Infection: Humanity's Last Gasp - Game Review

(Note: I found this draft of a review from 2017, and it was too hilariously timely not to post.) 

WILL YOU PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS

THE PLANET IS DYING

OKAY JUST HUMANITY

ANYWAY GET IT TOGETHER, PEOPLE


Whoa, easy there, chief. That's no way to talk to epidemiologists. Well, maybe the feuding ones who won't make nice long enough to find the cure for a super-bug about to kill everyone on the planet.


Infection: Humanity's Last Gasp is a solitaire game by John Gibson, published by Victory Point Games as part of their Gold Banner series. I had been anticipating this game for a couple of years or so, thanks to the 7.5 rating on BGG, and was happy to get a copy in 2016. I finally got enough plays under my belt to feel like I could be coherent about it, wrote half a game review, and then promptly went on blogging hiatus.

The premise of the game is simple, and turns are short and procedural, in theory. There's a constantly mutating super-bug (not an insect, but instead a type of bacteria if you're playing easy mode, or a type  of virus in hard mode) that is going to kill all of humanity unless you can find a cure. In easy mode, you get funding every turn while governments are still worried about budgets. In hard mode, you've got some seed funding, but don't get regular income. Finding cures for the individual strains of the infection get you money in varying amounts.

The central mechanic and biggest thing to understand in Infection: Humanity's Last Gasp is that there are two pools of chits to manage. The bad Molecules are represented by round chips with letters, some with singles, some repeating (A-L in bacterial mode, D-O in viral mode), and are placed in concentric hex rings in a simulated petri dish on a two-sided (bacterial/viral) playmat.  You fight the bad Molecules (circle chits) with good Proteins, which are represented by chunky square chips with cute shapes. Each of the bad Molecules has a specific "recipe" for the cure as a specific set of proteins printed on the playmat, a die-cut sturdy cardboard production that assembles for a solid feel to a game coming from such a small box. 

Every turn, an event card is flipped up. There are good and bad effects that can improve or restrict your choices. There is also a "Mutation" section on the card. Sometimes, new Molecules are drawn from a pool, and will either replace others (which are discarded for eventual recycling to a new pool), or just jump out to menace humanity further.

Every turn, you can harvest up to 2 of 4 Proteins shown in 4 Incubator spaces on the playmat (and pay for that privilege). Once you've completed a recipe, you can apply it to kill vulnerable Molecules with 3 or more exposed hex sides. Kill all the Molecules in your petri dish? You win! Let all the Molecules be put into play, or let a death track be completely traversed, and humanity dies and you lose! The best part is, the whole thing works really well. There's a lot of back-and-forth as you eradicate strains, old ones mutate away, and new ones pop up.

There is also a deck of cards, most of which is lab equipment you can buy, some of which are employees you can hire. Managing your limited funds is a balancing act. You need equipment to use the lab's special powers (once per turn, sadly, regardless of your collection), hire employees (some of whom will not work with another of their colleagues, pandemic be damned), and develop the Proteins you need to fight individual strains (there are several machines that revolve around re-drawing or re-using Proteins, with good, thinky, implications on how you might want to handle drawing and discarding. There are several obvious strategy archetypes, but the supplies deck is shufffled and has 5 cards tossed out of game randomly, at the beginning of game setup, regardless of difficulty level.

There's an event deck, and each card has several applications. The super-bug Molecules can be shifted or replaced by new ones from the pile, making your preparations useless. (Read through the rulebook definitions carefully, as the terminology looks similar but has a big impact on gameplay if you're doing it wrong. I did it right, but a couple of the keywords seem similar but do different things.)

All of which is to say, there's quite a bit of replayability here. Beyond the random variation of how each game progresses (revealed Molecules and employees/equipment), you can test different strategies and see what the individual moving parts do.  The harder "Virus" level makes there be fewer identical bad Molecules, so the lucrative killing of duplicates in the Bacteria level can't happen. As mentioned earlier, in Virus mode you don't get the every-turn income you get in the early game in Bacteria mode. Money gets very tight, and you will have to make tougher decisions, knowing that overspending early will hobble you later. 

I should mention, there is randomness. If you only own one copy of an equipment card, you need to roll a 4-6 on 1d6 (included, natch). With two copies, the power just works. Again, you can only try to use one power per turn, so there's a lot riding on how your equipment loadout develops. There's also the doom track, which requires rolling the same d6 not to progress along (the odds get worse as the game progresses and you get farther down the track). Some event cards modify that roll, as well, so there's a narrative being generated. "Well it was a quiet night and then nothing happened and then our lab equipment was out, and then the employees were feuding and then..." The flavor text isn't usually too grim, and is sometimes just plain goofy.

Last year, during the height of the pandemic, I got out Infection: Humanity's Last Gasp, and it held up really well. The core Molecules Do Stuff/Proteins Get Grouped To Treat Molecules engine is very solid. There are only 16 Protein chips. but only 4 are put out each round for purchase, barring special event or equipment bonuses. You can usually just buy 2, and their cost depends on the order drawn. I found the whole "I need these two Proteins, some of which have multiple copies. Do I buy the 4-cost one, or let it pass and hope the next round gives me a better spread?" super satisfying. It's nice to understand the implications and play smarter. Even a little rusty, I was able to still beat Bacteria fairly reliably and Virus level some of the time.

Overall, this is a very solid solo game with a lot of replayability. If you can tolerate the whims of a single d6, there's a lot of satisfying moments and emergent gameplay.

High Frontier: an exhaustive (and exhausting) space sim game, or "In space, no one can hear you scream because you screwed yourself and are out of fuel"

Recently Nich Vitek (of Indented Blank Dice and Living Worlds Games, publisher of 1955: War of Espionage and upcoming Schlock Mercenary-which you can preorder with a discount) and I, along with some other folks, have managed to get in games of High Frontier, an extensively-researched simulation about space exploration. The designer, Phil Eklund, worked at NASA for many years, and has been working on High Frontier for the last 3 decades or so. The final result is impressive, but is it fun? (Spoiler: it depends!)

Oh look, I've got a bunch of cards!

There are rules for aero-braking, space piracy, regolith thrusters (conversion of Moon/Mars dust into fuel), how the distance from the sun affects the thrust you get from solar sails, how afterburners cost differing amounts of fuel, which generators one needs for powering things, sizing radiators with mass differences based on cooling needs etc., etc. If you like lots and lots of tiny, fiddly details, this is your game.

Yet, there's a certain elegance to it. Once you get the details down, High Frontier turns are basically 20 seconds of "move a rocket, based on your prior planning, then buy one thing/sell one thing/take a buck." Okay, it's a water tank (water is propellant is currency), but it's also a clear plastic disc.  Nich, being Nich, used his industrial acrylic laser cutter to make totally sweet acrylic markers for the claim sites, with little flags and factory cut-outs that fit into the site bases (see picture of the universe).

The technologies available are frustratingly random. Some are Just Plain Better Than Others (see Magic: The Gathering for why this is bad) which you won't understand the first game (see Power Grid or Greg Costikyan's fine game design essays for why this is bad).  Eklund has more pages of notes on the technologies presented than rules... and there are a lot of rules. The balancing for the different technologies comes from two things, neither of which work perfectly. First, auctions! The technologies come in either 3 stacks, or 6 stacks, depending on if playing the base or expanded game. Almost everything has a significant amount of mass, so over-equipping a rocket is almost worse than under-equipping it. That would be elegant, were it not for the squirrely movement rules about when you burn fuel and how much... which are based in physics. Rockets with fuel can drift in space or hang out in Lagrange points, hopping from orbit to orbit. But burning fuel is necessary in a lot of spots, so careful planning is essential. In every game, I think every player announced, "Crap, I don't have enough fuel to get there and back!" at least once. All this really costs you is calculation time unless there's really nowhere in space you can go... in which case, you're screwed, freighter the crew home (more on this in a moment).

The coolest part of High Frontier is in solving the challenges of getting a robonaut and refinery, along with assorted reactors, radiators, whiskey bottles, makeup cases, handbags, and other accessories, to a site you can then prospect and claim. Prospect? Yes, after all this time and effort, winning a claim, and potentially winning the game, may be based on the results of a single d6 roll. After that, you dump some junk out of your rocket and make it into a factory. This lets you flip a card in your inventory to the other side, upgrading it to (usually) a much better and lighter version, then build the tech and put it in your rocket. Or, if you failed the roll, pack yourself and all your junk back in the rocket and get back on the road to the next die roll. The die roll always succeeds at large sites, which require a bigger rocket to leave. It'd be nice to have more than one rocket... but you can't. (You CAN pack multiple thrusters, including a solar sail, which, yes, Virginia, can be fed into a regolith converter to yield fuel. Heck yeah.)

OH YEAH. Everyone only has one rocket. Just like in real life, each space agency has a monomaniacal focus on only a single moving stack of junk in space.  Screw it up and strand your folks around Jupiter? Ship them back home in a freighter cube that only moves one space per turn... which could be 30 minutes of game time where you do little but relaunch some parts.

There are three ways the game ends: a set number of factories are built in total, two totally sweet Space Ventures are claimed by the same person (I got one in two games), or someone builds 3 factories and spends 5 bucks to end the game. The problem is this: all of these are based on die rolls, unless you're going to the very largest of sites where there are tons of exploitable resources about. We ended one basic game about 2/3 of the way through... which is a segue into another point. Even in the base set, there are two ways to play, basic and advanced. Advanced offers many, many more ways to die, including radiation attrition. You can build the perfect rocket, then roll a 6 and lose parts to radiation, and be stranded/screwed. Whoo! Realism!

The auction rules are also limiting in that if parts fall off your rocket or it blows up, you may be at your hand maximum number of cards, and be unable to bid in auctions. When this happens, other players get fantastic bargains. One faction, the Shizumi, can always buy patent cards and indeed, I locked the expanded game by doing so and rendering two other players unable to progress. We paused the game, argued tensely, and resumed after house-ruling me to a hand limit of 10 cards.  Since Eklund is a regular participant of two lively Yahoo groups devoted to High Frontier, I can't wait to see his reaction to our dilemma and resolution thereof.

There are also combat and piracy rules, and one of the special powers of the Chinese space agency is being extra-heartless about voluntarily killing your crew. We never tested the missile/ray gun rules, nor the kamikaze space buggy rules. One oddity/oversight is that there are only 5 space agencies, so in a 5-player game, you'll have the same set of special powers to haggle over. It seems strange, and I wait eagerly for an expansion with new agencies/powers. ("The Canadian Space Ministry is used to dealing with moose. Any component with a mass of 4 or more is reduced by 1 mass." "The Brazilian Agency has Samba powers, and can do a dance that shuffles one patent stack at the start of any player's turn.")

Another odd non-oversight is that, other than patents flipping to their extra-terrestrial improved side, which you'll do at most perhaps 3 times per game, there's very little you can do to improve your overall lot in life. It's your brain, your crews, some water, and whichever patents you win in auctions, versus the board, and expansion board if you buy that as well. I longed for the ability to do research on general improvements, but that would probably make it too easy.*

In conclusion, High Frontier is brilliant, and also has a lot of depth for those willing to play a few times and get the hang of it, yet there are many groups for whom it won't work. Even one or two players who have a low tolerance for failure or are prone to analysis-paralysis will wreck the experience (we had none of these). Also, it's entirely possible that some approaches will pay off much more handsomely, based entirely on 10 rolls of a single d6... and if the first 5 rolls are fives or sixes instead of ones or twos, that could be the difference between last place and first place.

We managed to play out the Expanded game in about 2.5 hours, which is much less than I expected, and our game finished with scores of 21(me), 20, 19, 18, and 11 (that player got irradiated and/or hit by space junk in Low Earth Orbit more than anyone else combined). Nich's preparation for the second game and willingness to speed us through auctions definitely eliminated at least 20 minutes of mostly-dead time. Even on the second play and being tired as hell, most of the mechanics were second nature to me, and it's gratifying to be able to look at a stack of patents and work out where in space you can head profitably.

Do I recommend High Frontier? Fans of Eklund's earlier American Megafauna, or other longer high-learning-curve games like Outpost, 18xx, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Arkham Horror, Up Front, or Star Fleet Battles will be intrigued. Standard/new-school/young gamers are going to frustrated by the high learning curve and slow pace, and should stay away. We had a hearty debate about whether or not High Frontier is a outlier Euro-game, or a category-transcending unique beast. To be perfectly frank, I don't know if I'm up to playing again soon; I had originally finished the session declaring in frustration, "I'll never play this again, even winnin' ain't fun!" but in writing this review, I had time to reflect on the nature of the game. I am glad I got to play the 2 High Frontier games in short succession, as it was helpful on bringing more game ideas forward and required all (or more!) of my concentration. You don't get that from Dominion or Carcassonne.

I'll also add that the expansion makes the game better.  More tech means more options, and the reduced masses on each patent makes them easier to mix 'n' match. Play a game or two only with the basic set, then jump into the mix!
___________
* "Too easy," of course, meaning "easy at all, in any way, shape, or form." Space exploration is dangerous and difficult, and every turn of High Frontier is a reminder of this.

Blogs I read #1: The Blog Of Michael Mindes

(This is the opening post of my new 2010 series of gaming blog reviews.)

Why are board game publishers so interesting? I'm friends with several. They're smarter than the average bear. They have a dream, and are following it. They tend to be high-energy, hard-working folks who have a broad range of disciplines at which they excel. They're self-starters and usually brimming with ideas. They have a critic's eye. With thousands of dollars invested in a high-risk, low-return business, they've got to be self-aware to succeed. Best of all, the vast majority of them understand that they're building a brand, and do their best to be friendly and nice.

Of course, you can't get far in the publishing business without being a half-decent editor and writer. All of this leads me to my next point:

Publisher Michael Mindes has a great gaming blog. Of all the gaming blogs I read, seeing a new post from Mindes is the surest way to start my morning with insightful, funny, and novel ideas on board game publishing. He's a Seth Godin advocate, which means Mindes cares about the way his message is received, and is in the world to build long-term value for everyone involved.

He's cranking out high-quality posts at an amazing rate, as well as giving away free games, in order to build himself and his company Tasty Minstrel games into a household name, at least in the Eurogaming world.

A confession: since I was laid off at the end of September, I haven't had any business buying new games, so my acquisitions have been meager and guilt-inducing. Thus, I haven't bought and played either of the Tasty Minstrel offerings yet. That last word is key. Both of his company's just-released games, Terra Prime and Homesteaders, are getting good reviews and commentary, and are on my to-try-soon list. I'm actively reading the buzz on them, and definitely am intrigued. Would I have gotten around to them without Mindes' blog? Maybe, and maybe not.

The only drawback to reading Mindes' work so far is that he's limiting his RSS feeds to not show everything, which is a major irritant for me. Thus far, he's publishing such interesting material that I still am willing to click through; of all the blogs I read, only about 3 get a pass on that.

Overall, The Blog of Michael Mindes is a fantastic study in how to promote games, with a clear understanding in switching up your message to appeal to as many facets of interest as possible.

The next post in this series will sing the praises of Brian Bankler's The Tao of Gaming, and after that, I'll wave my hands in an equivocal manner about Matt Drake's snappy Drake's Flames.