It Came From the Tabletop! - Fowers Games Roundup and Back to the Future Double Feature

I don’t think Al adequately expressed just how much I love these Fower games. They are so smart, fresh, fun and exciting. I love the world they create. The art work is gorgeous. With the exception of Burgle Bros (which is co-op), you are 100% playing against the other player(s), not the game or the system.

Hey, I don’t think I quite articulated why Back In Time (the Prospero Hall one) is so good or why I prefer its structure to Pandemic-like co-ops.

I started saying on the podcast that rather than random spots putting out Bad Stuff to deal with, you actually get to see what kind of things will be coming out on what turn. You know that they’re increasingly difficult to deal with and on somethings you know you need to meet a certain criteria to avoid it (ie, the McFly photograph). The details of some of these things you don’t know and they change the rules in big, meaningful ways. This gives you a trajectory that you should be trying to follow as you balance getting the end game goals accomplished and try to have some better power tokens to handle the increasing difficulty curve.

It’s also never a done deal. Any time you roll the dice you can roll as many as you have power tokens for. But each die can also move Biff. It remains tense and up in the air right up to the very last turn. It’s great.

I don’t play with alpha players, so the biggest sin any co-op can commit is the slippery slope, when you start to win winning gets easier and when you start to lose, you just lose faster. It’s 2020, we don’t need to any more of those. Back In Time is a really novel solution to that type of game and is just as accessible as Pandemic while also delivering strong on the narrative front.