The Initiative - How To Play

[Music] hi and welcome to watch it played my name is rodney smith and in this video we're going to learn the one to four player game the initiative or at least that's what they'd have us believe it's called look part of the name's been scratched out well whatever this is it's been designed by corey kneska and published by unexpected games who helped sponsor this video here it's 1994 and after a day of riding bikes you and your friends stop at a local yard sale to find a peculiar board game called the key which you buy at a bargain and rush home to play but what's even more peculiar is the strange car that follows you home in the mystery you're all unwittingly about to fall into now before we start i should explain that the game comes with a guidebook where its unfolding story will be revealed as you play but make sure you don't read any of this until you're told to and in this video we'll only look at the pages needed for your first game for example you'd start here to learn how you all discovered the game and caught the attention of this unknown stranger then you turn the page and read these rules until you got to the section here that says stop that instructs you to read the rest of the rules here and all of these rules as well as the ones here in the guidebook are what we're going to go over in this video so you don't have to worry about reading any of this instead join me at the table and let's learn how to play to set up each player picks a character in matching standee we'll be setting up a game for two players returning any unchosen characters back to the box the guidebook will tell you which mission you should be setting up for and for your first game after learning all the rules we're going to be going over in this video it instructs you to turn to the next page of the guidebook and continue the story anytime you turn pages in the guidebook fold it so you can only see the page you're meant to be reading and then continue reading until you're told to stop like we are here at the bottom this also tells us that it's time to play mission one you collect that numbered mission from the mission deck but make sure you never ever look at the other side of any mission until you're told and then return any missions you're not using back to the box in fact to avoid any possible spoilers i've been provided with a demo mission for this video which we'll be using instead and once you have your mission examine the map in this area of the card here then place the double-sided board with the matching side face up now find these tan backed tokens and set them all with their backsides face up and give them a good mix returning any other colored clue tokens back to the box using the guides shown on your mission randomly stack as many clue tokens into each space as shown in this case they're all placed in stacks of two it will look something like this when you're done and just make sure that you don't accidentally look at the underside of any of the tokens as you place them also check your mission map for any features which will be marked with a symbol for example this green dot represents a wall token which we then add to the indicated spot and this represents the entrance which we collect and put here and then each player adds their standee to the same room as the entrance token for your first game you'll need to assemble this mission console mine's mostly put together but basically you'll have these tabs which snap into the grooves for them like this then ensure that all of those are flipped face down while also taking note of the groove here at the top you'll place the console face down and then slide your mission into the top groove again ensuring that you do not look at the mission's underside you can now stand the console upright and in this way you'll be able to only see what you're meant to see all the important clues you'll be working to uncover during the game are now properly hidden behind the face down doors by the board set these four brown action cards in this double-sided discard pile with this side face up and these four time resource cards stacked on top of it cards with this back are the resources which you'll shuffle into a face down deck dealing four of them to each player as their opening hand you can always examine your own cards but keep them a secret from the other players and speaking of secrets there's a whole deck of them but never examine these unless you're told to you won't need any of them for now so we can just return them to the box and that's the setup in the initiative players will be working together as code breakers to complete a mission and each mission will ask a question in this case what is the key phrase which you'll find the answer to by breaking the code shown below it if you get the right answer you win but whether you win or lose you'll still get to advance to the next chapter of the story and each chapter will provide you with new codes to break and even new gameplay elements you'll unlock for use in future missions but as i said win or lose you still continue to advance through the story it might just unfold in different ways now each chapter will take between 30 and 60 minutes to complete on average and you can play them one after the other or easily pack the game away and then resume from where you left off in a future session and we'll talk more about that a little bit later once you get through all the missions in the main story well look i don't want to spoil things but just know you'll unlock a slew of new missions to continue solving you can even replay the initial stories so long as you had at least one new player and left the code breaking portion to them but let's not get ahead of ourselves let's first learn how to solve the mission that's currently in front of us the game begins with any player who volunteers to go first and then turns are taken in clockwise order around and around the table and on your turn you perform one or two actions four of the actions are listed on these cards and to take an action you play a card from your hand onto it and then you get to resolve its related effect described here cards will show a value and a type and the type is represented by its color and picture but the colors don't matter at this time but might in future missions they totally will however to play a card to an action its value must be higher than whatever card is currently on top of its pile these all begin with a value of zero so at the start of the game i can play to any pile but let's say i was taking my second action now if i want to go here i'd have to play a 7 or higher and just so you know the cards in this deck run anywhere from 1 to 12. so imagine if i played a 12 to this action now no one else could take it remember how i said at the start of the game anyone can volunteer to go first well that person should probably make sure they have some lower valued cards to play so they don't limit who else can take actions later and this brings up another important rule players are working together and you can discuss options openly but you can never give information that reveals the exact values of your cards for example you could say hey which action do you think we need the least because i have some high cards and i'm going to play one of these on one of those actions or hey if no one takes that particular action i have an ideal card to play next there but you couldn't say huh i don't know what to do with this 12 or well i've got a card that comes directly after that one anything that would reveal a specific value is not allowed and with that understood now let's look at the different actions you can take and how to resolve them when you play a card to the run action as it says here you may then move up to three rooms a room is a space surrounded by walls and openings known as passageways so a single move takes you from the room you are in through any passageway into the next room sometimes walls are permanently marked on the board other times they're tokens that you add but either way you can't move through them you can however move through other players and even end on the same space as them and don't forget the run action lets you move up to three rooms so you can move fewer including moving no spaces at all all right with that understood let's move on to another action known as intel playing a card here lets you choose a room and reveal up to two clue tokens in it you can reveal fewer than two but no matter how many you reveal they must all be in the same room however you can pick any room even if you or another player isn't in it so for this example i'll pick this room here now tokens must be revealed one at a time starting at the top so i flip this one over and set it next to the stack if you see a glyph like we find here check to see if it's shown on the mission console if it isn't found there as we see in this case you actually remove the token from the board entirely as it won't be used in this mission remember you can reveal up to two tokens so i could now decide to flip this or stop but let's flip it and it's another glyph this is one that's shown on our mission in three places actually so we'd leave this token face up in the room where it was revealed while we're talking about glyphs i should point out that some will have symbols like these on the bottom and if so you can just ignore them during this mission they may come up in later missions when new rules are introduced glyphs are what you're trying to find and uncover as you play as they'll be used to help you crack the code as we'll see when we learn this next action known as gathering putting a card here lets you collect up to two clue tokens from the room you're in one at a time if your room contains a face up glyph you can choose to collect it by removing it from the board then reveal all the windows on the console that match its symbol so here i'd get to reveal these three and just so it's clear all matching glyphs will reveal the same matching letter or number in this case it was an e instead of collecting a face up glyph in your room you can choose to collect the top face down one by first flipping it face up if it's a glyph that is showing on the console you immediately collect it as we just explained and reveal the related windows if it shows a glyph that isn't on your console just discard it as usual but that still counts as one of your actions now some of you might be wondering why would you ever do those intel actions we learned about previously to reveal a token if you get to reveal tokens anyway any time you try to gather them well one reason is that as you've seen not all tokens will help you break the code so it might be helpful to reveal tokens that are far away from you because that can save you actions trying to move all the way over to their room and then use actions to gather them up if they aren't even necessary as we'll see you don't have unlimited time so you don't want to waste turns if you can help it the other reason you may want to reveal tokens though is because they won't always show a glyph sometimes they'll be a trap for example you may reveal one of these security cameras if so leave it in the room if you ever end a turn with your figure in a room with a security camera you must discard one card from the top of the resource deck into the disk card pile for each security camera there if one of these gas trap symbols are revealed then each player currently in that room is forced to discard one random card from their hand if they're able and then the token is removed from the board so perhaps you can see that using an intel action to reveal this when no one is in the room is safer because then no one would be affected by it and the token would still get discarded some traps like this one here or either of these two will only have an effect if they're revealed by an intel action if so once flipped over you then move the related token to the action with that related symbol while an action has one of these tokens resource cards can no longer be played onto it preventing players from using that action but remember these tokens only take effect if revealed by an intel action if they're revealed by any other action including a gathering action by a player in that space then they're just discarded with no effect i'll also point out that these traps have two different colored backgrounds the security camera has a brown background and this one here is yellow brown traps stay in their room when revealed but yellow ones as we saw are resolved as soon as they're flipped and then removed from the game or sent to another area this leaves us with one main action left to go over known as regrouping as you can imagine as actions are taken the values on the topmost cards of their stacks will get higher and higher making it harder to play cards onto them and this is where regrouping can come in handy by taking this action you get to choose any other action card and discard all the resource cards and any tokens that might be on it the catch is that the regroup action can only clear other actions the regroup action itself cannot be used to clear itself so you have to be careful what you play to that action as that will dictate how often you get to use it along with the four main actions you can also perform your character's special action which is listed on their card here to do this discard any two cards you're holding it doesn't matter their value or type and then you get to resolve the effect of their special action so remember on your turn you must perform one or two actions and those can be any combination of the four main actions and or your special action and you can even repeat the same one as both of your actions for that term you can also perform an action and not really do anything with it for example you could play a card to run and then choose to move zero spaces but either way after resolving one or two actions you then draw new cards from the deck until you're holding four again and then the next person in clockwise order goes and the game will continue like this until you either all win or lose to win you need to answer the question asked at the top of the mission card at any time as a group you can decide to solve the question even if you haven't opened all the windows just agree on a final answer as a group and announce it out loud then remove the mission from the console and if you got the answer exactly correct you all win if you guessed wrong even by a single letter or number you all lose sometimes a mission will have a gray area labeled as answer for those missions you only have to correctly say the information below the answer area to win though by breaking the code above it will provide you with the clues to figuring out what that answer is the important thing to know is you cannot attempt to solve the mission unless everyone at the table is in agreement and also feel free to use pen and paper to take notes while playing if that might help you work out the answers with that understood we should now go over one other way you can lose running out of time as soon as the resource deck is empty you must stop and shuffle all the cards in the discard pile and remember this started with these four time cards already here so these will get shuffled in as well and this entire stack is then set as a new draw deck also flip this discard pile to what is known as its in peril side and if this occurred while a player was drawing cards they continued drawing as necessary the game now continues as normal however if a player ever draws one of those time cards they must immediately reveal and put it in the discard pile and then they may choose to draw another card to replace it if they want but they don't have to once you're in peril you're no longer forced to draw cards if you don't want offset time cards as they're discarded because if you ever have three of these time symbols in the discard pile while it's on its peril side then the players all lose and be careful because one of the time cards has two time icons on it so in a case like this the game would end immediately when the game ends because time runs out players do not get to make a final guess at cracking the code they just lose now that said while in peril you do get a couple extra options first of all normally you must always refill your hand to four cards at the end of your turn but while in peril this becomes optional you don't have to draw even if you had no cards in your hand but if you do decide to draw you can take them one card at a time and then stop any time also while in peril you may be forced to pass now normally you must perform at least one action on your turn even if it will have no effect but if you have no cards in hand or you only have one card and you can't legally play it to any of the action piles then you're forced to pass you would then be able to draw cards if you wish and then the next player would go you cannot pass however if you have at least two cards in hand because that means you could perform your special action so if you're able to perform an action then you must with that we now know all the rules but there is one term we should go over that may come up in future missions some abilities in the game may affect nearby components nearby is anything in your room or in any adjacent room that's connected by a passage and that's all the rules for playing the first mission though as you play new rules will get unlocked changing how missions are completed but either way once a mission is completed whether you want or lost turn to the back of the guidebook where you'll find the campaign log here you record whether you won or a loss by checking off the related box by the chapter you just completed and then either way you resolve the after mission instructions which in this case say you would read page 17 in the guidebook there's also boxes here to check off and record achievements when the game instructs you to and if you ever need to pause your game after a mission just pack it away and then you'll resume at the topmost unchecked row here you should also record any secret cards that you collected in this area so when you get the game back out you can make sure you have them as well we didn't discuss secrets in this video as there is something that will be revealed as you play but any time the game uses the word secret followed by a number or letter you collect and reveal that secret from its deck sometimes this side of a mission will show a secret and if so you gain that secret at the very start of the mission sometimes the secret might be gained as part of a code you need to break and in that case whether you break the code successfully or not you still gain the revealed secret and if a game component ever lists a page and number that means you turn to that page in this book i should also mention you can play with different people during the campaign if someone has to drop out or you have someone new who joins in that's okay just catch them up on the story but otherwise that's everything you need to know to get started with your adventures in the initiative if you have any questions at all about anything you saw here feel free to put them in the comments below and i'll gladly answer them as soon as i get a chance you'll also find forums for discussion pictures other videos and lots more over on the game's page at board game geek and i'll put a link to that in the description below and if you found this video helpful please consider giving it a like subscribing and clicking that little bell icon so you get notification anytime we post a new video but until next time thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Watch It Played

Views: 30,078

Keywords: How To Play, Watch It Played, Instructions, Board Games, Card Games, Tabletop, Miniatures, Play Throughs, Board Game, Tutorial, Tutorials, Rules, Learn, Learn How To Play, Game Rules, Learn To Play, The Initiative, Unexpected Games, Asmodee, Corey Konieczka, Instructional

Id: 6LgMhAnMbnk

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021