Barrage - A Gaming Rules! review

[Music] hi my name is Paul Grogan and welcome to another gaming rules review in this video I am going to be telling you what I think about barage designed by Tommaso Batista and Simone 8 Luciani and published by cranial creations now this was a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018 and he's been delivered to backers around the time that I'm filming this video this is july 2019 and it's been delivered to backers now now however I got a copy so I have a professional working relationship with cranial creations I contacted them when I went to origins and I said look barage is a game which looks fantastic a lot of people who like the same kind of games I like are super excited about it and looking forward to it I'll be honest with you I didn't back the game but is there any chance that you're able to get me a copy and I'll potentially do a review of it and they brought a copy over gave me our regions and I brought it back with me so that's what they said so I was looking up to get a copy of the game before before backers got it and I have been playing it and this is my review of it now quick shout out to all of my patreon supporters thank you very much to all of you who basically make these videos possible if you enjoy the content I create then please consider supporting me over at patreon.com forward slash gaming rules and this is one of the games that my patreon supporters voted on as a game that I would review this month now a number of people are probably tuning in to this video because they're interested in the component quality now I am gonna be covering the component quality in this video but I am going to be focusing also on the gameplay I'm fully aware that when when I got the game back from origins suddenly I was made aware of all of the controversy around the game and I'm not going to go into that too much here but I know that the publisher has come in for a lot of criticism regarding some of the components and the delays and and and everything else the version that I have here I believe is the similar version to what's being delivered to Kickstarter backers I cannot guarantee because this was an earlier copy I don't know if one who represent this is exactly the same as what backers are getting and I've not seen that many pictures of people getting it around the world so I think it's mostly the same but please bear that in mind that this may not be the final version of the game it may be I don't quite know so anyway let's talk about what this game is Faraj is a game set in the 1930s I think 1922 specifically it's in the Alps it's kind of a dystopian alternative history and basically what you're doing is you are generating energy by building dams to trap the water ruining the water through the conduits through your power stations or power houses I think they're called and generating energy to fulfill contracts which get you other stuff and victory points the player with the most points wins the game after five rounds and there are a number of routes to victory I've certainly seen one game of this one where the player didn't really do any energy production but there's lots of other things that you can do they get your points in the game as well so the games played over five rounds it is a worker placement game so you will be placing your 12 engineers you'll be going around the table one at a time placing your engineers generally on this part up here which is all the different action spaces or on your own player board and you will be taking actions to either build stuff on the board generate a new contracts get new excavators or concrete mixers which are these things which you'll need to build or actually generating energy and then at the end of the round you work out who's produced the most energy there are various points available for that there's an end game scoring title as well the replayability the variability is is quite quite a lot so let's cover that as the first thing that I like about the game the game comes with these scoring tiles I think I've lost one yeah eight here right so the game comes with these scoring tiles and you will shuffle these and randomly place them over there and that's how we be scored at the end of round one that one at the end of round two etc etc these give you points based on what you've done in the game so that is going to influence your decisions about the order in which you build things also there's an end game scoring tile I think there's six of them in the game maybe seven and that's going to adjust you know what you do in the game as well each player has a player board there are four included in the base game they have asymmetric powers basically things do something slightly different and there is a power and you also get an executive officer and there I think so generate executive officers in the game and what happens at the start of the game is that you will basically randomly pick one executive officer for each of the nations this is France this is Germany there's a couple of other ones as well and then they will be drafted in Reverse player order along with the starting contract wherever the starting contracts are they're over there but you get a starting contract so you will choose and and the executive officer has a special ability as well so that along with the way that other things come out that is definitely a bit of variability now the board is always the same board and the board is really interesting and it takes you well it took me a couple of plays before I realize some of the intricacies of this board because this is an extremely tactical game and this is probably the best part of the game that I like it is so tactical in what you build and where you place things and it can be very cutthroat now this is the board at the end of a two-player game that I did yesterday there'll be a video on my channel me doing a solo game against one ultimate opponent and this is the board at the end of the game you always use the same board no matter how many players are in the game now I've played this a three players for players and I played the two-player game yesterday one thing that I'm concerned about the scaling is there isn't any on the board there is no scaling changes depending on the number of players so in a two-player game you've got a lot more of the game still works but it is certainly less tight and less aggressive and in a four player game you will have a lot more player interaction going on on the board itself whereas in a two-player game you can generally build wherever you want to build you know the other player might get in the way but in a four player and that's three other players that might get in the way anyway the board is really clever in the way that it works basically you the water will come down from the mountains and it will go into the dam so let's say that down wasn't there and it will stop at a dam and then there's one water Sarris one down so it'll overflow and it will go down here and it will go down here and then it will stop here and this dam is a size 2 dam so it can store 2 water if another water went in there it would overflow so that's how the water flows down now what you can do in the game is you can say well hang on a minute this player here is getting all of the benefit because once the water is in your dam you can then use that water to generate energy so what you could do is the pink player might decide to come along to build a dam here and what that means is when the water now comes down from the mountain it's going to be trapped by the pink dam instead of the white one so if a player builds a really really good dam and he's getting lots of energy from it because it's got lots of water in it you can build a dam slightly higher upstream it's in the same basin and then you can basically scoop with them so there is definitely the player interaction here now that white player could have built it there to start with it's more expensive but they could have done that and then that stops somebody stealing it later on but money is very very tight in the game these ones here these are neutral dams there is always a size three neutral dam down in the plains a size two neutral dam down in the hills and a sizable neutral dam in the mountains and you can use those the water in the neutral dams to ship energy in order to basically get started so you can only ship water from your own dam or a neutral dam you ship it through a conduit which can be anybody's you can use your own conjugate or you can use a conduit from another player you have to pay them to do so and this is one of the interesting aspects of the game if somebody else let's say the white player has built this dam here the pink player goes along and builds that conduit there the white player is now going to have to use that conduit to generate energy so they're getting some of the income from it so that's interesting and then through a powerhouse now you can only ship energy through your own powerhouse so and basically that's that's how you do it now what would happen in this case this - water would go up here and look this the line is actually going upwards so water doesn't always go downhill this conduit here will send water up here through this powerhouse and then down into there one of which will go there the other one will overflow and go in there so you can really set up a nice chain of links here anyway very very tactical lots of player interaction in this part especially in a four player game and the board is really interesting in the way that it works out and that is probably my favorite part of the game is I mean its worker placement and I like worker placement games there's nothing really new there apart from does that on the left hand side in actions on the right hand side the rig the ones on the right hand side will cost you money so you can still do it but it will cost you it would cost you a bit money but this bit the tactical nature of this game I've said tactical way too many times but anyway yeah really good really like that part of the game the other thing that I like about the game is these wheels so what happens in this game is stuff that you build requires a combination of either concrete mixers or excavators and what you do if you armor as they build a power station I will slot that in there like that I will put the required number of these little grib Lee's in there like that and then the wheel will rotate one so basically the things that you use to build are kind of tied up and then once the wheel is rotated all the way back to the start you get that bike so you can do that again and you get these back so the resources that you use to build well not the resources but these these machines that you use to build they're not lost they're still yours but they're there they're being used up and there are things in the game you can do to get that to spin further which is the spanner action and a few other things and that that's really nice as well so other than that standard worker placement stuff but yeah they're that they're sort of the two main bits that I like about the game now let's talk about the rulebook so the rulebook overall was quite nicely laid out I mean it was all very clear as I was reading through it lots of graphical examples suggested setups for your first game so you don't actually draft them bits so basically the first game it recommends you don't use the Patent Office and we did I mean yeah we followed those instructions the first gun we played we didn't use the Patent Office and what's nice is that the bits that are highlighted in pink it basically says skip those for your first game it's a really good well laid out rulebook however then when we came to actually play it some of the things in the game weren't really explained in the rulebook so there's one executive officer mahir II the explanation of how it worked in the rulebook is very very vague I've had to go online I've got an answer from one of the designers and the answer that they gave is not mentioned at all in the rulebook so although the over was good there's parts of it there yeah we're not that we're not that clear it could have done with a bit more work also the solo game the solo game you click a QR code and that takes you to a 12 page PDF on the cranio website which I got yesterday unfortunately the solo game they're going to need to update that PDF because there's typos in it there's errors in it and there's a certainly one part where it contradicts itself and I'm not sure so I'll let them know about that but the solo rules they're probably fine it's just the rulebook needs a little bit of work graphic design wise now first of all the artwork in the game I like artwork is very subjective but I particularly like the artwork of this some people might say it's bland and it's boring but it's extremely so I've switched onto graphic design the artwork is nice I don't mind these boards being a bit dark and the fact that the titles of the section are a bit hard to read because of the typeface they've used it doesn't matter once you've played the game maybe even before you've played them the name is just thematic it doesn't matter it's just a worker placement spot that gets you stuff graphic design this bit is extremely clear it might look a bit fiddly might look a bit complicated but it's actually very clear all these little has arrows the colors yeah really good job with the graphic design on this board or the generally speaking the iconography was fairly clear the parts where the graphic design I feel was let down is this this Patent Office here so the Patent Office every round there are three things to choose from and you put the tiles in stacks of 1 2 & 3 so what I've seen done is people will take a one tile and put it there a two tile and put it there and a three tile and put it there and you don't do that you go through all of the ones first and then the twos and then the threes however because this was laid out like that it makes it really counterintuitive because you think that that one would go across there there that one would go to there and that one would go to there so what I do when I'm playing in the game and I would recommend you do this as well ignore what's printed on the board put the threes there put the twos there and put the ones there so it's clear that you do all the ones first then the twos then the threes that bit another thing that happened over the weekend at manikin and this was an interesting one this executive officer board here this is where you put your money your excavators and your concrete mixers okay however one player : and it's a valid point had that on his player board and thought he had three money it's a very very minor point but this should have been fading out and I know there's no one in it bought this should have been faded out a bit because once you've got things on there that kind of looks like you've got three and it messed him out because he thought you had three and he didn't I only had two anyway little minor thing but I thought I'd point it out because it did happen and he did mess up one player um components wise then right let's talk about overall components wise is pretty good the wooden pieces are really nice the big thick chunky the player boards dual-layer player boards no warping as I have seen on some other dual layer player boards so they're really nice all of these components are pretty good the board and all of the other stuff and the punch board it's fine no problems with that whatsoever where the components do kind of fall down ease these Gribble ease right so these these concrete mixers and these excavators there's three different types for each one so you've got these tiny little concrete mixers then you've got these slightly bigger ones these are worth three and then you've got the even bigger ones that are worth five then you've got the excavators which are worth one which you were also worth three and also worth five they're a little bit fiddly they're a little bit weird and if you look very very carefully there's kneecaps on this one basically the design is not just a bigger version it's a slightly different mold or a cutting tools thing for each one no need it should have just been three of them three different sizes and it's odd that the middle one is a darker color than the lighter these are just a bit weird also they look like space invaders now they're supposed to be like yeah steampunky dystopian concrete mixers I don't know but yeah they look a bit too much like space invaders to me right two of the biggest problems with the game the water now since get in this game Khurana oh I think I've accepted that this water is really not good these I don't I don't understand these I don't know whether they're from some kind of jewelry kit but the problem the problem is with them is twofold first of all they're a horrible shiny silver on one side so when you put them in a pile like that half of them London silver side up and you've got to flip them face down like this the second biggest problem if you can't pick them up so these for me are totally non-functional and I do not use these in the game they might look like nice pretty gems but as I say the fact that they're quite often London silver soda and you can't pick them up so I have replaced them at the moment I've used the in Akron II water for one go but I've since then found some little blue wooden disks and I believe to be fair cranio we're finally accepted oh this has been a problem and they are going to send some kind of wooden replacements out to people ivy I've been using these wooden disks and I use these in my solo game and I'm actually going to try and get bigger discs because what I want is I want wooden disks that are the height of the dams because that way when you've got a height of two it will be the same height as the dam and thematically you'll be able to see that the water flows over the top so yes I would recommend replacing your water things and as I think cranio we're going to replace them anyway the second thing is the wheel and I wonder at what percentage of people have watched this video literally just to see the wheel now there's been a lot of concerns about this wheel the fact that it doesn't work oh it does work and again this copy I've got I am not 100% sure if this is the copy that everybody else is getting so I'm not going to be too critical of it but it does work it is a little fiddly that has to slot in and it has to slot in perfectly because it is then turning and if you don't slot it in absolutely right it won't turn so that's a little fiddly the other thing about the game is it's sticking so you kind of have to turn it like that which works but sometimes as it's turning these these spokes here can rise up and then they can go over the piece like that and it doesn't quite I'm sure there must have been a better solution to this and I'm not sure what but this I don't know and I'm not sure how now I've played this game five times and it's working fine I have seen pictures online of people getting warped boards chronic oh we're going to replace them so if you get in really badly warped boards then cranio will replace them so yeah I'm not sure about this it does work it's a bit of a clever mechanism but I think there may be a better way of doing it and I look forward to people making their own wheels online I don't think they should have had to I think they should have been a better design for it but it is what it is and as I say I've played five games and it works it's just a little fiddly what else is it that I've not talked about I think I've talked about most things that I wanted to talk about gameplay I really like I would at the moment never say no to a game of this I very much enjoy it one thing that I have a concern about is the balance of the game and if it weren't for my last game I would be a bit more critical about this but bearing in mind I've only played it four or five times but we have seen people in most of the games we've played not produced energy for the first half of the game just build stuff and not do anything with what's on the board and the people who do do something with what energies on the board end up coming last so the game kind of thinks how well maybe I should just not bother doing the thing that the game is about and just building stuff and then going for a late-game splurge the last time I played I was producing energy from turn one and I won the game now whether I would win the game against players who were experts at the game I don't know because my winning score was about a hundred and I have seen winning scores in the 150s 160s so I don't know maybe it wouldn't work but it also depends on the scoring tiles if the board set up lends itself to an end game splurge where oh you're going to get points for damage that you've built you're going to get points for this all at the end of the game then that particular set up does kind of encourage you know not do anything at the start of the game and they just build up because if you're producing if you're shipping one energy through at a time you're spending one action to gain four or five maybe six energy and that's it if you've built up all of your dams and it can store three water and you get a really good conduit then at the end of the game you can be producing energy and you can be getting you know 14 15 16 with one action which allows you to fulfill these national contracts which are really powerful so that may be a strategy it's certainly not put me off playing it again definitely want to play it and I want to try all sorts of different strategies to see how that works out right just a couple of other things game time it could be a bit prone to AP because there's so much thinking involved in this bit if you watch my solo playthrough that I've done my brain is exploding a couple of points just because I've got so many choices of what to do your first game might run two three maybe three and a half maybe even four hours with four players but I reckon you could play this game in probably two to two-and-a-half hours once you know what you're doing and that is probably yeah that is my estimate for how long a game would take once you all know what you're doing the other thing I found in my notes which was missing from the rulebook is one of the end game scoring tiles gives you points based on how many things you have in the mountains the plains and the mountains the hills and the plains and these power stations here it's not clear where they are they're kind of between the hills and the plains it doesn't say anywhere in the rulebook where they are it doesn't say new anywhere in the rule but where they are we have now had an official answer but the only way we found out is by looking at the 3d board which has been made I don't have the 3d board and the 3d board clearly shows that these are in the hills and these are in the plains but without that there's no indication in the rulebook as to where these are so yeah there's just a few little finer points of the game it's kind of let down a great game I really enjoy the game I think the gameplay is fantastic I am gonna enjoy playing this game more and more but it's been let down a couple of times by bits in the rulebook that could have been clearer and some component issues which is a bit of a shame but hopefully shouldn't stop you enjoying the game itself anyway that is what I think about barrage there's also an expansion the Lea water project I've not even opened this yet so if you want to hear what I think about this tune in on a future monthly video log where I play it I now feel line ready to play this there's a whole host of extra I've included in it but I'm normally playing the game with people who haven't played before therefore the expansion doesn't come out so anyway that's everything that I think I wanted to say about it thank you very much for watching and as I mentioned at the start if you enjoyed the content that I create please consider supporting me over at patreon.com forward slash gaming rules until next time take care and thanks for watching [Music] Gaming rules is proudly sponsored by game Stoppers upgrading your gaming experience visit game stoppers llc.com

Channel: Gaming Rules!

Views: 15,037

Rating: 4.9302325 out of 5

Keywords: boardgame, board game, gaming rules, paul grogan, Review, barrage

Id: V3KMwHeFxRE

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019