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Well that’s the real question isn’t it?” laughs the designer, “that is exactly what you’re trying to figure out.” It’s a bit like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book with your puzzle-solving skills determining the outcomes.
Gameplay starts off with a simple tutorial-like round, then gets progressively more challenging over the course of 14 missions. There’s also a trove of extra content: 24 more missions are available after the main game is completed, without an accompanying story but arranged by category in a different sort of structure. Each player controls one of the characters as they navigate around a game board, collecting clues that allow you to flip windows covering parts of the mission card and reveal hidden information behind it. You can guess any time if you think you’ve figured out the answer, but if you’re wrong you fail the mission. The first mission feels a little like an easy round of Wheel of Fortune, but things get more complicated fast as the solutions change formats to involve numerical sequences or scrambled words. There are a few situations that require you to think outside the box, and these moments are very rewarding. I want to avoid spoilers, but I can say that there is at least one big thing that has never been done before in a board game,” says the designer, “with the puzzle aspect of the missions, I designed them to slowly build up your knowledge of how the game works. Each chapter of the campaign slowly increases the complexity and we occasionally flip things on their head.” Read the instructions thoroughly at the start, and refamiliarize yourself with the rules in between sessions. There are a lot of details to remember.
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That’s not to say that it’s not a game with challenge of course – Konieczka is a designer with a pedigree in making interesting choices central to his games. The game gets brownie points with me for its unconventional design that makes it easy to ignore the couple of minor flaws I found: the components not always lending themselves to communal play and some of the codes being perhaps a little too simple. Despite this, The Initiative is distinct from its peers and well worth giving a try. Mapping this to my personal journey, when I was making BSG I was in my mid 20s and newlywed. Now I’m in my late 30s and I have a kid of my own. As a parent, I have a new perspective. It gave me a strong desire to revisit the lost days of youth; when we felt like we could change the world.” Four teens find a spy-themed board game called The Key at a yard sale and decide to play it together. When mysterious events start occurring in real life, they resolve to uncover the truth behind the game’s origins.
Close attention to the comics and other game materials revealed secret messages that sometimes changed the story or permanently affected gameplay. AnalysisIf you haven’t played a campaign board game before, think of it as a video game with different “levels.” Each level is a self-contained play session (in The Initiative, a session lasts 30-60 minutes) in which you either win or lose, but either way, you discover more of the story and possibly change the rules of the game for the next session. The story, gameplay, and puzzles all felt satisfying on their own, but also intertwined in unique ways that felt novel for a board game. This wasn’t the case with The Initiative. My friend and I breezed through in three play sessions. And, while it would be difficult to fully reset the campaign due to some of those legacy elements. The game does come with twenty-four extra missions that also promise another meta-puzzle within them. Though I haven’t tried these yet. The story starts with a group of four teenagers buying a strange board game at a yard sale,” says Konieczka, “as they play it, they discover that the game is tied to their lives in strange ways, and they vow to discover the mysteries surrounding the game.” In this gorgeous tile-placement game about nature and the Pacific Northwest, players compete to build the best salmon run, the best bear habitat or the largest collection of deer. The beautiful cards and art were designed by, as Mik Fitch says, “the queen of board game art” Beth Sobol (who also illustrated Wingspan, from our 2019 guide).
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