Techlandia
Designed by Dan Ackerman
TL,DR Corner
- Players: 1-4
- Time (on box / actual): 60-90 minutes / 30 minutes
- Setup / Teardown Time: 5 min./5 min.
- Footprint: Small table
- Components: 2/5
- Fun-factor: 1/5
- Replayability: 2/5
- Style: Solo, dice rolling, hand-management
- Summary: a game that has a fun concept, but manages to be underwhelming in all respects.
Sometimes I pick up things on Kickstarter just because the theme sounds like a lot of fun. Such is the case with this small box game by tech journalist, Dan Ackerman. Mixing Lovecraftian lore with tech is an area I’ve quite enjoyed since getting into Charles Stross’ “Laundry Files” books, so it was with high hopes that I backed this that it would give me a simple little game with a similar vibe.
Like many other gamers I know, I like to take pictures of the games I play, especially for sharing online. You’ll notice that there are very few pictures taken to accompany this review. This is because what you see in the shot above is pretty much all you can expect to see in this game. I started feeling like maybe this game had a low level of effort attached to it, as soon as I started looking through the cards and realizing that the designer had used the same art for each card type, front and back. Backs make sense, of course, but in a game that wants to convey a Cthulian atmosphere, you want to set a mood, and none of the card art really accomplishes that. Double down on this fact with reusing the same art on each card in a given deck (all the Gear cards have the same art, all the Encounter and Investigation cards, likewise, as well as the Enemy cards) ... my heart began to sink before I’d even started reading the rules and setting up my first game.
I mean, yeah, I’m spoiled by artwork from the likes of the incredible Andrew Bosley, or Nolan Nasser, and so many others. ... well, I would just have to try the game out and see if maybe the game had more under the hood.
A game which I completed, successfully, in around 30 minutes, rules-learning not included.
The box says 45-90 minutes, and perhaps with especially ponderous players, that might be the actual time it takes to play this game.
The rules are really really simple: two actions per turn, except for playing cards from your hand of Gear, and those can give you anything from free actions to automatic combat successes. You spend one action per “move” from hex to hex. You have to use an action to Investigate a hex (the outer four to the left and right of the main column). When you Investigate, you draw a random card that either grants you a “success” (revealing a piece of the MacGuffin you need in order to win the game), or a success and spawns an “enemy” ... or a failure that can spawn an enemy, move you to another location, or other things that were fairly tame.
Oh, the goal of the game is to 1) investigate all four rooms, 2) gather four “QR code fragments” 3) take them to the Security hex, 4) scan them, one by one, with your phone’s QR code reader to figure out which one is the real deal. If you fail, oops, you are eliminated! Now, you can get “Decryption codes” by defeating enemies elsewhere, which give you an automatic retry (thus avoiding instant player elimination), so you might want to do that, too, before trying to finish the game. Assuming you find the right code, just jaunt up on your next turn, using both actions to step lively to the Elevator hex and win the game.
Of course, all of this does have to be accomplished before your 20 turns are up, and if you lose to enemies enough times, there’s a marginal reset and acceleration of the timer, and some of this might become more tense with multiple players, but due to the nature of the highly randomized encounters / investigation and randomization of the MacGuffins, plus the ability to get out of trouble or shift the trouble to other players with the Gear cards, it’s mainly going to come down to who has the best hand of Gear and has the most luck with dice rolls.
I hate ripping into a freshman effort. I like rooting for the underdog. There has to be some level of knowledge you take into designing a game before you put it out there, however, that this design shows a complete lack of understanding and/or respect for, leaving it feeling like more of a cash grab or the result of someone losing a bet with a buddy at CES.
There are inconsistencies in the card texts (ex. “Automatic combat win” vs. “Win a battle” ... what is the difference?), outright omissions where a card tells you to base your result on rolling a die and getting either a “Success” or a “Failure” ... but where there is no definition of what constitutes either, that show that either this had a very limited play test in front of a bunch of friends, or none at all.
The rule book claims that there will be “other scenarios” to be found on their site. Right now, there are two videos there... an unboxing video and a set up video for play, but not even a play through. I honestly don’t see them carrying through with extending this game, if the initial game design is any reflection of their dedication, and sadly enough, there are just too many other games on my shelf that look and play far better for my time for me to really care.
