XCOM: The Board Game

EvEvanstar10.0

This game has no physical rulebook, and the rulebook on the tablet is written and organized like a PC DOS user's manual from 1991. This game has very simple choices for players to make that felt incredibly dull. 'Where will you deploy your planes mr. budget guy?' 'I'll deploy them to where the alien ships are'. This might have been fine because of time pressure, if ultimately what the game came down to was more than dice luck. Regardless of your task, in the resolution phase you simply roll X dice where X is the number of guys assigned, and then you get a semi-random number of re-rolls to get your success tokens out of 2 of the 6 sides on each die. I'll also say that other timed games like Escape: The Curse of the Temple, Zombie 15' and Galaxy Trucker do the timer much much better, because more than one player can see or hear the countdown. Not very interesting at all. ☆ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment