LogFAQs > #932592008

106. The Grizzled (2015)

Category: Cooperative
Genres: Restricted communication, sequence-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-40 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 2 sessions with 3, 5 players (2016)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), 54/80 (2018)

Summary - The goal of The Grizzled is, as a team, to clear a set of stages representing psychological traumas of World War I. A leader chooses the ambition level of the mission, and then on their turn, each player plays cards with attributes that might cause trauma, like darkness or gas masks, or cards that limit others' abilities to play as easily. The game works like an anti-set-collection game; if you get too many of any given trauma, you blow up.

Experience - My friends and I played The Grizzled for the first time while staying together to attend another board gaming friends' wedding. Any co-op game with vaguely defined, loosely restricted communication results in kind of funny circumvention of those communication rules. We ground through the campaign with three players and it was unique-feeling and satisfying. Just a few weeks later, wtih no less likable a crew, we played a five-player game later and... it was just insanely punishing. There's no way that I was strategically worse my second go with the game, but there was no point at which it felt like we could possibly have won.

Design - The Grizzled is pretty clever. I like the art (which always depicts a combination of afflictions), I like the special abilities, I like the the courage factor (where a leader can choose to be conservative or risky in deciding how many cards to draw), I like the "lucky charms" that give you little one-off abilities to discard cards, I like the retreat mechanic (and the trash-talk that can come from calling your teammates cowardly), and I really like the support mechanic.

But in the end... Playing it with three was good and perhaps four would be challenging and tight, but something about the game just feels fundamentally broken if you can't realistically even hope to win at a player count that it endorses. I made this comment last year, but the one thing I felt would best improve our chances last year was... cutting out a player or two. I don't think that's a particularly good look.

Future - I've played a fair number of different cooperative restricted communication games (a few of which will show up later), and usually they provide more laughs, more intensity, or simpler rules. The Grizzled also doesn't seem like a great 2p game, which further limits its niche. Like many games in this tier or so, I'd like to refresh my memory of it, solidify its ranking and my thoughts on it, and perhaps lay it to rest.
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