Read All About It!
by Ian. Fri, 8 Dec (Updated at Fri, 8 Dec)New game around making news stories hits the club.
Last night Derek Lovell brought over his game Byline. This is due to hit Kickstarter sometime next year and this was a great opportunity to try the game out.
We hope to see Derek a lot more at the club but for now, let’s take a look at the game.
The official description reads:
It's 1960. The world is brimming with important news and waiting for reporters to tell these stories. Byline puts the player into the role of independent newspaper reporters writing articles, trying to elevate their reputation, and increasing the popularity of their newspaper outlets. Over the course of seven days, players will pack each workday with seeking out sources, validating leads, and delivering stories just in time to meet the critical deadline.
Byline, at its heart, is a worker placement game with a twist. The game plays one to four players in 60 to 90 minutes.
How does it play?
Well, very nicely thanks. The game is not unique in the fact it is essentially a worker placement that uses time as workers. You can see similarities with things like Village, Expansion to Darwin’s Journey and I am sure many more. However, what makes this different is how it uses time.
You see most games that use time don’t use it sequentially. That is an action that may cost you x hours/minutes..etc but tbh you could say that’s x action points and do away with the time element. In Byline time is a lot more.
1st your workers are all clock faces with an hour. Range from 9 am to 3 pm. Actions cost 1, 2 or 3 time but you have to place them sequentially. So for 2 time, you can do workers 10 and 11 ..etc
This makes a lot more sense and is very thematic for the game. After all, you have to complete “deadlines” by a certain time, so that worker is needed for that.
The actions are then resolved din time order. So all 9 am, then 10 am..etc. If you do a 2 or 3 hour action you can only resolve on the latest time you placed. So that card you want and you put down 11 and 12, well the person who put 9 and 10 before you just grabbed it. That means the 3 pm worker you used to submit it is void as you needed that card.
The game we played had a lot of player interaction and table talk.
Very good game and one I will certainly be backing.