MERCS: Conflict Review

When people say “this game feels like it has hidden depth that will reveal itself after more plays” they usually mean one of two things. Either it should be taken exactly as a face-value assessment of the design’s lack of immediately tangible dimension or as wishful thinking bordering on buyer’s remorse expressing the owner’s hope that their money wasn’t wasted. I repeated this mantra after every game of the new dice game MERCS Conflict, and I’ve finally decided on which of the two it is for me.

I received it in January as part of my MERCS Recon Kickstarter, and thanks to striking dockworkers in California it’s all I’ve received from my Holy Crap-level pledge so far. I added extra dice to allow three to four player games, which weren’t shipped with the game for some reason. Typical Kickstarter woes aside, the custom dice are cool. Most faces aren’t intuitive, but since they’re representing corporate-level actions , publisher MegaCon Games gets a pass. It’s not exactly easy to pictorially describe Reparations or Subterfuge on a die face. Or Subterfuge. They look good, as do the player sheets, and their twenty-four different actions give a variety of game options. At least it looks that way until you get to the words because the rulebook, to borrow corporate terminology, is a barrier to entry.

The difference between discarding, damaging and downsizing your dice? None, but the rulebook uses all three terms, and the place dice go after being discarded is referred to as either the Downsizing or the Damage Pool. Barrier to entry number one.

Barrier number two: rulebook layout. Important rules are difficult to spot. One of them we noticed after I got insta-killed, buried in paragraphs of normal font. Part of a bulleted list, admittedly, but that particular rule deserves a headline, or at least bold print. A few of these game-changers are scattered about, some referencing barrier number three: player count.

It says “a game for two players” on the box. MegaCon Games claims it can be played with up to four and some rules bear this out. Certain effects allow the player to steer an opponent’s attack away to a different target, implying more than two opponents, but don’t clarify what to do if playing as advertised. Some abilities state the attacker must attack themselves if reversed, but others don’t. Another rule aiding players from getting piled on in three- or four-player contests is tucked away in normal font, a la barrier two.

Pass these barriers lies gameplay. Players pick their MegaCon, a futuristic conglomeration of synergy leveraging and cluster bombing, and grab dice to set up their board. Each of the four asymmetric entities gets Infrastructure dice to use purchasing Asset dice, the colorful means of downsizing your opponents’ discards into the Damage Pool. Once starting dice are placed, players then read their MegaCon’s two special Corporate Abilities, Leverage ability and MERCS Contract. In summary, each player has twenty-eight different possibilities for entering into aggressive negotiations with their competition. CEOs might consider this excessive. Or call it diversity. Purchasers of a dice game might quit at this point. Me and mine, we straightened our nanosilk ties and powered through.

A couple turns of dice rolling, table-consulting and tentative policy-making went by before one of us unleashed a crippling move. Stunned silence preceded a rules check, followed by “Yep, that’s what happens” acquiescence and a few vain turns of prolonging the inevitable. This process was the same for games two and three. We stared at the table before uttering the quote from the beginning of this review and vowing to try again in a day or two. This time with whiskey and leather chairs, in true CEO fashion.

MERCS Conflict tries to be two things at once: a deep strategy game and a quick-playing dice fest. It’s played at the corporate level, where the law is mightier than the L.A.W. and the subpoena you never see coming is the one that topples you. Lateral thinking and asymmetric abilities create many possibilities for strategic victory and necessitate careful timing, but just when you’re starting to get excited about your long-term plan, along comes Conflict’s dice-fest side to smash it.

Undefended, rolling a one or six on the game’s lone traditional die after using an Asset cuts your opponent off at the knees, either preventing them from using their dice or forcing them to be downsized after use unless they sacrifice a die from their Corporate Sector, with few defenses against it. If a MegaCon’s Corporate Sector is empty at any point in the game, they lose.

The game plays in under half an hour with two players due to this little quirk and an early setback is nigh impossible to recover from. Asset dice determine available actions and fewer dice mean fewer chances for helpful ones, so gameplans rarely survive first contact, especially with two of the four corporations getting a maximum of five dice instead of six. I’m assuming MCG balanced out this disparity in other ways, but so far it remains an assumption. I say that in the spirit of my original quote because we’ve never had someone recover in any of our games. Who strikes first wins.

The most stunning flaw rears its head with three or four players, centered on a single word: each. Red dice sport the only attack appearing on two faces of any die, allowing one attacker a 33% chance to downsize a die from each player, either by rolling its exact location or forcing a sacrifice due to the “one or six” roll. One MegaCon’s special ability essentially adds a third red face, giving that player a 50% chance to damage one die from all opponents every turn. I thought a four-player game would last longer and allow for more strategy; in reality, it’s a race for red dice, usually with the same MegaCon winning.

Return on investment at this point? Low. When whiskey and leather chairs can’t salvage a game, something is amiss. In the final accounting, I’ve realized that I’m experiencing more buyer’s remorse than hidden depth.