War. War never changes. What does change, however, are board games. Those suckers change all the time, with thousands of new ones coming out every year, sometimes in big boxes, others in little ones, and occasionally ones based on a popular property. That’s the case with Fallout: Power Play, a small-area control card game designed by Resurrectionist Games and published by Modiphius Games, currently up for pre-order. It’s a small game with some good bones to it, but its compact design is more of a hindrance than a benefit.
Fallout: Power Play puts two to four players in command of four possible factions, each with their own unique decks and special ability. These are the Brotherhood of Steel (good at completing missions to earn influence and hunkering down in a location), Super Mutants (lots of big and powerful unit cards to deploy at locations), the Enclave (excellent at disrupting other players’ turns), and Raiders (thieves, every last one of them).
On their turn, players deploy agents to locations, complete quests to earn rewards, and use their faction-specific ability, all in a bid to earn the most influence in the different places, netting you victory points. Whichever player has their agent holding a location at the end of the turn gains influence over the spot, with the top play considered to be “dominating” and earning a victory point. The first player to reach 10 points triggers the end game and scoring, with whoever has the most points winning at the end of that round.
Things get shaken up a bit thanks to the random Wasteland Encounter cards you draw at the start of each round, and unique Power Play cards that each player has in their deck. These events can range from spawning ghouls that attack everyone’s agents to even detonating an Atom Bomb Baby and destroying everything at the location(s) where players have the most influence. That one is a particularly fun card to see safely from the sidelines, as all of your friends’ units are blasted out of existence all at once in the region they were fighting so fiercely over.
If the encounter cards are the right hand of chaos in Power Play, then the titular Power Play cards in your deck are the left hand of chaos. These cards have the potential to be played not only on your turn, but also in response to other players’ actions. Think an Instant spell in Magic: The Gathering. This resulted in some tense back-and-forth, play-and-counterplay moments with my friends, and I often found myself holding my breath whenever I would put down one of my more powerful cards in hopes they wouldn’t get countered or worse.
While at first glace, Power Play may appear to be more of a simple “bigger number better” war game, the more I played, the more nuance and strategy I found in it. Each location only has spots for four agents, and in games with fewer players, this allows for you to allocate multiple agent resources to a location. But regardless of how much you are overpowering the other players in a spot, you will still only gain a single victory point at the end of the round. On the flip side, every round where you don’t have an agent at a location will result in your losing an influence at that location (to a minimum of 1), so it pays to spread out your forces.
This management almost makes Power Play into more of a worker placement game, and I often found myself opting to have one stronghold as my main “VP generator” and then spreading out and setting up at the other locations to pull off big influence gain turns by completing quest cards that would net me a boost in influence for a spot. Whenever I managed to pull off these well-laid plans, it tickled that good spot in my brain and never got old.
Resurrectionist Games, Power Play’s designer, has put together a card game with solid bones, and its focus on capturing and holding locations reminds me of the hot new TCG Riftbound. That said, issues surrounding the delivery and presentation of the game blemish and knock Power Play down some notches. The most disappointing of which is that the whole product feels less like a Fallout card game and more like something with the beloved property slapped on the side of it.
Despite the four factions and other nods to the Fallout universe, I never felt as though Power Play did much with the property. Instead of decks featuring notable characters from the games that fans would recognize, the designers opted for bland and generic fill-ins instead. Taking the Brotherhood of Steel deck, for instance, a group whose Power Armor is arguably just as synonymous with the series as the signature blue-and-yellow vault suits, your forces are composed of no-name cards like “Knight” or “Elder.” Instead of a generic Elder, why not have the lead agent be a character like Arthur Maxson or Sarah Lyons?
The home base locations of each of the factions feel rather soulless and are identical to one another from a gameplay standpoint. While “activate a location” is an option you can take on your turn, there are only two locations that have something to activate, with the others being the starting strongholds of each faction. They are “War Camp” or “Raider Fortress” instead of something memorable from the series, like Nuka-World or even a Vault. I would have appreciated these spots to be two-sided, with a generic, ability-less side and the other having an action associated with it and pulled from somewhere players would recognize if you were in the mood for a more advanced game mode. Alas, no such luck.
This more uninspired approach extends into the art and even the card descriptions. Keeping on the Brotherhood train, the Initiate and Field Scribe agent cards feature nearly identical character faces, and cards like their “Knight” read as “Each time Knight kills an Enemy…” which feels generic. Do these things impact how the game plays? No. But if you’re going to adapt a well-known property, you want it to feel meaningful, and considering the attention to detail I’ve come to expect from Modiphius, especially with Fallout, thanks to the Fallout TTRPG they also publish, Power Play just doesn’t get there.
My other main gripe with Power Play has to do with some of the quality control and decisions involved with how the game is packaged. Now, I’m all for a game being nice and compact; heck, one of the most prestigious awards I can give (in my mind anyway) is the Glovebox Award, given to games that are small and fun enough that I always want them with me wherever I go (Flip 7 is an example). It’s rare that I’ve found a game that feels too small – but Power Play does. Inside its box are spots for two decks of cards, with a small gap in between. Now, these two spots aren’t quite deep enough to contain all of the standard-sized cards included, causing some annoying shifting, and unfortunately, you can just forget sleeving your cards.
Fallout: Power Play also uses tokens to mark each faction’s influence in the regions and other little reminders. Unfortunately, these tokens are incredibly tiny. And while the faction tokens are at least color-coded, some of the reminder tokens, all of which are about 3/4 the size of a dime and contain text, are barely legible from anything more than maybe six inches from your face, let alone from across a table. Power Play may also be the first board game I have that uses tokens but doesn’t come with a small bag to keep them in. And to make matters more annoying, they easily slip into the small gap between the two decks. Thankfully, my cardboard hobby has granted me extra baggies that I was able to put them in, but beforehand, more than a couple of times, I spent more time than I care to admit trying to get some of these damn cardboard pieces out of the box.
Fallout: Power Play is a great example of how a bunch of little missed opportunities and annoyances can add up, and it’s a shame. This is one of those products that I can see potential and promise if Resurrectionist Games takes a bit more care into any future properties they adapt. The underlying game is fun, and I can imagine a day down the road where Power Play becomes the system, and you can buy additional sets, akin to, say, Smash Up!, and you can have the Brotherhood of Steel facing off against the forces of the Borg from Star Trek, or the demons of Hell from Doom pushing back Super Mutants. That’s a game I would love to play, and if they put a bit more care into those sets, you can count me in day one. It may even make it into the glovebox.
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