Fallout the Board Game

I'm a fan of the Fallout New Vegas and Fallout New Vegas, as well as the Wasteland series. When I found out there was a Fallout board game called, appropriately, Fallout the Board Game, I bought the last copy available in New Zealand (or at least at Mighty Ape, but I couldn't find it anywhere else). I've spent several months with it now, and this blog post is my review of it.

In many ways, the board game seeks to mimic the experience of the Fallout video games. And I do mean it tries to mimic the video games. I think if somebody told me to create a tabletop game using the Fallout IP, I would do what Modiphius did and create an pen and paper RPG. But that's not what Andrew Fischer and Nathan I. Hajek at Fantasy Flight did. They deliver a boxed RPG-alike, plus lots of the video game subsystems, with all the convenience and limitations that comes along with that. And amazingly, it works! t

The biggest problem with the game is its failure to explain the most important part of the game: How to win. I may as well address that single negative aspect first, to get it out of the way.

Win condition

The win condition of the game is technically clear from the rulebook. The goal of the game is to gain 11 Influence points. You gain Influence by completing quests for inhabitants of the Wasteland, like you do in the video games. So far, so good.

The problem is, the rulebook doesn't explain what Influence is. The board game has a tracker for everything: rads, HP, level, conditions, SPECIAL attributes, inventory, faction progress, shopping, loot, encumbrance, and more. But it appears to not have a tracker for the one thing you must track in order to win.

In the Board Game Geek forum, it seems most people believe that when you gain an Influence point, you take a card from the Agenda deck and add it to your inventory. The rulebook doesn't say that, though. The rulebook never equates Agenda cards with Influence, and in fact it consistently uses two terms ("Agenda" and "Influence") to refer to them.

In the game, when the Agenda [Influence?] deck runs out, a Faction progresses. When a Faction reaches the end of its track, the game is over. There's a variable number of Agenda cards depending on the number of players, but as an example there are just 11 Agenda cards in the deck in a solo game. If the Agenda cards truly are the currency for Influence points, then the more Influence you gain, the faster the Factions advance, forcing the endgame at an increasing pace. That makes some story sense. The more you Influence events in the game world, the sooner one Faction or the other grows into power.

As a mechanic, though, it's a little counter-intuitive. You only have 2 moves a turn, no matter what stage of the game you're in, so at a certain point you are literally unable to move across the board fast enough to attempt a quest to gain Influence before the game comes crashing to a close.

Then again, the Agenda cards often have bonus Influence on them, so having 8 Agenda cards could mean that you've actually got 11 Influence points under certain conditions. But what if you don't? It feels pretty fuzzy, to be honest, or at least fuzzy enough that it makes it not fun to bank whether you win or lose on a feeling that you probably have enough Influence, should the game end suddenly.

None of this is actually game breaking. If you play assuming that Influence is represented by Agenda cards, it'll probably feel wrong and scary and like the game just won't work. But it does. It gets chaotic, and certain enemies start to move a lot more, because the pool of possible actions is reduced the more Agenda cards you remove from the deck. I do think it's something Fantasy Flight should clarify, though, because I spent the first couple of days playing the game by tracking Influence with marks on some scrap paper. The game was uncomfortably long, the progress of the Factions was achingly slow (and I'm still not sure whether Factions move by two spaces or one space along the progress chart, but I think it's two).

A one-sheet errata page would resolve confusion over Agenda, Influence, and Faction Progression, and I'm shocked that Fantasy Flight hasn't bothered releasing one.

Everything else

Literally everything else about the game is great fun and, most importantly I guess, clearly explained. I'll admit, the number of moving parts is staggering to think about. This isn't one of those low-maintenance games. There's a lot to manage. There are cardboard tokens for caps, SPECIAL, conditions, quest markers, Faction NPCs, Faction progress, wasteland enemies, and probably others I'm not thinking about. There are card decks for assets, loot, special items, character traits, Agenda (er, Influence), and encounters. There's a status board for your character, with plastic pegs to track your level, rads, health, inventory, Faction allegiance.

Although the game has lots of components, the game play is pretty consistent once you get a feel for it. The first few playthroughs, you'll be referring to the rulebooks a lot, even for simple actions. But you pick it up after a few plays.

Make no mistake, this is one of those play-to-play games. The more you play, the more you internalise. And the more you've internalised, the more fun it is to play. This is NOT one of those games you buy, spend an evening to learn and play it, and then put it on the shelf for later. You have to have the game out on the table for several days in a row so you can practise. It's not fun when you have to turn to the rulebook for every action you want to take.

Rulebooks

Confusingly, there are two rulebooks. Fantasy Flight does this, sometimes, and I can't quite decide whether I love it or hate it. The first rulebook tells you how to setup and get started playing, and it kind of assumes that edge cases won't come up in your first playthrough. The second rulebook is more like an encyclopedia, with full definitions and cross-references of game terms, mechanics, and rules.

I feel like it might be better for the first rulebook to just be a step-by-step tutorial, providing a controlled environment that introduces you to the vital rules (movement, rads and health, combat, camping, encounters, and so on). The second book could be the book that explains the algorithms. In its current state, though, I'm never really sure which rulebook to turn to when trying to refresh my memory on how something works. I guess, in the end, it's always the second rulebook. Except when it isn't.

VATS dice

The game comes with 3 special VATS dice that are suggestive of the famous VATS interface in the video games. It's a fun visual reference, but it does take some getting used to because the elements on the die are re-purposed depending on the context of the roll you're making.

For example, when you're making a skill check, the pips (that's not a Pip-Boy pun) on the VATS die indicate success. The more pips, the better. But in combat, the pips represent how many hits you have just taken, and therefore how many health points you lose. The FEWER pips, the better. It's a small thing, but it does require your brain to switch modes depending on the kind of action you're rolling for.

I think this could have been solved by just adding a different element on the die, even though it would be entirely redundant. Give me a triangle pip pointing down to indicate when I lose HP, for example. You'd ignore the triangle pips (as you ignore the body graphic) when you do a skill check, and you'd ignore the circle pips in combat. It's a small thing, but saves the player from having to switch contexts every other action.

RPG

The RPG part of Fallout is represented by SPECIAL attributes, which you earn by leveling up, and by encounters. Encounters come from the Encounter deck, and serve as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure story that runs within the board game. When you go to a settlement, you draw an Encounter card, and the decisions you make lead to more Encounter cards, and so on, until you've earned Influence (er, Agenda) for your troubles.

The Encounter deck is finite, obviously, and it can only offer a subset of possible actions. When you're sent to go find a possible android on the loose, you can only follow the leads the cards suggest. And the next time you play, that'll be a quest available that you've already seen. Play often enough, and you'll eventually, presumably, exhaust all possible story paths. And then your board game will be useless.

Or at least, that's what a voice in the back of your head will insist.

In reality, I don't think it's a problem. I've played through the android scenario several times by now, and none of the quests feel tired, even after there's no surprise about how a specific path is going to turn out. The board game itself provides randomness for what the rest of the game world is doing around you as you head out into the Wasteland to complete a quest, so even a quest you know by heart isn't a perfunctory exercise. You may not complete the quest. You might run into a deathclaw. You might wander into radiated lands and decide that a different quest is an easier target, this time around.

The one thing about the Encounter deck is that it's a whole other subsystem to manage. It's a lot of cards to sort through, and it's a different mode of playing. You play the board game, and then you have to stop for a choose your own adventure, and then you play the board game and then you stop for a choose your own adventure, and so on. It's not a problem, but it does feel a little like a mini-game to me. I don't always play with the Encounter deck for that reason, and I've developed some random tables as a quick non-narrative substitute. I'll post those tables in a future post.

Miniatures

One of the most fun aspects of Fallout the Board Game for me has been its miniatures. It come with 5 miniatures, one for each available player character, and mostly they're really nice sculpts. The Outcast Brotherhood of Steel and the Mutant are the least detailed, I think (but ironically the largest), and I foundt hem pretty difficult to paint. The vault dweller, wastelander, and ghoul are a really nice, though, and a pleasure to paint.

I've personally augmented my games with Death Fields miniatures and robots from Blackstone Fortress and monsters from Wrath of Ashardalon. When an enemy spawns, I put the miniature on the board and the cardboard token with its stats off to the side. It really brings the game to life, or at least as much to life as plastic toys 28 to 32 mm tall possibly can.

Fun and replayable

I've only played Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3 a hundred times, so while I don't absolutely need another Fallout game in my life, I'm elated to have one anyway. I was hesitant before purchasing, because I was a little afraid that I was just buying any other post-apocalyptic game with a Fallout skin. Did I really need Fallout branding? Why not just grab a handful of Traitor Guardsmen and play a wasteland-themed wargame? Reign in Hell could easily be skinned for exactly that.

But the board game version of Falloutis more than just blue jumpsuits with vault numbers on the back. The game emulates the mechanics of the video game, and although it was the theme that initially attracted me to the video games, it's the way it plays that keeps me coming back to it. It's the mechanics that make it unique on the tabletop, too.

If you're a fan of Fallout, the board game is worth a look. If you're a fan of carefully designed, high-maintenance board games, then this could be a gateway into the Fallout universe. Either way, it's a fun game and tends to spend a lot of time set up on my gaming table.