Barrage

One of our favorites is undoubtedly Barrage. Great, unique theme, the game is very complex and challenging, it can be a slightly different experience for each number of players depending on the temperament, it's very atmospheric, compared to the fact that it is a complex euro.

According to the story, we are in the dystopian past sometime in the 1920s. The first great world conflagration has already ended, but industrial development has taken a strange direction, because in the wake of Tesla's legacy, a new war is unfolding between the mountains of the Alps. A fight for the use of water, for the continuously extractable energy inherent in it, because everything electric in the world and with a few well-designed dams, pipelines and power plants can gain leading power whose engineers design their systems more efficiently, thus producing more energy.

Befitting a complex Euro, many interrelated rules and details, numerous options raise its complexity to 4 points on BGG. The important event of the game, the construction, takes place on the central board, which is divided into three parts. There are 4 water basins in the mountains and 3 in the hills and plains connected to the rivers, with a different number of locations for the construction of specific structures. We can build a dam in 3 sizes, which helps the river to work, a pipeline through which we can channel the water for our own benefit, and a power plant, which we can use to convert the water's work into energy.

The game develops the Interaction between the players in an exciting way, as we can only convert the water captured by our own (and a couple of independent) dams into energy in our own power plant, but we can use the pipelines built by anyone by paying some money and bringing the other to victory points, but we can even divert water from our competitor if we build a dam above it

In order to build, we need to have Machines, which are not very richly measured in the game, these can be Concrete Mixers or Digging Machines, of which we need to use more in the mountainous part of the central board, and less and less as we move towards the river section crossing the plains. We work with our 12 engineers per round to be successful, we use them as workers distributed among countless possibilities, we can hire them to build, earn money, obtain contracts, and we can deploy them in quite a few other locations.

The game brings the theme casually and easily, which - let's face it - is still industrial and dry at first hearing. But the graphics, the background story, the gameplay and the constructions that stand out from the board come together well into a very atmospheric, serious game. Into a strategic, brain-burning, heavy thematic euro. The gameplay is varied from party to party, due to the individual abilities of the selectable Directors and their assistants, the spinning wheel is an interesting mechanism, there are plenty of decision options and, for those who enjoy it and want it, real, hard interaction with their fellow players.

It takes up so much space on the table with the large central board and the 3 smaller boards, plus the player boards, spinning wheel and the board for individual helpers that even the large playmat just barely fits! Although if we are a little clever with the layout, we can have more places, the photos show the Retro 140x80 playmat with three players.

Regarding the quality, there were several complaints about the first edition, there was a non-functioning rotating wheel, bent and misprinted two-layer player boards on the stage, our version was relatively free of errors, but it was far from perfect. But anyway, the graphics are beautiful, large and thick boards and tiles, the presentation is demanding, it's nice to look at.