Payload is a 1–5 player card-based hour-long space race of rocket engineering, involving set collection, trading and auctions. The goal is to build high scoring rockets, acquire the best engineers and launch valuable payloads.
The campaign page says: You take on the role of a leader of a space company in a fast-paced and competitive space industry. You will be bidding for payload contracts, hiring engineers, upgrading rocket parts, and racing rivals to launch. Navigate a dynamic market where prices change with every purchase, and use unique Operations to gain an edge. With shifting opportunities, risky launches, and tough timing decisions, every play brings new challenges and strategies to explore.
This is the first game by designers Ashutosh Kumar and Arjit Raj, though not their first crowdfunding campaign.
Gameplay Summary
Each rocket comprises 4 parts: nose cone, propellant tank, engine, and the nozzle bringing up the rear. Each two-sided card (basic and upgraded) comes in 4 colours, marked with distinct symbols to aid those with colour vision difficulties. There are 7 of each type, meaning there’s some colour asymmetry here, so players will have to keep an eye on what’s out to estimate the likelihood of getting the parts they want.
Your rockets are managed by a team of engineers, 3 types corresponding to the rocket parts except the tank (I wonder why that needs no engineer…), and a junior engineer, who’s a jack of all trades (albeit somewhat underpowered). There are 9 of each type, distributed across 5 colours (that colour asymmetry again).
The other card types in the game are payload contracts (the main point scoring mechanism) and operations (essentially, action cards).
The cards are set out in a market of 4 rows (one for each type) of 4 cards, forming a market, alongside draw decks for each type (apart from operations, since there are only 4 of those in total in any particular game). Given how many different cards are and how each is associated with a distinct draw deck, a playmat would be welcome, showing the positions of all the cards in the market and the routes from draw deck to appropriate market row—of course, that would make the game box much bigger, since as it stands, Payload amounts to a very compact bunch of cards and 3 dice.
Players have an area in which to build their rocket, i.e., 4 slots for the different part types, with room for engineers underneath. There is also space for unlaunched and launched payloads, as well as a spare part area. The other game components, a money tracker and shield (used for risk mitigation) counter, sit here too. Again, a playmat would be a nice add-on to keep this area under control. The shield counter is a card which rotates and flips to show the current shield count at the top, and the money tracker is a pair of cards which show a tens and units value when you carefully align the cards—this money tracker is the physical bit of the game I like least, as it’s all too easy to jog the cards and mess up the value. It should be noted that a better tracker is available as a campaign extra.
On each turn, you can perform one optional action (such as switching parts between rocket and spare parts area, moving your junior engineer, or bidding for a payload contract—see later), then take 2 main actions from:
· Buy a rocket part, paying the amount of money marked on its card along with a surcharge depending on where it is in the market; there’s also a take-that operation for ‘stealing’ a part from another player’s spare parts area, but the conditions for being able to do this are quite strict.
· Hire an engineer, similar to above, but for the engineer market row.
· Use one of the operation cards to, e.g., upgrade a part or gain shields.
· Launch!
I’ll talk about launching first, and then come back to how you get the payloads you’re going to launch.
Part and engineer cards all have various attributes marked on them, standing for safety, thrust and stability—upgraded parts include higher counts of the associated attributes, and there are further bonuses when parts and/or engineers match colours. Payloads have counts of those icons which your combination of (fully assembled) rocket and engineers must possess in total before you can make use of them. Some payload contracts list a number of tiers—differing combinations and counts of those attributes giving you different scores when you successfully launch, so you can choose to go for an early, low-scoring goal or wait until you’ve built a better rocket to aim for one of the higher tiers.
The launch itself uses a push-your-luck mechanism: parts specify a risk factor (lower on upgraded cards); you sum these up, subtracting 1 for each part whose colour matches that of the payload, and then have to roll at least that amount on 3 dice. One of those dice, known as the weather die, will have been rolled at the start of the turn, giving you a hint about how easy your launch might be to let you decide if you’re going to select the launch action in the first place. You can spend shields to increase the value of your rolls, and you can also abort any time before rolling the final die if things look bad.
If the launch was successful, you keep the payload card (for points and other bonuses) in your launched pile, with the card rotated to show the rewards for the chosen tier at the top. Unless you pay shields to retain them, all your rocket parts are discarded—this game clearly doesn’t feature reusable space vehicles! But if the launch failed, you have to flip an upgraded part back to its basic side, or if you can’t do that, lose the propellant tank.
Now, back to bidding… Before you can launch, you need something to carry! As the rulebook says, ‘In real space missions, companies bid to acquire and launch Payloads. The lowest price wins the contract, and the company gets paid to do the launch.’ You don’t buy payloads as you do the other cards; instead, you choose one and initiate a bidding process. Each player gets a card which translates specific words to numeric values—all the cards are have different encodings—and players call out the word on their card that indicates their bid. Only when everyone has called are the numbers revealed. I feel this is a rather cumbersome mechanism, and would have preferred having a handful of numbered cards per player such that each can place their bid face down then reveal simultaneously, but I do have to acknowledge that the chosen mechanism does reduce the amount of cardboard. Whoever wins the bid by having the lowest value gets the payload and the money (minus a ‘tax’ based on the card’s position in the market).
The game end is triggered either when everyone has had 2 successful launches, or when one player completes their third successful launch. The round completes, and final scores are totted up based on launched payloads, part and engineer cards and remaining money, with penalties for unlaunched payloads.
The solo mode is basically a 2-player game, but your opponent, the Tycoon, is controlled by dice rolls.
Campaign
The campaign page starts off with a short list of quick pointers to, e.g., the rulebook and overview videos, letting people find out about the game without a lot of faff.
An outline of the game follows, which is a breath of fresh air compared to all those campaigns where you have to scroll past a huge list of rewards and reviews before you can find out what the game is! Unfortunately, this overview is provided as a sequence of brief animations with little to no explanation of what’s going on—but luckily, you have the previous section of this article to explain the game!
It’s nice that a low-cost Print-and-Play version of the game is available, though the physical game doesn’t appear to be overly expensive—this is where I normally warn people not to forget about VAT and shipping, but impressively, that’s all been taken into consideration for this particular project; one of the campaign FAQs says ‘The price you see is the total price you pay.’
I’ve mentioned the upgraded money tracker; it’s a pair of tens and units dials either on or within a card frame, but it’s not clear from the pictures how big or robust it is—regardless, it can’t not be better than the two-card approach in the basic game, so is almost certainly worth the extra cost.
If you fancy spending more money, you can get a deck of playing cards containing rocketry-related artwork and a ‘companion book,’ which ‘expands on each of the cards and covers the topic in detail’ (I assume ‘the topic’ is space exploration). Based on the picture on the campaign page (shown above), the cards came from one of two previous projects by the same creator, or a mix of both. You can also get a ‘Flipbook showing the animated journey of Saturn V and Falcon 9’ and ‘2 descriptive Journey Books.’ These also seem to be the product of a previous campaign.
Arjit’s previous campaigns mainly seem to have been successful, and people are generally pleased with what they received. In particular, people talked about the quality of their card packs, which ought to give some confidence in the material quality of this game (assuming they’re using the same manufacturer, of course).
Impressions
In terms of components, the game is a heap of cards and 3 dice, packing an awful lot of gameplay into a small bundle. The iconography on the cards is clear and the cards themselves are bright and clearly illustrated, if a tad uninspiring. I don’t especially like the way money and shields are counted; while the dial-based trackers are an improvement, I think the game would have a greater table presence with some nice tokens. As I mentioned earlier, playmats would be useful for providing structure for the moderately complex cards layout when playing, but that would act against the pleasant compactness of the box.
Payload is a nice looking and compact game, and who doesn’t want to build and launch rockets? I do feel the gameplay is let down a little by the fiddliness of juggling market cards (and managing money in the basic game). A potential gameplay flaw is that a large amount of the playing time will be devoted to achieving that first launch; after that, the bonuses gained as a result will speed up the journey to the second and the end of the game. To be frank, I’m not sure this is an actual problem, as the actions involved in subsequent launches are essential a repetition of the first, so it’s probably good that this happens more quickly.
Would I recommend backing it? I don’t think it’s my cup of tea, but I can see the appeal to a lot of folk. Definitely take the time to check out the first couple of video links and skim the rulebook before deciding if it’s for you.
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Horizons of Spirit Island, with a side of Dune: Imperium - Uprising and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
