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.

My brother bought me a copy of XCOM: The Board Game for my birthday, so I spent a bit of time learning it today since you can play it solo, and I’m planning on playing it with some friends this weekend.

I must confess that I’m not actually massively familiar with XCOM as a whole, though I did play UFO: Enemy Unknown back when it first came out, and I do at least own a copy of the more recent reboot, even if I have never actually booted it up as yet. I know the principle, though, and I also know that knowledge of the video game series isn’t particularly important for enjoying the board game, as the board game has a somewhat different focus than the video game.

Basically, aliens are invading and everyone is fucked unless you save them. You do this by responding to UFO sightings around the world, completing missions, researching technology and, hopefully, eventually thwarting the alien menace. While you’re doing this, the various regions of the world are gradually getting more and more panicked by the Bad Things that are happening everywhere, so you need to try and take care of them as much as you can lest your funding gets pulled from that region.

XCOM: The Board Game is a cooperative affair for one to four players. However many players are playing, four “roles” are used, with multiple players taking on more than one role if you’re playing with less than a full complement. The Commander is in charge of the overall budget. The Science Officer is in charge of research. The Squad Leader is in charge of leading the troops on the ground. And the one I’ve forgotten the name of is in charge of other important stuff like communications and whatnot.

Yes, communications; XCOM: The Board Game has an interesting twist on the usual “players against the game” formula of cooperative tabletop games: there’s a companion app for smartphones/tablets, and it is required to play, not optional. The reason for this is the “real-time” phase of each round, which requires someone to be in charge of the app and bark out orders to the other players as the app issues them; the players, in turn, then have strict time limits in which to complete their actions, and the exact “phases” through which a turn proceeds are part randomly generated, part determined by the information you pass the app about the current situation of the game.

It’s an elegant solution to the sometimes clunky nature of cooperative games that rely on “event cards” or equivalent to help build the narrative of a play session. Those who like to know all the possible things that might happen in a turn may balk at the idea of not having a deck of cards to flick through before or after the game, but the element of mystery is very much a part of the XCOM experience, as is responding to unexpected threats at a moment’s notice.

The real-time phase is pretty hectic — and, I can imagine, prone to some horrible disasters. It’s followed by a resolution phase in which the app walks you through each step in turn and tells you how to resolve each action. Unlike the real-time phase, the order of actions in which is part-randomised (though you always get new technologies and budget first in a turn), the resolution phase follows a fixed order, so learning this will allow you to formulate effective strategies.

The basic mechanic of the resolution phase is press-your-luck dice rolls. Generally speaking, for every (insert appropriate unit here) you have on a particular task, you get a blue die, which is marked with some blank sides and some “success” sides. Each task requires at least one success to complete; enemies generally require multiple successes to defeat. If you fail to get the successes you need on one roll, you can press your luck and try again — the risk factor comes in the fact that the “threat level” increases for this task each time you do it, making it more likely that you’ll take losses even if you’re ultimately successful in completing the task. Losses are determined by a special red eight-sided die; this is marked with numbers, and rolling equal to or under the current threat level (it begins at 1 and goes up to 5, so there’ll never be a guaranteed loss) counts as a loss, which usually means military units are killed and “reusable” units such as scientists and satellites are exhausted, meaning they’ll be out of action for a whole round.

The mechanics are simple to understand and seem to combine a good amount of luck and strategy. You can, of course, manipulate the amount of “luck” you’ll be relying on by assigning more units to a particular task, but there are limits in place — not to mention something of a shortage of units to scatter around the world!

I lost both the solo games I tried earlier; once from two continents falling into full-on panic (which results in an immediate loss) and once from my base being destroyed by alien intruders. I had a great time, though, and I’m very interested to see how the play dynamic changes with multiple people around the table; it’s rather overwhelming to take responsibility for everything!