Horizon Zero Dawn: The Board Game is a board game that feels like it’s trying to be a video game. In a lot of ways, it does this successfully! It stays true to the core idea of the 2016 video game released by PlayStation. Each character plays a hunter, and is put into a TTRPG style map, facing off against the mechanical beasts originally introduced in the video game. This game has a lot of fun mechanics an opportunities in it, the biggest of which being its interesting mesh between its competitive and cooperative aspects. Additionally, the game has an aspect of asymmetrically, which I really enjoy in a board game, as I can get a different experience playing it multiple different times. Finally, this game tackles hit points in a way I’ve never seen before out of a board game: each player has their own personal deck that they draw from during the combat phase, which doubles as their hit points. When monsters do damage, the player must discard from their deck, and if they are out of cards, they faint. When a player faints, they skip their next turn and must discard any glory points they currently have (glory points are awarded to players for killing monsters). Also, as an added bonus, the game comes with a ton of awesome minis that make my little kid brain happy.
The game is split into two general phases: combat, and shop. Combat phases are when a map is picked by one of the players, the monsters and players are put on the board, and then there’s, well, combat with the monsters. This phase is really interesting because it requires the players to tow a fine line between helping and hindering the people they are playing with. On one hand, if the players don’t defeat enough monsters, they will fail the combat and won’t reap the rewards of winning. But on the other hand, YOU as an individual want to be the one to defeat the monsters, because the player who defeats the monster gets glory points. The player with the most glory points at the end of each combat phase gets a sun token, and the player with the most sun tokens at the end of the game wins. Additionally, the player who defeats the monster can salvage it for scrap, which they can spend in the shop phase. So it’s a constant battle of playing nice with your allies while secretly doing less damage than you can on your turn so that the monster will still be around when it comes back around to you. Or you can do what I found myself doing, which is to just blatantly play selfishly and hope that I’m lucky.
Shop phases are when whatever the current shop deck (based on the level of the previous combat phase) is laid out and players can use items that they salvaged during the combat phase on gear that might help them in the future. During this phase, if the players defeated an encounter higher than their level, they level up at this time, moving the token on their skill tree and adding cards to their deck.
Now with everything I’ve written so far, to someone who has never played the game, it might seem like there’s a lot to this game. And let me tell you, there is. And here is my major gripe with this game: the game is so difficult to learn how to play. The rulebook is almost unreadable; It is laid out so poorly, and nothing is where you think it should be. All of the player cards, as well as the monster cards, have somewhere between 4-8 different symbols which are not explained in one coherent place. Many different kinds of decks have the same backs, so its incredibly difficult to sort them into their respective piles without knowing what the cards do already. Some just completely deviate from a potential pattern. I remember the first time I played the game, all of us were new players and we spent almost an hour just setting up the game, because we didn’t understand what any of the cards did or where they went. I respect a complicated game with a bunch of different symbols and icons to designate everything, but as a note to the designers: if you make a lot of symbols, please put aside a page in the rulebook to label each symbol and tell me what they mean. And, I want to emphasize the “each” in that note, because the rulebook does have a “Quick Reference” page on the back, which only covers some of the icons. To me, that’s even more infuriating. I got incredibly frustrated at one point because every time I had a question about the rules I had to sift through the entirety of the 52-page rulebook.
That being said, though, once I understood how to play the game, I had a great time. It really feels like a true board game RPG experience, realized with upgradable weapons and skill trees and bossfights. I don’t have any of the expansions (which, for reference, are all different “campaigns” i.e. the boss you fight in the final round is different, and I believe some expansions also have more shop cards, map tiles, etc.) but unfortunately the people who I learned how to play the game with aren’t people who have ready access to WGL, and I’m dissuaded from teaching new players how to play with how unhelpful the rulebook is. But if you can trudge your way through learning the rules (or honestly, find a youtube video that explains them, that’s probably a better option), it’s a very fun experience that will take longer than the box lets on. Happy hunting!
