Wastelandia: Solo and Co-Op Boss Battler (Review)
Transcript
Hey folks, welcome back to the Dungeon Dive. Daniel here. I hope you're doing well, and if you're not, I hope you are soon. Okay, today we're taking a look at Wastelandia, and this is a co-op and solo boss battler where you are playing as a group of teenage friends trying to defend their neighborhood against the onslaught of baddies after a robot apocalypse. So, uh this is from Drew Williams with art by Re Bermudez. And I love the art in this game. It's one of my favorite things about it. The art is really cool, it's unique, and it's bold, and I think it just Yeah, just has an overall great look to it. What's interesting is Drew contacted me to cover the game, and so this copy was provided to the channel to review, and it turns out we just live a couple of miles from each other. So, I actually got to meet him for coffee when he passed the game off to me.
And so, let's uh read a little bit about this game, and then we'll take a more detailed look. So, this says that it's 1990X, robots destroyed everything, and the world is a flaming hot mess. You and your ragtag group of friends just want to chill out in the post-apocalyptic suburbs, but when bullies, bots, and other things start a fight, you'll have to finish it. So, uh when we get together to talk on the Dungeon Dive and when we have our Patreon meetups about once every 6 weeks, and hey, if you want to join those, you can join the Dungeon Dive Patreon, and uh they're fun. They're one of the highlights of doing this channel, it's just getting together with people and talking about things. Uh we often talk about, you know, our favorite mechanisms in games, and often times what comes up is our games that uh use uh dice pools where you get to roll a whole bunch of dice, and then you get to assign those dice to different powers for your characters and you can uh use different items to change and to manipulate your roles to build, you know, combos and things like that.
That's something that a lot of us love. It's something that I really, really love. It's one of my favorite mechanisms. And this game is kind of all built around that. And this version here is kind of like a deluxe version. It has these really crazy dice that have has these like this toxic goo on to molded on to the the the D6s here. I'm not quite sure if that affects the rolling in any way. I haven't really noticed anything. I haven't noticed things being like, you know, kind of bouncing weird or rolling weird. Things seem to be random, but I'm sure somebody much smarter than me can do some kind of scientific test on these kind of weird dice that have different protuberances here if they really do affect things or not, but I haven't noticed anything and they're kind of cool. They're kind of neat looking dice, but you don't need the special dice. You can just use regular D6s.
But in the game, so I've only played solo. I plays up to four. If you do play solo, you have to play as two characters and you will be fighting through a battle book. And the battle book has all of the bosses that you will be fighting. And a full game is a four battles. And this game can get really, really challenging because in between each battle, as you progress through the battle book, you don't regain all of your or you don't recover all of the fear that you have accumulated. And so it is kind of like this resource management where you need to keep your characters in a healthy condition from one from battle one to battle four. So battle one always starts with the same battle here. We have these Clanks. So there are two robots and depending on the difficulty that you to on, you will start the robots at a certain number of health, and to win this battle, you have to defeat both of the robots, and then in between each battle, you go to this loot phase here, where you have certain items, certain weapons, and certain rewards, and you put those out in pairs, and then the players get to choose a pair of an item and a reward or a weapon and a reward. And then that also dictates the turn order for the next battle. And the items are all kinds of
different items, like a pogo stick, a mini scooter. As you can see, this is, you know, very much themed around that kind of 80s kids on bikes style theme. Golf bag rockets. Um, it does remind me, I think it would make a really cool double feature game with something like Ghost B Twix. I think both of these games kind of slot in that wheelhouse there or in that in that that theme. We have a grabby hand, a bag of stuff, rocket skates, and all of these are powers and items that you can add to your characters that will allow them to trigger different abilities with certain die rolls, will allow you to manipulate your dice in different ways. And then as you can imagine, the weapons will allow you to damage the baddies. So, we have things like remote mines, a flame sword, a bladerang, a torpedo ball, um, man, lawn darts, remember those things? Um, the moon shooter, a baseball bat, a laser blaster. So, really, really fun items. I love the the kind of comical items and and weapons. And then we have these rewards, and these rewards have two different categories, the regular reward and the super reward. Each of the battles in the book has a a a special challenge, and if you overcome that optional challenge, then you get the super reward. And so, these are ways that you can heal yourself or give yourself um uh bonuses going into the next battle. You can alleviate some fear
that builds up. We'll talk about fear in a minute. Fear is a really cool concept in this game. And uh so on. So, yeah, really fun. I love it. I love this uh kind of loot little page here. It's kind of cool. It's kind of like you're going through and you're ransacking the houses in your neighborhood. And after you've done this loot phase, then you roll for the next battle. And so, battles two, three, and four will be randomized. So, you never quite know what's coming next. So, just to flip through a few pages. I don't want to give everything away, but you can kind of see the different things that are coming up. We have these rat thieves. We have these cult recruiters. Uh mutant mischief here. Uh Punkville. The big bad bully. Bomber boy and the raiders. And I'll leave the rest up to your imagination.
This is the furthest I have gotten in the game is battle three against these raiders and their biker boss was a real pain in the butt and they totally slaughtered me. And at the top of each page here, you will have a survival rate. And so, your first battle, you have a survival rate of 98%. Uh the second battle against the thieves, a survival rate of 74% or against the cult recruiters, that would be a 70% a 79% survival rate. 30%. So, as you can see, the the difficulty really jumps up when you get into battle three. Uh 35%, 38%, and for battle three here against the raiders, a 28% chance to survive. So, the game can get very challenging.
And a lot of the challenge comes from you using your dice and your combos in creative and efficient ways. But, there also is some luck because you are uh rolling handfuls of dice and assigning those values that you rolled to your characters powers. However, there are some built-in ways to augment that bad luck, and one of the main ways are these power cubes. And so, at the start of the game, you will have 12 power cubes that you will slot into this board here, and then this becomes a group currency that the group can choose to spend, a player can choose to spend that anytime to reroll any number of dice. And you start with 12, so you start with quite a few, but you will want to use them. And there are ways to replenish this track as you are playing. So, this is a currency that gets spent and replenished as you are playing the game. And I really do like that. There's a good sense of pressure luck to this game. And the characters are really interesting, especially when you start combining them with the different items and weapons and rewards that you unlock in between each boss battle.
So, the characters are as follows: Brilliant Bridget, Reckless Ralph, Fashion Blake, Crazy Carl, Deadly Dorothy, and Wicked Willow. And they come with these foldout mats here. And so, on one side you have all of your main information. You have the art of your character. All of the characters have the same basic abilities. A way to heal, a way to uh to gain courage to negate fear, and a way to recharge those uh those power cubes. And so, here healing, any even die can be placed there. Courage, any odd die. Power, any die. Each character comes with the same basic weapon, which is a stick, and you can assign any die to the stick. So, all of these will be the same on every character. Then every character also has four different starting items. So Bridget brilliant Bridget here has a magnet gun, a hammer, spider mines, and a BMX bike. And so the magnet gun, you can place any die. The hammer needs a four to activate. The spider mines need an even and an odd to activate. And the BMX bike needs a one, two, or a three.
Now on the back of each character you will have some information about how to play that character. And you also have their complexity level, how good they are at attacking, at support, and in randomness. So that's really cool. You can kind of choose, you know, your your party of characters based off their stats there. And then each of those characters will have a way of how to use their four particular items that they start the game with. And the characters do play differently. So don't think you can just pick any character and go into. You really do need to think about how your character is being played. Uh this version of the game also came with this little micro expansion and that's this junk pile scavenger expansion, which has all of these random tiles here. And these are all pretty good things adding dies or alleviating fear or maybe gaining different targets or or gaining you know, different types of bonuses.
And so at the beginning of each battle you will randomly draw four of these scavenger tokens and you will slot those into the junkyard here, the junk pile. And then this will allow you to spend a six or two of the power cubes in order to draw one of these scavenger tokens. And then that will give you some kind of benefit. So I do like using this because sometimes you know, you just don't have the thing that you might need for a six and it's kind of a wasted roll, but you can always go to the junk pile to scavenge. So I I do really like that little expansion. But yes, when you play solo, you will need to use two characters, but we will just uh use one here for the example. I'll kind of put that up here.
And so, each of the battles does start with a little story, and the stories are pretty funny. This game has a lot of humor to it. You know, don't go into this game thinking it's some kind of like really serious boss battler. But uh battle one, the Clanks emerge. Things have been mellow in Wastelandia for a hot minute. Bored to death, you and your home slices are throwing stuff at other stuff and breaking things with other things. Uh player one, check this out. I bet I bet you I can hit that bottle on my first try. Player two, with your aim, you couldn't hit that bottle if it was the size of a school bus. You throw a rock and miss wildly. It whizzes over a bush and you hear a loud clank. The bush shakes and something emerges. Uh what the flip? Are those Clank bots? Clank bot? Looks like a toaster that learned how to walk.
They send uh tracking signals to Death bots, dude. Psh. Death bot, something bot, big whoop. Yeah, they're only a military death machines that blow everything to bits. It's too late to run, the Clank bot says. Weak humans detected. Stab sequence initiated. Um just a hunch, but I think they see us. We better beat them up before they alert the big baddies. So, depending on the the difficulty, you will place your your health on the various enemies. There can be I think up to three different enemies that you have to fight in each boss battle. You have a victory condition, maybe some extra setup rules, and then we have this optional challenge, and then what you get if you complete that optional challenge. So, this victory condition here is defeat both Clank bots in six turns or less. If completed, go to page 31 to 32 for the leap uh the loot phase.
And then the optional challenge is to beat them in four turns or less, and then you get the super reward in that loot phase. And so, we have our turn tracker here, and then we also have this bag that has our six different boss attack tokens in it. And each player will draw one of these at the beginning of each one of their turns, and then that will dictate which attack the enemy is going to do to the characters. So, this can actually help you in determining your strategy. Because if you draw A here, it says that uh they will do shin kicks, and that will be 2x damage to you to the active player, where X is every two or five you have showing. So, you don't want to have any twos or fives showing. If you have zero of those numbers, then you will take zero damage. But if you have four twos showing, you're going to take eight damage from each Clank Bot.
And so, damage uh damage goes up and down quite a bit in this game. Each of the characters will start with 15 health, but you can generate up to 30 health. So, that is not your maximum. Your maximum is actually 30, and a really good strategy to do at the beginning of this game is to use your powers to generate more health. So, that's something you do want to keep in mind. So, let's say it was a bri- uh Brilliant Bridget's turn here. Let's move this up a little bit, just so we can see it. And so, at the beginning of her turn, so, this would be turn one, we will draw the uh baddie ability here, and it is going to do ability C. So, let's take a look at C. C is going to do two damage to all. It doesn't have any qualifiers or anything, so we don't need to worry about, you know, um uh manipulating dice to avoid the damage, and we can use this token here to keep track of what ability they are going to use, so we can remember as it is our turn. So, two damage to all, we really don't have any way to stop that.
So, we don't have to worry about that. But then, we will take our D6 and the players will start with five dice in their pool. And this can go up to seven. And so then, we roll our five D6 here. And we look at the numbers and then we can assign those to our powers and then we can trigger those in any order. Now, one really important concept to keep track of is fear. Each player will have a fear dial that you will tick up when they take points of fear and that can start that starts at zero and that can go up to 10. And then each baddie also has a fear level. Fear is an interesting concept and it really is the key to doing well. What fear does is it adds to the damage that you do or to the damage that you take. So, if your character becomes frightened, they're going to take more damage. Let's say that this bot A here or the second bot here had two fear and we were to use one of our maybe our stick and we did one point of damage, we would add the fear to that total. So, we would do three points of damage. And fear is accumulative throughout the battle. If I were to use that two points of fear, it doesn't reset to zero. Some of the baddies have abilities that will uh their fear. The heroes can use their courage ability to
lessen their fear. But fear keeps ticking up. And so, you know, you can stack up to 10 points of fear on a baddie, do one point of damage with a stick, but end up doing 11 points of damage. I think that's really neat. I do really like that concept a lot. So, here we have a one, a three, a four, a five, and a three. So, we can look at our powers here. So, we do have a four. We could trigger our hammer with that. Uh we could trigger our BMX bike with that. We need an even and odd to do the spider mines. Uh so, maybe we don't want to use our hammer. Maybe want to we want to use a three and a four for a spider man mines. Or maybe we wanted to beef up our health and at our first turn spend a four to uh generate four health so we could bump our health up to 19.
Uh maybe we had some fear. Maybe we had three points of fear from an earlier turn. We could use our three on courage to uh bump that down to zero so we don't take additional damage. Uh let's say we didn't like the five and the six here. We could use a power cube to reroll that five and six. Well, we got a six again. Well, I could use the junk pile to slot that six into the junk pile and draw this which would give me an additional uh two there. So, I can add two uh to one of my rolls. There are a ton of different ways to manipulate dice. Your various powers, your various items will allow you to manipulate dice. Sometimes uh flipping them over to their opposite side, sometimes adding or subtracting numbers.
Uh lot of these abilities you will slot in a die to use it and then it will tell you to roll. And when you roll, you will do the trigger on the power for what you roll but then that becomes the new facing value. And so, you know, you might have some powers that'll say do two damage for every three showing at uh you know, when you use that power. And so, let's say you had, you know, you had a couple of different threes uh showing here and you had a power that said do two X where X is every three showing. Well, you would do two times one two so four damage. And so, the more threes you have in your on your tableau, the more damage you will do. There are a ton of ways to manipulate and change the dice.
There are a whole bunch of ways to kind of mitigate that bad luck, and there are a whole bunch of really interesting decisions to make. And the game gets quite difficult. I mean, you you know, starting off I actually found this first battle pretty hard in the last game I played, and the second battle for me was just much easier. So, that That does show that there is quite a bit of luck in how you roll your dice, but also you will get better at knowing how to manipulate the board, knowing how to manipulate your dice, knowing how to use the various characters and their powers. Reckless Ralph here has these boxing gloves, which are pretty cool. Bash'em Blake I haven't used yet, but he has like some football armor, and and he has a minion. He has a pet dog named Fleabag.
Crazy Crazy Carl has this battle cart. And so, that can cause fear to all the enemies. You know, you and all your friends pile into the battle cart, and you you you step on the gas and you ram into the monsters, and you do fear to the monsters, but all of the players also have to roll a die. And if they roll poorly, then they take fear too, because they're in this car, you know, barreling towards these monsters and these robots, and they might get scared. One of my characters had a jetpack, and it was pretty cool because the jetpack was like, "I'm out of here." So, you could escape from battle, and you would lower your your fear value, but all of your friends, all of your the other players would watch you escape, and they would get scared because they're left fighting the battle while you're up in the air.
So, they would take fear. I really do like that. Just that the different combinations of characters, the different combinations of items and weapons and rewards and their innate abilities makes for some really interesting play. And I do like that a whole game is only four battles, so you know, it's not some kind of a big epic campaign. You can get through a whole game in in, you know, a couple of hours, just in a nice kind of casual evening session of play with some friends. And so that is something that I do put a lot of value in. But yeah, overall, I think Wastelanders is is really fun. You know, boss battlers are pretty popular and I think this is a good one, especially for how quick it is, but also it's not just random. It's not just rolling dice.
There is a lot to think about. There is a lot to learn about your characters and the items and the weapons, how to put together good combos because it really does matter the order that you use your powers in. And as a matter of fact, the rule book here does give you some tips and strategies and it does really point out that sequence matters. The order in which you use each ability matters. Example, you might have an ability that deals extra damage for every three and four you have showing. If you plan to place a two on your stick, you might use your stick first in hopes that when you roll that die to use the roll power, you roll a three or a four to enhance your other weapons. So building combos, uh stacking fear early, uh alleviating the fear using courage on your players so they don't become scared and take more damage. And uh really using your power cubes to initiate those rerolls to press your luck at good moments. And then also using your power to regenerate those power cubes is something that you constantly have to be thinking about. And so this isn't just a simple dice checking game, although dice checking is definitely involved. But uh yeah, Wastelanders is pretty cool. I know there are copies left if this sounds interesting.
And uh yeah, I do a A just kind of normal sized uh box here. Nothing big, nothing extravagant. Just kind of a normal game. It just kind of reminds me of a game that you know, you might have walked into a store maybe 10, 15 years ago and saw on the shelf and thought, "Hey man, that looks really cool." And uh yeah, then it just ends up being a lot of fun and I think it plays really well solo. I think it would shine with the right group because you can kind of get into this uh the kids on bikes theme and maybe do some trash talking and things like that. So, I hope you enjoyed taking a quick look at Wastelandia. We will talk to you later. Bye-bye.