Gamer Goals 2023 – Finishing off the Year with Old and New

Even more board games to finish off the year with, including new and ones that haven’t hit my table for at least 2 years.

See other games new to my table

• Horizon Zero Dawn – The Board Game
  New to me, looking forward to playing again

I wish more boardgames based on other media like video games and movies did as well in capturing the feel of the source material. Like the video game, sneaking and distraction are key to achieving victory. We played the co-operative mode, working together to prove our skills to the hunting lodges. Each hunter had a unique deck of abilities and during downtime we were able to get extra gear and enhancements as well as improve our deck. Taking damage removed cards from your deck, but this attrition to your hand is nowhere near as punishing as Gloomhaven‘s mechanic. I wrote up some cheat cards to help support our play with victory point tracking, terrain effects, and things that would alert the enemies. One thing that doesn’t get enough celebration is the ergonomics of how a game packs away and this game does a good job of that. We found the play time to be about 30 minutes per scenario (3 – 4 scenarios make up a game) but some of that was the learning curve. We might wind up painting the minis for better contrast and feel. There are plenty of expansions to add additional boss enemies and I presume more cards for gear.

• Clone Wars – Pandemic System
  New to me, will play again

I’ve been happy to see so many different ways that the core Pandemic mechanics have been retooled to reflect different narratives. Each player gets a Jedi Master with a unique ability that they must use to keep planets safe from armies of droids and the plans of the villain.
The villain is the source of the key changes to how this one plays out. Each villain has a deck of their own. In addition to the usual infection step (this time it’s Separatist Droids), the top card of the villain is also played. This villain deck is only 6 cards deep and some will play out differently if the villain fig is on the board or not. One of those cards intensifies like regular Pandemic, filling the new location to 3 droids and increasing the usual doom factors. Similar to the World of Warcraft – Pandemic, there are three specific quests (called missions in this one) to be completed before you can attempt to defeat the villain. The available mission stack is pretty deep so lots of different ones to draw randomly. Also like the WOW version, there are dice and you can use the cards in your hand to complete missions and assist in combating droids and villains. For the most part, these cards are tapped when used and don’t get discarded except as as the consequence of taking damage from failed combats and villain effects. Even though the cards fell into basic functions, each one was had its own unique name from the source material, so losing a combat could mean losing Cody and Gregor and a Scout Walker as part of that damage taken in trying to liberate Kashyyk with Yoda.

Despite these changes, it feels a bit simpler than some of the other Pandemic games out there. We tried two different villains and improvised where the rules seem not to explain how some bits were handled. A rule or two we had inadvertently overlooked, but as a whole, it was a good experience. The figs are slightly different in pose so despite the identical pawn color, we could still tell who was who with a little effort and I expect we’ll paint the bases to help with our older eyes. On a similar note, the invasion card art made it very easy to identify which planet was targeted.