Month: April 2026

Flash Point: Golden State Heroes. A Solo and Cooperative Review After Full Playthrough

Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is a cooperative game about being firefighters rescuing people from a fire! It’s the third or fourth (or even fifth?) version of the Flash Point series of games. This particular one was on Kickstarter back in June 2025, promising delivery in January 2026. It arrived at my house in April 2026, so it’s about 4 months late (which isn’t bad in Kickstarter land).

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a pretty thick oversized box!  See the Coke Can above for scale

The reason it’s so thick is because there are 4 double-sided boards!  (2 of them go together to make a third board, so there are really only 6 different “boards”).

Each player assumes the role of a firefighter, each with different abilities!  The firefighter markers are above …

But you want to pick one of the characters.  The base game comes with 9 different characters (and if you got the Back In Action expansion, a bunch more!)   Each character has a special power that really changes how they interact with the game!

You might notice “Hey! Those are envelopes! Rich, why are they envelopes? That’s weird!!” Yup, this is a campaign game, and you will get to keep your gear in those envelopes between games.

So, this is a campaign game, with a 6 episode arc!  Don’t get TOO excited, because there’s not really that much stuff that follows you between games.  Really, the only thing that follows you is your gear.  Now, each GAME is actually quite different, as described by the Call Guide book above. 

Each episode of the Campaign has some new rules/new concepts for just that game: see above for the rules for episode 4.  It’s not really much of a spoiler; there’s no real story unfolding between games that will be revealed.

The gear is pretty cool; you usually get 4 and choose 2 at the start of the game (in later games, you draw 2 and use the previous gear).  But you get to CHOOSE extra powers to augment your built-in power!  

See as Lisa Beckett (whose base power is to mitigate Fire cards) chose stuff related the Supression Blast actions, so they can augment each other!  That’s some of the fun of this game, is that you get to CHOOSE some of your gear to go along with your innate power!

To win, you have to save 7 people (dogs and cats are people too) before the building collapses, or before 4 people get burned up!  That’s right, if you fail to save someone (because the fire engulfs them), people (dogs and cats are people too) will die!  So, this is a race to save 7 people!

Players traverse a map, looking for POIs: “Points of Interest” (the blue ? markers above).  Usually, the POIs are people (remember, dogs and cats are people too), but sometimes the POI is empty! NO!  

To save a POI (after you flip to a people side), you have to carry them out.  Sometimes, they are healthy enough to walk out on their own, but you need to get them to a “safe place” (usually the ambulance) to count as a “saved person”!

Along the way, smoke and fires comes out!  Every turn, you will roll dice and place a smoke on the cross: see as we place a Threat on 6-8!  Now, normally that would be a smoke (which isn’t QUITE fire), but since it’s adjacent to fire already there … that smoke immediately becomes fire!

This is an action point game: each player has a certain number of action points to spend per turn: see chart above.  (These are nice player summary cards).   It’s only one action to extinguish smoke, but two actions to extinguish fire!  Usually, it’s just one action point to move, but saving people around is pretty intensive, it’s 2 AP to move a victim with you…. 

To be clear, this is NOT a real-time firefighter game!  Players decide how to spend their actions WITHOUT a timer.  If you wanted a more frantic real-time Firefighter game, check out Firefighters on Duty!  See our review of that here! 

There are lots of other little rules, but the most important is that if you have to place a threat on a place with fire, it explodes!  This might a little like  Pandemic, but instead of disease cubes exploding, fire explodes out in all 4 directions!  It’s so much harder to fight fires after the fire explodes and spreads!! Even worse … those fires it may weaken the structure of the building and it may collapse!  Fires are bad, mkay?

This game has a LOT of nice components.  Nothing is super awesome, but all the components are good quality and easy to read.   And there are QUITE a few components in here (see above), which is why you need the extra tall box for this!

Rulebook

The rulebook is pretty good; I have a few issues with it.  

The rulebook gets an A- on The Chair Test!  It fits perfectly on the chair next to me, it has plenty of pictures that are easy to see, and a font that’s easy to read!  It doesn’t waste too much space.  I think the only reason it isn’t an A is that I wish the font were just a little bit bigger.  But Solid A- on the Chair Test!  This rulebook is the perfect size and doesn’t droop AT ALL on the chair next to me!

The Components and intro are good enough, if a little cramped.  

The rules are generally well-spelled out, but as you get into the game, there are a lot of new rules that come out and some of these interactions are not well-specified. There’s going to cracks, helicopters, lift-basket, new gear, new spaces, new vehicles, new rubble, … all sorts of new stuff!  You’ll have questions about how things interact.  Sometimes it will be there, sometimes it won’t.  The nice thing is that this is a VERY thematic game, so can kinda make a call based on theme.

A simple example is my rock, Camila Ruiz (Camila followed me throughout all my 6 games of the campaign).  She can remove a threat marker for free.   I assumed that a threat marker was anything that was a threat!  Fire, smoke, hazmat, livewires … right?  Those are all threats?  I was beginning to think that was overpowered so I went searching.  I downloaded the PDF rulebook and searched for the word threat.  There were ONLY two places; one was a mention (without a definition) and the other was a picture of THREAT next to fire and smoke at the very front!!  So, yes, a “threat” token is sparsely defined to be ONLY a smoke or fire token.  Seriously, we could have used a sentence anywhere in the rulebook, even on Camila’s card (“A threat is a smoke or fire token”).  There’s not even an excuse for not enough space:  see how little writing is on Camila’s card and how much is on Lisa Beckett’s??? See above.

This was just an example of things could have been a little clearer.  It’s not a bad rulebook, and there was a lot of good stuff.

You know, this might be a textbook defintion of why we need an Index or Glossary:  If you had to put together an Index or Glossary, they would have realized “Oh! We don’t have a real good definition of Threat to refer to!”  There are SO MANY new rules that come out as you play, that an Index or Glossary with all the rules might have been helpful?

Anyway, I learned the game from the rulebook, but I made some mistakes.  You might too. 

 

The Campaign

As a campaign, this is probably the least campaigny campaign I have ever played.  Basically, every game was completely independent from the previous games (the final game just uses rules from previous games).

It’s cool that at the end of each game, you get more stuff; Gear and Boost usually.  See above after the end of call 1 (game 1).  I don’t feel any guilt about spoilers because it’s just a few things!

The campaign tries real hard to have an ongoing story: see above for some flavor text after game 3.  I gotta be honest, I never read the flavor text.  It really didn’t add much to the game for me.  My friends enjoy the flavor text a little more than me, so we read some of it in the cooperative game, but … it didn’t really add a lot.

What the campaign is, more than anything, is an excuse to play through 6 different games that come in the box.  There’s really just 6 different games with a little more gear and boosts available.  The grand finale (the 6th and final game) does a little bit more by bringing in rules from previous games, but even then there’s no “state” between games.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the campaign.  It was a fun excuse to play all 6 boards in the box!  But there’s realllllly not a story or any state that moves from game to game (you can save gear, but that’s about it).   The flavor text that’s there is there if you want it.  I didn’t really read it.  Shrug?  Maybe you and your group will really like it?  It’s there?

Solo Game

So, Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is very clear on how to play solo!  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) .  On page 4, the rulebook very clearly states you simply play with 2 (or more) and the solo player operates them! See above!

So, this is not true solo play, but neither do we have to worry about any wonky new rules to adjust solo play!  Just play the game as it was meant to be played!  Like I said, Camila Ruiz was my rock as a I played; she was in every game of the campaign. 

Interestingly, during set-up (each call has its own set-up in the call book) encourages you to use one of the characters explicitly! Call 1 (game 1) encourages using Steve Sullivan by giving him a little bonus at the start of the game! (See the text above in blue).    This was a nice way to make players cycle through all the the different characters in the game to really get a sense of everything in the board.  I applaud this; it gave you a “reason” to cycle through different characters!

I played the entire campaign with Camila as one of two characters.  Each game adds some very different rules (firefighting on a boat, in an amusement park, on the edge of a cliff!), so it was nice to know one of the characters really well so I could concentrate on the new rules being added every game.  Don’t get me wrong, the base game doesn’t change THAT much, but there was some very different and interesting firefights.

I played through the entire campaign solo.  Each game was its own thing; remember there’s not “really” any holdover state from the previous games, but each board was VERY different!

I liked playing through this solo, modulo one or two issues (see below for discussion).  I would play it again.  Playing two characters worked great!

 

Cooperative Game

I wanted to see where this would land with the cooperative game.   I was hoping I could convince my friends to play through the campaign with me, or at least a few games!

What happened: we didn’t do great in the first game.   Or rather, the dice didn’t go our way.  We cleaned out the board quickly when we started, but we got some explosions and empty POIS at the WRONG times.  We played for about two hours and lost.  We lost two ways, out of building cubes and 4 people died!  We weren’t sure what we would have done differently, and I think that really depressed my friends.  

Sara made the comment: “Ya, this is how the game went last time we played”.   We have played previous versions of Flash Point (Legacy of Flame), and had a similar result.

Last week, when we lost our first game of  Firesiege, my friends wanted to play again to redeem themselves! (See review here!)  This week, they were just done and didn’t want to play again.  The game wasn’t broken or anything, but it just felt like it might have been a little too random.  Losing the dog in the fire was the last straw.

Randomness

This is the hardest part of the game to come to terms with; there’s a lot of randomness.  EVERY turn, you roll two dice and place a smoke/fire (see above) … and sometimes you place more!  If you roll poorly, you can cause explosions all over the place!  The more explosions there are, the more fire there is, which makes it easier to have more explosions and fire!   A few bad rolls can really wreck your game.

I got lucky when I played the solo game, but maybe this game is a little easier with two firefighters. 

Flash Point is very similar to another cooperative game called Pandemic in many ways: players travel around a map trying to keep something under control (diseases or fire), players have action points, players have special powers, players need to keep things under control or they will explode (diseases or fire)!  For a while, when I was trying to introduce new people to cooperative games, I pointed to Flash Point!  Who doesn’t love working together as fire fighters to stop a fire?  Over time, I have deferred more to Pandemic as the better game and less random (as there’s fewer axes of randomness), so I would recommend Pandemic first … it’s just the theme of Pandemic is harder to get over sometimes.  We all lived it at some point.

Which Flash Point?

Flash Point has actually been around for some time!  I Kickstarted the original Flash Point back in July 2011!  And then the Extreme Danger Kickstarter too! See picture above!  But, as you can also see … I never got my Extreme Danger out of shrink wrap!  

Then I was SO EXCITED when Flash Point: Legacy of Flame went on Kickstarter in March 2024!  See above!  The game arrived in 2025, and I fully expected this to be as great as Pandemic Legacy!  But after two games of Legacy of Flame, it just fizzled out.  No one wanted to play again. And it all boils down (no pun intended) to the randomness of the game.  No one wanted to play a Legacy game where there was SOOO MUCH Randomness in the dice rolls!  If you start off with a few bad games, you’ll completely screw yourself!  My friends, I think saw this and didn’t want to pursue Legacy of Flame.

The nice thing about Flash Point: Golden State Heroes is that each game IS so independent, you don’t have to worry about being screwed by your previous game!  I think that of ALL of the Flash Points I have played, Flash Point Golden State Heroes is my favorite version.  Why? Because you get 6 VERY different firefighting scenarios that you can play at any time!  You don’t HAVE to play the campaign: you can just jump into any game you want!   The legacy issues of Legacy of Flame don’t become an issue.

House Rule

There’s one House Rule that I don’t think the game can live without.  Sure, the game can be random on dice rolls when the smoke/fire comes out, but the fire dice rolls “generally” distributes the fire pretty evenly over the board.  The game is random at you; that’s what games do.

The problem is the Fire Suppression action.  You spend your entire turn (4 actions) to roll dice and you MIGHT hit some fire.    Are you an incompetent fire fighter?  Can you not see where the fire is?  This is so ridiculous that you roll dice and pretty much have no control over this!

You might remember Lisa Beckett (see above) we mentioned earlier: I went ALL OUT trying to make her the Fire Suppressions expert!  I gave her two Gear related to that!  See above!  And she still sucked!  Because I rolled bad!  Now she’s not just rolling poorly, but she is actively contributing to losing because she has 4 actions THAT DO NOTHING!

The Fire Suppression, I think, is broken.  In fact, I remember playing the original Flash Point, and I tended to eschew the action!  “Oh, you have to roll to see if it’s successful?  And it takes all 4 actions?  And it may not do anything?  No thanks, I’d rather just do something that I know will make some progress”.

We added a house rule: you have more control.  The players, as a group, get 4 tokens. THAT YOU CAN ONLY SPEND ONCE!!  For a  Fire Suppression action,  roll the dice normally (with flips), then you can spend a token to up/down any/either dice any number of times (up to 4).  This makes it so you can maybe can’t cheat and just Fire Suppression the rest of the game, but the few times you do need it, you have SOME control, and not just random crap! This kind of limits the Fire Suppression to 1 or 2 shots … but that’s kinda what you want?

I won’t play without this House Rule.  If I do, I simply won’t do any Fire Suppression.  It is SO AGGRAVATING to spend 4 actions and do nothing.

Conclusion

We’ve sorta been all over the place in this review, and it may sounds we don’t like Flash Point.  We do like it!  It just … it can be frustrating.   As a solo gamer, I really enjoyed playing through all the campaign (even though it’s not REALLY a campaign, just 6 different boards).  I pretty much had to add the house rule about cleaning up the Fire Suppression action, or I might have hated it too.

The cooperative game didn’t go as well unfortunately.  I think my friends would play the game again but the randomness that can happen will prevent them from ever playing any campaign.  

I personally think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes IS the best of the Flash Point games.  If you like the idea of a cooperative fire-fighting game that has a Pandemic feel, I think this is the one to get.  It has so much variety (the 6 boards are all so very different) and you can play any game you want!  It’s not REALLY a campaign; it’s just an excuse to play all the boards!

I think Flash Point: Golden State Heroes has to get a ranged rating from [6-8] out of 10.  Whenever I give a ranged rating, it means the randomness can overwhelm the game and make it not fun, but when the game “behaves”, it can be fun!  The lower end of 6 is when the dice don’t behave; the game still works but it’s much less fun.  When the game is challenging but not too random, it’s fun and can be an 8!  

If you take away my house rule for Fire Suppression, this rating falls an entire point and would be [5-7]. 

 

Firesiege: Underdone But Still Tasty! A Solo and Cooperative Review

Firesiege is a cooperative Tower Defense games that was on Kickstarter back in May 2024.  It promised delivery in April 2025, and missed by about a year.  I got my copy in early 2026.

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

This is a fairly standard sized boxed.  See Coke can above for scale.

Players each take the role of a warrior that can earn special powers!

Each warrior starts with NO special powers, and has one of two conditions to flip them to their more “powerful” side with more hits, some powers, and usually more hit points.  See above as Gestha can flip to the other side if she either (a) she spends 5 energy or (b) has any bar reaches its max.

Once the warrior flips, they are more powerful!  And actually have special powers!  One of the tensions in the game is trying to figure when to keep the invading hordes under control and when to work on powering-up your character!

What’s being invaded you might ask?  The citadel!  The citadel is the center of the tower above!  If a bad guy reaches the center, players immediately lose!  Note that there are three lanes in which in the invaders may invade: red, green, and yellow.  

At various points during the game, the “bad news” cards will come out (see above) and cause the bad guys to spawn and move.

There are actually all sorts of different bad guys in the game but the main ones are the Skrell hunters (smaller: with 1 hit point) and Skrell Mothers (large 3 hit points).  See above.  They look NOTHING like Aliens from the movie Alien or Aliens.  Or maybe they do.   We pretty much called them “aliens” when we played.

There are also some “super” bad guys that can come out during the game at various points.  See above.  These typically have a special power and a few more hit points.

Luckily, the good guys summon little white warriors (see above) to help them or even “someone distinct from Hela, but is pretty much Hela”.

How do you win?  You need to get 6 Victory Points, and you win!  There are 3 cards that control the 3 main ways to get those 6 victory points.  The first one (far left) shows victory points you get from killing spawn points in the game … you always have this.  Killing a green spawn point nets 1 Victory Point, killing a yellow Spawn Point 2, and red 3.  Summoning Hela can help you in different ways (and summoning her gets you 1 VP).   Basically, the game can vary quite a bit, depending on the cards you get! 

There is shared tracker which tracks (1) movement (2) summoning (3) extra swords and (4) energy.  As you play, you can choose (as a group) to move these tracks up and down!  The higher the movement, the more you can mover per turn!  The higher the summoning, the more white warriors per turn!  The higher the swords, the extra oomph you can add to a combat! The higher the energy, the more you can power the special powers of the characters!

Each character has a bag of tokens that they draw from to form their turn.  The tokens are unique to the character (and color).

The player draws 3 tokens for their turn and places it on their board.  Note that the tokens have a white side and a black side!  The light side is good things the player can do with that token: actions, healing, energy, moving the V track, adding/removing walls, and a few others things  See the white tokens above.  The black side is (usually) bad stuff!  Roll the black dice!  Advance the V track!  Summon/spawn Skrell!

An interesting thing about this system is that when you choose a tile, you must do BOTH sides!  Good news is on one side, and BAD news is on the other!  So, you must do both sides!  This is a real interesting idea as you are choosing BOTH the good news and the bad news at the same time!

Even weirder is that you can’t see both sides of the tile!  When you draw, you can only see one side, but the REST of your teammates CAN see the other side!  If you have ever heard of Indian Head Poker or Hanabi, this is exactly the same idea! 

Players basically just play until they win (get 6 Victory Points) or they lose (someone dies or the hoarde track reaches the middle).  

The way the game proceeds is quite interesting; the act of selecting a tile causes things to happen (good and bad).   The game is activated by every tile you choose.  It’s kinda different and interesting.

This is a tower defense game where we, as a group try to keep the Skrell and other bad guys from reaching the middle and killing us!

 

Rulebook

Sadly, this is not a great rulebook.

Firstly, it does poorly on the Chair Test.  I think this is a D-; it droops really badly on the edges, has a small font, as is very hard to consult on the chair next to me.  It doesn’t fail completely because I can sorta use it on the chair next to me.

The components page starts on a good note: the components are well-labelled with a little pictures.

The set-up is “fine”, but it’s where also start noticing rulebook issues.  Some things aren’t even labelled (step 7?) and so we have to guess at a few things.  

Over the course of the first night with my game, I had SO MANY questions and issues with the rulebook that I started writing them down! 

I ended up with 2 full pages of questions and notes!  This was not a good rulebook.

If I just had a few rules questions, I would typically head on over to BoardGameGeek and try to get them resolved.  The problem was that there were just too many questions.  I was generally able to “make an assumption” and move forward for most if not all of them.  But this will be a non-starter for some gamers.

This rulebook is missing a lot.  But it has some good things too.  I like that they have a campaign, I like that it has rules clarifications for all the special cards (victory cards, super bad guys, warriors, etc).  But the rulebook is missing too much to be able to call this a good rulebook: it underspecifies the game.

Solo

So, there is a solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)! 

This is a true solo mode, with one player taking the role of one warrior.   The only real differences are that TWO bad guys must enter the Citadel (instead of one) to lose … AND the solo player can elect to flip a token using one energy.  Other than that, the game plays the same!

There’s a lot of maintenance for the solo player (Skrell, super bad guys, the track, spawn deck), but it’s not that bad.  It slightly brings down the game (it’s better in cooperative mode when all those systems are shared).    I was able to get my first game going pretty well … I don’t think I made too many rules mistakes (despite the underspecificity of the rulebook).  I had fun.

My second game went a little better as I understood how the systems worked together.  I was looking forward to my second game.

Something about this world is very appealing: it’s easy to get into, the components are top-notch, and generally the game flows really well.  I liked the solo game and would play it again.

The only thing I would change; the game is a little neutered because you don’t have others “sharing” what tiles you might have … the solo game tries to compensate for that by forcing you to spend an energy if you want to flip a tile.  I feel that energy cost  to flip a token isn’t in the “spirit” of the game … I think a better way to handle that is simply: “If you ever have all white or all black tiles in you hand, you may flip one for free.”   That way, you can still make decisions but don’t get “stuck” with all white or black tokens.  It’s a very minor house rule.

Cooperative Play

So, my group played two cooperative games in a row: we lost the first one but wanted to redeem ourselves with the second game!  And we did!  Once we had a “flavor” of the game, we were able to plan and come up with some strategies to win the game!  This is always a good sign when your groups wants to play AGAIN!

We probably could have done better with the limited communication; we sometimes probably overshared.    I hate to say this, but limited communication games typically have this problem!  Unless you are Hanabi with explicit exact rules on what you can say, then most limited communication rules are wonky.  “How Much Can I share?”  To not bog the game down, we just moved forward if we weren’t quite sure.   

Another thing we did which helped the game was share the load: Teresa took care of the super bad guys, Sara handled the Skrell, Andrew handled the spawn cards, I took care of the shared tracks.  Doing this much maintenance for the solo game does bring down my solo score a little, but sharing the load made it so we could concentrate on playing the game rather than maintaining the game as we played.

We did end up using a House Rule: we used Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained: see discussions here) .   This allowed us to be more strategic about choosing the good news/bad news token!  “That’s a real good good news … but can we take the bad news?”  I really did NOT think this Hanabi like mechanism (where everyone can see everyone else’s token, but not their own), but it really did promote discussion as we played.  And I am surprised that it worked.

I kind of think I would only recommend Firesiege when using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained).  Why?  Because without PSTO, then you are STUCK with the tokens you have and you have to play them (your only choice would be the order the 3 tokens you have are played) … that’s the game playing you!   But if all players can discuss playing their tokens, it becomes more interactive, more cooperative, more strategic, as it gives the players more choice!   I played a token, then Andrew played two, then Teresa played one … we got to choose which bad news to take and which good news in the order that was more strategic!  THOSE conversations in the cooperative game made the game for me!

Conclusion

Here’s the thing; objectively, this game has a lot of problems with the randomness, the underspecificity, and the vagueness of the limited communication.  Objectively, I’d probably have to give this game a 4.5/10 or 5/10.  There’s too many problems.

But here’s the thing; I kinda liked it.  I liked the pieces, I liked how much variety is in the game, I liked the ideas that we get to choose how we move forward (bad news/good news) and I liked the way the game unfolded.  Granted, I had to throw a few house rules at this game to like it (fine-grained Player Selected Turn Order especially for the cooperative game), and a few “I think this is how you play” rules.  But I enjoyed every game I played, despite all the issues.   Subjectively, I personally would give this a 7/10; I’d be happy to play it again and teach it again.  But this HAS to be using Player Selected Turn Order (fine-grained) to get the 7/10!

My friends were a little more underwhelmed and might give this a 6/10.  There’s a little bit of caveat with that score:  I gave my friends the best games possible (by limiting their exposure to all the wonky issues), but they did want to play it twice in a a row after we lost the first game, so that’s a good sign.  If they had to learn this from the rulebook, I am sure this would have been a 4/10 … my group would hate the underspecificity.

Obectively: 5/10, Subjectively 7/10. Overall probably 6/10.  

The game was underdone, but was still tasty!

Tembo: Survival on the Savanna. A Solo and Cooperative Review.

Those of you paying attention might say “Wait, didn’t you already publish this?” And you are right! We did! It turns out we got a critical rule wrong, so our review was a little unfair! So, we took down our original review and adjusted it after replaying. Here we go with an updated review!

Tembo: Survival on the Savanna is a solo and cooperative tile-laying/tile-placement game from The Op Games.

This is a game all about exploring the Savanna but keeping the elephants alive and away from the Lion and Lioness!

This is a lighter game for players ages 10 and up.  The time range seems about right at 30 to 45 minutes.  It can play solo.

Is this game good enough to make our Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement games?  Let’s take a look!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent.

The game set-up and components are on opposite pages and this works great.  The components are annotated and the set-up is well-labelled.  This part of the rulebook is excellent.

The rulebook is generally okay.  It’s not great on some edge cases: For example: when you rotate a card, can you can also rotate it 45 degree to get diagonals?  There’s no discussion of that!  From a consistency point of view, it seems like you can (because diagonal is considered adjacent), but it’s not clear.  Why are some spaces purple and white on the final board?  Do you have to place final elephants in the white zone?  When the Matriarch is by herself on the board, what does playing the Matriarch card means? When an elephant line gets disconnected, are there any special rules?  If the Lioness eats an elephant, and goes to sleep, then the Lion moves to her space with the Matriarch … it seems like you SHOULD NOT lose (because the Lioness is sleepy), but the rules make it clear whenever the Lioness and Lion are together .with the Matriarch … you lose!  This seems inconsistent with the theme of the game (sleepy Lions).

Oh yes, after a few passes over the rulebook, it’s clear that each player MUST DRAW TO THREE CARDS no matter what, on their turn.  So, they keep drawing. They should have made that clearer, instead it’s kind of buried in the text.

The rulebook was decent, you can learn the game, but don’t expect there to be a ton on edge case clarifications.  You’ll have to make your determinations in a few places.

Unboxing and Gameplay

Tembo is a fairly standard sized box. See Coke can above for scale.

Each player will take the role of one of four herds of elephants.  See the gorgeous wood elephant meeples (elepheeples?) above.

The thing is, there is only ONE matriarch who guides ALL the elephants!  See is the bigger blue elepheeple above.  Her job is to try to keep her elephant herds away from the Lioness and Lion!  See above for the gorgeous wooden pieces! Elepheeple and Lioneeples!

See above as the matriarch is shepherding the pink and grey elephants above (in a 2-player game).  Every new elephant placed on the Savanna MUST be adjacent to another elephant!  It doesn’t matter what color because this is a cooperative game: you can place your new elephants next to any adjacent elephant.  It’s worth noting that elephants are considered adjacent in both orthogonal and diagonal directions!  This is important  to note for later.

Each player has three cards that do double-duty; they form the grid for the Savanna (this is a tile-laying game after all) AND they allow placing the elephants to the Savanna.   Each player always has three cards at the start of their turn: each turn starts with the active player playing a card to the grid THEN playing another card to determine how to place elephants onto the grid.  (Actually; this was the rule we messed up.  You play EITHER to place a grid space OR to place elephats.  This rule was clear in the rulebook, so I have no excuses other than I misread it.  I do think having a player summary would have helped me; anyway, don’t be me and make this mistake).

How you are sitting at the table actually determines HOW you can place your card and your elephants!  Note the arrow in the upper left corner of the card above: if you are facing the grid, you can only play this card to the grid IN THE DIRECTION OF THE ARROW.

If I am facing the grid, you’ll notice all my cards (above) in the grid pointing away.

Interestingly, when you place a card/tile onto the board, the spot you choose has a special power (usually how many elephants to energize).    See above: one spot energizes 2 elephants for ALL players, one spot gives just you 4 energized elephants! You start with only 3 energized elephants, but you can only place energized elephants on your turn!

The secondway you can play a card: the  card you play is discarded, but it allows you to place elephants on the grid ONLY IN THE PATTERN (or just a single elephant) specified on the upper left corner of the card.  If we discarded the card above to place elephants, we could ONLY place 2 energized elephants east-west (next to a previously played elephant somewhere on the board).

To win the game, players must have the elephants visit 6 Landmarks on the board AND make it to the final location.  To “visit” a Landmark, some elephants need to occupy the purple spots of the Landmark.  See above as 2 grey elephants and 1 pink elephant visit the waterfall Landmark and earn the waterfall standee!

If you want to “scoop up” all the elephants on the board, you can play the Matriarch card (elephant card above) which returns all elephants to the players!  You might do this at certain points to limit how many elephants get chased away by Lions (but see below).

The only problem is that it costs 2 (or 5) energy to engage the Matriarch to gather all the elephants!  See the energy track above.  If you ever go to zero energy, you lose!

You can place elephants on the trees to get more energy!  See the red trees above!  If I can place two elephants there, I can get more energy! Yum!

As you play, the Lion and Lioness move.  If they are ever in a Location with elephants, all the elephants are chased off!  (They are not eaten, no.  Even though they are taken out of the game forever).  If you ever get BOTH the Lion and Lioness on the same space as the Matriarch, you also lose!  If you ever run out of elephants, you lose! If you ever run out of energy, you lose! If you ever run out of cards, you lose!

You can only win if your elephants visit all 6 Landmarks AND you make to to the final spots at the top of the board!  See above for  a winning game!

This production is gorgeous and will enchant you.  The Vicente Dutraite art and the wooden meeples are just so beautiful.

Mixing Bad News and Good News

Many cooperative games have a separate deck of “Bad News” cards, that is, cards that keep the game flowing against the players.   Interestingly, the “Bad News” cards are all interspersed into the same draw deck as the player cards!   In this case, there are two “bad” cards.

The first is the Liones/Lion cards.  When the players draw these cards, they activate the Lioness and Lion (in that order): the Lioness/Lion moves, and then will eat (pardon me, “chase”) all elephants in its region.

If a Lioness/Lion eats (chases) some elephants, it has to rest (until it stands again).

Although the Matriarch cards are “Good” cards (you can play them to move the Matriarch and collect all elephants on the board), you are FORCED to play them if you ever get two of them!  This is a unique kind of bad news because (a) you don’t have a choice and (b) the energy cost is much more significant at 5 (rather than 2).   Getting a Double Matriarch (like above) is actually bad!!

Intermixing the Good cards and Bad cards into one deck reminds us a little of The Siege of Runegar (see review here) where the Troll cards were interspersed into the playter decks of this deck-building game.

The Game Can Kinda Play You

You have to be a little careful when you play; the game kinda plays you just a little.

First, there’s not much strategy with the Matriarch cards because you are pretty much forced to play them as soon as you get them.   If you don’t, you will almost certainly get a Double Matriarch where you are FORCED to play them and lose 5 energy.  Energy is a  very limited resource; you can maybe handle losing 5 energy once … maybe.  You are almost guaranteed to lose if you take 2 Double Matriarchs.  That’s 10 Energy, … and you start with 10 or less (depending on the number of players).

After playing a bunch of games, I found that you pretty much want to play the Matriarch card AS SOON AS YOU GET IT (which costs 2 energy) so that you aren’t forced into a double Matriarch (which costs 5 energy).   That’s not really a strategy; you can’t save it up until you need it.   Every time I tried to “be clever” or “push my luck” by saving Matriarch cards, I got screwed by the double Matriarch and immediately lost.   It seems like the best “strategy” is to immediately play a Matriarch card, even if it doesn’t make any sense. 

Now this isn’t quite as bad as I first thought (on my first wrong playthroughs), because the game moves forward more slowly (I originally though you were drawing two cards per turn; BUT you are only playing one and draing one).  But it still seems imperative to play a Matriarch as soon as you can.

The game is kinda playing you.

The other problem is that the “Bad News” cards cluster and cause major havoc.  You ALWAYS have to draw up to 3 cards, even if you don’t want to!  “I’ve got a Matriarch card, I’ll just defer drawing for now!”  NOPE! You can’t do that!  There’s no choice.

The game is kinda playing you.

Games like Pandemic try to mitigate this clustering a little by distributing the bad news cards more equally over the deck (by separating the deck into 4 pieces and distributing the bad cards in those 4 sections).  I wish Tembo did something like this to help mitigate this clustering.  Or give me a choice to NOT draw.  Nope.

The above has a list of the distribution of cards. 

At the end of the day, your game will probably be won or lost by how the bad news cards cluster, despite how well you play during your turn.  But it’s not as bad as I originally thought.

Solo Game

There is a solo mode built-in (thanks for following Saunders’ Law).  

The solo player gets about 24 elephants (collected from two colors: see above as a I mix pink and grey).   The game plays “about” the same, but the solo player doesn’t get the special powers when they play a card on the board: you always just get 4 elephants when the play a card to the board.   And you can, at one time during the game, discard a Matriarch to avoid a double Matriarch,  The solo player just plays turn after turn by themselves until they win or lose.

This true solo way is “okay” to learn the game, but I don’t think it’s the best way to play the game solo.  The problems are two-fold: First, you don’t get the special abilities on the board, which is one of the only ways you can be “smart” in the game …so the solo mode takes away one of the ways you can be clever and sort of dulls the games.  Second, the double Matriarch “fix” isn’t that great.   Sure, you can choose to get rid of a Matriarch ONCE, but as I pointed out earlier, the double Matriarch problem is pretty steeped into the game.  It’s just not fun to play when are you are MORE likely the get a double Matriarch (see below).

A better way to play solo is to play two-handed solo: the solo player plays two elephant tribes, alternating between them as-if it were a 2-Player game.  I think this is a better solo mode for many reasons: 1) You are playing the game the way it was meant to be played: no special rules for solo player.  2) The odds of getting a double Matriarch are actually reduced because you are distributing the Matriarch cards between two hands!   In the true solo mode, you are much more likely to draw double Matriarchs because you have exactly one hand!  At least with two hands, the double Matriarch is less likely.  Finally: 3) Being able to use the special powers on the board allows you to be more clever.

I’ve seen this in so many games recently: a two-handed solo game is always the better way to play solo.

 

Cooperative

I”ll be honest, the cooperative play turned me around a little. I “leaked” the strategy that you must play your Matriarch as soon you get it (to avoid the double Matriarch) and we had a pretty good time playing cooperatively.

As a cooperative game, it’s pretty quick, and the game flows quickly if someone can explain everything. Having played at least ten times, I was able to shepherd Teresa and I through a game … and I had fun.

We didn’t get too unlucky on our deck, and generally we were able to me smart (when to play certain cards, when to eat trees). We were still forced to play our Matriarchs ASAP, but Teresa said she liked knowing that because it made it “easier” to think about.

The cooperative game was fun, we had to strategize together, and the game looks gorgeous. I had much more fun playing cooperatively than solo.

What I Liked

The Production: The production on this game, with the wooden meeples, the linen-finished cards, the gorgeous Vincent Dutraite art, and the quality of the everything really shines.

Specials: There are special one-time tokens that allow you to be “do something” special on your turn. The basic game allows you to start with 5 of them. I think without these tokens, you won’t feel like you can ever be smart, as you can be “stuck” with what you get. I will never play without these tokens.

Special Activations: I really like the decision space around the cards you play on the board. This allows you to feel clever! Do I need more elephants? Then I’ll take the +4 elephants! Does everyone need elephants? Then I’ll activate the +2 for everyone space! But I still need to connect the landmark sites, so maybe I’ll place a tile on a location JUST so I can connect locations! This was one of the most important parts of the game to make you feel smart. Taking this away from the 1-player game seems to neuter the game a little bit.

Diagonal: I really appreciate that diagonals are adjacent! You get so tired of games where everything has to be orthogonally adjacent! I feel like this opened up the decision space a little more!

What I Didn’t Like

Games Plays You. I hated that there is almost no mitigation of the double Matriarch. Can I choose not to draw? Can we distribute the matriarchs and/or Lions over parts? Nope. I sometimes feels like the game just is playing me because you pretty much forced to play the Matriarch when you get it.

It has an edge of randomness. It’s can be frustrating to lose because of the way the deck is laid-out. Or sometimes you get the Lions and all clustered and the Lion and Lioness sneak up on the Matriarch and you lose! Your game can be determined by how well you shuffle! The bad news cards can cluster and completely screw you …

The Rulebook:  The rulebook was great on the form factor, and the rules that were presented were presented clearly.  But the lack of some edge cases might really throw some gamers for a loop.  I have no problem moving forward if a rule is unclear, but some of my friends get stuck and can’t move forward.  I worry that this lack of specificity might turn off some gamers.

Conclusion

I am struggling with the score to give Tembo. I did have a good time playing once I figured out you always play a Matriarch as soon as you get it. But I still struggled with how the order of the deck can completely determine whether you can win or lose: the game can play you. BUT after replaying the game correctly, it’s not quite as bad as I thought. I still had fun.

In the end, I am giving this a ranged score: [6.5/10 to 7.5/10]. I needed to capture that I like the game when the deck is fairly well behaved, but I wanted to give a warning that the game can a little too random and frustrating. If I brought this certain groups, they might get a little frustrated by the game playing you (“you always play a Matriarch as soon as you get it …is that really strategy?”). Other groups would just enjoy the setting and production and art … and the fact that it’s a little random is mitigated by the fact the the game is quick.

I think my friends Max and Cassidy would really like this game (with a little strategy hint); they would like the cute and quick game herein.

Oh, and the given solo game is fine for learning the game, but I think it neuters the gameplay a little. If you want to play solo, play two-handed solo instead to enjoy the cleverness and choice that is still in the game (modulo the deck shuffle issues).

Tembo might make my Top 10 Cooperative Tile-Laying/Tile-Placement Games now that I have played it correctly! If I had to redo that list, it would need to be redone anyways to make sure Mists Over Carcassone (see review here) were on it! Tembo too.

Star Trek: Star Realms + Borg Invasion = Great Solo and Cooperative Experience!

So, I downloaded Star Realms to my iPad years ago … and I play it all the time. Even after all these years! It’s so easy to play on the iPad! You can play it solo against the computer, and that’s the only way I play. So, Star Realms to me is a solo game.

I even have the original Star Realms little box game (see above).  I think I have played that physical copy … once?  

I was kind of interested in Star Trek: Star Realms because I love the Star Trek theme. The back of the box even claims there is a cooperative mode in here!

Let’s be 100% clear; what the box (see above) is referring to is a team-based mode, where teams of more than one person play against each other … the teams are cooperative within themselves, but this is NOT what we mean when we say a game is cooperative!! This base game is a team-based game; there is no cooperative mode.

And that’s why we are here! The expansion Borg: Invasion DOES indeed add solo and cooperative play to Star Trek: Star Realms!

Let’s take a look!!

Unboxing Star Trek: Star Realms

See game box above with Coke can for scale.

This is obviously a little nicer than my little Star Realms box! It has a full rulebooks! (The original Star Realms little box has a fold-out for a rulebook!! UGH!!!) It has a mat to keep things straight, and hit point tokens. Oh yes, and the cards.

This is a simple deck-building game: see decks above. The decks above are the four different factions in the game: Federation, Klingon, Romulon, and Dominion. Honestly, these are pretty much exactly the same four factions from the original Star Realms, but using Star Trek empires!

There’s also starting hands (Scouts and Raiders, see above). You use coin (gold coins on cards like Scouts generate coin) to buy new cards every turn, hoping to upgrade your deck. Each card does damage (see red 1 on Raider) to do damage to your opponent.

Each player starts with 50 authority. It’s weird! I would have called it Hit Points (because when you get to 0, you lose/die), but the game uses the more … thematic? less-damagey? more PC? term of authority. Weird. I will probably slip and call it Hit Points.

Me vs. Me

Everything I have seen leads me to believe that Star Trek: Star Realms is exactly like Star Realms (modulo the theme). After playing a Me vs Me game (a solo game where I play against myself by jumping from side to side), I can tell you with 100% certainty: this is Star Realms … with a different coat of paint, but the exact same game and cards underneath.

I didn’t do a card-by-card comparison, but everything I saw was an exact copy of a card from the original game. That’s a good thing in some ways, because it means the balance and original luster and gameplay of the original game has been preserved: it’s just now Star Trek.

Just so you know what you are getting.

Borg: Invasion Unboxing and Gameplay

Let’s be 100% clear!  A copy of Star Trek: Star Realms is required to play with Borg: Invasion! 

See box above with Coke can for scale.  Note that this is exactly the same size as the Star Trek: Star Realms game!

The Borg (which will be played by some AI rules) has its own mat: see above.  The Borg ship you start with depends on the number of players!  See above as the Borg Sphere (not as powerful as the Borg Cube) is the starting Borg ship for the solo or 2-player game; it has 25 Hit Points to start with.  There is a notion of starting hand, but that’s only is a player is playing the Borg! One player can play the Borg against the other players, but we are concentrating on the solo and cooperative rules where the Borg are played by an AI.

To the far-left of the Borg mat are the force-field cards!  When you hit the Borg with some damage, the Borg “modulates” their shields so that race can’t do damage next turn! Gulp!  This is super thematic as it reminds us of the Federation modulating the frequency of the their phasers to keep doing damage to the Borg!

The marauders are deemed “neutral” damage, and even they can be defended against! by the Borg!!  Luckily, if three force-fields come out, they will be dispersed at the end of a player’s turn.  So the force fields don’t stay out forever … but they are really annoying. 

The right side of the Borg mat has places for Hive Assimilation cards! Whenever the Borg assimilates a card, it activates a Hive Assimilation card of the appropriate color!  These are placed on the right side of the Borg mat and activated.

In the middle of the mat are all the cards the Borg have assimilated!  The number of cards is the value of the attack by the Borg that turn!  GULP! The more cards the Borg assimilate, the more damage it does every turn!

The Borg ship itself moves left-and-right on its mat; it’s trying to assimilate the “best” technology (where the card of the highest cost is considered the best).  Like many places in this game, if there are ties for a decision for the Borg (two ships cost the same) , the players get to choose. The Borg always assimilates the ship it’s over (it just tries to move one space towards the expensive), and that’s when the Hive Activation cards activate!  See above as the Borg assimilates the 7 cost card!

The card is then placed on the Borg ship!  It hasn’t FULLY assimilated yet!  If the players can do enough damage to the Ship being assimilated, they can detach it from the Borg ship and put it in their discard!  

The players have to be able to do enough damage (same as the cost of the card).  If the players can’t extricate the card from the Borg, it becomes fully assimilated!  From then on, it counts as another damage towards the players!

The Borg have another avenue to attack … they beam Drones (see above) to you!  About 30 of these cards are shuffled into the Market deck.  If you ever draw one, they immediately go the active players area!  As long as you keep drawing drones, they go to your area!  And they will immediately assimilate cards from your discard onto the Borg Ship!  If you have 5 drones land in your area, they will assimilate cards that cost 5 (starting with the biggest cost cards).   They steal from your discard!

You can fight the drones on your turn (one damage per drone) and they go to the scrap yard.

Now, it sounds like the Borg have WAAAAY too many advantages … and they do!  But, each player  also get two gambit cards. 

These gambit cards can come out at any time of the player choosing, so that they can use a special power.

Basically, the Borg attacks, then the players attack. The AI for the Borg is relatively straight-foward, if a little wordy (just to describe what’s pretty clear).

And yet, when the player takes a turn, it’s mostly like a normal turn of Star Realms! Attack the enemy (the Borg)! Buy ships! The difference is that they player can also attack the Drones (if any have beamed onto his space) OR try to de-assimilate a card that’s about to be assimilated!

Players go back and forth with the Borg until (a) either the Borg is defeated (and the player instantly win) or (b) all players are defeated (and the Borg win)! As long as one player survives to destroy the Borg, all players win!

Rulebook

The rulebook is decent to pretty good.

This gets an B on the Chair Test. It fits well on the chair next to me, the font is a decent size,  but it is a little too “thematic” a font; I think it detracts from the rules just a little. Also, the pages are black with white text, which I usually hate for rulebooks.  This probably should be an A on the Chair Test, but the color choice  (white on black) and font choice drop it to a B.

The components pages are nice, but they tends to drift over a few pages, explaining as they go.

It works.

The set-up also works.

 

The rulebook works decently.  I would have made a few changes (for example: you discard all the Hive Integration cards at the start of the Borg turn … I would put that as an explicit step for this instead of it being buried in the description of the Hive Integration cards).  I think all the rules were here, but sometimes you had a took a little to find them.

Does this rulebook need an Index? I don’t think so, and it doesn’t have one so that’s fine.

 

Solo Play

So, we finally have a true solo mode for Star Realms! (I could argue that my iPad had Star Realms solo for years, but that’s an iPad thing, not a board game thing). Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!

The solo mode is a true solo mode as you operate one position against the Borg! It’s you vs. the Borg!

Set-up is some work: you have to shuffle 30 drone cards into the market deck. I mean, the market card deck is pretty big (151 cards?) so shuffling in about 30 cards is kind of a lot of work! You need to make sure the drone cards get shuffled in well, and that requires some real good shuffling; I pile shuffle because I don’t know many people who can riffle shuffle 180 cards!

It takes a little bit of time to get into the groove of the game. The player turns are pretty quick (play some cards, buy some ships, do some damage), but the Borg turns are a little more work. Once you have played a number of Borg turns, it starts to go much quicker. At some point, both sides take their turns pretty quickly. The game gets into a good groove.

I have played a number of solo games, and it always feels like the Borg are just crushing you! See as the Borg assimilate a cost 6 card early in the game!  I can’t get that back early in the game!  “No!  The Borg is totally kicking my butt! I’m screwed!!!” 

After those initial few turns, you start to feel a little more power, but man, the Hive Integration cards really do a number on you in the first few turns.

After a few turns, you finally get your deck going and you feel like the tide is turning!  Well, usually.  Sometimes you just lose because the Borg does so much better … they got all the good cards!

To be fair, this arc really reminds me a lot of Star Realms solo mode on the iPad.  I have played SO MANY games of Star Realms that you think I’d always win, right?  Nope!  Sometimes you are just at the whim of luck and will get bad cards while the opponent gets good cards!  And it will be frustrating! But I keep playing because it’s fun.

After a few solo games, I can pronounce … I like this! I can see myself playing again!  The game feels very thematic as you watch the Borg assimilate cards, then try to wrest those cards from them before they get fully assimilated!  The drone cards in the market deck are an interesting twist, and feel thematic as Borg just “teleport” to your ship!  This game really embraced the Borg theme well.

One thing we like to talk about in a solo game is maintenance: how much maintenance does the solo player have to do in a game?  That usually divides into three sections:

  1. Set-up Maintenance
  2. Game Maintenance
  3. Tear-down Maintenance

The absolute WORST part of this solo game is tear-down!  Set-up is annoying, but not terrible.  The Borg turn maintenance, once the game gets going, is doable.  Once you get to tear-down, you may cry a little!  You have to separate all the drone cards from the market deck, separate the Borg Invasion cards from the Star Trek: Star Realms cards and generally sort a lot of cards.  

Sleeve Your Cards!

This is deck-building game; you should sleeve your cards,  I played my solo games without sleeving, but after touching the cards a lot, I realized I should probably sleeve them,  See above as Teresa sleeves them.

The Borg: Invasion cards fit in sleeved … barely. See above.

The Star Trek: Star Realms cards ONLY fit if you remove the insert.  If you sleeve, you will have to probably nuke the insert.

Cooperative Play: Pregame

Before we played a cooperative game, we did a quick head-to-head game (with two people per side managing one deck); this is the way the original Star Realms is meant to be played, and the easiest way to learn the flavor of the game.   None of the my friends had ever played ANY kind of Star Realms!  Granted, they are all experienced players, but they don’t know this variety of deck-building that Star Realms  offers.

It was a pretty quick game (as are most Star Realms games) and my friends got the feel of this deck-building game before jumping into the cooperative game.

I think I recommend playing a quick head-to-head game of Star Realms to learn the system before you jump into the solo or cooperative game.  It just makes it easy to absorb all the new rules that the Borg: Invasion introduces if you already know the flavor of gameplay.  And it’s quick enough, you don’t have an excuse not to!

Cooperative Play

We played a 4-Player cooperative game of Borg: Invasion.  The games scales simply: when the Borg does damage, it does the same amount of damage to everyone!  Thats’ really the only scaling the game has; no other mechanisms really need to change.

There were a bunch of things we noticed.  

  1.  4 players works, but we feel like it is not the best player count. The game stretches out a little longer and it does take a while to play.  We kind of think that 2 or 3 might be better.
  2. Having more players definitely helped with the load and keeping the game running!  Andrew managed the force fields, Sara managed the Hive Reactions, Teresa handled hit points and counters, and I ran the Borg.  This shared load made it a lot easier to keep the game running.  It also helped out a lot when we had to tear-down!  The worst part, the tear-down, was made a lot better by simply having everyone sort and shuffle together.  It may sounds silly to dwell on this, but as someone who tends to always set-up and tear-down games, it’s really nice when the players all help.
  3. There was frustration.  Sara in particular kind of got shut-out of her deck (the Drones kept stealing her tech) and didn’t have a great game.  The force-fields can be really frustrating in the beginning of the game!  You can’t do anything to stop the drones or assimilation or anything because you have such a weak deck!  Everyone was surprised by the game arc; The Borg tromps you, and if you can survive and build a deck … you have a chance!  This is a very different arc than many cooperative games!
  4. There aren’t a lot of cooperative mechanisms. .  There aren’t that many mechanisms in the game to help each other!  You can’t kill drones in someone else’s area, you can’t share cards during normal gameplay, you can’t share healing.  In fact, the only real mechanism in the game for helping others is when you die: You are allowed to throw one card at someone! This game is very multiplayer solitaire.
  5. There is some high-level strategy.   We did notice some high-level discussions emerge as we played. “Don’t do damage this turn!  I have to kill the drones!”  Honestly, almost all the discussion centered on the force-fields!  We would discuss when/why someone would do damage so that we wouldn’t get locked out on damaging things!  It was a little surprising that so much of our conversation was on those (very annoying) force-fields.

Although the game is pretty multi-player solitaire, there was lots of discussion (esp. on the force-fields) and the load was shared well among all the players.   The arc of the game was strange and different for a cooperative game, but it was interesting.

In general, I think the game was a hit, if a little long and a few moments of frustration.

House Rule

The Gambit cards are really cool, and generally have an effect on how you play the game, but you really don’t have any choice on what you get!  You just get 2 gambits and that’s it!  I think a much more fun house rule is that you get 4 Gambit cards (see above) and get to choose 2!   It just makes it feel like you have more choice, and maybe you can even get Gambit cards that suit your play style a little more.

Conclusion

Star Trek: Star Realms is a great game, as it’s just the great Star Realms with a Star Trek theme pasted on. Up until now, you have no way of playing solo unless you got the iPad! Now, with Borg: Invasion, you can fend off the Borg either solo or cooperatively! EDIT: I think there are some ways to play the original Star Realms is solo/cooperative, but this is the first solo/co-op for Star Trek: Star Realms.

I think the Borg: Invasion is a fantastic expansion! Sometimes I worry that “expansions that make a game solo/cooperative” either do too much (so there’s too many rules: Dice Throne Adventures, I am looking at you…) or do too little (so the game is just some shared victory points: Amber Mines, I am looking at you…). This expansion adds just enough rules to make the game thematic, challenging, and interesting but not so many rules that the game becomes unwieldy! There seem to be just enough new rules, and the game just seems soooo thematic!

The cooperative game is very much multiplayer solitaire, as there aren’t really any cooperative mechanisms for helping each other out (just one: when you die!). Having said that, the high-level discussions about the force-fields and the Market and the drones really do seem to keep everyone engaged and caring about other players turns, so there is some cooperation that definitely emerges.

Solo: I’d probably give this a 7.5 or 8/10. Cooperatively about 7.5 or 8/10. The only reason this isn’t a little higher is that there is a little frustration that emerges in the early game that can be debilitating; that game arc is weird, but still interesting! I suppose if embrace that early-game frustrating arc, this could be an 8.5 or even a 9. It’s so thematic! Just like an episode of Star Trek with the Borg!

Neat game. Fantastic Expansion.