Barrage

I was expecting Barrage as one of the three heavy games of the summer, but my prediction had been completely wrong: I thought Pipeline would be the likely game of the year and that this would be an overhyped flop. On our first encounter, Barrage not only failed to disappoint, it immediately showed how brain-burning it can be. It is one of those euros that puts hatred on the map and then gives you a very civilised worker-placement system to express it. The evening, in general, ended in a massacre and with a game decided by a single point, so the tension was anything but theoretical.

At its core, it is worker placement: on my turn I place workers in available spaces and try to make use of the water and my constructions on the map. The interesting part is not merely making my own engine work, but getting ahead of the other players’ moves and exploiting the flow to my advantage.

That is also where the malice lies. The interaction is very direct: my choices on the map can literally torment someone with the torture of the dripping tap, denying them what they were expecting to do. With asymmetric abilities producing strong combos and worker-placement spaces not scaling with player count, this does not always feel like tough but fair competition. Sometimes it feels like someone found the right button and decided there did not need to be a second one.

This is where my initial impression started to turn sour. The game has ingredients that I should normally love, yet on both occasions I did not genuinely have a good time playing it. It is not about winning or losing; I have taken repeated last places in other games and had a great time. It is that visibly broken combos in an asymmetric euro pull me out of the game, and Barrage seems to tolerate them far too comfortably. Even so, I will give it another chance. After such a large investment, it would be a shame for it to remain on the shelf as an overpriced monument to bad decisions.

Updated session

On the second session, with the expansion and after roughly half an hour of sorting the upgraded components, my opinion clearly dropped. The previous play at the BLTG event had left a good impression, even though the middling production and fiddliness had tired us out. The expansion at least helps: if you are out of contention early, it gives you things to do and something to enjoy. It does not solve my central problem with the combos and the spaces that do not adapt to player count. The initial 8 became a 7, and I already consider 7 generous.