There are thousands of games out there - which deserve to grace your table? Welcome to Cardboard Combat, where games get dinged and dented by our hosts in order to see if they’re right for your group!

Today on Cardboard Combat, two co-op games about alien invasion:

VS

If two games fight, are they in fact boxing?

CALVIN: What’s your favorite alien invasion movie? Please don’t say The Avengers.

RAF: The Aveng-uhhhh. That’s a tough question. Honestly, there are a lot of really good ones but I’m going with Independence Day. It gave me nightmares for literally 3 weeks after I saw it. One of those “maybe he was too young” moments for my Dad.”

CAL: Ah, so “hoo-rah can-do humans prevail” attitude mixed with lavish production values, space-fights, and pants-wetting terror. You sound like an XCOM man!

XCOM for those who don’t know is a co-operative real time board game - a cardboard adaption of the 2012 video game XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The game uses app integration and real time decision-making, with players taking on one of 4 unique roles in managing the overall defense of the Earth - from the researching of tech upgrades to the deployment of aircraft over the globe

RAF: There is a lot of stuff going on in XCOM but the heart of the game is in two things: A push-your-luck dice mechanic and the app, which feeds you information about what’s happening and forces you to respond - draw a crisis card, deploy planes over North America, enemy in the base, etc. It’s actually really well done.

CAL: Hang on, are you saying XCOM uses a human computer program to defeat the aliens just like Independence Day? The rabbit hole never ends.

Not pictured: the pants-wetting terror

RAF: Each of the 4 players takes on a different role:

- Central Officer: assigns satellites to orbital defense, manages the app and communicate its instructions to the team

- Chief Scientist: pushes researchers to the brink of exhaustion to develop tech that helps everyone else perform their tasks more efficiently

- Squad Leader: defends XCOM base from attack and completes missions that actually drive towards victory

- Commander handles the deployment of fighter jets to shoot down UFOs and handles fiduciary responsibilities in a role that makes little narrative and gameplay sense.

CAL: Keeping track of the spending is great social commentary. As the world is going to hell yell at your chief scientist ‘NO MORE SCIENCE WE’RE POOR’. Just like real life!

RAF: At least the scientists don't face grave danger. If you fail in base defense, soldiers die. Fail in research and the scientists have a nap.

While each role has different responsibilities, they’re all executed in the same way. From shooting invaders to researching tech, players will roll a number of dice, including an 8-sided Alien Die, in search of some success symbols. If they fail, they can roll again after moving the Threat Track up a space. If the Alien Die rolls a number lower than or equal to the Threat Track it’s a Loss; soldiers die, scientists pass out, and the aliens get closer to taking over the world. This info is fed into the app that changes how the next round will play out based on how well or poorly the players are doing.

We need all of these, but can pay for 0.66 of one.

You never have quite enough resources so you’ll have to take risks leading to strings of poor rolls just decimating your forces, leading to moments where your Commander is desperately trying to reign in spending while the Squad Leader screams that the base is going to be overrun if she can’t deploy more soldiers.

CAL: Hard choices. That’s the game’s capture from the video game, where life and death and percentage points slip around each other until the decision to risk your entire squad on a 65% shot to save your hero soldier starts to feel like a good one, because you’ve missed the last 5 65% shots so this one is guaranteed to land dammit.

And of course it doesn’t. Because XCOM.

RAF: That’s in the board game too. Right when you think you have a pattern down for how the app is going to feed you tasks, it starts to scramble them or give you incomplete information. If there are more UFOs than satellites, your comms go down. You have to commit fighter squadrons to defense before you know how many enemies there will be. It also changes your income, so you’ll have to adapt on the fly and your whole team has to lean hard into the wind. It’s tense, dramatic and leads to amazing moments.

CAL: That’s what’s great about XCOM for me. You don’t win the game, you enable others to win the game by helping them out as much as you can.

RAF: That’s an interesting point. After a while I realized that only one player, the Squad Leader, can actually win. Everyone else is just trying to help not-lose. It’s a different take on a co-op, and I’m not sure I like it.

CAL: My favorite moment is being the player in charge of the app and saying ‘Either we lose Asia or all the soldiers on the mission die. You have 10 seconds.’ It makes me feel like those gravelly-voiced joint-chiefs in the movies.

Tick tick.

But you’re right - the dice and the often indirect decision points can lead to a frustrating experience. I understand why they did it, it’s to prevent the game from becoming ‘4 people stare at their cards for 45 minutes’. Taking control away from the player and placing it in the hands of others COULD lead to a great co-op experience if it weren’t for those damn dice.

RAF: Yes that’s one of my biggest complaints about XCOM. For all the focus on different roles and responsibilities, it all comes down to everyone doing the same thing: Roll in search of successes and push your luck. Any tech that helps you just adds dice or grants re-rolls. It’s bland gameplay wrapped up in FFG’s classic gorgeous packaging. And a great app. It doesn’t get enough credit for trying something new, and I think it’s because the gameplay is uninspiring.

CAL: Do you feel they played it too safe? You have 2 of the greatest designers in board games right now - Eric Lang and Lukas Litzsinger - on this game. I feel like this can’t have been a designer error, the game may be intended to be as simple as possible, possibly to offset the real time and the app integration.

RAF: It could be. It was one of the first games announced with an integrated app so maybe there was a concern about the audience. It’s also a popular IP and what we see as simple or uninspiring could be something novel and amazing for fans of the XCOM IP who have never even looked at our cardboard hobby.

CAL: Then again Eric did make Quarriors.

RAF: I’m not sure I’d recommend XCOM to most people. It’s got an audience for sure, and the game is well put together, but it’s a techno-thriller King of Tokyo in many ways. More complex, but still the kind of game to play casually.

CAL: You know what, XCOM is probably a REALLY good gateway game, actually. It holds your hand through the rules learning, it has a tutorial mode, it’s easy to pick up but tense and deep...

I think really the problem is is one of marketing and expectation. XCOM was billed as this game which broke barriers of technology and app integration and it was from a HARDCORE DIFFICULT CLASSIC VIDEO GAME FRANCHISE and it turned out to be a light/medium dice chucker co-op with production values through the roof.

RAF: Pay attention everyone who backed Dark Souls.

CAL: I lurk XCOM-related internet space and all those people love the hell out of the board game, which to me is amazing, because that means it’s introducing people to the potential of our hobby.

At the same time expansions are the measure of how popular an FFG game is, and this one hasn’t got any. Maybe Eric Lang is too busy atm releasing two games an hour.

RAF: Tell me about Invasion.

Waaaaarggghhhh!

CAL: Going back to our highly apt alien invasion movie metaphor: My favorite is District 9 - a film about invasion as social commentary, examining the political, economic, and social effects of occupation. Level 7: Invasion has aliens to fight, but also social order to maintain, people to feed, and a military industrial complex to protect.

That picture, times five of those things in the bottom right. It’s a biiig game.

Each player takes the role of one of the five continents (Sorry Australia, you’re alien territory now) and is trying to fend off the invasion by allocating and sharing their resources to protect their own needs as well as the needs of the others - deploy your troops to aid a neighbor, spare some hard-fought food so they can feed their people and not descend into chaos.

RAF: That’s pretty cool. For all of XCOM’s focus on the global scale, keeping the population in line is abstracted as heck. It’s just a track measuring panic levels of various continents.

CAL: ...admittedly Invasion’s terror levels are also a little track, but you need to devote specific technology (and thus resources) to managing your terror. If you let it go too high, you lose income, you lose food, and if terror completely remains unchecked, you lose your ability to wage war at all.

While it’s more detailed than XCOM in many ways, on the combat level Invasion is a lot more abstracted. There’s only 1 type of human unit and 2 types of alien unit, for example. I miss the XCOM classes, and I miss the ability to have planes.

To win the game, you have to research a superweapon, and each stage of the research has to be completed by moving the MacGuffin to each of the 5 continents, in order, and spending a hefty chunk of resources.

RAF: Are those the same resources you’re trying to manage?

CAL: Correct, hence the co-op! You have to protect the MacGuffin and escort it to your neighbor’s territory, and maybe sacrifice some precious Minerals to help their stage of the research.

Brief segue: The game is technically semi co-op, since players can be eliminated if their continent falls, and only those who weren’t eliminated win - but honestly, if Africa sacrifices themselves to preserve humanity, Africa didn’t lose, Africa is the freaking hero of the century!

Africa falls.

Anyway. Every turn new dropships (see photo) land in random locations on the world map and you have to fight them off with your units. Combat is *extremely* one-sided, requiring you to severely outnumber the aliens - unless your military research is up to par - but even that won’t last since the enemy continuously evolves and adapt as you fight them. If you can’t handle the baddies, you lose that region and its income, terror goes up, bad times.

This is where XCOM and Invasion differ the most. In XCOM, each player has a very unique role - I am the Science guy, she’s the App Person - in Invasion, everyone’s units are identical and so are the techs they have access to. The only difference is your starting resources/income levels, and geography.

This is fine, because my lord is Invasion a complex game. There are 15 phases to get through per round. Most are quick - adjust terror level, gain income - but you cannot play with fewer than 5 continents. If your player count is reduced, some players will have to double up, which means a lot of things to manage.

To be fair, there is a really good video tutorial, but have a look at what you’ll be staring at for the entire thing:

Dials, tracks, and card overlays, oh my.

And that’s not even counting the tech cards and the actual board.

RAF: Woah. The invasion will be over before you’re done reading! That’s one nice thing that XCOM has going for it. Set-up to finish goes pretty quickly and the tension is up there from the start. It doesn’t take long before panic starts setting in and the app starts screwing with you.

CAL: I do wish the tech was more involved in XCOM. Research in that game is random cards off the top of the deck. In Invasion you can level up one of four tech trees. So while your civilizations start nearly the same, you’ll soon be highly differentiated. I’m immune to orbital bombardment! But oh man are my people jumpy at alien propaganda!

If XCOM plays it too safe, Invasion plays it too big. It’s loaded with lots of dials (literally and figuratively) that you have to twiddle - wait, do I get protection from terror from my social sciences upgrade, or biotechnology? What’s the power level of my units relative to the aliens? Did we remember to draw an Adaptation card for the last few battles?

While it all goes quite quickly because 13 of the game’s phases can be resolved simultaneously, the game will stretch to like, 3 hours. But god damn do I love it. It’s alien invasion writ small on my table with all the trimmings, but it needs 5 players and a long long time. If I’ve got 5 players, most of the time they want Kemet.

RAF: Kemet?! Now you’ve got me excited.

So would you recommend Invasion? I know you love Omega Protocol.

CAL: Yes. But you have to know what you’re in for. Invasion is an epic war campaign, and you have to plan accordingly. But when my friends and I strategized layers and layers of decisions to beat the aliens and complete the weapon - and then held out against their nail-biting desperate push - it was awesome! One of my most memorable gaming sessions, if partly because we played on the floor and were mildly drunk.

RAF: Ha! That’s actually something you could do with XCOM, given the excellent tutorial. However, I wouldn’t expect you to do very well.

CAL: Is that something we’re going to rate on D&D from now on? Floor-ability: ‘Board too big, 0/5’

RAF: On a scale of wine coolers to Mezcal, what can I drink while playing this?

CAL: (consult your doctor)

Cardboard Combat - XCOM vs Level 7: Invasion

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