I checked lot of video game customizations as part of my board game coverage for Kotaku. As expected, as this is primarily a video game website. Some of these adjustments were fine, some were pretty good, but I haven’t played any like this before Society of Heroes Before.
Some of these decent customizations, like Downfall or Fail, tries to replicate some of the themes and basic gameplay hooks of their digital counterparts, while still clearly being their own signature tabletop experiences. You could play these games and think, yes, that comes down to the same general point as the video game, and I liked this video game so I like it too.
Better adjustments, like the Assassin’s Creed Game I just reviewed, manage to go a little further. They are able to transfer entire systems from the video game to the tabletop and give the board game the same overall mood as the video game. You don’t like the board game just because you like it Assassin’s Creed, but because you liked it Assassin’s Creeds special attitude to stealth and evasion that Brotherhood of Venice could reproduce so brilliantly.
Society of Heroes somehow manages to go further. That practically is the videogame. All of it. Every system, every aspect, everything that you remember about the video game and love is here, only now you’re playing it on a table instead of a PC. It doesn’t matter that it’s turn-based now while the video game was real-time, you get the exact same feelings, just at a slightly slower pace.
It’s so close that I don’t even know if it’s still an adaptation. It’s almost a port, though I say that with the greatest admiration for the designers at Bad Crow Studios, because while the board game manages to cram in everything from Relic’s 2006 release, it is ways they stuffed it in are of course unique on the tabletop and therefore commendable.
Society of Heroes Ships with a few different play styles, from standard skirmishes (taking and holding victory points) to HQ attacks, and the co-op expansion offers the option of adding (very intelligently handled) AI opponents and teammates to the mix. There’s no campaign, but there are a couple of great maps to play around with that can be scaled and changed (and even combined if you have the space) to offer different challenges.
There are four factions that players can choose from: Germany, the USSR, the US, and the UK. They’re all pretty interchangeable (at least in terms of the amount and mix of units), so they’re not tied to any particular side in the war, so you can face the British against the Americans or uniting the Soviets in Germany. However, through the use of special forces and upgradeable HQs, each side is pursuing largely the same basic themes as they are in the video game, with the British being focused on building positions while the Americans are focusing more on infantry gimmicks.
As I said, the brilliance here does not lie in a groundbreaking and innovative board game design, as practically every system here is based on one that was invented by Relic back in 2006. But the Bad Crow team deserve immense credit for the way they understood these mechanics and then found ways to adapt them to the tabletop, a skill that cannot be valued enough in this type of game. If it were that easy to turn a video game into a board game, I wouldn’t be as excited about the work this one has done.
Just because it feels like that Society of Heroes every corner doesn’t mean it’s just copied from the video game; that would be crazy as the video game is in real time. Instead, it takes every feeling you have from using every system on your PC and all the satisfaction you get to achieve a resounding tactical triumph and fills in the gaps, elegantly offering us the same options and possibilities, from upgrade paths to flanking possibilities, but the execution of this is handed over to dice and witches.
Cover is there. There are also buildings here that can be used to protect the infantry but which collapse under fire. As well as oppression and video The perfect rock-paper-scissors balance of the game between units and the way control points are captured and the way each battle starts with weaker squads and then has to be upgraded to bigger guns and tanks.
In this board game you can plan and play a battle just as you would on the PC. In fact, the only area that would be said to have made a distinct breakthrough is combat, as this could never be handled in the same way in real time, but here again the board game does its best to do it in real time anyway feel.
At the point of each round when it is time to shoot, any unit in range of another can be assigned dice, some of which will automatically deal damage, others with a chance to escape the hits can, depending on the type of unit and the unit it is attacking (a simulation of the way the video game would not attack a tank if it was not specially equipped). It doesn’t matter whether it’s a battered infantry squad with a surviving rifleman or a brand-new tank, every unit gets an exchange of blows, and no unit can ever be wiped out without a chance to fire its own shot. So while the fight is resolved by players who take turns rolling the dice, the path It’s resolved, still playing out as if those bullets and grenades were being exchanged in real time.
Society of Heroes is a wonderful haptic experience. Thick, giant game boards still exist on even the smallest scale, and the plastic miniatures you’ve littered the battlefield with look amazing, from the smallest infantry squads to the largest tanks (which can be painted and come with stickers to attach ) if you are modeling at all). It gets even better with the optional terrain package that adds plastic buildings you can put infantry in, small plastic sandbags for cover, and real flagpoles with small flags that you can swap out every time a point changes hands.
Between all the units and the board and the mountains of dice and pieces, it has all the sensory appeal of a serious war game with almost no effort, there Society of Heroes is definite on the Memoirs 44 Side of the complexity scale; The fun here lies in the broad brushstrokes of the tactical engagement, not in its details. I know that looks like a lot of dice in these photos, but here you have to think of each one as an explosion and not as a complicated set of rules.
Society of Heroes is a game where you keep moving and seemingly always shooting, where front lines bend constantly but rarely break. It’s a game in which the whole war just goes up and down gently, your plans are always one step away from realization, but also those of your opponent. It’s such a delicious balance that the video game has nailed, and the board game that gets it right goes a long way towards making it as enjoyable as it is to play.
Bad Crow Studios deserve immense recognition for what they have achieved here. They neither invented nor reinvented the wheel, but what they did is almost like a translation job that takes the design language of a successful video game and puts the same joy – if not the same methods – into the tabletop. I once said Society of Heroes was the perfect RTS and I still mean it, but Society of Heroes is now also a near-perfect tabletop game.
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