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At first I apologise for the lack of imagery, I’m currently at Dreamhack sthlm so the editing on my cell phone is not the greatest but anyways here is my analysis.
Introduction
What do you get if you flatten Gears of War? No, not space invaders you get Gears of War the board game from the designer Corey Konezcka. To start with I have to say this is one of the finest reverse engineering I have ever seen. From being a third person shooter to a cooperative board game without loosing the feeling of the original.
How does it work?
Gears of War: The board game is a cooperative game where four players takes upon a campaign of levels with various goals in order to progress through Gears of War’s (the video game) story. The players are given a character from the game and a set of weapons and ammo token which has relationships which each other in way that the placer will sacrifice an ammo token to attack unless using an ability. The properties of the weapons was mainly to attack but the grenade could also seal off enemy spawn points. These properties was could be a bit altered because the attack damage or attack pattern varied depending on how lucky the player was with the attack and defend dices.
The players then chose a level from the campaign cards to play, we started of with level 1: Emergence day. The goal of the level was to seal of one of the enemy spawning holes in the level, to seal this a grenade were to be thrown and get what the game calls an omen (rolling a dice with the Gears of War facing upwards).
Before the game begins the players set up the level as indicated on the campaign card, then goes on with placing enemies in the level.
A typical turn
A typical turn starts with a placer using an ability card given before the game starts (usually six cards) he may then preform the action on the card. The actions vary, from being a special attack move to an ability where the player can move extra far. However the player may also chose to fire one of his weapons (required that there are an enemy within range) instead of using an ability, this requires a sacrifice of one ammo token and one ability card chosen by the player. When firing a weapon attack dices are rolled to show how much damage it gives. The player shall actually before this (unless being that the weapon is a grenade) roll defence dices to show how much damage the enemy can defend, the number of dices vary among the enemies.
After the active player have done his turn, he must pull an AI-card and this is where the game really gets interesting. The game actually recreates the AI-system of the video game, take the Wretches for an example, in the video game they are fast moving and attacks with out a sense of wit. In the board game it is the same thing, what make them so unpredictable is that there are about three different AI-cards for each enemy of the game (There are a lot of enemy types) but the Wretches moves several steps in a turn and can down an hero in just a couple of turns. This becomes balanced with the low hp of the Wretches. After the AI’s turn it is the next player’s (players are called Cogs in game).I would also like to add that an important object is the covers in the level which opens up for an interpretation of the cover system from the video game, if a player is in cover he then gets an extra defence dice if being attacked.
The best sides of the game
The best side of the game was how it captured the feel of the original game, you often felt overwhelmed by a swarm of enemies and that forced the placers to take action or take cover. Our group of Cogs stuck together and worked our way through the levels but every now and then there was a player going berserk into a group of enemies because he thought he could take them all which more than often left the player bleeding out and crying out to his fellow Cogs to heal him. I really feel that this was the most amazing thing about the game, to make the player act as if he was playing the video game version. To enable these feeling and actions the game offered a large variety of missions (as mentioned above). Apart from the emergence day we played a mission where the group was chased by a large enemy, the team’s objective was to run through the level full of other locust (the name of the enemy army) enemies and make the large enemy follow the group until they got out on a courtyard (last part of the level) where they finally could take the monster down. There was however a twist to the main objective, whenever a weapon was fired in the level the huge monster would move towards the gun fired.
It was really interesting to see how they could make the players fear an enemy and how the group planned their movement in order to make it through the level and as a previous Gears of War player it reminded of the mission in the video game. So the game never felt as a repetition as many other board games (we did not play all the levels). So the best system of the game was the AI-system, you could never really predict what would happen next which made it really interesting. The functions of the system varied depending on what type of enemy the AI-card corresponded to, but the relationship between the players and the AI was always the same, kill each other except for one scenario. The large enemy I mentioned above did not care if there was fellow Locust in the attack area, it damaged everything in its way, this was really interesting seeing how a small alternation changed the feel of the whole enemy system. A player could for instance sacrifice himself for the small chance of the big monster wiping out the rest of the enemies in the room.
Worst part of the game
Do not get me wrong here, I loved the game but the instructions was really hard to grasp unless you were familiar with the terms of the game. It actually took about an hour to set up the game and even then we were not sure we had done it correctly, during the first and second session at several occasion there were a player interrupting the game because he read the rule book on another page than the previous reader and realized that we had used an item wrongly. The game almost took for granted that the players had played the video game otherwise to understand the terminology a new player would have to read through about 30 pages to maybe understand what was going on. What they could have done was to have a section early in the manual that explained the different terms, like a dictionary.
Core game system
The game is as mentioned about cooperation, the player must survive and make their way through deadly forces in order to complete the objective at hand but the game is also a lot about resource management. The weapons of the game uses ammo tokens, I have already explained in previous text pieces that you consume ammo and ability cards to fire your weapon. So the core game system to me is cooperation among players and resource management. Without your teammates you wont make it far in the game and without proper though behind your weapon actions you may end up with no ammo and then receive a game over.
But it is hard to find the core game system in Gears of War the board game since there are so many systems in it that is so important, there are the AI-system, the ammo-system, cover-system, buddy-system(healing) and the ability system. But with all the systems working together it simulates a real time third person action game really well.
Target group interpretation
This game is clearly for the already Gears of War fan, which judging by the age ratings of the video game should be somewhere between 16-20 but I feel that any group of four friends can sit down and enjoy this game if they can get into the whole terminology. The game is also targeted strongly to male players with the box art being designed to attract with its guns, strong male characters and that the title has “War” in it. However the gameplay can be enjoyed by anyone if they can cooperate with the other players and if they have the ability to keep track on several things at the same time. So if determining the suitable target group only based on the gameplay I would say anyone above the age of ten.
Summary
Gears of War the board game is what the title says, Gears of War played on a board. It takes the best of the game and translates it so the feeling of the action and tension is exactly the same as in the video game. There are a lot of systems to keep track of but that is one of the things that makes the game that good however the game has some troubles with explanations of the various objects in the game but makes up for it with the most entertaining gameplay I have ever experienced in a board game. So play this game with your friends and you will have a lot of levels to fight through and when that is done there is always the horde mode (which we unfortunately did not have time to try out). One last tip: Try playing the soundtrack from the second Gears of War game in the background as you are playing the game, it will enhance game even further.
Simon Johansson - Programmer student - Uppsala university campus Gotland. 
Once again I, along with ever single other student taking our course, have been charged with doing a peer review, and due to matters far more incomprehensible than matters of a more comprehensible nature, I shall do this peer review, this evaluation of work by one of more people in a similar competence to the producers of the work, as it is described by the great free encyclopaedia of the internet, on this very review of this very board game.
First of all, apology duly accepted, mostly since I myself have also played the board game, in accordance to the format of the ‘board game and blog’ assignments, I am well aware how both the externals of the box as well as the internals and all of the fiddly bits look.
And boy is this game crammed with little bits.
From my long and arduous gaming experience of the gears of war series, by which I mean visiting a mate’s house a couple of times times and LAN-ing it a few years ago, I must say that all things considered, I do most assuredly agree that the reverse-itude of its engineering truly is rather spot on, both with the general feeling and mechanics behind the scenes working those dynamics to grow and nurture those feelings, at least if my memory is correct regarding the actual feelings that was felt when playing the actual video game.
The explanation of the general gist of the game is well written and very understandable, which is always a big plus when one is not in the mood to do an mildly annoyed rant about how much one disagrees with what one has just read, so thank you for writing well written and very understandable sentences that do explain the gist of the game.
I do feel that if I had read those instructions before venturing forth with my group to actually try to play this beast of a board game, it wouldn’t have taken as long to get started as it did.
But that’s a rant for later if the word count still is too low.
I do indeed agree that the AI cards did well simulating the AI of the game, if my memory once again is correct, however on further pondering, I am growing ever more unsure if I ever encountered the AI, pretty sure the happy fun times of LAN-ing was with actual people against each other. There may or may not have been a session or two of that weird game mode that I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called, there were all these hordes of those evil alien monster guy fellas, and the horde grew stronger with each wave, until you were veritably swarmed by the horde.
If memory serves me right, the horde of swarmers always won when we tried, but anyway the board game very much did a good job of simulating the AI if the AI was pretty much like it was during that game mode where I actually faced the AI.
Ah well, I trust you enough to believe that you are indeed right in that the board game simulated it rightly.
I also agree that the best part of the game was indeed the feeling captured and bottled up in its very own box-tacular board game.
It was very much ‘take cover’ the board game, although in our play through it rather quickly devolved to ‘Leeroy Jenkins: we wanna go home already’ the board game instead. But never the less it was indeed the feel of the game that was captured, and the feeling captured was very much the best part of the board game.
If you are still reading this by now, I do apologise to you for having to suffer trawling through this miserable state of a peer review.
I do without any single pinch or penny of a doubt most assuredly agree that the instructions was the worst part of the board game.
And since our group did not have the good fortune of having someone experienced in the game present, in fact it was not until half way through that I started to remember that I had in fact played the video game before, it sure took its sweet time getting understandable enough for us to attempt playing it.
We also got a few things wrong, took us roughly one third of the actual game play through to realise that we couldn’t all sacrifice our guard cards at the same to literally wipe out every single enemy that got near to us.
The game got a little bit harder after that realisation.
As did it after we found out that one have to discard cards to pick up weapons, and what that weird long piece of cardboard was for.
As for the core game system, it was indeed all about the cooperation, and just as indeed-ly very much a great quantity of smaller systems that all together doing a well made simulation of the video game.
I feel the 16-20 demographic is very much the ideal target group to interpret, and although we’re thankfully saved from the masculine grunts of the video game, it does indeed retain its ridiculously macho men waging war with guns, as you so rightly say, box art.
I do say sir that the argument that it can be enjoyed with a group one feels that one can cooperate with while keeping track on several things at the same time can be applied to an almost unlimited amount of things a group can venture on doing, although most of those examples that I can think of do require alcohol to go through the working day.
My eyebrow did twitch worryingly at the notion of it being suitable for anyone over ten, but I am quite comfortably reaching the end of the tunnel, so I won’t make a fuss.
Besides, if I did more serious pondering about it, I would probably conclude that your notion was right.
All in all, this was a well-written review, and it has been an honour to have had the chance to peer-review it.
If I ever end up in a situation where I will play the board game again, I will keep the soundtrack tip in mind.
Cheers.