Revenant Review: My Brain Hurts
Transcript
Hi everyone, I'm Tally. This is Farrell and we're bored of it. And welcome to our review of Revenant, a brand new worker placement heavy complexity euro for one to four players set in the voidfall universe. Here players are tasked with commanding the Revenant and its escort fleet on a journey to find a new home. Whilst players are playing competitively in an effort to gain the most prestige for their actions, they also have a common enemy, the void.
Yes. Like in void fall, you will all be fighting against the void who act as a common enemy and you should ignore them at your own peril because in this game they will keep coming and keep coming and if players don't work together to fight them off. You'll find yourself with fewer worker placement actions as the game goes on. So before we get into how to play what we think, please note that this was a review copy sent to us by the publisher.
Revenant is played over four rounds and each round is going to begin with a worker placement phase. You'll send out one of your free workers to a ship on the main board and then you'll get to take a bonus action of which there are five different options.
Each ship on the board is a worker placement space. Ark ships and the Revenant have two actions, each of which is unique. Fighters let you fly around and remove void, whilst drop ships allow you to land on planets and take that planet's actions, each of which has two unique options. Lastly, you can use your frigot, which is a personal ship, which can either act as a drop ship or a fighter. Importantly, any worker placement action will gain you influence with a faction, as most ships are aligned with a specific faction. If they're not, they'll either let you pick which influence you want to gain or they will gain you hidden influence via a card. The influence is important as it makes up a significant part of the endame scoring as you'll take your influence with each faction and multiply it by the amount of ships they still have on the board. At the end of the worker placement phase, the voidorn will attack, damaging ships, and then more are going to spawn. Unless you've activated the revenants hyperdrive, which will essentially reset the map, not all ships will survive the game. So, it becomes a battle between the players to keep the factions they care the most about alive, which can be done through a variety of tactics. of note is that the players closest to a sector decide where damage goes when the void attack. So they have the ability to manipulate which ships are going to get destroyed.
In the simplest terms, you'll be collecting resources, gaining influence, fighting void, and upgrading your workers and frigot. Captains come with a unique upgradeable board, whilst the frigot and workers are upgraded via cards, which let you do more when used or activated or help you make your bonus actions get better. At the end of the game, you'll score for influence, as previously mentioned, any cards you've played, any secret objectives that you fulfilled, and any leftover resources with the player with the most influence winning. Revenant is a crazy crazy game. There are so many different interesting mechanisms and ways you can interact with the other players. There are many ways that you can customize your workers, your frigot, and the way you play. There are many different choices, outcomes, and combinations that make each game feel unique. However, with all that said, this probably made Revenant one of the most overwhelming games we've played.
Yeah. And if you're not that familiar with us, just to give some background, we regularly play and cover heavy complexity, high rules, overhead, very intricate games. There are bread and butter. There some of our favorite games. One of my favorites is actually Revenant's big brother, Voidfall. So, we're very familiar with heavy complexity games, and we've almost never felt overwhelmed unless it was due to high uh sorry, bad rules. a bad rule book basically which this game does not have. So it was very novel to us to be overwhelmed because of the decision space and the crunch. As an example, imagine it's your first turn after a lengthy rules explanation.
You're just about to put your first worker on the board and then after that you're going to take a bonus action. Now, there are something like 20 plus different worker placement actions you can take on the main board. And then you have five different bonus actions to pick from, which means your first turn combination potential is over 100 different combinations of actions. It's completely paralyzing. It's overwhelming, and we're not people who particularly suffer from AP. Now, you have to remember that as the game goes on, you're going to be upgrading your captain, your cadets, your frigot, and one of your bonus actions to do more and give you more options. And then all of this is going to enter your your mind space. It's going to factor into the crunch. It's going to give greater decision space.
And you can really see how it can very quickly become overwhelming. This combines with the worker placement to really fry your brain because remember you only get to use each worker four times over the course of the game and your frig probably only once per round. So revenant sometimes gets in its own way like here in our opinion by making the worker placement so brutally limited in a game with so many options and so much customization. When you spend your hard-earned resources on a new powerful or interesting action card upgrade, you of course want to make the most of it. However, these powers actions are often very situational, such as take this action and get that or do an action with this symbol and get this. Which means that you end up bending over backwards trying to come up with a plan, a strategy to fit using that exact worker to that exact type of space to take that type of action to be able to use that power to be able to use this bonus action all so it can come together. And obviously this installs a huge amount of AP trying to make everything fit perfectly together in a game that's so limited. Sometimes you start this process from the act of how to get resources to play the card to use the power on a future turn and before you know it, you're planning out an entire round with all possible permutations.
Because you may only get to use the powers one to three times in a game because of the limited worker placement, you feel such a weight to use it. Otherwise, what was the point playing it? In summary, our least favorite thing about Revenant is that it gives you all of this cool stuff, but you just get such limited use out of it. We'd really love if the game maybe had an extra round or perhaps a couple of extra workers each round so you could really maximize the fun of playing with your toys. Lastly, what worsens the situation is the iconography. This is going to be a bit controversial as we've actually seen others be quite positive about it and we actually feel embarrassed to say it because Iano is the best in the game, but we just don't find the iconography very good. We've already mentioned the insane amount of things that you can do in this game with almost all of it being handled entirely by iconography.
Yeah. So, it's a bit weird in one way because we're very experienced with Voidfall and that should have given us a leg up actually. So, to have this problem then is not great and we just don't think the iconography does a great job of conveying what is happening on those cards and on those powers. five plus games in, we're still burying our heads in the appendix every game, you know, every round, every turn to figure out what things are doing, which isn't a great look. And then we've also had occasions where individually without discussion, we've come to the same conclusion about an icon and then it turns out that icon does the exact opposite of what we think. Meaning it's quite counterintuitive and that's not great either. [snorts] And then finally in terms of using all these icons, I've actually found occasions where these icons haven't been used when they should be.
So for example, there are powers and uh cards which when you look them up in the appendix, they'll say do this in your sector and there is a symbol for that, but the symbol is not on the powers and the cards. We've both been caught out by this. And so then it it makes it an even worse reflection that there's symbology that then they're not using when they want to use it and there's discrepancies between the appendix and the cards themselves.
Okay, so we know all of that sounded a bit like a negative review, but honestly, Revenant is addictive as you try to conquer its wealth of gameplay. There's so much to try out that you just want to play another game to see the new cards, try new captain boards, and see new planets. One game you might build yourself into a powerhouse of combat, whilst in another you might make it so that your bonus action becomes four actions in one. There's just so much customization. It's off the charts and each game feels like a totally different puzzle to solve. In part, this variable puzzle comes from the random setup of ships and eventual random spawning of the void, which leads us nicely onto influence. The void are relentless and ships are going to get destroyed. The core of the game is to subtly and not so subtly influence which ships are going to get taken out. And this makes a lot of space for a lot of interesting mechanics and strategy here because you could play offensively, steering ships into the danger zone or command the Revenant to jump to a system that would severely disadvantage other players. Or you could go on the defense, clearing out the void, protecting the ships, or simply adding more ships of the factions that you're aligned with back onto the map.
Yeah. So, it's an endlessly interesting system because the more you interact with it, the more you learn ways to manipulate it and play around within its uh limits and therefore interact with other players. It just keeps giving back and keeps being kind of exponentially interesting as you gather these ways. And it takes what could have otherwise been a dry euro, you know, a bit by the numbers and makes it something that's very interactive, very mysterious, and in some ways very novel. So, this is potentially a game that if you played the original or not the original, sorry, but Big Brother Voidorn and you were kind of excited by the idea of it, but you found it to be just another heavy, dry, solitary Euro, this might be the thing for you. It might be what you expected Voidfall to be, and it might be to your taste. There are a lot of great things about Revenant. We loved the asymmetry and the options for customization. We love the intrigue system and how it allows players to interact. We were terrified by how ruthless the void one are. And it's quite novel to have a system that if players don't work together at least a little bit, then they're going to end up losing worker placement spaces and have less options. However, as great as the individual parts of Revenant are, I came to a realization after my last play. The realization was that I don't have much interest in taking Revenant further and
playing it more. And it's just that comparatively to its peers, the amount of effort required to play just doesn't balance what I feel I get out of it. For example, the extensive setup, the extensive upkeep to make the game run every round, the amount of crunch that is required of players, the fact that you have such an overwhelming decision space that gets more complex as the game goes on. First, the very limited number of work placement actions and needing to have my head in the appendix, you know, continuously every round. There's so much that what I get out just doesn't seem make it seem worth it to me to continue. That said, if there was someone who was going to run the game for me, set it up and take care of the upkeep, then I would always say yes, I want to play. Final thoughts? I don't really have anything more to say cuz I just in a sense my final thoughts in that last paragraph, but is there any final words you'd like to give on Revenant?
[sighs and gasps] [panting]
It's so hard to describe succinctly because I think it is
true
a brilliant game and like you already touched on, it's very addictive. The system is interesting. You want to kind of give it another go, but at the same time, the overwhelm prevents me from wanting to play it again in a way. So the kind of good parts of it I like and are addictive, but there's just a barrier for me personally to wanting to get it out again. So when you've been saying, let's get Revenant out, there's a part of me that's like, I know this is going to be a bit of a struggle for the next couple of hours, but then once I'm in it, I'm kind of enjoying it. Except for when the void go really overwhelming, and then I'm like, oh, what's the point? you know, it's really hard to, but then I get to the end of the game and think, yeah, okay, it is really good.
That's not super summarized or helpful, but that's just how I feel.
Yeah,
I'm very in the middle with it and have a roller coaster of emotions about it.
Yeah, I thought in some way, you know, the first couple times we played this, it's a game that cuz our opinions haven't changed from kind of you say play one or two to
where we're at now. And to me, it almost uh reeks of a game that's going to come out in like a number of years with a second edition and be an absolute blockbuster.
Mhm.
When it's like a bit tightened and polished and not saying it's unpolished and it's probably too tight, but you know [clears throat] what I mean? Where some things are played around with and it's
I don't know. There's more breathing.
There's definitely an excellent core here. Yeah, for sure. It's just some of it for me is not enjoyable to play.
Yeah.
Sometimes.
Uh so just I think one final word because we got sent um the expansion which is a mini expansion which is called reason and faith and we have tried reason and faith. They are like two little modules and you can put I think both in or one or the other and we kind of did one at a time and they're okay. I think the biggest criticism for them is that they both add to an already, as we've continuously said, overly burdensome game.
Yeah. And they were both kind of one more thing that wasn't needed in a sense because the reason one is that they add science ships and you can send a worker to them and then they kind of give you an ongoing power. Uh so it sits above your board and you just have this power now. But the problem is it takes away one of your worker placement actions if you want to go there. So the powers have to be very good for you to want to do that. And I kind of found it a little bit weird potentially that they didn't give you some kind of like mini worker that you could send just specifically for that, right, to allow you to play with it a bit more.
And it basically kind of got ignored by both of us because we didn't see the powers as particularly great. And then it's a secondly weird thing because they only shuffle halfway through the game if they're not taken. So if no one wants them in the first round, guess what? You get them again in the second round, which I found a little bit weird. And then in the faith element, based on what actions players take uh in terms of what factions they interact with, this tracker moves left or right and then something happens. And again, it's that was kind of more interesting because it allowed more interesting scenarios to happen. you might get free bonuses or you know something might happen and that was interesting in that sense but
it was too hard to consider which way you're moving the tracker because you have so much to do and so little time to do it that there's no way you're going to go okay I'm just not going to do this action now because this thing happens unless it was catastrophic for you.
Yeah.
So it was kind of like a random event generator in the end.
100% I agree. I was I am I was interested in this and I thought it was cool like the end of the is going to happen now and that just adds a little you know wrinkling
but it was never it could never be part of my strategy. It's exactly like you said there's too much going on about you you constantly calculating where you need to go next to be able to do this and get the right influence. I would never just go some to somewhere just to move the tracker left because it was that particular influence. If you happen to be going there anyway, great. But yeah, it's less strategic and just another little it's a little fun thing at the end of the round that might happen.
Yeah. So, that is our review of Revenant and its mini expansion, uh, Reason and Faith. Please ask us any questions you might have. Uh, we really appreciate you watching. Please consider subscribing if you found this helpful and would like to see you again next time. Thanks. Bye.