Paper Kaiju

I played this one at my FLGS board game night, from someone who had apparently gotten it at Gencon. I’m a fan of deckbuilders, and the theme for this one was really attractive; it’s essentially like Thunderstone, only you’re playing tribes of jungle beastmen a millennium after the Mayan apocalypse (I have a nerd-on for Meso-American mythology).

Unfortunately, aside from being nearly as random as Ascension, the game suffers from a very interesting flaw; it both plays too slowly and is over too soon. ‘Plays too slow’ is due to how individual turns take an absurd amount of time to resolve for a deckbuilder without any combing. This is compounded by the fact that only 4 of your 6-card hand actually comes from your deck, the other two come from two communal decks, and you only get to see them at the beginning of your turn; so you can’t really plan your next turn while you’re waiting. And while you can play Scouts on your opponent’s turn to help or hinder their monster-slaying (and getting a cut of XP if you’re on the winning side), any expended Scouts get replaced at the beginning of your turn, which further stymies any ability to plan.

‘Over too soon’ is due to how quickly the game actually ends when measured in rounds; the game we played couldn’t have lasted more than ten. The person who won had only slain five monsters (slain monsters are the Victory cards in this game), and two others had only slain two each. Also, you only start the game with four cards; and with only ten rounds of buying plus trashing, my final deck only had about fifteen or so cards in it (including my four slain monsters). So it’s a deckbuilding game where you never really feel like your building an actual deck.

The other reason for the low amount of monster slaying is due to how random fights are; each one requires one or more dice rolls to not get completely screwed, or to not have the monster just run away. This, plus your opponents’ decision to help or hinder you, plus the random two cards from the communal pile, plus the lack of actual deckbuilding (and the fact that the Ascension-like purchasing strategy of ‘buy the best weapon/ally you can afford.’), ultimately means that your ability to kill anything has almost nothing to do with any decision you made throughout the game.

The only real choice you get to make is whether to help or hinder an opponent’s fight. And even that is conditional on if you have a Scout in your hand to play (while you start with 4 out of a 4 card deck, fights don’t really start until a third of the way in, and Scouts are often fodder for trashers to gain Allies or Weapons.) And 2/3 of the time, the other two player’s just followed the first one’s decision.

One of the other players described it as a deckbuilding version of Munchkin, which I’m inclined to agree with. It’s only advantage over Munchkin, other than the art and theme, is that a player with a solid lead can effectively cement his victory by helping fights whenever possible in order to leech extra XP, since hitting max level is one of the endgame conditions.

Summation: a very pretty game with almost no strategic depth, whose only saving grace is that it doesn’t drag on too long. I would have given it a rating of 3 since I didn’t outright hate the game, but I bumped it up to a 4 because I kinda had some fun playing (I just can’t see myself playing it a second time unless there was nothing else around), and then up to a 5 solely because the theme was something I’d like to see more of.

I grabbed this game for half off during a holiday sale, knowing absolutely nothing about it other than the Classical Rome theme (which I’m a sucker for). I was more than pleasantly surprised with how enjoyable it turned out to be.

Tribune combines worker placement and set collection mechanics, and then adds a good deal of interaction as players compete for the best sets. Followers are placed on the board in order to collect faction cards, earn denarii (which is used to pay for cards), or to attempt a faction take-over. Taking over a faction requires playing a set from your hand that beats the set already in play (either in total value, or number of cards). Taking over and holding control of the various factions earns you various victory requirements (faction markers, laurels, legions, Favor of the Gods, or Tribune), or gives you resources to aid in their acquisition (denarii, faction cards, assassins, an additional follower). The game is over at the end of a round where at least one player has earned the required number of victory conditions (four to six, depending on the number of players). If multiple players have done so on that turn, everything they’ve earned is scored to determine the winner.

Replay Value: I’ve had about a dozen plays so far, and I still get excited about the prospect of breaking it out again. It includes several aspects that I love in eurogames, but constant interaction and competition between players creates a perfect amount of tension and uncertainty which keeps it engaging. So far, the game has been well-balanced so that runaway leaders are non-existent, and aggressive play is dictated more by what will benefit the acting player than simply screwing over the target. Tribune also includes multiple sets of cards with scalable victory conditions, so the game can be tailored to your number of players and preferred game length.

Components: Like most Fantasy Flight Games, production value is high. For Tribune, however, they even managed to go the extra mile by provided an extra of every token in case one is lost. There is even a constructable punchboard chariot (plus, a backup one) that doesn’t really add any function over using a simple token (the chariot can prevent a single faction from takeovers for one round), but still looks fantastic.

Easy to Learn: Unlike (thankfully) most Fantasy Flight Games, the rulebook is simple and well laid out, and the rules are designed so that the various phases of the game flow together well (which probably means that FFG didn’t design the game in-house, but only published it). The only caveat is that the rules are rather front-loaded, so you kind of have to know all of the steps before you can know how any of them are important. Since I’m always the one teaching it, it is a source of frustration, but not enough to keep me from sharing this gem with new players.