Some of the Game Journal editors had a chance to play the new board game Revolution! from Steve Jackson Games. After two runs through the game, we each provide our reflections, but first, an overview of the game.
The goal of the game is to amass victory points by influencing people in a generic village of days gone by. In theory, the town is on the verge of revolt (never mind way), but you don’t care about that – all you want is to be the one on top in the new regime. Thus, you employ bribery, blackmail, or good old-fashioned brute force to ply the various important figures in town. Each figure can give you one or more of three possible rewards: support, which converts immediately to victory points; gold, blackmail, or force tokens to be used next round; or influence, represented by a cube placed on the board in that figure’s corresponding location. The Priest grants influence in the Cathedral, the Captain grants it in the Harbor, and so on. Two special personages allow you to manipulate influence: the Spy lets you replace one cube belonging to an opponent with one of your own, while the Apothecary lets you swap any two cubes on the board.
You bid your tokens secretly each turn, trying to outmaneuver your opponents. Force trumps blackmail, and blackmail trumps gold, but not every type of token can be used on each target: the General can’t be forced, for instance, while the Spy can’t be blackmailed. Money talks, though – anyone can be bribed.
Once all the influence spaces on the board are taken, the final scoring occurs. Each zone on the board awards support to the player with more cubes in it than any opponent. The winner is the player to amass the most total support.
Adam: Revolution registers squarely in the wheelhouse for a successful casual strategy game. It’s easy to learn. It’s easy to play. And it requires enough thought to keep it from being too simplistic and mundane.
It isn’t a perfect game. You need to rely on chance a bit too much for my taste. The best strategies can be undermined by a lack of resources. Your constantly struggling to get “power” and “blackmail” tokens, but more often than not you need to be able to play those tokens to receive more in return. It’s a bit of a Catch-22.
Also, I had a bit of an issue with the screen players use to hide their “bets” from each other. I was lucky enough to be playing with two upstanding gentlemen, but I could see the potential for wandering eyes. Perhaps they could have made the screens larger, or maybe they could have re-thought the method for betting.
Those gripes aside, Revolution! is very entertaining. I agree with Neal’s assessment that it’s probably best played with four players, but our group of three was sufficient enough to show off the game’s most entertaining aspect: screwing over other players. The more times you play, the more you realize which categories become the most popular. With this info you can proceed to bet the farm on things you know other people need to gain monopolies in various parts of the town or to acquire the top tier tokens like “power” and “blackmail”. A single game doesn’t take very long to play, but players are rewarded for multiple plays as those game trends become more evident and it is fun to see how people adjust their strategies based on how the other players approach the game.
At the end of the day, Revolution! is a solid casual game with some nice, although rudimentary, strategic elements. I give this game a 4 out of 5: it isn’t perfect, but it’s nice while it lasts.
Kevin: After reading Adam’s review, it may suffice to say, I agree! But, being a mouthy fella, I will of course prattle on and repeat some of the same things in different ways. I really liked this game, although at the time of play Adam and Neal may have thought differently. I was being a poor loser and after getting nailed twice in a row I threw a grumpy fit. Sorry! But this was not the game’s fault.
The game had several things I like going into it: strategy, shortness of play time, speed of turns, and great board graphics. To elaborate, strategy is a great feature of games that I enjoy a lot, but not so much strategy that players spend hours thinking up their next move or wind up hogging the game. I like randomness in a game, too, and there was a nice balance of the two in Revolution!, so no one can get too far ahead by being an evil genius alone. I also really like games that are quick, on two levels. I like a game that takes an hour or so to play and that permits quick turns, so I get to participate as much as possible. This game met both standards. Lastly, I am a visual guy, and a good looking game does catch my eye. While the box was a bit bland and could use a spruce-up job, the game board looked good and said “I’m fun” to me. This is an important element of any board game I play. Fun is a must and I like a game that proclaims it from the packaging on down. But, good looks aren’t everything.
Revolution! is a well-balanced game that is fun and gets my brain working, but not so hard that the game becomes work. While I didn’t win, I really wanted to and that means I will play this one again. Some games have me becoming apathetic if they take too long, but this one was well paced, so no worries on that front. It is not a perfect game, but a solid 4 out of 5 seems right to me, too. Game hint: play this sucker aggressively!!!! Don’t dilly-dally for more than the first game or the savvy player will beat you every time. The strategy switcheroo that happened once each player caught on to the others’ plan was my favorite part, and this happened often in the game. Anyone for a revolt?
Neal: This game definitely seems like it would work best with the maximum of 4 players. Because of the token hierarchy, if you don’t get at least one force each turn, you’ll probably have to content yourself with bidding on people your opponents don’t want or can’t spare the tokens to claim. It’s possible to then use a lead in force (or blackmail, if you have enough) to then monopolize the three or four people in town who provide more force and thus lock down competition. Admittedly, I did this toward the end of our first game, and it won for me. Having more people to bid against should theoretically allow monopoly-breaking.
The game is elegantly simple – the rules are easy enough to explain in less than five minutes, and there aren’t a lot of complicated systems to manage. There’s a certain amount of area control, obviously, with two or three zones yielding very juicy support rewards, but the resource management angle is the most appealing to me. You can’t bid on more than six people in a turn, and rarely did we even get close to that, instead getting into bidding wars for one or two key people. The catch to pursuing that strategy is that, if you’re outbid, you lose everything you threw into the bid and gain no reward. If it weren’t for the fact that you get gold to make up the difference if you have fewer than five tokens, one or two bad decisions could ruin you for the entire game (and even then, gold is not the optimum currency in Revolution!) so careful second-guessing is a must.
The game has a decent replay factor, since what you do depends on your opponents and has very little to do with the opening game state. This is not a game in which you can just pick one tactic and “hit the button” until you achieve victory: game play is dynamic and rewards paying close attention to your fellow players. It also benefits from being pretty quick once you get the hang of the turn sequence. The limit of four players is actually something of a drawback: if you have more people, someone’s going to be left out. While I’m not privy to the playtesting notes, and perhaps I’m missing something, I don’t see the game’s balance breaking down until perhaps six people. (Maybe I’ll make up some additional tokens, privacy screens, and influence cubes to try it out.) The ease of play could also be considered a negative in terms of keeping a group’s attention over multiple plays; really hard-core gamers might get bored with this one after several tries.
I’ll give this one a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Revolution! is best suited for casual play, just poking above the level of “filler game”. Try this one some night when you’re playing several different games and need to throw something light in the mix.
