“We are not alone… The Faza are here! Their deadly motherships are deploying Drones, hunting humans down, and changing the land into something… terrible!”
FAZA is a delightful cooperative game themed around an alien invasion of a retro-futuristic Earth. You, the players, are a small group of survivors, fighting back to save our planet, with the help of Faza Rebels who have become disenfranchised from the Faza war machine they helped create. While the players fight off the Drones on the ground, the Rebels help protect them, and once the coast is clear, they sneak aboard one of the Faza intergalactic Motherships and sabotage it. (They’ve learned their lessons well, from those great earth philosophers: the Beastie Boys.)
To start the game, players each select one of the four Areas of Focus: Medical, Political, Tactical, or Technological. Then they choose one of the two Character options for that focus, and the matching cards for their focus. While there are two characters, each with a unique ability, there is only one set of Player Cards per Area of Focus to ensure balance among the players.
Unlike most games, even many other cooperative games, the players all take their turn collectively. Any player can take any action at any time, and working together is key to winning the game. This somewhat uncommon style of play can come with a downside. The dreaded “cooperative” curse of quarterbacking, or a single player taking control of the group and telling everyone what to do. FAZA solves this with an optional additional action called Radio Communication, which prevents players from discussing their in-game actions without taking an in-game action. It’s not a perfect solution, but the only total solution is not to play with game table quarterbacks in the first place.
Most actions players take will involve using a player card to do a thing or enhance a thing. For example, one of the Technological cards enhances the Tactical Bazooka card, making its long-range attack more effective. Regular attacks, however, don’t require any cards and can be done as long as that player is alive. If the player is dead, there is a bigger problem than just being unable to attack, since the players will have lost the game. The other main action that doesn’t require a card is attacking a Mothership. To do that, all Drones on the ground must have been defeated, and a Rebel must be on the tile with the player and Mothership. The Rebel is removed from play, and after taking a damage, the Fasa get to retaliate. Thankfully, not every retaliation card is bad. Some of the cards do things like kill Rebels and/or drop more Drones onto the tile. But some contain rewards or less-bad retaliations that have an added bonus of being able to attack the mothership again. (As there is another live Rebel on the tile.)
Once the players have finished their collective turn, the Faza take their turn. There are three Motherships, that each have a different autonima controlling it. The Carrier Ship moves around dropping new Drones. The Destroyer Ship moves around destroying Rebels and injuring any Players in its path. The Former ship “Fazaforms” tiles, flipping them over to a less helpful, and possibly deadly, landscape. One ship activates per player, and that’s just the Easy Mode. I honestly can’t even imagine winning on Hard Mode.
Think of it this way. In a four-player game, the Carrier ship is going to drop up to 12 Drones on the first Faza turn, with as many as 33 Drones starting the game on the board. There are only 42 total Drones, and the players lose if a Drone can’t be placed. You do the math. Players also lose if any of them die, or if the game goes on long enough that all four of the players’ Outpost tiles get Fazaformed. In Hard Mode, you also lose if there are no Rebels on the board. Ack! The one saving grace in all of that is that the Former ship starts on the highest numbered tile, and the Outposts are the lowest numbered, and the ship tends to move to higher numbered tiles first, you probably won’t get Fazaformed to death. Aren’t you just lucky?
But seriously, a good co-op game is a hard co-op game. That’s where FAZA really shines. The game is always hard, but if you want to make it harder, it gets harder. Even if you don’t want to move up to Normal or Hard, you can increase the challenge of the game by increasing the life of the Motherships from 4 to 5 or 6. Quite frankly, that might be as much challenge as you need.
Besides whining that it’s too hard — because, again, it should be — I only have one real complaint, and it’s also one of the things that first attracted me to the game in the first place. The art. The art is a fabulous retro-future style in delightful shades of orange. Unfortunately, once I got it on the table, I realized that everything is too close to the same colour. I love that the Fazaformed tiles are a dark orange, with apocalyptic art. I love that the regular tiles have simple art, knowing that they are just going to be overrun by Drones anyway. But I wish the regular tiles weren’t so close to the light orange colour of the Drone meeple. Someone with visual impairment would likely have a hard time making out the pieces. The Player and Rebel pieces are brightly coloured and stand out beautifully. If the Drones were even black, that would stand out much better.
Other than the possible accessibility issues, FAZA is a great game. The modular board and card-based Faza reactions, combined with the varying difficulties, mean you’ll never play the same game twice, and that takes work. FAZA takes the razor edge balance between enjoyably hard and frustratingly hard and hits it spot on. If you want a challenging cooperative game, this is one for you.
You can find FAZA online at TheFaza.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/FazaBoardGame
