Evacuate – First Impressions
Review copy provided by the publisher
Alien communal living is a beautiful thing. You’ve got all of the slugs, bugs, chitinous creatures, and amorphous blobs all on one ship. Everybody lives in harmony.
Until the Nomia attack.
Then it’s every alien race for themselves. Running through the ship’s corridors, scrambling for an escape ship, all the while trying to avoid being taken from behind, surprised from the front, or ambushed all over.
You don’t want to be trailing behind the pack. You may also not want to be leading it. You want to be squarely in the middle, in the safest spot as the ones on the perimeter get body-snatched.
Evacuate is part of the four-game Monster Invasion series from Petersen Games. It’s designed by Tony Mastrangeli and Jeff Petersen. In this chaotic survival game, players will seek to end the game with the most Survivors, and that’s going to be influenced by what cards are in the Nomia enemy deck, what corridors players run through, and where all of the aliens are in the mob of panicking Survivors.
It’s not the massive miniature and apocalyptic setting of other Petersen Games titles. It’s a small miniature and alien extinction setting… which sounds equally terrifying!
What It Does
This is a survival game mixed with elements of social deduction, push-your-luck, and deck-building.
Players are trying to survive long enough to escape the vessel with the most Survivors out of the group. The social deduction part of the experience is determining what you think other plays will do and adjusting your movement and actions accordingly. The Nomia can attack most frequently from the rear and the front. So you want to stay amidst the group and not present yourself as an outlier. Pushing your luck is dependent on what cards you’ll choose to add to the Nomia deck when you lose a Survivor. You can incorporate safe cards that help all Survivors or more attack cards that could injure other players… or yourself. And then the deck-building is the communal mechanism in which players add to the Nomia deck as they die, creating a deeper and more unpredictable set of cards to resolve each round.
The time estimate is a little off as I think this will be a 30- to 45-minute game minimum, even with 2 or 3 players, as they have AI decks to operate, but it’s still a fast-paced game where death happens quickly. Players will just want to be the one who died the least by the time the evacuation shuttle arrives.
How It Does It
Here’s how things go down:
Players run through corridors. Each of those corridors has a special function that will affect gameplay and must be considered when selecting a card.
Movement and actions are resolved in player order and this can be important for figuring out final locations where Survivors are stopped.
The Nomia deck will activate and the card ability will occur. This could kill one or more Survivors, but it can also provide a small respite from attack, depending on what cards are in the deck.
Each player has a special race with variable powers and special cards that help make a unique deck of movement and action possibilities. Those are other elements used to assess the best course of action.
As Survivors die, they push the game to the final phases, which brings the Evacuation Shuttle into the Nomia deck. Once that card is revealed, the game ends and the player with the most Survivors wins.
So, you’ve got action selection, player movement, action resolution, and community-deckbuilding taking place each round.
It’s pretty simple to understand and it can be taught in five minutes or less!
Why You Might Like It
The semi-coop deckbuilding between the players creates some interesting choices and the aim-for-the-middle gameplay to avoid getting killed also presents players with unusual strategy.
When considering the location effects, the alien race abilities, and the community-built Nomia deck, there are numerous factors for players to weigh, which makes for fun choices.
Why You Might Not
The production quality on the game is difficult to justify for $40. The components will likely not hold up to extensive use unless you sleeve everything.
How a player feels in the hectic scramble to survive is not as thrilling as other games in the genre like Tiny Turbo Cars or Death Roads: All Stars.
Final Thoughts
There are some strong qualities to Evacuate. The deck-building shared between the players has potential, as it allows players to decide whether to make the enemy Nomia deck more sedate or more threatening. The different alien races all provide different twists on movement and evasion with their special abilities. And it’s a change of pace to not want to be in the lead. You want to stay in the middle of the pack in order to avoid the brunt of the Nomia attacks.
However, there are just too many issues with Evacuate that prevent me from looking toward the next play or fully recommending it to most players.
The production quality is the first discernible issue for me. Two of the six alien player sets were missing a miniature and one other had a broken miniature. All of the cards suffered noticeable wear after just two plays. They would need immediate sleeving to avoid damage. The base number of alien players needed is four. If you have two or three players, you’ll need to control 1 or 2 AI decks, but the more annoying part is that the location cards can’t fit four aliens side by side if they’re on the starting spot or another row. This seems silly given that it’s the minimum amount needed on the “board”. And then finally the text on the locations is really small and only on the bottom of the card, which doesn’t help most of the players see how it affects the gameplay.
All of this wouldn’t bother me as much if this was a $25 game, but it’s listed at $40, which seems inconsistent with what players are actually getting with this game.
If you’re a fan of Petersen Games and the approach to wacky and unique monster or alien games present in much of the publisher’s catalog, then you could certainly find something to love in Evacuate. But if you’re coming from other $40 to $50 games to something like this, I think you’ll be disappointed.
I believe a reprint of this game with a wholesale revision of its production could certainly help it find an audience.
If you want to check out Evacuate, you can visit Petersen Games or read what the community thinks on BoardGameGeek.
Have you played other board games with movement based on simultaneous action selection? What’s your favorite one?
Let us know in the comments and give a recommendation for other games of which to share our first impressions.