You'll only be able to play through once, due to some of the creative ways in which the game's physical components are used. The story, gameplay, and puzzles all felt satisfying on their own, but also intertwined in unique ways that felt novel for a board game. 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. 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.

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 Sea 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. And as with any game that looks to give you the opportunity to fail forward, there are multiple endings to the campaign. In a word, no. The Initiative is as engaging as it is quirky. Without giving spoilers, the meta-narrative revolves around a group of teenagers who find a game called ‘The Key’ in a yard sale. You and your fellow players take on the role of one of these characters as they play through the game solving codes and uncovering secrets both within the game within a game and the story wrapped around it. After you beat the campaign, there is still tons of content to explore. There are dozens of bonus missions that include their own secrets and mysteries. Some of these really turn the game on its head.”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.” It’s a bit like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book with your puzzle-solving skills determining the outcomes.

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.” The Initiative blends together the player-driven storytelling of Choose Your Own Adventure books with the puzzles of an escape room.It is hard to review The Initiative without ruining it. Part of its charm is how it modestly disguises its true nature and slowly reveals itself through play. The combination of comic, puzzle, and codes was something I haven’t experienced in a game before and felt fresh. In this gorgeous tile-placement game about nature and the Pacific Northwest, players compete to build the best salmon run, the best bear habitat or the largest collection of deer. The beautiful cards and art were designed by, as Mik Fitch says, “the queen of board game art” Beth Sobol (who also illustrated Wingspan, from our 2019 guide). Take a journey to the Pacific Northwest as you compete to create the most harmonious ecosystem in Cascadia! Buy Micro Macro Crime City- Full House If you haven’t played a campaign board game before, think of it as a video game with different “levels.” Each level is a self-contained play session (in The Initiative, a session lasts 30-60 minutes) in which you either win or lose, but either way, you discover more of the story and possibly change the rules of the game for the next session.

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. The goal was to keep challenging players and to keep the game fresh all the way through the campaign.” The game gets brownie points with me for its unconventional design that makes it easy to ignore the couple of minor flaws I found: the components not always lending themselves to communal play and some of the codes being perhaps a little too simple. Despite this, The Initiative is distinct from its peers and well worth giving a try. To not spoil anything about the campaign experience I will keep things quite general. The storyline throughout isn’t going to be optioned into a movie deal anytime soon, but was enough to keep the group engaged. It’s family appropriate as well so The Initiative would work perfectly for kids of reading age. The missions are varied throughout the campaign. There are secret cards that get revealed between missions that also give you fun things to do. It’s really the confluence of secrets, puzzles, and cooperative gameplay that makes the game stand out. It’s one of the few games in the past few years that I can honestly say asks players to do things or think about things in a way I’ve never done in a board game before.Those misgivings are easy to excuse due to the ambition and innovation at the heart of The Initiative. It reaches for greatness, and while that’s not always attained, it strikes enough notes to cement a legacy of sorts. Fans of the tabletop escape room genre craving a little something more will find plenty within the ranks of The Initiative. And the first one is this, The Initiative, or if you look at the game’s box, The [crossed out] Initiative. So, what is it? Changing the world might be a youthful urge, but this game seems to be a product of Konieczka’s own maturity. With that comes the approach to failure in the game. Failing a mission isn’t the end of the game, but like life, there’s no restarts. Update: Unexpected games is offering free replacements if you have a problem with your mission console, details here). I love games that tell stories, and I think Battlestar Galactica and The Initiative tells stories and explore humanity in different ways. The emotion of Battlestar Galactica is very much about distrust and betrayal, while the tone of The Initiative is about mystery and the being a teenager. Children are dreamers that see the world very differently than adults,” muses Konieczka

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. Occasionally the randomness felt needlessly unfair, in particular when it came to the virtual countdown at the end of each mission. We wished there had been slightly more wiggle room before we risked losing the round by random draw in the final stages. We found a couple typos in the story booklet, but nothing too distracting. (At least they seemed to be typos, rather than part of a puzzle.) The Initiative is a cooperative campaign-style game that unfolds throughout fourteen missions (and there is more to explore after the main story). While there are more than a handful of cooperative legacy games these days, The Initiative goes about things a bit differently. So let’s dive in and see what it’s like. Gameplay Overview: The story has multiple endings. Some are more triumphant than others, but all of them are interesting—and if the ending feels like a letdown, there’s always the bonus content to explore.The Initiative offered a few game-changing moments of surprise that evoked the same feeling of wonder as the best play-at-home escape games—or even real-life escape games. It’s safe to say that this year did not go as many of us expected. In year two of the pandemic, who would have guessed that Covid-19 variants and a politicized resistance to vaccines would keep many of us sheltering for another winter? The teens’ story was suspenseful and engaging, even for non-teens like us. It took issues like depression and cheating in school seriously without getting bogged down in them. 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.” The difficulty curve felt well balanced. The first mission eased us into the challenge and provided a foundation for the experience ahead. Then the complexity increased with the addition of harder levels and new game elements.