Introduction
Isn’t it a delight when you buy a product and think to yourself “I would recommend this to almost anyone”, when the overall package is somehow even greater than the sum of its’ parts. This isn’t a feeling I often have, but I did have this feeling after buying and playing Deckers over 30 times, both solo and 2-player.
This is a truly special game and one I feel that almost all solo and co-operative board game enthusiasts should try (I say “almost all” for good reason which will become clear through the review).
Quick facts
Player count: 1 - 4
Play time: Officially 60-90 minutes (I agree for 1 to 2 players, I suspect 3-4 players takes longer)
Age recommendation: 12+
Gameplay overview – Setup (yes, Setup needs its’ own section!)
Deckers is a solo or co-operative board game; each game is a one-off challenge that you play in a single sitting. Each game is played over three cycles (rounds), with each cycle having a goal (copper, silver or gold objective card). Players win the game if they successfully fulfil the final gold goal. Players lose the game if they are ever required to place an enemy token (spark or guardian) and there are none left in the supply.
What is very interesting about this game is that the decisions begin even during setup- something truly unique I have not seen before. I will explain how this works, but worth noting that there are explicit instructions for how to setup your first game in lieu of the following steps (which is really nice to introduce new players).
Players begin by choosing an opponent for their game (one of seven SMCs, “Super-Massive Computer”). SMCs have varying difficulty ratings and so it is easy for players to customise difficulty of the game. The SMC reference card will dictate how many cycles there will be in the game, and which objective card colours are applicable to each round. Therefore, at this point, players will randomise the objective card decks and draw one card of the applicable colour for each cycle.
And here is where the decisions start… the network (game board) is made up of five different coloured server tiles (blue, green, red, yellow, purple). For the next step of setup, players will randomly determine which server tile is placed next- they will follow placement rules to create the map. More experienced players at this point can use the knowledge of which SMC they are facing plus the full knowledge of the goals facing them to influence how they build out the map.
Once the network is built, players will select a Decker (there are ten Deckers to choose from across five double-sided sheets, each having a colour designation as per one of the server tiles) for the game. And again, there are big decisions to make using all the information already available to the players; the network layout, the SMC, the goals. Once Deckers have been selected the remaining setup does not require further decision making.
Let me pause here… setup is done but you’ve ALREADY made several strategic decisions on how to approach the challenge of this game! You’re already crunching this over, or in full team-talk with your fellow players. Let me be clear, for me this is a huge positive, but I do recognise for some this could be quite overwhelming! Some players may find the prospect of mid-setup decision space to be quite daunting.
Gameplay overview
With setup all done we can talk about how the gameplay works. Deckers utilises deckbuilding as a significant part of the gameplay.
Each Decker will always have exactly 15 cards in their deck, beginning with 15 starter cards dictated by the colour of the Decker. Each Decker also has unique abilities that can be deployed during play.
Your priorities during play are two-fold, focus on the cycle goal while controlling the board state. In a similar fashion to firefighting co-operative games (such as the classic, Pandemic), enemy presence will grow and needs to be controlled to avoid losing the game. Players will be constantly juggling these priorities. An interesting twist is that not all cycle goals need to be successfully fulfilled; only final gold cycle goal must be fulfilled for game victory. However, failing to complete goals generally results in penalties which will make the next cycle even harder.
On a players’ turn they will have 5 (or 6 if one retained from previous turn) cards in-hand, and they have a wide variety of scope and many different actions that can be taken. All actions are dictated by coloured icons and other abilities on the cards in their hand (again icons have colours blue, green, yellow, red, purple). Here is a brief overview of what each colour does:
Blue - Movement, each blue icon can move the Decker one space on the network
Green - Shift, each green icon pushes a player/enemy token one space on the network
Red - Infect, red icons can (provided a red token also on the space) remove enemy tokens
Yellow - Modify, yellow icons can (provided sufficient yellow tokens also on the space) replace one enemy token with a player token
Purple - Wild, can be used as any of the other four colours
Gameplay is largely fully deterministic which plays into this being such an excellent puzzle; players have full detail of what they can do. The only element of gameplay where luck plays a factor is with the Infect action (described above); when taking this action two dice are rolled to determine whether the player is successful. However, even for this action, players can contribute as many red icons as they wish which bolsters the dice roll (meaning if you allocate enough icons you can still all but guarantee success!). Personally I enjoy having a little bit of luck in the game, it’s certainly never frustrated me at all, rather it adds a little excitement and you can still mitigate the luck if you choose to.
The one action I will talk about is upgrading cards because wow is this a satisfying action! There will be four advanced cards available at any given time in the card market. A player can take an upgrade action to pay with icons to acquire a card from the market. I said earlier that there are always 15 cards in the player deck; this means that at least one card used to pay the icons must be removed from the game in trade for the new card being acquired. But the beauty; once acquired the new card goes straight into your hand and can be used immediately (in many deckbuilder games, cards go to your discard pile, but not in Deckers).
Players take as many actions as they want/can on their turn and then play passes to the next player. Once three turns have been taken the cycle is over and the objective card is resolved. Players continue until they lose or the final goal objective card is successfully completed.
Player scaling (how does the game handle player count)
The game plays fundamentally the same regardless of player count. If playing the game solo you only need to control one Decker for the game to work beautifully.
Player scaling is achieved by referring often to the number of Deckers in play on the SMC card and objective cards. In short; switching player count is totally seamless in this, with no special rules for any different player count
Art and Components
I really like the art on display in Deckers. In particular, the cards and Decker sheets have really cool, evocative and colourful art. The actual network (map) is fairly basic to look at but it will soon be populated with colourful tokens as play progresses.
Despite the colourful art, this is largely quite an abstract game. The theme/setting that you are Deckers hacking into a computer network does not really carry through for me and there is a slight disconnect. This doesn’t bother me at all because the gameplay is amazing and it is still very colourful and nice to look at, but that disconnect may bother some players and I would come to this game for a puzzle rather than an experience.
The rulebook is very well written and clearly laid out with plenty of diagrams. There are also really handy player aids- enough for each player to have one. No complaints from me there at all!
The components and storage are superb. The tokens and cards feel a good thickness, nothing is flimsy. The box is conveniently small and almost all components are stored in handy tuckboxes. In particular the tokens come in trays which are great for easy storage and to place on the gaming table. On the side of the box there are even instructions on how to package the game contents into the box. This is so thoughtful and I wish more publishers did this.
