Virtual Revolution review — Servers temporarily offline

Have you ever picked up a weird indie game as part of a humble bundle, gotten around to playing it, and been oddly impressed? I’m not going to try to find the German compound word I’m sure exists, but your mind isn’t blown, and you’re probably never going to play it again, but it’s quirky and unique in a way that makes you happy it exists for the three people who will play it ‘til the day they die. Virtual Revolution is that game, as a board game, neophyte co-designers Guy-Roger Duvert and Cyril Villalonga’s attempt at adapting Duvert’s selfsame movie. You might have guessed it, they tried to do too much for a first design.

What you probably didn’t guess though, is that just about everything in this genre potpourri is mechanically immaculate. The engine building with agents is crunchy after the first couple rounds, and it’s always tempting to retire an agent from your active pool to get an extra action. Area control hits the sweet spot where you’re always torn between protecting your territory and expanding to get a new neighborhood power. You can sink your money into servers or verses, decide on if you’re going to just take an interpol raid and necro attack on the jaw, your economy is built strong enough, or divert to grab some immunity tokens. Hell, even the pseudo-worker placement of the directors is a great piece of crunch. Do you need them there most to help with your area control game, or do you need them on the other side of the map to recruit an agent for your engine? There’s so much here, and I’m impressed at how well executed it all is, especially for a first design. Hats off to the designers, I sincerely hope they continue to design games as hard as I bounced off this one, because all my gripes I can lay firmly in the lap of publisher Studio H.

Most games that ask their players to parse this much information right off the bat, especially in pure iconography, provide a player aid. Virtual Revolution doesn’t, which is a strange choice. Most games with this many options devote specific areas of the board to specific options, but since this is also an area control game with discs that doesn’t really work,and why they chose circles, which any teen in a geometry class can tell you that circles don’t pack nicely in an area, is a mystery to me. Sure, you’ve got the top area that has the verses market, and the bottom area contains the available agents, but you’ve got to find where on the map the corresponding marker is, so it doesn’t actually work. And now we get to the really baffling decisions. The neighborhood powers, which can kick engines into eightieth gear and make and break games? They’re on 3”x1.5”minicards instead of being printed on the board, so I hope you memorized some text and iconography you hadn’t even learned yet during teach and setup. Because now they’re all either on the other side of the table, in front of another player, or tucked in a rulebook that I guarantee someone will be actively looking at at any given time. So asking for it just to peruse feels less like imposing and more like you seriously can’t because they’re looking at it to solve a rules query or figure out a misprint or something. These would all be small issues, trivial ones even, if there were individual player aids, but instead they compound into almost game-breaking ones. Throughout the game, we also found ourselves frustrated at the lack of clearly indicated endgame scoring criteria anywhere on the main or player boards. I’ll be wrapping this up with one final gripe that I feel speaks to the general lack of thought put into how production decisions would affect the player experience: both the player boards and the influence discs that fit into their gaps when they’re not in the main board are ⅛” thick. That would be fine, I’ve got absolutely no issues with that, but it does mean that if the player boards wind up warping at all, and two of my four have, you can no longer actually slot your discs into them as intended. No big deal, we wound up just stacking ours to the side for our inter-round count, but it’s indicative.

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