XCOM: The Board Game

XCOM is the latest in a string of video-game-to-board-game transitions. However, it’s one that seems perfectly suited to have made the move to cardboard: XCOM the video game is turn-based, strategic, takes place in a small and tightly defined map and relies on a mixture of tactics, luck and skill that makes for an interesting and rewarding experience. Ready Up visited Loading Bar, home of both video and board games, to have an early look at XCOM and see whether this was actually successful, or a poorly executed mission.

First of all, a confession: I am terrible at XCOM; at turn-based strategy games in general, never mind the ones where you have the added pressure of attempting to defend the world from an invading alien force. I am so terrible, so shockingly bad that you wouldn’t want me anywhere near your war table. I don’t have the patience to plot several moves ahead, nor do I have the strategic acumen which seems necessary to do so. Yet strangely, I like board games. Or perhaps that isn’t so strange given how accessible board games are, now that they have broken away from that image of endlessly consulting rules and cards and moving figures across a board. Well, a fair chunk of them have anyway. Maybe it’s just strategy games that turn me off in general, although I do enjoy watching other people play them. It’s very cool to witness when someone’s plan comes to fruition – it’s just never mine.

So I didn’t know what I let myself in for, agreeing to test out a game that was no doubt going to heavily involve the elements of games that I don’t like, in fact to be a perfect example of them. I took someone with me who was well-versed in turn-based strategy and XCOM in general, just in case and watching his face light up at the sight of so many cards and tokens was almost painful. I considered the board with the small global map, endless spaces for pieces, strange threat meters and next to them all, four clear spaces for players with even more cards and pieces in front of those and could feel the cloying sense of shame and hear the roars of evil alien laughter as I led my army to their certain doom. Just remember not to assign them names, I told myself. That builds attachments you don’t need.

However, it turned out that I didn’t need to be wholly concerned with staving off the alien invasion alone. XCOM is a co-operative game and there was no sole leader. Where it seemed intimidating was trying to learn how to play it, but we had a friendly helper on hand. Even with experienced players though, I would estimate that the game takes a minimum of one hour. We were talked through the basics, and went through two ‘slow’ turns where our helper explained exactly what needed to happen and answered even my most stupid of questions. There were two elements of the game that I instantly found fascinating: firstly, there’s a free companion app that forms an integral part of the game, secondly, it truly encourages co-operation.

The game takes up to four players and you have four ‘roles’: Chief Scientist, Squad Leader, Central Officer and Commander. Each of these roles has a very important part to play, and more importantly than that, they must work together closely in order to put up the best fight. The Squad Leader sends out soldiers on missions, the Central Officer manages communications (i.e. looks after the app) and satellites that help destroy alien ships in orbit, the Commander makes sure we all stick to the budget, requisitions more soldiers and air support and makes the tough crisis decisions and, finally, the Chief Scientist researches tech in order to provide support to the team and puts salvage from dead aliens to good use.

There are two phases to the game: Timed, and Resolution. In the tutorial, the first two rounds were not timed in order to let us get used to the game because there is an awful lot to do. The app starts the round and then there are a series of instructions and each player is told to do something. Everyone is prompted to do certain actions, whether that is for the Chief Scientist to choose a tech to research that round and how many scientists to assign to it, the Squad Leader to choose a mission and later to pick the soldiers that go on it, the Central Officer to deploy satellites, the Commander to decide on which crisis the team would rather face out of two frankly terrible choices and what planes to send where as part of the global defense effort. All of this means putting pieces on the board, drawing and playing cards and most importantly, talking to each other. Every resource on the board costs money and the budget is set each round – if the Commander fails to manage everyone’s spending, countries go into panic and make everyone’s lives harder. The Chief Scientist has to support everyone by researching tech – so has to keep an eye on everything and decide which one is the most beneficial to research that round and how many resources to commit to it… and so on. Lots of mini-decisions are made and then the round ends and the Resolution phase begins.

The Resolution phase sees the consequences of your actions as a team playing out in the form of dice rolls. Resources you commit means the number of XCOM dice you can roll. You roll a number of XCOM dice, and one alien die. Roll victory points using the XCOM dice and you can beat aliens or successfully research tech. However, each round there is a marker that moves up and if the alien die is equal to or less than that number, you sustain a loss. Satellites go down, soldiers go down, scientists go down and you can’t use them for at least the next round. The game becomes about heart-stopping luck, especially since the XCOM die only has a victory symbol on two out of six sides, which means that you’re automatically geared towards failure. Each team member takes turns to roll and it is here that your resources become important: dare you risk precious resources for the chance to have more dice? Or play it safe? When do you stop rolling? How far will you go? So many questions! So many dice rolls, too! The Scientist rolls to gauge whether tech was successfully researched, the Central Officer rolls to determine whether alien ships in orbit are destroyed, the Commander rolls to determine the state of whether ships fighting UFOs over continents are destroyed and the Squad Leader rolls to see whether missions were successful or whether the base is successfully defended. Whew.

If it sounds harsh, it gets worse. Once we had found our feet, we proceeded to play a genuinely Timed round. This is where it got crazy, but also where we became an actual team, calling things out to each other across the table. The app gives you something to do, for example “Chief Scientist: choose tech for this round” (draw six cards from the tech deck) and a brief time slot to do it (30 seconds). Call out “done!” and tap the app to continue and get the next action, complete it in time and so on. There are some things that take longer than others and you need to really be on top of things because if you take too long, you might be depleting time from your next team member. You fall quickly into time management and an awareness of everything that’s on the board and what your comrades are doing and yes, they become comrades very quickly – there isn’t time for them to be otherwise! This added an interesting dimension of pressure which I thought set the game apart and well-represented the XCOM experience. Especially when the game’s own tense music is played on a loop through the app.

The app provides instruction every step of the way, and in the Resolution phase asks you questions about the state of the board. For example, are there countries in panic? How many alien ships are left in orbit? (This will eventually start to play havoc with your communications – the game will adjust accordingly as aliens mess up your satellites and so on). Did you complete a mission? Is the base still intact? It will then use this information to work out how this will affect the next round. This makes a real difference because there is a lot going on, and there are many strategy games that rely on you to make the calculations. Having the app do it for you is very welcoming.

Eventually, the final mission will trigger where it’s make or break time. The pressure was on the Squad Leader, however the Commander had done well to make soldiers Elite and the Chief Scientist (me!) had provided some very good support tech. We won, and finished with a decent score of 81, then were promptly told that we had been playing in tutorial mode. The game goes up to Expert levels of pain and stress – it asks you what difficulty and how many people are playing when you set it up. But after seeing the looks of dismay cloud our previously jubilant faces, we were told that 81 was a very good score, and that even our tutor for the evening had only won the game a handful of times out of the many that he had played it.

The lines between video games, board games and apps will most likely continue to be blurred. In the case of XCOM: The Board Game, the blurring makes perfect sense. The app was an integral part of the game rather than a tacked on afterthought, and the board game was perfectly stylised and fit really well as part of the XCOM universe. Every aspect of the game works together, but what I found most impressive was how genuinely co-operative it was, and how absorbing an experience it was. I found my perfect match in the Chief Scientist role, and got disturbingly excited whenever an alien was killed and someone handed me precious, precious salvage to use for research. Even though I would consider myself a useless strategist, it became almost second instinct to look around the board, quickly analyse what was going on, listen to my teammates call out things and make the decision about what would be the most useful thing to research. “I need help! Got a big battle coming up!” Well, I’d better research that big gun thingy. I can make those dice rolls if I commit some salvage… “We need funding!” Oh, I researched something that means I can trade salvage for emergency funding… I’d better hand that over to the Commander… And so on. All of these decisions happened in the space of actual seconds, and then watching them play out and finding that a combination of wit, understanding and solid teamwork ultimately defeated an alien invasion was incredibly rewarding. Just like in the video game, but less lonely.


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