Back to the boardgame café.
Our main game this evening was
Resurgence,
on the "new arrivals" shelf though it was apparently published
in 2022. You're a scavenger band in the radioactive ruins of Moscow
after the One Day War… well, mostly you're playing a worker placement
game to gather resources, then spending those resources to get points.
That's the problem for me, really; I'm not wild about the theme, but
apart from some of the Soviet-Realist-styled art, there's nothing here
to say "Moscow" or even "post-apocalyptic": call the resources
something else and you could say that this is about Stone Age tribes
or factions at the court of Shaka Zulu.
As we have it here, you have to plan chains of actions: clear this
room at your compound so that you can put a labourer in it to gain
resources, but to clear it you need to get a Build action from the
main board which will cost some resources, and eventually you need to
plan a mission and then send one of your workers into the right part
of the map and spend those resources to get victory points… it's all
parts moving in different directions, but it never feels as if it
means anything.
If you want to use a placement space that another player (or a
random mutant) is already occupying, that's fine, just pay one of any
resource.
The rulebook is long and verbose, though the actual gameplay is
relatively straightforward; much of the space is taken up explaining
the individual cards, even though a better symbology would have made
their meanings rather more readily apparent.
Now to be fair I know this style of Eurogame is one that I tend not to
enjoy. But the whole thing felt like too much: waggling these levers
isn't fun, but what if we give you a whole lot more levers ro waggle
in different ways?
Anyway, after that we were all a bit gamed out, but revived for a
couple of rounds of Timeline: General
Interest
at which we all did quite badly.
