Horizon Zero Dawn: The Board Game Review - From Hero to Zero

and so then he says is that all you can do but imitations [Music] funny jokes what uh what are they doing here i think i think they're here for the horizon zero dawn the board game review oh okay do you want to do it now no it can wait horizon zero dawn the board game review copy provided by the distributor is a gorgeous lavish adaptation of horizon zero dawn a popular video game here's the problem because we're board game reviewers we know absolutely nothing about video games or as we call them the lower arts but in preparation for this video i decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and play horizon zero dawn the video game god speed efka godspeed people say this video game stuff is addictive but i don't know what all the fuss is about honestly just gonna finish this bill be right with you i'm not gonna lie i was surprised by horizon zero dawn i was never the biggest fan of open world play spaces especially when they get trophy but here each corner of the world was a challenge in hzd you play a hunter a loy that's written like alloy but ally in a collapsed world that reverted to tribalism plagued by robots who look and behave like wildlife first up the world is just gorgeous to look at second every monster has its own behavioral quirks and patterns and to overcome them you have to study those behavioral quirks third not only do we get to play as a female protagonist but we get to play a female protagonist in the world that's been literally plunged into the cultural stone age and everyone's obsessed with traditions when they don't even understand why those traditions exist and there comes a loy to sort those idiots out for a triple a game that's class and now that i know what horizon zero dawn is about i want more of it which brings us to the board game horizon zero dawn the board game is sort of like the video game but there's some notable changes to the concept instead of playing one character or a group of characters bound by a common cause you play a competitive game where you each take on the role of unnamed hunters representing the different factions from this universe you're still hunting together and trying to outsmart the beasts with clever tactics and you can still fail together but one of you is hoping to become top boss hunter i used to dance under that name each game you will pick your quest the big bad thing that is your ultimate quarry in the main game there is only one quest sawtooth but with future expansions you'll be able to expertly murder different animal-shaped robots however you can't take on sawtooth just yet first you'll need to attempt a set of progressively more difficult encounters with smaller critters dismantling them for scrap trading that scrap for better stuff to hunt with and leveling up on your talent tree so far so good right well before i tell you our verdict and i realized the way that i phrased that is already showing our ankles a little bit let me tell you that after i read the rule book i was more excited for horizon zero dawn the board game than any other big box miniature kickstart extravaganza before it [Music] we have two basic criteria for what makes a good board game that's trying to appeal to the video gamer crowd first it needs to have ease of access because video gamers aren't exactly used to fitting this and depth of gameplay easy right so then let's talk first about what you'll do as characters each encounter you'll build a map populated with critters and then one at a time activate your characters swing into action and then watch the monsters respond already the rules here are clean and simple when it's your turn you have two actions each action is also simple action number one you can make a ranged attack against an enemy within range of your ranged weapon whether that's a bow or a sling or anything else that you might have action number two you can make a melee attack that lets you scooch one square closer to the enemy and then whop them with a spear or a maul or again whatever other melee weapon you might have action number three you can craft putting cards from your discount pile back into your action deck action number four you can distract an enemy making them wander into a trap or better yet another hunter's square alerting them to their presence and then finally action number five you can walk one square if you're being sneaky or two squares if you're not each character in this game has their own individual list of equipment that they'll start the game with and their own individual action deck this deck is spice it is loaded with cards that empower all of my attacks turning a regular walk with them all into a ferocious stomp with that can't be right i says it turns my attacks into fire they gave me a fire hammer but also it's filled with ammunition each time you want to make a ranged attack you have to slot in an arrow or a bomb or even a trap from your action deck didn't draw an ammunition card i guess it's time to run into a giant monster here is the best bit at the start of each turn you will draw five of these cards which means that if you wanted to you could unleash absolute pandemonium except if your deck which starts anywhere between 18 and sometimes even just 14 cards runs out you've just fainted also your deck is your hit points and every time a monster damages you you have to discard cards from it every turn has the potential to become an epic moment where you jump in front of two enemies and then you swing your axe then you set everything on fire and then you swing your axe again to shove a monster into a trap that you played with a free card and then that trap explodes dealing damage to everything around it but does that mean that you've just killed yourself what happens when you faint do you lose well no you skip around and come back afterwards every encounter has a limited number of times all players can communally faint in a two-player game if someone fades once that's totally fine nothing happens however as soon as another player's character faints everyone loses the encounter which means that you can if you want to run in front of a giant monster totally ignore any damage it does to you throw cars away left right and center and after you racked up enough kills and gotten enough glory points just go for a nap whilst everyone preciously guards every single card they have [Music] but what about these monsters elaine please tell us that they aren't just chuchkies and that it's cool to fight them it's alright i got you remember we said that when you move you can choose to move one square silently or run two squares loudly that's because machines like chipmunks have two states non-alert and alert there's a quality fresh meme there please still love me at the start of each encounter all monsters are non-alert they'll start at designated spawn spaces and each activation follow the patrol route until they leave the map that isn't something that you want them to do remember that you're here to hunt and gather parts from machines that you destroy if at least one monster leaves the map then you won't get the scrap bonus for the encounter and if enough monsters leave the map then you will collectively fail the encounter altogether one way of making the monsters stay make them alert sadly once they're alert there's no going back they'll be alert until they die or until you lose the encounter at the same time you don't want too many monsters to be alert because each one of them will activate at the end of every player's turn which in a four-player game could be as deadly as a nail polish factory next to a volcano imagine i decided to take on this strider attacked it and made it alert i roll some dice and didn't quite kill it at the end of my turn it will attack me at the end of the second player's turn it will attack me but at the end of the third player's turn it will attack me but at the end of the fourth player's turn it doesn't matter because i've already fainted this sounds like an easy problem to solve just don't activate too many monsters that's like saying don't pet too many lions on the savannah there's an entire bucket list of things that will alert monsters a machine walks into your square alert a machine activates one square away from you and you're not until grass alert you sprint past a machine alert a machine taps another machine on the shoulder alert someone coughs and everyone at the table is very very alert the trick is to give these machines some space maybe distract one of them whilst the other walks a bit further away and then hope you can get to it before it leaves the map divide and conquer but you're also dividing your enemies with your other enemies so that's how that works and finally the machines themselves the key selling point of verizon zero dawn both video game and board game returning from its digital counterpart is the part counter system where you counter the machine's parts each time you attack a machine you have to designate whether you're going to be attacking the machine itself or one of its parts if you decide to attack the machine directly then whatever damage you deal to it will be mitigated by its armor and the rest will reduce its hit points however if you attack one of its parts you'll only damage the part if you deal at least half the damage equal to its tear value or destroy the part entirely if you deal damage equal to or over its tear value since you have to designate whether you are attacking one of the parts before you even roll the dice you're never sure whether what you're rolling is going to be enough to do anything if you manage to destroy the part that's great you'll deal the machine some damage you'll disable one of its abilities but if you whiff that's just a wasted turn and you've just painted a big target on your face this face but perhaps the juiciest idea in this box is the machine behavior cards if you've played the video game you'll know that each robot has a different purpose watchers act as sentries and alert other machines to your presence rams are very fast they're not rams destroyers but they ram you as soon as they see you and crabs be crabbing i guess i'm still not really sure what these are meant to be or do i just know that i'm really into the idea that i have to learn each machine's quirks to take them out what a package huh just a riveting promise of ideas aesthetics and fun and that's before i even tell you that each character has diverging paths of progression and each of them has a very different feel the karjat is all about diving out of bushes getting that tall grass bonus and immediately moving away but whether you'll focus on maneuverability or getting yourself a better spear is entirely up to you delightfully after each encounter you'll be able to visit merchants and spend the scrap you got from your kills on better weapons armor ammunition and fill up any gaps that your character progression was missing page after page i was reading this rulebook and the promise the hope the dream felt oh so real and then then we played this game [Music] randy oxford's big book of words defines disappointment with a picture of heroes of land air and sea which i guess is appropriate because horizon zero dawn is the worst board game we have played since heroes of land air and sea of course now you're asking us how how can all of this excitement potential and exuberance melt into a puddle of catastrophe i think the best comparison that i can summon here is england's track and trace system it has all the necessary components to make it work but as soon as you press that launch button it implodes under the weight of its own incompetence remember when we said a good video game adaptation needs two things ease of access and depth of gameplay well this fails on both counts imagine opening this box and going cool i can't wait to dive into all these goodies well wait you will because first you have to defeat the hardest machine of all the 50-page rule book i'll give kudos where this game deserves them because it's a rare opportunity as far as reading this thing goes it's really not the end of the world it's written concisely and explains the general concepts of the game well but like many of these games once you actually start to operate the machinery you quickly realize that your crash course manual didn't explain half the things you need to know so off to bgg and faqs except there's no faq yet i won't go on too much about this because if i had a dime for every kickstarter over promiser that didn't have a comprehensive rule set i'd have a hundred bucks which would at least pay for this game but what does fill off it is just how many rules there are for a game that ends up being roll some dice kill some monsters and listlessly repeat so this game is semi-cooperative right wrong well then what is it i don't know the rules say that this game has us working together but still scoring points individually to see who wins except it just doesn't work like that there are two types of points in this game during an encounter you get glory points each time you destroy a machine or destroy one of its components whoever has the most glory points at the end of the encounter gets some tokens and runners up get half sun tokens in games with more than two players whoever has the most sun tokens at the end of the game wins that all makes sense but humor me whilst i describe this scenario that's my norah marksman that's my opponent's banuk survival together we're gonna try and take down the scrapper and these two watches although that watcher over there not a problem right now because it's further away within the spirit of horizon zero dawn one of us would distract the scrapper whilst the other one safely takes out the watcher at least that's the fun way of doing it right except if i spend my time distracting the scrapper i'm letting the other person take the kill and the points and the only way you inch closer towards victory in this game is by killing things so what this quickly devolves into is everyone just picking a target and then rolling dice until target is dead the problem here is that this game features a cooperative framework lifted nearly whole cloth from games like descent or imperial assault but then someone rubber-stamped a form that says it's now semi-co-op if something is semi-cooperative it needs concepts and ideas to push people to make those decisions not just say it's semi-cooperative and expect that it somehow magically just works so this halfway competitive thing doesn't work on a conceptual level but some of the rules that have been created to support it are just punk every time you kill a machine you draw a card from the scrap deck on average you'll just get some scrap metal or some fancy schmancy part all of which you can use to buy stuff from the merchants but sometimes and by sometimes i mean more frequently than any of us would like you will randomly draw one of these cards imagine killing the big crab thing it had a lot of armor hit points all kinds of things you draw a card and that card says oops you score no glory from this kill too bad your opponent on the other hand kills a watcher which you could literally dismantle with a whisper they draw a card an oh look extra glory they barely did a thing you did the hard work yet they will win the encounter and get the sun token fun right you know what's even less fun giving one of the characters a ridiculous glory point generating ability that no other characters can even come close to competing with every time the osirim sets things on fire it gets a glory point how hard is it to set things on fire not hard spend the right card and you can even set things aflame in nine squares well at least everything is limited to having only one fire token so you can't abuse this ability haha say hello to a card that lets you deal things a fire token if they already have a fire token in one turn i could jump into the middle of three enemies attack once get three glory points attack again and get another three glory points if i manage to kill something with those two attacks that's at least another glory point that's more glory than any other character is reasonably able to generate in any given encounter and if you want more cards here is the event deck that gives catch-up advantages to the player with the least sun tokens which sounds great except that half of these are just take that cards which screw with other players making it fun for no one so that's where we're at things don't work and when they do they're broken but efka you might say if you hate the semi-co-op mode so much isn't there a cooperative mode listed at the back of the rulebook i'm glad you mentioned that because now i can tell you about all the other things that don't work i think this game would be better without the pretense of competition but if you turn on cooperation you can't escape the fact that this is just ridiculously easy each encounter has just enough monsters so that every player can get one kill and one player can get maybe another kill these things aren't even hard to take down a couple of hits and they're dead that makes distractions pointless attacking components a waste of time and pointless worrying about alerting other monsters pointless and doing anything that's not just attacking the nearest monster pointless also attacking some components doesn't even make sense the scrapper for example has the radar sweep ability that lets them ignore tall grass tall grass stops monsters from noticing you when they're near you naturally if you destroy the scrappers radar you can disable its radar sweep ability except when you attack the scrapper it becomes alert and once the machine is alert it's permanently alert so why would you attack something that stops it from becoming alert when by attacking it you are making it alert the answer according to some forum posts and bgg is because there's cards that stop machines from being alert and they become no alert again except after examining all of the cards in the game i can safely tell you that's just not true steam forged are also responsible for dark souls the board came but one of the main criticisms of it was that you had to wade through minion encounters before you got to the big boss fight which was the good part of the board game i wish that i could say the same thing about horizon zero dawned the board game because after an endless trawl of uninteresting encounter to uninteresting encounter all you get to do is one more uninteresting encounter by the time you get to the end your characters are so souped up that it no longer feels like a challenge nor is it miraculously somehow more interesting it's just another monster with more hit points and more armor it has some cards that change its behavior from turn to turn but ultimately it's just a matter of time before you take it down and then it's just over i guess it would be fair to admit now that in the past we haven't exactly been kind to games that went on kickstarter and had a lot of miniatures but frankly after the letdown this game was and knowing just how rightfully excited people get about horizon zero dawn this felt more like a public service duty we had to do and you know what almost every other one of those games that we reviewed i can see why people would get excited about them aside from pretty figurines rising sun it didn't work for us but at least it's loaded with intriguing ideas and kooky competition clouds buy a ridiculously compelling solo game even tainted grail which we loathed i could applaud for how much work went into the world building conceptually horizon zero dawn the board game is a pale shadow in comparison to all of them and i wouldn't recommend it to anyone even the figurines feel kind of small and not as grandiose as they should be but at least the setup and teardown is pretty fast so overall seven out of ten no pun included judgment approved [Music] [Music] i said

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 61,668

Rating: 4.7848277 out of 5

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2020, horizon zero dawn, steamforged, kickstarter, miniatures

Id: sTsOr2P6duI

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/flyliceplick]

This is why bad games should be reviewed.

[u/[deleted]]

I wish Steamforged would just...stop.

[u/Jbx316x]

Glad I pulled out of my pledge. Something stunk about this game the moment the pledge manager opened and steamforge started changing the goalposts.

[u/Mortlach78]

This review achieved two things:

1) I will not be getting this board game

2) I will look to see if the video game goes on sale this holiday season.

Still love you, Elaine, despite, or is it because of, the stale memes.

[u/emohipster]

Kinda sad that it sucks, it's my favorite videogame.

[u/KamahlFoK]

NPI

Big miniatures KS board game

Steamforged

There is no way in hell this is going to be a positive review, even if the game was somehow good to a niche market (mostly saying that because Steamforged, where apparently some people like RE2).

[u/AbdullaFutta]

Hopefully they learn from this and don't screw up the Monster Hunter board game 🤞

...but based on their track record...I'd say that's unlikely...

[u/TheAerouge]

Am I the only one devastated that SFG aquired the Monster Hunter license? Like I know how this will play out ... the IP pulls in tons of videogamers, SFG delivers the next terrible game, and again thousands of people will think boardgaming is for strange nerds?

[u/bobn3]

I'm so sick of these kickstarter games that have a nigh empty retail version (cough cough Hellboy). I get it, backers need rewards, but ffs put something in the retail box at least