Revive

Summary

👥 a game for 1 to 4 players
⏳ Play time is 90 – 120 minutes
🏢 Publisher is Aporta Games

Introduction

Western Legends Stories is a standalone, competitive and narrative open-world campaign game set in the Wild West.

In connected and fully replayable scenarios, you explore the region and create your own legend through your glorious (or infamous) deeds, as your decisions have a lasting impact on your surroundings. In this vast environment, you will encounter a wide variety of characters, wild animals and locations. Develop your skills as you see fit, collect items, interact with various non-player characters and fight your way out of dangerous situations.

Setting up the game

Place the game board in the middle of the table. Shuffle the 5 starting area tiles and place them face up on the indicated spaces in the middle of the game board.

Shuffle the remaining 25 area tiles and place them face down on the other spaces and shuffle the 5 large location tiles and place one tile with a random side facing up on each of the 4 corner spaces of the game board. Return the unused location tile to the game box.

Shuffle the citizen cards and put them in a facedown deck. Reveal 5 cards and place them face up next to the deck. Sort the machine tokens by color and put them in three piles next to the game board.

Flip 3 tokens from each pile face up and shuffle the slot module tokens and place them in a facedown pile.

Reveal 5 tokens and place them face up next to the pile.

The face-up citizen cards, machine tokens, and slot modules are referred to as the display. Shuffle the crate tokens and place them in a facedown stack next to the game board.

Place the energy markers as a supply next to the game board.

Put the action cubes near the game board. 

Make a stack of the minor artifacts and place the end game tile on top. 

Related to the player count, place the major artifacts face up in the crater area on the game board.

Also, each player takes a player board. Place it in front of you and randomly select a tribe board. Place it with the sun side facing up to the left of your player board.

Place the machine markers on space 1 of each of their respective machine tracks. 

Take one energy token from your storage. 

Place the switch token in the indicated slot. 

Each player randomly takes a set of 6 starting citizen cards, marked with an “S” on the back. 

All these cards should have the same letter on the front. 

Shuffle your 6 cards and place 3 of them face down to the right of your player resting area. Place the remaining 3 cards face up in the player’s active area. 

Each player takes one artifact card, which they keep secret from the other players. Return the unused artifact cards to the game box.

Take a player’s aid, choose a color, and take the corresponding tokens. These tokens can be placed on the corresponding parts of the player board.

Also, gather the starting resources related to the player count.

Now you’re ready to start this new adventure!

Let’s get it on the table

To start with, Revive has two play modules: a campaign and the regular game.

Let me explain a bit about the campaign module, which consists of five parts. During the campaign, you will unlock additional content for the game. We recommend that you start the campaign right away, but if you prefer, you may also just play the game with the basic rules.

The campaign deck will guide players through the five chapters, one by one. Players do not need to play the entire campaign with the same group. After they have completed the five chapters, they may continue to play using all unlocked elements or only the ones they prefer.

This campaign module gives us a very good vibe. Now, proceed if players are not ready for this and just want to play Revive.

The starting player takes the first turn, and after that, the next player takes their turn in clockwise order.

On your turn, a player performs up to 2 actions or hibernate.

Preform “Up to 2 actions”; this can be one of the following:

• Play a card: Take one of the cards from your active area and tuck it into a vacant card slot on your player board.

• Use your switch token: Gain any one basic resource; this doesn’t include a crystal.

• Explore: Choose a facedown area tile on the game board. Players need to pay the cost for range to get to this tile and the cost shown on the back of the chosen tile.

• Populate: Choose a population figure from your tribe board and place it in the chosen location. This does cost the range price of getting to this tile and the cost of populating itself.

• Build: Choose a vacant sand space where you want to build. Pay for the range to this space and the type of building you like to build.

There are two types of buildings: small and large buildings. This type of building is related to how many rewards you’ll get. When you place a building, the rewards are based on the following, where small buildings get these rewards, and large buildings get twice as many:

• Depending on the terrain type, which can be a forest, mountain, or field, advance the corresponding machine track marker on your player board one space for each terrain space.

• If your building is adjacent to a crystal, gain a crystal resource.

• If your building is adjacent to a new water space that you have not already used, take the reward shown.

Perform “Hibernate”.

If you cannot or do not want to perform one or two actions on your turn, you must hibernate. 

When hibernating, players perform the steps as following: 

1. Return all energy from your machines to your energy storage. 

2. Take all cards from your resting area and place them face up in your active area. If you have unplayed cards remaining in your active area, they remain in place. 

3. Take all played cards from your card slots and place them face down in your resting area. 

4. Slide your switch token up to the “unused” position. 

5. Advance your hibernation marker one space. Gain the reward shown to the right of your current space or any space below on the hibernation track. 

When you move to the fourth space on the hibernation track, which is on the main board, this player must immediately remove one major artifact of their choice from the game board. This artifact is removed from play.

Another cool action that each player can take is that, at any time during their turn, they may use energy to activate any of their unlocked machines to gain its immediate effect. Move an energy from your energy storage to the machine you want to activate. This machine may not be activated again until the energy has been removed, which will happen when you “Hibernate,” as explained earlier.

So, getting more energy and unlocking new machines makes the players’ turn even nicer.

If a player takes the last major artifact, they also take the end game tile.

When they are done with their turn, all other players take one last complete turn before the game ends. If any player is supposed to gain an artifact after the last major artifact has been taken, they instead take a minor artifact. Then all players tally their “purple” points as follows.

• The lowest visible points on their progress track. 

• Points on unlocked technologies on their tribe board. 

• Points from each large location where they have a population figure. 

• Unlocked end-game card bonuses on a machine track. 

• 1 point for each 5 remaining resources. 

• Points from the artifact card and major artifacts. 

The player with the most points wins the game.

Conclusie & eindscore

Difficulty: 3.42/ 5
Re-playability: 8
Our score: 9 out of 10 dice

WOW, it’s a very fine combination of diverse game mechanics like exploration and strategy without any combat. Sorry, I’m more of a peacemaker 😁… Each player has enough to do or gain during each game. And yes, you can get in the way of your opponents and start some “lovely” conversations. Still, every player will have a lot of diversity to explore and win their game.

Sometimes the theme can be a bit sad, which lingers during the game, but with Revive, this does not stick.

The gameplay gives the good feeling of really wanting to revive each time the game is brought to the table. Maybe it’s because there is no combat needed to fulfill the end goals, which maintains this feeling. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with good combat, but there are many other games that will fulfill that purpose.

Getting back to the components and quality of the game, it is really well executed. Normally, when players need to place cards under their player boards, it’s dramatic. But no, not with Revive!

Double-layered player boards and good components are just nicely done.

I truly like the campaign module, which you don’t need to play, but when you do, the achievements can be added or not. This extends the replayability a lot.

Also, because each tribe has two sides, it is easy to start gameplay, and when you have played it a few times, you can turn to the side that makes the game more complex.

When we played it for the first time, we thought it would be a difficult game to play with all the different tracks. However, after just a few turns, we both already got the hang of it.

If something needs to be said, the insert could have been better. But luckily, we received the colored insert from Folded Space, which enhanced the setup for the extended game vibe.

What is Revive for me? A board game changer and fully Moosefied 🤪.

Thanks to Aporta Games for this preview copy and the opportunity to write about it.