During the last game day, I got the chance to play a couple rounds of Fireteam Zero with Ian. I backed Fireteam Zero on kickstarter, so my expectations were that it would be a good game, but that there would be some polish missing. I was pleasantly surprised, then, that Fireteam Zero was really quite fun and was well polished.

Over the last few years, I have played a lot of cooperative games. Oftentimes, I find that cooperative games are very complex, and I have often wondered if that is strictly necessary. The first thing that I noticed about Fireteam Zero is that it is a fair bit less complex than many other cooperative games. This means that both player turns and monster turns are fast, and downtime is minimal. The main exception to this are the player’s tactical response cards – these are very powerful cards that get played out of turn, and tend to be a lot more complex. However, the only chance players have of playing these cards are after having them in hand for a full round, and they are not allowed to draw cards the turn they play it (meaning that they are unlikely to do much else that round).

The thing that really impressed me is how they handled increasing difficulty over the course of the game. At the start, the monsters don’t pose a significant threat to the team – even reasonable coordination can keep the team above water. However, every four turns, the monsters get a “twist”. These are powerful special abilities that the monsters develop or complications for the team that makes the monsters very dangerous. None of these are good and, the times when we got to look at the top three and choose, we both agreed that the decision about which ones were less bad was a difficult one. The great thing about the twists is that they didn’t make the game more complicated, simply more dangerous. The pacing was also spot-on; every time we got comfortable with our tactics, it was time for things to change again.

In terms of the game’s polish, felt that the game did well in both invoking the mood and being clear on the surrounding rules. The cards and the mission manual clearly divided the fluff from the rules text and explained the latter in plain and terse language. The CD with mood music and audio mission briefings was also quite neat and added quite a bit to our game. The place that falls down a little bit is the rulebook, which is always unfortunate. The main part of the book describing the rules and how things work is quite solid, and hit the right flow for where to find relevant rules. However, the setup section left a bit to be desired – there were a number of things that were unclear (the references to exploration cards which weren’t mentioned in the components) or simply missing from the setup section (that the two specialists needed to be added to the board).

Overall, Fireteam Zero was quite a neat experience. I love the mood that it sets and the gameplay is spot on for a great cooperative game.