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| Us trying to figure things out. |
Introduction
After setting everything up we were ready to start playing. The game is played by one to four players. You play as one of the characters in Gears of War, a COG member and you fight the evil locusts. The game is played through several missions available that is also in the video game. You start by choosing a mission, then according to what mission you chose you setup up the game according to the instructions. There is a lot of preparation to be done for this game. Each player chooses one out of four characters who have different bonuses. The amount of enemies and how the level looks are specified by the mission you chose. There is some randomization during setup so each mission will never play out the same.
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| A typical level setup |
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| Neat figures that represents the enemies in the game, locusts |
After you're done with your actions you draw an AI card. These AI cards determine what the enemies do and after the AI turn is done the turn is passed to the next player. The AI cards can be anything from attacking the nearest player or spawning in a swarm of locusts at an emergence hole. The combat is done with two types of dices, attack and defense dices. All players start with three different weapons and ammo for them. The weapons determine how many attack dices you get to roll. In emergence you have to seal the emergence whole and you do that by throwing a bolo grenade at it.
The Good
Gears of War: The Board Game is a very immersive experience once you get the hang of it. You really feel like you're being overrun by a swarm of enemies. You constantly have to make decisions that determine your survival. You can tell that a lot of thought went down into the development of this game. It's very well made, everything ranging from the beautiful figures you get with the game to the amazing level design is gorgeous. Everything about this game is high quality; it's visually appealing and feels polished.
From what I heard from my classmate Simon who is a Gears of War fan, it is very accurate to the original. It is a great abstraction of the video game, the mechanics and the aesthetics all fit the series very well. I've never played a board game that actually manages to capture the feeling of a 3rd person shooter until I played this.
The Bad
After praising it so much there surely couldn't be any faults with it? Well there is but I don't think it's that bad of a flaw. The only thing about this game that was subpar was the fact that it took a painfully long time to learn. The learning curve of this game is very steep and even when you think you know everything something new pops up.
The only way to fully learn this game is to play it, this means that the first couple of missions you play might not be the full experience because you will constantly be checking the rulebook to find out what's going on. One short mission takes about 30 minutes to prepare and one hour to play so we're talking about a lot of time going down into just learning the game. This means that it's advised to play this with someone who have a played it before so they can explain the rules for you. The instructions can be very overwhelming at first but don't let that scare you away.
The Interesting
The most interesting thing about this game is the order card system. You start the game with six order cards and you draw two each turn, you can have a maximum of six so you'll have to discard if you have too many. They are basically actions that can work in a multitude of ways. Some action cards lets you move the enemies toward you so you can ambush them and some let you draw another order card and gives one of your allies an extra turn. Some are very ordinary and let's you move three areas and perform an attack but they are all important and not a single one of them feels wasted.
There are three types of order cards; guard, dodge and follow cards. If you have a dodge order card you can discard it during a fight to increase your chances of survival. If you have a guard card you can discard it to fight back when an enemy attacks you. My fauvorite of them is definitely the follow card; the follow card can be discarded to let you travel with a fellow player during their turn. This means that if you all have follow cards on your hand in the first turn you can all four move up the level like a deadly assault team.
Oh did I forgot to mention? The order cards are also your health. If you lose all of them and are attacked by a locust you are knocked out. A fellow player can revive you if you are on the same space by discarding an order card. You have to balance and manage your order cards very carefully.
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| Two order cards, the left one being a guard type and the right one being a follow type. |
Target Audience
While this game is obviously aimed at Gears of War fans, this game is for everyone who has played a multiplayer shooter. I've never played any of the Gears of War games but I enjoyed this just as much as anyone would. It captures the feeling of working in a squad of soldiers very well. The game is made for people ages 18 and up who enjoys working in a squad of elite soldiers exterminating deadly aliens. I believe that because the game is branded with Gears of War it might scare away people who would really enjoy this.
Core System Nr. 1
The most vital system in this board game is the order card system, it enables the player to take action but also works in a multitude of ways. It is what drives the game forward and makes for many interesting situations. You have to carefully balance your order cards to make sure you have enough of them to move forward. If you end up using all your order cards on helping your teammates or guarding you are very vulnerable to locust attacks. We noticed during the game that when you were attacked you always had to make a choice whether you should discard the dodge card to increase defense or if you should hope that they roll low on their attack dices and take the hit. When you discard a card to increase your dodge you still lose one health since the order cards are your health.
Core System Nr. 2
The other core system was a tough choice for me; it would either be how the enemy worked and the AI cards or how the game was setup with missions. While both of them are important to the game everything revolves around the locusts being the antagonists. The amount of locusts are determined by the mission but what actually determines what happens is the AI cards. When first setting up the mission you take out certain AI cards according to the mission and shuffle them in a pile. Because they are shuffled it means that anything can happen when you draw from it. It is also what makes the locusts attack the players. If a player is lucky they can go several rounds without getting attacked by locusts but that means that sometime later they are going to get all dangerous AI cards at around the same time. This adds a lot of replay value to the game which means that you can play several missions over and over. It is also optional to increase the difficulty of the game in multiple ways, this means that you can always increase the challenge if you feel like there is none.
Conclusion
Gears of War: The Board Game is a very advanced and interesting game. It brings the video game shooter genre to life in a traditional board game. The overall quality of the game is very high and everything feels polished. The instructions can be very heavy and it is quite hard to learn. The game itself makes up for it faults though, as long as you give it a chance I promise you that you won't be disappointed. If you got the time why not try it, it's not that expensive. Thanks for reading.
I absolutely agree with you that the game takes a LOT of time to set up and prepare. Especially when being new players, as there are so many different elements that you need to figure out what they are and where they should go.
SvaraRaderaRegarding the good part I am not sure that I completely agree, when we played I believe that we had a somewhat different experience, possibly because of the fact that we were all new to the game as well as to the rest of the Gears of War franchise.
Maybe it is because we did not really get the hang of it but we felt the swarming of enemies where rather overwhelming and at some points it felt almost ridiculous and we started to wonder if we had misinterpreted or made mistakes. When taking the great amount of time required going through the rules for an answer we found that that was not the case. For us it felt too much too soon and it made it very difficult for us to learn and get into and appreciate the game.
I do agree with you that it is very polished, one thing that we had problems with though, was that many of the characters, especially the COGs where really difficult to tell apart and most of them were very difficult to figure out which character card or type they belonged to. The character details were way too small and too similar to tell apart and we had a hard time keeping track of which character belonged to which player.
I can definitely believe that it is close to the original and that to the target audience of Gears of Wars fans, this recognisability could be what the best part of the game is.
I most definitely agree with you that the difficulty of learning the game was the worst part of the game; I believe that it can scare away a great part of a possible audience for the game, narrowing the audience down to hardcore Gears of Wars fans.
It felt as if they had put so many little elements into the game that they were all drowning amongst each other and as if they did not manage to convey all necessary information in a straightforwards, easy to find way. We had to search back and forth in the massive amount of text constantly to try to find things. When we started playing we realised that we had no idea how many lives each character has for example, it took us a long time and a lot of searching to find the answer.
I think that they could have benefited from organising the way they wrote down the rules in a different way, making things easier to find by putting them in a more logical way. Also they could have written the rule book so that it is clearer what section is about what, for instance more visible and explanatory headlines; so that it is easier and faster to scan for the information you need at the moment. This would decrease the time spent preparing for the game while letting the players actually play, experience and enjoy the game instead.
I do not know if any of your group had played the game before, but I agree with you that it probably would have helped us. It is very possible that we would have had a completely different experience while playing it if we had been playing with an experienced player. We could very well have completely loved the game instead, but the mush of information and the complexity as well as the time spent trying to understand the easiest things unfortunately scared us away from the game.
Part 2
SvaraRaderaThe order card system is absolutely the most interesting system and we enjoyed the fact that it was correspondent to health as it creates an interesting dynamic in how to spend them. I could argue that this was also the best part of the game, possibly because it was one thing that we understood pretty well.
The guard, dodge and follow options were really appreciated by us since it was pretty much the only chance we had when facing a swarm of locust enemies. When we played it mostly felt necessary to use them as we were attacked constantly by a horde of enemies, it would be a kill or be killed kind of situation, which I believe is something that you would actually experience in the Gears of War video games so I feel that it is a good thing that they have managed to translate that into a board game.
Probably because of how our AI deck was shuffled, leaving us constantly attacked, I felt that my favourite of them was the guard type of card. I am not entirely sure that we completely understood how the movement worked and were always facing a wall of enemies, so the follow card was not as much of use to us when we played as it seems to have been for your group.
You are right about the game being aimed at Gears of Wars fans; I would even like to narrow down your interpretation of the target audience to being only them. I have learnt that the developers of this game also created Battlestar Galactica the board game and we had the same experience there, the games are very much aimed at a fan base that they are trying to please by putting all they know from their favourite game (or TV-show) into a board game in order to expand the franchise.
You say that the game is for people of the age 18 and up, but I would think that this might be a case where they aim a game at an older audience to get the interest of a somewhat younger audience, although the complexity of the game probably requires a certain amount of maturity. Also I would like to change the word people to male players, immediately when picking up the box, the other girl on my team and I, looked at each other and said that this is definitely targeted at a male audience. With that said I do not believe that they automatically aim to alienate female fans but rather that they know their fan base as a younger male audience.
Considering the core systems I agree with you on the order cards as being one of them as it is pretty much what makes up the gameplay of the players. I would not say that the way you set up missions is one of them as I feel as if that is more something that is used to gain more replayability by adding some randomness. The AI is however a very important part of the game and it is interesting that they manage to include enemy AI instead of having other players play as the “bad guys”.
I wish that we would have played with someone familiar to the game or that we were familiar with the Gear of War franchise as I feel when reading your analysis that we might have enjoyed and understood the game a lot better. It really seems as if your group had a completely different experience from us.
I fear that the developers have alienated a large possible audience by making it so difficult to understand that only players that really love the franchise can truly enjoy it.
Part 2
SvaraRaderaThink about it like cut scenes in video games, how much cut scenes would you sit through to play for 30 minutes? A minute or 2 before you start getting bored most likely. Set-up is basically the same as that, you want to play, but to play you have to set up, so you are a little more enthusiastic to set up. But a 1 to 2 ratio is still a bad ratio. I would say that 1 to 4 is the absolute minimum and many board game designers know this today. So they build smaller, simpler games that work without almost any set up. Look at games such as sushi go or zombie dice. They got 30 seconds set-up time but give a lot more gameplay than 60 seconds. They give 10-20 minutes of gameplay.
The Target audience for this game is in my opinion 15-20 male who enjoy the 3rd person genre that also loves to play co-op games, basically the same person that would play the original gears of war game. The art and aesthetics are aimed for that and the dream of Badass hunky marine guy is more often than not a male dream than a female dream.
The game is also way too complex for someone younger than 15 to play, there is just too much to think about and acting on behalf of the enemies.
More so the game is definitely aimed towards socializers and explorers if you look towards Bartles Players Types and if you look at O.C.E.A.N. or the 5 domains of play the game is aimed toward the people with high Extraversion, Agreeableness and conscientiousness. People that like playing together or enjoys a challenge, which they have to actively work towards.
So to sum it up, my thoughts about the game is basically that the game was too complex for its own good, it needed more play time for the setup time it required and that it really needed easier to get into rules. That is pretty much it, it was after all that an enjoyable game, but I think this game miss a lot of people by being hard to get into and having a bad gameplay to setup ratio.
That’s it from me, a Van and a Game Designer
Part 1
RaderaInteresting, interesting.
As a game of Fantasy flight it seems reasonable that it should take a lot of time to set up, be glad you didn’t take Android!
Setting up a game is generally the biggest flaw of board games and the more board games you play, the more it becomes a problem. A game is only worth the setup time if it has enough interesting play to make up for it. Something that I didn’t feel Gears of War did.
Having half an hour setup time for an hour of game-play is not much. Battlestar: galactica has the same setup time but has 3 times the gameplay. So for me that is a much bigger problem than. Turning this into just an hour of unpacking and rules reading for a first time player is too much. A new player would try to get into it but give up after a while.
But if they are able to get into the game and start playing they will find a lot of interesting mechanics in the case of Gears of War just as you are saying, the order system is brilliant, trading health for extra actions or movement is a very strong mechanic, it gives the players the freedom of choice. The one problem with it is that defense cards can end up in a weird in between state, where they don’t really protect you, you always take a wound.
But all in all, the orders are interesting and really empower the game, it makes sense to use them and the flow is created by them, the players know what they can do and when they can do it.
I don’t see them as the best system though, the best system, when I played was the AI. It allowed for single-play which is a rare feature, in any type of board game. Playing single-player is most likely very hard, but as it is possible I have to give the designers a pat on the back for it. Designing a board game AI that is not very simple, acts differently and is still hard to beat is hard, very hard, especially when you put it into a game which tries to put the hectic, action paced 3rd person shooter to life in a genre which is stale by nature.
Personally I never got into it that much, so I don’t find the good to be that good in your text, but I’m not a big fan of the third person genre, and it definitely puts a lot of that on the table, which is a good thing as this is what it tries to do, it’s just not to my liking and I don’t feel the immersion.
The thing it does well, objectively well, is translating the 3rd person genre to the tabletop. You really feel that a lot of thought has been put into the game as you play it, they must have been researching on this game for so long, to get the feeling right. The level design is nice together with some other details, it’s aesthetically pleasing but that is because the original Gears of War is, since so much of the things used in the game are inspired by the original game series.
The bad things you mention about the game are fully true. I know that, I myself would most likely never learn the game, if I didn’t play it with someone who knew the rules. I didn’t feel like I completely know everything this game has to offer, I more know about the basics and tried it around a little.
Also the set-up to gameplay ratio is terrible in this game. That is as I mentioned earlier, one of the bigger blows to the games longevity. I’ve had games that have 20-40minutes set up times just, never being put up due to this reason, even if it’s a great game. People won’t go through the work that is 30 minutes set up time to play for 1 hour, even if that is really enjoyable game play.