Review of Fire!

Blurb from the publisher: 'The arcade game for one or two players!

Fire! uses the Fable Game system introduced in Fabled Fruit. With the presorted deck of cards and a rules booklet separated in 9 sections, you will discover all 9 challenging levels step by step. You can reset the game at any time and play it again!'

What you get: Your USD 19,95 or equivalent will buy you Fire!, an abstract solo, hand-management card game that can be also played by two players in co-op mode. A level can be played separately in anything from 5 minutes to half an hour. Playing through the game in one go is bound to last hours.

In addition to the two English rulebooks that can be downloaded from the publisher's website free of charge, the box contains 89 rectangular cards.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have not played Fabled Fruit or any other game using the Fable Game system, if they do indeed exist. Thus, I cannot meaningfully compare Fire! to any of them.

Gameplay: Fire! is a mathematical puzzle in which you have to defeat aliens (target numbers), by pumping up the energy output (random numbers mostly from 1 to 5) to different weapons (columns). You only do one thing in a turn: play a card to a column.

As an example, in the first level the player has fifteen cards at his disposal and faces five aliens through the use of three weapons. Four of the aliens have 12, 9, 6 and 3 as to-hit thresholds, while the fifth alien has 8, 6, 4 and 2. In order to inflict a hit, a player must store energy in a weapon (put cards in a column). When the sum in a column reaches 10 or more, the weapon automatically fires; the player cannot stop it. To count the damage it inflicts, the player deducts 10 from its total power (anything from 10 to 14, seeing how 5 is the biggest card), and multiplies that number by the number of cards used. Taking the number distribution into account, at first level one can use anything from three to eight cards to fire a weapon. Thus, the total damage output ranges from 0 to 32.

A hit can be applied on any single surviving alien. Its value has to be equal to the alien's current life. Thus, a strong alien at full health needs to receive at least a 12-point hit in order to drop from 12 points of health to 9. If the hit has enough remaining strength, it can continue hitting the same alien. Thus, a 16-point hit that hit an alien who already was at 9 points will immediately drop him to 3, eradicating both his 9 and his 6 threshold (total sum: 15). Any surplus strength (e.g. a 1 when the alien has 3 life remaining) is lost.

Every time a player scores a hit, and irrespective of the extent of damage it does to an alien, the player eliminates one of the cards he used in that column, and discards the rest. The eliminated card will not be used against until the end of the level. The discarded cards will be reshuffled and used again once the player's hand runs out. The level ends once the player eliminates all the existing aliens, or if he, due to the lack of cards or their placement on the columns, cannot fire any more. In the former case, he wins. In the latter, he loses.

Levels are different in that the complexity increases. As levels progress, aliens with different values are added, some aliens have to be eliminated before others, damage can spillover from one alien to the next, the player gets access to additional power cards (e.g. 0 power cards, cards that provide damage additional to their existing number, cards which may short-circuit a column if they are not accompanied by other cards, and many more), etc. The game's culmination is level 9, where a player has all the game's cards at his disposal in order to eliminate nineteen (!) different aliens plus the dreaded alien four-threshold mothership. Fun fact: the latter's thresholds are all identical, at a value of 20 each. It is not an easy challenge, I assure you.

In the two-player mode each player has his own deck (e.g. 10 cards on the first level each). Both decks are identical. The game plays like in the solo mode, but with players alternating turns.

The strong points: If you like arithmetic you are going to love Fire! The game's first level is a clear-cut case of you against yourself. Can you analyze well enough, in order to defeat a totally straightforward level? You have fifteen cards with a well understood distribution, three guns, and five aliens to kill. Irrespective of how Lady Luck behaves, you should be able to tackle it. Yet, as the levels increase in complexity, your options become much harder to read, and the Lady's behaviour feels less controllable. That's where the excitement is.

The principles behind the game design are solid, with many clever twists. Fire! does not dump everything in front of you from the get-go, but chews everything into digestible bites. The game is fully modular. One clearly does not need to play level 1, or even 2, or 3, if he no longer loses on them. There is no fear of never finishing a game due to time constraints. Pick a level that is challenging for you and which can be played in the amount of time you have at your disposal. When approached this way, Fire! can become one of the games you play the most often. Bonus points for the extremely fast setup. Even at level nine, and depending on how you put the cards back in the box last time you played, you might be 30 seconds away from a new game.

The basic tactic behind the game is obvious: hit the aliens hard, so that each hit reduces their health by many levels, if not eliminates them outright. If one were to go the long way about it and eliminate each alien level threshold one at a time, he would run out of cards very fast. In an outright perfect first level game (and luck must actively help you achieve such a feat), you will only burn five cards to kill all five aliens. In other words, each hit will be a kill, averaging out more than 20 points. Even though that is statistically improbable, it demonstrates the game's range. Yet, luck will not always be as helpful. When numbers don't come up in the order you want them to, you have to ration your hits so that a) they at least have an effect, and b) they set you up for the end of the level. You will feel outright stupid when you burn a card without having hit any alien whatsoever due to poor calculation, or when you realize that you have been burning the wrong cards all that time, effectively digging your grave. There are many things to take care of, like not allowing sum-10 combinations in your hand for the end, not burning your very low-value cards (0 cards are your friend, when they become available), and other small tricks like this. I won't reveal them all, yet this shows what the game demands: continuous, high standard analysis that takes statistics into account. You don't play Fire! by a feeling, you play it by the numbers. You might still not always win at the highest levels, but damn, with all that capabilities you can start working as a project manager.

I am extremely happy to have playtested Fire! instead of merely playing it. I devoted a lot of time in each level before reading the instructions on how to set up the next. This allowed me to understand the principles behind each level, and have a thorough understanding of what the cards are. I wholeheartedly suggest the same approach; don't go to level 2 just because you defeated level 1. Defeat level 1 three times in a row, and then proceed. Idem for every other lower level, until you reach the highest ones. The deck is easy to know and understand in the first few levels, it becomes however more and more complex as you progress. You won't need to memorize the cards you played; your discard pile and your eliminated cards are open for you to see. The game however gets you in the habit of knowing what is left in your hands. The only thing you don't know is the order of the yet to be drawn cards. At higher levels that can make all the difference in the world.

The two player game is solid, and requires good communication. I am not sure whether it is better. It is just different. You should know your deck, your partner should know his, and you should definitely use your collective minds together for faster and more efficient analysis. Let me be honest however: if I have a partner available, Fire! is unlikely to be the game to bring to the table.

I enjoyed the artwork, even though the theme is only a veneer. Even so, it gets you into the arcade mentality; I caught myself shouting 'pew pew!' to the nameless hordes of aliens more than once. The production values are good, and pretty much what one expects from a small game of such gravity.

The game is compact and can be easily transferred around. The first levels can be played using a minimal amount of space; even the table inside a train will do. Do not expect to do that with the higher levels though.

The weak points: This is a 100% arithmetic-based experience. There is nothing else to it. If you don't like numbers, stay away. If you like the premise but you get bored easily, you might also want to stay away. The game is as repetitive as they get. I wonder whether it will ever see an electronic edition like Onirim (Second Edition) did, and whether that edition will also be faster to play.

For a number-based game relying on thresholds, the design omitted a rather obvious number: the total number of health remaining in each alien and not just his current level. It might not seem like much at first when you have only two types of aliens on the board, yet things get more complex fast. How hard would it have been for a 12/9/6/3 alien to read 12(30)/9(18)/6(9)/3(3) instead? It would make the game easier to deconstruct, more attractive to play, and ultimately faster to master.

As I previously wrote, I do not believe that, at least in level one, a flawless play can be lost due to bad luck. By definition this means a lack of replayability. Once you master a level with a systematically favourable win to lose ratio, you are unlikely to come back to it for more. On the other hand, in the higher levels the game's outcome does not only lie upon your skill, or so things feel due to the incredibly high number of permutations you have to think of. The card draw becomes a strong factor, seeing how your deck increases in size but the columns at your disposal remain limited. Games will be won and lost 'just because'. That is disappointing, to say the least, especially if you were playing a level for half an hour or more.

I do not recommend playing the game from beginning to end in one go. First, you will be bored to death by the repetitiveness. Second, you are likely to get confused, and forget one or two of the additional things that take place in the higher levels. Just take advantage of the game's modularity and you will be fine.

I enjoyed how the rules are broken down per level, they are not however always clearly written. As an example, in solo mode you always get three columns. Yet, that is stated in a rather confusing way level after level. The editing is also not that sharp: the instructions for solo and co-op mode should have been better separated, even if things needed to be repeated more than once.

Fire! is not an arcade simulation. Taking the arcade Alien Invaders aesthetics into account, I expected something like Z-Man Games' The Battle at Kemble's Cascade, for which, incredibly enough, I have still not written a review. Yet, Fire! does not try to simulate an arcade, it merely uses the imagery of one, along with the 1980s fonts. You control more than one ship, you can hit any alien without targeting, you amass energy for shooting (instead of just shooting), and many more. I ultimately didn't mind thanks to the game's merit. Just be sure that you buy the game for the right reasons, and not because you got misled by the imagery.

I am not happy with the size of the cards. On the one hand, rectangular cards make sense for this game. On the other, sleeves for 70 x 70 mm cards are on the expensive side and cannot be readily found. The silver lining is that you will require only one package, seeing how there are less than one hundred cards in the game.

Conclusion: If you are into arithmetic, or if you want to sharpen your analytical skills for your next big civ game, Fire! is a great game to play. Give it to a kid that has just learned multiplication; not only you will excite it for a very, very long time, you will also see his school grades improve. Admittedly however, this is not the first game that comes to mind when I think of which solo to play.

To find out more about Fire! and Stronghold Games take a look at http://strongholdgames.com.

Shameless plug: for more gaming news and content (including, for example, pictures of Fire! that I am unfortunately not able to upload on RPG.net for the time being), and to better keep track of my reviews, subscribe to my Antonios S facebook page.