New Angeles

We had been looking forward to it for ages, but New Angeles is not one of those games you open, play once, and immediately understand. In our first game, we made a complete mess of things: the city collapsed as early as the third round, having collected all the Pharaoh’s plagues, while we were still trying to work out what exactly was going on—or, more specifically, how broken NBN’s assets are.

At its core, the game has you keep an eye on a city that can fall apart quickly if the problems hitting it are not dealt with. In our first attempt, the third round was enough to show how easily things can spiral when the group does not read the priorities and consequences correctly.

Player interaction, at least as we experienced it, runs through the players’ choices and assets: we got stuck on NBN and whether its tools are excessively powerful, while the city around us was going to hell. It is one of those games where, before judging balance or strategy, you first need to make sure you are playing it correctly.

And that brings me to my main complaint: FFG keeps up this irritating policy of card-game-style manuals, split between a learn-to-play book and a reference. We made small but meaningful mistakes because of that setup, so I am not going to rush to a verdict. We will come back to it with six players and a few more games; until then, the question of whether New Angeles is a dud or not remains open.