Highwaymen Review

“Are you ready men!?”

The coach was picking up speed as it approached the old forest road. The guards pulled up to cover the flanks, eyes twitching between the road ahead and the tree line to the side.

“The money must make it to through!”

He checked the reserve guards one last time, making sure they were securely fastened into their quick release harnesses. A flash of movement from the trees caught his eye and the crack of a bullet signalled the start of the night’s terrors.

“They’re here!”

Or, rather, you are, as you take on the role of the titular Highwaymen. No more are you satisfied with merely holding up aged rich men’s coaches. The gang of you have set your eyes on a bigger prize, a coach laden down with money… but this job isn’t going to be without risk, the coach is heavily guarded and can you really trust that your friends’ greed won’t over take them in the heat of the moment? It’s time to decide whether Highwaymen is worth your money, or your life!

Along a randomly generated winding forest road you’ll be chasing the coach and shooting it’s guards. Only the player with the most coins at the end of the game will win, but you’ll need at least 50 to count! Just like modern cars, successfully shooting the coach will cause it to drop coins into the road behind it that can be picked up by riding over them. But you’ll need to get through the guards first, and these bullet magnets re-spawn around the coach every round! Either this is the most well guarded route in history or all these guards (and their horses) are squeezed into this coach ready to be deployed at a moments notice. I presume the patent for the spring-loaded horseman deployer is pending.

To move you’ll roll 3 dice – wait what!? Roll and move!? ROLL AND F***ING MOVE!? Ok, ok, don’t panic. Phrases like that cause knee jerk reactions in the board gaming community and here it’s not as bad as you think. No, really. Firstly, 3 dice actually forms a reasonable probability distribution, so that most of the time you will be rolling a comfortable amount, 8-12 spaces. Very rarely you’ll roll high and go careening past the coach or you’ll completely fluff your roll and amble along, which at least provides some moments of amusement for everyone else. Especially when you only needed a 5 to reach that gold piece…

On the one hand, this movement system sort of evokes the feeling of only being partly in control of your horse, tearing through the forest while taking pot shots at the coach and the guards as you fly past. Which is great! But most of the time it does feel awkward. You tend to have a hex or two in mind that you’d like to reach and generally you’ll roll more than you need (the coach doesn’t move too far each turn) leading to a ridiculous situation where your horse makes elaborate loops to reach that spot. A forest chase scene isn’t the place to practice your dressage!

This isn’t the worst abuser of the roll and move mechanic by a long way, but it doesn’t really add to the experience. It’s just one more dice roll to make, and you’ll be making a lot of dice rolls this game. A dice roll each turn to randomise turn order (plus re-rolls when there’s a draw!), two shots at the start of your turn, 3 dice to move and then, another two shots. Some sucker will need to roll for the coach’s shots and the guards’ shots and oh my GOD it’s so clunky! There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with dice rolling but when how quickly the game moves comes down not to how long you spend making decisions but to physically how long it takes to roll a dice at each step of the gameplay, you pretty quickly get fed up of that.

So really, the problem is not rolling dice for each action, it’s that each action involves seemingly little thought. Shoot anything that’s in range. Move to a position where you can shoot. Shoot again. Maybe you remove a guard or two, maybe a coin appears. Except most likely that coin will be picked up by someone else so why did you waste your time shooting the coach? Because otherwise the game wouldn’t get anywhere…?

The one real decision in this game is when to betray your friends. Either you’ve gathered the 50 coins you need to win the game, or someone else is about to. Maybe it’s time to do a runner and hope your remaining friends can’t cope with the guards without you. Or maybe it’s time to try and steal some directly from your friends.

Thing is, either of these options, when taken, pretty much changes the game state permanently. Stop fighting the guards for a single round, as will happen when you all start stealing, and the next spawning will put you so far on the back foot you’ll never recover. Then it’s just a fight for the gold in player’s pockets… so you can’t afford to start stealing before someone has 50 gold. Even if they do you’re very unlikely to steal enough to win for yourself. I don’t see the losing players breaking the truce.

Then the decision falls to whomever has been lucky enough to gather 50 gold. Really, it’s so far in their interest to leg it, maybe trying to steal from a trailing player on the way out, that it’s almost foolish to not do so. That’s not fun for everyone else! And it’s not that interesting for them either…

A semi-cooperative game needs an ever-present threat of failure for players to work against. It needs to be a good co-operative game first. The betrayal element adds spice. Look at Dead of Winter or Archipelago. All players can fail whether they have completed their objective or not. But in Highwaymen there is no failure once you’ve achieved that threshold 50 gold (except by losing it). This is not a cooperative game. It is a competitive game where your ability to compete is almost entirely reliant on the generosity of other players. All the other players. As soon as you get left behind there is almost way for you to catch up. Which might be fine if so much wasn’t down to luck.

Highwaymen suffers from some design decisions that break your immersion, like infinite guards or low walls you can’t jump over, or aren’t as elegant as they perhaps should be, which could be forgivable if the core experience was fun. I love the game’s theme, a theme that should give rise to the thrills and excitement of a forest chase, desperate fights with the heavily protected carriage, the cunning manoeuvres of a band of plucky robbers attempting to attain the unattainable. But it doesn’t. The game’s simplicity fails to give rise to exciting emergent gameplay or interesting decisions, boiling down to an endless string of die rolls, one player after another. Fundamentally it’s just dull… And in Creaking Shelves Town, that’s a hanging offence.

 

Rating: Just shoot me

 

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Our review copy of Highwaymen was sent to us by Fat Chance Games. Highwaymen will be up on Kickstarter from mid-May (I shall update once it is live). All the components you see here are prototypes and do not represent the finished game – particularly the final Highwaymen, guards and the coach will be miniatures!