All these mutants and not a turtle in sight!
~Game Stats~
~Publisher: Mighty Boards
~Designer: Gordon Calleja
~Artists: Mark Casha / Arjuna Susini
~Players: 1-4
~Sweet Spot: 3-4
~Mechanics: Exploration / Bidding / Dice / Storytelling / Tile Placement
!!!Find it on Kickstarter now!!!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyboards/posthuman-saga-and-the-journey-home-expansion
As if we aren’t experiencing the end of the world enough as it is right now, we here at LDG have decided that a post-apocalyptic themed game was the perfect way to celebrate this perpetual quarantine. In Posthuman Saga, fighting over toilet paper is the least of your worries. Scavenge for supplies, explore loot-laden terrain, complete missions for the Fortress (your bossy home base), and battle monstrous baddies; all while risking mutation and incapacitation (just ask Kitty). Strap on your good boots, we’re about to march into the unknown.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~THOUGHTS~
Lizzy: With Posthuman Saga we’re living out our fantasies of exploring a fallen world ravaged by mutants. With every journey out into the wild being a struggle to achieve goals and make it back in one piece.
Brooks: That’s a very specific fantasy to have, Liz.
Kitty: To be honest, that kinda sounds like going to the post office…
Brooks: Yeah… except this game is actually enjoyable and the post office is… well… not.
Lizzy: I don’t wanna hear it! You guys can get literally anything delivered in Manhattan, while I’m over here in Ohio lucky to get a pizza half the time. I have to venture out for everything.
Brooks: I definitely don’t miss that 5-mile Ohio delivery radius. But hey, at least with Posthuman you’re able to alleviate some of those frustrations with some good old-fashioned apocalypting!
Kitty: I am definitely stealing that word… this is an apocalypting good time!
Lizzy: Ooook. Anyway, upon hearing that Mighty Boards was making an expansion for Posthuman Saga, I knew I would instantly be head-over-heels for it (I’m a little in lust with their games)!
Brooks: I appreciate your ability to make people uncomfortable in any situation.
Lizzy: Thanks! It’s my superpower! With the Journey Home expansion currently on Kickstarter, we were able to get our hands on a demo copy of it to integrate into the already amazing Posthuman Saga. With the base game, your primary goal is to venture out into the mutated wilds with challenging goals to complete for your colony, the Fortress. The setting for the Posthuman series is long into a post-apocalyptic world where resources are incredibly scarce and most living things have mutated due to genetic experimentation that led to the downfall of mankind.
Kitty: The goal of the game is to complete a variety of tasks to establish your worth to the burgeoning colony. Discovering specific scavenge sites, defeating mutants that are encroaching on the Fortress’ territory, and completing important missions relevant to the human colony’s expansion are the key tasks in Posthuman Saga. My favorite part of Saga, and what sets it apart from the OG Posthuman, are the story encounters. An entire book of encounter stories is provided causing an explosion of enrichment to the experience as a whole.
Brooks: Exactly! The stories help weave together the entire purpose of the game with the random nature of what you would encounter while exploring the wild unknown. From campy to creepy to deceivingly involved, the story encounters create more of a connection to the act of adventuring.
Kitty: Pretty sure my favorite encounters so far are ‘Vote for Dave’ and the creepy meat-shack one!
Brooks: Hey, I told you not to eat that burger, but you couldn’t help yourself!
Kitty: Yeah, and I told you to punch Dave in the face… but you just had to accept his weird voting pin!
Lizzy: Brooksby, don’t forget about all those kids of yours you discovered you had! I get to be Aunty Liz, finally!
Brooks: Yikes… hard pass! But yeah, the theme is certainly engrossing and the addition of the Journey Home expansion fits right in.
Lizzy: For sure! After an expedition out into the wilds, finding your way back home is the perfect fit for the ever-evolving scenarios. The expansion also adds some new point-scoring opportunities such as private mapping objectives and new characters and stories. With all other objectives being public or shared for the most part, the inclusion of private goals adds an interesting layer of mystery.
Kitty: When it comes to the mechanics of Posthuman Saga, you certainly have a lot of different things to keep your eye on: your combat cards, health, morale, fatigue, ammo, food, and more… and balancing it all is quite the challenge. Each character certainly has their strengths and weaknesses (As hot as she is, the Cage Fighter I always play is great at melee and speed… and about nothing else, but I love her anyway)! Another important mechanic involves broadcast tokens that are used in bidding for turn order. It adds something to gameplay that wouldn’t typically be present in a game like this, creating palpable tension when bidding what few tokens you have in hopes to secure first place for the next round or two. The hardscrabble nature of managing your waning resources makes the theme sing.
Lizzy: Brooksby, remember when you blew your tokens real fast in one of the games and resorted to just being last every round to see how it would impact your score?
Brooks: Yeah… that didn’t work out very well for me. But, lesson learned! When it comes to gameplay, something special that Posthuman Saga does is merge multiple play styles to create a unique flurry of activity, while providing multiple avenues for a victorious outcome. If you’re not as keen on monster slaying, charting resource rich routes will score you points as well. There’s also personal objectives, side missions, story missions, landmarks to discover, and with the expansion you get our own cartography card making tile placement more of a scoring opportunity. All of this creates a sort of a win-your-own-way feel, freeing you from the monotonous constraints of only-one-way-wins.
Lizzy: Beautifully said. Also, another thing Mighty Boards has delivered is amazing art and components, creating a sprawling world of immersive possibilities. The basic components offered are nice, typical cardboard tokens, but the deluxe components offered in the current campaign are an awesome addition that provides that chunky goodness a lot of gamers love in their pieces.
Kitty: And in true Mighty Boards style, there certainly isn’t a shortage of bits and bobs. The table is always full with one of their games. One thing Brooksby suggested, that I fully agree with, is that we wish the individual player exploration boards were separate instead of joined into one large board. That way, no matter the table size or player count, everyone could have the board perfectly in front of themselves. The deluxe version also comes with an elevated fortress for displaying the land tiles. This was a fun (albeit not entirely necessary) addition that actually made gameplay clearer and easier before we had a copy and were playing remotely with Liz. She was able to pick up the fortress and slide it easily under her magnifying cam for us to always see what tiles were available.
Brooks: Also, being someone who typically doesn’t like a lot of fiddly tokens everywhere, I felt the deluxe component kit fixed a lot of that because it provided individually molded tokens per type, instead of a heap of cardboard circles. But if that’s not something that bothers you, then the regular components won’t be an issue at all; they’re good quality and have nice, clear iconography.
Lizzy: Posthuman Saga also features a decent amount of diversity, which is always something we closely scrutinize. Age, race, and size are all represented and the cast of mutant enemies is varied and interesting. The artwork is also very stylistic and the characters are weathered, making it all integrate perfectly with the theme. We did feel the tile art could have shown a little more variation making the locations feel a bit more unique, but that’s a small gripe. As for remote play, like Kitty touched on, the fortress helped make showing the available tiles a breeze. We definitely feel it’s much easier and more immersive if both sides have a copy, but we were able to do it with just me having the game at first, and it was still a great time. Before Kitty and Brooksby had a copy, I just had to send pictures of their upgrade cards as well as the various objectives for their easy reference. I also made a chart representing the values of the different attack dice so that they could roll colored D6’s when needed to be more involved since they didn’t yet own a copy.
Kitty: So happy we have a copy now so that we can see it all in person. Also, we thought the attack symbol looked like a megaphone over remote play instead of an axe… and it definitely still does in person. Just sayin. Makes me feel like we’re yelling at our enemies!
Brooks: Yes, they do, Kitty, and your remote mods were muchly appreciated as always, Lizzette! We don’t let distance stand in our way! Also, there weren’t very many complaints overall about either the base game or the Journey Home expansion. The nitpicky things would mainly be wishing for individual player boards and that sliders may be nice instead of pegs for tracking stats so that my big man-hands wouldn’t clumsily knock the pegs out every time I fiddle with it. Another thing we discussed was that while we love the Journey Home expansion, it didn’t feel as much like an expansion as it did a game variant.
Lizzy: Agreed, if you’re looking for a dramatic spark of newness for your Posthuman Saga experience, Journey Home is not going to provide that. But what it will do is enrich the base game with variants for scoring; both publicly competitive and private, which will definitely change things up for the better.
Kitty: And best of all, for someone who in video games wants to save every NPC possible, I had a blast obtaining followers, naming them, and giving them backstories.
Brooks: And then you were incapacitated, and they left you for dead. So much for that forged bond!
Kitty: This is true. But it’s all about the friendships made along the way!
Lizzy: That’s the sappiest way I’ve ever heard anything post-apocalyptic described.
Kitty: It’s true! Posthuman Saga and the Journey Home expansion will leave you wandering the wilds, encountering strangers, leveraging your success on risky decisions; always feeling like you’re just on the brink of survival, leaving you intensely immersed and satisfied. I suppose in the end it’s all about the Journey… Home. See what I did there?!
Brooks: …
Lizzy: …
Kitty: Guys… you saw what I did there, right? Guys…
Kitty: 9/10 ~ Lizzy: 9.5/10 ~ Brooks: 9/10
!!!GAME PLAYLIST!!!
i don’t want to watch the world end with someone else ~ Clinton Kane
Shake the Dust ~ The Sweeplings
Powerless ~ Mat Kearney
Surrender ~ WALK THE MOON
SOS (Acoustic Piano) ~ Lusaint
End of Days ~ Prides
Beyond Today ~ James Gillespie
Death Valley ~ Fall Out Boy
Unless You’re Drowning ~ Emotional Oranges
Survival ~ NEEDTOBREATHE/Drew & Ellie Holcomb
Bloodstains ~ Rhys Lewis
Gaunt Kids ~ Phantogram
End of the World ~ Hunter Hunted
Sanctuary ~ Joji
Lack of You ~ Myylo
I’ll Fight ~ Daughtry
Diggin’ Up the Heart ~ Brandon Flowers
Mess Me Up ~ Neon Trees
Burn ~ NIGHT TRAVELER
Bad Got Me Good ~ Gin Wigmore
Madness ~ Ruelle
If the World Was Ending ~ JP Saxe/Julia Michaels
Stuck ~ The Aces
Take Me Away ~ Young Mister
You Broke Me First ~ Tate McRae
Thin Air ~ Colouring
Distance ~ Ruel
Only the Dark ~ K.Flay
I Know Alone ~ HAIM
Not the End of the World ~ Katy Perry
I’ll Haunt You ~ Tennis
Long Distance Gamers 
My game group actually was planning on playing this. HOWEVER, I am the only one with a copy since my group usually meets together but our country is entering lock down again. How does this play with ONE copy without deluxe pieces?
LikeLike
Hey there! Brooks, with LDG, here! Happy to (hopefully) help! We actually play most games with only one copy at first, until we discover if we like it enough to buy two, so we deal with this a lot.
~First, a great way to make the game more immersive for the copyless side is to let them roll the dice for enemies. Since the attack dice aren’t typical dice, we made a dice chart so that we could roll colored D6’s and know what the attack result was. I will update the post to include a picture of the dice chart for you to use if you’d like!
~Since you have the copy, you’ll be the game runner obviously, and it’ll take a little patience and extra time. We don’t ever mind the added time it takes to play with only one copy because we just like hanging out!
~Take pictures of all objectives they will need to refer to throughout the game and just send them to some communal group chat so that everyone can check their phone when they want to see what’s available. We like to put all objectives in a nice little grid in one picture so it’s all together and you don’t have to check 10 different pictures. This goes for character cards also. You’ll have to keep track of their stats, but have them keep track on their end also with random tokens from another game or pen & paper.
~Make sure everyone has a pad of paper or whiteboards (which is what we use for ease) so that they can jot down any information they need per round.
~I’m not sure what your camera set up is, but assuming it’s a typical built-in laptop webcam, you could get a card holder (or fashion one yourself: we’ve totally jury-rigged stuff we’ve needed before, haha) to stick the tiles in and prop the scavenge tokens in front of each tile, which you can easily hold up in front of the camera. We suggest doing that and not reading them off to everyone each round because you’ll have to read off so much information (terrain type, bonus resources, scavenge token) for each tile and it’ll bog down playtime a lot.
~Make sure going in that everyone knows a game that normally takes an hour or so, will have an extra hour tacked on most likely. But it’s totally worth it if your friends are cool with hanging out and not high pressure about game speed.
~Also, it can sometimes be easier to take a clear picture from above of the board grid so that they can print it off and have a grid to make notes on, sort of like a roll & write. For instance, they could draw a mountain shape in the place they chose to put it, and then write “gear” for the scavenge token. Then just cross “gear” out when the token is used for any achievement.
~Those are the most important bits. Just be creative and discuss what feels best for your group! And hey, if you wanna practice beforehand, hit us up! We play remote games with random people all the time! We’re super chill and very easy to get along with. Great space to learn game-running remotely! We could be your Guinea pigs! Just let us know! (Longdistancegamerblog@gmail.com) Please ask any more questions if you need any more help! Excited for your remote gaming adventure!
LikeLike