Revenant Board Game Review

0:00 Reloading.

0:34 Hi everyone. I'm the broken me. Win or lose, I'm going to be honest with you. And despite this game being set in the cold vacuum of space, it's still bloody hot. But that's why I'm getting my videos recorded in the morning when it's coolest because otherwise I'd just roast to death like I did with the last video I did. But we're talking about Revenant. This isn't a review copy. I actually backed this one on uh Game Pound. So, I actually wanted to try this one because the first initial demo of it I played essentially, okay, I'm actually intrigued. This seems pretty cool. I want to see more and it's finally now starting to fulfill to people. People are starting to get reviews out, you know, slowly but surely and I don't want to miss the crap. So, I figured I want to put a video out to give you my thoughts. So, this is effectively a sequel to Voidful. Now, yes, you've heard me talk about Voy a lot on this channel, usually in a negative way, but not crazy negative, cuz I don't think Voy is a bad game. It's just too much.

1:28 Too much setup, too much FAF, too many rules, too much complication, and too much time length demanded of you. But the solo mode in it is actually a decent solo mode. And if you're willing to accept that the game is going to suck up most of your spare time and then some, you know, you might be like, he's like, "Daddy, did you remember mommy's birthday today? Sorry, I played Voidful." It it is a bit like that.

1:51 That escalated quickly.

1:53 Revenant is a sequel which is meant to be a bit shorter, a little bit easier to get into. Still set in the Voidful universe, if you want to call it, but a very different game. It's just going to share like sort of similarities in terms of some of the feel of the game, the graphic design. It's still, you know, tool. It's still mine clash. So, there's definitely going to be some variance here. Although different designers this time round. It's not the same as with Voidfall. So, there is a bit of a a switch over. Question is, was it worth backing? Is it worth your money? This is the retail version, like the well, I say retail version, the normal version. It doesn't have like crazy, you know, miniatures or anything like that. you know, we're sticking with standard pieces for the most part. And, you know, I will GIVE YOU MY THOUGHTS. NOW, you're going to have to rely on a lot of the photos for showing off this game because uh well, we'll get to that bit in the negatives later, but suffice to say, there's only so much room on my table to showcase a lot of the stuff.

2:46 But the idea with Revenant is that this is kind of set as a prequel to the voidfall game. So, voidfall game, you're already kind of navigating the galaxy, setting up bases, and dealing with a void threat that was already in place. This is kind of set at the time when Voy actually started. You know, oh my god, what is going on here? You're a bunch of ships flying through space. The Revenant, which is like your sort of big capital ship, and then various other ships employed by different factions, house factions, of which you've got seven of them in the game, and they're represented by these tracks. Your goal of the game is effectively to win favor with certain factions, make sure they survive what's about to come, and score victory points in that fashion. But what essentially happens is that you have the Revenant on the board in the center and then you have these ships populating around the edge and the void are attacking. So they are basically just portal in from whatever dimension X or whatever that they come from. Who remembers that reference? Um and you know they're here attacking and they're basically gunning down the various ships that you have. What you as players are trying to do is basically utilize the ships of the different factions to fend them off as long as possible while keeping the factions that you want to have favor with alive for longer because effectively your main part of scoring is based on the power level of the faction.

4:01 So how many of their ships they got remaining versus also sorry multiplied by how well you are in favor of them like your favor rating. So, if my favorite rating is seven and they've got four ships left, 7* 4, 28. There you go. And that's effectively like your main goal. But the idea is is that you have this map with different sectors and all the ships and the boyborns attacking each other. You then play through four rounds and in these four rounds you are, you know, placing workers like your little soldier cadet dudes on the ships to do various actions. So, the ark ships as they're called from the different factions have all got two actions a piece. One action there, one action there. and each one has two different ones. And the idea being is that you will place your worker on said ship and do one of the actions. You can also utilize the smaller ships that are around which include your own personal frigot which is kind of like a small shuttle ship that you have control of.

4:54 You know, imagine like basically the the one from every sci-fi show where it's the protagonist ship or whatever. But you have things like fighters that you can use to fend off the enemies. You've also got things like drop ships where you can go off to a nearby planet and do some action or get resources that way. Do a bit of mining and all this is going on whilst the void born are trying to pumme all these ships to dust basically. So you're trying to survive. It's almost kind of like a BSG battle star galactica type feel. But with these workers that you've got, you've got two normal cadets and you've got a captain. The cadets can be upgraded with cards and always have special abilities. But your captain also has some upgradeable abilities that you can level up during the game. There's several of these available, so you can chop and change and flip it to A and B side. But basically, what you can do during the game is you can level up your captain, which gives you certain bonuses, certain benefits, unlocks, and just basic makes it more powerful as well as gets you points. But in order to do these actions, you're going to have to get resources. So, you get your own little frig board here. You've got frig upgrades you'll put along the top, but then you've got these bonus actions that you will perform. You effectively do the action for the turn and then a bonus action across your board. and you'll store resources at the bottom which you'll use to pay for the actions.

6:04 However, corruption can be delivered by the void. So, they will corrupt the various ships. So, if I put one on here for example, this one is now corrupted, which means using said ship is going to obviously corrupt you as a faction. But you also have corruption spaces on your board, which means that as soon as you put a corruption token on there, you can no longer use that bonus action or the resource depot or below it. So essentially hinders your progress the more you get corrupted and can potentially be negative points but you can clean it up. So you know there's a little environmental message there once you have everybody has done their actions for the turn by placing out these the void then attack the ships. So you've got all these ships um flying around but then you've also got a bucketload of these voidorn ships dotted around the place which you can shoot down. There is a reason to do that um but not just defending yourself. But the void will attack ships based on how many there are and they'll basically just do flatout damage. But depending on where players are positioned, they will get the deciding factor as to who gets damaged. So I might have control over this particular sector and it's like right well based on four ships attacking four damage. I say that this yellow faction ship, you know, the whatever the Dunlop, whatever the names are, you know, this one's going to get damage, maybe blow up or something, but I'm going to keep the blue one alive because that's the one I'm going with. So you know what? Sucks to be you. And everybody's going to be doing that around the table. So damage is going to get inflicted on ships. You can repair it or the ship might get blown up, but you can rebuild it, bring it back into play later. So there's little aspects there. Shooting down the ships gets you some tactics. So again, got to bring out

7:36 a massive board here. You've got a tactics track along the bottom of the main board. And basically leveling up on tactics is kind of like an initiative thing. You get some bonuses and obviously and it sort of breaks ties, allows you to go first, you know, gets you some advantages by basically being the admiral or general of everything. Now, what you can also do is very much in the style of BSG is do a jump from the Revenant. So, this can be used to rebuild ships, but there's also an action on here where you can basically hyper jump to a new location. So, you've got these cards that allow you to pick a different region of space. And within this region of space, it will have a different setup. And effectively, what you do is you reset the board. Everything clears off and you put this new setup on the board. And hopefully that setup is a lot calmer and a lot more quieter and more in your favor than it was a minute ago when you were overrun by these ships because um that's going to happen. You ain't going to keep these void ships in like check. They are going to overwhelm you. As well as that, you know, there are a lot of other things to that I can't really go into too much detail over, but you do also have these cards that you play during the game. So, one of the most popular actions is to play cards. You can play these ones which upgrade your frig. So, the more stuff you um upgrade your frig the frig with, the more powerful it gets. You have oneoff uh cards, you know, one-off ability, do something cool, and then it goes away. And then you've also got the cadet upgrades, which means you can upgrade specific cadets. So, you've got two of them. You can upgrade each one separately with a couple of upgrades. And basically, it improves the cadet when you use them.

9:04 So, you've got the classic sci-fi upgrades of my faction gets to do this with a bit of asymmetry compared to yours. Now, there are other little bits and bobs dotted throughout the game, but I can't really explain everything. Otherwise, we're going to be here until next week, especially if I go into like little mini factions and stuff like that, but that's kind of the general theme of it. You know, you play through the four rounds, you move the ships about, you use the actions on there with your little guys, which you can upgrade. Ships are getting blown up, actions are getting removed from the table, which you have to potentially like bring back. And of course, people of also not necessarily obvious which uh factions are going to have influence with because you will level up these tracks during a game, but you can also have hidden influence, which basically is a secret thing for the end of the game. So, you might actually have a secret desire for, you know, the red shivers faction to do well because I'm holding a bunch of red cards in secret. And you play through the four rounds and total up your victory points. And of course, the one with the most,

9:58 of course,

10:02 it's already pretty hot, isn't it? Why? Why is it hot here when it shouldn't be hot in space? Okay, that doesn't make any sense. But basically, let's go with production quality first. You know, the production quality is pretty good, but then you're paying for it. I mean, this is 90 to buy the normal version of this game off of off Game Found. It's £140 or something like that. 130 140 if you want to buy the one with the miniatures. Honestly, I don't think you should bother. If you want the miniatures, if you're going to paint them, then they can look pretty cool. But for the price increase when you're already paying tons for the game, save your money and just get this version because this captain's version as it is, the captain's pledge gives you a tray system so you can store the game nice and easily. So it makes setup a lot easier. But then the the cardboard ships that they use, I mean, they're dual layered. The token, the cubes and tokens sit in them just fine.

10:52 And you know, they also are painted artwork, so at least they look like a ship. But I I think they look just fine. It's also a bit more easier to manage it on the board because I mean you're only seeing part of the board, believe me here. But when you've got a bunch of miniature ships running around, it can get a little bit crazy like trying to see what's what and that and it's already quite a busy board as it is. Uh, you know, the resource tokens, I mean, cardboard tokens are just fine. You already get these little, you know, plasticky tokens for your personal bits and that. And the void ships are a lot better with this as well. I much prefer seeing the artwork version of these because if you use the miniature version, the sort of orange plasticky things, the board gets so littered up with just basically crap all over the board that you just cannot tell what is going on and it's too much to deal with.

11:37 So to save myself 4950 quid, I think I'm good enough with the normal version. You know, you're certainly getting the components and the stuff for your money, but it's not cheap. You know, this is an investment game through and through. It is just that the luxury edition has so much more eagle. One of my beefs with voidful was its theme. I didn't feel like the theme came through in Voidful. It felt more like a heavy euro than it did aatic game. And I know it was trying to obviously be a heavy euro, but you know, you can have a theme with a heavy euro. But in that game, I just feel like I'm doing what I would do in any other theme game. It's just euro mechanics and getting victory points.

12:15 Well, that's a lot less hot.

12:16 With this one, it's kind of the opposite way round. Actually, this one I think sold me a lot when I first tried it because the theme was very strong. You know, you do feel like you're in this constant battle getting slaughtered. You're not able to do much against this void. You can't win the day. You can't go, "Hey, we killed every ship, right? Let's wait for the next wave to come through." No, it's continuously coming and you cannot physically kill all the void ships.

12:42 Just give US THE CHECK, YOU SON OF A

12:45 IT'S Nion impossible. I think even if every single player around the table was to focus on upgrades and everything and do nothing but kill ships, I think you'd still struggle to keep them all at bay. It's just very difficult. It's meant to be a slugfest where you're up against a relentless enemy that you can't defeat. You know, classic uh, you know, sci-fi invasion.

13:05 TREMBLE IN FEAR AT our three different kinds of ships.

13:09 What that does is that it makes for a very dynamic board because ships are moving around the place. You know, these arc ships sadly don't move that much. which I wish they did move a little bit more, but ships are getting blown up, you know, which means the actions aren't available anymore. But you can, you know, rebuild them or repair them and get them back in the fight. You're moving your little frigots around, your little fighters, taking out a couple of ships here and there. And it's it's got and even the hyper jump. The hyper jump's just Oh, that is icing on the cake. You remember the anacrony thing that I loved where you have that loan system, which is the traveling back through time to lend yourself something that you borrowed from your future self. You know how I love that? That's aatic way of explaining loans. Well, I love the idea that you've got this, you know, BSG hyper jump thing. You know, that feels very much like the actual BSG game where you can hyper jump to a new region and your ships all arrive, but there's void threat there. It's just not as bad as where you were. So, you're constantly on the run from an enemy. You know, you don't get to the end of the game and go, "Yay, we beat the void back." No, it's we got to the end of the game and these factions are the ones who are going to stay in charge for this area, you know, for this ship and everything. It's still god to hell in space with the void invading. So, I like the the arc that this game has. The board is very dynamic. You know, that changes each game. Different strategies by different players and upgrades and that will influence greatly how the game progresses. You know, are you going to have people mostly ignoring the voidable, in which case ships get blown up within seconds, or are you actually going to have a couple of people be your defenders while you go do something

14:40 else? There's a good amount of banter, a lot of sci-fi references that come out into play when people play this from movies and shows. It just brings it out. DIE SPACESHIP.

14:50 The storage system is nice, but it could be better. I mean, the fact that you've actually got trays and you're not putting these things in bags does mean that the game is actually possible to set up. I think it would be impossible otherwise. But the ships are in a nice container that are easy to keep around. The tokens for players and other things that you use very nice to keep in place. Although I find the resources a little bit weird because you've got these little like cupby holds for them. But they don't even when you've got all of them in there, they don't really stack up properly. And if you were to turn this on its side or upside down, I think they would just fall off everywhere. So that I think is a bit of a mis match. But then also the bottom of the tray is, you know, good to keep a lot of the cards separate and that, but you know, they do give you a diagram as to where everything's meant to go. But a few of these cards do like to mix with things, but what I'd also like is that you don't need a lot of these. Some of these are from the mini expansions, so you won't need any of that. And there's quite a decent amount of content down here for it. But then even some of these cards in the middle, you know, you only need so many of them in each game. So once you've got the cards you need out of here, you can pretty much just put this aside with this entire trade. You don't need it anymore. We just make boxes here.

15:55 Now, I always like a game where you've got dynamic changing options and plenty of them. This it's kind of what Revenant does for you. The options that you have in the game are going to be very plentiful at the start. You've got all the ships available. You've got all the different drop ships. You got free planets you can go to. You got all these different upgrades that you can grab. So, yeah, for the AP prone, this could be a bit of a problem. But then, as the game goes on and ships start getting blown up, certain actions don't become available anymore. And you have to kind of plan ahead for that sometimes. But, you know, at the end of this fight, that ship's not going to be there anymore. So, if that's the ship that you use in order to get a lot of science tokens or to, you know, potentially move around the map a lot, then it's like, well, what am I going to do when that ship's not there? Do I bring it back into play? Or is this whole area just getting a bit ridiculous? Like, if I don't do something now, I'm just going to get shot to hell. You know what? I'm the one who's going to make the BSG hyper jump and make us go elsewhere. You know, you get a reward for it. So, it's not like you're putting yourself out to do it, but it's just cool that you can kind of decide, you know what? I'm the one who's going to set this thing into hyper jump mode. You lot are not helping me out here. And with that also being said, you know, you've got a lot of different actions. I mean, there are seven different arc ships here with two actions a piece. You've got the drop ships, you got the fighters, you got your frig. Oh, we Yeah, this game does give you a lot to think about. And that's before you even do your bonus actions on here, which can be playing more cards, upgrading your scientist, doing a bonus action off a card, or even just getting a resource. But there's plenty to be doing this game. This game is not going to leave you thinking there's nothing really I can do that's useful. Now, there'll be something you

17:25 can do that's pretty useful. It's just whether it's the best thing ever for what it is you need to do.

17:31 Well, that was pointless.

17:33 The game also scales relatively well, I think. From one to four players, you can do this. And I'll get into the solo mode a little bit later, but two to four players works kind of equally well across the board. The the caveat with the higher player count though is that you do have to sacrifice quite a bit of time. This is not a short game by any means, you know, but it's not excessively long once you get past the teach and that which we'll get on to a bit later. The actual game itself is typically around two and a half three and a half hours absolute tops with four players if they're all really new. But you should be able to keep this underneath the 3 hour mark. And that's not bad going actually for a heavy ML class game to keep it under the 3-hour time limit. Of course, that's not necessarily including the teach. Again, we'll get more on that later. So, the game does demand a lot of you for a fourplayer game, but then when you got four of you, you got a lot of stuff happening around the map. You got loads of ships everywhere, different things going on, so it can be quite cool.

18:25 Three, I think, is the ultimate sweet spot. Three gives you enough player interaction on the map while not taking the game to the length that it needs to go to for a four-player game. Two-player actually still works quite well, though. The game balances itself out with the number of ships that pop out and things like that. based on player count. So, you're not like fighting twice as many ships as you need to just because it's a two-player game, you know? So, there there is a balancing fact there, but there's also a little mini deck of cards where basically you flip it over and this neutral player puts their workers on those ships depending on priority and things like that. So, even in a two-player game, you're still getting blocked off spaces as if it was a threeplayer game. you just don't necessarily have that dummy player shooting ships down or anything like that, but it's already scaled back for two of you. So, I find two-player actually ends up being quite a good fun experience. The solo mode also pretty good, but we'll talk about that a bit later. So, I find that two, three, or four, I'm happy to play this game. four player just has that bit of a caveat that it is going to go to the uh it's going to go to the borderline of what is considered too long. But compared to like Dracarian and Acry and Perseverance and all the other Mind Clash games that have come out in a heavy category, I'd still say it's shorter to play any of those ones.

19:42 He's out of line, but he's right.

19:44 I love the variety I can do with this as well. Like what type of game can I play? because you've got your faction board which will be marginally different with the frig upgrades at the top. So there's your first little difference right there. You've then got seven different factions that you can go for and be leveling up those tracks will get you slightly different bonuses and they've all got different actions. So there's something to sort of think about to focus on. But then you've got the rest of the variety in here. You've got essentially right we get here we've got like your science board. So there's four of these like four boards and there's four of these that you can flip to the B side. So there's effectively eight configurations for, you know, just your science sh um science, sorry, your um captain ability that you can do, but then you've also got all these cards. So you've got the one-off cards, which is just cool to play anyway. But then you've got all the different frigot upgrades that you can do and all the cadet upgrades you can do. So you can turn yourself into like a different, you know, asymmetric style of gameplay compared to other people just with the use of the cards. But even if you're just doing certain different things with the ships, you're going to have a different game. you know, if you focus more on the drop ships compared to fending off the void, for example, you know, is are you going to spend most of your time doing the hyper jump all the time? Are you going to just leave it be?

20:56 It's there's a lot of different ways that you can approach the game. And I like that the game gives me a way of both from a mechanical um impact, but also from aatic flavor standpoint. It gives me many ways I think, oh, what do I fancy doing this game? Am I going to just be like the the gun toing, you know, madman on a frig just gunning down Or, you know, am I going to play the more like am I going to play the repair guy? Am I just going to be the coward that runs away all the time? You know, it's there's a lot of cool things that you can do. A lot of like opportunities that you can find like somebody sets up a ship in an area where you might, oh, you know, this could actually work or, you know, now's the time to hyper jump or this sort of thing. And it's there's a lot of different tactical and strategic things that you can do. And I like that the game is basically one for options and variety. AP players may want to stay away from this game for sure, but for someone like me, you know, this one gives me plenty enough to think, hm, what do I fancy doing this time?

21:51 But wait, there's more.

21:54 Another little cool thing for the good section is these two mini expansions they threw in. Now granted, you really ought to stop throwing in mini expansions into your game. That's hilly complicated before people even had a chance to play it. But these ones, you say that you can't throw in both modules together. Fine, that helps. They work for solo mode and they basically are two ways to tweak the game. They're both actually pretty good ways to tweak the game though, and that's surprising given that most mini expansions kind of suck. But you've got basically the reason one gives you science ships. So that's why I was getting confused when I was saying science instead of captain earlier. It's a science vessel that basically lets you do other actions during a game, let you get more little research upgrades and, you know, more customization for what it is you're doing. It's a little bit more on the rules though. Do not recommend it for your first game at all and only recommend it if you are playing hardcore mode. I mean, this is a good module, but not for the not for the early starts.

22:50 All right, but I actually think you should spend most of your time playing with the faith module in this. So much so that I actually like putting the faith module into every game, even if I'm teaching it, because it's a very simple include. It basically has a small little board with an effect that's going to happen. It's like a voting system, although not quite voting, but you can influence it. So the card is there and it will have factions and it will say whether like if you use a particular faction during the g round, the marker will move this way. Use a different faction, it will move this way. And basically, they've got two different effects. Similar effects, but different in key ways. And the idea is is as players do actions, the marker will go left and right. And you can kind of think, well, if I do that one, I'm going to move it over there. That's good. I would like this to trigger. And at the end of the round, whether it makes for the next round or it's an instant benefit or whatever, the effects will trigger. And then a new one comes out for the next round and a new one comes out for the next round. I like this.

23:46 It's very simple, but it's another thing for players to go, that could be interesting. It's another opportunistic thing that you can kind of aim for or aim to happen and it's an additional bonus. There's no extra like, you know, negative that comes into the game. It doesn't make the game harder in other respects. It's just this is in the game and everybody can benefit from this. So, in a game that's super tight, in a game that you can't really pivot very easily on, it's nice to have an additional bonus coming every now and again, that could get your engine going a little bit better or pull you out of a bad situation or allow you to recover a bit or just accelerate you a bit further. You know, I like including the faith module and it's so simple rules-wise. It does takes it takes like barely a few seconds like 30 seconds to explain it and people get the concept pretty easily and hell you can pretty much just explain the basics and then worry about what the resolution is when you actually get to that point. It's a very nice simple proper you know definition of the words mini expansion as opposed to something being crazy. It says that you shouldn't use it in conjunction with the reason one. Fine. I'll use the reason one on rare occasions, but I think I'm just going to keep using the faith module because I think it's pretty solid.

24:59 I admire it purity.

25:03 Okay, we got to go on some negatives here. And um well, first negative I think is pretty obvious to you. Okay, there's a reason I'm struggling to get all this on the table to show you lot. This is a one of the it's got to be one of the worst table hog specimens I've ever seen for games. I mean, it is insane. This board is only a third of what the board is. Look at these photos. This was me trying to do a was it a two-handed teach or a solo run. And look how much space it takes up for that alone. That was two players max, maybe even solo. I forget where the photo was taken, but yeah, that's just for this on the Geekas table. That is the second largest configuration they had.

25:42 Please excuse the crudity of this model. I didn't have time to build it to scale or to paint it.

25:46 Wow. Okay, now look at your player board area. So, you got to have this long thing with a captain board bolted onto it like this. And the frig cards go above here where my head is. Okay. Per player. And that's on top of other things that you got to store around your board. You know, like other cards you've played and things like that. Okay. That's a bit. Then you need this faction board somewhere somewhere. It's just got to squeeze in places. You've got the trays. You're going to need this one and this one on the table because they've got the rest of your ships and boy and stuff like that. But then here's the cherry on the cake. Oh boy. I didn't even show you this in the overview because um it's a little ridiculous. So, uh you have uh let's see. There we go. You have this. This also needs to find space somewhere on your table. This is just the round overview track and tactics track. That's all it is. This is basically the rounds, right? And it's a, you know, a lot of iconography, but basically you've got the round tracker here, right on this part. You've then got endgame scoring. You've got what happens in each round from start to finish done in iconography design. And then you've got the tactics track down the bottom and a little reminder of how each ship works. Okay? When you do the basic ships for an action, right? So from players perspective, they're more interested in this bit here, this track.

27:11 The rest of this is purely an aid, a memoir aid. And aid is relative depending on your ability to deal with all these icons. But you got to find this and that and those and the board and the trays. You got to find space in them somewhere. Where the hell is it going to go? It's insane. I mean, at conventions, this is going to take up those big tables. And even then, you're going to be like, "Right, can I fit everything on here?" and trying to reach across the table to like, right, I'm going to reach over there and sort out those ships or something. No, you're going to be chucking your cadet to another player and say, "Can you put my cadet over on that ship, please, because I can't quite reach it." Can't quite reach it is an understatement, and that's going to be one of the bug bears for this. You know, if you're playing this solo, it's already a bit of a pain. But you play this with four players, oh bloody. Yeah, there's a lot of reaching.

28:00 There's a lot of requesting. And there's just too much of the table being sucked up by this. There had to have been a way to condense this down. Sadly, it doesn't seem like they could or it just didn't want to because let's face it, when it comes to these big heavy Euro games on Kickstarter and that, nobody makes money by any making it small.

28:21 Making it bigger doesn't make it clearer.

28:24 Then you've got actually teaching this game. The game itself doesn't take too long for a heavy game anyway. When you get going, the problem is is getting going in the first place. This is overwhelming for a lot of people. I mean, you see this giant box here, and it's already like, oh, do I want to play this game? It's mine class. You already know it's going to be pretty heavy. But did you remember that board I showed you here? The iconography overload in this game is off the chain. You know, it is a frontloaded teach because you cannot teach this game as you go along. You're going to have to tell people what's going on cuz if you make a mistake in like the first round because you didn't understand how a phase worked that you've only got three rounds to make up for it, it's not enough time. It's a very tight game. But the amount of iconography you've got to learn is mad.

29:11 And people will say it's no tool, therefore it's fine. No, just because you know tool designed it, it just means that it's legible. Okay? It doesn't necessarily mean that it's the most intuitive error. It also doesn't mean that it makes the game easy to learn. There's a ton of icons in here. I mean, I'm showing you this. Can you work out what half the bloody rounds do as a result of all these icons? It's mad. And you know, so you've got to tell people a bunch of icons. You've got to really have a good teacher with this. This is not a game for learning from the rule book. The rule book's fine. There's nothing wrong with the rule book, but it's not a uh small rule book, shall we say. I mean, if I get the rule book here, this is the main rule book. Okay. It's um it's not short. There's a lot in here, a lot of pictorial examples, but also a lot of stuff to learn. But that being said, it is a good rule book. So, I will say at least as you know, even though this is a negative section, the rule book is pretty solid. There's just a lot of it. But that's just the normal rule book. Oh, yeah. Did you notice I took other books out there? This is the mini expansion. We'll gloss over that one later. This is the solo rule book and the glossery. The glossery. Okay.

30:19 Glossery. Glossery. Glossery. Glossery. glossery, uh, glossery, and then solo rules. The solar rules are already about two or three pages. The rest of this is one massive glossery. Every single card, every single ability written in text form so that you can understand what it does. Now, granted, I'm glad this is here because a lot of these icons are not as intuitive as I would like. You know, you're looking at a card, looking at an ability, and it's quite hard to tell, wait a minute, so that's got to be done when I use the frig or after I've done the frig. Um, is that used when I is my turn or when the void attacks and is that movement or is that a bonus one? I'm not quite sure. It's a lot to take in and it makes it really hard to understand what some of these cards do, but you only have this glossery. That's it. Just this. There is a simple card player aid that you have to explain what the eight actions on the ark ships do or whatever it is. Those those actions.

31:13 Great. But that's it. The rest of it you got to get from this book. that you got to pass around everywhere.

31:22 That is why you fail.

31:25 Take a leaf out of something like, you know, the Lord Eagle Griffin games, okay? You know, the ones that have been giving people little booklets. Seti gave you like a little booklet thing that gave you the key stuff you need to know in a nice handy little pamphlet for players. Start doing that mine class because trust me, they really do help. I hate having everything in one place that I've got to pass around a table. constantly, which you will be doing a lot. So much so, I've printed my own. I'm not joking. Yeah. I haven't laminated them or anything like that. Although, I probably won't laminate these. They're basically booklets. But I've got one here for all the scientists abilities and a glossery. There I've got a holistic summary of the rules here. I've got I've printed out some samples, so I was showing them off. They're basically all from BG, but you know, we've got an icon guide, and that's a lot of icons. But then I've got the entire glossery printed out. Again, each player will have one of these, not just one book you got to play around with. Uh there's a yeah, one sheet icon reference. So again, there's a lot of stuff here that I'm going to experiment with. But yes, every player needs one of these things, not just one book. That is really annoying. But what this mean, what I'm getting at is that this game is a bit of a slog to teach. It's hard to get it to the table. You're going to need a very dedicated, heavy games loving group to do this. You got to make sure they're not AP prone, you know, because that will slow the game down like crazy. But they also need to be good at iconography. I've seen people freeze up enough to the Mac Garfield

32:55 game, you know, with all the icons in there. If they can't handle that, this is going to absolutely blow their frigin minds. Some of the iconography will make sense as you're explaining it. But you need a good teacher. You got to have a teacher doing this. A teacher who knows this game inside out, who can teach very well. A bad teach of this will just leave everybody confused and they won't enjoy it. And it makes the barrier to entry for this quite high. It's a bit of a leap you got to take before you effectively settle down and then can cruise along. But yeah, it's hard to get people to play this. You know, I'm saying like, you know, you want to play this. It's got a cool fan fair. It does all this and that, but it's a lot to take in. It's a lot of icons. It's a heavy game. We're going to be here for at least three hours plus to teach, I suspect. And then people start walking away. It's, you know, this is one of those games that I think is going to be relegated to convention only for a lot of people, but yeah, we'll get on to the solo a bit later, but yeah, it's just it's quite a lot.

33:51 I checked this out weeks ago for a bit of light reading.

33:54 This is light.

33:56 The game is also only four rounds. I wish it was a little bit more. Not that I want the game to be 5 hours long. Keep the same time length, but give us more rounds. Make them quicker or something. Because one thing I do notice sometimes is that you've only got four rounds to play this, right? And there's only so many actions in those rounds. You've got to be very good with action economy. So when you're playing these upgrade cards, playing them early is a lot better. But then a lot of these upgrades only trigger when you use the thing that they're upgrading. So you obviously want to use something else to upgrade the ship before you use it in that round to get the most out of it. But then it means that the most you will be able to use these upgrades on cards is four times because you assuming you upgrade the card for the ship like the frig that you're using on the first couple of turns in the game before you use the frig you're going to get four uses out of it. That's not a lot. And it means that sort of halfway during the game you look at a bunch of these cards as upgrades and it's just like why should I bother playing these cards? Yes, they may be worth a couple of points at the end, but you know, I feel like I'm not playing it for its ability because I'm not going to get enough time to use the abilities. You know, you want cards that are really cool to use no matter what point in the game, but that seems to be relegated to these oneshot cards, which are generally pretty much always good to play throughout the whole game. But the cadet upgrades and the frig upgrades, you tend to find that a lot of people come for them early and then kind of stop getting them. And it's mainly because that there just isn't enough time to pivot. You know, if you if things are going bad for you after the second round, you're kind of done.

35:26 You're not really going to be able to pull it back. You're not going to get a surprise victory or anything like that, you know, unless something dramatically changes. So, you won't necessarily always be able to predict the winner, although you have a pretty good chance of doing it, but you can certainly think, right, out of the four of us here, there is no way these two are winning. And you know that can be a little bit sucky when you know that you've got a lot more of the game to play.

35:49 Well, we're boned.

35:52 I'm getting hot and sweaty. Oh my god, I can actually see the sweat patches. This is insane. Right, so the solo mode, you have got, as I mentioned, where's that solo book gone? This is so much stuff here. So, you've got two to three pages in the book for the solo mode. And the solo mode actually could be one of the saving graces for this game. If you think that you're struggling to get it to the table because people don't want to play it or don't want to um you know like invest the time and the rule set and you're thinking that a frontloaded teach, the solo mode could be your savior because it's a pretty good solo mode actually. Similar I can't remember how the solo mode exactly worked with voidfall, but I think it was like an enemy AI that you were going up against. Well, this is the same thing. It's not just another player, you know. Yes, you do have that little dummy player that blocks up ships. the well I forget what they call it but basically you know the neutral player but the way this works is that you are effectively going up against an en enemy AI the void are basically trying to corrupt various ships they're infiltrating and so what they're doing is seeking to you know corrupt a couple of factions make them non useless and kind of get in your way so they're clogging up actions or they're just conveniently missing when they shoot stuff and that and it's that's a a pretty good way of doing it but it also makes for a good fun game because not only are you doing all your cool, you know, customization, all this stuff and trying to fight back the void, but you're also trying to kind of gear your attacks to deal with this corruption that's happening. You know, they're they're corrupting various ships. You need to clean it up. You

37:24 know, they are threatening to use a drop ship and go into a planet and do nothing with it. And it's like, well, can I use it first? Do I need it? You know, where am I am I going to do this? And, you know, they're scoring points. So, you do have a target to beat eventually based on the AI. But the other benefit is that it's a relatively easy one to pilot once you get the rules down. And there are few rules to learn to get used to the priority system with it. There's not a lot to pilot. You basically have four little cards with a counter on it. And basically you just when it's their turn, you move it to the next one and do the action. And for the most part, the action just says do nothing. You put the cadet on the ship in question and that's it. Now you're trying to, you know, obviously they're getting favor with factions and they'll score points in that kind of sense. So you're obviously trying to either, you know, jump along with them or you're trying to make their factions worse while yours are better.

38:12 So it's like, well, if they're corrupted, shoot them, you know, like kill them off and, you know, kill off the ones that are already fully corrupted. And it makes for a good dynamic for the game arc that feels a little different from the multiplayer experience, but still gives you the joy of customizing your own ship and that, but that moving the counter around the little four cards is nice and easy. An arc ship, it goes on there and it'll do the action. Oh, it do the action. No, arc ships, it doesn't do anything. It just goes on there and clogs it up. Great. The drop ship, it moves the drop ship to a planet and then just does nothing. Okay, cool. The uh fighter, it goes on there and misses conveniently.

38:49 Careful, you idiot. I said A CROSSER NOSE, NOT UP IT.

38:53 SORRY, SIR. Doing my best.

38:55 And then does nothing. You know, easy. So, the only time it really actually has a lot to pilot is when it uses the Revenant. you know, whether it's going to do a, you know, clog up the hyper jump thing or whether it's going to repair ships and stuff. You know, there's a bit more that happens there. And the tactics track is kind of the main thing that's aiming for because depending on where it is on the tactics track at any particular time, different effects are going to happen and you're going to get negatives and stuff. So, that's the real piloting focus of the AI mode. Otherwise, it's pretty simple to do. poor. I I would dare say out of all the solo modes I've experienced with Mine Clash games. That's um well, uh Ember didn't have a solo mode anyway, but you know, of all the big meaty Mine Clash games that have ever come out, this is the easiest solo mode to use by by like a million light years. You know, all the other solo modes and games, Tracarion, Anacrine, Perseverance. Oh god, that's solo mode. Um, you know, the, you know, other what was the other meaty ones that they've done with crazy well void form. I mean, that solo mode's a slo to get through. You know, all these other solo modes take a ton of time, a ton of effort, loads of rules, loads of things you got to learn, and loads of piloting. Don't get me started on the perseverance one, but man, this one super simple. Get the main corks of the game down, get the solo mode down for rules of the priority in that, and then have fun playing this game solo to the point where actually I think it's better to do this than multiplayer. I

40:26 mean, the multiplayer is still fun. It's still a fun game, but man, the solo mode is where it's at. I think this game will hit the table far more in that context, and it's going to be the saving grace for a lot of people who think they won't be able to get this played with others. You're getting the feel of a two-player game with a unique arc and you still get to do all the cool stuff you do. It would just take you a long time to set up and pack away. It's going to be a bit of a slog fest in that regard. But, you know, that is a negative with the game and it's just something you're going to have to contend with. But yeah, thumbs up for Solomon.

40:59 I don't think any of us expected him to say that.

41:05 I feel like we're flying into the sun at this point. But uh summarine verdict. Well, Revenant, to sum it up in but a few words, this is the game that Void Ball should have been. Okay, Voidfall should have been this cuz this one is a really fun game to play. I love its theme. I love its mechanics. I, you know, there are, you know, irks here and there, but not that many. And I love the options I have. I love the solo mode. I think the solo mode's a great implementation. So, you know, a good idea of easy piloting along with a fun game that you can play by yourself. And there's a lot of good stuff here going for it. Now, this is caveed though with the fact that the game is a bit of a slog fest. You know, it's a massive table hog, like crazy tablehog, way more than it needs to be. It's also a very front-loaded teach. You know, if you're playing this by yourself, you're going to be learning this from the rule book.

41:59 Now bearing in mind Paul Grogan has done a tutorial for this game and I think he's got another one coming out soon as well tutorial and playthrough. So you know he's done he's done an official tutorial for Revenant. You're probably going to want to watch that. But also the diceed uh what do they call it? Is it pronounced dice d i z dice on their app have got a fantastic tutorial for this game as well. So, if you use both of those in conjunction, Paul Grogan's video and that dice app or just pick whichever one you're more comfortable with, you'll learn this game a lot better because both of them are really good ways to learn the game. Um, but if you don't have those uh like things to hand, they are official. They are official things. It's not like somebody's fixing the problem of this game. It's this case, they are official. But yeah, if you try to do this from the rule book, there's a lot of iconography to get through. Way too much of it. I mean, it it needed to be a bit more intuitive in places. And certainly from a glossery perspective, the fact that I'm having to print out ones for each other, I mean, they really should have thought more about individual players.

43:00 You know, having to pass around a book like this with a ton of stuff in it is just a pain. You should have come up with some way to give everybody their own little personal thing. I mean, if you can afford to waste money on miniatures, then you can and you know, and metal, you know, power tokens and stuff like that, then you can afford to spend a few extra quid on giving people a smoother play experience. You know, that is more important than miniatures. Why won't people get this? But, uh, you know, with those blemishes aside, the game is good fun. It's just going to be one of those that's hard to get to the table. Scaling wise, four player really does kind of hurt. I mean, it is certainly a bit of a slog at four players in terms of time, in terms of the teach, but it does give you a fun experience with lots of players interacting with the game board. But it works well at three, best at three, I would certainly say, and two is pretty solid as well, but it's certainly best at free, and probably best at one. This is a one in three player game ideally.

43:57 Two and four still good. It's just lacking in certain areas. But you are paying for this £90 for the game. you hope it would do pretty well for that kind of money. Especially if you forked out for the unnecessary miniatures version and paid £140 in that respect when this actually releases properly, if it gets a retail release, God knows how much it's going to cost, but it's still not going to be cheap. And so, you do have to factor in that you are paying for what you're getting here. And there are still annoyances despite that price tag. But overall, I'm giving this one a solid eight out of 10. It is a It is a great game. It's fall shy of being a 9 out of 10. It had potential to be a nine. But I think the front-loaded teach, the lack of, you know, the annoyance when having to pass this around all the time, the iconography not being the most intuitive at things particularly on certain cards, a few little edge rules here and there. You really want to use Paul Grogan's vid or the dice app to learn this game. I think, you know, to be on the safe side, even though the rule book is good. Um, and the fact that it is demanding a lot of time and it's certainly demanding a lot of money from you. I think those things mean I can't really give it an excellent a distinction seal, but I'm still giving it a solid eight. I really enjoy this and honestly, you could probably argue it is a 9 out of 10 for solo because I think solo works really well in this. You know, you get the best of you get the best of everything providing you're comfortable with all the rules and that. So, you know, solo gamers rejoice. this game will actually do nicely for you. Yep, Voidfall just

45:28 didn't win me over, but this one did. This is what I wanted from Voidfall. So, if you want to keep your Voidful, then by all means, I for one am keeping Revenant.

45:38 Isn't that lovely?

45:40 So, that's it for me on this episode of Roam. If you like what then please thumb it up on YouTube and thumb up on board game when it goes live on the page. Check out the rest of my content. In fact, if you want to know what it is I thought about Voidfall in horrendous detail, then by all means, the review for that is on this channel. You can go check that out. Uh, leave your comments down below. Have you tried this game? What do you think of it? Different player counts. What do you think of the table hog and the teach and all that lot? Have you played the solo mode? Do you like that? What do you think of the two mini expansions? You know, basically, and what do you think of the miniatures version if you want to talk about that? Get your comments down below and let's hear what you've got to say. Until next time, remember, it's only a game. And assuming that I don't melt in the next 5 seconds into a pool of Burky water, it's still only a game. and I'll see you on the next Broken People video. Take care.