BATMAN: EVERYBODY LIES

A bit of a cape-er

2022-11-25 - Designer: Weronika Spyra & Ignacy Trzewiczek | Publisher: Portal Games GEORGE BARKER

Crime is rife in Gotham city, a new gang is on the rise and I guess Batman is busy. Under the guidance of Commissioner Gordon it’s up to you to save the day where the corrupt system has failed. Batman: Everybody

Lies is a coop investigation game that features a short introductory case and three main cases for you to solve (I played everything in about eight hours). Players will be asked a question at the start of each case and they must then pursue leads to deduce the answer. Each lead pursued is a card that offers a short written scene from the point of view of one of the playable characters. Leads will also give access to various computer files (a phone, tablet, or laptop is required) and comic book panels to set the scene. The fewer leads you need to correctly solve the case, the better your score.

The mysteries are engaging and feature multiple threads for you to unravel, working out which are the red herrings and which will lead you closer to cracking the case. The small side plots layered within each mystery do a great job at making Gotham feel alive. You’re rewarded for paying attention as background details and characters from one mystery might show up in the next. The cognitive sparks as you recognise something from a previous case goes a long way to making you feel like a hard-boiled detective. It’s a shame then that the game only has three full cases but the evolving story across the cases isn’t something I’ve seen done in other investigation games.

How much do I need to know about Batman I hear you ask? Not much. The game doesn’t hinge any of its logical leaps on deep bat lore. A passing familiarity with the caped crusader is enough to get you by. While Batman might be on the cover, the real star of the game is Gotham city and the glorious noirish nonsense it’s home to. There’s a melodrama to Everybody Lies that keeps things light and fun in a way that feels refreshing after some of

the drier moments in the many Holmesian games of this genre.

The game’s stories are a joy if you approach them in the right mindset (prep those silly voices), however the actual mechanics feel a bit wonky. There’s an economy of ‘investigation tokens’ to keep track of, that can be spent on accessing certain leads. The system feels a bit arbitrary and fiddly in places so much so I’d almost suggest ignoring it altogether.

Every character is given a personal goal that the game suggests you might want to keep hidden. From a thematic perspective, that makes sense. Four people thrown together in a corrupt city, working outside the system, each with their own agenda, would understandably be wary of each other. However, it’s a co-op game and you’re better off sharing everything. The rich world and personal goals encourage you to read as many leads as possible yet you’re pushed to reach a conclusion, placing fun at odds with efficiency.

With each lead, there’s a chance it contains bonus info for a certain character who can spend investigation tokens to access it. If you’re rushing to solve the case with as few leads as possible, your character might never find their specific bonus discovery.

Finally, the token that marks your location is a blimp, suggesting that this is the team’s mode of transport. This is never mentioned once in the game, though it does seem like a crucial part of the mental picture one builds as each scene is read aloud.

If you put aside the wonky mechanics and gather a friend or two for a few hours of silly voices and conspiracy diagrams then there’s some real fun to be had here.

ABoard&Dice

mong the ever-growing series of other Mesoamerican Eurogames, Zapotec has an immediate advantage: it has an easily pronounceable name. It also has another advantage, although this one is less obvious: for a Eurogame that comes with all the trappings expected of the genre, Zapotec is a fast-flowing game.

Zapotec is roughly divided into three strands of gameplay. There is the main board, where players compete in light area control by constructing buildings in various areas of the board and picking up tiles that will assist them with setting up their resource production engine. That happens on the individual player boards, where the tile is added to one of the spaces on the three-bythree grid. During their turn, players can select certain lines of that grid earning all the resources from the tiles activated this way. Finally, there is resource management. There is lots to build and everything costs a specific combination of resources. The most exciting constructions are the pyramids (which is the only real contribution of the otherwise immediately forgettable theme). Composed of several stackable pieces, the same pyramid can be built by different players resulting in aesthetically pleasing multi-coloured construction. As you would expect, there are multiple ways to earn victory points during the game including inbetween round scoring, progressing along the Sacrifice track, completing objectives (here known as Ritual cards) and earning points for various constructions.

There is a lot going on and it is easy to wonder how a single game of Zapotec can consist of only five rounds and cover all its aspects. Perhaps, the game could have been convoluted if not for the addition of its final element: the action cards.

Action cards have multiple purposes. Firstly, they set the initiative order for that round. Secondly, they

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Main board

◗ 4 Player board

◗ 45 Building tiles

◗ 4 Palace tiles

◗ 36 Trade tiles

◗ 9 Scoring tiles

◗ 90 Resource tiles

◗ 27 Action cards

◗ 27 Cocijobot cards

◗ 4 Reference cards

◗ 36 Houses

◗ 20 Discs

◗ 12 Small pyramid

pieces

◗ 8 Medium pyramid

pieces

◗ 4 Large pyramid

pieces

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

◗ Game board

◗ 20 Section tiles

◗ 33 Structures (5 golden, 6 silver, 7 brown, 15 natural)

◗ 22 Equipment tiles

◗ 23 Achievement

tiles

◗ 19 Year bonus tiles

◗ 64 Action tiles (16 each in four action colours)

◗ Draw bag

◗ First player marker

◗ 4 Player mats/solo

player mats

◗ 200 Cubes (50 each in four player colours)

◗ 4 Supervisor pawns (1 each in four player colours)

◗ 4 Assistant pawns (1 each in four player colours)

◗ 4 Scoring discs (1 each in four player colours)

◗ 16 Quadrant markers (4 each in four player colours)

◗ 8 Play aids

◗ 4 Solo play aids

14+ and then popping faces off dice and upgrading them. It’s got a tactile element that gives it a rhythm that anyone can fall into, it’s got a similar feeling to picking up a snack after your move and it’s thoroughly satisfying. The game ending trigger is also as simple – any time one of the token piles needs a 10 token adding to it to make change, that’s the last round. You have nothing to remember.

Dice Realms was a kind of respite of satisfying gameplay, perfect flow, and accessibility. It can slip into your life like you’ve always had it on yourself. It feels dependable and you can entrust it with your time (because of the huge amount of depth and replayability that promises many returns to the table). This is a roll of the dice you can be sure comes up in your favour.

CHRISTOPER JOHN EGGETT

15+

And it’s here that it’s very easy to get tricked. A big group of your friends having a great time, in your home, laughing, joking – that feeling is a Must-Play feeling, right? This is where Blood On The Clocktower excels – you’re able to generate so much in the way of good fun between people (and, to fully explain, we played the game in one of our sessions for 7 hours in a row). The production leans into it. You’re not sat at the traditional ‘biggest table in the house’ – you’re forced into a slightly more comfy room, as the storyteller has to move around in the middle, between players, to wake them up with a tap on the shoulder. Players can also get up to have private chats, separately. It becomes theatrical in that way, everyone reads into everything too much, people fall out in-game and fun little stories about who knew what and who lied about who.

CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT

WE SAY

Buy it for your group, or ask your game store to run event nights. It will create great evenings, and even a reason to get people together, but maybe share the burden of the cost between you all.

AAlderac Entertainment Group

t first glance, John D. Clair’s nautical 4X game is yet another title which embraces the kind of high-seas skulduggery repopularised by the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Don’t get us wrong – Dead Reckoning does feature piracy. You can hoist your black sail (represented by a piracy token that slots neatly into your dinky ship miniature) and plant an imaginary parrot on your shoulder whenever you like. But that is not the whole story here.

As you’d expect from a 4X title, which awards victory from a wide menu of possible achievements (ship upgrading, trading, exploring, island-owning, sinking other player’s ships, etc.), there are a variety of ways to play. You could lean into the mercantile side of things, trading cargo with the merchant ships you encounter on your voyages in Clair’s mildly fantastical world. Or you might style yourself as a privateer, charging around the frankly gorgeous modular board, building fortifications on islands and aggressively tackling any threats that arise, whether they’re drawn from the Advancement decks or created by your fellow players.

The way piracy works is interesting, if a little counter-intuitive. At the end of your turn, you can announce you’re

going into “piracy mode”. This doesn’t mean you can attack other players (that action is granted by certain ability cards for your crew), rather that you can be attacked. It’s basically a “come at me” move – with the added bonus that if any other player stops on your current ocean tile, they can’t interact with it unless they fight you first... Even if the ocean tile contains an island they own, with their money and/or cargo stored on it. It’s a fun wrinkle – although, as we say, entirely optional. You can have a satisfying game without any pirate antics at all.

And it is a very satisfying game. Clair has built it around the same “card crafting” mechanism he innovated for 2016’s Mystic Vale, and it’s implemented perfectly. Your crew of 12 sailors – represented by mostly blank sleeved cards – not only level up as the game progresses, they’ll also be able to slot in new abilities granted from encounter cards. Which ones you level up and upgrade depends on what your focus is. The bosun, for example, gives you access to building construction; the purser will enable you to produce at islands you control.

Clair also makes conflict a component-based treat, via an elaborate cardboard-ship cube tower, into which your combat-strengthrepresenting cubes are dropped.

The results are determined by where they fall on a battle board: plunder obtained, hits taken, explosions and victory points.

If we have a criticism, it’s that the base game is quite, well, basic. The only encounters are merchant ships, which you either attack or trade with. The real exploratory flavour only comes with the “Saga” expansions (of which there are currently two, with a third on the way), which add in story elements, some narrative choice with certain encounters, and a smidge of Legacy, especially if you choose the campaign mode. Meanwhile, if you crave a bit of asymmetry in the crew decks, you’ll want the smaller Sea Dogs expansion, which gives you different crew members.

Even if you choose not to fork out for all the extra stuff, there is still a great game in here, whose multiple courses to victory allow for sufficient variety and replayability. It’s just a shame the best experience Dead Reckoning offers lies beyond its coreset borders.

DAN JOLIN WE SAY

❚

A superb, deeply thematic game with innovative mechanisms. If any of the expansion material were available in the core box, it would deserve a ‘Must-Play’.

hold a single active worker, but as there are multiple ways and spaces to do each action, you’re rarely blocked from what you need to do. However, movement beyond one space costs gold which you’d rather be spending elsewhere – moving along your typical Euro-style tracks or building places for your rescued people to work. You definitely need to plan strategically, but other players are bound to get in your way in that again typically euro ‘passive interaction’ way.

Once on a hex you’ll first deal with the plague, then save any people present, before doing the hex’s action. Plague needs fire (a resource) to get rid of it, but you’re rewarded with a move on the popularity track – which in turn gives all kinds of nice rewards. And not dealing with it earns you rats, that will punish you for points at the end of the game – and there’s no way to get rid of them. Saved residents move to your player board (if you have space). Ones from plagued hexes go into one of four quarantine buildings for two turns before joining the others. The rest go into one of 18 action spaces on your board, which can be triggered later. Actions do what you’d expect – allow you to build, move you on tracks, and give resources. You’ll earn resources and points for working citizens on your board and can later use them to repopulate the city for even more points.

I’ve not been a fan of Vladimir Suchý’s games in the past. They’ve tended to hide overly long, dry experiences behind themes that suggest otherwise. Perhaps it is the influence of relative newcomer Raúl Fernández Aparicio as co-designer, but this time they’ve nailed it. The theme doesn’t suggest anything but ‘dry Euro’, which feels appropriate. While the gameplay is satisfying and – most importantly – just the right length. Every action feels important, while there are definitely a variety of workable routes to victory. And there’s just enough passive interaction to keep you watching the other players throughout. Sometimes actions trigger other actions, which can get a little messy mentally. But equally this can be hugely satisfying to pull off. Getting a complex Euro to play in little more than an hour (for two players) is an artform in itself, and is a keeper for me because they’ve pulled it off with aplomb.