The Hungry Gamer Previews Fractal

[Music] oh [Music] that looks tasty fractal is a new kind of 4x game where instead of beating each other and attacking each other and backstabbing each other you're all going to work together to make the new galaxy a wonderful place where everyone gets along no no not buying that yeah i'm not buying that either welcome folks dave the hungry gamer is back with another kickstarter preview and today we are talking about fractal beyond the void and before i get started please make sure you turn your cling on subtitles because if i make any mistakes in the rules overview that's where you'll find the corrections and additionally i do need to point out that everything you're going to see here is still in the prototype phase and is subject to change the next thing that i'll say is what you're looking at here is the aftermath of a game that i recently played against streamlined matt he utterly obliterated me but i just left it set up and figured jump in and do the video now so this is actually kind of the end of one of the games that we just played so what fractal is is it is a 4x game which each player takes on one of the many different races and you all have the same types of units and you're going to expand out across the somewhat randomly created universe and do those lovely 4x type things and at the end of four rounds whoever has the most victory points is going to be the winner along with that there will be an aftermath campaign which is a green legacy style game which will see you doing different types of scenarios might be team might be co-op might be competitive whatever it may be and i'll talk a little bit about that when i get to my final thoughts now if you are not interested in how this game is played i just want to jump into my final thoughts then you will go to the timestamp on the screen right now for those of us still here let's talk about how this game is played so the game is itself is going to be played over four different rounds and you'll notice that there's a five and six here that's for during the aftermath campaign sometimes the games are gonna go to five and six rounds but in general you're gonna play over four different rounds and obviously i'm not going to cover everything in there but i will cover the quick basics now at the beginning of the game each player is going to select their own unique race and you'll see we have a whole bunch of different ones right here and what's important is each one comes with some different starting abilities they each have their own special ability that makes them well special as it were and they each are going to have their own different types of government that they're going to be able to start the game with and each of those different governments are going to give their own different types of abilities and bonuses that you're able to use as you're playing through the game and it'll make a little bit of and this will make a little bit more sense as i kind of go through what's going to happen on each individual turn then out here each player is going to start with their own starting planet which is just off the edge of the camera on both sides there and then there's all these other plants you have productive planets which are these yellow ones you have bio plants which are the green ones you have mystery planets which are these purple ones and these are going to matter because throughout the game each player is going to have different mysteries that they have and if when they get to these mid phases here if you control enough of these mystery planets then you'll get some kind of bonus and then there are arid planets and these uninhabitable zones here and then on each of these when you start these non-habitable zones there will be one of these living galaxies that will be moving around in each one of these as they flip over and as you discover them and each each of these have their own different rules of how they work this one here if you sacrifice a light ship you get four technology this one if you simply have two light chips there you'll get three technology and so on and so on they all do different things then the other thing that you really need to know on the setup is you'll start the game with a specific set of victory point conditions and just like with the mysteries i mentioned you'll score this first card halfway through the game and then once you've scored that you'll then add another card to increase what it is you have to do so in this case if you have at the break three imperial points you'll get the victory point if you have these types of colonies if you have this technology and so on and so on and so on i'm not going to go too in depth but then halfway through the game we would add this you would do that there and then you slide it under and now to get the points at the end you have to add those on as well and these are going to be your main victory point conditions which is how you're going to win the game not just by beating the tar out of the other player though beating the target of them certainly helps as you're playing through the game for the most part you'll be taking four different types of actions you'll be recruiting which means you'll be getting more troops on any of the worlds that you have to control you'll be colonized you'll be taking your colonies and you'll be placed in different places where you have ground troops in control you'll be advancing which means you'll be moving your units as long as there's a ship to take them from one's hex to another and you'll be doing research and when you do research you'll be able to either upgrade your military with these cards over here or you'll be able to upgrade other various technologies with these cards over here and as you can imagine they all do different types of things and i'll touch on that a little bit later on now before i go into great detail about how the player boards work and how you're getting through all of your turns let's talk broadly about some of the other things you're going to be able to do on the map so i mentioned you're going to be able to advance and what most people often think about when you're doing your 4x type game is the exterminate part where you are fighting with each other and so let's just set up a fictional little combat right here on the center planet and so here we have the blue with a light ship a soldier and a mech versus reds destroyer two mex and a soldier and so what's going to wind up happening is after all the actions are done you enter the conflict phase and that's when you're going to resolve these conflicts and the way this plays out is do card play each player is going to pick one of the cards that they have and they're going to choose to play them face down and they're going to go in the order of initiative here with low being faster and the high number being the last one to play and what's important is you can only play cards that are have that have effects based on what you have on the board so blue can only play cards that utilize the mech the light ship or the troops so they could play this one they could not play this one because they don't have two light ships they could not play this one but they could play this one they could play that one or they could play that one as well as any of the defense cards they're able to play meanwhile the red would be unable to play any of the light ships but could play the ones with the destroyers here hopefully that makes sense and then what's gonna happen is each player will reveal so we'll pretend that there's a ground assault from the blue player and a planetary strike from the red player so the red player has the two so they go first and this one right here does a massive damage meaning that the red player is able to pick one of the opponent's units and simply remove it from the board so we'll pretend that they take this one and then there is a three of them would have to retreat and that would just mean they simply move to a nearby hex usually down the bottom there's various tech upgrades that they're able to do which you can buy and purchase make things better and so you'll notice now blue has no soldiers so they are done they can't do anything but we'll just pretend that we blew up the mech instead then the soldier would have a chance to hit back and you'll see it's simply going to make two of them retreat but if i had three i would also do one of these damages here which means the red player would pick one of their units to be damaged or destroyed and then we would move on now if combat didn't end because someone was completely eliminated or they had to retreat we'd go into the next round and then you would have to play another card now there is one more symbol that i do need to point out and that is with this one right here that is this direct damage which means the attacking player would get to choose what unit gets gets damaged and that's actually pretty much how combat works it's actually pretty simple though there is a nice stack of cards that you have and you're able to upgrade each of them with various texts to make them more powerful and each card has its own upgraded version that's even better which you can do very which you can upgrade via mysteries and other action cards and so on and so on now in addition to that there is the explorer and since the board is set up at the beginning of the game it might seem like there's not a lot of exploring but that is not actually true because in the various places around the board and i'm just placing this one here you might have things like this anomaly right here which is when you enter the hex you get to flip it over and find out how you're able to deal with it so in this case if i were to have three light ships here and i've gained a technology i can draw two artifacts and keep one of them artifacts as you can guess or simply powerful bones that you're going to get for your faction the other thing you can that you will often run across is there'll be obstacles that are out on the board which again the same type of thing when you flip it over you have various ways that you're able to take care of it in this case you can sacrifice a credit and that will immediately gain you an imperial point or you can stack for an imperial point and immediately gain to tech pretty simple quick and easy i've gone over kind of the stuff on the board here but really the but really i think the most important thing is understanding what's going to be happening on your player board so let's clear some of this junk away and talk about how that is going to work now so here is one of the faction boards and you'll be tracking up here your imperial points which you're going to be able to use to activate your race powers and your government powers and so on but as you're playing through the more of the colonies that you have out we have imperial colonies and we have imperial colonies productive colonies scientific colonies military colonies and each of the different hexes will tell you what kind of colonies you're able to build there so for example on this green hex you can only build a scientific or an imperial colony you'll be upgrading your abilities and what we're looking at here is the imperial is going to let you move more and more units anytime you're doing an advanced action the productive is going to give you more and more money more and more credits every at the beginning phase of every turn the scientific will allow your units to travel further when they do advance and if you take the research action give you more of the tech credits which is going to allow you to unlock various abilities and then the military down at the bottom is going to get let you get more and more different units when you do the recruit action and you'll see those are the four actions down there at the bottom and the way you do your actions is you're simply going to pay one credit for each action that you're going to do so if i want to do a recruit i would simply pay a credit take the recruit action and then done done and then each round of your turn you'll do two actions and then the next player gets to do two actions and you're gonna go back and forth the rule is though you can't do the same action twice in the term so i couldn't go recruit but i could do a recruit in advance or whatever order i wanted like that additionally if you run out of credits you're able to deplete one of these actions which means you get to do it for free however it is no longer available to you and at the beginning of each round you're only going to remove one of those depleted tokens so you have to decide is it worth it to you to not have access to it in the following round but to get it for free and then the last thing that you're doing is there will always be three of these action cards available to you every single turn and what's going to trigger the end of the round is once a player has drafted two of these cards their turn is over and they have to pass and then once all players have passed then the round ends you do your conflict and you move on and each of these different actions are wildly wildly different and once they're taken they get removed and then they get replaced with something new so that pretty much covers how this game works it is a very very high high level overview because there is a lot of depth and crunch to this game that i have not talked about so with that said what do i like about this game first off strap in because i got a lot to say so sorry first off i love love love the different factions and it's not necessarily because oh the lore really grabs me on one more than another or anything like that it's because each of them has a ridiculously overpowered ability ridiculously and it feels completely unfair every time you play against somebody who's using one of those powers but of course you got one too that's just different and there is something so delightfully fun to me about i have some kind of superpower that is going to drive the other players crazy and make them want to smash me into space dust love that love that and it's just one of those things that falls into that when everybody's overpowered nobody's overpowered and it's one of those kinds of games and that is just fantastic i mean it is great along with that i also really like that you only have four kinds of units that's it everyone has the exact same units and at their core all the units do exactly the same thing so the differences in the factions are not in different kinds of units oh my god what is your unit no you know what you know what a mech does it does heavy fire that's what it does and yes you can get the military upgrades to make it more powerful but again everybody can do that so the winning and losing is not going to come down to your army is better it's going to be how do you deploy it and how do you use it and that is great as well the next thing that i really like is the combat system now and some of you are going to disagree with me but i really like it it's not a determinative combat where it's a i have more units look at me i have one or chuck and dice to where who knows what's going to happen though i do love me some dice but it has a bit of reading your opponent in there it's a little bit of gambling it's a bit of maybe i should not play this card yet my best card because i know that he knows that i have this card and i know that he knows or she excuse me he or she knows that it would be smart to play this so therefore they're going to counter it but i know that they want to counter it so therefore i'm not going to do it i say it over and over and over again i love that mind game in a game it just makes me really happy but then along with it combat's not hard to manage it's really not you flip the cards whoever goes first you move some things out you take it off the board done it actually goes pretty quickly and so i really really like that as well i also like the way the action selections and the board work this is pure 4x game the more colonies and stuff you have out the better you are and so on but that's great i love how that works it's no better no worse than any other game out there just quick easy i like that but i like the way that you have your four core actions that you're doing and you can pretty much keep doing them over and over and over again i mean not the same series of two as long as you got money and depending on how you spent that money and i just i don't know why i like that so much but i really like that there are turns when i have less actions than somebody else because maybe i didn't manage my business to turn prior so now i'm in a position to where maybe i'm a little bit behind so i got to be even more clever to kind of make up that gap moving forward along with it i really like the option of the depleting your stuff because you can make up that gap of you're out of credits and they still have credits you can deplete stuff but that means you're going to limit yourself next turn i think it's i think it's great i love how that works i also love all the different action cards on every single turn you're going to use two of them and that's kind of your end turn triggers when you've played two of those cards those cards are so crazy different because sometimes they're going to come out be like i have to have that card that means i might end my round earlier than everybody else and be at a bit of a disadvantage though you do get the watcher token which gives you extra bonuses and so on and so on i really really like that as well the next thing that i like is i like the way the exploration works now i'm going to caveat that with i think the exploration is probably this the lowercase x in this 4x but i like the way it works i like that it's not you're putting out new tiles and where it's all over the board and this huge thing and like xayah i'm looking at you where i can't even i couldn't even play it on my game table here i'd have to go to another huge table it's not going to just spread and expand everything that's not the kind of exploration the game is it's with these anomalies and obstacles that are out there on the board the living galaxies that are moving around that you don't know what it is but each one of them is going to have something of value so you want to get there but when you get there you might get there and not be able to deal with it which means you've wasted a whole move getting there so it's kind of finding the time to move into those spaces and claim whatever it is that's there or deal with whatever it is i really think it's very clever and there's so many of those tokens like you're never going to have the same setup especially when you consider the different setup of the different tiles that aren't always determined on the board and so i enjoy that as well so what you're hearing is i pretty much enjoy all all four of the x's in this game what can i say the next thing that i'm excited about i say i'm excited about because i haven't gotten to fully experience it but i'm excited about the aftermath campaign and the way that is set up to to work and what i mean with that is i really like the idea of your playing through and one you are changing the galaxy as you're going through whoever wins they will play the same faction but whoever has lost they play different factions and then eventually it's possible to completely eliminate factions from the world or from the universe i should say or whatever that's very cool but i really like the idea that as you play through you're going to play different types of games you might play everyone for themselves you might play teams you might play a co-op and as you go through it's going to change each time as you're kind of building your own world then at the end you'll have your own game that you can then play competitive on but i believe you can always go back and just kind of pick a scenario you want to do a co-op scenario you can just pick the scenario and play it and so so i'm very excited for how that's going to come together so what are my quibbles with the game the first one is it's a lot i mean it's just a lot and it's a deceptive amount of stuff that you have to learn to play this game because you read through the rulebook and you think well that's not that hard but then when you play oh my gosh there's just there's so much going on there is so much going on that you have to think about and not make a mistake here and not make a mistake there because if you do make a mistake you are really hurting yourself because this is not a very forgiving game there is no as far as i can tell ketchup mechanic of any kind of this game you can get pounded into space dust if you play stupidly and along with that speaking of playing stupidly last game played i played really stupidly because i just forgot about the objectives and there i like the objections they're very cool i just forgot about it i got so focused on capturing streamlined match units and beating him in combat that suddenly we got to the mid game and i scored two points and he maxed out his points and at that point could i catch up yes but i was really really far behind and so you might not like that that you can play this game and just get smacked down along with that i think pretty much everyone's gonna have to play this game two or three times before you really understand the flow and you can really dive in and really enjoy it and because this is a pretty long game i'm going to say it's 45 minutes to an hour per player that's a big commitment that you have to be ready to do you have to be excited about that and you might not be the same thing with the aftermath campaign that's a real commitment to do that because you're going to have to get a group of people that want to play this long game long complicated game many times and probably you should play it just straight up competitive a few times first to work through the whole thing and so by committing to that that's many many many hours and again that might not be what you are looking for it's just not a simple quick game there's a lot going on here the next thing is you might want a heavy tech tree this is not this you know there's 10 different military cards you can get and there's 10 different science cards you can get and that's that's it that's all there is to it now to be fair there might be more added in the campaign there might be stretch goals there might be something aftermath campaign and all of that but at its core it's not a huge tech tree it's a significant tech tree and it makes a huge difference but it's not huge so if you're looking for that you're not going to find it here but there you have it folks that is fractal in general i'm not really a forex kind of guy i like uprising curse of the last emperor which is it which is coming that was very cool but that's a co-op one full co-op which is very different it's but in general it's just not my jam playing 4x games but i like this one i really like this one like i want to play this one most forex games if streamlined matt who loves them like let's play let's play this i'm like okay if you want to sure not this one i got him to come down to play because it just works for me so what i'm getting at is if you like 4x games then you need to be checking this out you probably need to be backing it but you definitely need to at least be looking at it because i because i think this is a fun heavy brain burning exciting kick your opponent in the teeth me kind of game and it's good it's fun it's exciting but it is also all those things i just said so if you're not into 4x games then you probably want to run very far away so anyhow there you have it folks that is fractal if you like 4x games i you're really going to like this i think i've played a lot of forex games i don't love any of them i don't own a own except for uprising which isn't here yet this one i don't want to get rid of i'm hoping they don't make me send this prototype on to somebody else because i want to keep playing it over the next however long to really dig into all those different factions and everything so there you have it folks a bit long-winded this time i'm pretty high on this game and i think you might be too lots of things that you might not dig this is a game that you're i think you're really gonna like you're just you're not gonna be interested in but for the people who like that style of game i don't think you're going to find many that are better so as always if i made any mistakes in the rules overview please let me know in the comments with the time step i'll get that into the clan subtitles if you found this video useful please like subscribe and share thank you so much for watching have a wonderful wonderful day

Channel: Hungry Gamer

Views: 1,665

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: rZNN2q-eP_A

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021