Review: Strain – A Bio-engineering Board Game

Hungry Robot is the publisher of this game.

Strain.  A pretty simple to learn tile board game based on building up organisms to attack other players, or turn in completed organisms to score victory points.  The rule book for this game is half the height of a normal rule book, and only about 3 pages of rules. Even though it has few rules and is very simple to play, it really has a ton of strategy involved.  I’m not kidding, it is very deceptive.  Once you start playing you really realize they amount of strategy involved in this game.

On your turn, you get to draw three cards from the 3 different decks.  There’s a organism deck, cytoplasm deck, and petridish deck.  You can draw from any of the 3 decks.  Take 3 organisms (bad move) or 1 organism, 1 cytoplasm, and one petridish card.  Any combination of 3 is yours for the taking.  The organism deck has organisms with victory point values of 2, 4, 6, and 8.  That is how many building block tiles, cytoplasms and organelles (found in petridish deck), you need in order to turn it in for victory points.  Don’t be too hasty at turning in that first organism, this makes everyone keep a watchful eye on you as you only need 12 victory points to win.

You need to find a balance of building up organisms and turning them in, but also attacking your opponents with viruses, or attacking them with your organisms to weaken theirs.  You have a hand size of 4, so you can’t save up cards and immediately make enough organisms with enough building blocks to win.  You also can only play 1 cytoplasm tile per turn, but can play as many organisms or petridish cards as you want, as long as you have the resources to do so.

Organisms are free to play, so are cytoplasms.  However, most petridish cards have an ATP cost to them.  Your cytoplasm cards give you ATP and Toxin resources.  You use resources by flipping over your cytoplasm cards that have them, making them dormant.  You cannot flip these back over until your next turn, this opens you up to attacks, as your resistance for that organism is now lowered.  You can play as many cards as your resources allow.

Toxins are used for attacking other players.  Your toxin resources you commit to a battle are compared against an opponent’s organism’s resistance value.  The opponent places resistance tokens on his cards that have them on his organism.  Now based on the number of toxins committed to the fight, the opponent must remove 1 resistance token for each toxin.  This is how you get players to lose cards on their organisms, their organism doesn’t die unless the resistance tokens are removed from the organism as well.  Resistances are brought back up to full after combat.  When attacking another player, you can use multiple organisms of yours to attack any ONE of theirs.

I’ve only played a few times, but I really enjoy this game.  It’s easy to learn and there’s a lot of depth to the gameplay that isn’t noticeable until you start playing.

Finding the right balance of making a strong supporting organism and other smaller organisms for turning in as victory points is my strategy.  What’s yours?

printf(“Hello World!”);

I suppose that’s video game design rather than board game design, but I do both so it will stay.

Have any of you ever had a great idea for a game, whether it be video or board game, and you just really wanted to get it out there?  So did I, until I discovered how hard it is to design a game.  You can come up with a fantastic idea, but once you start getting into the specifics of the game, you really start to find its flaws and some can be big, gigantic flaws.

So, let’s say you come up with an idea for a space board game.  You love space, so why not, right?  Say you want players to be able to attack each other, but you also want to add an enemy into the game.  You want resource gathering, and building up a colony.  So you want people to choose between attacking others and building up their defenses.  Sounds like the making to a fun game, huh?  That’s when you need to start getting into the tiny details about how the game plays.  This is where you find out problems of your design and how they just wont work.  You may need to remove something from your game design.  I know, you don’t want any little bit of your idea being removed from the design, but sometimes it’s necessary to make the game better.  Who knows, maybe later on down the line of the design process you may come up with a way to add that mechanic back in, but maybe at a limited capacity.  More than likely you are going to fail quite a few attempts at making a board game, but don’t give up!  You are learning from those failures, right? Good, then keep moving forward.

Like cooperative board games?  They can be much harder to design, which is mainly where I am struggling now.  I’ve come up with a few competitive board game ideas, but I would much rather focus on a cooperative board game.  There are already plenty of competitive board games out there.  Balancing what players can and can’t do is much easier than balancing players and a “computer” player for a board game.  You have to design it so that players aren’t too powerful, but also so that the game isn’t too powerful.  If it’s nearly impossible to beat the game, not many people are going to want to play it.  Too easy, and the same effect, it will have. Yoda.  Finding that balance medium is hard.  Play testing can really help with that though.  People will be able to tell you what they like and don’t like, and maybe they’ll even have some ideas on how to improve the game.

This is a lot of the stuff I am learning about in my beginnings of game design.  For the most part I have given up on video game design, I think I actually have more fun with board games these days.  Never thought I’d say that.  I’m not the most sociable person, but there’s more interaction between players in a board game than most video games.

tldr: Board games are fun to design, but don’t give up if your idea fails.  Keep trying, you’ll get there.

Danny out.