Fractal

The last game of the year was Fractal: pleasantly good and unpleasantly tiring. It also marked Marcel’s return to the group, and he treated us to pain and mechanical swarm, so the evening had the necessary drama as well. I hope we see him more often in 2024 — and Fractal too, because this one needs more plays.

It is an indie 4X from a company with no other substantial work behind it apart from a bad co-op, but the design direction is immediately apparent. The game looks straight at the familiar problems you find in TI, Eclipse, and their clones, and tries to tidy them up without throwing away the genre’s ambition. Development, exploration, and slapping your fellow players are held in a very good balance, while the scoring leaves plenty of room for reversals and unexpected comebacks.

The rounds move along fairly streamlined for a game of this scale, without losing the weight of its decisions. Combat uses cards and is one of the system’s smartest parts, while the campaign and the many singularity tiles in the central hex add a great deal of substance and variety. My own game showed just how violently your position can change: by the end of the second round I had been wiped off the map, and two rounds later I lost the win by a single point.

It is not perfect. Some end-game technologies seem simply crazy good, while the designers’ inexperience with development shows in the visual load: icons that look far too similar to one another, or even mean completely different things depending on context, plus a player aid that explains the irrelevant bits but not the essentials. It is not a disaster; the first one or two games will simply take a while. After that, presumably, the friction goes away and what remains is a 4X that plays very smoothly. It is already first on the menu for the new year; I will return with a more complete opinion.