Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space is the perfect case study of a good game idea getting totally mangled by inept design. If its disaster of a title doesn’t completely scare you off (seriously, did it take four people to come up with that?), then what’s waiting for you inside the box likely will: a clunky, tedious hidden movement/social deduction game without a single interesting element to its implementation beyond the marriage of those two genres. Encumbered by a turgid pace, monotonous cadence, and chaotic decision space — not to mention its necessitation of copious amounts of straight up guesswork — Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space ultimately adds up to merely a much more complicated (and much more irritating) riff on the widely-maligned, yet seemingly perennial Battleship. Like many a bad game before it, Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space sounds thrilling on paper. A social deduction game where the goal is to escape a failing spaceship, and half the players are secretly murderous aliens who really just want to slaughter everyone? Awesome! And all movement is hidden in order to simulate a ship-wide power outage? Double awesome!! Yeah, if only. How the game works is every player gets a personal map of the ship which they use to track their own movement and any information they might have on the whereabouts of others. The maps are split into white and gray hexagonal spaces, where white represents a “Silent Sector” and gray a “Dangerous Sector”. Players take turns moving secretly about the…
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…
Picture this: you’re walking down the street, minding your own business, when a strange old man jumps out at you from behind a tree. “Name a breakfast cereal!” he shrieks into your face. You stammer for a moment like an imbecile and cannot think of a single one, despite having inhaled a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch not one hour earlier. For reasons no one can explain, you eventually shout “Cereal!” at the top of your lungs. The strange man laughs at you and disappears in a cloud of purple smoke never to be seen again. Now let me ask you this: was that fun? Was that an enjoyable experience for you? If your answer is yes, then you might like Anomia, which essentially consists of an endless sequence of these types of situations (sans the strange old man). I, however, find this abrupt tip-of-your-tongue sensation rather unpleasant (as does pretty much everyone I know), so to build an entire game around it is, for me, a bit of a non-starter. Anomia is a party game that doesn’t work with enough players to really be a party game and is mostly just exhausting and stressful. In it, players take turns drawing cards from one of two shuffled decks in the center of the table. Each card depicts a category and a symbol. Categories can be extremely broad (“Noun”) or quite narrow (“Bicycle Brand”), and the symbols are your standard arrangement of basic geometric shapes. Turns continue uneventfully until a player draws a card with…
Pandemic is not half as fecund a core design as it may initially seem. Its social puzzle approach to co-operative gaming and fresh theme were groundbreaking, don’t get me wrong, but its mechanical innovations were simply not foundational enough to be successfully transposed wholesale betwixt systems like Puerto Rico‘s and Dominion‘s were. Apparently, its designer Matt Leacock seemed to be the only one who didn’t notice this and Pandemic‘s two follow-ups, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, burst onto the scene a short while after it like no big thang. Forbidden Island is basically babby’s first Pandemic, which is all that needs to (or can) be said about it. Forbidden Desert, while a significant improvement, is still nowhere near unique or interesting enough an experience to stand on its own in its predecessor’s wake. It doesn’t help that both games are simple to the point of mindlessness. Now I get it, these are children’s games, basically just toys, and I probably shouldn’t even bother reviewing them. On the other hand I’ve played games with lower age ratings that I consider masterpieces, so let’s do this! Let’s start with Forbidden Island, a game about hunting for treasure on a sinking island. I’m going to forego my usual structural/mechanical overview and instead paint this one in broad, abstracted terms. This will only work if you’ve played Pandemic. If you haven’t then I’m not sure why you’re even reading this, but hey, you do you. Forbidden Island is often described as Pandemic-lite (notably by Leacock himself), but to me it feels more like Pandemic-minus (minus…