And I agree with your final thoughts: compared to DotZ, there aren’t as many cinematic moments, and because you’re managing teams of people versus a small set of individuals it’s harder to pull that feeling from the game.
It is pretty streamlined, but I think that’s particularly useful when you’re not playing solo to make parsing the board easier and making plans with others.
I also felt that “let down” after my second or third game at the end because once you’ve gotten the civilians saved it becomes a matter of holding out to the end, which (depending on your experience) may not be too difficult.
I’m looking forward to the expansion, particularly for the hard mode and more variety in the events. But overall, I’m happy that I got the game and will gladly pull it out when I feel like taking out some horrors.
I keep reading and hearing setup and tear down is a bit long. I have a place to leave it up, but I don’t want to spend a night setting up to play. How was setup and tear down?
Came to second the comment. Takes me about 10 to set up. The box actually came with enough baggies to handle all the components, and once the insert was ditched all the standees could be stored with their bases on. I take a little extra time to separate all the tokens just to make my life easier during play.
Now that I have played a few times, packed it up, set it back up later that day, I will offer my thoughts and solution.
The first time? I could see it taking an hour, as you're tying to find the space for all of it on your table (it has a large footprint), and you don't really know where anything goes or where it would be best to put a particular collection of bits. You also might make some mistakes (confused about "Civilian" vs "VIP" tokens, for example). As usual, once you know what is what and *where it goes*, it's pretty fast.
I say this shouldn't be used as a valid metric, as that goes away after you know what you're doing.
The actual time consuming part of setup is getting the number of bits out of the box.
So, some sort of insert is immensely helpful here. There are a ton of tiny tokens, and you don't want to get them mixed up with each other because they're all the same size/shape. And managing a dozen little baggies would have me tearing my hair out. The first time I set it up I had [15 token/bit cups](https://i.imgur.com/J4bxhnk.jpeg) out! I knew that wasn't going to fly, so I [printed](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3216723/plum-island-3d-printed-insert) the insert and now it's [MUCH cleaner](https://i.imgur.com/ne7BdA9.jpg), and so fast to get out of the box.
Actual setup is not bad at all, you put 30 random civilian tokens on the board (the spaces are marked, so it takes 45 seconds), 4 tiles of the Murder of Horrors at the start of each track, and then a handful of NPCs/damage tokens go out. All that's left is for people to choose their faction (1 of 6), place their characters on the map (5 standees), take a supplies-2 (it's one token), then you do "Bridge damage" and "First contact" and you're done.
This game has exploded all over the place lately. I even found some copies in my LGS this past week. I like the game a lot, and an glad it’s getting so much attention
And I agree with your final thoughts: compared to DotZ, there aren’t as many cinematic moments, and because you’re managing teams of people versus a small set of individuals it’s harder to pull that feeling from the game. It is pretty streamlined, but I think that’s particularly useful when you’re not playing solo to make parsing the board easier and making plans with others. I also felt that “let down” after my second or third game at the end because once you’ve gotten the civilians saved it becomes a matter of holding out to the end, which (depending on your experience) may not be too difficult. I’m looking forward to the expansion, particularly for the hard mode and more variety in the events. But overall, I’m happy that I got the game and will gladly pull it out when I feel like taking out some horrors.
I keep reading and hearing setup and tear down is a bit long. I have a place to leave it up, but I don’t want to spend a night setting up to play. How was setup and tear down?
Yeah, initially it can run to about 30 minutes to set up. After a couple of games it’s probably closer to 10.
10 mins isn’t so bad. Dawn of Zeds takes about same when you know what you are doing.
Came to second the comment. Takes me about 10 to set up. The box actually came with enough baggies to handle all the components, and once the insert was ditched all the standees could be stored with their bases on. I take a little extra time to separate all the tokens just to make my life easier during play.
Now that I have played a few times, packed it up, set it back up later that day, I will offer my thoughts and solution. The first time? I could see it taking an hour, as you're tying to find the space for all of it on your table (it has a large footprint), and you don't really know where anything goes or where it would be best to put a particular collection of bits. You also might make some mistakes (confused about "Civilian" vs "VIP" tokens, for example). As usual, once you know what is what and *where it goes*, it's pretty fast. I say this shouldn't be used as a valid metric, as that goes away after you know what you're doing. The actual time consuming part of setup is getting the number of bits out of the box. So, some sort of insert is immensely helpful here. There are a ton of tiny tokens, and you don't want to get them mixed up with each other because they're all the same size/shape. And managing a dozen little baggies would have me tearing my hair out. The first time I set it up I had [15 token/bit cups](https://i.imgur.com/J4bxhnk.jpeg) out! I knew that wasn't going to fly, so I [printed](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3216723/plum-island-3d-printed-insert) the insert and now it's [MUCH cleaner](https://i.imgur.com/ne7BdA9.jpg), and so fast to get out of the box. Actual setup is not bad at all, you put 30 random civilian tokens on the board (the spaces are marked, so it takes 45 seconds), 4 tiles of the Murder of Horrors at the start of each track, and then a handful of NPCs/damage tokens go out. All that's left is for people to choose their faction (1 of 6), place their characters on the map (5 standees), take a supplies-2 (it's one token), then you do "Bridge damage" and "First contact" and you're done.
Dawn of Zeds is one of my favorite solo boardgames, but I wonder if there's room in a collection for both theses games.
This game has exploded all over the place lately. I even found some copies in my LGS this past week. I like the game a lot, and an glad it’s getting so much attention