Other Stuff Monthly #18!

 Wow, what a long month it's been! Feels more like eight of them, doesn't it? Anyway, I'm finally able to start getting though the backlog of board games that's built up from Kickstarters and cheap online sales over the past year or so, and as such, I've regained the motivation to make these posts (though having said that, there isn't going to be a sudden string of monthly board game posts. I've got other stuff to cover, too). First up is a game that sat on my shelf for months, the communist-themed worker placement game Red Outpost!

 

Set in an alternate (better?) world where the USSR never ended and ventually made its way to the stars, the players take the role of the people in charge of a newly founded Soviet space colony, telling which workers to go where and at what time. It creates an interesting dynamic, as while you are competing for victory points, resources that might be in seperate player pools in other games, like workers, and the resources they produce, are instead communal. During the game, you get points for instructing workers to produce efficiently, but the big scoring happens after each day (there are two days in a game, and each day is broken down into five phases), when the mood of each worker is assessed, and each player who moved that worker during the day scores points based on both the worker's mood and how many times they moved them.

 

You can improve a worker's mood by sending them to do a job at which they're skilled (send the fisherman to fish, the shepherd to the pasture, and so on), or by giving them time off. Conversely, if you think one player stands to rake in a lot of points from a certain worker, there are also ways to decrease their mood, like sending them to do an ill-fitting job, framing them for stealing from the warehouse, or even having them spend some time in the gulag. So you can try and risk putting all your eggs in one basket for a big payoff at the end, or try and keep a few workers at slightly above-average levels of happiness, or you can concentrate on sabotaging the other players and making their favoured workers unhappy.

 

It took a few turns to really get into the swing of Red Outpost, but once we did, it was a really fun game. I think the Soviet theme really comes through in the game mechanics, and it's also a game with a lot of player interaction and opportunities for aggressive or sneaky play. I'm not sure if they're in the retail version, or if they're Kickstarter only, but the components are also really high quality: differently-shaped wooden meeples and tokens for the workers and resources, player counters with little hammer-and-sickles printed on them, and beautiful painted artwork on the board, too. Altogether, Red Outpost is a really fun game with great theming, and I definitely recommend at least giving it a try if you get the chance.