First Impressions of Adrenaline

This is a first impressions article (based on 1 play). I’ve now posted a full review of Adrenaline here.

“Czech Games Edition is releasing a what!?” My bemused response to the news of their upcoming game Adrenaline, a first person shooter board game. “How the hell is that supposed to work!?”

Well, bizarrely, it does! But not in the way you might think. Naturally, you’ll each control some tooled up sci-fi character, running around an arena picking up weapons and ammo, blasting your opponents and trying to stay in one piece, but this isn’t some chaotic all action game. This is, without any shadow of a doubt, a Euro game. In fact, it’s a resource management area control game. Huh!?

Resource management keeps your guns filled with ammo. Each shot you fire sees you dramatically slamming a weapon card down on to the table, but to pick it up you’ll need to pay the ammo cost as you reload it. These cubes are obtained by picking up the random drops spread liberally across the map, but it’ll take up turns that you would rather spend shooting or just running away.

The area control element is just brilliantly absurd: it’s the players’ health bar! Do some damage and you drop your coloured counters on to their player board to indicate damage, and once a player is killed you score by having inflicted the most (/second most/third most etc) wounds. But this being a euro game, the more wounds you take the stronger you fight, and once you’ve been killed once you’re worth fewer points the second time round. Leading to the hilarious realisation that if you’re the only person who hasn’t died yet… you’re next!

Do you try and score by hitting multiple characters a little bit? Or aim for big hits on one or two players? Do you try and get the first shot in for first blood bonuses, or finish off characters to get end game points? You can have multiple weapons and their effects can combo together, but then you need more ammo. There’s an interesting give and take, all tumbling around an opportunistic/spatial element that comes from positioning on the main board. Not to mention that you are perfectly free to negotiate and collude with one another against the other players!

Adrenaline comprehensibly fails to capture the essence of a first-person shooter game, which under normal circumstances would be grounds for me to take them task! Yet here they’ve created such an enjoyable and interesting puzzle that the jarring clash between theme and mechanics is soon forgotten about. It’s completely unique! The way you interact on the board complements these classical euro game mechanisms in such an interesting way that you can’t help but be impressed. I mean, I’m sure almost everyone has played an area control game before, but when was the last time you had to chase that area down a corridor with a flamethrower?

This is definitely one to watch out for!

My play of Adrenaline was of a prototype so elements may change between now and its intended release at Essen 2016.