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Zeppelin Attack! is a deckbuilding (or card drafting) game in the style of Dominion or Ascension, probably the two most popular and well-known in this particular gamespace. The core mechanic for this type of game is that each player starts with a fixed set of cards (usually in the ballpark of 10-12) as their own deck, from which they draw and play cards, ultimately with the goal of adding more/more powerful cards into their deck and acquiring victory points which are tallied up at the end of the game. Zeppelin Attack! throws in some interesting features that are novel to the deckbuilding genre to great effect, resulting in a thematic (the game is set in Evil Hat Productions' pulpy 30's-style adventure oriented Spirit of the Century setting that served as the basic setting for their FATE rules, and which has a few short stories and novellas associated with various SotC Kickstarter projects fleshing it out a smidge) game that neatly blends some classic Eurogame signatures with Ameritrash interactivity and theme, and wraps it up in some of the best card game layout I've seen.
Description of Play:
To begin a game of Zeppelin Attack, each player chooses a start deck, each of which is themed with art and card names to fit one of 4 iconic Spirit of the Century villains: Der Blitzmann, Jaqueline Frost, the Walking Mind, and Gorilla Khan. The starting decks are designated by being the only cards with white borders, and each card has their villain's name in the keywords section in case they get mixed up. From this starting deck, each player removes their Flagship, the main and most versatile zeppelin that is always available to each player. This is placed in front of the player and always remains in play. To the starting deck, each player adds a 3-point Fate Card and a 4-point Fate card; as Fate Cards are the currency with which new cards are bought, this provides the seed to help jump-start the deck's purchasing power without first requiring several buy-less rounds in a row.
Next, the Mercenary Cards (conveniently designated by their black card borders) are divided up into their 5 types: Operatives, Defenses, Attacks, Operations Zeppelins, and Attack Zeppelins. These 5 stacks (6 if the Doomsday Weapons expansion is included, as it adds a Science Zeppelin type to the Mercenary cards) are each shuffled individually and placed face-up in the center of the play area. Next, the remaining Fate Cards are shuffled and placed face-down in the center, and each player places their villain's experimental card(s) (with red borders) near the Mercenary areas, and shuffles their starting decks, and finally draws a hand of 5 cards.
Players then play in turns. Each turn consists of an Action phase, a Buy phase, and a Discard & Draw phase, in that order.
During the Action phase, a player may play zeppelins and action cards from his or her hand. Zeppelins have no prerequisites to play, but Actions must be played on a zeppelin that possesses the corresponding capacity. If an action card is played that exceeds a zeppelin's capacity, that zeppelin is overloaded and must retreat (return to the discard pile) at the end of the turn instead of remaining out to potentially be played upon next turn. Flagships cannot be overloaded, so cannot have 3-rated operations or attacks played from a Flagship.
Actions come in 3 varieties: Attack, Defense, and Operations. These are color coded with boxes at the edge of the card, and each has a rating represented by a number inside that box. Defenses played on a player's own turn are a source of draw effects and may be played out of turn to block attacks against your fleet. Operations acquire Fate cards, injecting currency into either the hand, discard, or top of the player's draw deck. Attacks will target another player's Zeppelin or Flagship, and feature a mix of beneficial effects for the attacker and detrimental effects for the target. Attacks and Defenses may have some effects that only work when the attack is unblocked, effects that only work when the card is played defensively against an attack, and general effects that happen regardless of when the defense is played or whether the attack connects. These are handily color coded and denoted with icons as well.
Attacks are suited with one of 4 damage types, Cold, Electric, Explosive, or Psionic, and Defenses defend against one, two, or three of those damage types depending on the power of the card. Each starting deck consists of one Attack for each damage type, two single-suit Defenses and a double-suit Defense to provide full coverage, and two Operations cards. The Doomsday Weapons expansion adds in Atomic attacks and Defense cards that combine Atomic and one other suit.
When an Attack is played, the attacking player declares another player's Zeppelin or Flagship as the target of the attack, and the attack's damage type. The target's owner then draws a card from his or her draw deck if the target was a Flagship, and then may play a Defense card from his or her hand of the matching damage type on the target. Any matching Defense card will block the attack regardless of the Attack and Defense's respective ratings. If the Attack was blocked, the target's owner resolves the Defense and General effects of the Defense action card (usually card draw or forcing a discard on the attacker), and then the attacking player resolves any General effects on the Attack action card. If the attack is not blocked, the Attacker takes any card from the Mercenary card piles and places it face-down under his or her Flagship as a Battle Point worth one Victory Point at the end of the game, and then resolves the Attack card's Attack and General effects. The target zeppelin is forced to retreat to the owner's discard pile provided it's not a Flagship.
Operations are the primary economic engine, and will involve drawing Fate Cards to be placed into circulation in the player's deck. More powerful ones will draw directly to the hand, less powerful ones will deposit the new Fate Cards into the player's discard pile, delaying the gain. Often they will call for multiple Fate Cards to be drawn, and only add the lowest (or occasionally highest) to the player's cards. Fate Cards sometimes have special effects that take place when they're acquired, such as forcing everybody to discard a card or permitting everybody to deploy any Zeppelins in their discard pile.
The active player may play as many Zeppelins as they wish from their hand, and may play as many Actions as they have Zeppelins to host one action (of an appropriate type) per turn. The ever-present nature of Flagships ensures that a player will never be unable to do anything on their turn, though the inability to overload means that Flagships cannot be relied upon to execute the most powerful (3-rated) Attacks and Operations.
Next up in the turn order is the Buy Phase. Fate Cards in-hand may be spent to purchase the top Mercenary Card from any of the piles in the center of the table by returning the Fate Cards with sufficient value to match or exceed the FP cost listed on the Mercenary Card to the Fate Card discard pile in the center of the table. Bought Mercenary cards go directly to the player's hand, and any time a Mercenary Action card is bought, the player may opt to purge one Action card from their hand or discard pile, removing it from their deck and placing it under their Flagship, face-down, with the Battle Points. Any purged cards are also worth 1 Victory Point at the end of the game, and serves to keep the deck thin as you acquire more powerful Actions.
Finally, the player removes any played Actions from their Zeppelins and any overloaded Zeppelins and places them in his or her discard pile. The player also has the option to discard any number of cards from their hand, and then draws (or, rarely, discards) until they have 5 cards in-hand again, at which point their turn ends.
The game's end is determined by the emptying of 3 Mercenary Card stacks (or 2 with the Expansion, since it increases the sizes of each by about 50%), after which point play continues until end of the player to the right of the starting player. Battle Points and purged cards are worth 1VP each, the player with the most unspent Fate Points remaining in their deck (draw, hand, and discard piles) gets a 3VP bonus, and then each Mercenary Card and Experimental Card is worth a number of VP indicated on the card.
So those are the rules. Now let me describe what makes this game stand out from other deckbuilders.
As much as I love deckbuilding games, it's often very easy for them to devolve into solitaire games. There's rarely much you can do to disrupt an opponent's strategy, to the point where you can often succeed despite not even paying much attention to what they're doing. This is a habit that you'll want to break when playing Zeppelin Attack!. It's crucial to keep an eye on what defenses have been played recently, who's got killer action cards you want to watch out for, whose fleet is growing fat and sitting around waiting to facilitate monster turns with an enormous number of actions played per turn, and so on. And you can do things about each of these observations! You can save an attack until you see a player use their defense, buy new defenses against those killer attacks, and make sure to pick off zeppelins from large fleets to keep their turns reasonably under control. This is a HUGE amount of interaction for a deckbuilder, and it's really quite refreshing.
I love the elegance of the action economy promoted by attacks, zeppelins, and deck tailoring. Buy too many zeppelins and you'll run the risk of thinning the action density of your deck if you can't keep them all out from turn to turn, but having enough zeppelins is critical to cycling those cards through your deck and ensuring you get to play those big turns. Especially with 3-4 players, even the most defense-heavy player probably can't keep a huge fleet afloat if his opponents all throw a few attacks his or her way.
I've seen both attack-centric strategies (focusing on accumulating Battle Points) and operations-centric strategies (focusing on accumulating cards worth Victory Points) work well, so I don't feel like there's a golden path, here, but rather, the game supports a good spectrum that can be adjusted on the fly even when you see that card that's too good to pass up on top of one of the Mercenary Decks.
The starting decks are all mirrors of each other with damage types swapped on their Attack and Defense cards, but with differences in the way the capacities are distributed on their two starting Zeppelins. Combined with the different special abilities (and capacities) of each villain's Experimental Zeppelin (and Experimental Attack in Doomsday Weapons), this is enough to give a little character and minor preference to playstyle, but not so much as to railroad a player into a strategy -- I've seen Gorilla Khan, the most buy-oriented villain, attack his way to victory more than once.
The game plays in about an hour or less with the expansion pack and no rookie players, pretty much regardless of the number of players. Setup is pretty quick, tear down is easy. There's a lot of shuffling small stacks/decks, so I recommend sleeves to ease/speed the shuffling process. If you choose not to sleeve, the 112-card base game fits neatly in its box the size of 3 standard playing card boxes laid side-by-side, and the ~50-card expansion fills the space perfectly if you remove the insert.
It's a game where skill and experience plays a strong role, but new players quickly get up to speed after a game or so. The second game I ever played was a two-player game between me and one of the other guys who tried out the game with me the first time the night before, and it was the kind of game where we both felt like we might have come out on top but weren't sure, and upon counting up points, it came down to a razor thin margin of 45-46, so I feel like it's struck a very good balance.
The Bottom Line: This game is a tightly designed small deckbuilder for 2-4 players that is a must-try and maybe a surefire hit for any Dominion or Ascension player who wishes they could cram a little more interactivity into their deckbuilding. The theme doesn't take itself too seriously, so it's a great game to promote a few laughs while you play the Monkey Samurai Catapult to attack your friend's zeppelin. The art's great even if I wish some of it weren't recycled a few times.
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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades
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