Alone Game Review
Related Products
A game I've never heard of. Not that I care much about the games over the hill, just what reaches my ears through the hype of the saint. I have enough new products on the Russian market, I would have time to buy them, but trying new things in online areas is completely out of bounds for me. But thanks to friends, this also happens...
So, the game is a variation of one against all. Only here everything is the opposite: one hero and several lords. The hero supposedly woke up somewhere, and the villains are trying to send the poor guy to the other world. According to reviews and rules, I got the impression that it is better to play dueling than we actually did.
We played two games in a row, with a change of sides. Actually, let's take a closer look at them...
HERO
The owner places the hero figure on one tile of the field and chases away. You can look into the distance, or you can just take a step into the unknown. Playing for this side, you don't know the map and you don't even have an idea in which part you are. And to give you motivation - the game comes with missions that you need to find and do. The research element in all its glory. Moreover, the ruler breeds all kinds of animals that the hero meets on his way. If the animal jumped out unexpectedly or out of nowhere, then you lose self-control, and if you saw it from afar, then everything is normal. And now you are climbing through the tunnels, having absolutely no idea where you are going, fighting back every step. The game has a lot of tools that help you cope with hardships and wanderings. These are the mechanics of light, where you firmly fix the status of these rooms, plus the monsters there are weaker (after all, in the light it is easier to plant any chthon in the eye), and a clock with echo location, where the owner can answer what is the distance to the object, about which you ask Separately, I want to emphasize the mechanics of noise. If the owner moved a monster that the hero cannot see, he must say the direction of the light from which the sound came. On the way you find all sorts of things, Andrii just found a fur suit in which he cut out monsters left and right. On the one hand, you feel like a blind kitten staring from side to side, on the other hand, you crush monsters without much trouble, and a bunch of items and a mechanic help you in this.
RULER
Here you are king and god. But God is like that, weak, but cunning. You know the whole map, and it is also two-level. You give birth to animals (you can't stand right next to the hero: the stronger the monster, the further it appears from the hero), lure it into traps. Monsters are not that strong, but when there are a lot of them, there is enough trouble. There are laconic rules that will not allow you to create an army in every room, so you have to connect tactics and set up networks. In our party, Andriy easily passed the first level and said that it was necessary on a different level of difficulty (in the game of 4, we played on the second). But when I got to the second level, I realized that I prepared most of the manipulations for him precisely at the end of the game.
IMPRESSION
The general atmosphere of the game reminded me of Claustraphobia, but I only have one game before it, and that was a long time ago. I liked the action mechanics. You take an action, after which the other party has a chance to react. Thanks to this, you do not wait for each other's moves for 10 minutes. For the hero, all actions are performed from the standard set plus item cards. And the owner operates with cards from the deck that he chose for the game. (A total of 4 half-decks, of which you choose two per game; hello, "Tyrants"). Each deck focuses on something different: attack, movement, traps, control. We watched all 4 - and it's interesting! You are like the king and god of locations, but you have limitations in implementation. It plays very lively and the game time is comfortable - we played 2 games in one evening and it took about 4 hours, considering that it was the first games for both of us. Simplicity. I like games where the actual implementation of actions is not complicated by a lot of factors, but how to win is another matter. The same is true here: the rules are concise and clear, there is a good video with the rules on YouTube, after which questions remain at least. There are also few exceptions.
CONCLUSIONS
I was impressed and liked the toy. It is interesting to sit on both sides, but probably the owner is closer to me. There you don't feel like an imboy, but you develop a plan to steadily bite the hero and lead him the wrong way. You run monsters where you don't need it, creating the illusion of protecting the area with noise, you lure in the network and play from the cards that came to you. The threshold for entering the game is low, the table is small, because the map is constantly removed between rounds, the language on the maps is primitive, although, of course, it would be more comfortable in localization. I would like to get such a box for my collection.