1. You’re a fan of all things Austen, and you can’t believe your luck – there’s a game with this setting.
2. You have a special someone in your life who isn’t as into board games as you are, and you want to know if this game could be the one that lures them into your hobby.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, the answer is a resounding maybe. Obsession is a great game and no mistake. It may just be a little troublesome for someone unaccustomed to a modern board game’s disposition.

The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone

Despite that opening salvo, I’m not a big Austen fan, nor do I have anyone I think I could necessarily tempt into my cult of cardboard with such a game. I had heard, however, that Obsession is a great Euro game in its own right, so my curiosity was piqued good and proper. There’s no denying that the setting is a very clever twist on the standard Euro fare, and it is gorgeous.

There are plenty of games set in 19th Century England, and some are fantastic. Brass: Birmingham is a great example. All too often these games are very industrial in nature. They’re about the businesses, the resources of the time, and the Industrial Revolution. Few games take on the people of the time, and it’s a gap that Obsession gratefully squeezes itself into.

While you’ll spend time in the game adding to your house’s facilities, Obsession’s roots are planted firmly in the families and guests involved. Your family members are all cards in your deck, as are the various guests you entertain. Some are casual guests you invite into your home, while others are more prestigious, and it’s this sense of gentry, breeding, and society which pervades.

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more

Obsession’s 19th Century Derbyshire veneer is very nicely applied, but what really matters is the game beneath. It’s a mixture of deck-building and worker-placement, and it’s one which seemed to slip past everyone’s radar when critics were waxing lyrical about other new games using the same combination of mechanisms over the last couple of years. Dune Imperium, Endless Winter, Lost Ruins of Arnak – all of them do the same thing, but poor old Obsession was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

It’s a crying shame really because I believe Obsession does a better job of working the deck of cards into the game than any of those other games. Each player’s board houses a set of tiles which represent the various rooms and areas of their family’s home, and it’s these same tiles which act as places for your workers to go. Take the example of the Riding Stables tile. You can host any two guests, as long as they’re a gentleman and a lady, and you’ll earn £200 for their afternoon ride.

Of course, being of landed gentry, the very idea that you’d deign to let them ride without sending a servant to escort them is unthinkable. That means you’ve got to move one of your wooden servants from the Available Service box on your board to the tile, but only if you’ve got the correct type available. There’s no use in trying to send a Lady’s Maid off to the stables, they need a Footman.

Obsession, then, is a game of carefully planning your various actions, ensuring you have both the staff (meeples) and the ladies and gentlemen (cards) available to carry them out. There’s a very satisfying feeling of ‘getting stuff’ when you carry out an action, because you not only get the bonus from the tile (money, in the afternoon ride example) but also the bonuses from each of the cards you played. Your money goes towards new tiles to add to your board, giving you more worker spaces, and more combo opportunities. It’s a really nice set of systems.

I have not the pleasure of understanding you

Looping all the way back to the opening of this review then, and me telling you that Obsession is maybe the game that bridges the gap between board game enthusiasts and period drama fans. Obsession is a great game, as I said before, but it’s one that can prove too difficult to explain to someone who has never played a modern board game.

The principles are simple enough to explain. You have to put the matching colour worker on the space you want to use, spend the cards which match the conditions, and if those cards demand workers themselves, spend those workers too. But the planning that goes into making sure you have the cards (guests) you need to visit those tiles, and the servants to go with those tiles and cards on your turn… that’s tricky to get your head around. It can lead to a level of frustration that turns people off.

On the flip side of all of this, hardcore Euro gamers might find annoyance at the random draw of tiles and guests. There is a rotating storefront of tiles to add to your board, and you can spend reputation to refresh them, but when it comes to guests it’s usually a case of blindly drawing a card, or if you’re lucky, drawing two and keeping one. If you draw a guest who needs to be gone by the end of the game (some reward you with negative points if they’re ne’er-do-wells), it might fly in the face of your strategy. It’s a game of adaptive tactics, rather than strategy. If Terraforming Mars, Everdell, or Ark Nova vex you because of their dependence on lucky shuffles, Obsession might do the same.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn?

Those of you who revel in multiplayer-solitaire games will love Obsession. The only real competition is in the scrapping over the buildings on offer, and the odd tile that lets you recruit a worker from another player’s board. Other than that, it’s just you against your own brain. To be honest, that’s just as bad for me, my brain is my own worst enemy. That sort of game should be a natural fit for a good solo game, and guess what – it is.

The solo mode in Obsession works well and is smoothly implemented. There’s a choice of opponents, and the reality of playing it means rolling a D20 and removing the matching tile from the builders’ market. There’s a little more to it than that, but what I want to stress is how easy the solo mode is to run. It’s one of those games which doesn’t alter the goal to make solo gaming fit. You can play using the same ideas and tactics you would if you were playing against real people, and that’s a really nice touch.

Final thoughts

Theme and Euro game aren’t always the best of bedfellows. Some games’ themes are applied like gilding a gearbox – pretty from a distance, but still just a bunch of interlocking cogs and gears. Obsession, on the other hand, is an exemplar when it comes to making a thinky game that’s practically brimming with life and colour. Dan Hallagan – the designer of Obsession – has done a sterling job of finding that balance between a Turing Machine wearing an Easter bonnet and a vacuous box of swooning fan service. Fans of novels like Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility will absolutely lap it up, as will hobby gamers. Just bear in mind those couple of caveats around perceived difficulty, and Mister Strategy stepping aside for Lady Luck at times.

A special mention has to go to the overall level of presentation throughout. From the portraits on the guest cards to the beautiful boxes included to store the game’s components, everything has had so much attention to detail lavished upon it. Critics might argue that the tiles are bland and uninteresting, but they’re very much about function over form. The clear iconography throughout makes it possible to discern everything you need to know about a card or tile at a glance.

It’s fair to say that Obsession’s position as an outlier when it comes to board game themes may well have helped it climb the rankings over on BGG (it’s #107 overall at the time of writing), but it’s the game itself which is keeping it there, four years after its release. It’s a fantastic game which I think would go down a storm with people who like games like Castles of Burgundy. People who like games with a fast gameplay loop once learned, but with room for a lot of tactical, reactive play, with a strong focus on your own little world.

Obsession was recently released on Board Game Arena (play it here), so you can try it out right now before spending any money. If you enjoy it, I encourage you to pick up a copy, because it’s a beautiful thing to own, and a game which you’ll play time and again.

Review copy kindly provided by Kienda.co.uk. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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Obsession (2018)

Designer: Dan Hallagan
Publisher: Kayenta Games
Art: Dan Hallagan
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 30-90 mins

The post Obsession Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Vast: The Mysterious Manor is Leder Games’ follow-up to 2016’s Vast: The Crystal Caverns. It follows in the same vein of being an asymmetric adventure for between one and five players, but does so with a few big tweaks. Gone is the sprawling crawl through the caves. Instead it’s a lock-in at Spooksville central – the mysterious manor.

Battle royale

Maybe it comes as no surprise to find that a Leder Games’ title is an asymmetric game, after all, they’ve got form. The first Vast game, Root (review here), Oath – as far as I’m concerned it’s Leder and GMT who are the masters of balanced asymmetry. The Mysterious Manor has a very different feel to something like Root, and it comes from the wildly differing goals each role has.

The paladin, macho bugger that he is, wants to kill the giant spider. The spider, however, wants to raise the terror level and then escape, leaving everyone else shaking in their boots. Then we’ve got the skeletons, tunnelling in from the manor’s grounds, raiding the armouries, and trying to take out the paladin. Then, there’s a mysterious warlock who can move through walls, and looks to curse and dominate the various treasures and poltergeists. Finally, you can play as the manor itself, through its manifestation, the wraith. If the manor performs enough rituals, it wins.

Root has different ways to play and gain VPs, but the players are all racing along the same track to win. In Vast: The Mysterious Manor, the wildly different goals really make it feel like you’re playing as your characters, not just trying to be the first to a number. I found it adds to the immersion and experience, and gives the game a really tense, exciting feel.

Forewarned is forearmed

The biggest problem with The Mysterious Manor is the same one that’s evident in every asymmetric game I’ve played: It’s very difficult to play well if you aren’t familiar with all of the other characters in your game. There’s nothing that can be done about it, it’s the price to pay if you want a game in that style with any level of depth to it. This is a bit of a non-issue after your first game, but it’s worth bearing in mind for your first game, if you’re playing with people who’ve no idea about it.

Each player gets a great player aid, and I love the player boards. Each role’s turns are explained really clearly on each one, and it means if you don’t play for a while, you can play again without needing to re-read the rules. It’s great for playing an unfamiliar character too.

Understanding the rock-paper-scissors interaction of the roles makes for a really tight game. In true “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” style, you’ll find yourself racing to help others when it looks like a player is close to winning. Is the paladin one hit away from finishing off the spider? No worries, the manor can rearrange the tiles on the board. This kind of interaction means that I’ve not played a single game yet where one player has raced away with the win.

Something for everyone

The different characters in Vast: The Mysterious Manor do something really clever. Each plays so differently, and some are more complicated than others to play effectively. If you play a game of Root with less-experienced board game player, you’d probably give them the Cats, as they’re the most intuitive to understand. In the same way, in The Mysterious Manor, they’ll probably play as the Paladin first, for the same reason.

While Root feels like a war game though, this game doesn’t. If you’ve got a member of your group who doesn’t like games where players attack one another, teach them how to play as the Manor. The Manor’s goal is basically a series of spatial puzzles, which has them moving tiles and trying to create polyomino shapes, more reminiscent of games like Patchwork and Silver & Gold.

I love how this game still plays really well with differing player counts. It’s undeniably best with four or five players, but a two-player stand-off between the paladin and spider is still great fun. There are some combinations of roles that just don’t work with smaller play counts, but the rule book explains which combinations do.

Final thoughts

Vast: The Mysterious Manor’s biggest problems are always going to be Root and Oath. They’re both incredible games, but that fanfare leaves Vast like the last kid to get picked for a team in P.E. It’s a real shame too, because The Mysterious Manor is a brilliant game. I think I might even prefer it to Root.

It does some really wonderful things. The enclosed manor board really makes it feel like you’re stuck in a haunted house. The theme permeates everything in the game too. The way the giant spider can split into several spiderlings and scatter, then reform at any of those new locations is great. The Warlock can ignore walls and float about at his leisure, and the army of skeletons lay the house under siege and sneak in for weapons and attacks. You’ll initially feel like the paladin is the hero of the game, the main protagonist, but you quickly feel like everyone else has their own good reason to win too.

Your first few games will feel clunky, but just ploughing on rewards you with a terrific game, laced with fleeting alliances and tons of ‘Oh wow!’ moments, when someone’s turn flips the game on its head. I urge you not to assume Vast: The Mysterious Manor as Root’s poorer sibling. It’s so much fun, and so well balanced. There’s a ton of life and replay in the box, and it deserves more love. Get your spooky on, and venture into the haunted house, you won’t regret it.

Review copy kindly provided by Leder Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Vast: The Mysterious Manor (2019)

Designer: Patrick Leder
Publisher: Leder Games
Art: Kyle Ferrin
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Vast: The Mysterious Manor Review appeared first on Punchboard.