Blackout Hong Kong Review

It feels rather serendipitous to have been reviewing this while the real Hong Kong is in the midst of chaotic turmoil. Peaceful (and ingenious) grassroots protest is being met with an increasingly vicious police response on behalf of an undemocratic state. Learn more of what the people of Hong Kong are fighting for here: https://standwithhk.org/

Players: 1-4
Time: 75-150 mins
Designer: Alexander Pfister
Artist: Chris Quilliams
Publisher: eggertspiele

---

Blackout Hong Kong is a game I wanted to like. Expected to. It is, after all, the latest big box Euro from Great Western Trail designer Alexander Pfister, and that game is one of my absolute favourites. But the Blackout has some surprises in store. 

The first is just how much table space the thing takes up! A standard sized board with attached card market grid. Each player board is large enough to use as a place mat and you’ll need a fair bit of space around each of those for the various cards you’ll be moving around. Squeezing this on to a pub table is not going to happen. I wonder if this some metaphor for the overcrowding of Hong Kong? 

But more surprising is the round structure. Its EIGHT part round structure. While that at least provides a clean route for explaining the game it also produces a snort of disbelief from first time players. This is not Great Western Trail’s elegant rondel. Let’s break this down.

1) Roll dice

Dice, in all their random glory, decide what resources are easily available this round, although it is no great problem when collecting to spend truck tokens to select the other resources. 

2) Play cards

The start of the round presents your biggest decision. Selecting 3 of your hand of volunteers to send out to do what they do best. The purple cards have a mix of special abilities that often require resources to get the most out of. The red, blue and yellow cards gather resources according to what has been rolled on the matching coloured die this round. Ostensibly there’s nothing too clever about this but numerous other factors compound your thought process.

For one, the cards will stay out, building up columns until you are allowed to pick them up (in step 8). You can only do that if you have sufficiently few in hand and you must take the largest stack. So you want to play your best cards to the stack you’ll pick up next, but you don’t just want to play one great card a turn… To make matters worse there are various objectives that will ask you to create stacks featuring a very specific sequence of card colours. Trying to optimise all considerations at once becomes this mystical target that remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Wait… did someone say objectives?

3) Complete objectives

You’re here to rebuild Hong Kong which means getting sh*t done. Broadly that means spending resources to fulfil objectives. While the reward for that is most often points, there are (running theme here) other considerations too. Some cards will be new volunteers set to swell your hand size and always these are better than your starting selection. Others offer little bonus ‘tick’ abilities that trigger every time you refresh your hand. Such cards may also have multiple parts which tears you between the desirable completion bonus and the value of getting the tick ability out and available early. Gaining a new character always seems like a great move until you realise it takes you over the refresh-your hand-limit. Why is everything so hard?

Well don’t worry, the colour of the card also decides how your control is allowed to expand across Hong Kong. Wait, sorry, you should probably be worrying more shouldn’t you? And I haven’t even mentioned the difficult, expensive but immensely lucrative player board upgrades which let you play more cards or refresh your hand more often. Except maybe, actually, that’s not the perfect solution for your approach this game?

4) Buy new objectives

Good news! You managed to decide what to do about your objectives and now you have space for new ones! You did… save some money right? You now get to the chance to purchase new objectives from the 3×3 grid. The more cards in a row, the more it costs, with rows refreshing only once all are bought. Even the most innocuous part of the game has to be some tweak to the conventional solution. It is at once impressive, fascinating, and that hint more painful to teach.

5) Clean up

The rightmost card from each row vanishes in a puff of missed opportunities. Meanwhile your stores manager sells off any unspent food or water whether you want him to or not.

6) Complete districts

Why were you putting out cubes on the board? Oh that’s right! To surround districts and in this phase you get your reward. A pile of points and a new base, unlocking you a wonderful new tick ability. But this phase isn’t just about you. Any other player with a cube on a closing district gets points too, creating the intriguing interaction of leaching points off other players’ hard work. Just in case you wanted something else to consider when you are picking objectives.

7) Refresh hand

Finally you get to pick up cards and trigger all those lovely tick abilities. Except you have a choice: since you always pick up your largest column it is quite likely you won’t want to if you are still playing out the cards for a colour sequence objective. Even here, an obvious clean up phase can thrust an unexpected choice upon you.

8) Search

Feeling lost in the mechanics yet? That’s because we just doubled back to cover the phase that is the least well integrated and the most fiddly: searching. You can form a team from the cards still in your hand and send them out into an unsecured district to gather resources or even points. If you can pull together enough search symbols from cards or other tokens to fulfil the target on a search tile you gain that tile and its rewards. But this is a dangerous time to be out and about. One random member of the search team ends up in hospital. Useless. But they can be healed with your doctor card, which will even score you points for doing so. Losing your best cards is as much an opportunity as it is a detriment.

The complications start to pile on. The tiles start face down but once a successful search occurs in an area, they are left face up, giving everyone else knowledge of what is in that area. Collecting the different types of tile is worth end game points but repeats give you permanent boosts to future searches. You can only search next to where you have a cube on the board, integrating this phase with the objectives and pulling you away from securing districts.

As you might have gathered, rebuilding Hong Kong is no simple matter and navigating the layered, interlocking systems of Blackout is a worthy challenge. Considering the degree to which each system touches on the others and how even the simplest element has been tweaked into something unique to this game, it is surprising how quickly you get into the flow. Gather resources, complete objectives, search, buy new objectives, tidy up, go again. If everyone knows what they are doing things can move along at a solid clip but the phase by phase structure, even with a lot of actions being performed simultaneously, has a tendency to get dragged out to uncomfortable lengths. Especially with 4 players.

That round structure also gets in the way of the game from cohering. You are forever switching focus, first the cards then the objectives then the map. Driven by the beat of the first player marker up a player board. My first impressions of the game were not positive. I flailed between objectives without a greater purpose and never found a footing. 

I suspect this could be a common first experience of Blackout. Most Euros give you a mix of short term and long term goals to build towards. They give you direction, targets to aspire towards and dreams that stick in your mind between games. Blackout, for a game overflowing with objective cards, has none of these things. Objective cards are completed so quickly they provide only the briefest direction, while the more complex tasks, unlocking the player board sections or surrounding districts, are a means to an end. But ‘the end’ is absent. 

Yet, the more I played, the more the pieces started fitting into place. Blackout Hong Kong is a scramble to recover from the event, but natural or unnatural disasters are not in some binary state of resolved or not. The scars remain on a city for years, decades. A fire station gets rebuilt here, a new market starts up there. Suddenly life has adapted to the new normal and it is the cumulative contribution of dozens of separate actions that makes this happen. 

Blackout Hong Kong refuses to give you a definitive target, of when you’ve solved the crisis, because there is no definitive target. There are few long term goals because, ultimately, the small act of securing books for a teacher can be as important in the long term as re-establishing some island-wide government. It is intentionally a game of completing as many small scale actions as your overstretched team can possibly achieve. You’re there to do the best you can and you won’t know that’s enough because you can’t know it’s enough. That might make it less satisfying as a player but it is excellent for the theme.

Instead of wanting to get your train to the end of the track this game, Blackout is about the process. Moving forward. Finding the little pieces of engine that fit together into something that never exactly explodes into productivity, but still gives you a sense of progress. It needs to be well managed to achieve even that, mind. Therefore each game is somewhat unpredictable, dictated by how the dice fall and what objectives appear in what order. The experience is broadly the same but the details, what new volunteers you gain, what tick abilities you unlock, and how that affects your relative focus between scouting, objectives, volunteers and territories, varies quite a bit.  

But it makes Blackout a tough sell in a crowded market. Especially when it does so little to sell its setting, when the art and graphic is functional at best, and when there are fairly major misprints in the European (2nd!) edition of the game! It needs investment to see through the esoteric structure to the engaging puzzle within. And too many first impressions will likely turn people away.

Rating: Flickering Brightness

---

Our copy of Blackout Hong Kong was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £43.99 RRP from your local hobby store.