Level 7 [Escape]

[LabRat]

Has anyone tried this game out yet?

I reluctantly bought a used copy - and by reluctant, I mean very reluctant - a friend, the friend who got me into board games and sold me my copy of IFOS, lend me the game and it sat in my room unplayed for more than a month, so long that I had to agree to buy it eventually. After months and months, I finally decided to try it out and well, I had an average experience with it.

It's a semi-cooperative game where the main goal is to escape, and it will take you seven scenarios to completely escape, with each scenario representing each level of the base/prison/laboratory/whatever that place is. Semi-cooperative means that each player has the same goal - to escape - and you can work together in order to achieve this goal or not. It's like Left 4 Dead - it's much easier if you all work together, but when you reach the end and all hell breaks loose, it's every man for himself.

The good stuff:

- I like the randomness of the board - it's like a snowflake, each game will definitely result in a different board layout. Improves the replayability of the game. And the detail of the tiles - you explore things like an incinerator, several different corridors, different labs, etc. They're all nice-looking and they all make sense.

The game also makes use of vents - each tile can have different tunnels at the edges, and if the tunnels end up getting connected to vents, you can enter one vent, follow a tunnel, and exit out of another vent. As you're forming the board, keeping an eye for the system of vents helps gameplay.

- The game mechanics make it possible to have two enemy types AND have them fight each other too, so it's not just you vs the game - you can get the enemies to fight each other for your advantage. And I love it when that happens.

- The fear and vitality system is great. The number of cards in your hand represent your health, so you really need to give your card usage a thought or two as it may be the difference between getting KO'ed and surviving.

- They saved a lot on combining card effects into single cards. Adrenaline cards (quite similar to Hero cards) can do 3 things, modify your stats for the many different 'tests', have a game effect, or adjust your fear level by 1. So you have a lot of options for one card, unlike LNOE's cards where one card is only good for recovering wounds. Event cards dictate (1) if an enemy spawns, and what kind, (2) one effect out of three different effects that depends on what kind of tile you explored, and (3) which enemies activate at the end of your turn. So each card is maximized.

- The scenarios are strongly linked together. In the first scenario, you and your fellow captives need to find an elevator. In the second scenario, the elevator stalls on the next level and you have to find a way to make it functional again. And so on. In some ways, I'm glad I stuck with the game and played through 2 scenarios, because I want to know why my character was captured in the first place.

The bad stuff:

- The rulebook. UGH. I haven't had much experience learning board games by myself, most games I've played were facilitated by others who already know the game. And I guess I got spoiled by how Flying Frog rulebooks are so easy to read and understand. If you had trouble with the ATOE rulebook, then you're going to have a lot of trouble with this game.

There's no TOC, no index, and there are two separate manuals - a rulebook for the general rules, and a scenario book for the scenario specific rules. I've had such a difficult time with the rules that I shudder at the thought of having to explain the game to novices.

- Instead of miniatures, you get cardboard cutouts on standees. I normally don't have problems with this (I was fine with King of Tokyo's cardboard figures), there are functional issues that stem from not using miniatures. First off, the cardboard cutouts are too big for the board tiles. Once the game starts to be a bit busy, you'll find yourselves having to pick up each cutout just to check which one is which. Functionally, there's a reason - each enemy type is numbered, and they act in order of their numbers, but they could've added numbers to the miniatures to identify this. Plus, the art on the cardboard cutouts is dark, sometimes it's hard to make out what the cutout is supposed to represent. Under poor lighting conditions, this will lead to difficulties.

- Despite the randomness of the board, there are scenario specific rules that determine when a goal is going to be met (probably to manage the game length, to avoid games being too short or too long), so it kind of ruins the suspense. The first scenario, for example, requires the players to find the elevator. Because of the set up, you know that the soonest time you'll find the elevator is after you've explored 8 tiles - so while you're exploring those 8 tiles, you know that you're not going to find the elevator. You're just going through the 8 tiles as fast as you can so that you can find that freaking elevator.

- The game lacks a lot of flavor. A game like this that is supposed to be scary needs a lot of flavor to reinforce the theme, and it just fails. The event cards keep telling you to do an Intelligence test, or a Strength test, or a Speed test, but it never tells you WHY. A good comparison is A Touch of Evil - you're told to do a Spirit test, but the game never fails at explaining what the Spirit test represents in the game. In Level 7, you move to a tile, then you do some sort of test. Rinse and repeat.

The publishers have left a lot to the players imaginations; use an adrenaline card to lower your fear by 1 and modify your Intelligence by one. Um, why? How did you lower your fear and improve your thinking? Did you take a deep breath and calmed yourself down? Did you take some sort of medicine? You drew an Event card that told you to pass an Intelligence 5 test and if you failed, an alien will spawn. Um, why? What does that test represent? Did the board tile have some sort of sudoku puzzle that if I failed to solve it, an alien sudoku enthusiast would come up to me and get mad at me?

This is where the game really fails, for me. Imagine yourself, exploring one random tile after another, usually doing some sort of dice test for no reason other than because a card told you so. And then every so often, you have to stop because you need to consult the rules, which takes a while because there's no table of contents or index to help you.

Final thoughts:

- Level 7 [Escape] has a lot of good things going for it, and a lot of bad things too. It's not a bad game, but the bad things keep it from becoming a great game. If you're like me, who doesn't own a lot of games, then it can be worth playing especially since it's not like LNOE where I need someone competent enough to play the other side, and it's not like Flash Point where there's very little story to make you want to keep playing it.

But even I'm not too enthusiastic about it. Honestly, I'm really craving for Mice and Mystics, which has a similar scenario structure that fleshes out an entire storyline. It's just too fiddly and it doesn't help my imagination much for me to really enjoy it.