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Review of Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth
Blurb from the publisher: 'For years he's been the law in Mega-City One, but now it's time for Judge Dredd to bring justice to the rest of America. It's time for him to venture into the Cursed Earth.
Lead a team of Judges as they fight through dinosaurs, mutants, and the land itself to hunt down a citizen harbouring a deadly disease, before a gang of criminals gets to him first.
Based on the best-selling 'The Lost Expedition', Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth introduces new rules and mechanics, such as psychic powers and radioactive landscapes, and features a brand new storyline with artwork from Dredd artists Rufus Dayglo and Dan Cornwell.
On an impossible journey through radioactive hell, can even the Judges survive the Cursed Earth?'
What you get: Your GBP 24,99 or equivalent will buy you Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth, a resource management board game that can be played both solo as well as in cooperative and confrontational mode. The game can accommodate from one to four players in just under an hour or less.
The game is a reimplementation of the well-known The Lost Expedition. Unfortunately, I have never played that game. Thus, I cannot meaningfully compare the two.
In addition to the 16-page A5 rulebook that can be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the box contains the following: 60 Encounter cards, 6 Character cards, 13 Location cards, 2 meeples, and an assortment of tokens, including Wound, Radiation, Ammo, and Rations.
Gameplay: Seeing how the game can be played in three different modes, I will start from the coop one.
Players control Judges Dredd, Anderson, and Giant as a team; no Judge is attributed to a particular player. Each Judge is an expert in either Survival, Diplomacy, or Psi. Their goal is to reach Max Normal, the game's human MacGuffin. To do so, and depending on the number of characters and good old-fashioned luck, the Judges will need to cross through 8 to 13 locations. In order to keep moving, they need to resolve two sets of 6 or 8 encounters per day/round. Days and locations do not align. Sometimes you might be crossing locations like a breeze in the same day. Other times you might be stuck in the same location, resolving encounters without making progress.
Each Judge starts the game with a number of health, ammunition and ration tokens. The Location cards are shuffled; depending on the chosen difficulty (Cadet, Street Judge, Chief Judge) some of them will be removed and some rules will not apply. Each player also has a number of Encounter cards in his hand. The Max Normal location card will be shuffled with two random location cards and will be placed on the bottom of the deck; its appearance is thus semi-random. Three locations will be revealed. The Perps start with a two location head start over the Judges. Locations either follow the game's usual rules, or provide additional rules for the encounters that take place there. You don't only need to survive, reach and secure Max Normal; you need to do so before the Perps find him. Every time the Judges meet the Perps (but not vice versa), a random draw of a Perp character dictates what type of resources the Judges will need to expend in order to proceed.
The game is played in rounds. Each round represents a day spent searching, and consists of two investigations: dusk and dawn. After each investigation Judges must eat. At the end of a round, they also replenish their hand.
During dawn, Judges play one card face up on the table until each has played two or three cards, depending on the number of players. This is the encounter row, i.e. the people and the hazards the Judges have to overcome in that location.
Each card has from one to three caption boxes. These can be mandatory events (they all need to be triggered), choices (only one out of the many needs to be triggered), and options (they can be either triggered or ignored). Caption boxes force the Judges to either lose or gain tokens. Health and radiation tokens are won or lost by one character only, the other resources however can be shared by the team in any way the players decide. Thus, one Judge might get wounded or healed or become radiation poisoned (which does not heal), yet ration cans can be spent or gained by anybody on the team. Ammo works slightly differently. You can earn it or spend it as any other resource, yet if you don't have any to spend but you need to, you can lose two health from a single character instead. Judges can also gain or spend Expertise. This means playing an already gained card with the matching symbol, losing one health from a character with a matching Expertise, or losing two health from a character with a different type of expertise. Psi can add encounters to a row either randomly or semi-randomly through player interaction and persuasion. Captions can also cause different game effects. As an example, an encounter might allow the characters to discard another encounter in the row, force a character to die, make the Judges or the Preps march faster towards their goal etc.
All Encounter cards are numbered. During dawn, and after all of them have been played, they will be rearranged and resolved in numerical order. In dusk, cards will be resolved in the order they are played by the players, without any rearrangement. After dusk the enemy always advances. Judges only advance when their encounters allow them to do so.
The solo rules alter the way cards are placed on an encounter row, so that such rows are created semi-randomly instead of the single player structuring them at will. The solo game allows the player to score how well he did by counting unspent food, ammunition, unused expertise cards, successfully resolved locations, and whether he reached Max Normal. Dead Judges lose you points, as expected.
The competitive rules pit the Judges against the Perp team of Mean Machine, Satellat, and the Disciple. The Perps mirror the Judges in that each also has a different area of expertise. Some Encounter cards are removed from the game. Players add cards to rows like in the coop game, yet it is the current player that decides, at the end of that placement, whether he will investigate a row first or whether the other player will. Rows can be uneven, both in quantity as well as quality (I.e. the ratio of positive to negative encounters). The last team standing, or the team that reaches Max Normal first, wins the game.
The strong points: Now that's a clever little filler, and yes, it is more of a filler than Helter Skelter. Its strongest point: it is an equally intriguing experience in either of its three modes. On solo mode you have more control over what transpires, yet the rows are also partially decided by luck. In coop mode your coplayers might give you ideas that you didn't think of, and the card placement will have a cleverer, more human element to it. In competitive mode, each player will try to outmanoeuver the other when it comes to the structure of the rows so that he depletes his resources first. In contrast to the solo and coop game, the competitive game is the perfect implementation of the old proverb: 'I don't need to be faster than the bear; I just need to be faster than you'. In the Cursed Earth, you don't need to catch Max Normal; you just need to survive longer than your opponent. Seeing how creating a row can actively cripple a player if he doesn't pay attention, killing out the opposing team is more of a goal than coming out first.
This is a game about choices and prioritization. If you want to seriously reduce your learning curve and deconstruct the game better, someone posted a superb distribution table of all the resources in the game; download it immediately. Even without that table however, you can empirically observe that, statistically speaking, you will lose resources much faster than you replenish them, your opponents will outrun you, and that you might have to kill a character here or there in order to progress. Just don't kill them all! The hierarchy of resources is fairly evident from the very first game already; radiation is bad, bad, bad; it is a masked, permanent hit point loss. You want to field as many advance icons as possible in order to move locations, but not at any cost. The game is neither about taking the scenic route, nor about charging head on; it is about surviving.
Thus, you will need to play it clever, especially during dawn, so that bad encounter cards can be removed or skipped through the cards that your coplayers will put down after you. Since you cannot share with your coplayers the exact contents of your cards, you need to understand human psychology. Playing a totally crap card encounter card first is a loud cry for help. If your partners pay attention, they will try to find a numerically inferior card that will be placed just before it in order to negate it. During dusk on the other hand, you might consider playing advance and encounter changing cards first. Your partners will then know that it is safer to play their bad cards afterwards. This does not mean that your plans will always come into fruition; miscalculating one expense or another is in the order of the day, and you simply can't counting everything while still laying cards down.
Production values are very high. The cards are sized at 80 x 120 mm; this makes them more expensive to sleeve, the stunning artwork however really comes through at this size. I really liked the idea behind the caption boxes, even though I feel they should have looked more like talk bubbles; in many ways it would have felt like reading a comic. The box is masterfully made. The cover does not detach itself from the box's lower part, giving an air of luxury to the game. The Justice Department Field Ration box inside the game box is an ingenious divider. Not only it keeps the tokens safe, it allows you to sleeve your cards and keep them steady inside the box no matter whether you store it horizontally or vertically.
As much as the game costs GBP 24,99, by sheer coincidence it was sold from the publishers website at a discount of 79% (!) when I submitted this review. That would be only GBP 5,25. This is literally a steal, even if the game ends up not being your cup of tea.
The weak points: The Cursed Earth is a hard game. In both coop and solo, expect to lose substantially more often than you win. This can be frustrating at times, especially if you believe that you have gotten a hang of the game. That is because the luck of the draw, especially in the solo game, can be decisive in what happens. The concept behind the theme does not help either. You are merely trying to survive before you reach a predetermined location; you are literally watching your resources dwindle down. I like The Cursed Earth for what it is; I really liked Escape the Dark Castle, and the two games are conceptually close to one another, even though this is by far the meatier one. Some however find this narrative style depressive. Yes, you overcome all sorts of encounters, yet there is no feeling of victory; you merely survived to the next one, and good grief when do we win already?
The pictographs should have been clearer. Expect some mistakes between gaining and spending resources in your first couple of games. The black cycle around the pictograph is not as intuitive as, say, a prohibitory traffic sign. Even more so, the tables explaining pictographs should have found their way at the end of the rulebook for ease of reference. Not only they are in the rulebook's middle pages somewhere, they are also broken down in four entries. Silly editorial omissions like that pointlessly increase the learning curve.
Osprey Games has two Dredd games on the market, and both are reskins of systems first used in something else. Just because a game is accompanied by Dredd imagery however does not become a Dredd game, in the same way that a Mickey Mouse story does not become a Dredd story through the change in art. Even when examined through good will, the theme is pasted. The Dredd imagery might help some of us construct a random Dredd story in their head, that's however it. Most of us, out of the second or third game already, will only perceive the icons on the cards, and will only think of how to optimize our resource management. One could potentially claim that the artwork on the encounters somehow matches the options that captions give to the players, it is however a shallow feeling. This could have been about Jyn and Cassian running after the Death Star schematics, teams of cooks searching for the secret ingredient, or a reviewer and his playtesters trying to catch the deadline rabbit and publish the season's most anticipated review before X-mas. Wait a second; that's a fantastic skin! Can somebody make it happen, and when he does, can I have a commission for it?
What are these generic black and white meeples? It is criminal how unthematic they are. Are Judges supposed to be black or white? Helter Skelter had incredible miniatures. Would it have been so hard to include one of Dredd and Mean Machine here?
And while we are at supporting materials and components, remember the distribution table I mentioned earlier? The publisher should have done it himself in order to help players better understand the game; not leave it to hardcore fans. If games like Carcassonne and Kingdomino can do it, everybody can.
Conclusion: Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth has merit in all its three modes; very few games can claim the same. It might be a filler and not be the game that you will meet to play, yet it will see the table more often than you think thanks to its rather short duration and the inclusion of a solo mode. I feel Osprey systematically wants us to play solo, Dredd-skinned games, while contemplating our dystopic future. On the other hand, don't expect to find Dredd's heart, head and helmet here; this is just a whiff of his scent.
To find out more about Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth and Osprey Games take a look at https://ospreypublishing.com.
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