Stationfall

boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/316624/stationfall

The biggest thing in hilarious tabletop fun or just that little bit too complex for its target audience? I struggle to find any quality content on it besides Dan Thurot's article from a while ago (he loved it).

Anyone here who has played it perchance?

I have not. It seems like the kind of game I would love, and also the kind I could never get to the table.

I ordered it many months ago, and it finally arrived last week. It's one of the games I'm most looking forward to playing. However, I have a line of titles ahead of it I've committed to review, so it's going to be awhile.

I've been reading Chris Farrell's opinion on it over the last say 6 months on instagram. He has mixed but mostly positive feelings? He seems to think it's quite sensitive to which of the crazy player positions are included in the game and he wishes that they had set scenarios and a little more control over the included PCs to create a good game out of it. But it does sound like a pretty random chaos.

I got in 4 plays at WBC . Its not as complex as it looks, mechanically speaking. The rulebook is....OK; the best way to learn is via the excellent example of play booklet . The core rules - moving, actions - are very straightforward. There are some subtleties in terms of how to activate the pods for evacuation .The hard part is knowing WHAT TO DO once you grasp the mechanics. There are some seeming disconnects that may slow people's grasp of the game. For instance, not every character needs to survive to score points. Or that anyone can activate your character until you reveal.

You need the right frame of mind to play it. We had one AP player in one game who I wanted to throat punch after attempting to redo a move for the umpeenth time. This is the sort of game you play where you do something.....anything....and just see what happens. Once you iron out the kinks its about a 2 hour game, shorter than say NEMESIS or BSG.

The replayability is virtually endless due to the sheer number of character combos. I do think Farrell may have a point in that certain character combos may produce suboptimal games - particularly those that don't need to survive to score points like Security.

I love the concept of this game, but on the table, it looks busy with open information, which tends to lead to analysis paralysis. One reviewer at BGG said that it takes 60+ minutes to teach the game, and if that's true, that is a massive barrier to getting the game played.

60 minutes to teach ? Um, no. Maybe if the “students” are the insufferable types who are too lazy to read a rulebook/summary yet insist on being taught every last rule before making a single move. We taught several new players at WBC in well under half that time. The key, like most learning games, is to get playing sooner rather than later; seeing stuff in action is often more effective than just hearing about it.

I got in one play of this last weekend, 6p. Overall I thought it was pretty good. It does suffer from the typical Ion/Elkund presentation and graphic design issues — it’s not as bad as earlier stuff like Origins or High Frontier, but it still has the vague sense of being laid out in MS Paint and then printed off at Kinko’s.

This absolutely makes the learning curve much harder than it needs to be. It’s not a terribly complicated game — there’s a bunch of personal actions you can do, and then some actions you can only do in specific locations. They are all logical things that you would expect characters on a doomed space station to do.

And of course the rulebook is written in wargame fashion, please refer to paragraph 15.2.11 for this simple answer to your question. I get that’s how wargamers like it, but this is an absurd approach to a game that could have very wide appeal.

The layer of influencing/activating characters is also complicated and for a learning game it might be better to skip all that and just give everyone a character and tell them how to earn points. I’d also question the relevance of the “Schrödinger reveal;” it doesn’t seem to add too much gameplay compared to the overhead of explaining it (at least for the first game or two).

But, very fun game. In a perfect world the whole thing would be given a second edition by a company with good graphic design chops. I was the medic bot and when I realized I could get points for braining people with a wrench and then reviving them, it was like the skies parted and a ray of divine light shone down upon me.

The point of the Schrodinger reveal is that if your Primary character is Downed w/no hopes of being revived or worse, Annihilated - you still have the possibility of switching your Backup to your Primary. I've explained to newbs and they usually see why its there . That being said I've rarely seen it used.

As far as the case numbering of rules, sure it looks a bit archaic, but it sure makes referencing from other parts of the rulebook easier and more precise.

I was a teenage wargamer (not a werewolf), and my theory about war game rule numbering was that it made it easier to add rules while they were working on the game. Helps avoid the "page xx" errors that you sometimes see in rules that weren't properly edited. Instead of referring to a page number, the rulebook will refer to a specific rule number which won't need editing just because the page count increased or decreased.

Oh, yes! In high school I borrowed that system for taking notes in class, and it helped me stay organized.