Roll For:- The Initiative

Game: The Initiative

Publisher: Unexpected Games

Designer: Corey Konieczka

Year: 2021
 

The Initiative is a 1-4 player cooperative game which has you wandering through maps collecting clues in order to solve the mission's puzzle. The missions themselves are tied together into a campaign story told via an interactive comic book. Naturally then there are spoilers as you go through the story, so I won't be talking explicitly about anything story or mechanically past the intro of the first mission. Throughout the game you'll also be finding secret cards, these might unlock new rules, tell more story, or introduce a new puzzle for you to complete between missions.

Once you have read the intro for your mission you set up the mission by placing the player board in the center of the table and adding the shuffled clue tokens to the spots marked on the mission card. You then place the mission card into the decoder's slot. The decoder has a series of flippable panels which should all start down, hiding the solutions. Above many of the panels will be one of the symbols from the clue tokens, when you collect one of these tokens you can flip the panel, giving you a part of your solution. Eventually, once you have flipped enough of the panels, the answer for the round may become clear to you. As a group you can, at any time, agree on what you think the answer is. If you do so you can reveal the answer, if you were correct then you win, otherwise you will lose.

 

Mechanically the game is a card game, on your turn you can perform one or two actions by playing a card on top of that action's discard pile. The only caveat being that your card must be higher than the card below it. The actions themselves are relatively simple. Run lets you move through rooms, gather lets you collect tokens from the room you are in. Intel lets you flip some tokens face up, helping you avoid traps and know which rooms to go into. The final action lets you clear one of the other actions of cards, letting players start again with low numbered cards. Should the player deck run out then it gets reshuffled with some time cards included, if you draw too many time cards then you will lose the mission.

The how to play may be rather simple, but it doesn't remain that way for long. New hazards are included including roaming security personnel who will mess with your actions and new traps to help thwart you. These are added slowly, letting you get the feel for each new addition before they start combining threats on you. The mission card's puzzles will also get more complicated. In Mission One you are only looking for a simple phrase, but sooner or later even once all the letters are revealed you'll have a puzzle on your hands to figure out the last answer. In our experience all of these puzzles are aimed at that perfect level, enough of of challenge to make you satisfied once you get the answer, but not so long that you spend minutes scratching your heads. In addition as you unlock some of the secrets in the game they will include meta-puzzles to be completed between missions. Again none of these are overly complicated and they actually succeed in giving you a basic education into encryption. Once again these tend to appear in a very tutorial like way, with a simple puzzle for you to solve right away using your newly learnt skills, then hidden away in three mission's time the game might ask you to put those skills to use again.

You may be getting the impression then, that this game is easy. And you'd be largely right, The Initiative isn't trying to give you the mind-blowing puzzles of an escape room game. The missions themselves are 30 minute experiences which lack the nuance or difficulty of other cooperative card games. The story itself is engaging enough, but brief and certainly no epic work of fiction. But the beautiful thing is that The initiative is far more than the sum of it's parts. The initiative takes simple gameplay ingredients and comes up with a recipe for fun. If you are looking for a heavy game to have three hour epics with then look another way, but if you wanted a light game that's perfect to share with a group of regular house-guests or as a family then The Initiative is there for you with open arms.

Overall The Initiative is a wonderful game! The story might be simple, but it manages to touch some great emotional points as you progress with real character development... or not, if you fail the puzzles! While I can't guarantee you won't fail any puzzles as things get trickier, the consequences for failure are usually light and the puzzles are generally aimed to make you feel smart, rather than to stump you. The main flaw with the game is that it's not really re-playable, once you know a mission's solution that's it, you could simply say it out loud and reveal the mission card and count it as a win. This does make it feel much like a legacy game, but without the need to damage components meaning that you can pass it on to a friend once you're done.

8.5/10

The Initiative was a review copy provided by Asmodee UK. It is available at your friendly local game store or can be picked up at http://www.365games.co.uk