Resistor Review

I loved RESISTOR_ as soon as I saw the box. It’s designed to look like some kind of Mother Box-like piece of tech made in 1978. There’s a slot in the box lid into which you stick a cardboard “cartridge” from which the two players engaged in this excellent head-to-head design draw their cards. It’s a cool, fun visual on the table and it totally sells the concept of Cold War-era computing on the precipice of nuclear annihilation. The rules are faux-printed on old fashioned printer paper and the cards are all designed to look like imprinted circuitboards. Needless to say, this is one of those nerd games.

I can’t say that I’ve ever played a game where I was cast as a computer before, but here it is. One player is Deep Red and the other BLU9000 and these are the presumably room-filling supercomputers that are in control of their nation’s nuclear stockpile. I’m sure you can sort out which is which there. Launch sequences have been initiated, each of these computers engages the other in primitive cyberwarfare to try to stop the other from launching. It seems that these machines are afraid of M.A.D.- mutually assured destruction.

So it’s a cool, very original setup and the gameplay is also unusual. The cards are all double-sided, so that when you hold them in your hand the other player can see the backs- which are also hidden from you when you draw due to that cartridge box. The goal is effectively connect your mainframe to the enemy mainframe by playing these circuitboard cards and lining up circuits of your color across a seven card expanse. You need to do this five times- DEFCON 1-4 and then the coup de grace.

There are three mandatory actions each turn. The most significant is Flip Over. Remember how you can see what is on the back of your opponent’s cards? If you remember what is on the reverse of a card he or she played, you can flip it to possibly make a connection between to other cards- or thwart a possibly successful attack. You also have to draw a card and trash a card, with the twist being that you can do so to either player’s hand. The last action is Switch Out, which lets you take a circuit card out of the line and put it in either player’s hand- but it retains its facing relative to you. You can do these in any order, and you’ll find that the game lies not only gathering and recalling information, but also in sequencing actions to your advantage.

Some cards have Resistors on them, and if you connect your mainframe to one it repairs you down a defcon level. However, this also causes anything connected to the Resistor to flip and then you discard the card. And it also shortens the board for each time. It can get down to two cards, which is pretty crazy. It’s an interesting way to increase tension, and if you are taking damage it’s a strategic concern as to whether or not you actually want to reduce the play field in exchange for the repair. Once someone hits DEFCON 4, the final success means that the enemy computer’s defenses have fallen and that nation’s nuclear arsenal is offline. Arrivederci, Ivan or GI Joe, depending on which side you are playing. This takes about 15-20 minutes.

RESISTOR_ is a very neat entry in the recent microgames trend. It’s surprisingly crunchy for something small, mainly because it relies on memory and intelligence-gathering rather than on resource management or other typical strategy game tropes- which also means that I’m pretty bad at the game because I just can’t keep track of which cards are where. But I still enjoy it because the concept is killer, the mechanics are novel and the atmosphere is awesome, particularly if you grew up in the era of “WarGames” and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation.