Review: WORMHOLES Almost Has Enough Power to Suck Players In
Balancing complexity with fun and competitiveness in board games is always a tricky feat. Often we see games favor random chance for a sense of thrill, incorporate many complex rules to give the sense of choice, or make you constantly butt heads with your opponent to feel extra competitive, but very few can balance all three effortlessly. Wormholes comes very close to the mark but falls just a bit short of thought-provoking mechanics, genuine entertaining gameplay, or intense competition.
That might sound like this game is very bad, but that is not the case at all. Wormholes is actually fairly enjoyable, but it could’ve used a bit more depth, variety, and forethought to make the game something really grand. Starting with the mechanics, this is a delivery game that relies on creating wormholes to jump to various parts of space with a few environmental interactions to liven things up. Players get points when delivering passengers and when other players use their wormholes. That is about it. I like that the game has relatively simple core ideas, but some of the mechanics to get from point A to point B can be overly complicated and slow for how simple the gameplay actually is. But for experienced gamers, the game is fairly approachable and reasonably fun.
Fun is such an interesting word here. I don’t know if I thoroughly enjoyed being a space delivery guy, but it was fun to try and win the game. I think most of my fun was bogged down by the randomness of the delivery quests and how they could easily favor one player or another by the nature of how they are distributed. It does feel great to bank many points by delivering a bunch of passengers to the same planet, but it feels equally frustrating to see another player do the same things while your deliveries are all over the place. Even though the game does somewhat account for this by giving players points for other things or opportunities to change up what needs to be delivered, it doesn’t solve the problems with luck favoring one person or another. I never saw a game with a massive point difference between last and first place, so it does balance out, but being able to overcome that imbalance of strategy is nigh impossible. If there was some form of trading jobs with other players, some high-cost and high-reward mechanics, or better ways to combat randomness, I think my enjoyment could have been a lot higher.
This is a good game and it is a good stepping stone for players to move from casual games like Uno, Monopoly, and Bananagrams to something higher in complexity and concept. However, it isn’t a high-caliber game and there are more interesting games with refined mechanics that reward players for using strategy out of their luck instead of passively watching the game happen to them as they move around.
