By Kaysee and Max

Disclosure: finished all the 2-player co-op scenarios in hard difficulty

We like space-themed board games. The last one we played together was Galaxy Trucker, which was fun, but we prefer playing co-op if it’s just the two of us. There are some space-themed cooperative board games in the market, but many of them are either what we consider questionable, have some mechanics we don’t really like, or are not available in Germany. Voidfall caught our attention for not having any of those things, but one thing that delayed us from purchasing it was that it is a 120-Euro Eurogame (as of this writing) that was initially designed as competitive.

The question whether we would enjoy it cooperatively was a huge one, since neither of us had played something like Voidfall. We read the rulebook, more specifically the co-op section of the rulebook, and both of us were convinced by what we had read. Still a bit anxious, we eventually decided to bid goodbye to 120 € and brave the Voidfall universe.

The Setup, the books, and the works

At first glance, Voidfall can seem like just another generic ‘space’ themed game, albeit with some gorgeous artwork. However, a closer look shows that this isn’t really the case. The game comes with three books: rulebook, compendium and glossary, as well as a four page guide to the iconography. All of these are well made and do a good job of fulfilling their respective roles.

In addition to the setup instructions for all of the scenarios, the compendium contains quite a bit of text describing the setting. We could see that a lot of thought has gone into writing the setting in such a way as to both explain the differences between the competitive and the co-op/solo modes and to avoid some controversial narratives sometimes found in ‘space’ games. The different houses available to play also have some nice bits of flavor text that generally tie in well with their mechanics and possible starting technologies. We like that, even though it’s a heavy eurogame, the setting was still given enough attention.

The explanation of rules in the rulebook is generally clear and the structure is really good, but there is one case where a clearer explanation might have been more helpful, as there is a possibility that what the authors consider as intuitive may not be intuitive for others. The question is whether cards get discarded after getting played. This is not explicitly mentioned in the rules. In many rulebooks that we’ve read, the authors make it clear whether cards that were played should be discarded or not. When we encounter an explanation that isn’t clear, we often times read the subsequent steps in order to see what makes sense, which we did here.

Another thing that may not be so intuitive to some is the iconography for the combat. Some people may find the symbol for the salvo step confusing as it is represented as a round icon, regardless of whether it represents damage or shields. Seeing the round icon one might think that it refers to a shield bonus, but it’s the red or blue color that tells you which it is. Same goes for the approach step where it uses the arrow/triangular shape for both damage and shields. But the rest of the icons were very inuitive and easy for us to remember.

The glossary contains a detailed description of all the cards, sector tiles, and house mats in the game. We thought that after our first few games we wouldn’t need it much. We were wrong. While the iconography of the components is mostly clear, we still found it helpful to be able to check how each card works exactly, even as we gained more experience. This is also because there are plenty of different components, only some of which you’re going to see in a given scenario.

The competitive tutorial

For the tutorial, we had to play competitively, which was supposed to be easier than the co-op mode. In order to finish it, each of us had to get at least 120 Influence points. Influence points are gained by taking a sector, gaining improved technologies (also by gaining basic technologies but not all the time), or by fulfilling Agenda objectives among other ways. Powerful houses, be it economomically or militaristically, have high Inflence points. The more powerful and influential your house is, the more likely you are to have the highest score (or beat the score of the Voidborn in the cooperative mode).

We love that there are different houses to choose from in Voidfall. Each house has a complexity level. The complexity of a house is based on how much of the game mechanisms you have to take into account in order to use them effectively. But for the tutorial, it is recommended to use one of the basic houses, all of which have the same set of Civilization tracks and doesn’t have special Focus cards. But, like other more complex houses, each basic house has its own choice of two starting technologies. What one might not like about the basic houses is… they’re basic. As mentioned, they do not have special Focus cards, which make them less interesting to play in more complex scenarios. More on Focus cards later.

We were able to succeed in the tutorial, but it took a long time before we were able to finish it, as we were learning the rules. There was no combat that happened between the two of us, but we were excited to move on to the co-op mode of the game.

The co-op mode

In the co-op mode, instead of facing off against each other to become the new ruler of the empire while mopping up the remaining Voidborn presence, houses don’t (and cannot mechanically) invade each other and instead work together during the height of the Voidborn invasion to stop this threat to human existence. The Voidborn is the one responsible for corrupting citizens, the agendas of a house, and its Civilization tracks to lead to their ultimate demise. How the Voidborn came to be, we do not know. One theory that we have is that it existed the same time as the universe itself came to be.

While houses still accumulate individual Influence just like in the competitive mode, in order to win, every house needs to score higher than the Voidborn, whose Influence points are determined by the presence of Corruption, how many citizens are corrupted in Voidborn sectors, the presence of corrupted leaders called Harbingers in a Voidborn sector, the open Rifts, technologies it consumed, how much Catastrophe there is, the number of “unsaved” Fallen Houses (Houses completely corrupted by the Voidborn), and the lack of Safe Havens. That’s a lot of Corruption to prevent and deal with on top of the Voidborn having base Influence points ranging from 65-140, depending on difficulty. Each house only has 10 base influence points at the beginning. We have to add that we think some houses are less suitable for cooperative mode than others.

Same as in the competitive mode, in the begining of a game, each house has a home sector, which cannot be invaded, and another sector that can be. A sector represents a planet, where every citizen of the planet is united by being residents of the planet (a bit like Star Trek). Each sector shows the population and the Guilds they belong to (if there’s any). Guilds are responsible for the type of resources that can be produced. The amount of resources that a Guild can produce is determined by the size of the population.

A Crisis board is added on the cooperative setup where each player has to resolve a Crisis or be at war with the Voidborn on each turn.

There are three cycles in every game regardless of whether it’s competitive or solo/co-op mode. For each cycle, there are between four and six rounds indicated by a randomly drawn event card. These events further modify the board state in various positive or negative ways, such as adding rewards and/or enemy fleets to some sectors. They are nice, because they mean that even when we repeated a scenario, each playthrough was different. Each of them has two additional goals to choose from that give rewards if you can reach them by the end of the cycle. Early on these are things like Guilds and resources, while the event for the third cycle always rewards Influence points. Some event cards are only available in the co-op mode.

After resolving the event card, players start taking turns, one turn per round. On their turn they first have to draw a Crisis card if there’s no war in that round. A Crisis card is a form of attack from the Voidborn, where in order to resolve it and prevent it from staying on the board, the player has to do a specific sequence of actions that are detrimental to their house. If a player cannot resolve it, they could either put it on the Crisis board to let another player resolve it, pay the penalty, or take a Catastrophe token. Having plenty of Crises on the board is bad as it results in the Voidborn getting stronger during wars and when it attacks at the end of the cycle.

After drawing a Crisis card, the players can select a Focus card from their hand. These are mostly the same for each player, although the more complex houses have one or two special Focus cards that replace the more basic version.

Additionally, in co-op there is an offering of three Joint Focus cards, which have some co-op specific effects and allow players to share some of their actions. In any case, Focus cards have three actions printed on them of which players have to select two to resolve on their turn, unless they have a Trade token, which allows them to take all three actions. Some actions may allow a player to increase the population of one of their sectors, invade a Voidborn sector (you cannot invade another player in co-op), establish a Guild, and produce resources, among other things.

We really like the way this works in practice, as it means that there are plenty of interesting decisions. We wanted to do more almost all the time, which made it very tricky to decide on a card to pick. Often there was some goal we wanted to reach that required a multi-turn sequence of plays from each of us. A significant part of our playtime was spent planning these together. Pulling them off and achieving our goal was extremely satisfying when it happened.

Tall and Wide

Another important aspect of the decision making is the gaining and playing of the Agenda cards. These can be gained in various ways and can then be played in combination with specific Focus cards. When played they provide an additional action based on their category. More importantly, they can be scored at the end of each cycle, which is one of the main sources of Influence. We like that each of them has unique scoring conditions that can majorly influence your playstyle.

Speaking of playstyle, in Voidfall it’s possible to play either tall or wide. Playing tall entails developing your sectors by adding Guilds and increasing their population. Playing wide has more of a focus on acquiring more sectors and spreading out. We have found that in 2-player co-op it’s a good strategy for one of us to play tall and the other to play wide. As mentioned, in the cooperative mode each player has to score higher than the Voidborn and two of the major ways the Voidborn scores are Rifts and unfinished Safe Havens. We find that closing Rifts requires a wide play style, as you need to conquer your way there, whereas finishing Safe Havens is much easier to achieve when playing tall.

The co-op way

In easy difficulty of co-op mode, interaction between us wasn’t as needed as it was in the higher difficulty and more complex scenarios. We just did our own thing without much talk about what we’re planning to do aside from stating that we will deploy a fleet, build a Safe Haven, close the Rift, play a Joint Focus card, or get a specific technology, and pretty much said “ok” most of the time without thinking much about it.

It could also get anticlimactic when we noticed that the Voidborn cannot gain more Influence points than each of us had. Whenever that happened, we turned our focus toward gaining more points and becoming corrupted by our own greed, and in a way, competing against each other as to who gets the higher Influence points. That’s what the Voidborn wants, but what can it do when it has less points than us. We were turning into the very thing that we were fighting in the first place.

But in higher difficulties and more complex scenarios, there was a huge adjustment in terms of how we cooperate. Aside from the complex scenarios forcing us to adapt and testing our playstyle individually, us being greedy and too selfish could lead to losing against the Voidborn, which of course makes sense thematically.

While we do play plenty of cooperative games of varying complexities and types, we had never cooperated in quite such a way as we did in high difficulty and complex scenarios of Voidfall. On top of preventing the Voidborn from gaining more points, we also had to ensure that each of us gets to score enough points to defeat the Voidborn. We also discussed more as to who gets to solve a Crisis, and when to solve the Crisis before the next war comes. We had to choose which one should play a specific Joint Focus card and who gets which action.

And since we cannot co-exist in one sector, we had to make sure that whichever house gets the sector would strategically benefit the team, and same goes with choosing technologies as there are less technologies available in the 2-player setup.

There are other small things that we had never considered in earlier scenarios, such as who gets which reward from completing a Safe Haven; for instance, giving the option to deploy a fleet to the other player rather than to yourself might be better for the group. We like that it tested how well we cooperate and communicate. And we think that the cooperation itself added a layer of complexity to the game.

That said, despite being in temporary truce, there is no treaty between houses in co-op mode. We couldn’t just move our fleets through each other’s sectors. We do not like this part, but we understand that it would probably make the game easier if the houses have treaties even in times where we look out for and help each other out. Where’s the freedom of movement here? Fine.

The combat system

Despite the co-op mode having more elements of randomness (the type which forces you to adapt), the combat system remains fully deterministic. Although randomness in combat can sometimes be interesting depending on how it works and how it’s implemented in a system, we like the level of satisfaction that we get from being able to know whether the number of fleets and the type of ships that we have are enough to successfully invade or defend a sector.

We also like the technologies and the different types of ships. But we think that despite the co-op mode being more complex than the competitive one as a whole, the combat system in competitive mode can be more complex because the Voidborn can only have Corvettes (the basic ship that everyone can have). Whereas in competitive mode, it can get spicy if you want to invade an opponent who has an advanced ship with some added technologies. It would’ve been nice if the same level of spiciness in combat is present in co-op mode.

Our final thoughts

Voidfall has consumed most of our free time. It’s a highly addictive game. We’ve tried different playstyles, houses, and strategies and talked a lot about it outside the game sessions. So we can safely say that Voidfall is a good game.

But it also made us think and discuss about what it means for a co-op game to be good. It logically follows that a good purely cooperative game is a good game, but whether a good game with a co-op mode is a good co-op game is a different question. We’re still thinking about it.

But we think that for a co-op game to be good, the spirit of cooperation in some form (i.e. by discussing strategies or theorizing together) should at least be there. It wasn’t there in scenarios with low complexity in Voidfall, but it was very much present when we were struggling against the Voidborn.

It’s difficult for us to say that Voidfall’s co-op mode is good in general, but we think that it’s really really good in scenarios where we cooperated more. And we probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to reflect more on how we play and cooperate had we not chosen to get Voidfall.

Kaysee’s rating: 4/5
Max’s rating: 4/5

Combined rating: 4/5

Title: Voidfall (2023)
Game Design: Nigel Buckle, Dávid Turczi
Illustration: Ian O’Toole
Publisher: Mindclash Games

Photos by Kaysee

The post Voidfall in Co-op Mode (2-player review) appeared first on Schmeeples.

By Kaysee and Max

Disclosure: Bought the game, survived all the scenarios (see the combinations of scenarios and socities that we’ve tried so far here)

The heatwave in Germany was about to arrive, when we discovered and bought a game called Frostpunk: The Board Game. We were looking for a cooperative game with a complexity rating higher than Spirit Island to play at home, because going out in the scorching heat and getting grilled by the sun wasn’t something we wanted to experience. We wanted to get our minds off of the reality and escape the heat. No better way to do that than to play a highly complex board game about surviving an apocalyptic winter.

Frostpunk: The Board Game is based on the video game Frostpunk, which was inspired by the Polish novel Ice by Jacek Dukaj. Neither of us has read the novel nor played the video game, but we do like stories that are dystopian or post apocalyptic. Frostpunk is not post apocalyptic, though, as players get to experience shaping a society during the apocalypse. It’s a survival game, and the initial setup itself was already a test of our survival skills even before starting the game.

The setup, the societies, and the scenarios

It took more than 4 hours for us to do the initial set up, which included reading the rulebook (and breaks and some showers). The heat wave didn’t just slow us down physically but also mentally. It was weird for us to flip tiles depicting snow and see the snowy white expedition cards, characters wearing winter coats, and the frozen meeple trees while sweating heavily. We were both somewhat confused and immersiveness seemed to be off the table. And the game was actually off the table, as it requires more space than our table has, so we decided to play on the carpeted floor. The confusion and questioning of choices didn’t stop after setting up the game; they continued and evolved as we entered and played the game. The immersion was there, but instead of the cold setting, it was triggered by the moral choices we had to make along the way.

The game has nine scenarios, three of which are significantly more difficult than the others. Each scenario offers different conditions to determine whether our society has survived the apocalypse. Surviving also means surviving each round. A round represents a day. There are nine phases each day from the Dawn Phase to the Nighttime Phase.

The society we chose also determined how difficult it was to survive. There are six different societies to choose from which can either be played in normal or in hard difficulty. These also determine how many citizens and resources we have in the beginning. A society in this game consists of three types of citizens: children, engineers, and workers. Some societies can have an automaton, a gigantic robot, which is not considered a citizen. While a citizen meeple is equivalent to 1-4 or 1-10 citizens of its type depending on how many citizens of the corresponding type there are, an automaton meeple is equivalent to one automaton. Automatons are very strong and it is apparent that the game gives high value to technology.

As we tried different scenarios and societies, we noticed that some societies are more compatible with some scenarios than others. You may check out our record of combinations of societies and scenarios here. We also noticed that it was more difficult for us to adapt to a new society than it was to a new scenario.

Resource management: humans vs automatons

The basic resources for every society in this game are coal, wood, food, and steam cores. Some resources are easier to get than others. Civilians require plenty of resources to keep them safe. Wood is required to build shelters and other buildings. Coal keeps the generator heated. In the beginning it doesn’t take much, but over time more coal will be needed to keep everyone warm, especially after a storm hits. But heating up the generator causes stress. Having too much generator stress may cause it to break down or even blow up, which leads to a game over.

Automatons require a steam core to be built, but they don’t require much resources to use and no resources are required to maintain them as they are apparently quite sturdy, would never malfunction, and would never rebel and kill humans. We noticed that in every society in the game, it is more efficient to have more automatons than groups of civilians as they don’t require food and they don’t get sick. But we often times ended up having more civilian meeples, as we still like humans and it’s difficult to get a steam core. But mechanically we prefer automatons as they are more efficient.

Civilians lose their agency as we gain ours

We had to take turns using the available meeples to gather resources, remove snow from the vicinity, use buildings, or send a group of civilians to an expedition in the first round of the game, the Action phase. Building actions include passing a law, increasing Hope or decreasing Discontent, obtaining additional resources, removing stress from the generator, or developing new technologies.

This phase has a simple worker mechanic where only one meeple can use a building or a space to perform an action such as collecting resources and passing a law. Because there were always more actions that we wanted to do than meeples available, we had to be careful in terms of which actions to perform and tried to avoid performing cold actions as much as possible. Most of the communication between us happens in this phase. We also sometimes had to make sure not to think too much in advance as we wanted to avoid losing track as to whose turn it is.

A cold action causes an adult citizen or a child to get sick. As the number of sick civilians increases, the chance of citizens dying also increases. If the corpse marker reaches 10, we lose the game. Adding coal to the generator helps heat up the tiles and buildings so that the actions of the citizens are heated. It’s also possible to send a worker to an expedition which is not a cold action. This struck us as not very intuitive, since removing snow to reveal a tile is always a cold action yet expeditions are not. We thought maybe the group of people on the expedition has some additional equipment to help them survive, but it still leaves the question why removing snow is colder than going on an expedition far from the generator.

Michael Plower and his gang

Child meeples cannot be typically used to perform actions unless some conditions are met such as having a child citizen card, passing a specific law, and some other spoilery thing. We did our best not to pass that law. Every session we did our best to keep the children safe and comfortable. For one, the mechanics of the game are in favor of taking care of them and we also think that a good society has healthy kids. But sometimes a group of children in the game, specifically a group lead by a child named Michael Plower, who thinks he is an adult, wants to go out, help out, and look for areas with resources even after knowing full well that one of them would get sick. We couldn’t stop them.

The advisors

Each society has advisors – the role of the players. Since there’s only two of us in our game sessions, our societies had only two advisors. Each advisor has a specific ability that can only be used if a corresponding Hope is active. The game includes responsibility sheets for each advisor, which are supposed to serve as a guide for each phase and make it easier for the players to keep track of the rules by dividing and assigning responsibilities to each advisor. We didn’t find them very useful and decided to not to use them and just refer to the rulebook.

One of us mostly used the Foreman Advisor and the other advisor was chosen depending on the scenario and starting Hope we have. Each player gets an advisor card and five citizen cards. Some of the citizens are children and some of them are workers or engineers. The citizens cards each of us get to have are partially random as we draw six citizens and then choose five of them to keep.

Hope and Discontent

While Frostpunk seems to be a grimdark game, it is not, as hope is important narratively and mechanically represented as Hope. In the game, Hope is very much defined by what tendencies the society can have and what can be activated with it. The three concepts that can be active are Justice, Care, and Motivation. If the society has Motivation, the citizens are more likely to be able to work and perform actions. Having Care means people are more likely to recover when they’re sick. And having Justice may deter people from harming others or causing instability in the society. Losing all the Hope tokens on the board is another way to lose the game. Having Hope as a mechanism in this way means it represents a very distinct interpretation of what hope means.

The flipside of the coin is Discontent, which also has three concepts that can be active, representing a societies darker impulses. Roughly speaking, Greed is the mechanical reverse of Justice, Anger that of Care, and Apathy that of Motivation. Filling the Discontent track predictably also causes a gameover.

The system behind Hope

We find the mechanisms behind Hope to be very interesting and think that it has a very intriguing complexity. There’s a mixture of randomness and choice behind it. Adding Hope means either drawing a Hope token from a bag or activating a Hope token on the board. While the Hope tokens that you get are generally random, the type of Hope token that gets activated is mostly determined by choice. Hope sometimes serves as a resource to spend, as you can get opportunities to exhaust an active hope in order to cure someone, motivate someone to work again, or keep the society content or in-check. There is a degree of ludo-narrative dissonance here, as in reality hope isn’t something that you lose when you do something that has a positive consequence. Hope can also delay or stop things from spiraling out of control. For example, it may decrease the number of sick citizens and prevent them from dying, which would lead to an additional loss of Hope.

There’s plenty more to say about Hope. For instance how its disambiguation or restrictiveness leads to one of the thing it activates being questionable in context of some Morning Cards and some spoilery things. But this (the review) is not just about Hope, it is also about the hopelessness we felt despite having plenty of Hope tokens on the boards, but still not being able to finish a scenario objective. It is also about the suspense of the Morning Phase.

Morning to Dusk

During the Morning Phase we have to draw a card. The suspense comes from the possibility of drawing cards wherein no matter what you choose there’s a negative consequence. The differences between the choices are that some of the consequence may happen during the Dusk phase and some of them may happen soon, and some of them have more negative effects than the others. Not all Morning cards are like that, but it’s our least favorite phase of the day. It is mechanically interesting but practically stressful. We were just looking forward to end that phase and be able to control convince the citizens to be more productive and prevent them from being a danger to themselves.

We also find many of the laws interesting. There are two consequences for each Law and only one of them can randomly be added to the Dusk deck. We find some law consequences to be inconsistent with some possible actions in the game. Without spoiling and giving too much detail, one example is passing a specific law and building a fighting arena where citizens and even automatons were allowed to fight. We only sent automatons to the arena, but neither of the consequences of the law is aligned to what we were trying to do.

We also like the suspense from drawing a card from the Dusk deck especially after prioritizing short term gains during the Morning, knowing that the there’s a possibility that our society is going to get screwed. There are ways to set the Dusk deck in such a way that negative consequences are less likely to happen. Again, without spoiling, we’re just going to say that choices matter a lot in the game, and it gets a bit easier once you know what the consequences of your choices are.

Interaction between theme and mechanics

Despite some possible thematic inconsistencies mentioned earlier, in a game where the theme is well integrated into the mechanics, the rules of the game are still consistent as far as we’ve experienced. The concepts and how they function in the game are clear, so that the players can learn how to use them and what the potential outcomes of their choices are. This allows them to survive in a game in which there are multiple ways to lose. The goal is to survive. The theme can only go so far in terms of how it is integrated into the mechanics of the game and we think that it’s ok in this type of game; the thematic inconsistencies don’t take anything away from the excellent gameplay.

Our Final Thoughts

The heatwave is over in Germany as of this writing. We lost multiple times before we won the first time. Sadly, our first win wasn’t legitimate. We thought at first that if a citizen becomes a victim of a murder and dies, we could also decrease the number of sick citizens. Our reasoning was that maybe the killer was some psycho who kills sick people because they think they’re useless (coincidently at that time there was a news in Germany about a doctor who was found guilty of killing sick people). The game does not allow that.

We were able to have a real win. There’s a high level of satisfaction knowing that we survived all the scenarios despite having to deal with the heat and intensity of the game while consistently trying to keep the children safe. We wanted to be more critical about the game, but the annoying part is that the things that we didn’t like in the early scenarios were resolved in the advanced scenarios as if the designer, Adam Kwapiński, already knew what we wouldn’t like and also what we would like because some of the things that we did like were changed. We think that it’s a way to challenge the players’ playstyle and maybe their belief system.

We are looking forward to playing this game again in the dark cold winter of Germany and see how immersive it’s going to be.

Kaysee’s rating: 4.5/5
Max’s rating: 4.5/5

Combined rating: 4.5/5

Title: Frostpunk: The Board Game (2022)
Game Design: Adam Kwapiński
Artist: Agnieszka Dabrowiecka
Rulebook: Paul Grogan
Story: Jakub Wiśniewski
Publisher: Glass Cannon Unplugged

Photos by Kaysee

The post Frostpunk: The Boardgame (2-player review) appeared first on Schmeeples.

By Kaysee and Max

Disclosure: played more than 15 times, beat the game in one of the highest difficulties

The first time we noticed Deckers was on BoardGameGeek’s list of most anticipated games at Spiel 2025. Its cyberpunk theme immediately caught our attention. BGG describes it as a reimplementation of Renegade, a title we had never played nor heard of before. Kaysee checked the BGG page for Renegade and saw that it’s a cooperative deck-building game with a complexity rating of about 3.5. This really made us more excited to try it since we were looking for a game with mid to high complexity and Max really likes deck-building. Just as in Renegade, in Deckers the players (the titular deckers) are working together to defeat an intelligent Super-Massive Computer (SMC). We decided to jack-in and give it a shot.

We started playing Deckers the night after we bought it (we’ve lost count of the number times we’ve played it since then but it’s more than 15 times). The box is impressively compact (7.5 × 19.5 × 19.5 cm) and light (1.16 kg), which makes it easy to bring to board‑game nights to play with our friends. All the tokens, dice, cards, and tiles fit neatly inside, and the setup is very straightforward, given the complexity of the game. Building the network of five server boards is quick and can feel like a fun mini‑game in itself. The beautiful and vibrant art style fits the cyberpunk setting.

While the setup is light, the rules are not. There are many terms that we needed to remember. We’d recommend for both players to read the rule book, since it’s more efficient that way; if one player forgets how an action works, the other player can remind them of it. Neither of us has tried playing Deckers solo, but playing it together helped us differentiate actions and terms from each other and understand the rules better. The player aid cards were very helpful to us, but we still found ourselves checking the rule book every now and then since some definitions are much clearer in the book. It is important to follow every step in the sequence of the game and understand what happens at each moment and to take into account what is stated in the objective card.

There are three types of objectives: bronze, silver, and golden. The number of objective cards that you need in a game can range from three to six and is determined by which SMC you choose and whether the SMC is upgraded or not. Whatever is written on the Goal section of the objective cards determines how you’re going to beat the SMC, but in any case, the goal on the golden objective card(s) must be fulfilled.

The game has a number of rounds equal to the number of objectives. Each round begins with the intel phase, during which players take note of the special rules introduced by the SMC or the current objective and the interactions between them. Next is the command phase, where every player gets three turns with the turn order freely decided by the players. For each turn you draw five cards, but the SMC will also spawn so called sparks to oppose you. The cards have different symbols printed on them, which are called commands. Different commands allow you to perform specific associated actions or to buy upgraded cards for your deck. Importantly, every card that you buy replaces another card in your deck, so that the total number of cards is always 15. After all players have had three turns, the SMC acts in the aptly named SMC phase. Finally, the round ends with the refresh phase.

Against Alpha-Moby, the recommended SMC for beginners, the first character that Kaysee chose was Monty (mainly because he’s green) and Max chose Oshin (just because he looks cool). After reading their character profile, we thought we made the wrong choice since Monty and Oshin aren’t really the best buddies. As we played, we realized that we made the right decision as we figured out how the infect action and the commands work.

We took advantage of Deckers having no communication limit. We talked about how we were going to position our characters and the actions that we were planning to take. For two players, we find the action step to be fast. If one of us isn’t sure whether to take the next turn, it is possible to let the other player take another turn. One mechanic that Max likes is how the deck-building works in this game; instead of adding or removing a card from your deck, a card is replaced by another card which makes it much more efficient in terms of decision making and game speed.

We were able to fulfill the final goal, but each of us had one turn left and we had to take them even if there was no way for us to be defeated by the SMC during its phase. We won, but Kaysee didn’t like the sudden drop in tension, she did like the flavor text at the back of the objective cards, though. We both decided to play again and chose different characters with a different set of objectives. We lost the second game. We tried again and won, then we changed SMCs, which made the game feel different and more difficult, making it less anti-climactic. We like the possibility of controlling the amount of randomness by choosing a specific SMC or character. Some SMCs and characters can make a game more random and some can make it less so. Having that flexibility and choice is a good thing if one wants to have a less random game. The playing time may take less than an hour if playing against a low-starred SMC, but it may take more than 3 hrs (breaks included) if it’s a 6-starred SMC.

For those who want an extra challenge, there are the three variants included in the rules. First, the server boards have a second side featuring fragmented servers. In this mode a server is spread out over all the boards instead of a one to one correspondence between servers and boards. Second, there are two upgrade cards for the SMCs, each adding a special golden Mother’s ghost objective and changing the rules for spawning sparks. Playing against an upgraded SMC straightforwardly increases the difficulty level. Finally, there are ‘packet tokens’. These are placed during setup and have various positive or negative effects when picked up in game.

Our Final Thoughts:
Deckers is a well polished co-op board game. The different sets of objectives that you can get, the different SMCs, and the addition of variants make the game highly replayable. The first game can be anti-climactic if you use the suggested objectives, as they are specifically chosen so that finishing the earlier ones helps with later ones. At higher difficulties you’re just glad that you were able to fulfill the objective, leaving no space in the mind for the anti-climactic. One thing that would be nice to have is a unique flavor text after defeating the Mother SMC.

We had a huge amount of fun playing Deckers as a couple. It’s not a cozy date night type of board game, but it allowed us to discover together how a specific action works and come up with different strategies to beat the game, which made for better evenings even in sessions where we lost. All in all, we would wholeheartedly recommend Deckers to 2 players who like crunchy games that require creative problem solving and who don’t mind a moderate degree of randomness.

Reference:
Deckers[Rulebook]. (2025). Deep Print Games GmbH.
SPIEL Essen 25 Preview

Title: Deckers (2025)
Game Design: Richard Wilkins
Illustrations: Lukas Siegmon
Publisher: Deep Print Games GmbH

Photos and non-board game illustrations by Kaysee

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