review

large-scale energy failure

Blackout Hong Kong

Coping with the fallout

The novel „Blackout – Morgen ist es zu spät“ by Marc Elsberg probably inspired the topic of Blackout Hong Kong, even if the novel deals with an energy blackout of long duration over practically the whole of Europe instead of only in Hong Kong.

What exactly are we dealing with?

On the big map of Hong Kong, several colored dots represent crisis centers and are connected with lines, creating several areas = districts of varying sizes and there is also the respective victory points track - the bigger a district the more points. Each of the districts is equipped with three face-down scout tiles; furthermore, the Hong Kong board shows a rondel with six resources - water, rice, tools, petrol, etc. - and the joker resource of batteries in the middle (what else in case of blackout?). Each player is given his own player board featuring slots for card placement and a summary of game phases, as well as five transport tokens, four Hong Kong Dollars, two random starting volunteer cards which are put on two of the three task slots on your board, an emergency plan with three tasks and twelve cards comprising volunteer cards in yellow, red and blue plus some specialists like doctor, mechanic etc.; some of those cards immediately go to the hospital at the right side of your board; from the marker cubes in your color that you also receive, you put one on any crisis center of your choice. As mentioned, two of the three slots on your board are filled with the starter volunteer cards, the fourth slot is locked and must be unlocked.

The sequence of phases is really well structured and depicted on each of the player boards; it comprises eight different phases, well provided with pictograms and short info text. This is something one would like to see more often in other games, because if you did not play the game for some time, you can re-access it rather quickly that way and newbies, too, rarely need more than one round to grasp the sequence.

The three colored dice in yellow, red and blue, corresponding to the colors of the volunteer cards, show different distributions of resources and are rolled until they show three different resource symbols and are then placed on the rondel accordingly. The dice indicate the resources available to players for the round, provided they hold suitable volunteer cards in the respective colors and provided that the cards are placed on the slots. By discarding transport tokens or spending victory points, you can got to adjacent resources, change the dice virtually so to say, if nothing suitable is available otherwise.

Each player now plans his move by placing one of his cards from hand into one of the three or four slots on the board, we know this from Mombasa, while already considering which card needs to go in which slot as that becomes important in a later phase when picking up all cards in a slot. If you have cards in hand, you must place cards.

By revealing the cards in the Deploy phase in any order, each player places his marker cubes, according to the 1 to 3 cubes depicted on the volunteer card, on the resource on the rondel and thus increases his resources. Those resources are then used by the specialists that you might have placed in another slot, or by the task cards (next phase) to swap them for money, GPS tokens, victory points, batteries and other items or to use the doctor to retrieve a card from the hospital back in hand and to mark its victory points on the victory points track accordingly.

In the Objective phase you can complete objectives of cards in your own objective area or the objectives on the emergency plan. Completing objectives is mainly achieved by discarding resources or money, but also by connecting crisis centers on the board, along pre-set lines, with marker cubes of your color. Some objectives can be met by certain color combinations of cards displayed in a slot, e.g. the unlocking of the locked fourth sloth on your board. Cards are - depending on their type - either placed into the so-called check mark area or taken up in hand. They give you victory points, Hong Kong dollars or allow you to place your own color markers on a given or any color slot on the board. Such cube marker placement must be carefully coordinated, too, as a cube must be placed adjacent to another of your cubes already on the board; if that is not possible you pay with transport tokens or victory points for each position left empty. Some cards even show two or three objectives that must be met; if you manage that, you score a considerable amount of victory points, resulting however in the disadvantage that the cards arrives late or maybe not at all in the check mark area, which is bad. So, you are continuously forced to make decisions.

In the next phase, Scout, we play a little memo game. We may look at the face-down scout tiles in areas next to our color cubes and, if there is something that we want and can pay for with our GPS markers, we take and put back the other tiles face-up. If there is nothing interesting revealed, we put all tiles back face-down, of course memorizing what they were. For GPS markers we can use GPS tokens of value three or GPS symbols on cards already in the check-mark area. We must, however, use a minimum of one and can use several cards from hand, one of them is drawn randomly and placed into the hospital; the doctor must be kept busy, after all, and must be activated for business in a slot. The scout tiles give the usual selection of resources, money or instant victory points and, at the end of the game, once again victory points in relation to the number of different tiles. By the way, two of those tiles are stated for your task on the emergency plan.

In the New Objectives phase, we can buy new objective cards, additional  objectives, volunteers and specialists from a 3x3 grid that was displayed at the start of the game; one cards from a row of three cards costs four HK dollars, two cards 3 HK dollars, etc. New objectives can only be bought if you have an empty slot on your board for it. Remember that you must complete the depicted objective before you can access the card. This buying continues in turn until all have passed. If the last card in a row is bought, you lay out three new ones immediately.

In Clean up, you remove cards from the display and, should there be food and water left on the rondel, those resources are forcefully swapped for HK dollars or the coveted CPS tokens (for two water).

Near the end of the round we have the point-heavy phase of Secure Districts, in which you are rewarded with up to 14 victory points for districts completely surrounded by your color cubes and, when a house is removed from a check mark area, one of five effects is unlocked; for instance “discard a book to receive one GPS marker with three symbols”. Other players also involved in the district

 that is scored, receive victory points in relation to the number of their color cubes.

And with his we have reached the final phase - Refresh hand - in which players maybe can take back cards in hand, but only if you have four (or six in case of a previously met special objective) or less cards in hand. You must, however, then take all cards from the slot that holds most card - this gives you many cards for your hand, but if you have saved up on a certain color combination in a slot and then have to pick up that special slot because you have few or new cards in hand, it can get rather aggravating. If must take up card, you can implement all your check mark actions once which can be very rewarding, as they can be done in any order of your choice, which allows for the resolving of very impressive chains.

If, at that point, the draw pile for the volunteer and special cards is completely empty, a last final round will be played and then the game is scored. All cards in hand and all cards in the slots, but not those in the objectives area and in the hospital - score the victory points stated on them; each resource on the rondes gives you 1 HK dollar and for every 5 HK dollars you score an additional victory point. All open-faced scout tiles also give victory points, as already mentioned.

Conclusion: With Blackout Hong Kong, Alexander Pfister has again provided a so-called „big“ Pfister, following Mombasa and Great Western Trail, using some mechanisms already familiar - the card slots - but marvelously embedded in a new topic. Which takes us to the topic: This really only comes across in full strength, if you read the flavor text on the cards - Protect a Pharmacy, or Reopen a School, and so on. In my personal opinion, however, the portion of luck is a bit too big in a game of that duration - up to three hours in a game of four players; it can be a deciding factor if the three resource dice provide a passable result or not, as the imaginary relocation to an adjacent resource slot costs a transport token or a victory point, if you are out of transport tokens; and relocating over three slots is very expensive, therefore! Another big portion of luck comes from the random drawing of a card with a GPS symbol from your hand by another player - it makes a big difference if a card with two victory points wanders into the hospital, ore one with seven VPs, if you can get it out with the doctor soon, thus giving you the victory points. But maybe I would have needed that card rather urgently in the next round!

A final remark: The game also provides a campaign mode over several games with different game set up, and also a mode for solitaire play.

Gert Stöckl

Players: 1-4

Age: 14+

Time: 150+

Designer: Alexander Pfister

Artist: Chris Quilliams

Price: ca. 45 Euro

Publisher: eggertspiele / Plan B Games / Pegasus 2018

Web: http://www.eggertspiele.de

Genre: deck building, resources management

Users: For experts

Special: 1 player

Version: de

Rules: cn de en it pl ru

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Includes solo mode and campaign mode

Long duration

Generic topic

Compares to:

Mombasa for slot mechanism

Other editions:

Broadway Toys (cn), Cranio Creations (it), eggertspiele (en), Lacerta (pl), Lavka / Zvezda (ru)

My rating: 5

Gert Stöckl:

Once again a well-working and well-made „Pfister“, albeit with a generic topic and long duration, with a chance factor that is a bit too big for a resources economics game.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 1

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0