Batman Gotham City Chronicles Review

[Music] [Music] Batman Batman Batman but if you ever had the itch for the Caped Crusader then surely Batman Gotham City Chronicles is the bomb the ointment the e45 that will spread plastic heroes and villains into every dry pork begging for loot illogical release here is the game so big that it isn't a shame to split itself into two boxes each twice as big as Johnny cardboards average board game immediately posing a problem for anyone who's thinking about taking this puppy to a game night on public transportation awkward looks on public transportation be done because what the other passengers don't realize is that inside this box you've got a treasure trove greater than the batcaves collection this - I say - double sided gigantic boards for your adventures a staggering amount of Batman's and bat women and Batman sidekicks ranging from the popular ones like Boy in tight pants man in tight pants dead and resurrected and therefore now much more evil and jaded man in tight pants who's no longer wearing tight pants to the more obscure like Azrael spoiler and wait for it bad cow I'm going to let this shot linger for a bit just so you fully appreciate the okay enough now that's not even it this dice cards cubes an even greater amount of a veritable variety of villains a plastic control panel trays 5000 cardboard tiles and possibly my favorite board game component of all time but we have to go outside for me to actually show you this the bat tablet this is really I can check this out right a real example of a boardgame publisher going out of the way to deliver a superbly thematic board game component I really do if you could just back up a little bit yes Batman raised 4.4 million dollars on Kickstarter from some folks who are hoping for some dope minis and dope gameplay and whilst we can certainly guarantee that they delivered on the first dope figuring out if the game about the world's greatest detective is actually any good is going to require the world's greatest board game reviewer sadly all you've got is me that was no joke I mean the reviewer part was a joke because I am obviously pretty great but the problem about actually needing a PhD in board game investigation to even sit down and start playing this relatively simple game if you thought you were just gonna open up Gotham City chronicles and stop playing oh boy the first Guardian of fun is the 50 page rulebook you'll have to absorb just to get to grips with the game where you practically only have four near-identical actions that all involve you spending some energy rolling some dice and seeing how many successes you get what in the world happen here well I can explain but first we have to jump back a few years before Batman there was Conan publisher mama lives first Kickstarter campaign they drew a more modest three plus million dollars and upon publication managed to stir quite a few controversies there was the infamously lambasted Conan's depiction of women which for those interested was covered by Kotaku there's a link to the article in the description you could say that Batman learned from that and is more appropriate almost then there was the lack of support for many of the Kickstarter stretch goals leaving backers with scores of miniatures and no scenarios to actually use them in and then there was the rule book I had the pleasure of learning Conan from its original rulebook and let me tell you few games have a manual that made lessons and even the subsequent updated rulebook left many fans wanting that layout was disjointed many of the things were unexplained and it felt like someone just came and dumped a box of puzzle pieces with no final picture to refer to Batman Gotham City chronicles which rules wise is a reskin of Conan C's publisher mana left desperately trying to correct past mistakes and give us something workable but in the process grossly overcompensating detail after detail this booklet bludgeons information into your head whether you like it or not want it or not needing about tables and tables of nearly identical sequences hitting you over the head over and over again until all you can do is ask is this over yet but all you hear back is grotesque laughter not only does it feel more like a car manual just blurting out information without any semblance of desire to teach you how to actually drive but somehow in this unending bloat of text it still manages to miss quite a few bits of important information for example there's not a chapter on setup anywhere this is some setup information in the mission booklet but it doesn't feel entirely complete all about if you have a mission that uses a lie and bystander figures well those rules are included but they're so hidden and tucked away that it will just cause you confusion and stress and I could go on normally we tend to not focus on the rulebook so much especially without having really talked about the gameplay yet but I'll be honest with you I was so defeated by it that after finishing reading the rulebook I didn't even want to play the game anymore and I think that's important and it would have been a shame if I didn't because Batman Gotham City chronicles it's quite a nifty little thing oh do you hear that that is the sizzle of something a little bit different technically Batman is a dungeon crawler you have heroes up two free players control each you have bad guys the villain player controls all of them each bat hero is equipped with a bad tablet into which they'll slaw in the character sheet and I promise you that alone feels as satisfying as you would expect it to be you'll then equip them with gear and if they have a utility belt you'll get to select from a whole variety of bad gadgets and finally you'll get to plunk down an arm load of cubes these red cubes of energy are the backbone the voracious vertebrae of Batman systems want to punch a Mook sure how many dice would you like to roll would you like to roll one maybe two or how about four nothing is the bottom just spend four energy and go ahead my friend go right ahead for each energy you spend you'll roll that many dice and then you'll apply hits equal two successes you got after some minor defending each character has innate dice inherent to each skill so for example Batman's really good at punching and gets red dice which happened to be the best but he is after all blind as a bat and not so good at the shooty shooty so he'll bro orange on his ranged attacks and whatever you want to do whether you want to punch or shoot or disarm a hack or bomb a computer the rules with minor alterations are practically the same spend that much energy and roll that many dice of course if you're rolling red dice and you only need three successes you don't want to overspend so maybe just two dice is enough or is it but don't worry even if you got totally screwed just spend more energy and you can rear all that many dice got punched in the face that's also fine spend some energy and you roll defense each success negates a hit it's all fine let's recap what happened here you spent four energy on a ranged attack two on a mr. McGee you've rewrote some dice you moved a little bit you defended some attacks and you're grinning like a toddler who've just learned how to potty it surrounded by the wake of mayhem and destruction you of course surely this is just a great time right in Batman's famous words with great power comes great energy costs here's the thing at the start of your turn you will recover some energy but how much depends entirely on whether you want to be active and actually take a turn or rest which means you can't do anything but defend and re-roll if you rest you recover five energy whereas if you're active you recover just a measly to the table analogy Bill's apt because Gotham City chronicles treats you like an unsupervised parent by letting you stick those fingers right into the electrical socket and learn for yourself in my very first game I played as Jason Todd and spoilers Jason Todd gets a minigun feeding endless amounts of dice into the minigun produces the exactly the effect that you would expect a floor littered with henchmen but that gives the villain player the perfect opportunity to take back the scales because energy isn't just your ability to do things it is also your life points and dad paints a very big target on your head and even just taking that minigun is a meaningful decision you'll often find that each scenario is tipped towards the villain with swarms of creeps cahoots and cronies craving to tear out a little corner of the bad cape for themselves your objectives are often spread very far apart movement is exceptionally costly and feels like diving into a swimming pool filled with knives so having this little friend right here would be tremendously helpful but guess what Jason Todd is already a competent sharpshooter and a lot of your abilities have a fresh hold where the certain cumbrous you just lose them so yeah you can be a competent killing machine but you will be the slow plodding time that we'll have to say goodbye to abilities like leaping kicking swooping and what rhymes with swooping oh no every damage you take moves your energy into the wound slot you can recover them but only into the fatigue slot constantly waning your ability to be effective round after round you will feel more beaten tired and grasping and we're never synergy you can find between your characters just to pull out that one last rabbit trick out of the Hat and hopefully take down that final objective and that's the beauty of this game if you want to go all out go all out but if you do go you go and if the heroes get to build sandcastles then the villain player gets to tear them apart there isn't much of a change here apart from opposing objectives so for example if the heroes needed to stomp out some fires then the villain player just wants to watch those babies burn analogies are hard as it turns out and yes you still have energy and that same balancing act but the choice this time is simply in which feelings you activate you could activate a fog or you could activate burn but each one you activate slides down what the game calls the river and the second activation of the same character becomes prohibitively expensive and of course because this is such a playground whatever you activate becomes the epicenter of action and you want to keep activating it over and over again no matter how hard you tip the scales they always tip right back and you could certainly argue that the system is great it's like it's flexible it gets you what you want from it but only if you're engaged by what's happening and with the all-too-familiar rolled dice and get successes Roadshow it's so easy to see how some people just won't be and if you are one of those people boy will you find this system tedious not only will some players find Batman just too shallow but their patience with it will likely be further aggravated by the same thing that makes it great want to be effective spent energy you've spent your energy to skip a dead which wouldn't be so bad if there were more than six or seven turns in any given scenario which means that you could either have fun three times during the course of the game or have some moderate fun seven times in a game and that's what board gaming is all about having a very moderate time [Music] no no no no no way there's still that little matter of whether we actually recommend this game and ask things done it would be so easy to say hey if you think this game is for you if you're looking for that lazy Sunday afternoon dice checker for a carefree game of some fantastic plastic it's not for everyone but it's for you right it's for you this is just that little matter of accountability we are known to give big Kickstarter titles a good shake when they deserve it and look if you back this game and you love this nothing I'm about to say is going to take away from that I think even you'll agree that what's coming next is only fair it's not just that there's an inherent risk with backing a Kickstarter project it's that big campaigns encourage a business model that focuses on delivering everything that was on the project images and putting too much focus on the final details isn't really profitable most people who want your thing have already paid for it and retail customers aren't going to deliver the same bang it becomes especially evident after the news that the king of one-and-done Kickstarter campaigns semen has offloaded all the post Kickstarter retail efforts onto as MIDI and while certain people doomed and gloomed over big as MIDI buying everything ask me who got the better end of that deal and you'll hear some very different ideas more live isn't nearly as bad as that after all the only reason we're reviewing this game is that even though it is a Kickstarter exclusive come June this a second campaign for Batman so if you want to get your hands on all the goodies gray you'll get to shell out a few hundred dollar reduce and model if reaching out to us and asking us to review this game and providing us with the review copy is every indication that they want to develop a game that is good fun and will deliver good word of mouth and apologies for being worried here but I really want to make sure that this lands right I believe the intentions are good but there is a vision here that wasn't allowed to be compromised by minor things like I don't know usability and I'm not even talking about the impenetrable although that is certainly a big part of it each character sheep comes with nearly a dozen different abilities each handily referenced by nothing more live have taken a cue from language-independent games with symbols relating to rules the idea is that you look at a symbol and you know what it means without needing any actual text but whereas most games have about ten symbols making them easy many languages to learn Batman has 51 which turns your first experience of diving into the sea of gorgeous plastic less exciting dice rolls and more quizzically looking at your character sheet and patiently waiting for your turn to look through the rulebook the only resource that explains what any of these symbols actually mean worse yet is the totally inconsistent battle maps that your adventures will take place on they sure are pretty and detailed with moody lighting revealing tiny pockets of Hope in dark desolate cityscapes which would be great if the rest of the game didn't have a completely different art style less dark night and more Saturday morning Bruce Wayne and the fruit bats bearable until you realize that all of this terrain matters this was blocking line-of-sight as elevation changes that hinder movement and actual hindering terrain indicated by the tiniest of icons and all of this is clearly highlighted at the back of the rulebook which you haven't got because someone else is already looking up what their abilities do and yes there's fan-made reference sheets the bridge rule books and promises that everything will be sorted out in the next printing but whilst us enthusiasts love finding our extra resources on BoardGameGeek for every one of us there's about four people who've never even been on that website and with a minimum backer pledge of a hundred and forty dollars plus shipping is it really too much to ask that the game comes usable out of the box with fixes that don't need to be mailed whenever the next campaign ships and even after all of that I want to throw Batman a bone I didn't expect to like this game perhaps because I'm just not looking for yet another zombicide alike but I have to admit that I do like it just a little bit and potentially that's partly astonishment that all these mechanisms come together as well as they do gotham city chronicles is a game where the sum is greater than any of its parts prop them too much and the entire thing falls apart with villains that feel that cluster scenarios that they're just a touch to prescribed and sometimes mr. mark and aside from aesthetics nothing really feeling like whatever it is that Batman is supposed to feel like there's no character building aside from choosing some bad gadgets which are nearly as influential as actual items and actual items are sparse and barely present and then you have these things like a toxic that which if you go into it it will kill you but there's no real way of pushing anyone into it Batman as a game likes what I love most about this your honor the sense of feeling inventive with the tools that I'm given which if you think about it Batman liking inventiveness that is the greatest sin so that's where we're at it's pretty but it's expensive it's fun but it requires an inordinately not for anyone who doesn't enjoy 3d lut cubes and it would be a total slam-dunk and a recommendation if monolith put as much effort into development as they did into the aesthetics and the design of the game as it is even in its final initial form it's just the wistful look at what it potentially could be this video is now over but if for some reason you did not have enough of this face then UK Games Expo is only a couple of days away and we'll be doing not one not two but three live shows on Friday 6:30 p.m. will be joining nightmare live on stage that's nightmare with okay you know the cult classic British TV show I believe that event is ticketed but that's the only one the other two events are free on Saturday 12 noon at tube sweet we'll be joining this game is broken podcast for a live recording of their podcast as guests and on Saturday 4 p.m. toots we will be doing our very own Victorian parlor game show hosted by alight so please come down and watch that one or the other ones or all three of them and we'll have a lot of fun and there's something I'm forgetting what do people do at the end of YouTube videos

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 50,513

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2019, batman, gotham city chronicles, monolith, kickstarter

Id: NoCo-S0ZXiM

Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Romdeau0]

The worst offender in this game by far is the symbols without supporting reference sheets. Did the devs at Monolith really think including that many symbols without an easy way to look them up for a group of 4 people was a good idea? Come on, it's like they do 0 play testing outside of their internal network of folks. It's blatantly obvious that the game needed those reference sheets, yet we need to depend on others and BGG to fix this easily fixable problem.

Better yet, does a game really need over 50 symbols to be considered engaging? I would say it's a tad overkill.

[u/milkyjoe241]

I've played this game 12 times now and it's a weird one. I love it, but damn if there aren't things that just make it so hard for new players. If you want this game to work you have to work hard to make the other players get over the large hump of inaccessibility. And I think the worst part of the game is that all its major problems could have been fixed. Like he said in the review, printing out stuff from BGG helps out a ton.

[u/kennystetson]

Since playing Conan, and then seeing the issues people are having with batman, I've sworn I will never buy a Monolith game again. Conan's frustratingly unclear rules, contradictions and oversights make the game so frustrating to play. It's a light game at heart, but all of the above make it feel like I am playing a heavy game. I have no idea what Monolith are thinking. By the looks of it they've made it even worse with Batman

[u/boardgamebarrage]

I didn't grow up on Batman, and I imagine thats a big part of the love.

[u/butters-chaos]

I just received this game (all in) last week, checked content and everything is perfect condition.

I'm hesitant to host it, it is hard to teach and hard for players to absorb the rules?

Will need to put aside half a day to trial play it before hosting at game day/night.

[u/forlorn_bandersnatch]

Monolith has made it apparent to me as an "all flash, no dash" kind of company. Everything looks great, but you are buying, at a premium, a lot of nice plastic and a mediocre game.

[u/Notfaye]

Things I need for season 2: ai, campaign, rules-book, reference cards

[u/Derelicte226]

I'll be watching this later. SU&SD are also doing a video review.

I wonder if either of them can turn me away from backing the reprint???

[u/U_DoneMessedUp_AAron]

Hopefully with Season 2 coming up they will look to provide an updated rulebook and maybe some reference cards?