Based on the lovely illustrated world of Matt Dixon,
Transmissions brings his world of mechanical friends to life.
Hello all and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!
We have been jumping around quite a bit of late: celebrating Freya's first birthday last week, the arrival of Oathsworn the week before that and then my first game of 40k before that. Back to my hobby butterfly ways!
Today we are once again flitting over to another different topic. It's another Kickstarter that arrived just before Oathsworn; it's Transmissions.
I have played this game three times already with completely different groups of people and have greatly enjoyed it each time.
This is a delightful and atmospheric game where you trundle four characterful robots around a board, collecting and spending resources (which include butterflies!) to gain abilities and points to win the game!
Above you can see the board at set-up. The three areas that you can gain resources are the power plant (left side of picture above, meadow (middle), pond (right side) in the latter two areas you gain coloured engrams (memory tracings) and in the former you acquire power.
The other areas on the board afford you the ability to buy items (like socks, toasters and other things that pique a robot's interest - which are cashed in for points), ideas (which you permanently equip on a robot to allow him an extra ability for the game, forest cards (which contain powerful one-time-only abilities but might work against you at the end of the game, or pipes (also for points, but involving a fun little mini-game of trying to construct long runs of puzzle-like pipe tiles.
Above you can see my wife and I mid-game.
A fun mechanic of the game is that anyone can control any of the robots (you are not tied to one) provided you have the correct activation card. This means that you always have something to do. You can move a robot into a beneficial position for yourself, or screw over your opponent by trying to anticipate their plan and then moving a robot out of position or so that it is blocking another position.
Even though it looks very light on the surface (especially with the wonderfully vibrant and child-like art direction - this is the opposite of Grim Dark!) there are real opportunities for tactical play.
As you can see above, the components are beautiful, as are the robot miniatures. I actually have no urge to paint them because the bright, washed figures perfectly suit the game already. Take a look:
The game is not perfect. The pipes are a little over powered, making them the best strategy for gaining points, but this is balanced by the requirement to have the particular engrams and be able to integrate the specific pipe into your individual pipe system.
Also, the more players you have, the less you will be able to anticipate / plan your next move because the game state will have dramatically changed from when you were last in control. This is not necessarily a flaw, but it does increase the randomness, and makes 4-player games feel less tactical than 2-player games.
These small quibbles are forgivable when the game is just so delightful to play! I look forward to times in years to come when I can play this game with my girls.
Thanks for tuning in to this transmission on The Art of Caesura!
Watching: Prey (2022)
Listening: RTE Lyric FM
Buying: Plane tickets and a new car!
Next Week:
Saoirse's Birthday!
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