Playing – Bastion

I came across Bastion in a discount bin and figured what the hey. Overall, I and my table were not disappointed. We agreed that we all would play this again.

The Pitch

Bastion is a co-operative tower defence boardgame, in a similar vein to the classic Castle Panic with a feel that reminds me of Pandemic.

Instead of having to defend multiple fronts, it’s a march of enemies of about 30 basic, – 12 advanced, and one or more legendary opponents. The advanced and legendary have special abilities that add complexity through how the cards mix together. Each turn starts with a heroic mage moving, channeling mana to defeat enemies, defeating an enemy, and activating special rituals after defeating an enemy. There’s no dice rolling, only the randomness of what enemy card gets drawn after the hero actions.

Enemies start at one corner of the board and usually get added clockwise until they reach the Gate. Once there, the game ends and the heroes lose. Monster abilities include blocking off mana sources, defending other enemies, drawing additional enemies, resistance to spell cards, to name a few. To defeat an enemy, a hero spends mana points of a matching colour. Once defeated, the enemy card can be used by a hero as a spell to reduce enhance an attack, use multiple colors of mana, make additional movement, and so on. Ritual cards played after defeating a monster can be used to activate special abilites. Once all the enemy cards are out, they start the march. The enemy furtherest from the gate advances to the next available space, creating a countdown mechanic that really ramped the tension.

It sounds like there is a lot going on, but it’s one of those games that’s easier to learn through playing. The instructions (important to note – there are significant differences between the original release and the Z-Man release; turns out I’ve got the Z-Man version and their name was part of the reason I picked it up) include a simplified starting scenario. They also include rules for modifying the difficulty by changing the number of advanced and legendary enemies, as well as scenarios that build up a campaign. With the variety of enemy cards and the scaling, this game has a lot of replayability. In fact, after the intro game, we jumped right into the full rules and almost went into a third game (we went with another 4 player game, taking advantage of a night with fewer than 5 at the table).

Rituals can add additional sources of mana, mana boosters, and even make it easier to defeat enemies that match the color of the ritual.

The player reference cards are well laid out and use distinctive icons for the powers. The minitures are plastic but solid and durable, distinctive from one another in appearance. One minor complaint was that depsite the hero characters being unique in appearance, they were identical in play. We bounced around a few ideas for special abilities and look forward to testing them out.