Hyperborea is a game about timing

(Originally posted on BoardGameGeek and G+. This review is after ten plays with all powers and player counts up to five.)

Hyperborea is a good game.

I think the biggest problem with it is setting expectations. From the box art and blurb, players are led to believe this is going to be a Runewars-style experience – heavy on narrative and epic fantasy. Those players will be disappointed.

This game is a puzzle with some interesting player interaction, heavy on the planning and light on the story. There’s theme to be had, but it plays second fiddle to the meat of the game: “how can I best use the resources available to me to score victory points?” “when should I push to end the game?” “which is the best special ability to help my strategy?”

Politics? Effectively none. History? Ignorable. This is not a board game that tells a compelling story. Instead, you get one of the best planning games I’ve seen in a while, with some minor flaws around how the game attempts to mitigate analysis paralysis.

See, Hyperborea is a game about timing. Unlike Orléans (another entry in the “bag builder” genre), here you know exactly what you’re going to get over the course of a few turns. You don’t know what order they’ll come out, but between this refresh and the next, you can precisely determine what actions you’ll be able to take. This is the cornerstone of good play.

In Orléans, actions taken place the tokens back in the bag, so you could see that singular Monk several times in several turns. In this game you’ll have no such luck. That change makes it extremely important that you plan out your bag. Wasted cubes are inefficient, so avoid them.

To keep turns from getting stale, the game provides a ton of incentives to mess with the contents of your bag.

• Technologies (which provide victory points, alternate actions, and a way of causing endgame) add a gray cube to your bag, which isn’t given an action by default.
• Many location actions give you a cube, or cost a cube to activate.
• Powerful technologies hold onto cubes across refreshes.
• Each colored cube is a VP at the end of the game, which is a heavy incentive to purchase when scores hover in the low tens.

People tend to enter this game with deck-building heuristics: keep your deck lean, try to build an engine, score VPs when you’re making your lunge for victory. This is a mistake. Your bag isn’t your deck. VPs in this game don’t slow you down. Many of your actions aren’t cube-related, so control of the board is as important as off-board actions is as important as gathering the right technology.

There are many great design decisions here, especially from a perspective of replayability:

• Asymmetric players that have a choice of starting powers, making every game different.
• Even your starting bag has a choice (one of each color, plus one of your choice).
• The randomized world means that sometimes it’ll be difficult to move around, but – because of the exploration mechanic – you don’t know how difficult in the early game.
• A ton of technology cards means the actions available in one game aren’t guaranteed to come up in the next.

Ok, so lots to recommend this. However, I’d never play with six, or even five. Four is pushing it. I think it’s best with two. Why? Analysis paralysis.

You know how in Dominion there’s always someone who wants to take the mega-turn? “Here, give me a few minutes while I play out all the cards in my deck.” In a game where most turns you barely have enough time to shuffle before your turn comes up again, these are major speed-bumps to enjoyment. In Hyperborea the mega-turn happens every refresh.

You see, most of the time you only have three cubes to assign, and generally (with good habits, anyway), this is quick. You plan out your turn, execute one-and-a-half actions, and pass. However: just after refresh, all of your figures on the board are free for assignment. Board actions often give you additional actions – movement, for example, opens up new avenues of attack at the very least.

There are several design decisions that exacerbate this. Exploration, which makes the opening so crucial, also makes turns longer. New information that comes in the middle of a player’s turn gives them new things to think about. New things to think about could possibly change their plan. The default Technology rule allows (practically forces) you to draw two new cards to optionally replace existing ones. More new information.

I’ve been attempting to figure out how Hyperborea could use my favorite design pattern (interleaved turns) to keep turns small and make a six-player game possible, but it’s extremely difficult. Turns are already [ostensibly] small, with the occasional refresh+explosion of map actions throwing a wrench into it. This provides a ton of strategic depth, as you can combine icons to generate larger effects, but only on a single turn. It’s like floating mana in [Magic: The Gathering]. The game loses a bunch without it, and some actions become impossible.

I’ll keep thinking about it, but if anyone here has a suggestion, let me know. Otherwise, keep it to groups of two or three.