u/SolitonSnake

This felt good. Nice well-rounded game with a ridiculous final round: matched two battle icons, doubled rewards with a double purchase, and played an endgame card for 6 total points. Bots were right with me the whole time and I held off on getting worms for much longer than they did.

Really great app. Glad I’ll get to play this game more. Side note: why isn’t it showing all of the leaders for the DI:U base game on the leader drafting screen? Pretty sure a handful were missing Staban wasn’t available. Is there some rule I’m forgetting from the tabletop about removing leaders from the pool before selecting?

Tonight I played Revenant for the first time. Revenant is a worker placement sequel/spinoff to Voidfall, taking place in the same universe. It would almost appear to be the designer’s take on a Battlestar Galactica game that got reskinned. You’ve got a fleet of human stragglers surrounding a big flagship, jumping through hyperspace to avoid an enemy that infiltrates your ranks while trying to find a new home to colonize. But here you’re also trying to gain the favor of seven of the same factions that appear in Voidfall.
 
The worker placement is pretty interesting in this game and gives you a lot to chew on. On your turn you place a worker on a ship and perform its function. Big arkships don’t move, but each provides unique actions no other ship can do. Smaller ships can destroy enemies or land on planets for research and other benefits. When you place a worker on a ship you gain influence with that ship’s faction, and you ultimately get victory points based on your influence for each faction multiplied by that faction’s fleet power (number of ships remaining). 

So, over the course of the game you become more interested in protecting ships that you have high rep with and letting your opponents’ favored faction ships get destroyed. But there are competing interests too – you may need those ships to perform their actual functions, including soaking damage to protect the Revenant. Critical damage to the Revenant comes with major penalties to the player (and to all players in multiplayer) so you want to protect it in addition to just mindlessly dooming your opponents’ ships.

Another twist on the genre is that you can upgrade your workers with special abilities. Your captain gains abilities along a skill track as you level up, and your other two workers (cadets) gain abilities through cards you play and slot in next to them. You can also upgrade your personal frigate to gain abilities not associated with any specific worker type.

In this game I won 57-44 on the easy difficulty, although I can see how a couple lucky things broke my way. It did take some effort to prevent the Revenant from being destroyed (not an auto-loss but a major penalty and eliminates the ability to score for the colony at the end). The bot also triggered the final hyperjump to the colony planet and got to choose a destination that wasn’t great for me, but it also wasn’t good for the bot either so it was mostly a wash. 

I also had some practice in that I learned the game by playing a “three player” game by myself first in order to learn. This game is pretty heavy and has that a lot of (mostly great) iconography, but unlike Voidfall it doesn’t have (and probably isn’t conducive to) a manual that integrates the solo with the multiplayer plus a tutorial. It’s just the rulebook, and then the solo rulebook. So I felt like I needed to understand the multiplayer before I played the solo. It was a tough haul learning it. However the setup and teardown are not all that bad, and the trays help a lot. 

I like the minis since there aren’t stands that add to the setup time, and they’re big and chunky and help parse the board visually. But, they’d be better if painted (a big project obviously). The gray looks kind of sad.

The Admiral edition from the Kickstarter came with two mini expansions that aren’t meant to be used together: Reason and Faith. Reason seems okay, adding yet another ship type and another way to gain abilities. But I’m especially excited to try Faith, because it adds a small political element where two flip sides of a policy decision are being deliberated. Based on which factions’ ships you visit that round, one of the policies will be enacted and have some effect.

It hasn’t left quite the impression Voidfall did, but they are different kinds of games despite the skin. As a result I’d prefer not to compare them too much, but Voidfall has a certain tightness about it, in the gameplay, rules, and icons. For Revenant, I’m seeing a few more requests for rules clarification on BGG where I’m like “oh that is a good point, not sure I can tell from the rulebook” or “yeah that is inconsistent” but they’re all getting resolved pretty quickly by the designer to be fair. There rulebook does have a few small goofs. And there are just a few things, particularly in the solo mode, that are left off the board’s icons and that you just have to remember. One last comparison is that rather than having a ton of choices of factions to play as like in Voidfall, each with a totally different personality, in Revenant the variety seems to come from the large number of operation cards to upgrade your cadets and frigate with, plus the wildly varying fleet positioning and order of ship destruction that changes the availability and utility of different worker spaces across games. There are also a ton of planet cards, and you don’t see too many in one game.

Overall a good first impression. This is a super intriguing game that I’m looking forward to digging into further. Curious if anyone else has tried it and has thoughts.