Let’s get into the weeds of what Arcs is, what it does, and touch on why it’s dividing opinion so strongly, before telling you whether I think you’ll enjoy it or not. A word of warning: despite trying to stick to my 1000-1500 word self-imposed guidelines, this one will probably top 2000 words.

Blackout impossible

Normally I go into writing a review blind. I have a self-imposed media blackout so as not to be influenced by other outlets’ reviews. This time around that’s been impossible. Arcs has been everywhere for the last month or so, and thanks to people desperately trying to make themselves relevant or ride on the coattails of others’ success, it’s impossible not to know what a lot of people think about it. Regardless, I made sure to approach my plays of the game with an open mind.

You’ll hear Arcs described as a trick-taking space game, and that’s partially correct. The big diversion from trick-taking games, however, is that nobody wins a trick, and there are several different ways to ‘win’ each round (trick, for want of a better word). Each round begins with the player holding the initiative marker playing a card from their hand to the main board. Each card belongs to one of four suits and lets you perform multiple different actions. Low-value cards have more pips on them, with each pip giving you an action if you follow suit.

When it’s your turn to play a card, you can either play a card of the same suit with a higher value and claim all the pips as actions (Surpass), play a completely different suit and take a single action from it (Pivot), or play a card face-down to copy the lead card, but again only for one action (Copy).

I love the closed economy of the game. It’s another thing which keeps the player interaction at a constant high level. There are only five of each resource token, and in a game where three of the five scoring conditions want those tokens (as well as the icons on the cards you’ll collect), competition is fierce. Even when you’ve got them, the temptation to spend them during your prelude phase for additional actions is more tempting than snoozing your alarm on Monday morning.

I’m not going to explain how to play Arcs here, there are plenty of other places you can find that, like the rulebook on Leder’s resources page. Essentially you build cities to gain resources from, starports to make ships, then you move your ships about the board to control areas and engage in planetary pugilism to see who emerges victorious. The difficulty here though, and the key to everything that happens in Arcs, is being at the mercy of the hand you are dealt at the start of each chapter of the game. This is where a lot of people cry foul. For me though, this unpredictable ‘chaos’ (it’s really not that chaotic at all) is what makes Arcs sing like a magnificent space whale.

Tactics vs strategy

There are some core concepts to understand if you want to know if Arcs is for you and your group. Firstly, this is not a space 4X game. Not really. The likes of Twilight Imperium, Eclipse (review here), and Xia: Legends of a Drift System might resolve combat with dice rolls, but they’re strategy games. You set your stall out at the beginning of the game and work to a plan. If anything it’s closer to Voidfall (review here) in the way you play cards for actions. That’s where the similarities end, though.

Scoring points in Arcs is done when Ambitions are declared. There are five different scoring categories and the players choose which are scored in each chapter. Three of them are built on accumulating the most of specific resource types, while the other two rely on having the most trophies from combat, or prisoners claimed from the game’s Court cards. What this means to you, the player, is that going into the start of a chapter the way you score is a blank canvas. There’s no advantage to being a power-hungry warlord, smiting all in their way if all of the VPs are going to come from collecting resources.

Regardless of who declares an ambition, the scoring is open to all. This makes timing your declaration of ambition tricky and a lot of fun. The moment you declare, you paint a huge target on your back. Everyone knows what you’re after, and you’d better believe they’re going to try to stop you. You can always wait for the first ambition marker to go and place a later one, but they’re worth fewer VPs, so what do you do? Drawing a line in the sand and committing to a goal is an awesome moment that never gets old.

This is where the difference between strategy and tactics comes into play. Think of strategy as your long-term plan to get to your goal. Tactics are the smaller steps that’ll help you get there. The way Arcs is built means that any long-term strategy is all but pointless. It’s a game of break-neck adaption and canny tactical play. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about here, to try to wrap some context around my rambling words.

Picture the scene. You’ve locked down the planets producing fuel and materials. You’ve been taxing them like crazy to fill your player board with them. You’re all set to declare the Tycoon ambition this chapter (VPs for the player with the most fuel and resources), but fate has kicked you squarely in the balls and you don’t have a 2 or 7 in your hand. The very cards you need to declare that ambition are in other players’ hands, and they’re not going to be stupid enough to declare something you’ll win.

Great, the game’s ruined, right?

Wrong! This is where some people struggle to understand Arcs’ design. This is where you pivot like a sofa in a staircase. In this example, resources on your board can be spent for bonus Prelude actions on your turn, before your main action. You can spend that stockpile to build more starports and ships, use the fuel to catapult your newly bolstered fleet across the galaxy, then beat the snot out of some damaged ships in other systems and work towards the Warlord ambition.

This is a quick and simple example, for sure, but it’s wholly representative of the constant pivoting and adaptation that Arcs is propped up by. If you come to the game expecting Eclipse and try to plan in the same manner, this is where you’ll come unstuck. This is where I hear a lot of the complaints about Arcs. “I’ve been dealt these cards, I can’t do the thing I wanted to, boo hoo it’s not fair”. Mitigation and planning are your friends. If you really want to attack in the next chapter, make sure you secure and tax weapon planets so you can spend pips for combat. Copying a lead card, even for a single action, can be hugely powerful. Invest in court cards. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. Are you truly hamstrung? No, there are always options.

Training wheels not included

Arcs is from the brain of Cole Wehrle. I’ll happily admit up-front that I’m a big fan of Cole and his games. Oath (review here), Root (review here), Pax Pamir, John Company – all of these are games from his brain and imagination. If you’ve never played one of his games and were brought up on a diet of Euro games, it can be a jarring experience. The importance of player interaction is present in all of his games, and the way they can swing and change (all of the above do this) are hallmarks of his design. They’re not for everyone, and that’s fine, but understanding how his games work will largely dictate whether you’ll enjoy Arcs or not.

There are similarities in Wehrle games to those published by Splotter. Neither of them holds you by the hand as you walk through the nursery doors, and both give you enough rope to hang yourself with in the early game (note to self: don’t combine those metaphors again). This is another point which can be a real turn-off for lots of people. It’s a far cry from the modern Euro game that lets you push buttons and pull levers just to see what happens, knowing that you may well still be in contention at the end of the game. A prime example was my second game of Arcs. On the very first turn of the game, I declared an ambition for a particular resource, only to find out I’d misread the board and where I could build and tax, essentially handing the Chapter to my opponent.

If you don’t pay attention you can really scupper yourself. This isn’t fate kicking you in the balls. This is you curling up a fist and punching yourself squarely in the gonads.

Arcs is a game designed to be learned by repetition. To be played multiple times until you understand what makes it tick and how to play it properly. With this in mind, please listen to the designer when it comes to the asymmetric module you can add. I’ve seen and read multiple accounts from people where they’ve thrown in the asymmetric module of Leaders and Lore from the very first game. This is despite this is the back of the rulebook:

Cole’s games are tuned and balanced, but often hard to get to grips with. Throwing in asymmetry while you’re trying to learn the game is a bad move. There is no other game like Arcs, and the first games have a sharp, steep learning curve. If there were the equivalent of Root’s Walking Through Root playthrough book to explain how to use the asymmetry, it might be different, but it doesn’t. The last thing you want is for players to have a miserable experience because someone else’s leader and lore cards were stroked into activation through your inexperience as much as their clever play. Play the base game first, please.

Final thoughts

Is Arcs the best game ever? No. Not yet at least. Is it a chaotic, unbalanced mess? No, it’s not that either. Arcs is a superb game which comes with a few caveats to get the most from it. You’ve got to understand that the first couple of games will be rocky and unpredictable. You’ll mess up, but you’ll learn from it. Ideally, you’ll have a regular group who have the appetite to play it repeatedly, or access to other people who play it regularly. In this aspect, it’s just like Root and Pax Pamir.

I’ve seen the videos bemoaning the swingy scoring and contrived, ridiculous scenarios that could lead to a game-winning score in one turn. Ignore them. You’ll get some big-scoring rounds, but that’s because someone has played superbly, not because the stars happened to align in a particular way. Ambitions and resources are open information and easily readable, and killing the king is inherent in every part of the game. If someone looks like they’re racing away to a big chapter score, everyone else will do all they can to pull them back, because that’s the game. This is a game of extreme interaction, not a solitaire Euro game.

Just because Arcs is riding a huge wave of hype right now, and is surely going to end up in the BGG top 100 (it’s sitting at 509 at the time of writing), doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. Twilight Struggle and Mage Knight are both in the top 50, does that mean they’re games everyone will enjoy? Absolutely not. I want this review to act as much as a public service announcement as anything else.

Arcs is a Cole Wehrle game. It has Kyle Ferrin’s amazing artwork which makes it look cute, just like Root did, but in both cases, the game underneath the pretty wrapping can be unforgiving and difficult to get to grips with. If you like Cole’s games, I think you’ll absolutely love Arcs. If you’ve given his other games plenty of chances but still don’t enjoy them, then try Arcs, but be aware it might not do much for you. If, however, you found your way here and have no idea who Cole Wehrle is, or what the hell a Pax Pamir is, then this last bit is for you:

Arcs is brilliant. It will be noticeably different every time you play, and with the right group, you’ll have an awesome time. You have to be prepared to fight your friends every step of the way and get in each others’ faces, and you have to accept that the first couple of games might end up with a runaway leader while you all find your feet. Get past that though, and for the £45-50 you’ll spend you’ll end up with a game with enormous replayability, a very short setup and teardown time, and a box no bigger than Root’s. An amazing game that represents great value for money.

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

Arcs (2024)

Design: Cole Wehrle
Publisher: Leder Games
Art: Kyle Ferrin
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 120-180 mins

The post Arcs Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Star wars

The overall premise of Eclipse is pretty simple. Explore the space around you, adding more tiles as you go, building the shared galaxy. If the new system has resources you can gather them as ongoing income. If it has aliens in it, you can fight them for glory and riches. If two players come into conflict, they can fight one another by rolling dice. Pretty much exactly what you might expect. How it does it all is really clever, really engaging, and a lot of fun for the most part.

You can take as many turns as you like in each round by moving a disc from your Influence Track to your action track. Why wouldn’t you take ten actions instead of three? Each action you take increases the amount you need to pay at the end of the round as upkeep, so you need to be careful you don’t go beyond your means. It’s a clever system that introduces a nice level of balance. Sure, you can go out to produce as much money as possible to take loads of actions, but without materials or science (the other two of the game’s three currencies), all of those actions might be worthless.

It’s a simple balance which is made lop-sided by the variety of different alien races available and leaning into their unique, asymmetric abilities and differences. The Planta for instance are interesting to play as their strategy relies on exploring more than the other races, controlling lots of systems, so you might well find the Planta’s player exploring backwards, away from the conflict.

One of my favourite things about the game is the fact that although each player has the same class of ships available to build. the components and technology are completely customisable. You want a finely balanced ship with computers, shields, guns, and engines? Great, go for it. You want to create a glass cannon ship which is essentially a load of cannons duct-taped together with an engine stapled to it? Fill your boots. It’s a cool system which makes the game more engaging, as you need to know what you’re getting yourself into when it comes to PvP combat.

You’re actively encouraged to spread your wings and explore, because exploring means more resources, and often grabbing an exploration tile at the same time. The tiles give you a minimum of 2VPs, but often have some great bonuses such as free ships for your fleet, or unique, powerful techs to employ. The spreading tendrils of your empires eventually intertwine, and that’s where the interaction begins. The interaction is what drives Eclipse and makes it as much fun as it is.

In space, everyone can hear you scream. And cheer. And groan.

It should go without saying that Eclipse is a very interactive game. Player interaction is baked into its very core. It’s not a case of if players are going to fight one another, it’s a case of when, and who will fight. There’s a potentially overlooked piece of the game’s production that reinforces the interaction, and that’s the tech tray. Each round a new batch of the universe’s hottest new tech becomes available and gets added to the tray, and the first turns of each round often turn into a bun-fight for who manages to get their sticky mitts on which new tech first. In practical terms, the tray gets handed around the table like a box of chocolates, and in two of the different groups I’ve played Eclipse with it’s been referred to as the chocolate box. It’s a communal activity that gets eyes up from the player boards and boring holes into the souls of the other players, using every ounce of psychic energy to defy them from choosing the tile you wa… oh, you bastard, you took the one I wanted.

Get used to that.

The techs that become available are drawn from a bag each round, which means sometimes you’ll not see new weapons appear for the first half of the game, for instance. Once they do, the competition for them is fierce, and the lucky person who gets their hand on a powerful new tech quickly becomes a force to be reckoned with. It’s a decent way for the game to evolve, but it can be almost painful to be the last person to pick once all the good stuff has gone. If you plan your game around destroying anything stupid enough to wander into your crosshairs and you’re left with the puny “does one damage on a 6 rolled on a D6” guns, it sucks. Plain and simple. Especially if you’re the player to the right of the first player in a 6-player game, as five players get to pick before you. This is fixed with a turn order variant which I would recommend always playing with, but the out-of-the-box experience is a pain in the backside.

One of the thickest, twangiest strings to the Eclipse bow is how different every game is. The techs come out in different order, the space tiles are always somewhere different than the last time you played, and the races around the table start out in different proximity to one another. You can try to play the same way again and again, but fate (and the tech tile bag) will simply kick you in the balls and laugh at you, delivering upgraded drives instead of the plasma cannons you had on your Christmas list.

It’s clear that a ton of development has gone into Eclipse. The interlocking systems are so finely tuned that it feels like a polished Euro game. I love a Euro with complex, interlocking systems. The biggest difference between Eclipse and a Euro though, is the sandpit nature of the game. It ought to be its biggest strength, but as often as not, it’s its biggest problem. With the loose reins that the players are on when running headlong into this sandpit, it’s easy to trip and find yourself trying to stand back up for the rest of the game.

We will rebuild! Or at least, we’ll try to.

If you’re doing well in Eclipse you feel powerful. It’s a really fun experience to just keep adding more and more guns to your unstoppable war machine and clash head-on with someone else doing the same thing. If, however, you stumble early, it can be a lonely, demoralising experience. My most recent experience (and the trigger for me writing this review) saw me fall victim to the dice. Not once. Not even twice. Three times in a row. Combat in Eclipse isn’t deterministic as it is in Voidfall. All you can do is give yourself the best chance you can when it comes to combat. Add more guns to your ships, giving you more dice to roll per ship, then send a bunch into combat. From there you hope the law of averages works out. Lady luck is fickle though, and when you lose fights you should have won on average, it’s so painful. Going in with 60/40 odds in your favour won’t cut it. You want to be going in with at least 85% likelihood of winning to be sure.

When your ships are destroyed, all you can do is rebuild. Rebuilding takes resources, and more often than not you need to wait until the next income turn to get the resources you need, not to mention the actions, which as we learned before, cost money. The money you get from income rounds. Every round you spend rebuilding is another round your rivals are making their armada bigger and stronger, and experienced players can start snowballing in power. I realise I probably sound like I’m moaning about nothing here. It’s a 4X game, right? You take a gamble, it might not pay off. You take your licks and start again. In other games, it doesn’t feel as downright punishing. There’s a sweetener in that you get to take something out of the VP tile bag just for taking part in a battle, which is a genuinely great thing when war is foisted upon you by another player, but it’s no real compensation for losing everything you had in one fell swoop.

To make it clear, we’re talking about finding yourself potentially two rounds wasted (of eight in total) just because the dice you thought you’d swung in your favour didn’t work out. Honestly, I’m not sure what could be done to change it – the dice, combat system, and tech upgrades are so integral to the system now.

The same is true of getting cornered, which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say in a game about exploring space. if your neighbours align their explored tiles in such a way that you can’t join yours to them, sometimes your only choice is to explore away from the middle, taking the lower-value zone 3 tiles, or to push towards the middle of the board, into a skirmish you know you can’t win. Woe betide you if someone notices your bottleneck and forces their way down it.

Regardless, for all my moaning, people like Eclipse. Correction – people LOVE Eclipse, and why shouldn’t they? It does everything it sets out to and more. Overall it’s a very, very good game. My problem is with the sharp edges left in the cosmic sandbox.

Final thoughts

This is an odd review for me to write. I think Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy is a fantastic game that scales well from all counts from two to six. It sets out to do something specific and it does it. So why, at the top of the review did I say I’m not sure I ever want to play it again? Unless you’re very good at the game (and I am not), realising you don’t have a hope of winning with two more hours to play can feel soul-destroying. Eclipse needs a specific group to get the most from it. Friends who want to get together and enjoy an evening of games, snacks, drinks, and banter. You can end up in situations where one or more players are basically out of the game, or playing as a race which doesn’t quite work. If someone doesn’t know how to really lean on their race’s abilities, they’re screwed. make sure you do some hand-holding once you start playing with non-Terran races.

In the game I referenced above I had to rebuild my ships three separate times, and each time I did it I wasn’t advancing. I wasn’t challenging the other players. I was stuck in a narrow band of space I had no sideways escape from, my only option was to head to the middle of the map, straight into the arms of a waiting war machine. I enjoyed the evening, and I had fun with my friends, but two-and-a-half hours of not being able to compete or interact with anyone else isn’t much of a gaming experience for anyone. Honestly I suspect that some, if not most of that was down to the way I played. Choices I made, mistakes I made, but that’s my point. When you’re learning the game your bike can be very wobbly, while other players are off doing somersaults over ramps. Stabilisers are the way to go. What makes Eclipse sing is the group you play with. Ease them into their first few games, and you’ll have more players who love the experience. Steamroll them and I wouldn’t expect to see them at the next game.

Take it as a warning more than anything else. You’ll have amazing battles, you’ll be telling the stories of “Remember that game when all that stuff happened” for ages and be making great memories, but some people may have a thoroughly demoralising time. It may mean that more experienced players have to make sub-optimal plays just to keep the game flowing and keep everyone involved, or at least help them make good choices. Or not. Maybe you love a game where you get to trip someone over and then steal their lunch money. If you do, Eclipse is perfect.

Eclipse is an experience in a box. If you enjoy it, you’ll play it 20, 40, a hundred times and still love every minute, and it’ll be more than worth its £120+ price point. Just make sure it’s right for you and yours before you spend. If you want to get an idea of what it’s like before you spend, check out the excellent TTS scripted mod. It’s quick and easy to use, and I managed to get three online games played in addition to the two real-life plays. I still prefer Voidfall, but there’s no denying that Eclipse: Second Dawn for thee Galaxy is a fantastic game.

Eclipse: Second Dawn For The Galaxy (2020)

Design: Touko Tahkokallio
Publisher: Lautapelit.fi
Art: Noah Adelman, Jere Kasanen, Jukka Rajaniemi, Sampo Sikiö
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 60-200 mins

The post Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Review appeared first on Punchboard.

“The truest wisdom is a resolute determination”

So said Bonaparte, who knew a thing or two about combat strategy. Combat is a great place to start as we dissect Voidfall, because it’s where you’ll see the biggest difference between it and its peers, like Twilight Imperium. Combat in 4X games often sees players chucking handfuls of dice across the table at one another, praying to the chance cube gods for a favourable outcome. Combat in Voidfall is deterministic. If deterministic isn’t a word in your day-to-day vocabulary, it soon will be.

When you’re talking about a game, deterministic combat means that you already know the outcome of the encounter before it begins. You know what the defenders can do, you know what you can do as the aggressor, and you know what the board state will be in the aftermath. It’s a really important thing to bring up early because it’s the part that will likely make or break Voidfall for a lot of people.

Lots of people enjoy rolling dice. Part of that epic game experience is picking a fight with someone you have no right to win, but clinging on to that small chance that Lady Luck has blown kisses your way. Voidfall is a stark contrast. There’s no trench run with a torpedo down an exhaust vent here. You go full Death Star or you go home. That unknown quantity, the seeds of randomness sown into the soil of the 4X landscape, just isn’t there. Hearing all of this might have made the game sound dull, and there’s a chance you want to close this tab right now. I should know, I was one of those people.

When I first heard how my epic space battles’ outcomes were already carved in stone before my thrusters sputtered into life, I wasn’t exactly enthused. It sounded boring.

I was wrong.

Get your house in order

Each player represents a grand house in the game. A sci-fi race of intergalactic beings bent on ruling the cosmos. Each house is asymmetric in play style, each with its own perks, abilities, and suggested ways to play. Even the player boards that track your progress along the different tech tracks are different from one another. The nuts-and-bolts mechanisms in Voidfall are resource management, area control, and action selection. Sounds pretty Euro-gamey, right? That’s because it is. It’s a heavy Euro in disguise, gorging itself on thematic vol-au-vents at the buffet of an Ameritrash members-only party.

You’ve got a board covered in dials that track your resource levels and production rates. Thank goodness it’s there too, because having to manage five more types of tokens during the game would have been the tipping point in terms of what’s manageable.

In the main action phase of each of the game’s three cycles, you’ll take turns playing cards from your hand. Each card has three actions on it, some of which have costs, and you can pick any two of these actions to perform. The cards and actions have themes and names that help tie things together. Even without knowing the game, you can hazard a guess at the sort of things you can do with the Development and Conquest cards. Production isn’t a standard phase of the game however, as you might expect from a game of this ilk. If you want to produce resources with the various guilds you have strewn around the galaxy, you need to use one of your actions on one of your turns, and if you’re producing, you ain’t fighting.

It all stokes the fires that in turn power the engines of a good Euro game. Tech tracks and advancements, taking and fulfilling agenda cards, spending resources to build guilds and defenses on tiles. All the while trying to manage the orange corruption markers that invade the main board and your player boards. Then you’ve got the technology market where you can buy cards which, once again, add a layer of asymmetry to proceedings. All of a sudden you’ve got shields to soak up damage during fights, or missiles that let you deal damage before you even invade a hex. There is so much to try to keep track of.

A bridge too far?

Amazing as it may seem, I still haven’t talked about loads of things in the game. Population dice, trade tokens, and skirmishes – oh my! If you don’t like heavy games with lots of decision-making, where you’re trying to make a hundred tiny gears turn in unison, you’re not going to have a good time with Voidfall. In all honesty, I’d be surprised if you got through setting up and playing the tutorial. It’s a 3-4 hour assault on your cognitive abilities.

Even when you revel in this level of complexity – which I do – it’s still a force to be reckoned with. You’ll have an idea of what you want to accomplish in your next turn, and likely have 10-15 minutes to plan how to do it. But the cards are temptresses. Sirens, beckoning your brain onto the rocks of indecision. As you place card on top of card, stacking an action queue for the ages, you’ll see something that makes you think “Ooh, actually I could do this, couldn’t I?”, and by the time you return from that cerebral rabbit hole you’ve got no idea what your original plan was. Of course, by the time it gets back to your turn the game state will have changed again, and you can almost guarantee that someone else has clamped your war machine’s wheels, but that’s just what Voidfall is like.

The time and space commitments are genuine concerns too. Setting up a game of Voidfall is an undertaking that can easily take 30-60 minutes, depending on the number of players and the scenario you’ve opted for. It will also swamp your table. I don’t care how big your table is, Voidfall will devour the lot and insist on a wafer-thin mint to finish.

Did I mention that it’s an absolute pain to teach? There are a ton of concepts that you need to understand if you want to play. You need to understand that your production level and yield are two different things. You need to know about approach and salvo damage and mitigation in combat, on top of initiative. You need to understand how to calculate end-of-cycle skirmish combat values, and how fleets can be broken and regrouped. And the icons. Oh, the icons.

In addition to the rulebook, compendium, and glossary included in the box (40, 86, and 52 pages respectively), there’s a four-page icon reference sheet detailing 214(!) different icons used in the game. Two hundred and fourteen! Voidfall is not a midweek game for after the kids have gone to bed.

Final thoughts

You’d think that after that last section, I wouldn’t be recommending Voidfall. It’s an expensive, intense, time-hungry investment. But by the maker, is it worth it! Voidfall is a truly incredible game. If you can find a game to be a part of, I urge you to try it. Before you do, go over and watch the excellent how-to-play video from Paul at Gaming Rules!. It might take two full games to properly absorb the rules and iconography, but you’ll have such a good time getting there that you won’t care.

If I didn’t know the game was from the minds of Nigel Buckle & Dávid Turczi, who don’t seem to be able to put a foot wrong lately, I’d have sworn this was a Vlaada Chvátil game. The hex-based map, deterministic combat, card play, resources, and meticulous planning involved all make it feel like it’s what you’d get if he took Mage Knight and set it in space. Voidfall could so easily have tripped over its own feet if it weren’t for yet more sterling work in the graphic design department, thanks to Ian O’Toole. The man is some kind of wizard, I’m sure of it.

I could easily write twice the number of words I already have to try to explain the game better. I haven’t touched on the three different play modes, for instance. You can play competitively, cooperatively, and solo. The solo game runs smoothly and without too much overhead, and while I’ll be honest and say I haven’t had a cooperative game yet, the competitive mode is outstanding. When you consider the different houses and abilities, the pages and pages of scenarios on offer, and the different ways to play it, I can hand-on-heart say that the high price of the game is justified by its content, not just the amount of stuff in the box.

Hype games come and hype games go. I have a personal guideline which means I steer clear of heavily-hyped games for the first few months after release, just to see if people are still talking about them when the latest shiny trinkets are thrown before them. People are still talking about Voidfall, and I believe people will still be talking about Voidfall in the coming years too. It’s nothing short of spectacular. I recently played a four-player game at a convention which took close to four hours to complete. When we finished there was a palpable deflation, and had we not all had other games to go and play, I think we’d have all happily reset the game and played again immediately. Voidfall is that good.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.

Voidfall (2023)

Design: Nigel Buckle, Dávid Turczi
Publisher: Mindclash Games
Art: Ian O’Toole
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 120-240 mins

The post Voidfall Review appeared first on Punchboard.