Games and technology

I recently played two board games that required digital devices — XCOM: The Board Game and Alchemists. I totally geeked out over playing both of these games for the first time as I’ve never played a game that incorporated such technology. Fancy! I thought both games offered a fresh new dynamic to board gaming.

XCOM is a 4-player cooperative game where you and your friends are defending the world against an alien invasion. The game incorporates an app on the iPad or tablet that streamlines the game and dictates human response to the invasion. The app tracks your play in real time, which can be very nerve-wracking. Talk about making critical decisions under the gun!

Each of the four players has a role — the squad commander, chief scientist, central officer and squad leader. In general terms, the squad commander balances the budget and deploys intercepts. The chief scientists does research to get new tech. The central officer is responsible for controlling the app and relaying where the alien spaceships will be landing. The squad leader deploys soldiers and defends the base.

The app doesn’t tell you it’s your turn per se, but just it yells out an action with a timer countdown, so you need to pay attention in case that action is something your role does. With each action, you have to make a split-second decisions because the time is ticking. I played the squad commander, and one of the actions I had to do was pick 1 of 2 crisis cards (and hope for the best!).

Each round has a time phase and a resolution phase. Failure to deploy enough soldiers or interceptors, defending the base or completing missions result in consequences such as increasing a country’s panic level going up the base damage track. During the resolution phase, each player rolls dice depending on the task. With each dice roll, the threat track increases, thereby a higher chance of losing the dice roll.

The app also has options for easy, medium and hard games. The game is cooperative but reduces the quarterbacking mechanic as each player has to make their own decisions based on what the app action says. Some of my friends didn’t really enjoy the dice mechanic of it, but I still enjoyed playing it, even though that timer stressed me out! Alas, we did not survive the alien invasion.

Last week I also got a chance to play Alchemists. This is a deduction game about potions that also involves worker placement. You are alchemists trying to figure out the ingredients for various potions.

I enjoyed the bidding aspect of this game for turn order, and then you go around the board placing your workers in order to collect resources for your potion, sell resources, publish theories, debunk theories and test potions. There are advantages to going first of course, but the turn order track doesn’t give you any benefits for that. The action spot that cracked me up was the “Test on student” space. If you’re there first, you can test on students without penalty. If your potion results in a negative combination, all future tests by you and other players require $1 to convince the student to drink up.

The app comes into play when you are testing potions. You pull up the app and take photos of your cards (hidden from the rest of the players), and the app will tell you what it produces — either a red, blue or green potion, which can be negative or positive. From there, you start crossing out options on your score sheet and deducing what combination makes up each of the eight potions.

You then get victory points by publishing theories and placing your victory point ribbons on there. At the end of the game, the combinations are revealed and points are tallied up. Each round may also have a required goal where you can also net victory points.

The race is on though, as there are definitely not enough actions to figure out all the various potion ingredients. Thus, you have to make calculated guesses by what theories your opponents have been publishing, and decide whether it’s worth the risk to point ribbons on that combination.

I ended up coming in second for the game. Man, was it a brain burner! It totally took me back to grade school when we were given those logic puzzle problems. I had been wanting to play this game since I saw it at BGG Con. This was one of the hot games, and I never did find an open spot for me. And now I can cross it off my list of must-play games.

Have you folks played XCOM or Alchemists? Tell me about your experiences!