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“And the so-called sovereigns, in these different governments, are
simply the heads, or chiefs, of different bands of robbers and
murderers.” – Lysander Spooner
In this latest PDF game from
Greg Porter at
BTRC,
you and your buddies assume roles as leaders of various real-life
nations of the world. Your goal is to try to manipulate global
resources in a manner most beneficial to your own country. If your
buddies’ nations get screwed over in the process, well, welcome to
the real world, sunshine!
The idea is for each player to control both
natural and man-made resources and finances during the game to push
their own country ahead of the other players’, and to avoid
catastrophes along the way. Catastrophes are, unfortunately,
generated by the stress on your population by the manipulation of
said resources, so it’s rather a catch-22. You have to figure out
how far to push your tech, industry, and material reserves without
causing a national health, economic, or environmental crisis to
strike. Or, at least, how to cause such a crisis to nail your
opponents instead of you. By successfully wheeling and dealing,
producing, buying, trading, selling, researching, and bargaining,
you’ll earn Victory Points every game turn. Eventually, someone will
trigger one of the “victory conditions” of the game, and then each
player has one final turn to try to accumulate the most Victory
Points to become the winner. |
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The full-color PDF rules include a printable
“board”, nation info sheets, resource tokens, and handy in-game
reference sheets for players to use during their turns. The board is
simply a track to monitor how close to various types of catastrophes
your nations are inching during game play, but it also has tables
for Black Market and Free Market Trading.
Each player will need about 15 tokens, and you
can either use those provided or substitute poker chips, beads,
pennies, toenail clippings, whatever, as long as each person has a
different color or otherwise easily-identifiable set of tokens to
clearly represent their nation. It’s a good idea to print the
playing board and tokens on heavier cardstock paper if you have it,
just so they hold up better and don’t blow around when someone gets
up from the table to grab a soda. The pieces and nation sheets
should also be printed in color for ease of play, because while
there are identifying emblems on the tokens and the nation info
sheets, the attributes of each nation are color-coded to let you
know how potent a particular attribute is. (I didn’t have a color
printer at work, so I had to use highlighters to brighten up my
tokens and nation print-outs, which worked fine, but was
time-consuming.)
There is a selection of nations to choose from
to begin play, with each nation statted out on a short sheet for the
player. Each nation has five attributes:
Reserves: your country’s knack for
keeping strategic reserves on hand to use to mitigate emergencies.
Lifestyle: a combo quality of your
standard of living and your population.
Tech: what technological stuff you’re
capable of making, although not necessarily what you have currently
on hand.
Industry: related to tech, this
indicates how much stuff you can produce and how quickly.
Resources: Potential assets such as
materials, work force, energy sources, agriculture, etc.
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Since not every country in the world is equal,
neither are the starting stats of the nations. However, nations that
begin the game with fewer advantages in these attributes receive
more Victory Points from the get-go, to even things out. Japan, for
example, starts with only 4 VP, while the Pacific Rim starts out
with 17 VP. This means that while the Rim starts out closer to the
win, Japan will have moderately better production rolls for their
five attributes during the game and can generally gain VP faster
than The Pacific Rimmers, if managed shrewdly.
Each nation also has three Special Abilities
that they can activate after the game gets going, and sometimes
these abilities help offset lower VP starting levels. Special
Abilities may be things like market manipulation, foreign aid,
outsourcing, or military benefits. You have to pay for these Special
Abilities by spending tokens to buy them, so you won’t be able to
begin the game on the first turn with these Special Abilities
active.
Now, understanding the set-up is tricky at
first, because you have lots of colored circles all over the
place on your nation’s sheet. Before play starts, you’ll set tokens
on your sheet’s attributes according to your attributes’ circles’
colors, so everyone starts off with some tokens in play. As the game
progresses, you’ll move, remove, or replace tokens on some of these
circles, which will have various effects based on which circle is
filled. Token placement’s all described in the rules, of course, but
it took me a few readings to understand which circles are which,
since everything on the nation sheet is pretty damn round.
“...regrettable
as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides
little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom
that makes progress possible, lies in unification.” - B.H. Liddell
Hart
Once you’re set up, a basic game turn goes in a
set sequence, but sometimes all the players participate in certain
steps of the turn at the same time, and sometimes players are
performing steps individually. You’ll most likely want to devise
your arcane strategy for winning from the start; if you want to go
for the win on your own, trusting no one and taking the lead, you’ll
be better off with a lower VP nation as you’ll have better chances
to develop your resources faster. If you plan on schmoozing,
cooperating, and assisting your fellow players along the way in
return for certain concessions, then you can feel more comfortable
starting off with a second or third tier country, which will have
less access to resource tokens during a given round but start off
with a hefty dose of VP.
I have to be honest; I’m not even going to try
to thoroughly explain/describe a complete turn of play, because it
would basically require a re-write of the rules, and I haven’t got
that kind of energy. There’s a lot going on in Soft Landing
each turn. I’m just going to walk you through a rough idea of what
happens.
Very basically, the player with the lowest VP
score goes first. The first step for everyone to move tokens around
as needed. Red circles get tokens removed, green circles receive
tokens, and blue or yellow circles don’t do squat. Since actions you
want to take on your turn are fueled by tokens, this shuffling of
tokens may or may not help you out at the onset of the turn.
Then, a six sided die is rolled. Each of your
nation’s five attributes has a number or range of numbers associated
with it. For example, your Reserves attribute might be labeled
“1-2”. If the D6 number rolled matches a number on your attribute,
you put a token on that attribute. (So if a one or a two were
rolled, your Reserves circle would get a token.)
Each nation can then use its Special Abilities,
if they want (and if they’ve readied them with tokens during a
previous turn.) Using these abilities may garner you VPs, or allow
you to shift tokens related to your special ability around your
nation sheet to your advantage, or affect the Catastrophe Zone
tracks to hold off global crisis for one more day.
Whether you use Abilities or not, you may opt
to do some black market or free market trading to get tokens you
need. This seems useful, but beware that every time someone buys or
sells on one of the markets, the price then goes up or down for the
other players, respectively. Too many people going to the markets
for the same resources drive the prices way up, so buying resources
from the markets becomes more costly as the game goes on.
You could also opt to put tokens into the New
Tech Era, a vaguely defined resource representing the nations moving
towards some major technological breakthrough for the 21st
century. Placing tokens in the New Tech Era resource allows you to
remove tokens from a Catastrophe track, thus holding off impending
doom a bit longer during the game. (Tech Era allows for some other
tricks, too, but that’s what you need to know for now.)
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us
in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave
national emergency.” – Douglas MacArthur
Next,
players check for Stress. Certain circles on the nation sheets left
uncovered by tokens indicate that your nation lacks the ability to
supply what’s needed for your evolving country, and this causes
global stress. This world-wide freak out factor is represented by
adding markers to the stress tracks on the playing board, thus
driving the world towards a Catastrophe, with a capital “C.” To
check to see if disaster strikes during a given turn, dice are
rolled, with the target number being higher than the number
of tokens in a given stress track. If your roll is less than the
number of stress tokens… uh ooooh.
So, what’s the big whoop about Catastrophes?
To quote the rulebook, “Catastrophes are generally very, very bad.”
Well, there are minor and major mishaps that can occur. Minor
boo-boos cause the player(s) with the highest VP score to lose a
Victory Point. Major blunders cause a loss of 3 VPs. As if this
didn’t suck enough, one catastrophe can set off other catastrophes
on the track, causing even more point loss to the same, or
different, players.
On top of all of that, the nations that most
contributed to the catastrophe (whoever has the most of their
nations’ tokens on that stress track) get slammed with aftereffects,
such as losing useful tokens from their nations’ attribute circles.
The type of catastrophe that hits dictates exactly how players are
affected. For example, political disasters remove tokens from your
Outsourcing abilities, while environmental screw-ups remove tokens
from your Global Trade and Lifestyle circles. Part of the devious
strategy of the game is to set up scenarios where your opponents get
the worst blowback for contributing to the catastrophe, and thus are
on the receiving end of this fallout, making it harder for them to
manage their nations effectively and score or buy up Victory Points.
To again quote the rulebook, “One of your greatest joys as a
destructive player will be causing multiple other people to be
blamed for a major catastrophe.”
After stress and global catastrophes are dealt
with, players may all invest tokens in buying their Special
Abilities back up for the next round, or they may spend tokens to
outright buy VPs.
That’s a turn, more or less. Then the whole
shebang starts over. At some point, something will happen to trigger
an end game: a nation can bring about a New Tech Era, two major
catastrophes can occur, or any player reaches 30 VPs. Once one of
these happens, the game continues for one last turn, and whoever has
the most VP after that wins. Note that the person who triggered the
30 VP end game won’t necessarily win; if others are close to 30 VP
as well, they could bring the front runner down with a catastrophe,
or amass enough VP of their own on the final turn to surge ahead and
win. (Or someone could simply claim to be the winner, and if
discovered to not, in fact, have the most points, they could blame
the miscount on dangling chads…)
The rule book wraps up with five optional
variants for game play, including a two-player version.
The
GOOD
As Mr. Porter writes in the explanation of the
game’s basics, there’s very little left to chance in the game play.
Your standing at the end of each turn will be measured directly by
the decisions you and your fellow players make, and the foreseeable
consequences of those choices. Your devious strategy and the
educated management of your resources have a far greater effect on
your chances of winning than the few random dice rolls used in the
game.
In sidebars throughout the rules, and in a
short section near the book’s end, the designer offers tactics and
tips for playing, but really, the best way to devise a winning
global strategy seems to be to play the game repeatedly to get the
feel for it. Even using the same nations for each game, the game
play and outcome can be radically different depending on how
bloodthirsty or cooperative the players are. Soft Landing
seems to have solid replay value, and is a great game for
strategists and plotters who enjoy relying on their wits rather than
a randomizer for their sweet, sweet victories.
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The NEUTRAL
The game will take some practice to get good
at, and the rules and board are slightly confusing at first. Not so
much because the concept is difficult, but because everything is
colored tokens and a plethora of colored circles of about seven
different sizes. I had to read the rules I- don’t- know- how- many
times and stare at the nation sheets and playing board throughout
several readings of the booklet before I could recall what circle
was what and when to put tokens there. Plan on everyone using the
handy dandy reference sheets the first few times you play, at
least. You can
check out the short version intro rules for free by visiting this
link, just to see what you’ll be getting into. This free version
doesn't include the board or all the nation sheets, so you'll need
to order the full game for those, but that'll only run you $10.
Also, you’ll be stuck with the nation sheets
provided with the game, so you aren’t able to play any new nations
even once you’ve gotten the hang of Landing. There are no
rules for designing new real-world or imaginary lands, so I hope you
don’t have your heart set on playing the Sioux Nation or a tribe of
New Zealand Maori.
The
EVIL
There’s nothing inherently bad to point out
about this game at all. It is only available as a PDF, and
while this kobold doesn’t care for PDF-only game products as a
general rule, BTRC always puts out quality files… so those of you
who like the cheaper price and laptop-friendly qualities of software
products, well, here ya go.
If you plan on playing the game repeatedly, it
would well be worth the effort of printing it on cardstock of some
thick sort, or laminating it, or gluing it to a heavier-duty backing
than just the writing paper most printers use. Especially if you use
the printed tokens; one good sneeze from Eastern Europe and your
game board is screwed.
“However
fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is
an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.” –
Jacques Yves Cousteau
This is a well-designed, intricate, crafty
game. It’s not so much about world domination as it is about
resource control and agenda manipulation, so it’s a thinking man’s
pastime, and a fantastic opportunity for some table-side conniving
and deal making. It can be a straightforward power rush to the
finish, or an evening of international relations that would make a
UN negotiation seem like a Girl Scout campfire. If the subtle
machinations of global policy are your cup of sake, then
Soft Landing will be your kind of game.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a black market
tech deal to broker, and China’s just moved us one step closer to a
cascading international banking default of epic proportions. Gotta
run.
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