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Each player controls one of the characters as they navigate around a game board, collecting clues that allow you to flip windows covering parts of the mission card and reveal hidden information behind it. You can guess any time if you think you’ve figured out the answer, but if you’re wrong you fail the mission. The first mission feels a little like an easy round of Wheel of Fortune, but things get more complicated fast as the solutions change formats to involve numerical sequences or scrambled words. We spent roughly 30-60 minutes per episode, though a couple of them took only 15 minutes. A turn-based countdown starts at a certain point in each round, amping up the tension. Mapping this to my personal journey, when I was making BSG I was in my mid 20s and newlywed. Now I’m in my late 30s and I have a kid of my own. As a parent, I have a new perspective. It gave me a strong desire to revisit the lost days of youth; when we felt like we could change the world.”
But this nifty co-operative strategy game is just the first layer of The Initiative. In fact, it may be the weakest part of the entire experience. That’s not to say that it’s not a game with challenge of course – Konieczka is a designer with a pedigree in making interesting choices central to his games. Some of the early missions’ answers were on the easy side for experienced players, with many of the puzzles on the secret cards relying on common ciphers. But they were still satisfying to solve, and once the campaign got going, the complexity of the puzzle layer revealed itself. After a few missions, we could really appreciate the intricate design. This wasn’t the case with The Initiative. My friend and I breezed through in three play sessions. And, while it would be difficult to fully reset the campaign due to some of those legacy elements. The game does come with twenty-four extra missions that also promise another meta-puzzle within them. Though I haven’t tried these yet.When the kids in the story play their copy of the game, you play as them and determine their fate,” explains Konieczka, “the core gameplay itself starts out pretty simple, but grows in complexity as you play more games.” Four teens find a spy-themed board game called The Key at a yard sale and decide to play it together. When mysterious events start occurring in real life, they resolve to uncover the truth behind the game’s origins. Konieczka is currently wrapping up his second title for Unexpected Games – which he promises is “ very different from The Initiative. We won’t be talking about it for a while now, but the tone and style are quite different than anything I’ve done in the past. Then I’m turning my attention to game #3 and beyond. It is exciting times.” Players use strategy and a unique card system to collect clues, avoid traps, and try to solve the mission.” Corey Koniecazka currently holds five top 100 BGG positions, most notably for Star Wars: Rebellion, Mansions of Madness First Edition, and Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. The designer spent some 14 years at Fantasy Flight games, making some of the biggest games to define the hobby – but now Koniecazka has set up his own studio, Unexpected Games, bringing all of those years of experience to bear on a completely new direction.
We all aspire to leave our mark. As one of the great ancient architects, your goal is to create a wonder so amazing that it, as well as you, will go down in history as a testament to human ingenuity and skill! Buy Land vs SeaAnd the first one is this, The Initiative, or if you look at the game’s box, The [crossed out] Initiative. So, what is it?
The Initiative is a big deal. It’s the inaugural release from Corey Konieczka’s Unexpected Games. He is known for 13 years of prolific design work at Fantasy Flight Games, crafting absolute classics such as Star Wars: Rebellion and the Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game board game. But this game feels radically different.
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Final Score: 4.5 Stars – One of the most innovative games in quite a while. A wonderful mix of cooperative gameplay, story, and puzzles. The Initiative is a campaign game with some legacy elements, meaning how you perform in one mission may impact the story and adjust the difficulty of later missions. A bonus for me was that each mission is short 20-30 minutes. Meaning you can work through the campaign in a reasonable amount of time time. One problem with campaign games is that they can clog up your group’s play sessions as you grind through a game to its bitter end. Sometimes you don’t finish them at all. The Initiative is meant to be played over 14 missions with one to four adults or puzzle-minded youngsters, who can drop in and out of the campaign as they please. The strategy board game element is fortified with story in the form of a comic book describing a group of kids playing a very similar board game. There are also secrets hidden throughout the game materials, and even more missions are available to play separately after the main campaign. After spending a dozen or more hours with The Initiative, we still hadn’t exhausted all of its mysteries. To take an action you must play one of your resource cards to that action’s discard pile. But the card you play must be higher in value than the last card played to that action. So, the first player can essentially play any card to do any of the actions. However, if they play a 6 card to the “move” action, no one else can move without playing a 7 or higher.
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