's just how many of them do you want? Basically, what will happen is that you will shuffle this deck and then you'll draw one at a time and decide, hm, what do I want to do with this card? In this case, it's an expedition card. You got three slots, but you can free up more as the game goes on. I'll put it down on the slot. You then draw the next one. It's a storm card. Okay. So, the storm card has to go on the top. It covers a building, so you can't use the building, but the more of these you have, the more energy you generate. Okay, fair enough.
I don't particularly want this building here. So, we'll put it there. Fine. Flip the next one. It's another storm. Do I want a second storm? Well, I don't desperately need that building either. Fine. We'll have two storms. And then hopefully I'll draw an expedition card. Nope. Drew a storm. Well, there are tokens you can use to get rid of them. So, I'll use one token to scrap that one. Flip another one. It's another storm. Yeah, we'll get on to the problem that this generates in the later part of the video. But let's say I drew another expedition card. I could, right? I'll put one down there. And then let's say I drew that storm card and I didn't want to draw any more cards. I'd be like, you know what? I'm good. We're going to discard it and I'm going to pass. So, that would be that part done. And then you generate bonuses based on what bases you have revealed and what expedition cards you put down. This is essentially simultaneous between all the players.
Then every player gets a couple of their workers as well as the ability to get more cards. So this deck is only half the size of what cards you can sorry the deck you have. You draw five and you basically get to keep one or two depending on how much energy you wish to spend. And these are basically upgraded versions of these other cards. So, you know, they're better expedition cards, but they could also be project cards which give you special abilities, endgame scoring, you know, and the like, except one is bought by energy, one is bought by money. So, you have to make that kind of decision. Now, cards in your deck are separate from a cards that you have in a kind of personal display. You keep them aside. Once you have bought them, then they go in your deck or face up in front of you. But this is kind of like a holding pen for cards you have reserved. Maybe that's a better way of putting it. So when you get to the action phase, this is when the turn order sequence comes in for all players and where you get to perform actions. So the main actions that you have are building sites on the board of which you have some basic station sites of your own that are built with these little weird sort of um I don't know, we wanted to call them breast plates. They kind of look a bit more like a sort of chest armor and they do an actual station. But the idea is is that this station tile will be put on the board usually next to something else. Your station will go on top of it and then it will give more action spaces as the game goes on, as well as places for you to upgrade with new structures, which is another action you can do in the game, providing you have the materials to be able to afford them. On top of that though, you can also spend these radar tiles I mentioned before. You can use them for bonus effects, but typically you will use them to trigger expedition cards on your
board that have radar effects to trigger. So, it is a manual trigger, but it can also allow you to buy some cards from your personal display that you had. So, I look at these and I think, you know what, this one would actually be pretty good for the strategy I'm doing. It costs six energy, right? I'm going to spend my six energy tracked on here. Buy the card. It goes on top of my deck. I get to use it in the next turn or next like round more accurately. But the other thing that you will also get to do is to place workers on the map tiles themselves. So, there are spaces on specially selected expert tiles before the game starts. There's also the basic harbatile, but the main ones that you got are these ones that as they spread out, and there's limited spaces, there's bonuses for going on certain ones, and they each have an action, first come, first serve, except the workers don't come back at the end of the round. This isn't like a typical worker placement game where your workers go out, and then they come back, and then you refresh and go again. No, when the workers go out, they stay out. That's it. You get two every round. You might be able to get more by special effects, but typically you only get two each round. So, you have to basically deal with what's out there, but also add more tiles to the map in order to get more spaces you can actually go to because the spaces that you had at the start of the game are getting used up quicker and quicker. So, a little bit of a twist there. There's one or two other sort of minor things that you can do, but for the most part, it revolves around that aspect. Build more tiles, build buildings and structures to upgrade them or to buy more cards so that you've got more of an interesting deck for future turns. The other you have some other little minor
things like uh milestone objectives that you can do throughout the course of the game. Think how Boon Lake worked from Alexander Fister. It's pretty much the same mechanic where you have three milestones and you pick the first one to do in round three and then round five you do the second one. Round six you do the third one. So you're basically tailoring to you know how good you think you're doing at certain aspects. But the game will rinse repeat for six rounds and at the end of the day you don't track points during the game. You basically count them up by various means during. There's not a huge amount of endgame scoring. Most of it comes from project cards that you have accumulated over the course of the game, but otherwise it's mostly I've built this. I've got these cards and everything else is kind of preprinted. After six rounds, you will total up all your points from buildings that you've made, from the cards that are in your deck, as well as other aspects that might be relevant to the meteorite site, which is different in each game. And of course, the one with the most,
of course. Okay, some positives first. We'll talk about certain rulebook things later on, but in terms of how many rules do you need to learn in order to play this game, surprisingly, for a game that advertises 3 hours of play time in Alexander Fister, it's actually not that many you have to learn. There's only like some basic rules you need to know for the like that little card drawing phase. Grab two workers and choose out of a bunch of cards. Easily done. The action phase, you've only got five different actions you can do and you know, most of them work out pretty straightforward in how they operate. And in the milestone phase, phase four is just like checking for objectives. That's basically it. There's not a huge amount of subs separate rules. And I was expecting a lot more complexity in that regard, but I'm happy to see that it's not like a smores board of rules that you need to know. I don't have 40 pages worth of rules to absorb before I can even think of like oh great how do I supposed to play this well I have no idea and you know it does work from a you know it works well on that front so once you've got the hang of this game caveat on that later but when you have got the hang of this and you are teaching it to other players you should be able to get started in a quicker like teaching time than other heavy games would have you allow there's also not a lot of setup time for this you know most players will have their own board and it's basically just a case of putting the structures on there, having their like small deck of cards and just keeping a few bits and bobs nearby. Now, there are some weird questionable
layouts with the boards and stuff. I mean, they put two specific areas here which have no purpose. The rule book doesn't explain what they're for. So, you could put coins in there, you could put spare materials, you could put your spare workers in there. I don't know. It doesn't actually tell you. So, it's kind of a bit bizarre. But, you know, you do have basically this board with a few pieces on it. And then you just basically have this little setup here. A board which is already laid out with a bunch of these little expert tokens on there. You've got your basic harbor tile that's always there. And then you just basically set up tiles based on player count. So, they've got different temperature ratings basically for like the early tiles, the late game tiles, and so forth. And basically, you just bring out as many as there are per player and follow the red little notches in terms of where you place them. So, this is like me following the red notches in this instance, but you could create more of a snake. You know, it creates like some unique setups each time. But, you know, that's basically it. Somebody does that little bit of setup. Everybody does their own little board and you're kind of good to go really. I mean, the game does not take a long time to set up and therefore it doesn't take a long time for a competent teacher to teach it. That's not to say it's not going to take you a long time on your first game, especially if you've not played it. You've only learned the rules. So, expect your first one or two games to be a little bit on the shaky side. They certainly were with me. And you know, despite how I think I can teach a game, well, yeah, the first game was a little shaky, but you know, you will get to that point where it's like, yeah, you know what? We can get this going in a much shorter time than, you know, even a bunch of other Fister
games, frankly, but certainly a lot more quicker than a bunch of other heavy euros. Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring.
Now, there's two very distinct aspects to this game. We're talking the map section with the work of placement and, you know, the different tiles that can come up, but we're also talking your own board with the card system. Now, you can definitely tell that this game is kind of a little bit like Alexander Fisto's greatest hits here. There's definitely like, oh, this element reminds me of Boon Lake, or this reminds me a little bit of the Great Western Trail vein. It's like, oh, this reminds me of that uh uh was it the expedition to Newale vein? It's like there's definitely little cherry picks here and there, but all designers do this. It's kind of a thing. But, you know, there is some new bits here and there where I'm like, "Oh, okay. The workers stay there and never come back. That's a little different." You know, the decision space with your board. I mean, there's some differences there. You know, there's definitely some tweaks to what we've seen before, but what there is here is still pretty solid from a gameplay perspective. I particularly like this card system because it's a good decision space, but there is there are some downsides to this. We'll get on to this a bit later.
But overall, I like the idea that you've got this small deck of cards that you can, you know, improve as the game goes on and you could make this the focus of your game or you could just maybe not concentrate too much on it. And you flip a card and you're deciding what you're going to do with it. So, yeah, expedition cards can go down here to an extent, but then which expedition cards do you want? but also the storm card. You've got three bases that you can pick from with abilities on them. A fourth one you can unlock for storage basically. And when you flip one of those expedition cards, you can put it down. It's like, ah, sweet. That's really cool. But then when you flip that storm card, you're like, "Oh, great. Now I got to cover up one of these base abilities." Well, which one do I do? That's an important decision. Or maybe there's one that you're like, "Yeah, I don't really care about the investor experts this game, so that's an easy one to put a storm on." But the storms aren't entirely bad. Yes, they cover up base buildings, but then they're also a good way to generate energy based on how many storms you put out. It's kind of like having a bit like the equivalent of having a solar panel farm or something.
You know, the sunnier it is, you might get more energy. Who knows? But, you know, this one basically generates Is that how solar panels work? I don't know. I'm not a scientist. But, you know, with these ones, you might only put one out thinking, well, you know, I don't want to cover up my buildings. But then you don't generate a lot of energy that turn. So, you might, well, okay, I don't mind covering up all the buildings. Whatever. don't need them this round. Well, now I generate a lot of energy that I can use to do other things. It's a good little decision space, but it does carry a caveat, which we'll brush up on in the uh the negative section of this video. But, you know, I like just the basic decision space that brings, but then I also like getting these other cards. I mean, there's a lot of different cards here. Most of them are I think they're all pretty much unique or at least unique to some extent. There's definitely some heavy similarities with a bunch of these. And maybe there are a few that are the same.
But actually, yeah, there are a few that are the same, come to think of it. But no, there's still a decent amount of variety in this deck. And when you're constantly getting cards each time to add to your personal display, it's not something you have to go and manually trigger. So, you know, yes, you can manipulate how many cards you draw from your own deck and stuff, but you know, there is there are some abilities that you you draw more cards from here. Nice. But everybody gets to have a little bit of a look at some new cards and potentially get them for later. So I I like the fact that it automatically gets you to look for that rather than you having to go out and do it yourself.
YOU WANT ME TO DO TWO THINGS, MAN? I'D CALL MY LAWYER IF DIALING THE phone wasn't such a hassle.
There's also quite a few paths that you can follow in this game, which does bring a little bit of a tactical element as well as a strategic element. You might think, well, okay, this game I'm going to focus mostly on radio operators and really max out this track here and you know what I do out here will kind of support that. But, you know, the cards that you get during a game might facilitate taking a different route or you might find that there's other opportunities that can happen. So, yes, you can have a game plan from the get-go, particularly with your milestone cards where you're thinking, well, the milestones kind of like like those my personal one likes this. I should probably be looking at this. Okay, well, how can I go about doing that? But then other little opportunities from other people putting tiles down and such and such may actually give you something else to do in a particular turn. But you can play some very different games of this. I've had, you know, the first game I went stupidly hard in radio operators.
I maxed it out, got to the end of this track, must have looped it several times before the game ended and it was like, okay, that's one way of doing it. Then I tried one with investors, different thing. I had loads of money that I could deal with so I could buy project cards without any trouble and fill up on a ton of experts. just wasn't very good at getting expedition cards. But then you can also go heavy on the structures, focus more on the map element. You could, you know, try to do stuff with this meteorite or you could just ignore it entirely. You might go and explore a bunch of tiles and some of that can be facilitated by the project cards that you get. So some project cards will just give you special abilities and that. But then there are some that literally give you victory points at the end of the game. And you can't really strategize for these. You are just going to have to hope they come up in the deck. But, you know, if I pull out one here that says, "All right, if I've got four of these, uh, you know, wild experts on my board, then I get five points." Well, if I do buy that project, I probably should focus a bit on that. And, you know, you'll get other ones that say, "Ah, you know, ones for building stations with at least one upgrade or one for building on specific tiles or, oh, I get a bunch of points if I just explore a bunch of these. Okay, well, I better make sure I do that. I get a bit of a reward. I get some points. Not bad deal." And so, you know, you can play this in very different ways and depending what other players do, it's definitely going to have a little bit of an impact on, you know, what you do as well. But yeah, I've played a bunch of games of this and I've tried to do something a little bit different each time. And yes, eventually you will run out of possibilities, but it does mean that the games do feel relatively fresh from time to time.
Isn't that lovely?
It's also nice to see the game have kind of an arc to it with this whole map thing. You start off with this basic map and there's only so many spaces. This is kind of if I was setting up a two-player. There'd be more if there was four, but you know, the spaces there are very limited. Some tiles only have one, some have two, some have three spaces on them, but you will fill them up pretty damn quick, and you're not going to want to go on every single tile anyway. Some might only give you a coin, and you're like, well, I got all the money in the world. I don't need to waste one of my precious workers, of which you don't have many of them to go on those specific tiles. But once they get used up here, eventually these other ones will get explored. So it's like, okay, this one gets revealed. Oh, that's got a nice space that gives me a bunch of energy and lets me buy an expedition card. There's not a lot of ways to buy cards in this game. I do wish there were more, frankly. But, uh, normally you can only do it by spending the radar tile.
If you're unlucky enough not to find tiles that let you buy more cards, it then makes buying cards a little bit restrictive. That is one negative. But, you know, okay, I've used up these spaces. Another one gets explored. Okay, this one lets me do more with the radio operator. All right, I'm going to explore this one here. And they get more powerful as the game goes on. So, you start off with some basic spaces, but then eventually they get more juicy, more get added. You might even explore them all and then actually reveal even more tiles on top of that. So, it does depend what gets revealed, but also what other players will build during the game that can make this a nice little kind of like mini game art dynamic. It's not just a static map that never changes. is it actually does evolve.
You made those words up.
And it's definitely a game of pick your battles because as I say, most of the time you're only going to have two workers around. You're only going to have so many of these radar tiles. You're only going to have very few of these forecast tiles that let you, you know, bin a card that you don't like during that draw step. So, and there's a decent amount of structures, but you ain't going to build them all, which just not going to happen. You won't have the resources to be able to do it. You got three different types of experts where you're not going to be able to fill up all three tracks unless you could focus really hard on it. It is doable, but uh it's a bit of a mission. And you certainly, you know, with here, you've only got so many workers you can put out generally. So, you've got to pick your battles. You got to decide what it is you need to do. And so, there's a cool little efficiency puzzle here, as well as a a situation of I want a bit of that, but I also want a bit of that, but I also want a bit of this.
What's more important? What do I need now? What can wait till next round? Is there a way that I could combo, you know, this by, you know, putting a worker there, which then lets me get the energy and possibly a spare worker to allow me to do this bit. Let me think. And, you know, there's quite a decent amount of that. You know, not like combos firing all over the shop, but there's definitely a little bit of that element of, well, if I go here, I get to do this as well as get a little bit of this, which enables me to do this little bit, and you know, actions can follow through from there. So, if you're into efficiency puzzles or if you're looking for a game that can reward you for having a powerful turn, you'll get it here. So, to balance things out before we get to the solo mode, I do need to talk about some negatives. Now, I mentioned that the game does not have a lot of rules for you to learn, and that is true. A lot of the rules that you kind of need from a general phase standpoint is just basically there on the back of the book. It is all entirely text. I do wish it was a bit more easily laid out than that, but I say not too many rules.
It's just a shame that the rule book isn't 100% actually trying to explain it to you. You know, the layout of this book is a little questionable because you've got a lot of iconography in this game. Quite a lot indeed. And the iconography in this game is not what I would call intuitive. There are some icons in here where like, you know, you might struggle to figure out what they do or they could be a lot more clearer as to how they work. And the symbology is all over the shop in this book. I mean, you've got symbology on the two inside back pages. This is a fail. The fact that the the fact that the game does not have an icon card on the back of the book, which is bare minimum, is already a bit of a a noar, but no reference cards exist for any player. None. There are no reference cards in this game with any iconography or any explanation of the phases and the actions. Come on, guys. This is heavy game 101. You have to have reference aids, icon cheat sheets, and everything per player.
Of course, it's so simple.
It gets worse because not only have you got the two symbology pages at the back here, but then let's say I want to know what the milestones do. Well, the milestones aren't on this bit. Milestones are back here in the milestone section. the where is it? Yeah, milestone overview here. All right. Well, what about those expert tiles? What do they do? They're in their own section related to the expert tiles. So, all the reference aids that you need are inside the book rather than on a personal player age, which you should be doing. And, you know, they're scattered throughout this book, which just makes referencing specific bits a bit of a pain. But then there's also a few rules in here that just physically aren't in the book that should be. Like, some stuff just isn't as explained as well as it could be. And if you go on boardamege geek, you'll see what people have put up, including myself. I put up like several different rules which are either poorly explained or not explained at all in the book. And this is a first printing. And the publisher has said that obviously they will do a V2 rule book for another reprint. And they are working on icon cheat sheets, so maybe they'll appear on board game geek in the future and we can download them. That's fine. It should be in the book. It should be in the box.
I'm going to allow this
solo mode. I'll touch on one later, but the player scaling for this is relatively good in that it progresses linear. So, you basically just put out an equal certain amount of tiles for each extra player, which is good because it does mean that the maps remain quite tight no matter what. But this game is very much a multiplayer solitire puzzle, apart from the taking of spaces, which is the same with every worker placement game ever, and maybe the taking of an expert tile or putting a tile down on the space you might have liked. But that's pretty much it. This is very much a multiplayer solitaire puzzle, which does beg the question, do you really want to play this with more players? It's that's a very tough question. And I mean, forgetting the idea of whether you like playing with other people or not,
tell them I hate them.
The fact of the matter is is that adding more players simply just adds more time. And we're talking downtime and length for the game. This thing says two to three hours on the box. Even for one to four players, it says minimum two hours, which is pretty accurate actually. It's going to take you a minimum of two hours to finish this game, but it's long. This could easily take you up to four hours when you're playing this with four players. And certainly, you know, to include the teach and the setup and that and also play with four players, you're looking at the 4hour mark and that is an insane length for this game. As fun as some of the aspects can be, there's not enough here to justify that kind of length with lots of players. You got people who are Aprone. Oh my god, ban them from this game because they're going to hold things up. But the game just takes a while anyway. Yes, the first two phases are simultaneous, but you're only as fast as your slowest person. And one of those phases is so tiny it doesn't take that long anyway.
But, you know, looking at a bunch of cards and deciding which ones you want to keep. Some people are going to do that quicker than others. You know, some people will only have like three cards they draw in that first bit with a few bonuses. Others will keep drawing until half their deck's done. It's going to be a little uneven, but then even when you're just doing action, action, action. First couple of rounds will be pretty quick, but eventually they're going to get longer. Particularly by round five and six, you know, people will have a lot more to do. They might have extra workers or they just simply have more resources to play with. And six rounds of the game, I think, is maybe just one round too long. I think this game could have achieved what it needed to do in five rounds. Uh, five rounds seemed perfectly plenty, but for some reason there's six. And by the time I get to that point, especially in a three or four player game, I'm kind of like, yeah, this game kind of needs to wrap up now. I've done what I need to do. I don't think I can do much more. We need to stop this. And unfortunately, the game's got a bit longer to go.
Are we there yet?
Now, as much as I say the card system is really solid, it does have its own little caveat here. And this is the nature of these games where you have like mini deck building elements or cards that you draw from a random deck. And that it's got a bit of a randomness factor here, which wouldn't be so bad if the game was 60 to 90 minutes long. But as I said, this is going to take you a minimum of two, more likely three to four hours to play. And the randomness factors can have a big impact on this game. You know, the tiles that you draw, you you draw them from a bunch of stacks, you know, the ones that you build later on with more engineers, and it the rule just says you take the top one, and it's blind. You don't know what it is. It might be an action space that you have no interest in. It's like, well, well, I really would like to build something that allows me to do this. And it's like, well, tough. You're getting whatever this is. And it's like, oh, I actually house rule that you draw three and choose one. So, a little bit of mitigation, but then the cards also have this issue. This deck is a tiny fraction of what is in here. It's normally about this big. All right, it's substantially larger, right? And you only look at five cards each round from this deck if you don't use any other abilities to draw cards. So, the mo most of the deck will be expedition cards, but let's say you're not focused much on expedition cards. Well, you might still draw five expedition cards. And then, well, what do I do? I'm not focused on that. I need project cards. Well, tough. You didn't draw any. What are you going to do about it? Nothing. You can't. And in this case, let's say, you know, in my first game, I was focused really heavily on the expedition cards. So, I didn't want
project cards. I wanted expedition cards. Well, I just drew that randomly from the deck. That's four project cards. One expedition card. And I might look at that expedition card and go, "That's not particularly useful to me." Or, "It's too expensive. That's no use." So, basically, I've now got a bunch of cards in my hand I can't really use. Yes, there is a tactical element of this game of adapting to the cards you get. But if you are focused on a particular way to play the game, then well, you know, not getting anything that helps you with that is going to hinder you compared to somebody else who just happens to draw a bunch of cards and go, "Hm, oh, sweet. I could use that. I could use that as well. Yeah, perfect. I'll take these two cards. I'm going to buy them. They're going to be fantastic." Well, you know, good to be them. Sucks to be you, apparently. So, I do have a bit of a problem with how this game can generate that luck. and I haven't finished. I mean, there's also the drawing of your cards at the start of the round that has a profound effect.
And you might argue, well, okay, if you have a bad turn, you can even it out with a good turn next. But timing is important here. Spaces on this board are not going to be there for very long. You know, opportunities are not going to present themselves very often round. You can't afford for one of your rounds that you need the stuff to basically be like, "Well, sorry. You drew like you were unlucky with the drawing of your cards. So, uh, there you go. Have a sucky turn.
I missed the part where that's my problem.
Well, no, it doesn't matter that my next turn might be better with the cards. I need the cards now, not then. And you know, this goes double for these storm cards. Yes, there are ways that you can burn them out of your deck, but not many. You have to build very specific buildings to do it, and they're very costly in materials to be able to do it. it just doesn't feel like it's worth it, you know, with the you need a lot of materials to be able to do it. And if you're doing those, then you're not actually using the materials to get the structures in the first place. But for example, like you've got these, sorry, my throat's a bit dry, these little forecast tiles, right? You get one at the start of the game and then you get one in the very last round. That's it. Maybe there'll be a space that lets you get more, but that's it. If you do not have that tile in the game, these are the only ones you get. So, you've got very little mitigation with your deck of cards that you're drawing from. And I had one game, you know, where a friend of mine was doing okay, but not amazing.
And then in the last round, he'd already done stuff with his deck. He'd done what he could to uh, you know, trim a storm card out. And, you know, he bought a bunch of expedition cards. So, his deck was mostly good stuff or something. And basically his last turn after shuffling the deck and putting it back down in that went like this. Uh, storm. Storm. Uh, one expedition card. Storm burn that thing. All right, fine. And storm. Oh, great. Okay. Well, I'm I'm screwed. You know, and or like he couldn't put that one out, so he's like, well, I've got to I've got to deal with that. And that was his last turn. One expedition card and a full bunch of storms.
OH, COME ON.
I MEAN, HOW'S THAT MEANT TO MAKE YOU FEEL in a 3 to four hour game? in the last round. Having a situation where you just get unlucky with the cards and your last round sucks, doesn't it just kind of make the rest of the game just feel like it wasn't important? Doesn't it sort of give a massive advantage to the player who just happened to draw the best stuff at the last minute? It does. And and that's a swinny part of the game that there just isn't enough mitigation on. Doesn't happen in every game, but it can happen. And that's the problem. The fact that it can happen means that somebody could get away with lady luck on their side and have a great time, but somebody could just get screwed over a lot with the placement of these cards and it's going to make the experience sucky for them. It's not your fault.
Let's say I want to focus heavily on radio operators. There's some cards in here that give you more radio operator signals. There's some in here that even score you points for having a lot of them at the end of the game. Will they turn up? I don't know. They may do. And that's the thing. You you have a strategy and you like for two, three rounds of the game, you're following that strategy and then the cards just refuse to give you what you want. They just give you a bunch of expensive expedition cards that you can't hope to buy. I mean, you don't get even get a mulligan in this game at the start. So, you might have a bunch of cards from the chosen that you have at the start of the game and you look at them and it's like, well, these cost six coins, these cost like 12 energy, 15 energy, 13 energy. I can't afford any of these at the start of the game. won't generate that many resources. Well, sucks to be you. I have to house rule a mulligan in this game in order to try and stop that. But, you know, you could just draw a bunch of cards that just don't work for you. Some of these project cards with the abilities, some of them are like, eh, okay, they're not bad. They're okay. But then I have seen some just absolutely decimate things.
You know, the icebreaker one that lets you shift workers around after you've already placed them. It's like that's a really good one to get because it's effectively giving you an extra worker each round when well on the turn you use it and that can be pretty useful and invaluable. But then the point scoring cards well it's no good if I draw cards that score me points for stuff I'm not even doing. But it's you know you can sometimes just have a a game where you just get phenomenally lucky with the cards you draw or you don't see the cards you want at all.
I hate this game. Component quality. I usually talk about this earlier. I just kind of forgot. It could be better as well. You're paying €80 for this at Essen. And we It's quite an ask for €80. Yes, you get a lot of stuff in the box. I mean, you've got, you know, four separate sets of these dual layer boards. You assemble them a bit like the CG ones with the sticky adhesive and that, but you do have four of these that you put together and they stay together just fine. You've got a lot of cardboard tiles. You've got a decent amount of cards. You've got a lot of bits and even these pieces you have, they're rewood as they're called. So basically the recycled wood. Now a few caveats here though cuz firstly the card stock is um not what I would call uh strong. I mean I'm barely like flicking that and it's a very bendy thin card stock. You're probably going to want to sleeve these if you're going to manipulate these quite a bit. But then also you know some of the cardboard tokens. I mean they're relatively thin. The tiles are decent. I think the tiles are one of the better aspects, but you know, there are other is mostly just cardboard stuff here. You haven't got metal anything. You haven't got, you know, wooden coins or wooden materials. I mean, the materials kind of look weird as well. They look more like sort of like free dotted dice. It's hard to even tell. I mean, they literally just call it a material in this game.
The theme here is non-existent. I don't even think that this whole, oh, we're in the Antarctic and we're going to find stuff. It's like, yeah, whatever. This could be rethemed rethemed in space and have the exact same thing going on. It really means nothing apart from just some interesting nice artwork at times. But you know the rewood I mean the rewood is fine but I'm still on the fence as to whether rewood's a good thing in games because you know it can look cool you know compared to even like normal wood but the notches that you have on your boards to put these in are not the best like sizing wise. you know, some of them you have to kind of really dig them in and yeah, they're not going to fall out, but then you're struggling to get them in in the first place. You know, they could be a little bit more, you know, maybe a little less snug, you know, put it that way. But also, Rewood is expensive. It jacks the price up quite a bit. So, you factor in all these like, you know, different Rewood pieces for multiple players, all these cards, which are still not the best card stock, you know, artwork and all the tiles and that, it does jack the price up. €8 is uh quite a lot.
Is bread free?
Yeah, we'll split an order.
So, we got some positives, we got some negatives. Now, let's also talk about the solo mode. The solo mode is an interesting one here actually because I mentioned in the player scaling that the game does scale quite linearly in a linear fashion.
Dude, you're embarrassing in front of the wizard. Sorry.
And basically, yes, you put out tiles equal to the number of players. So two, three, and four have about the same amount of competition between them. You know, the game feels just as tight at two as it does at four, but you add a lot more time and potential downtime when you add more players in, but because this is mostly a multiplayer solitaire game, you don't add much in the way of interaction. In comes the solo mode, which I thought would just be a tacked-on thing. It really doesn't feel that way though because there are only three pages of rules for the solo mode. And one of those is the setup. There you go. You get a small board which is literally just this little thing here. You put out a couple of cards and populate it with some player pieces. Okay, that's easy. And then you just have that. That's the solo mode.
And this bit is the actual relevant. Oh yeah, here's how the rules work. And the other side is just a nice easy explanation with a guide as to how the different actions work on the milestone card. Oh, sorry, on the the AI bots cards. What the AI bot basically does is very simply it has a little rondelle that it moves around um and you know a couple of little rondell's here that moves along. But you have a deck of cards for the bots. Let's just take a few of these for example. And essentially what they have is you mix them up at the start of the game based on difficulty. So you can change up the makeshift of the deck. And essentially they have stars on them. So the the AI bot will do nothing in the first two phases of the game. Nice and easy. The milestone phase it does is literally just a bit like yours. It's an objective. But in the action phase, you basically flip over a card and do the actions on it. And they're very straightforward. It's put a worker out, put a tile out, put a station out, nick an expert tile, uh move the guy around the track a bit more. Pretty straightforward. But then when it's played a certain amount of stars on the card based on difficulty level and also, you know, how far it gets across this board, then it will then pass. But that's all you do for the AI bot. It's a very easy AI bot to pilot. But it also is a very good simulator for a player because frankly, the only thing a player does to get in your way in this game is it puts workers out on the spaces. It builds uh station tiles in places where
you might not want them to build them. And it may take they may take expert tiles from the board that you were hoping to take. The AI bot does all of those things easily and in much less time. You know, I've played this solo a couple of times and frankly, I'm not sure I would want to play this with more players. I mean, let's get past this argument. I'm going to mention this in a podcast at some way as well. This whole thing of I want to play it with people. want people at the table, want to socialize and that, that's a completely different thing. Let's talk mechanically about this game. This game doesn't add enough extra elements for more players at the game compared to what the solo bot already does. And so, what you have in the solo mode is you can do everything you want to do with the game as normal. You can look at more cards.
You can, you know, you can do your expedition. You can choose what strategy you want. You can do all the expert tiles and the card play and the building on here exactly as if you were playing a two-player game. No problem. So, you just need things to block your way. Well, the AI bot does that. And you don't have to spend like, you know, 20 minutes for every bot turn trying to figure out what it does. It's not a Turkey game, you know? It's it's easy enough to do it. It doesn't have like a weird flowchart or anything. It's just here's the card. It has an action on it. maybe moves the guy around his little rondelle track. And what does the action do? Well, they're pretty straightforward from the iconography, but there's a page in the book that tells you easily. It's such an easy AI to pilot. Depending what difficulty rating you put on, it will still be a challenge. I mean, even easy mode will be a challenge for people that are new to the game, but, you know, you can certainly, you know, up the difficulty rating if you want. And it's not a bad way to learn the game either because the AI rules are not that complicated. So, you could really even, you know, you could either do a two-player dummy run by yourself, but I think if you were a heavy gamer and you were getting into this for the first time, it wouldn't take you much to learn how the solo bot works and then just play a solo game with the bot that will teach you all the rules. You've only got to learn a couple of extra for the AI bot and you're only with a good stent there. So, it it's a very neat mode. And they had this with like, you know, with even fall and stuff like that as well, the solo mode and that was a very uh interesting one as well. It just ends up
being a way to play the game where you get to do all the fun bits without the added length, without, you know, the extra downtime, without needing a table presence. That's ridiculous. I mean, when you've got four people with these boards and all the bits next to you and all these tiles out there, called blammy, you're going to need a big table for this. is going to take up the space, but it works very well solo. I've enjoyed this more solo than I have multiplayer. So, for solo gamers out there, you could be in with a solid hit here. But, you know, if you want if you don't mind playing this for 3 to four hours, then yes, you will have fun in the multiplayer as well. I'm not saying multiplayer is bad, but it's going to be long and you're basically just adding time. So, is that what you want?
That just sounds like slavery with extra steps. Oh, someone's going to get laid in college.
So, 60 below, minus 60, whatever the hell you going to call this game. It's an interesting one. It's It's a mixed bag for sure. There's definitely a balance here of pros and cons, but some of it is going to depend on how many players you play this with, but even if not factoring that bit in, it's got a lot of good stuff going for it. I like the card play. I like the evolving map structure. I like the fact your workers are much more limited and they stay there. They don't come back for later. I like the decision space with what am I going to do with the initial drawing of the cards from my board. I like the upgrading of cards in my deck with new stuff. I like that I have a choice over that. You know, it's not just, oh, add a couple more cards or here's your 10 cards and that's what you can buy from. It's like no, here's a big deck of cards and you're going to look at a few and you're going to decide which ones do I like. There's a lot of decision space in the game. It's a big efficiency puzzle.
you really do need to pick your battles and you know a there's a decent amount of variety with the setups and you know these expert tiles that you can use. Uh you also just what strategy you're going to follow, what cards you draw as you go through. There's a lot of solid bits here. Now that has to be balanced with a bunch of negatives. The game does take forever if you play this with four players. I mean, wow, four hours. We are talking here and I don't think this game justifies that length. But you've also got, you know, potentially three hour length with three players. I mean, it's going to take you a long time. This is not a short affair by any means. And the box does not for at least I'll give credit. The box doesn't lie about it. I mean, you could possibly get this down to 3 hours with four players if everybody knew what they were doing and you ignored the teach. I would say it's doable, but it's going to take you longer with new players and certainly while you're learning it. But yeah, I like the fact that the game doesn't seem to think that you can play this in 60 minutes or 90 minutes or any of that garbage. It says no, it's going to take you at least a couple of hours. Yeah, that's pretty true. It's going to take you a good couple of hours at least. So, expect that you're in for the long haul, but it's very multiplayer solitire and you don't desperately need the other players there. Thankfully, the solo mode comes in and beefs the game up for that.
But, there are still a couple of other negatives that are a bit of a problem. I do think that more time needed to be spent on this rule book. You needed more reference aids. You know, I feel that, you know, with a heavy game, you have to judge the rulebook a bit more harshly than you would in a light game because these have to be pitch perfect for these type of things. And this one just needs needs a rulebook editor, needs a bit of a layout, sort of a, you know, a guide to think about layouts. And then you obviously need all the reference guides, icon cheat sheets per player, not hidden in the book. That's not a way to do things. But then also the swingy nature of the game in respect to the cards and the tiles. I'm having to house rule a lot of mulligans and look at this and choose ones and that and there are some of those in the game already. I mean you look at five and pick one or two in the drawing phase and you know and you might be able to you know get a choice over certain things later but you know you have to be blind drawing with the tiles that you build and no you should be able to look at several because you might just get a tile that isn't that useful to you. friend of mine had to draw a bunch of energy tiles and it's like, well, that's not his focus, so why is that a good thing? Uh, you've also got the the swinginess of drawing bad cards in that drawing phase. You could have a really sucky turn at the worst time for it. And you might be following a particular strategy and the deck basically says, "Now, I'm just going to throw this stuff at you and uh you're not going to like it because um well, like I say, sucks to be you." And it's like, well, no, it shouldn't suck to be me. I want to enjoy playing your game
and that's not a good feeling. the game was much shorter, this wouldn't be a big problem. So, it's definitely a bit of a mixed bag. But overall, I do like the game, but it is definitely one that I would want to play with less players or I know I'm in for the long haul. You got to get used to it. You got to get to you got to conquer a few hurdles before you get to this game's peak, but it's still overly pretty solid. I'm giving it a strong 7 out of 10. You know, a good rating. It's higher up, closer to eight than it is closer to six. Um, it's got a lot of good stuff going for it, but those caveats and those issues that I do have do bring it down a few marks. But I will say that the game gets better if you play this with less. If you're going to play this at one or two players more often, I think you're going to get easily eight out of 10 level, you know, gameplay without a shadow of a doubt.
But if you play this with more, it's going to be diminishing returns and four players is going to be a slog. It's going to be long and if you're teaching three new players, expect to be there for a while. And I just don't know if it's justified for that length, even component-wise. You know, to justify €8 is a high price point indeed. So, you need to know that you're going to be interested in this. And for Essen, I suggest you try before you buy. You know, try the game out, see if you like the mechanics, and if you don't mind the length aspect or you think you're going to play it with less players more often, then buy. Sure. Try it, give it a shot, and if you like it, buy it, you know, because I think it will be a solid one overall. And I have enjoyed my time with this. But cool blimey. Yeah, you've gota you gota sort out that rule book. You got to like maybe add a few more bits of luck mitigation in the game, you know, stuff that can be finished with a version two printing of this. And they are going out of their way to do some cheat sheets and reference aids and stuff. So, there is room to fix things for maybe the second printing. But for the first printing in its current state, I'm saying seven out of 10. It's strong.
It's good. It's pretty solid, but you know, just some little quirks to iron out.
The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows.
So, that's it for me on this episode of The Broken Me. If you like what you see, then please thumb it up on Board Game Geek and thumb it up on YouTube. Uh, let me know your comments down below. Do you love Alexander Fisto games in general? What's your favorite? Have you tried this? Do you love it? Do you hate it? What do you think about the player count? What do you think about the solo mode? What do you think about the swingy nature of the cards? By all means, get your thoughts down below. It would be interesting to have a debate and by all means this, you know, this was a review copy donated for them. So, thank you very much for that. But a lot of my games are not review copies. So, the Patreon is there to help me get more copies to help me attend trade fairs to keep the channel going and bring you the content that I hope you're finding entertaining. So, without further ado, take care. Remember, it's only a game and I'll see you on the next Broken People video. So, bye for now.