How to Play Zenith

Zenith is a two player head to head card game. You are competing for favor on different planets. But it’s not just about pulling that favor to your side of the track and getting a reward and token for it. There is more going on in the game as well.

The game can end in one of three ways. Either one player has three favor from a single planet. Or a player has four favor all from different planets. And the last way is that a player has five favor. So how do you get get favor?

You play from your hand of cards to get favor, or at least to move the planet token towards you on the track. When the token makes it all the way to you, you gain a favor token and the track resets. Let’s talk some about how the cards work.

Cards

Each card can be used for three different things. The main thing is playing out underneath a planet. You play it to the matching color planet on your side and then you activate the abilities. One is always going to move it closer to you. The other abilities will trigger to give you different benefits. These generally are gaining the resources in the game, which we’ll talk about soon.

The other two ways to use cards are based off of faction of the card. You can spend a card to gain the leader token and gain a bonus. This is a “free” action in that it uses your action for the turn, but it doesn’t cost any money or other resources. The other thing you can do is spend a card to go up on the research track. This generally manipulates the main board state or gains you more resources. But you need the rarer resource to play that.

Resources

Generally, you get resources from two different ways. Either from that research track or from playing out cards to the planets. There are two different types of resources. Zenethium is the rarer one, and one that I hope I have spelled correctly. This is for the research track. Each level of that track, for each faction, costs one more. So first level is one, then two and so on.

The other one is a more standard money or credits. These are used for playing out the cards to a planet. But as you play out cards to planet you start to get a discount. Each card on that planet discounts the next card to that planet by one. So cards, eventually, or possibly, can be free to play out.

This playing of a card and spending resources is the main loop of the game. And it continues with players doing one action at a time until a win condition is met, like I mentioned above. No counting points, or anything like that, when someone wins, they win.

What Doesn’t Work

There is an element of luck to the game. You might be going for a particular strategy and just not draw the card color that you need. If you need to get a lot of Venus cards to get your third, you better believe it will feel like they don’t show up. That said, it’s not a major negative because you can pivot and there are ways, with the leader token, to have a larger hand, or to move on the Venus (in this case) track without playing a Venus card. You just need to be smart about it, though sometimes it really is just pivot and play defense for a bit.

What Works

Artwork

Firstly, and not because it’s the most important element, but because it jumps out at you, I want to talk about the artwork on this game. The art is great, the graphic design is good. And while there are a lot of symbols you learn what they are quite quickly on BGA. I think that Zenith should come with player aids in the box, if the company wasn’t planning on them, because that’d be helpful, but you wouldn’t need them after a couple of plays.

Multiuse Cards

I also really like how you can use the cards for multiple things. It’s always a tough decision as you look at the cards and want to use them on the planets. But you know that it won’t work out perfectly for that. And the difference in hand size of being the leader or not, just one card, actually does open up so many things. And, I didn’t mention this, if you take the leader when you already have the leader you get the bonus and flip it over so you now have two more cards. But that said the research tracks are powerful and exciting as well. So you want to do everything.

Speed of the Game

Now, this one I like for two different reasons. The first being that turns are very fast. You do one action. And yes, that action might require some thinking about it, because your opponent can mess with your cards on planets, not with your hand though, so you need to think. But with that speed of the turn, the game isn’t too short.

There is be a chance for the game to go really fast, and I’ve played some fast ones. But often times it really becomes this back and forth tug of war battle that you need to strategically look for the advantage that you can get. So it feels like you do something in the game. There is and isn’t that rush towards the end of the game that is so great. And when you win, you feel like you accomplished something.

Who Is Zenith For?

I think this is for people who want a good two player head to head game. Yes, there are a lot of abstract ones out there. But Zenith is going to give you a bit of theme, at least in the artwork. And there is less of that skill gap that can develop in some abstract games. So if you know you or someone often can play two players, this is a good fit for that.

My Final Thoughts on Zenith

I really like the game a lot. It works well on BGA, and I have played this more than a handful of times at this point. And I think I’ve won every single way. The first couple of times the games went faster as all the players were fresh to the game. But as time has gone on, it’s definitely become more of that strategic game, and I love figuring out what my hand is going to be good at.

This feels like a game that a lot of people should enjoy. The artwork is good, the theme is fun, though barely there, and it is going to give you that good strategic feel. So for me it’s one that I know I’ll want to get when it comes out into print. It’s going to be a go to two player game, maybe not up there with Dice Throne, but it’ll get played probably as often as games like Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle-Earth and Hanamikoji, which from me is really high praise.

Have you checked this one out on BGA?

My Grade: A-
Gamer Grade: A-
Casual Grade: C+

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Pros

• Cooperative and a hard cooperative game
• Fantasy and Post Apocalyptic
• Good in Box storage solution
• Asymmetric factions
• Available to try on TTS

Cons

• Kickstarter Exclusive
• First game Created
• Information Overload

The Page

First, even though I say it’s a con that it’s the first game they’ve created, and that’s always going to be a con, this is a company that seems to know Kickstarter really well. The page is laid out like I expect a Kickstarter page to be laid out and they actually do a decent job of giving you an idea of what the game is about. There’s a ton of information on the page. That is another thing I have in the cons, the amount of information. Let me make this very clear, I like all the information on the page, but there is a ton of it. I’d prefer to see this much information and dig through all of it then less.

The Game

New section, because I feel like I cover this half in the page and half in my back or brick, and it should have it’s own section.

The game really interests me for a few reasons, hence why I dug deeper into the page. I like cooperative games and I’ve been interested in trying 4x games like Twilight Imperium and Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea. But those are big competitive games, so I’m curious about this one being cooperative. Then you put it in a magical and post-apocalyptic setting, and that makes it even more interesting. I love a good world where most everything has gone wrong. There seems to have been a lot of thought put into this game from the asymmetrical player powers, to every player needing to beat the enemies, not just collectively, so I feel like there’s a lot going on in the game, of needing enough for yourself, but needing to leave stuff for others as well. Finally, I like that this game sounds hard, I like to win cooperative games 30% of the time, that’s about right for me, unless they are story games then let me progress, and this seems like it’s a tough one ,and I like that. It also seems like you’ll be able to scale the difficulty level, which I like as well.

Back or Brick

Short and quick is a brick for me. Now, that said, it might become a back because of the TTS. If I can play on TTS (Tabletop Simulator), I will have a better idea of how the game would work for me. This is one that I’m bummed isn’t coming to retail because I feel like I need to see it in action more. I know that I would like it, but is it one that I could get to the table all that often. Definitely one that I want to try and keep my eye on though and could be sold on to pick-up.

How about for you, is this a back or brick?

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Risk Legacy keeps most of the same rules as the original Risk game. You still get troops based off of how many areas you control at the start of a turn. You still are rolling dice to try and take over areas, But the story of the game is different, in this, you’re still trying to take over a world that somehow was terraformed to look like Earth, just with rougher corners. Things went wrong when everyone came to the planet, so you all splintered off into groups. Each player at the start of the game gets a group and a base. The goal is to reach a certain number of victory points, and your base with worth a point as is everyone else’s bases. So you aren’t worrying about conquering everything, just getting their bases. Then, if you are knocked off the board, you can come back on the next round, so you still have a chance, though a very slim one. Also, factions have powers, but you might not always be playing the same faction so you have to know how to play different strategies with different factions.

Now, I’m going to try and talk about spoilers as little as possible as the game doesn’t have that many things to unlock, but the game was a ton of fun to play. It took Risk which can be a very long game and allowed you to focus in a few territories where your opponents had their bases. We had some games that would stretch on for a while because you’d end up with a lot of base trading so that even if you captured someone else’s base, someone had probably taken over your base the turn before, but all the games were much much faster than a normal game of Risk. It was a massive improvement, and unfortunately you only have a kind of playable copy of the base game afterwards, because I’d love to see Risk revamped to have that in it.

The special powers are great as well. It allows you to get a preferred faction, but not one that you are always going to play. It also means that you’re going to have something that makes you different. I like it when games can do that, so that even at the start of the game, you feel like you’re unique. And, not a spoiler, the factions become more diverse as the game goes on. This is interesting because it means that some factions can become stronger, so do you make changes to the faction to make them better for you now knowing that you might not get it back another game. This is another way that it is really a step up from Risk, being unique in a game where it can feel very generic is really nice. And like, I think, a good legacy game, you are different and then you can become more different and that keeps the game interesting for several games.

The set-up is also different from regular Risk. In normal Risk, every territory starts out with a troop on it, so the world is already populated for war, but that means that your troops are going to be spread quite thin even at the start. In this, you start with a base in an empty location or one that has a major city you founded earlier in the game. That’s where you start, and you can start as close or far from others as you want. You can expand out as slow or as fast as you want. It makes it a bit more of a strategic game versus just jumping straight into dice chucking. And it makes it seem like your choices matter more. There’s no trying to grab as much of Australia as possible, because you’re starting in one spot and someone could possibly block you in. Being in a remote corner or Asia can actually work because you’ll be able to expand out slowly. And, I think it helps with the speed of the game, because you aren’t always fighting each turn, so even though technically you could get to conflict faster, early turns of the game of Risk Legacy go much faster, and because you’re only dealing with trying to take out the bases, it works much smoother.

Finally, how does it compare to other Legacy games? Firstly, it doesn’t have as much to unlock. In Risk Legacy, you basically have a handful of envelopes and a couple of other spots to open. So, you aren’t opening stuff as often as you do in a game like Pandemic Legacy or even SeaFall. To go with that, since you aren’t opening as much, there isn’t as much of a story. There are a few twists that can come along the way, but it isn’t as story driven as Pandemic Legacy. There’s nothing to read at the start of each game, it’s basically put stuff down and start again. But what you do unlock, there’s a lot of fun stuff, and it has those moments of unlocking things and thinking that it is going to massively change the game, and it does. I won’t spoil what those are, but there are some very fun ones that you can get and unlock.

Overall, it was a really fun experience. I think that it still has some of the flaws of Risk because combat is still about who can roll dice with more luck than the other person. But the game length is shorter, the crazy moments of unlocking things is great, and the winning objective works really well. I don’t know that it really adds much more them to the game, but it does make it a whole lot more interesting. If you like Risk at all, Risk Legacy is going to be a really good option for you, and if you dislike Risk because of the length of the game, this could still be enjoyable. If it’s about the dice rolling combat, I’d skip it.

Overall Grade: B
Gamer Grade: B-
Casual Grade: B

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