Red is good, right?
When we think of HexWar, we don’t usually think of board games. Sure, they’ve ported some war games from their cardboard origins to the digital realm, but war games are in their wheelhouse. This June, they’re spreading their wings a bit and heading into unfamiliar waters, porting a traditional board game to the digital realm. The game in question is Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp from Victory Point Games.
Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp’s plot is similar to the excellent Pandemic: save humanity from a modern plague. Unlike Pandemic, which has you traversing the globe and fighting disease in the trenches, Infection puts you in the lab, fighting the disease on the molecular level. I’ve gotten my latex covered hand on a preview build of Infection and, from what I’ve seen thus far, we’re all in for a treat.
Upon first inspection, Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp looks a bit more like a puzzle game than a board game. Your screen contains a petri dish full of hexes that are filled with different strains of the disease that’s decimating humanity. Your goal is to build the antibodies that will combat the disease by harvesting and incubating proteins. It might sound dull, and if that’s all you were doing, it might be. Luckily, you also need to purchase lab equipment and scientists to help along the way and the game keeps punching you in the gut to make sure you don’t get cocky.
Not how I remember my microbiology classes.
Each turn of Infection involves harvesting proteins from the lab and using 2 of them to help build antibodies. If you complete an antibody for one of the strains in your petri dish, you can eliminate it from your dish and earn some cash. You can also go shopping on your turn and pick up lab equipment and scientists who all have special abilities which make your life easier.
I’ll take one of those, three of those….
After you’ve placed your proteins, it’s the game’s turn to kick you in the ass. First, you check to see if the disease spreads, killing more and more of humanity. If this happens too many times, humanity is destroyed and you lose. You then check to see if the strains you have in the petri dish mutate. If they do, more strains will be added to the dish, or strains that were there might change to another strain.
During this time, events will also trigger off that can both help and hinder you. Things like scientists unable to work that round or lab equipment that is working especially well. You’ll learn to both love and hate these events.
This is one of those events that we love.
From there, the player turn begins again, repeat until you’ve won or lost the game. Like all good cooperative/solo games, Infection offers many ways to lose the game, and only one way to win. Winning occurs if you find antibodies for all the strains currently in your petri dish. Losing happens if humanity is wiped out, if you run out of proteins and cannot build any more antibodies, or if your petri dish is completely full at the end of your turn.
The game is presented with that Tron-like glowing blue that we’re become accustomed to from games like XCOM or Pandemic, and it really looks and sounds nice. The UI is well done as well, using sliding trays on the left and right side of the screen to keep the main screen uncluttered.
Trays pop out from the sides, making everything easy to see and understand.
Where the game currently falls down is in the tutorial section. There is a short tutorial, but it still took me several plays–and a downloading of the game rules from the VPG site–to fully figure out what was going on. The problem wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what was going on, I just don’t know why certain stuff was happening. For example, every turn there is a dice roll to determine if the disease spreads. In the digital version, I wasn’t aware of the dice roll or what was actually causing the spreading to occur. I would hire scientists whose power was minimizing the chances of an outbreak, and yet the outbreaks would still occur. Nowhere was I told in the digital version that the scientist was giving me a +2 to a die roll and what roll I needed to succeed or fail. It can be frustrating to not know how your choices and actions are fully affecting the gameplay.
Starting a game is also a bit tricky. You’re given a lot of options, but no real description of what they do. For example, I didn’t realize that a bacterial disease was considered “easy” while the viral was “hard”. You can also change different molecules and select distinct viruses, but I wasn’t sure what any of that meant in relation to what kind of game I was going to be playing.
Don’t get cocky, kid.
HexWar is still a few weeks away from submitting the game to Apple, so perhaps there’s still time to make the board game aspects a little more apparent. Even with these few gripes, I’ve really been enjoying my time inside this world, and I think HexWar has a real winner on their hands. Games take around 15 minutes to complete, and I can guarantee that no one is going to walk away feeling the game is too easy. This game is a bear to win. It’s doable, and there’s a bit of luck required to pull it off, but even during crushing failure, it’s fun to try.
Expect Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp to arrive sometime around mid-June and it will be available for iOS Universal as well as PC/Mac. Android is a possibility, but that’s going to be down the road a bit.
