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Review of Anachrony
Blurb from the publisher: 'Command mighty exosuits, traverse the time rifts and lead your path through a cataclysmic future in this epic sci-fi board game!
It is the late 26th century.
Earth is recovering from a catastrophic explosion that exterminated the majority of the population and made most of the surface uninhabitable. The surviving humans organized themselves along four radically different ideologies: Harmony, Dominance, Progress and Salvation. Followers of the four Paths live in a fragile peace, living in almost complete isolation next to each other.
Now an even more terrible cataclysm is looming on the horizon: an asteroid is heading towards Earth. The time travel technology discovered in the wake of the old cataclysm is the best way to prepare for the impending impact; and it is up to the Leaders if they see it as a threat or as a potential.
Anachrony features:
- Two-tiered worker placement with workers piloting exosuits;
- Unique worker management system with four different types of workers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses;
- Turning point in gameplay for which players need to prepare and adjust their strategy;
- Four radically different factions, each with four different variations to play;
- Huge replayability thanks to the variable player powers and the countless ways to victory;
- Great potential for player interaction with a chance for temporary cooperation;
- Engaging science fiction world with a vivid backstory acailable to read and anachronyboardgame.com.
Anachrony includes the Doomsday expansion with strong thematic aspect for experienced players.'
What you get: Your EUR 59 or equivalent will buy you Anachrony, an asymmetrical one to four player worker placement game that lasts approximately half an hour per player, and which took the world by surprise last year, skyrocketing into the BGG #100 within a year of its publication.
In addition to the game's rulebook which can be found on the publisher's website free of charge in three different languages (English, French, and German), the game also contains the following: one Main Board, four Player Boards, 25 Scientists, 25 Engineers, 15 Administrators, 15 Geniuses, 80 Resources (Neutronuum, Gold, Uranium, Titanium), 24 Energy Core tokens, 66 Victory Point tokens, 30 Water Drops, 4 dual-sided Path Boards, 4 dual-sided Player Aid cards, 8 Leader cards, 4 Player Banners, 8 Time Travel and Morale markers, 32 Path Markers, 36 Warp Tiles, 60 Building tiles, 11 Recruit Pool cards, 11 Mine Pool cards, 12 dual-sided Timeline tiles, one Impact tile, 18 Superproject tiles, 2 Research dice, one Paradox die, one dual-sided Evacuation Action tile, 12 Anomaly tiles, 45 Breakthrough tiles, 15 Collapsing Capital tiles, 9 Hex Unavailable tiles, 8 Endgame Condition cards, 16 Starting Asset cards, one Scoring Pad, 16 Paradox tokens, (for Doomsday Module) one Doomsday Module components, 20 Experiments, one Endgame Condition card, 2 Trajectory dice, one Save Earth token, one Seal Fate token, (for Chronobot) one Chronobot board, one Chronobot Banner, 6 Exosuit markers, 8 Chronobot warp tiles, 6 Chronobot tokens, and one Chronobot die. In other words, it contains a fucktone of components, both in plastic as well as in cardboard.
Gameplay: In Anachrony players control the world's different ideological paths, in a planet that has been ruined by devastation, found out about the possibility of time travel, and now try to manage an upcoming future disaster. The objective? Overcome the other three paths as the dominant ideology for humanity's future, and secure the future of your people. In game terms, this translates as having the most victory points when the last Capital Action space becomes unavailable, or before the end of the 7th Era (the game's 7th round), whichever comes first. Player tally up points from buildings, anomalies, superprojects, time travel, morale, victory point tokens, timeline penalties and endgame conditions, as well as points depending on their Breakthrough sets. The player with the most points wins. In case of a tie, the player with the most water amongst the tied one wins, and in case of a further tie, the player with the most resources.
Each Path starts with different resources than the others. Each turn is divided into six distinct phases.
During the Preparation Phase, a superproject is revealed. New options open when it comes to constructing buildings (power plants, factories, life supports, and labs), while others might become temporarily unavailable. Workers are randomly recruited, and resources are mined.
The Paradox Phase is only relevant from round 2 onwards. Each timeline tile with at least a warp tile on it causes a roll by the player that has the most tiles on it. That player might end up accumulating Paradox. Upon the third Paradox, a player is affected by an Anomaly, placing an anomaly tile on his board. At the end of the game, every Anomaly remaining there will reduce his VPs by 3 points.
The Power Up Phase is used to activate the players' exosuits. Each player can activate up to six suits, paying one energy core for each. Unused exosuits produce one drop of water each.
The Warp phase allows the players to bring resources from the future. Each player simultaneously reveals from 0 to 2 Warp tiles and places them on the present timeline. Every player will receive the assets shown on the selected Warp tiles.
The Action Rounds Phase is the heart of Anachrony. Players play one after another, performing a series of free actions using their available path markers, and conclude their move by doing one of the following: placing a worker on an empty worker space on their own boards and perform that action, placing a worker with an exosuit on a hex space on the main board and perform that action, or pass. There are four types of workers in the game, one of which, the Genius, is a master key who can take the place of others. That is useful, seeing how some actions require a particular type of worker, or provide a benefit if that type engages himself there. Depending on the action that they wish to work on, workers might or might not need an exosuit. Some actions can only be executed by one worker at a time, while others can be chosen by more than one. Some actions require further expenditure of either water or resources, while others keep their workers motivated and do not tire them, meaning that they can be used again immediately afterwards. Three actions are Capital Actions: construct, recruit, and research. The more people choose to implement them, the more costly they become. The first allows you to build a visible building, or build the superproject that is available, always by paying its cost. Recruiting keeps the people occupied, also providing you with benefits depending on the type of personnel that you recruit. Research on the other hand provides with research tokens determined semi-randomly. Capital Actions can be copied by the World Council action, if none of them is available. Other Main Board actions include mine resources, purify water, trade with nomads, and evacuate, a once-per-game-per-player action that only becomes available after the impact, and which has strict prerequisites. Actions on the player boards on the other hand include supplying, forcing workers to work, power plant buildings, as well as cleaning up anomalies and implementing superprojects.
The Clean Up Phase returns all workers from the main board and the Path boards to the tired column. Exceptions exist for the motivated worker s out there. Hexosuits return to the main supply for repowering in the next round, while Path markers are returned to their owners.
At the end of the 4th Era Impact takes place. Capital actions start becoming limited, while exosuit usage gets equally reduced.
The Doomsday module adds an additional board to the game, and allows for Experiments to take place. Each Experiment consists of a condition, a cost, and a VP reward. Experimentation affects the Impact and when it will take place, creating a new random factor.
The game includes a solo mode, with the player competing against the Chronobot. It functions under slightly different rules than real players, the objective however remains the same: to gather more points than it. There are three levels of difficulty, for those who want to amp it up.
Variants to the game include alternate timeline tiles, with bonuses or penalties affecting the players, as well as a starting asset draft instead of giving each player the assets depicted on their path board.
The strong points: First, let's set the mood.
Here it goes: Anachrony is one of the most captivating, most engrossing, most complex games that were published in 2017. It innovates on the worker-placement genre, by creating all sorts of variables and complex layers. The two levels of distinction between workers (exosuit and plain in addition to the four worker types) is one of them. The borrowing of materials from the future under the guise of 'time travel' (any normal person would have called this an interest-free loan) is another. The asymmetry of choices ties everything together nicely, seeing how it avoids the creation of forced bottlenecks and scripted plays. It also makes the game extremely replayable, and even more so because one can opt to play it solo.
I admit I was sceptical when I tried to play against the Chronobot, a couple of plays later however I was convinced. As is expected in these cases, many of the aspects of human interaction are omitted in order for the AI to concentrate on the important stuff. I don't remember of other worker placement game that can be played solo, unless one counts the dice-management Dice City. Even if Anachrony wouldn't be the game to play when I have an itch for a solo experience, it definitely is the game to try when you have the itch for a worker placer and nobody is available.
Another point which deserves its own paragraph is the concept of free actions. They are pivotal towards winning you the game, seeing how they will contribute heavily towards some parts of the wealth-producing machine that you are trying to construct, yet they are nowhere near the spotlight like the workers and their exosuits are. Like most worker placement games, Anachrony can be distilled to get X, convert to Y, use to produce Z, and transmute into VPs. These, along with the cumulative, snowball effects of your action's combinations, are what gets the game going. I enjoyed the non-restrictive approach to actions, at least when it comes to a large part of them. Why prohibit them outright and annoy the players, when you can simply make them more expensive, and make them think instead? That's good design. If it was further secured by a stopgap for analysis paralysis (I am a fan of timed rounds in pretty much every game out there, I admit), it would have been flawless.
The production values are extremely high. Even the texture of the glossy box has a luxurious quality to it, let alone the hundreds of components and the hard cardboard boards. The art is unique, to say the least, even though there are a few pieces which are borderline average. The theme is sci-fi and post-apocalyptic, even though the colours used and the gratuitous use of white gives it a cleaner look than the Mad Max one that tends to come to mind.
Mindclash Games deserves the highest of praise for the box. It look quaint, at a non-standard size, as it if will not fit into a library. Yet, when one buys Anachrony with its expansion, the Anachrony: Exosuit Commander Pack, he will be happy to see that all the elements of that expansion, protective tray included, fit into this box like a glove. Finally! I want to believe others will follow in the practice of making the boxes of the basic game expansion-ready.
The weak points: The first feeling you will experience upon opening the box is one of despair. Big box, cool, tons of components, cool, yet once you start laying down the boards to understand what is going on, and realise that you have more than 65 (!) pictographs to learn, there's this certain feeling of 'what have I gotten myself into'. Take a breath, and be patient. The game is not that hard, at least not while learning it.
The pictographs are all necessary, mind you, which means that so are the game's components. As a result, Anachrony is both busy and fiddly, something that you will realize before playing your first round. Nothing showcases fiddliness better than the fact that you will need 20 - 25 minutes to simply punch out the cardboard pieces before playing for the first time. Some of the pieces are smaller than a centimetre. Why?
I am not so surprised that one of my comments while reviewing Trickerion is pertinent here; both games are published by the same company and share two designers. ' Not a weak point in itself, yet a fair warning to people disliking particular mechanics: this is a worker placement game with twists [...]. If you don't like the subtype overall, the rich, elaborate backstory and the theme might alone not be enough to save the game for you, no matter how good it is. Idem for the complexity; this is clearly not the 'learn as you go', 'let's play something light for the laughs' game that a non-gamer might want to instantly embrace.' The only thing that I would add to it is the point salad concept, which many find mind-boggling, counterintuitive, and too much work. If you don't like point salads already, Anachrony is unlikely to make you reconsider.
Those who have played Euphoria will be immediately reminded of that game for a number of reasons. The first are Anachrony's basic mechanics. The second is the futuristic theme, even though the concept differs. The third is how busy the board looks, and how insanely complex everything feels like, at least at the beginning. Don't ask me to pick between the two; different strokes for different folks.
In many ways Anachrony is a multiplayer solitaire, with extremely limited player interaction. The only meaningful interaction is denying your opponents of certain actions ŕ la Agricola. Depending on how well you can stomach this and avoid the analysis paralysis and the downtime issues that the constant point-whoring entails, you are less or more likely to enjoy the game. When I am looking for more player interaction on worker placement, Dominant Species and Tzol'kin are my go-to games.
Just like Agricola and other games like it, being experienced in the game means a definitive advantage when playing with new players. I don't consider Anachrony to be such a hard game, it is not however a game that gets explained in mere minutes. My experience tilts more towards half an hour if not a bit more, if one wants to be thorough, an amount of time that is insurmountable for some. Understanding the game's concepts and deconstructing its victory point salad is going to take more than a few casual games. Expect your first few ones to last around an hour per player, instead of the advertised half. After the fifth to sixth game you will be more likely to approach such performances and play even two full four player games in one sitting.
Conclusion: Anachrony is the second extremely good game that Mindclash Games produces; the Hungarians are doing something right. It is deep, complex, and engrossing, a puzzle waiting to be solved. The loan mechanic is going to be seen again very soon, I am sure, with or without its sci-fi trappings. If you want great production values and the next step in the worker placement evolution, you have come to the right place at the right time.
To find out more about Anachrony and Mindclash Games, take a look at http://anachronyboardgame.com and http://mindclashgames.com respectively .
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