Review of gears of war board game

For some, that theme may be a negative. It is a great co-operative experience with some unique mechanics regardless of the theme.

Teamwork is essential in this game. Unlike some games where you can sprint through to the end, in this game you need to take your time and not rush ahead. If you do, and you get injured, you will need to wait for your teammates to come to your rescue. This may end up putting everyone in danger. Every choice you make has its risk. You will need to conserve ammo tokens as they are few and far between.

One of the interesting mechanics behind this game is that your weapons have two modes of firing. Standard and Overkill. Overkill uses an ammo token, but will have a better chance at successful kill. Knowing when to use what method and when will also contribute to your victory!

It has a great AI deck that keeps the pressure on the heroes. The tension these cards build is amazing. There are points where the amount of enemies seems somewhat manageable, and the end is in sight.

Then a swarm of locust rush in and combat can quickly get out of control. Advantage is given to the enemies. They attack with more dice, have unlimited ammo and unlimited range.

This just adds to the tension and difficulty. It makes the game harder, but without it being a total slaughter every time. Even if you lose, you can see where you could have done something different in order to have survived a bit longer. But, sometimes a bad dice roll can make your best laid plans blow up in your face, so there is that luck element to this game. When trying to close an emergence hole, we ending up using all of our grenades with not a single success roll!

It forced us to make a mad dash to an equipment icon to restock. Luckily we made it and made it back relatively unscathed in order to close the hole and move the mission forward.

How many cards you have in your hand indicates how healthy your hero is. This gives even more weight to your decisions. So you need to use this to your advantage and wisely. Some may not like this mechanic, but I found it again fit well with the theme. In the video game you are constantly facing the hordes with too little of everything, and losing health rapidly is one of those things.

You can never truly die, you just need your team to survive long enough to revive you. Once you get the hang of things, the straightforward objectives can be a bit simplistic, but this is where the missions and AI deck step in to make you work for your success.

The game also scales well in its difficulty which makes the solo game just as fun as a game with four players. Even though there are set missions that you have to complete, the replay value is high as the maps are randomized and the decks will be drawn differently.

No two missions will be exactly alike! The components themselves are of really high quality. All the miniatures are very detailed, but I wish they would have had the heroes adopt poses that vary more than they do. At a glance to the board it is very easy to mistake one hero for another. But this is a minor complaint.

The boards are modular and are pretty durable, the art on them is sparse, but I feel is enough to keep with the theme, while allowing ease of use. The rule book is well laid out and are simple to follow and understand. Along with lots of examples and diagrams for set up and different situations you may encounter really makes this game a joy to learn and teach. Cards make up most of the components, and they are of equally high quality as the rest.

Overall this game is a ton of fun. It is a pure cooperative experience that, while straightforward to play, has layers of strategy and replay value. Although there are only a few missions, the modular board and random set up of cards will keep each play through fresh and challenging.

Everything looks great and it all ties into the theme nicely. It is exceptionally well designed. Futurewolfie loves epic games, space, and epic games set in space. You'll find him rolling fistfuls of dice, reveling in thematic goodness, and giving Farmerlenny a hard time for liking boring stuff. Your Name required. Your Email required. Your Website optional.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Home Featured. By Wolfie on February 3, Featured Reviews.

But hang on again, because those cards are also your health. Oh, yes. Now you're getting it. It's kind of ridiculous. By so much as moving, your boots are filling with blood. It's worth it for the atmosphere of players getting shot and seeing their options devolve like so much crumbling, masculine masonry.

But this is a modern board game, and it knows that players being eliminated is no fun for anyone - so, should you need to discard cards when you have none, instead you'll simply "bleed out" in the Gears style. There is no sitting still, though, because on everyone's turn you'll be drawing a card off the Locust AI deck.

They'll either attack, run at you, or yet more will spawn. This isn't so surprising. Today, most co-op boardgames are powered by panic, Pandemic being the most well-known: a game where players fly around the world as sleep-deprived disease control specialists, chewing their nails down to the quick as four plagues spread exponentially. What's interesting about Gears, and where it does deviate from the video game, is that you're not scared of the Boomers or Wretches flattening themselves against you like so much plastic paparazzi.

They're only a well-placed Bolo Grenade from becoming so much meaty kibble. What scares you is the slow-burning reduction of your character, over half an hour, from a tooled-up professional to an exhausted lump with a scavenged Boom Shield and a Boltok Pistol and no cards at all.

You're panicking. You're looking from your cards, to the board, and back to your cards. And you're having fun with your friends because they're all in the same sinking boat.

Gears of War also represents a compromise that's unique to board gaming. As a puzzle - and it is a puzzle - it doesn't quite work. Let's say you, commanding a battered Fenix, wedge yourself in some cover, only for two Drones to come crawling out of an emergence hole. Do you:. I have no idea what the answer is, because the correct choice lurks down the gun barrel of the game's systems.

More stuff probably won't spawn unless your friends kill some. The Drones might not attack, or they might assault you horribly. And could your friends be doing better work elsewhere? They don't know either. But hang on again. This is actually OK, because it makes Gears surprising. It's an almost forgotten pleasure, but the box you're paying for here actually contains the arcane thrill of rolling dice and playing toy soldiers. There's still room for moments of brilliance: if someone plays a card to follow you then he'll have no health, but oh my god he has the boomshot and then he can clear that whole room and do it, do it and YEESSSSS.

Your friends high-five you as you temporarily haul their asses out of the fire. But the moments that define Gears are when the game excites you with a sudden appearance, a rush of enemies, a doomsday roll of the dice that no-one could have predicted.

Gears of War isn't trying to be a perfect puzzle. It's trying to be fun, and it succeeds. So instead, where I'll criticise it is that actually, as a board game, it doesn't make the most of your friends. Context is needed. Take the spectacular board game Ghost Stories, which forces players to fight back-to-back against an apocalypse of ghosts - your fates so knotted that a player might decide to sacrifice themselves and you might then talk them out of it.

Other co-op board games, like Space Alert and Escape: The Curse of the Temple, have players screaming at each other because the game takes place in real time. Then there are Shadows over Camelot and Battlestar Galactica: games where you watch one another doggedly because someone at the table is a traitor or a Cylon, a double agent who wants everyone else to fail. These are games that bring you closer to your friends. By contrast, your sole interaction with your friends in Gears is a verbal scraping as you argue the semantics of whether to move now and attack later, or attack now and move later.

At its best, you all cheer as someone pulls off a risky gambit, buying you a few feet of breathing room. At its worst, it turns Gears of War into four people sat around stepping on each other's sentences as they state rickety opinions built on imperfect information. There's also the odd question of who Gears is for. It doesn't capture the video game's high-octane head-shredding and the theme's unlikely to make a dent among haughty board gamers.

But I'll tell you who it's for: it's for anybody in love with the idea of rolling dice with their friends. It's for anybody in touch with that untouchable inner child that lets us enjoy moving a tiny plastic man behind two-dimensional cover. Gears of War isn't a perfect board game.

But when you find a Boom Shield card and spend the rest of the game wading forward like hell's own riot police, or clear an entire room of Wretches with one artfully deployed grenade, you won't care. It's not a must, but if your finger ever finds itself hovering over the checkout button on a website - or, better still, you're in a hobby shop and you find yourself holding that big, glossy, shrink-wrapped box - I'd say: spoil yourself.

We want to make Eurogamer better, and that means better for our readers - not for algorithms. You can help! Become a supporter of Eurogamer and you can view the site completely ad-free, as well as gaining exclusive access to articles, podcasts and conversations that will bring you closer to the team, the stories, and the games we all love.

Read the Eurogamer.