hey everybody final thoughts time for voidfall but before i begin please keep in mind this is a paid preview now let's talk about this game because it is big voidfall is a big ambitious game and it absolutely pulls it off now whenever you talk about a 4x space game the question's always going to come up is it like twilight imperium and i know a little bit about toronto imperium so i feel uh you'll be qualified to answer this question no it's it's not like twilight on pyramid at all that's a good thing because if you're just trying to make a game that's like twilight imperium but is a euro or whatever it's that's not going to be great for you i mean for one thing the the two styles don't really mix that well but regardless it's important to have your own style it's important to have your own you know flavor your own identity with the game and voidfall 100 has its own identity this game is its own thing uh through and through and uh it really doesn't feel like playing any other kind of game for me anyway so i want to talk about a bunch of different things but i'm going to start with what to me feels like the biggest like standout mechanic of this game which is the action cards so these guys they'll break your brain a little bit at first because there are nine action cards you start with each are focus cards each card has three different abilities on it three different actions and when you take when you play them you're gonna take two of those actions usually sometimes you take three sometimes you'll play another card on top of it and you get a fourth one but regardless you're gonna play you're gonna take at least two actions or you know up to two actions and these are a lot to take in because almost all of these actions are different so when you start the game you kind of have to go through every single one and that seems like you're going through 27 different actions you can take that would be too much but it's not quite that because this game relies very heavily on iconography so once you learn what the icons are you can go through and you say oh okay i get that this is this and that's that um but on top of that the way these actions work because you're playing one card per turn and then you are taking a few actions it really it makes it so that you are deciding what flavor your turn is going to be and that i i really like so if you just take like the names of the cards you know the the ideas of them there's like reinforcement this is all about ships you're going to want to put ships on the board uh you need shipyards to do that you're also going to be putting defensive stations out on the board and moving your ships around so uh and lastly you can do a little bit of defense and a little bit of your society track so those are three different actions but they do all have they share the same through line to be you know in a way some of the cards are a little bit more varied uh than others but they're they all kind of follow the same idea uh or at least you know within the card so even though this you know prosperity is gonna give me three very different things the flavor of it is the same and so that makes it a lot easier to say like okay i want money let me play this prosperity card because even though it's not directly getting me money it is advancing my uh economic track that can help me put out banks it's also going to reward me for having banks and sciency things and stuff and i can potentially get an agenda and i can put down you know some defenses and stuff and those are going to help me in other ways so even though i might not know exactly what i want to do i can whittle down my options by saying like okay well i want to focus on this one type of thing what are the cards that let me do that these two okay cool between them what's best for me so it starts off looking like something overwhelming and when you first play the game when you sit down here for your first round it does take a minute to get into it but once you get past that once you get a little bit more familiar with it you start to realize just how much choice this game is giving you and how much this game is going to let you play exactly how you want to play because you can be aggressively combative um you know you're always going to need to fight a little bit with the the systems around you but you can really focus on that or you can focus on building up your economy only expanding a little bit but making sure that where you expand to gets even stronger and building up your economy in that way you can focus on technology so that even though you might be a little bit more poor a little bit weaker you can make up for it in a bunch of those different ways there's a a lot of different ways to play this game and the game lets you choose whatever one works best for you because you always have the options to try something a little bit different uh so and and the cards are a big part of that it is a lot i'm not gonna lie the first time you play it seems like it's too much but then you start to realize how much crossover there is and how much they kind of work together and then once i hit that point i even though yes there are complex decisions in the game that was more about the strategy and more about what i wanted to do uh and and a lot less of like this game is just throwing too many things at me now i felt comfortable with that uh what what became the really interesting part of it was realizing how many tools i had and figuring out what was the best one for my situation so i really enjoy that about this um on top of that like like i said within the game you have a lot of different ways to make the game your own but before you even start playing you can choose your scenario now i only got to see a couple of them because you know prototypes but i got to see a lot of really different ways of playing there's the starter scenario which i really like it's a it's a pretty standard board but the players are separated by a long stretch of systems and there's a bunch of voidborn in the middle and the technologies in that because the technologies are different from scenario to scenario those focused a little bit more on economy than warfare the game that i played for the run throw run through was a little bit more combat focused so there were you know dreadnoughts in there as well as torpedoes or uh you know deep space cans there's a lot of uh military stuff and different ways to eliminate the voidborn as well but also to attack each other so the different scenario that you're going to play is also going to affect what kind of you know game you're going to have not only with just the shape of the map but the technologies that you have available and also sometimes they're just special rules the this scenario that i was playing with had this vortex in the middle that made up six different systems all adjacent to each other that's cool it also had these fallen systems weren't controlled by voidborn but when you take them over you get a special tech out of it you get a bunch of bonuses out of it that you change things up there are other scenarios that you can have that have like a peaceful planet that doesn't have any voidborn or there are even uh co-op and solo scenarios now i wasn't able to play the co-op version but i got to look at the rules of them to some extent and they definitely look interesting um you're sort of going up against a uh a point total and the voidborn are going to have you know certain amount of points based on a bunch of different uh factors and you are trying to beat that total um and so uh it's but you're working together to do it i think it's going to be really cool obviously i haven't had the chance to try it but it's one really just interesting that you're making a 4x game that is co-op that's something that doesn't happen but it looks like it's going to be pretty interesting as well now this game is made uh by mind clash games and mind clash uh for me what i best know them for is anachrony and if you've played an acronym uh you might be you might find this kind of familiar ground it has i think the same level of complexity as an acronym i find it anachrony to be a little bit less complex rule-wise but a little bit more complex strategy-wise this one i think there's a little bit more some more rules to to learn upfront but the strategy is a little bit less taxing for me and i actually really like this about this game um there's a lot of different ways to score points and like i said you have the option of you know playing however you want there's always ways to make to earn points with the direction that you're going whether that's combat or science or economy whatever so one of the things that i had my criticisms of anachrony is that sometimes it feels like you're doing a lot of different things and not getting a lot of points out of it but in this game you are constantly getting points and it's a little thing but and maybe yeah i i'm a kid at heart and i like when number big but it's it feels very rewarding to get something for your efforts and so in this game sometimes it definitely feels like you don't know what the best move is and you really have to study the board and really have to think choose your cards wisely make your decisions uh the best way because there's no randomness here i'll talk more about that in a second but or very little randomness but so so when you make that decision you know like i am making the best decision that i can with what i have and when you do that and it takes like eight of those decisions to make a few points that doesn't feel great here every few actions especially in the later game you are making you are earning points and sometimes you're earning a lot of them the the game that i played uh the first couple games that i've played i'm scoring two 300 points or something like that um and on its own that means nothing you know it anyone can say this is worth things but that's because like there are so many different sources of points in this game and i like figuring out the best avenues for that figuring out what agendas you're gonna get because yes you can get a lot of agendas a lot of different ways to score points we have to balance that because having agendas costs resources uh unless you get a bunch of trade tokens but if you're holding onto the trade tokens that means you're not getting being able to use the extra actions on the cards so there's a lot of push and pull a lot of give and take in that way so yes you do have to make these you know sometimes difficult decisions about how you want to get to where you're going but i feel like there are a lot of stops along the way it's not just i am taking a circuitous route and eventually i'm going to get somewhere you are making progress as you go it's a little thing but i i feel a lot more engaged when that's happening so i think that's a very smart design now speaking of the design let's talk about the visual design because i i mean i love it it's the artworks by you know tool you know it does great work so no surprise but i i love these character sites the the entirety of the of the design work i think is really good but the character designs when there's actually very minimal like story about these guys like i'm just looking at house cortazar this guy with his ex-face helmet and his big gun and on the other side there we've got house uh bellaton and these people with just covering their uh faces with these you know red spaces but you can see behind it there's like their brain is exposed and there's wires coming in there is so much flavor in these designs which is interesting because this is not really a narrative game in that sense you know uh very briefly comparing it to you know say quan imperium is very much a narrative game there's a lot of story within it this has the prompt at the beginning saying you know there's the galactic empire the void born are in and they're corrupting systems and you want to fight them and uh be the best house at the end of the game that's about all the story you get but you can fill in the blanks a lot not only with just the looks of these but because each different race or each different faction has a couple of starting agendas the agendas also determine what tech you start with and the tech is unique to your faction so there's two different uh ones you can choose and that'll also kind of determine some of your starting setup determines uh whether you're gonna be like first player or sec player whatever so you fill in the gaps a lot with this because yeah this guy has big gun but you know that that means that oh this faction is a little bit more militaristic so the two different options i have both of them were military powers to come with whereas belton had one kind of military option one kind of economic option so they're a little bit more versatile and on top of that while the factions that i got and i've been playing with are otherwise the same i do know that there are going to be more factions than that in the in the game and they are going to be a little bit more unique and have uh potentially like uh variable player powers and stuff i think different uh potentially different tracks as well so there's just a lot of character might not be a lot of story in this game but there's a ton of character and i absolutely love that um i will say i've mentioned that there's a ton of iconography in this game um i've talked to the publishers i know there's going to be a uh what do you call it a reference sheet and then i think it's going to be vital unfortunately i did not have one but i was able to learn it well enough that i you know once you you steep yourself in these icons you figure it out it's not too bad sometimes it's a little small in these uh tech tracks especially it's these icons get really tiny but um again i think that they're working on that and trying to improve it um in just that little bit of visual design but again that's kind of minor once you know the game it's not too bad you're able to figure these things out and uh it's it's a very uh minor minor quibble that i have um i'm just i'm just trying to think about you know people with uh you know less than i i happen to be blessed with 20 20 vision so i i do okay with it people might have a tiny bit of trouble with that but visual wise that's the only thing that i could even think to to criticize about this um because i just love the whole setup of it there's also you can't quite see it in the run through probably but there's on the the player boards and the character boards there's just this little bit of like this is gonna sound bad there's a little bit of grime to it uh what i mean by that it's just like the this looks like a console on a ship and it's a lived-in console like it's a the ship has seen action and so it's scratched it's a little a little gritty and that's i think to this game's credit because like the idea is that this is an old empire your house is old it's been around for a long time it's just that they've now been sprung into action those little tiny storytelling details and like i said it's not a storytelling game but you just add those little details it really brings you into the setting that i can i really really appreciate um what else uh oh one last thing i wanna talk about gameplay-wise i think a really smart decision is these fleet bases uh and how they work so you've got the ship minis and these slot into the bases which is one a great way to cut down on the number of minis that you have to print because you slot this in and this can be one to three different corvettes or one of three you know fl fleet worth of these corvettes and so yeah that's that's cutting down on space it also uh cuts down on you know the space that you're using on the board uh but on top of that this is tied into the gameplay you're putting these fleet cubes on and this represents how much of the fleet you can manage at any given time so when these are destroyed it's not like you're losing the ship these go back to your player board because yeah some of your ships were destroyed that's you know that sucks but you are able to manage a smaller fleet easier on top of that you are only allowed to have two fleets in one system at the end of your turn or at the end of each action i think so while you can merge these easy enough you just do that and then you know that's one that's one fleet now um when you are working with the bigger ships like this dreadnought this big beefy boy then yeah this becomes an issue you need to make sure that you are being efficient with it so it's it's one of those things where i think a design i don't know what came first whether the design decision uh first because i think this is a great you know cost saving technique to to i mean cut down production costs but also to you know have less clutter on the board i think that's a really smart idea but on top of that you're able to make it fit into the gameplay and make it part of your strategic decision making that is just such a great marrying of ideas i i didn't want to let that go without mentioning it because i think it's just a really solid choice so that oh and then obviously when you are getting into combat that's quick and easy mostly uh comet is deterministic so when you start a combat you know whether you're gonna win or not which means that you're probably always gonna win every combat that you start nothing's nothing is by chance at that point and the idea is you know this is a campaign's worth of combat this is fleets hundreds thousands of ships that are involved so it's not any it's not down to any you know little bit of uh heroics or surprises or anything like that you you know and this is kind of true for a lot of military you know that like depending on what you bring to bear you know kind of know what the outcomes are gonna be so there's a little bit less surprise in that sense but it also means that you can put a lot more effort into the strategy of it into maneuvering your forces in just the right way that you are going to succeed when you want to or that you know what your opponents are bringing to bear and you know how to react to it so that is a really big deal now each ship does have its own special abilities corvettes are very simple but the dreadnoughts and then i also had sentries which i didn't end up using but could have those are uh completely different sentries are like mobile defensive structures but the dreadnoughts are just big tanks and that would be a lot to keep in mind but what they've done which i think is really smart is i didn't show this in the run through because i think it would have been a little confusing but they've got this uh what'd you call it it's like a combat specific reference sheet and it's modular so this is telling you what you know different defensive structures do what corvettes do because you're always going to have those in the game and then a modular uh have these little modular sections that you know you'd lie this down on the board but these lock-ins and now if you've got sentries you know that during the approach this is what they do during the salvage stuff that's what they do and then same with dreadnoughts they add you add a little bit more and you can just sort of see what they've got going on it's a really simple way to keep in mind the extra little bit of information of like ships are a little different especially if they are upgraded or not it would otherwise have been something that that you'd kind of like recheck with a rule book and remember but nice little reference uh i think that's excellent and that's why i don't have any concerns about like them being able to handle the reference sheet for all the iconography because they've shown that you can make something simple reminding you just enough to get you what you need so that's i think pretty much all i want to say about voidfall i think it's a fantastic game uh if you are looking for a hard euro because this is a hard euro uh you know there's a lot of a lot of choices a lot of you know intense strategy there's a lot of economics involved um so got to know that going in going in it's it's quite a game um but if you're looking for a hard euro with a really distinct style and a lot of player agency then definitely check out uh voidfall um but regardless i want to thank you all so much for watching love having you here love being here to to show this game off to you uh so thank you for watching and i will see you folks next time bye
2021-09-30