Review: Familiar, Frantic Fights In INVASION OF THE BROOD
As we’ve been moving through a board game revolution in the last decade with a wide variety of worker placement, role-playing, deck building, and economy games, Invasion Of The Brood brings back the classic strategy game to our tables. The game also leans on asymmetrical factions to mix up the action like the game Ogre. Between the humans and the aliens, the dozens of units, and unique objectives, there’s a lot of things to enjoy in this game even if some of its bass mechanics feel somewhat outdated.
The game is pretty straightforward, aliens are invading earth and the humans are gathering their forces trying to protect the earth and destroy the aliens on the moon. The humans focus on building loads of units and spreading their influence amongst all nations. The aliens strategically place their units and evolve/upgrade them to slowly build and hold their positions on earth. The overall objective of Invasion Of The Brood is simple and interesting enough with victory being pretty easy to understand for both players. However, the amount of mechanics, turn phases, and little rules for a number of situations can feel very cumbersome while not adding much to the overall strategy.
Being a strategy game, it’s obviously filled with lots and lots of combat. The stats of the characters are easy to see and assess, but the attacking and defending mechanics feel a little unintuitive. Another thing about most strategy games is that even if you make efforts to battle, usually failure isn’t so punishing, but feels frustrating and somewhat annoying when two or three rolls of the dice can drastically ruin your plans. To be honest, this may be partially just my own feelings, but combat always felt like a desperate gamble instead of an organized, tactical risk. As a side note, there are a lot of units in this game and with how combat and production happen, things can get terribly cluttered, which feels bothersome and cumbersome while trying to play.
Invasion Of The Brood does have its enjoyable moments and controlling each faction makes for an interesting challenge in learning strategies, strengths, and exploits. However, the game feels like an overly complicated series of lucky battles with some positional strategy. For casual players or those who are unfamiliar with strategy games, this game probably wouldn’t be all that enjoyable, but for people that thoroughly enjoy strategy games, there are some definite levels of entertainment and replayability here.
