Homeland

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 3 out of 10

   BaBang

   Despite being a licensed game, the games seems to be well thought out and polished. That being said, this isn't my "type" of semi-cooperative traitor game. In general, I like working with more concrete information and find the luck element palpable and annoying. Mechanically, this creates tension and prevents the game from being one of pure-memorization and dry calculations. But in practice, I find such mechanics to lead to uninspiring decisions based on one's own gut-feeling. Furthermore, using cards for plots/organizations/Intel/case-loads creates a very fiddly experience as players are constantly moving/adding/shuffling those cards and they have a specific arrangement. I suspect this game has a large market and will find numerous fans... but I'd much rather play The Resistance.

2. 5 out of 10

   Eeeville

   I always like trying hidden role/betrayal games. This one plays out a little different because instead of the 1-to-2 bad guys and the rest are good guys, you have 3 different roles: Agents (good guys), Terrorist Mole (bad guy), and the Politician. The politician wants things to fail, but not so often that the game would end in immediate bad guy victory. The most interesting thing about the game, is no matter what team you're on, there will only be one winner. It's also interesting that if the game doesn't immediately end in terrorist victory, the terrorist still has the opportunity to win in the VP tallying end game. The game has a 5 tiers on the board, with a number of spaces in each tier. When a threat (or "crisis") is at the top tier, it will be resolved at the beginning of the round. Also, at the beginning of the round, a number of threats equal to the number of players are placed. These threats have some hidden info and public info... public info is rewards for dealing with it, part of the more difficulty, determines the tier, and severity. Hidden has consequences of failure and difficulty. So, basically it's dealing with multiple crisis checks at the same time, until their resolved. This makes it very hard to keep track of who contributed to what and remember what's probably ok and what is potentially bad. It was a decent game. I would have probably liked it more if I had watched the show. I think this would be better with 5/6, in which case I would always rather BGS. I was hoping for this to fill the 4 player hidden role option, but I would rather play Dead of Winter with 4. As a quicker hidden role game for 5/6, I would just rather player one of my faster 5/6 player games. I try to keep a lean collection and this is good, but good just doesn't cut it these days. I'm sure some people will love this and could easily share shelf space with Dead of Winter.

3. ajewo

   Semi-coop game based on the TV-show Homeland. There are 3 teams: agent, opportunist, mole but only one player wins by victory points. The card voting system is the core of the game and similar to Battlestar Galactica, but there are a lot more crisis to handle. + Scoring at the end of the game (including factors like have been revealed) + Clever system of 3 different roles (possible mole) + Team game but only one player wins + Random element: each card stack gets a random card (to add uncertainty) after someone investigates it + Quick playing time (compared to similar games) + Replayability (a lot of threat cards) + Scales well from 4-6 players + Quick set-up # Artwork is okay (mainly photos from the TV show on the contact cards, other cards are abstract, the board is more or less a grid for the stacks) # The horizontal groove in the center of the board makes it more difficult to move the stacks up # Luck of the draw # Memory element for each looked up stack and what players have done / said # Not that easy to teach but not too complicated either # A lot of player interaction: deduction, players play cards under one's investigation stack # Downtime: not much to do on one's turn (especially if a player is not interested what other players do in their turn, which is a big part of the game) - Rather abstract game and theme - Board gets crowded with stacks - hard to remain overview - Very fiddly: a lot of stacks and moving cards Similar games: * Battlestar Galactica (voting, point to point movement, traitor, complex, long playing time) * Dead of Winter (move and collect, may have a traitor, complex, crossroad event cards) * Shadows over Camelot (traitor, point to point movement) * Dark Moon (dice based, rather abstract, quick playing time, traitor) * The Resistance (abstract, light, very quick, high player count, party game)