I've played the first mission 2 times so far with 2 different friends.We had a really fun time.I'm fairly new to board games, but my friends have been playing them heavily for years.This was a game that I thought I could finally relate to them with, and it's working.The art in the cards and miniatures is beautiful.I sometimes get distracted just looking at a card or playing with a figure.
To help me understand the rules, I watched youtube videos of a guy playing through the first mission.I'm a visual learner, so this helped immensely.
I bought a cheap plastic tackle box to put the pieces in, and it helps when looking for tokens or figures when playing.
I picked up some card sleeves and I'm glad I did, because one on my friends already spilled soda on some cards, but they were protected so all is well.
GM-less co-op? Constantly dynamic maps? Detailed figures and quick turns? Solitaire mode? Sure, you've heard it all before, but this time, you've actually FOUND it! CoreyK & FFG's 'Gears Of War: The Board Game' has instantly risen to be one of my most favourite games, purely on the *delivered* promise of real co-op. A bit more direct and far less lengthy° than 'Arkham Asylum', this has become an instant hit amongst my gaming friends and family because truly, everyone can play: everyone can help set up the map without getting an advantage over any other player; everyone can resolve combat phases by rolling for the enemy Locust Horde while still taking action and rolling for their own characters on their own turns; the shuffled cards leave everyone wondering what will happen next. By the second round of turns, everyone had figured out the flow of their hand and gameplay was speeding up.
'Gears' or not, this is a superbly crafted war game simulator, something that isn't 'Warhammer 40K' long but never dull, either! The AI system in particular is just brilliant, offering simple mechanics that result in massive overall effect, making it easy to implement, but complex enough to surprise and thrill you, too! The closest games that comes to mind: this combines the randomly-generated map-building of 'Betrayal At House On The Hill' with an almost 'D20 Modern'-esque combat rule system, creating a game that is a perfect hour-long roflstomp for a gaming group. It's even fun on your own, as I read the 1P notes so much, I had to try it! It's also very modular, meaning you can play to a certain point, then "save game" for another time, because each mission is nicely split up in setup and objectives (as is the map-generation, as a result). This is a nice shift in design than other CoreyK games, like 'Starcraft' (Superb! Infinitely long!) and 'RuneWars' (Great! Did I already use up "infinitely"? Insanely long!), so you can really make this a part of a gaming night, rather than a focus game. With the swiftness of turns that keeps people drawn in, it sometimes becomes hard to break *away* from GoWtBG!
° And with everything in box! No expansions, thus far! No real need for them, either, although BoardGameGeeks has had some great ideas for new missions to run. Also! HeroClix figures are just the right size to match the 1.5" figures included in box! This means you could expand the character roster yourself, like I did, to add a female character, AnyaStroud, to the mix. Exceptionally well-crafted game.
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Gears of War the board game is very well designed as both an extremely fun board game as well as a great addition to the Gears of War collection.It is surprising every time something new happens in the board game how easy it is to relate to something that would actually occur in the same way in the video games.. As a cooperative game it is nice to be able to use teamwork to overtake the locust horde, rather than fighting to take each other out. For every number of players it is still challenging to complete every mission's objective, but without feeling completely overrun.My fiancé who has never played any of the video games cannot stop talking about how fun this game is to pay.
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Every few months i get a bunch of friends together to play this.We love it, we have always been gears of war fans and this is a must have if you want to have a gears themed get together.
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Let me say off the bat, I am not a fan of Gears of War the Video Game. I have nothing against it, I am just not a fan of First/Third Person shooters. I have played it a few times to understand it is basically your Aliens/HALO/40K type humans vs. the alien Horde romp. What I do like is the quality of Fantasy Flight's board games and I'm a sucker for Dungeon crawls (esp. Sci Fi themed) like Space Hulk, Warhammer Quest and Castle Ravenloft, to name a few. Gears of War was on my watch list and I picked it up when I saw it on deep discount here on Amazon ... Getting a $70+ FFG game for less than 40 was too good to pass up.
My quick review of the game:
It's a slightly different spin on the crawler boardgame ... you are more or less compelled to take bold actions every turn, else you will get crushed in the unending wave of aliens, who are not anywhere near as squishy as you are. The basic mechanic is that your hand of cards is your bank of actions and your life. You can discard a card and take a basic action like move or perform a basic attack. or you can do what is on the card (in order, with little or no modifications) and hopefully have a big turn, but you must keep enough cards in your hand to soak damage, react to attacks and help your allies out when they need a hand. This game is divided into areas as opposed to the common grid, so movement, range and line of sight are a bit atypical (kudos for a line of sight ruler for determining LOS, instead of counting squares). The game certainly has some Ravenloft DNA (the enemy AI is on rails, but havinga semi random deck is nice no overlord is needed) as well as descent (weapons/abilites will get triggered off of symbols on the dice for a bit of interest and to make the human soldiers not so 'samey')
There is a bit of the 'we have to make this an homage to the video game' so there is an ever present aspect of collecting ammo and weapon drops. This game does do a good job of making this less clunky than otrher systems I have played and the scenarios are a nice touch .... but there are certainly enough components to kitbash your own random adventure.
My only real complaint is the play time is really through the roof. I thought the game's design to keep the humans constanlty on the move would keep things brisk, but in true crawler fashion, even the introductory scenario can take two hours to finish, becuase the game will choke you with enemies seemingly afgter each advance you make ...
that said, it certainly fits into that category of cooperative games that are fun to play win or lose, the game will make for some epic turns but it is a grinder of sorts that you measure more in 'how close were we to winning this time?' than worrying about ultimate victory ... but I'm sure when things do fall in place and the teamwork pans out and you do win that one game against the locust forces, it will be huge!
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Played the older version for hours against competion from all over the neightborhod in the 60's.Bought the new version to teach my grandkids.The old game required face-offs when the puck was behnd the net -the new design allows play to keep going wherever the puck is on the ice -The mobility of the new goalie is so much better.I am unbeaten on the new game -but most of my competition had never seen this game before--
