As is becoming traditional, my gaming group and I recently did an initial play through of MERCS: Recon, so I wanted to capture my initial thoughts about the game. I found the game to be quite good, and it flowed well, but I found a number of nit-picks that would have improved the polish of the game. For me, this wasn’t unexpected or problematic in the sense that they are things that could be smoothed out over time playing the game, but they do provide a higher barrier to entry, which is always a struggle.

First, and probably the most minor nit-pick was the internal packaging. All the tiles were shrink-wrapped together, and, since they were different sizes, the shrink-wrap deformed a lot of the tiles. This didn’t cause any damage (sans a little warping), but it was a little disheartening to see when opening the box. The other noticeable item right out of the box was that the miniatures all needed to be assembled (a total of 40 miniatures). This wasn’t unexpected for me, as they mentioned it in the kickstarter updates, but it was a lot of extra work to get the game playable. I generally enjoy putting together miniatures, and these were fairly easy, so it was not a problem, but it felt like a barrier to actually getting to play the game.

The other (somewhat expected) annoyance was the organization of the rules. This wasn’t completely unexpected as the first run of the Myth rules were also a bit disorganized, but it was still a problem here. In particular, there were two main issues: There was a lack of specificity on many rules, and the layout made it difficult to look up rules on-the-fly when needed. While I’m certainly comfortable making a call at the table to keep the game moving (especially since it’s a cooperative game), this made the game frustrating to learn, and we ended up not doing some things only because we couldn’t figure out how it worked.

Lastly, I felt that the quality of some of the components could have been better. The iconography on the dice, in particular, seemed lacking in detail (from a distance, it was difficult to tell the difference between the shields and the bursts, and the two-burst sides on the heavy damage dice was just a larger smudge). The player tokens were also quite small, which made moving them around constantly more difficult than if they were larger and easier to handle. Finally, concerning the employee and secfor tokens, I’m not a big fan of having tokens with different things on either side, as it makes finding the tokens you need twice as difficult.

Overall, the game was quite enjoyable, but very rough around the edges, especially rules-wise. It fills a nice gap as a five-player cooperative game, which is pretty neat, although I must admit, I don’t often have precisely five for a game. Finally, I think that the fact that the models are usable in the tabletop strategy game is really neat, and I look forward to giving that a shot when it arrives.