Black Angel Review - The Best Euro Games Have to Offer This Year?

this is a spaceship and I can already hear you yelling at the screen now Africa this is clearly not a spaceship this is a very sturdy very neon-lit cardboard box and you are right and that box also has a boardgame inside it and that board game is called Black Angel the ball game is also about a spaceship and that spaceship is also called Black Angel so that's that's how that works Black Angel is the cardboard child of Sebastian Dujardin Xavi is George and Allah open whose names you might recognize from tois a game that came out nine years ago which I think I played once when it was released I don't actually remember because this was so long ago but the critical consensus is that it's brilliant tomorrow was a game about medieval stuff like monks this game isn't really about monks and this of course you consider robots wordlessly wandering around a giant empty spaceship and performing whatever duties they've been assigned as a parable to monastic living then this game is totally about monks talking of monks black angel is meant to be a spiritual sequel to tois and that is something worth talking about not comparison wise I am totally not well enough equipped to compare them but the fact that this game from what I can tell has been in development for much of this nine year gap and obviously since tois has so many fans this game has been anticipated just just a little bit just a little bit but the thing is if you ask me I think 9 years is just too much I'm sorry I clearly don't like this already critical darling which some other reviewers have named it the headliner for game of the year so let's pivot to something safe and comfortable and talk about artwork which comes from none other than our favorite board game illustrator in hotel this should be fine space has never looked so in boardgames bright neon pinks purples and blues alien creatures that look like they crawl out of a blender that was stuffed with mobius comic book panels and Golden Age sci-fi and of course the titular Black Angel as cold as space itself lifelessly trudging past the stars jagged wings outstretched like a glimmer of faint hope in Black Angel humanity has died but in a last-ditch effort bestowed banks of the DNA on an interstellar vessel whose journey is going to take millennia for too long to make that vessel habitable its objective space no not space pronounced comedic Lee likes neck but space being the name of an earth-like planet that is going to be our next home and as much as I respect the thought that went into the presentation of Black Angel not to mention that it is leaps and bounds better than most eurogames I have to admit that I don't like it it's noisy it's messy and it's inconsistent every aspect of a game stems from a different art style the galaxy is neon Noir the aliens and robots that man our ships are dorky Golden Age weirdos and the technology boards hang like upside down cityscapes from Blade Runner artistically Black Angels ideas feel loosely cobbled together from anything sci-fi into a Frankenstein behemoth we all recognize that this is meant to be a representation of a human being even though its torso is made from a potato one of its legs is made from my dog's chew toy and it has no mouth which is probably for the best because I don't think any of us would like to know what this thing actually eats and you might be saying that I'm working little too hard to illustrate my point but well I had fun making this thing and also it's endemic of the game's problems as a whole I eat other potatoes it's a potato cannibal black angel is made up of three parts that I would argue are completely separate but because this is one board game and not free they have been sewn together my favorite part is the actual traveling through space each time you send out a robot to one of the alien planets and yes you do actually get to take a robot and slow it into the saucer it's very satisfying you are potentially able to play a mission card they will open up new actions in the game this one for example will give me new robots each time I activate it and this one will give me lots of flying sources if I play both of them I'll have an infinite army of little robots flying around space meeting aliens other mission cards only give you something when they fall off the edge of space and plummet into non-existence wait a minute that's not how space works you might say to me and you would be right because black Angel has a really funky system to represent Space Flight and I like it very much every time a player chooses to advance the spaceship further towards space the last space tile gets removed flipped over and put in the front then the Black Angel hops one tile forward from our perspective this ship is still in the middle of the board but some things that were further away are now closer and some things if I could pick them up are now unreachable any mission cards that were on the last tile get removed from this space board those planets are now too far away we'll never see them again sometimes this is frustrating because we lost access to a good action and sometimes this is great some cards trigger only when they fall off of the edge of the universe which sets a potential for interesting combinations for example I could have a card that's caused me free points for every yellow card that fell off I could then spend my game flying to various yellow planets and playing mission cards to them until eventually I would deploy that card itself and when it falls off then I'll get a lot of points and also I'll have a lot of dead robots like what happens to them when they fall off the edge of space do they just cease to function because they're too far away from the mothership or do they continue to exist with a purpose wistfully gazing into the horizon knowing they can never go home we'll never know here's the best part I don't even need to play cards to activate that action if I fly my dinky little robot to someone else's card I can then start activating their action of course the other player gets something little little bonus just for owning that card and it's the same four cards that fall off the edge of space if I play the card that gives you a bonus when it falls off of the edge of space I'll get whatever bonus is on the left side of the card whereas if I or anyone else still has a robot with a spaceship on it will get the bonus that's on the right side when you deploy a mission with your spacefaring little robot you'll put another robot on it to signify that it's now yours but that little spaceship is still there which means you can fly it somewhere else maybe get a little treat that's more in line with what your plan is or perhaps get access to a very delicious action this is where the promise of interplay the idea that what I do affect other players decisions really kicks in but never shifts into fourth gear actions are like ice cream we all want them there's never enough of them but in black angel actions are more like dice cream because you take the actions with the dice each time you want to do anything you need to spend a die strangely whilst black angel certainly goes out of its way to explain everything the matically at times stretching the definition of reason there is never any given explanation for why these dice in space let you do things the board is segmented into free colors just like the mission cards we've been playing in space each color has its own compartment of actions if I want to fight two grey planets I will need a gray dye on a grey space to fly to the grey planet and play the grey card but first let's talk about ravages the bad space baddies from bad space the going missions near dangerous zones forces you to draw cards from the Ravager deck this is a way of representing Ravager attacks no battle actually takes space win the game you always fend them off but these cards represent the lasting damage that has been sustained to your ship each card is deployed into one of the action zones producing a bad space effect each time you go there and additionally dealing damage to that area sustained enough damage in an area and then every time you send a die there the action that you do becomes weaker which produces an interesting effect one of the six actions you can take on this board of course lets you clear these ravaged cards mitigating the bad effects that happen to you every time you take one of these actions and there is another action that lets you clear these damage cubes off making the actions once more more potent but of course when I do one of these actions and my actions are limited I am benefiting everyone on the table and here's the thing this game is competitive in a way black angel is an empty ship but only empty when it comes to life not when it comes to intelligence each player plays one of the four potential artificial intelligences it's like one of those driverless cars except if it makes a mistake then all of humanity dies why would you put four onto one ship to argue and disagree with well because even facing imminent inescapable destruction humanity couldn't agree on which nations should put their AI onto the ship so they just put all of them in there which is uh yeah Touche black angel design team Touche and whilst we have a common goal reaching space and we can fail it there is only one winner the one with most victory points and unlike semi cooperative games there is still one person that wins even if the ship blows up novel right yes but it doesn't necessarily work very well choosing not to help the ship doesn't mean I'll lose so why do it yes my actions suffer but so do everyone else is it's just managing my own greed and how good I want the actions to be but there is some incentive in cleaning up the mess removing the Ravager effects gives you ravager cars which can be great and conversely any damage you fix becomes debris which lets you receive choice bonuses and modified dice results but these are not do or die resources frequently I felt like I was incentivized to let the ship barely hang together whilst that went off on alien missions to further my own prestige for a eyes on one ship and they behaved worse than humans do it's not a great detriment to the gameplay but it just feels a little loose every time I played black angel I felt that promise of interplay of discussions of which parts of the ship we should fix and what can be held off but that promise never comes to fruition because the game design just doesn't seem interested in it that looseness pervades the dice action selection - every time I advance black angel through space I'll get to rear all all my dice each time I take an action I can only use gray dice on grey actions green dice on green and so on the number of pips sum to die determines how many times I can take that action so if I have one pip and I place it on the take ravager card space I could take one card and if I had two pits for example I could take two and so on I don't have to use my dice I can always take dice from other players but at a cost of a resource what kind of resource no just resource this only one resource in the game and it's called resource moving on that resource is worth half a point at the end of the game but only if we manage to reach space if we do we count up our resources spaceships robots divide them by half and that's how many extra points we get because scoring points from resources is the pod that gets eliminated from scoring if your shoe blows up not create potentially interesting situations where one a I might have way more resources than you do so you deliberately fly into ravager space and destroy the ship that's a cool moment but our cool moment comes at a cost to make this decision significant the resources have to be abundant if my opponent has 20 resources in their hold and I have five it's clear our profit from destroying the ship but because they are abundant there is no tension in spending them if these were really hard to get it would be an incredible ache on whether I should spend my very last resource to take a better action because my opponent has a free die and all I have is ones and zeroes but that ache is rarely there because mostly I just do whatever I want because the results far outstrip the cost especially when those resources could end up being meaningless if the ship blows up if flying around with robots in space is my favorite part the dice selection on the board is my least favorite it all feels and I apologize for the technical board games argonne wobble dee gobbledy not to mention that the artwork necessary to clearly illustrate all of these rules makes it all look completely unclear and sometimes just silly this is where your robots hang out for example what is this place called a break room although it's not the break room that will eventually break you but these technology tiles that yet again feel like an entirely different game woven together with loose fred's you start the game with free technologies spending a yellow dye on the take technology tiles action you'll be able to get more each new one will slide into your tech board pushing others along the way eventually you end up with a jigsaw of various styles of various colors providing various bonuses but only if you spend a card to activate them spend a gray card on a gray column or row and you activate all the grades Kyle's in that column or row or you can spend a Ravager card and you will activate all of them regardless of color what's more you can acquire advanced technology and it's basically just technology that won't do anything but clog up your board at the end of the game it will score you points for various things like for example having ravager cards in your hand or having deployed missions of various colors but it will only score you a maximum of four points making them a dubious investment unless of course you manage to push it out of your board in which case it would potentially score you more points by a factor of two based on which color you assigned the advanced technology tile that you pushed out when you pushed it out and then how many cards of that color that you've played to the space board and they've fallen off the edge of space now get ready for some real hardcore critique it's fine all of this is fine it's a puzzle or bait not a particularly engaging or interesting one you'll push things around they'll do different things it all feels a little bit spur-of-the-moment and it's completely optional which is tense at the start of the game because you'll need resources but to get those resources you'll have to play a card to one of the rows or the columns and does that mean that you're sacrificing the linchpin of your plan to get those resources once the game kicks into high gear that tightness washes away resources on this crucial anymore so if you really don't want to spend the card don't it's no big deal just skip this step pushing these advanced tiles feels tedious and a slog you'll likely just end up buying whatever technology tiles are the cheapest so you can slot them in inject them into this board and complete the revolutions faster it all just feels so optional most I'm not mighty impressed with black Angel a lot of people are and that's fine I don't begrudge anyone liking it especially if you are enamored by the theme and engrossed by the art or that you just like euro games want another one you can get really good at black angel timing missions grabbing the right advanced tech noticing the right time to nab a die from another player or even deciding to destroy the ship those are all things you'll get better at every time you play Black Angel doesn't quite stand up not because it's a game that doesn't quite work it's a real working board game just like this potato is a real working human hello every time I look at Black Angel I find something else that hurts me but even I can't deny that all of its systems are fresh not quite something we've seen before in board games and that's exciting and no wonder that it took nine years to string it all together but since we're talking about humanity's doom it's worth asking the question just because they could doesn't mean that they should I feel like there's a great game somewhere black angel maybe even two or three great games and that's its problem I hesitate to use the word overdeveloped but every time I glance at the structure of this ship board that's the only word that springs to mind couple it with a rulebook that makes as much sense as my potato man and all I'm left with is this verdict by now it's become a bit of a cliche to say we've so many great euro games why choose this one but just because it's cliche it doesn't mean it's not true if you haven't gotten your hands on such great titles like Great Western trail Concordia or Terra Mystica and you're looking for a new euro game get those first but what if you are enthusiast what if you're looking for the new fresh thing is this the best euro game of the year so far yes but essence peel is right around the corner with many new exciting releases and until then this is strictly optional

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 55,523

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2019

Id: m7qCuzKh_2g

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019