Code of Nine
This is a worker placement game with variable scoring conditions. Before the game begins, each player draws two end game scoring cards and gets to set them down on their player board. This means that each person has some knowledge of what could be worth points at the end. During the game, players have the opportunity to take actions that allow them to look at the other players’ cards, though there’s a top card and a bottom card and one is harder to look at than the other. There’s also a scoring card out on the board that is public knowledge but not in effect unless someone swaps their card with it.
The types of things you can do are take coins or statues or books or willpower. The willpower is often needed to take other actions like looking at scoring cards of other players or swapping items around. The board has an intriguing design where the actions you can take each round change based on which section of the gear is accessible.
My initial feelings about this game are that it’s kind of a random mess. I decided to completely ignore the deduction element of the game and never take an action that would show me other scoring cards, meaning I was playing with less information than everyone else. I took coins all the time, not because I knew they’d be worth anything, but because they were easy to gather. One of my scoring cards was that anyone with willpower at the end of the game would lose three points, so I spent the whole game avoiding a surplus of will which hindered my choice in actions.
What was the result? A three-way tie at zero points. One player had a score card that stated our scores would be multiplied by the number of books we had and, since two of us had no books, we thus scored zero (and all other things we did in the game didn’t matter). Even though that player had gathered all the books, our other scoring cards had cost him enough points that he also ended up with zero points. It’s just as possible for someone to lose the game by 50 points because of a scoring card, so there’s a lot of variability there and I’m not convinced any of it even attempts to be balanced.
Weird backstory on this game: you’ll notice the anime-styled artwork. The original edition was titled Old World and Code of Nines: Ruinous Fantasy Board Game, or OWACON for short. One can only assume the original title didn’t market well and it had to be revised for the sake of trying to sound like...anything even remotely resembling a board game title. The game feels mostly themeless: the actions you take have odd names like “Her Library” or “The Place Where They Ended The Old World”.
As we played this, I compared it to Shadow Hunters and talked about how I’d rather be playing that as an anime-themed deduction game. If there’s a good side to it, the game plays fast for a worker placement game and is simple. The board is doublesided and has a basic or advanced side (we played the advanced side). Probably the biggest downside is that it only plays with three or four people and I just don’t feel like this brings a lot to the table compared to...a lot of other games. It’s quirky and you can certainly have fun playing it, but the random nature of endgame scoring will probably come off as more annoying than endearing overall.
4.75 out of 10.
- Sean
