Pop culture from the 60's and 70's for 1000 Alex. Gather your cronies and pick-up your baseball bats while you travel through the underworld of New York City in this era of feathered hair and outrageous leather. Going through the boroughs from the north end of the Bronx to Coney Island in Brooklyn, you and your fellow Warriors will duke it out in a cooperative, turn-based battler. You've been framed and you have to fight your way to redemption through the city beating other gangs along the way. Watch out for the bopper and maintain your status. Use your weapons and attacks wisely, or you might be knocked out!
Here is what Spider and Cat had to say.
Spider: The game is thematically spot on. I liked the art and the components, and it definitely fit the vibe. It felt like the movie, the source material is accurate.
I felt like the more I played it the less fun I had with the game. It became really repetitive after a while. I felt like all of the battles were basically the same. I did like how the different games did have unique condition to follow when fighting, but other than that it was like fighting the same thing over and over again. The game never really captured the duality of a fight because there was never a move by the other gang.
I liked the ranking system of the gangs and how that changed the difficulty of the fights.
I liked the bopper deck and how it added tension to traveling through boroughs. I think it's cool how it was the third card that got you, but you could always pull a coast is clear. This forced the team to have some strategy with how to progress through neighborhoods.
It was interesting how sometimes it was advantageous to not have everyone in the same area on the board during a fight. If a person wasn't in the same area when a fit arose, they had to wait and watch.
I guess you call this a deck builder. There was not a lot of variety. There were punchy punch cards, unique character abilities, and weapons. The deck building didn't really matter and the fighting aspect of the game was not back and forth.
It played as quickly as it could, but every time we played, I was ready for it to be done about 3/4 of the way through. It was just so repetitive. The game wasn't terrible, it just got boring. Basically, there was tension built at the beginning of the game, but you lose it having to do the same thing over and over.
This game was a near miss for me. It had a lot of great elements and mechanics, but something was missing. All of the games started out fun but ended in a slog. It's a fighting, deck-builder and the fighting and the deck building were boring. The periphery elements were great, but at its core this game missed.
Cat: I thought this was a fun game to learn. I'm a sucker for co-op games and this one fit the bill. We all picked our characters and worked together pretty seamlessly to battle from the Bronx to Coney Island. I pretty much stuck with Mercy as my character because I just couldn't pass up her unique ability (no spoiler). Spider is a bit more adventurous, and he tried a few different characters to figure out the most strategic combinations.
It did take me a bit to make it through the instructions. I think the font used was great for the theme, but the design of the instructions made it difficult to read. Probably a nit-picky thing to criticize, but I'm a rule follower and I referenced the book a lot in our first few playthroughs.
I like the idea of paying for dice with your cards to roll more and meet the objectives, and I liked that if you rolled higher than the objective it could still count. That being said the discard and remove from game aspects for the cards usually left my hand waning by the end of the game.
To increase the difficulty you just have to do the same things with fewer cards. So, the repetitive aspects of the game were just more frequent with a greater chance of losing. There was no twist. I don't think I'll go back to this game.
Spider and I discussed the possibility of this being a gateway game that will help teach mechanics common to other games, but I just don't think I can get past the repetition and lack of engagement with the fighting. By halfway through the game, I was ready to be done.
Pros:
aesthetics were great: theme and artwork
accessible
simple, fun mechanics
easy to teach
fun components
Cons:
repetitive fighting mechanism
experience of the game is boring
Ratings:
Two Spiders
Two Cats
