1942: Thoughts on XCOM After a Four-Player (Tutorial) Game

It’s my combined birthday/stag weekend this, uh, weekend, and so we kicked off the celebrations with a shot at XCOM: The Board Game. Since my three companions for the weekend have not played the game before, we had a go at the tutorial scenario, which I had already familiarised myself with beforehand. The tutorial essentially gives you a predictable setup, then walks you through two complete “rounds” of the game before continuing as the “Easy” difficulty until it concludes either with your victory or crushing defeat at the hands of the aliens.

My immediate reaction to the game after having tried it with a full complement of four people is that this is clearly how the game is intended to play. I enjoyed the couple of solo attempts I had, but it is a lot of things to keep track of at any one time, since you’re effectively doing the work of four people. When you’re against the clock, as you are in each round’s timed phase, this is very difficult to do effectively — though not, I might add, completely impossible.

With four people, meanwhile, everyone can specialise and concentrate on their own area, hopefully contributing to the overall war effort against the invading aliens. The Central Officer can concentrate on reading the game app and distributing information as well as allocating his “satellite” resources either to orbital defense against UFOs or special abilities and technologies. The Commander has overall control of the budget, and if there is a dedicated person controlling nothing but that role, it’s a lot easier to keep track of how much you’re spending during a turn, which is important because overspending carries some pretty harsh penalties!

The Chief Scientist, meanwhile, has overall control over technology research. Up to three technologies can be put into the research queue each turn, and technologies, once completed, effectively become extra special actions for one of the four players. Many of them have some sort of “automatic success” ability, allowing you to make combat or completing mission tasks easier or more resource-efficient, while others have other special effects that manipulate the game flow in some way, perhaps allowing you to “rescue” units that would otherwise be destroyed or gain resources that you wouldn’t be able to collect normally.

Finally, the Squad Leader takes control of the ground forces, and is responsible for completing missions — which bring the team closer to unlocking the final mission and, consequently, the victory condition for the game — and defending the XCOM base, which is one of the two main means through which you can lose the game. (You lose either if your base is destroyed, or two regions on the board reach the “danger zone” on the panic tracker.)

Once everyone had the rules sorted — and, unlike many Fantasy Flight games, they are pretty simple, elegant and easy to learn quickly — the game flowed nicely, and managed to become extremely exciting and tense. One of our number commented that he doesn’t usually find dice-centric games particularly exciting as they’re rather chance-based and it’s difficult to become invested in something you don’t have complete control over, but the overall setup of XCOM means that it develops a very clear sense of “narrative” as you progress through the game, and consequently those dice rolls become much more meaningful. By the end of the game, we were making up names for our Interceptor pilots; praising “Simon’s” brilliant defense of Europe and chastising “Pancho Gonzalez” for failing to defend South America adequately and ultimately costing us the game just before we could complete the final mission objective.

It’s a great game. I’m looking forward to trying it without the training wheels tomorrow, and probably failing to repel the alien invasion in spectacular manner. Unlike many co-op games, it all but eliminates the “alpha player” problem, where one player dominates the table talk and effectively runs the game by themselves by telling everyone else what to do. Because of the “timed phase” mechanic, there simply isn’t time for any one person to dominate the discussion; everyone has to take responsibility for their own area’s actions, and everyone else has to trust them to make the right calls. It’s a really interesting means of handling co-op, and it works really, really well.

Bed now, though. It is late.