Black Angel, (PGBA01)

It's pretty fun mt friends and I enjoyed it a lot.

Love it new worker placement game to share with friends and family.

I love the player interaction in this game. The different game systems all connect to each other so there's an organic give and take between players. Sometimes I'll do something which indirectly helps you to do something else. You really need to pay attention to what other players might do, and figure out how to benefit from it. The dice drafting also adds some nice tension and forces you to stay flexible.I also dig the innovative "scrolling world" mechanism (implemented more simply in Solenia), where cards you play disappear after a few turns. This keeps you from running any single point engine for very long. It creates a real feeling of pressure to plan your actions efficiently, and you rarely get to do everything you want.There's a pretty decent solo AI opponent, which takes very little work to operate while providing a good challenge. It's not exactly like playing with another human, because the AI doesn't react to your actions, but it's a pretty good approximation, and a decent solo game on its own merit.The artwork and components are beautiful. To be honest, I first picked this game up off the shelf because of the striking cover design. The rest of the art lives up to the cover's promise. The bits are nice too, even if I wish the resource gems were a bit less generic. The way the little robots fit into their tiny flying saucers is so satisfying.I'm not sure it's worth the $89 list price. The complexity of this game will turn some people off, so you can't play it with everyone. It's more expensive than a lot of other good medium-heavy eurogames, but apart from the nice presentation, it's not obvious what more it gives you. For $89, I want something epic like Eclipse, which tells a great story with a lot of drama and comes with a ton of miniatures and doo-dads.

great game

For how hyped this game was, it was extremely disappointing. Most boring worker placement I have ever played. Also not quote sure how the amount of supplies in the game equates the price. The options at which you have during a turn amount to almost nothing and are not interesting. Selling my copy for $60.

Great game

I got my local brick and mortar store to order this for me and it is AWESOME. Very intricate, thoughtful and interesting. It takes a couple plays to grasp all that is possible for this game.

I have a lot of thoughts on this game, good, bad, and some that I’m rather indifferent about thus the middle of the range rating. Let me go into this by saying I wanted to love this game, it was on my list of wanting to play and own and have on my shelf and it be this really cool colored box and I dreamt of friends asking what is that game and can we play it. Sadly, Black Angel isn’t that game, it sits on the shelf of games that I left friends borrow; the shelf of I’ll never play it unless someone else really wants me to teach it to them.The Good! It’s quite a striking game on the table, it has some funky interstellar space colors that just jump out and speak to me as someone who loves space board games. The modular board components that you actually pick up and move as the Black Angel thrusts itself towards plant Spes on journey over several millennia is a great interactive concept. I loved this in Solenia and it plays great in Black Angel also. And can I just say wow, the theme and the story behind the game, humanity is lost, a new planet is found, it will take millennia to get there so an ark of human DNA races through space with player controlled AI’s leading the way to our hopeful future resurrection. This is great stuff, the stuff that great Sci-Fi movies are made of, good job for pulling me into the game hook, line, and sinker.The Bad! There are a lot of choices for what you can do on a turn in the game, not so much that you can never decide what to do, although this game is an AP player’s nightmare, the choices require a lot more in calculating what is best for you, and in turn what will be a detriment to your opponents. While there isn’t direct confrontation it is easy to evaluate the dice an opponent has, work out a few of their possible moves, see that they don’t have the resources to do them, and then to top it all off you can go as far as to then actively take away some of their dice or simply choose to take the turn they may likely take. This may seem like a petty way to play, but in a game of robot AI’s these calculated assaults against what your fellow players seem to be the norm rather than the exception. The tech tree part of your personal player board is sure fire way to also send your AP players into a full blown meltdown and the end game reliance on a lot of points coming from there makes this a third game board you have to manage and do well on just to compete in points.The Meh! The dice allocation for how many times you can perform chosen actions is fun but also quite limiting at times, you don’t often have the resources to take powerful actions as dice rolling is mostly luck with possibilities of augmenting some of your rolls. The attacking Ravager species are an element I enjoyed quite a bit, if you’re traveling across the universe you’re bound to eventually bump into some space jerks who want to annihilate you just because that’s their role. I would have liked to have seen more interaction directly with both the Ravager alien species and the other three friendly species that you acquire tech from. There is a possibility that the Ravagers even destroy or prevent the Black Angel from ever reaching its destination but it plays out in a rather boring way.The Summary! I can’t label Black Angel a good game or a bad game, I think it could have benefitted from another year on the drawing board, a bit more polish, and something more to make this “just another space game.” This isn’t one I will revisit, it has an interesting story behind it, gameplay that mimics the scenario well; however it has enough clunky bits and repetitive gameplay that I just can’t get behind it.

Muy buen juego, tiene bastantitas reglas pero una vez que se entiende fluye muy bien y la producción y arte son espectaculares.