Crisis Review

A nation in Crisis! A global depression has brought the nation of Axia to its knees and its lifeline is financial support from the Economic Union it is a part of. But with that money comes strict economic targets that must be met if it is to continue. What an exciting work of fiction! I’ve never heard of any such events happening in the real world at all! What’s that? The designers are Greek? I can’t imagine what that has to do with anything…!

Players: 1-5
Time: 45-120 mins
Ages: 14+
Designer: Pantelis Bouboulis, Sotirios Tsantilas
Artist: Anthony Cournoyer, Viktor Csete, Chrisi Giannopoulou, Sami Laakso
Publisher: LudiCreations

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I previewed Crisis a couple of years ago before its original Kickstarter but now that I’ve finally played it some more, and with a second printing just around the corner, it’s time to give it a more thorough look.

Crisis is a unique game with a fantastic, attention grabbing slant. Each round the players will have a specific victory point target they must have reached; the economic target imposed by the Economic Union (I wonder if there’s a suitable acronym we could use for that). Achieve or fail the target, it has limited repercussions for you personally. However, all player’s scores will be compared to the target and the net difference added (or more likely subtracted) from Axia’s financial status.

As the country slides into economic woes more punishing events come into play and, more importantly, the game will end in national bankruptcy if the status ever hits zero. It’s an enticing threat that creates an experience unlike any other game I’ve played, quite the achievement when the core is worker placement and resource generation. Even if they are lovely resources.

A typical euro game asks you to set up and run an engine for the course of a two hour game. In Crisis the game might come to an early end via your collective shortcomings, which is both hilarious, and dodges the pain of watching an inefficient engine fall painfully behind. Because it will only end early if some players have done particularly badly. If it does, then any players above the target have a chance at winning, which creates its own fascinating end game as you try to decide whether it is worth investing in future turns that may simply never come.

The other subtlety lies in money. Make it to the end of round 7 and all the cash you’ve earned will be converted into victory points. This can be a big swing! But with a financial crash the value of money is wiped out, potentially screwing someone chasing the big money strategy. And this leads to some potentially fascinating player behaviour. By not chasing the target but focussing on cash and your own engine you can have a much more powerful endgame, but that’s only going to work if the other players can keep Axia in one economic piece. The game tempts you into being a selfish, greedy capitalist but punishes you for going to far. It reinforces a theme of collective responsibility through its mechanics.

But should you try that then the honest, upright players may realise this is what you are doing and intentionally do the bare minimum to keep the country, and the game, afloat. They can aim to stay above the line, but allow the economy to crash. In many ways that’s an even darker view – willingly destroying the country to win the game! And you have the scope within the seven rounds to switch between approaches, to adapt your strategy. Crisis has the potential to really let players do some special things, but only if you all, or mostly all, know exactly what you are doing.

Starting you off on the ground floor

Crisis features a board that comes dangerously close to being called a spreadsheet, with possibly the most worker placement spots I’ve come across in a game. The resolution phase involves 14 steps! And yet, weirdly, it all comes together really quite easily. Almost everything is straightforward, of the obtain this or spend X for Y variety, and new players will have a good handle on things within a turn or two. The core elements of the game are the factories and the workers. Not the workers you place. Those are called managers. I should have phrased this better.

The core of your game engine will be the factory cards that you invest in. Everything from the noble bread farm to the esoteric Spaceport. Running these will produce piles of resources, or money, or even straight up victory points. But everything requires workers to run it. Workers are cardboard people tokens you can hire coming in a set of specialisations, like shovel-men and hammer-women, who will slot into your factory cards like cogs into your capitalist-nightmare machine:

The guy on the left is the essential worker who, along with the pictured resource (power) is the cost required to get this mine running, that is, to produce the goods shown on the bottom right. However, where this simple process gets interesting is that extra workers can be added along the bottom of the card in the correct spaces to boost the factory’s output. The ‘+1’s and ‘+2’s workers have on them increase the output of the factory by that amount. This is a very satisfying part of the game, pursuing maximum efficiency in your output, that keeps pulling you back to the employment market for more, and better workers. When a rare ‘+2’ comes out of the bag, or that one accountant you’d really like, you completely re-evaluate your worker placement options for that round just because it would feel great to boost your output that little bit more.

The first round is a dash to get something running. The later rounds are all about leveraging what you have started off with, or filling gaps that exist in your business portfolio. You see, many factories require resources to run. Almost everything needs power, and there is an entire set of worker (the big wooden ones this time) placement spots dedicated to converting the other goods into power. But many others need specific resources too, like the farm that needs chemicals (fertilisers), rewarding you with a load more bread than other (organic?) farms. While you can obtain this extra resource from importing it, the cost is huge! Not just financially, but in victory points too! Because you shouldn’t be increasing Axia’s trade deficit, you naughty importer. It is far, far more efficient to open the factory that produces this resource so you can create your own self-sustaining engine.

Furthermore, when you’re producing all these goods you will run out of uses for them yourself so you’ll be looking to the export market. This is one of the big victory point areas, along with retail/tourist style buildings and… just buying up factories… even if you never run them (think… Toys R Us). As is typical, there are only so many available and they are keyed to particular resources, encouraging you to diversify and adapt your engine throughout the game as conditions change, especially in response to competition from the other players.

But in this facet of the game is a different opportunity, and a challenge I raised way back at the start of this guidebook to Axia. For the opportunity, instead of exporting (like a schmuck!) you can sell to the local black market, which isn’t worth any victory points, but doubles the cash you earn. The challenge lies in the balance between chasing points and keeping your engine running especially when you don’t know for sure when the game is going to end! Do you hang on to those resources you need to run your engine for the next few turns… or do you just make a quick buck now and deal with the future if it comes?

Final Accounting

There is a degree to which the game’s big selling point, that almost semi-cooperative element, doesn’t quite play out as you’d expect. There is the potential for magic there, but its fragile balance means it would likely take a special combination of player experience and in-game circumstance to reach its peak. Crisis works great as a desperate challenge on harder modes, a raw competitive engine builder on easier mode, and somewhere in the middle is a triumph that is sadly difficult to find.

While in some ways Crisis promises slightly more than it can consistently deliver mechanically, it hugely over-delivers with theme. Crisis takes all of its stereotypical Euro elements, worker placement, turning one resource type into another, the arbitrariness of chasing ever more points, and creates a narrative and world into which those oh-so-well-known mechanics fit perfectly. When has turning one wooden piece into another felt more natural? And when has a game of business felt more about the real people than arbitrary numbers? That alone would make this a game of note. But to my tastes, the wry cynicism baked into that world, the satirical take on real world events, just elevates this game to even greater heights!

You are the heartless men hiring foreign labourers on the cheap while local people riot in the streets. You are profiting from the misfortune of the people of this country. You sit around the table planning moves in perfect analogy to the businessmen around their boardroom tables. Crisis wants you to do what gamers do best: build an engine and optimise your way out of this situation. If your engine is too selfish then Crisis forces you to confront your selfishness. If you end up saving Axia, then Crisis will pat you on the back and make you feel good about it. But underlying its congratulatory smile is a message. That you were never the ones particularly at risk, but that in the real world, most likely, you absolutely are. Powerful stuff!

 

Rating: An Opportunity

 

Crisis is on Kickstarter until April 30th 2018. If you’d like more details about how the game plays, check out this video from Gaming Rules!

My copy of Crisis was provided by Ludicreations.