Some games are bad but I see why people like them. Innovation is bad and I have a hard time seeing how anyone could think otherwise. It’s an obtuse and visionless card game that brings very little to the table and asks a TON of its players. It’s random, chaotic, frustrating, and boring. Its core system is barren, and its meta is non-existent. Never before has a game offered so many ways for cards to interact without any of them being interesting.
To play a game of Innovation you start by shuffling and laying out ten different decks of cards. The decks are named after different eras of history and numbered chronologically, while the cards are named after technological innovations that were introduced to the world during that era. One card each from decks 1-9 is randomly removed and used to represent that era’s “Achievement.” 5 “Special Achievement” cards are then placed alongside the standard achievements with various rules on how to earn them. All players draw 2 cards from deck 1 and the game is ready to begin.
A player takes 2 actions on their turn, and there are four actions to choose from: 1) draw a card, 2) play a card, 3) activate a card, and 4) score an achievement. Cards come in 5 different colors, and when you play a card it goes on top of any other cards of the same color in a stack. Since you can only activate the top cards of each stack, the most cards you have available to utilize at any given time is 5. Your top cards also affect which deck you draw from, as you always take cards from the deck matching your highest current top card (or the next stack up if that deck is currently empty). To score an achievement you must either fulfill the conditions listed for one of the special achievements or currently have 5 times as many points in your score pile as the era of the standard achievement you are looking to score (you must also have at least one top card equal to or higher than that era as well). I haven’t mentioned anything about this score pile up until now because, strangely enough, there is no standard way of scoring points in Innovation. Certain card effects give you ways you can earn points, and without such a card on top of one of your stacks you simply can’t score. Strange indeed. At least the game’s winning condition is pretty straightforward: the first player to acquire the specified number of achievements based on player count wins.
Mechanically, Innovation is best known for its “Splaying” system. Every card in the game is lined with icons around the left and bottom sides of the card. These icons are used whenever activating cards to determine if your opponents get to take the action as well. For example, if I activate a card with a “Castle” icon effect on it and my opponent has more Castle icons currently displayed on their cards than I do, then they will get to utilize the effect as well. The only exception to this is if it’s an attack effect, in which case they do not get to utilize the effect but still only suffer the consequences if they have fewer of the icon in question than I do. What this means is that literally every card you activate in the entire game forces you to count every players’ icons. Couple this with the fact that everyone’s icons are constantly changing as they are laying out new cards, and you have a serious cadence issue. It’s bad enough in a 2-player game, but with more than 2 it is disastrous. Anyways, “Splaying” refers to certain card effects that allow you to adjust your card stacks in such a way that some of the icons from the cards beneath them are still visible and therefore still counted when it comes time to activate effects (up and right being the most desirable directions to splay in, because the most amount of additional icons will be revealed that way). I’m not sure why exactly people hype this mechanism up so much, but they do. It’s not like there’s a huge amount of depth or choice around it; you can only splay when and how an activated effect tells you to. To me, it’s just more icons to count. Ugh.
Otherwise, the card effects are mostly chaotic and obnoxious, full of “Take that!” nonsense and draw-a-card-and-see-what-happens RNG. If someone has a card that is grinding your gears, the only way to defend from it is to get more icons that match the effect. The problem with that is you have absolutely no control over the cards you get, so all you can do is hope you eventually draw a card that gives you a way to get more of the icon you need (or that has an effect that forces them to get rid of the pesky card somehow). Also, the text reading to actually doing things ratio is massively out of whack in this game. I’ve played the game a fair number of times, and all I remember doing in any of my games is counting icons and reading card effects. The game essentially has no core system and the possibility space is determined entirely by whatever cards are in play. This makes whatever tactical puzzle the game presents completely skewed and uninteresting. The winning player is not the most clever, devious, or strategic. It’s whoever is able to keep track of whatever the heck is going on the best, which usually means the player most familiar with the game. Familiarity is NOT the same thing as skill (although familiarity with a game can certainly help a player acquire skill), and good games give new players everything they need to emerge victorious as long as they have a solid understanding of the rules. Innovation instead very heavily favors such boring strategies as memorize-all-the-cards and keep-a-spreadsheet-of-everyone’s-icon-counts.
Here is how I imagine Innovation was designed: Chudyk wrote a bunch of random rules on cards, then play tested the crap out of them until none seemed particularly unfair. I don’t see any other possible way this game could’ve been made. The mechanics don’t simulate anything, there’s no social component to the game whatsoever, and the decision space is constrained to the point of tactical asphyxiation. Innovation may have a civ-building “theme”, but it really doesn’t. The mental gymnastics you have to do to make its card interplay make any sort of natural sense are more complex than the game itself. This is a flavorless abstract with only the slightest of thematic underpinnings (which is an idea the rudimentary card art — at least in the original Asmadi version — seems to support). So what grand vision could Chudyk have had while designing it? What was his core design principal? If I had to guess it would be that he wanted to make a game played entirely through card effects. In other words, a system comprised entirely of a constantly rotating and shifting subset of rules. Sorry, Carl. I like playing games, not rules. If you want a game driven entirely by card effects you still need a strong core system, good theming, or an engaging meta to make it feel like an actual game and not some goofy nerd offshoot of Oblique Strategies.
A good friend of mine loves Innovation. I might even say he’s obsessed with it. Why? I just can’t say. I’ve asked him several times. There’s actually a lot of skill involved, he says. I don’t dispute that. There is definitely skill involved in memorizing the effects of 105 unique cards and pre-planning viable scoring paths based on the probability of which other cards you might draw. After all, the ten separate decks force a degree of linearity to the order the cards come out, so it’s not entirely random. Also, good Innovation players will keep track of the icons on the cards in their stacks, so if they do eventually splay them they’ll know exactly what the benefit will be. Okay, so there’s a degree of planning to the game as well. But here’s the thing. Competitive hot dog eating takes skill, and I have no interest in that. Moving to a new apartment in the middle of sweltering NYC August heat takes planning, but that ain’t exactly fun now is it? What I’m saying is that I don’t care if Innovation takes skill to play well. There are thousands of games that take skill to play well. Memorizing card effects and keeping track of icon counts are not interesting skills to base a card game on, not by a long shot. Innovation is a misfire, plain and simple, and it features none of the elements that make tabletop gaming meaningful. It’s an experience defined entirely by the cards in its players’ hands, and not at all by the people holding them.
Innovation gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.