Board Game Analysis – Gears of War
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This week we sat down and played Gears of War the board game developed by Fantasy Flight Games and licensed by Epic. Due to certain difficulties with schedule I was unable to play with the rest of my group. Fortunately the game can be played with just one person, but I managed to get a friend along to play as well (thanks Herman). I’d also like to point out that I’ve never played a Gears of War game nor do I know anything about the Gears of War universe
With the introduction out of the way I’ll go over the basic rules of the game so that we’re all on the same page. If my understanding of the rules might seem a little bit off I apologize and I’ll go over why I feel unsure about the rules later on in this analysis.
The basic rules and concept
Gears of War the board game is played on a flat board using different plastic figures and various cards for gameplay actions. The figures represent the player characters (space marines) and the enemies (evil aliens of different kinds) while the cards represent things such as specific weapons, random weapons, enemy types, enemy AI, player orders, player character info, mission setup and special field effects. The main cards that the player is going to see the most of are the order cards and the enemy AI cards.
The order cards have several functions, first of all they can be used by the player to either move forward, attack enemies or use the effects printed on the card itself. The numbers of effects are quite varied and ranges from ones like Move and attack to Draw two more cards or even Attack and move and Move one alien and then attack it with a +1 attack. The cards can also be used as reactive abilities granting the player bonuses in both combat and movement. Finally the cards represent player health, whenever a player takes damage from an enemy (or another player) they remove one card for every wound, if a player is wounded without any cards left on hand she is put in the bleeding position and can’t do anything until revived by a teammate (needless to say, if all players are bleeding it’s game over). At the start of a player’s turn she draws two cards until she has 6 cards on hand.
The enemy AI cards are drawn at the end of every player’s turn and dictate how the enemy aliens will move and act. Each in-game mission has different enemies with unique AI cards and also different general AI cards that affect all enemies. The battles are handled with dice; the attacker rolls the black die while the defender rolls the red one, each die can land on a 0, a 1 or a 2 or in the case of the attack die the Gears of War symbol which activates special attacks of specific weapons and enemies. Every time a player takes damage they lose an order cards from their hand, while the enemies are put in a wounded state if they take enough damage or they’re killed outright if the damage is high enough. This means that most enemies can be killed in one or two hits.
When the game is played the players move from area to area and attack enemies in a nearby area, the number of areas she can attack reach being specified by the weapons she’s carrying with her. Each weapon can also be used to overkill in which case the player discards an ammo-token and rolls a few extra die the downside of this is that if the player is out of ammo she can’t fire her weapon at all. The game is won when all players complete the primary objective which varies from mission to mission.
Phew, that was quite a bit, now that I’m done with the basic rules description let’s go to the point.
What’s… not so good about the Gears of War board game?
I have a few problems with the game. Or rather, I have a problem with the in-game instructions; the actual gameplay isn’t that bad. Those instructions I posted above are a small snipped of the actual gameplay, the actual manual is about 30 pages long and while there is an index (that I only found out about long after playing the game) some specific rules are very hard to find information about. For example: What happens when you’ve defeated all enemies in a room? Do you draw another AI card or do you simply continue? I’ve looked everywhere in the manual but I really can’t find that piece of information anywhere; I know that it exists but I can’t find it for myself. This lead to us players suddenly realizing that there were a set of rules that we hadn’t applied before, simply ignored or misunderstood and then tried to apply them.
Another complaint I have is that some of the figures are hard to tell apart. I got stumped for a while when I tried adding new enemies to the game for the first time and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which one of the player figures was supposed to be mine. I guess this wouldn’t be too much of a trouble for a Gears of War fan but for me personally I found it hard to tell certain figures apart. Finally the game took a long time to set up due to the numerous pieces and cards that you had to understand.
As for the gameplay itself: I don’t actually have that many complaints about it apart from the fact that it might be a little bit simple with only two players. When we reached the final room we defeated all enemies in about two rounds which wasn’t even close to the number of turns it took for us to complete the other parts. It seems like the game can go by very quick when you know what you’re doing and get lucky with the cards and dice rolls. The more I think of it I can’t actually decide if the game is simple or complicated, the main interactions are simple and easy to understand but there are a lot of smaller rules that makes things a little more complicated than it needs to be. Perhaps this complexity stems from the fact that the board game is trying to imitate the video game? Speaking of the gameplay…
What’s good about the Gears of War board game?
Like I said before; I don’t really have any complaints about the gameplay itself. Once the game is set up it’s rather simple and fun even with the hard-to-read rules. Sure, there are a lot of pieces active at the same time but they’re all used in different ways and nothing felt like it was unnecessary at the time of play. The enemies take commands from the AI cards, the players retaliate before the enemies can call for reinforcement and the cycle continues until all enemies are defeated (I assume, like I said, I never found the paragraph that describes what happens when you defeat them all) and the players move on to the next room.
I quite like how the card-as-health system simulates the regenerating health that the video games are famous for, not only do fewer cards mean less health but it also means fewer possibilities to do actions against enemies and move to safety meaning that a wounded player has to rely on her teammates more than a player who hasn’t taken any damage. The idea of being able to trade your cards for reactionary abilities are interesting as well. When an enemy attacks you can discard a card to gain extra defenses or attack back however, there’s no guarantee that this will work as intended and you can actually end up losing more life than if you had just taken the attack. In short, it’s a risk/reward system of sorts. The enemy AI cards are also interesting and make good use of the different enemy abilities; it’s an interesting way to simulate the video game behavior.
All of these mechanics combined with several people at once on the battlefield makes it quite tense as the order cards give you several choices at once and the AI cards ensure that you never quite know what the enemy will do next.
Target audience:
Obviously the game is for anyone who likes Gears of War, no questions. Gears of War is the primary aesthetic theme of the game and the gameplay does its best to mimic the feelings of the gameplay of the Gears of War games (to my knowledge at least) so it’s safe to assume that this is the primary audience. But who else would enjoy this game? It’s not a simple question since the game does so much to be like the game that it’s based on, but I think that anybody who’s a fan of co-operative board games for up to four players with some tactical survival gameplay with a variety of scenarios would like this game.
Summary:
I was very pleasantly surprised by the Gears of War the board game since I’ve never been particularly interested in the games themselves and the board game is, as I’ve said quite fun. The mechanics hold up well and moment-to-moment gameplay is not too terribly complicated, however the same cannot be said for the setup or the instructions of the game which can be confusing and hard to understand unless one is used to this sort of games. The main consumer would obviously be the average Gears of War fan but others can find enjoyment in the game as well.
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