Salvation Road Review

As a sucker for all things post-apocalyptic, I sought to purchase Salvation Road from Van Ryder Games as soon as humanly possible. It seemed to me to be the perfect mix of tension and tough choices, all wrapped up in an end-of-the-world setting complete with Mad Max style raiders trying to take the players’ stuff. I cracked it open and played it the day I got it, and I was astounded by the graphic design and overall feel of the game. It is literally everything that I wanted it to be, but it did feel a lot like another game that I played a lot of, but didn’t particularly enjoy: Dead of Winter. It’s almost as if Van Ryder took all of the things I hated about Dead of Winter and stripped them out, leaving just the really interesting bits and adding some new mechanics that make the game a completely fantastic experience. That said, the similarities are absolutely uncanny; if you loved Dead of Winter, you’re probably going to love this as well.

I mentioned the graphic design first because they absolutely nailed the presentation in a way that has been lacking in the board game industry. Everything about the way information is presented to you is intuitive, and the look of the game is truly remarkable. For example, each of the locations players can visit are made to look like a faded Polaroid photo, which looks completely amazing, and the board is designed with illustrated spaces for all of the salient tokens, which helps deliver a level of immersion that I haven’t experienced in a very long time. Everything about the presentation helps underscore the setting and integral theme of dilapidation and unyielding despair; I’d go so far as saying that this is one of the most well-presented games I’ve ever played.

Above and beyond the graphic design, the mechanical aspects of the game are solid gold. You are trying to collect and store enough food, medicine, and ammunition to escape from your doomed bunker to the last sanctuary city on Earth, Salvation, before its reactor explodes. This is done using action points, of which each character has two, and can use to move, pick stuff up, search for more stuff, fight, heal, or arguably most importantly, perform recon actions which will reveal how many tokens of which kinds will be required on the trip on the eponymous highway to safety. Once there, you’ll also have to pay a toll to get in, and you don’t really know what that will be, either, so the game really is more about pushing your luck to the breaking point unless you’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time doing recon to find out exactly what you’re going to need for the trip. Even then, you won’t really know what you need because the toll is randomly chosen at the end of the journey.

With games like this, replay value is the big question on many people’s minds, so let me touch on that. The locations players can visit are randomly selected, the number of which is player-dependent; it’s safe to say that no two games are the same. On top of that, each player plays with one hero and one survivor henchman, with each hero having a special ability and each survivor having a disadvantage that balances the heroes’ abilities. It really does feel like it’s tightly balanced and was play-tested to death. There’s a lot of other facets which create surprise every game, so you’re going to be able to play this a ton of times before it gets same-y, if that’s even possible.

If one word had to be used to sum up the theme of the game, it’s “tension”. The game has you knocked on your heels the whole time, managing your scarce resources to keep the bandits at bay, making sure you don’t attract too much attention to the scavenging spots because it will increase your odds of being slaughtered. One of the really slick facets of gameplay is that when you’re wounded, not only does the wound token take up an inventory slot, each round a card is played to carry the narrative and some of the cards force you to flip up one or more of the wound tokens, delivering surprise knock-on effects that can be the difference between salvation or being consumed by the wasteland. These event cards come in several varieties and with quite disparate effects, but rest assured that none of them are going to be pleasant for players; they exist to continue telling the story and sucking the hope from the room.

The long and short is that this is a fantastic co-operative game that will have you sitting at the edge of your seat the entire game. The tension is so thick you could cut it with a butter knife, and the sense of existential dread is carried to players both by the expertly executed graphic design and the mechanics which are wholly integrated with both the setting and the theme. If this wasn’t on your radar before, it should be now, and I recommend this to anyone who loves co-operative games, press-your-luck mechanics on the “meta-game” level, and anyone who is a fan of Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic settings. If I have any complaint, it’s that the game is brutally difficult to win, and although it may have some sort of formulaic solution that’s not immediately apparent, we haven’t found it yet. I’m totally satisfied with my purchase, and I believe most of you will be too.