Evacuation

The evening continued as it should: fresh sushi, souvlaki — we are not trolls — and Evacuation, Vladimir’s new work, hotter on the brain than good wasabi. It has that salted-fish marriage of kinky theme and complex rules framework I expect from him, building toward a fiery crescendo of VIP salad. Personally, I prefer him to Vital as a designer and find his games more interesting; here, he also returns strongly after the slightly disappointing Woodcraft.

In Evacuation, we have four years to leave a planet that is being destroyed and colonise a new paradise. Beneath that delightfully odd premise, the mechanisms connect with smooth logic: each choice follows naturally from the last, and the decisions remain constantly difficult. The game did not merely ask me to find a good move, but to weigh my entire path across those four years.

The most interesting pressure lies in how much you choose to play in each round. Unlike many euros of this kind, round length is variable, and it is not always right to exhaust everything available to you: stopping earlier can make perfect sense. As I experienced it, player interaction lies mostly in this shared pressure of pace and decision-making, rather than in any overt aggression dominating the experience.

The one thing that held me back a little is the ending. Even the designer seems not to have settled on one definitive “this is how it is played”: there are two main closing variants, one with points and one as a race, while the basic and advanced actions are practically different games. I do not consider that a bad thing — everyone I spoke to who had tried configurations other than ours also had a good time, while we chose basic actions with points for our first game. But for a group like mine, which often has to leave one game unplayed in order to make room for a second play of another, the opportunity cost is high. Even so, Evacuation is one of the good games of the season, and I suspect that one more play will raise it even further in my estimation.