Forge War

EvEvanstar1,6

This is a nice idea for a game with a few interesting things going on, but ultimately it seems like it wasn't completely thought out. The general idea is that you play sort of James Bond's "Q" to a roster of unnamed misc hero types. You have to buy quests for them to go on, build their weapons for them, and then build more weapons for them as they manage to lose the weapons they had after each adventure. You do this by playing 'hey that's my fish' in a cleverly designed mining area of the board. To begin with, the graphic design in this game is really award. The quest cards are hard to read, the adventurer tokens and the way you track their equipment and development seem poorly thought out, the quest tracking cubes are the smallest board game component I've ever seen in a game, and I own a number of splotter games. The progress of the round takes you from the top right corner of the board to the lower right to the lower left to the top left. The game is also, clearly too long for the level of interesting things you do on your turn. I don't have a problem with long games, one of my favorite games is the original civilization. For a game to be long, it needs to feel satisfying, like you are really building something, and this game I didn't have enough to think about, especially between turns. Clearly the designer got some feedback about this, but rather than fix the problem he band-aided it with alternate modes. You can play the full game of 18 rounds that's way too long, or you can just play the first 6 rounds which is way too short, or you can play the fast forward mode, which shortcuts out the first 6 rounds, so you just play the last 12. It feels like a chaotic mess. I really think if this game had another year in development it would have been something special, as I love the method of resource gathering, and I like the idea of the game. :nostar: Art, Iconography and components functional :star: Clever or interesting mechanisms :nostar: Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players :nostar: Multiple plays stay interesting :star: Low or mitigatable luck elements :star::nostar::nostar::nostar::nostar: Raw enjoyment