Bored? Game! – Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia

Last year many of us blasted our way through New Columbia, leaving the tattered remains of  handymen, motorised patriots and Comstock’s hopes and dreams in our wake as we played Bioshock Infinite, but did any of us stop to really consider how the other side felt? Well, now you can, thanks to Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia, a board game by designer Isaac Vega.

There have, of course, been many board game adaptations of videogames, most of which are lacklustre affairs, quickly knocked together to make the most of the popularity of the licence. Siege of Columbia is one of the first to be developed alongside the videogame, releasing a few months after its console counterpart (and only then because it got held up in production). Rather than approach big publishers like Hasbro or Fantasy Flight, Ken Levine and his team turned to relative newcomers Plaid Hat Games. At the time this independent outfit only had one full time employee and a handful of freelance artists and designers, but was already starting to prove its design chops with games like the popular card based tactics game Summoner Wars and the RPG Mice and Mystics.

It was a good choice, because rather than an insipid, derivative spin off, we have a game that feels not only thematically linked to Bioshock Infinite, but one that has a strong enough identity to be its own experience. The choice of art in this lavishly produced game is a case in point: rather than take the easy road of producing card art from videogame assets, Plaid Hat employed its own artists John Ariosa and Paul Guzenko to create elegant, painterly images that fit with the universe but stood on their own.

Booker and Elizabeth are controlled automatically by a system based on event cards, which inform you where Booker will be and whether he is likely to beat the living crap out of all your troops.

Siege of Columbia is a strategy game for two players (or two teams) who take on the roles of Comstock’s Founders, the fanatically religious rulers of the city, and Daisy’s Vox Populi, the anarchic resistance movement, whose escalating civil war provides the backdrop to the videogame. Meanwhile the videogame’s actual protagonists, Booker and Elizabeth, are controlled automatically by a system based on event cards, which inform you where Booker will be and whether he is aggressive — and likely to beat the living crap out of all your troops — or sneaking around looking for lock picks instead. It’s a nice set up that reverses the roles of the NPCs and playable characters in the game, leading to some comical narrative moments. Consistent with the game’s theme of the multiverse, there are three different time lines that progress along with the game, altering Booker and Elizabeth’s behaviour and effecting the game state.

The game itself is a race to ten victory points; the majority of these come from controlling the various territories, formed of clusters of Columbia’s floating islands. But as there are only ten points worth of territory on the board in total, this must be complemented by victory point objectives that are revealed each turn, giving the game a nice sense of escalation and shifting objectives. Going first in this game is incredibly important as not only do you get to chose whether a powerful in game event triggers, but you also get to take your entire turn, which includes purchasing troops and upgrades (including turrets and strongholds) and attacking, not to mention having first dibs on claiming victory point cards. First player is determined by a vote, which is one of the functions you can use your hand of five cards for, the others being for gathering money and for adding combat value to fights (each of your troops will roll a base white, blue or red die with increasingly bigger attack values).

The stats of each card can be upgraded, which is tracked by a nifty sheet, and each card also has a special ability that can be unlocked. This system of managing your hand, improving your stats and using cards for multiple purposes adds a significant element of strategy and feels very consistent with the source material. It is a system developed by designer Isaac Vega in his previous strategy game City of Remnants, and in many ways this game feels like a development of the earlier title. Another thematically consistent mechanic is the ability to ride the skyrails, which branch around the entire board linking the islands. But using them is risky as a player must roll three special dice for each unit moved this way and for each section of track. If you roll a thumbs up (2 of the 6 sides of the die) then you’re fine, but rolling none causes you to stop and discard a number of cards or lose your troop. It’s an interesting “push your luck” mechanic that feels appropriate, but is also the most egregious example of the game’s biggest flaw, which is the utter randomness involved. Twice I’ve played the game and seen someone lose their leader on the first turn because of a bad skyrail roll, and on top of that the events can sometimes swing the game drastically in someone’s favour, making it feel very unfair.

The Siege of Columbia is an excellently produced game with a strong sense of narrative and feels mechanically and thematically close to its videogame counterpart, but your enjoyment of it will depend entirely on whether you play games for their flavour and unexpected twists, or you like to be the architect of your own destiny through careful planning and strategy. The latter does exist in this game, and there are certainly interesting decisions to be made, but they almost always seem to be undermined by the randomness of a card turn or dice roll. Still you can take solace in the fact that in another universe, in another lighthouse, things turned out better for you.

Designer: Isaac Vega
Publisher: Plaid Hat Games
Mechanic: Strategy, Hand Management, Dice rolling,
Players: 2 or 4 (best with 4)
Game length: 60-90 minutes
Complexity: Medium

You can buy Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia here.