Infiltration Game Review
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Infiltration is a game about "corporate espionage". Each player chooses a character and tries to steal data from some corporation (perhaps an evil corporation). However, once you've stolen data, it's still very important to survive - after all, a dead spy is much worse than a living one, even if he knows a lot. And being dead is very unpleasant. In each of your turns, you can take several actions: you can advance further into the building, retreat closer to the entrance, try to hack the computers in the room where you are now, and, if successful, get information or play an item card. Items will help you kill non-player characters (such as a police officer who can press the alarm button), crack security codes (thus finding even more information), kill lab workers, or add difficulty to other players. At the beginning of the round, each player chooses an action, in order of turn, on their turn, reveals it and performs it. After that, all active NPCs, if any, take their actions. And finally, you roll the dice and add the overall threat level of the alarm to the value (which is why the officer on the alarm button is so annoying) - you add the result to the already existing danger of calling drones. Once the threat level reaches 99, security drones arrive and destroy anyone still in the building. In this case, the one who collected the most information and survived is the winner.
The first thing I liked about the game is that it has a large element of luck. You definitely have to decide how far into the building you are going to penetrate, trying to keep in mind that you will have to escape (in the first games it may be obvious that the winner is the only one who survived and escaped). What I really love about this game is that luck is a central element of the game and not the only element of the mechanic (just like Farkle and many other dice games where you experience luck). Yes, you'll have to decide how far you're willing to go and how many rounds you're going to stay in the building. In addition, you will have to make a lot of strategic decisions - the winner is not necessarily the one who stayed in the building the longest and survived (it is worth experiencing success).
The second thing that should be noted about the game is that it is quite replayable - if you liked the game, you can play it several times and at the same time it's like the first time. There are many room maps in the game, and every time you shuffle them, you create a new building that will be different every time. In addition, the game has a lot of support item cards, some of which you will only see once per game and can make different combinations of them. And finally, there are several different uses for items.
Still, with both of these pluses in mind, I think the game has some things that could be improved. First off, the item maps in this game work absolutely horribly. It's very difficult to explain what I mean, but everyone who played with me had the same feeling, and all for different reasons. Although items are a very important element of the game and without them the game would be very dull. However, there weren't many ways to get these item cards (I think this was done to give the game a sense of scarcity). There are also a few items that are so specific and fit only for a specific situation that you have a good chance of not encountering. In fact, it seems like a lot of these items don't live up to their rarity - in the event that I'm only collecting four items in the entire game (which could possibly happen with a few players playing with all six), I want these items to be really useful . But instead, many of them seem useless and you can't even try to use them (so you'll be glaring at one of your opponents when they can use the item effectively).
I think that another disadvantage of the game is its quick ending, which does not give players time to learn and develop well. This is facilitated by the presence of a second floor in the game (each floor consists of 6 rooms). In order to get to the second floor, mind you, and leave the building, you need 13 moves (if I counted correctly) without special rooms or items. However, this does not include data collection. The duration of the game may vary depending on the troubles you encounter and the values you roll on the dice. But assuming you roll an average of 3.5 each time, the game will take 28 moves. Accordingly, if you want to enter the last room of the building and at the same time escape, then it takes 23 moves. Therefore, the farthest rooms will remain unused.
Now let's move on to such an element of the game as alarms. We were playing once when the officer who pulls the alarm was in the first room. This practically cut our game time in half because there were 5-7 alarms that we couldn't do anything about. However, if you get three alarms (which I think is pretty average) with an average dice roll of about 6.5, the game is reduced to 15 turns, which is enough to get to the first room on the second floor, extract the data twice, and get out outside. I understand that there can be many options here, and all this I lead to the fact that it feels like the game does not have time to develop at the time of its completion. I must also admit that there are a few rooms that will help you avoid this. The loading platform allows you to escape immediately (this is the first floor room), and in the manager's office you can get a secret file that will free you from any room in the building. There are also rooms that allow you to move through several rooms at once. However, depending on where these rooms are located, they can be incredibly useful or useless. After all, the loading platform, if it is the sixth room on the first floor, will give you freedom to move around and explore the second floor. If she is the first on the floor, she will be completely useless.
And thirdly, I was a little disappointed that the characters didn't have any unique characteristics. There is also a game option where the characters are specialists, and two of the six items are predetermined. One of the things I really like about most Fantasy Flight games is how balanced they are in terms of where your character starts moving and what specific features they have (much more important than what their figure looks like). This doesn't make the game bad per se, but it was exactly what disappointed me.
Overall, I give Infiltration a 7 out of 10. And I think that's a pretty fair score. I would like to play it again, if, of course, my friends ask for it.