by MillertimeRC
I bought Rex about two months ago and have been wanting to play it since that day. We have a regular Wednesday night game group that meets in a local tavern and the games played run the full range. I thought this game would be a hit because there is a sub-section of that group that regularly enjoys A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition), Battlestar Galactica, and The Resistance. We have played enough"dirty" games together that we don't take it personal and generally enjoy the "screw your neighbor" element as well as diplomacy and alliances.. but usually the backstabbing. Two weeks ago we were scheduled to play Rex but someone received their copy of Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Second Edition) just before leaving to come to the event, so that ended up being the game of choice. Last night we did finally get Rex to the table
In advance I had read the rules, played a few rounds solo to try to make sense of them, and I printed out the game summaries for each player. I also printed out copied of the How to Play summary and used these to teach the game. We had 5 players, which I was concerned about after reading just about every post on these forums. But.. our regular 6th didn't show and I didn't really want to send one player away, knowing that it might result in everyone choosing to play something else for the night and maybe never getting Rex played. I'll go into that a bit more at the end, but unfortunately I do think there are some issues with 5 players. I did not take notes during the game and my memory is sketchy since I spent most of the game trying to keep things moving and explaining and/or looking up rules. This will be a very brief overview of what happened...
Some of us had played TI3 before and so were familiar with the races. We drew for first player and some just took a random race or who they thought looked good, some did want to know about the races before making their decision. From the first player and going clockwise we had: Hacan, Jol-Nar, Lazax, Letnev (me), and Sol. No one was thrilled about playing space-faring turtles. I actually picked last and had the choice of Letnev or Xxcha and decided I liked the sneakiness of the Letnev with their increased traitor and strategy cards.
On turn one things were mostly slow with a players making moves towards picking up influence. With four traitor cards and four strategy cards I was confident and moved my initial 10 units into the Imperial Palace, then deployed units into the spaceport that I vacated to retain it's movement bonus. Sol decided not to push the issue and moved out of the Palace and then deplyoed it's remaining units into a large stack next to me. I had two of the needed three Strongholds at the end of turn 1, but the other three were all being well defended. I considered making a move on the Lazax controlled Stronghold since I held two of his leader's traitor cards, including one of his strongest. If I could get him to commit that leader to the battle I could win through the traitorous leader.. but I was not able to get enough units into place quickly enough.
A few rounds went by with some battles taking place, and everyone discovering just how bloody they are in this game. For some reason I was a target, perhaps because of my turn 1 grab. Sol attacked me at the Palace and although I lost, he committed all of his units, not understanding that the victor still loses all committed units. That cost me 4 units to his 14.
Lazax then attacked me, probably guessing that my troop buildup was aiming in his direction. With his death robots he brought in 15 strength to my 6, but he played one of the leaders that I knew as a traitor... it was too good to pass up and I played it. In one round the majority of the forces for both Sol and Lazax were put into the casualties area and things looked good for me.As fate would have it, the next Influence phase brought a ceasefire
Sol played a strategy card that prevented me from making and alliances this round as well. The outcome was that the Jol-nar, Lazax, and Sol players formed a three way alliance, leaving the Hacan and myself as unofficial allies out of necessity. Looking back I would probably choose to go with a house rule in the future where 5 player games are limited to 2 player alliances, because the three on two is pretty brutal. We got a few rules wrong as well, the main one being a misread of Lazax ally ability to give influence during the bidding phase; instead of once per round per ally they were doing this at will before each card was drawn. The result was that these three players were able to take most of the cards unless I paid heavily, which on occasion I did. Without any influence generating ability I was faced with being overcome on Strategy cards or unit recruiting/deployment. Hacan was not in such a bad situation as he was getting rich off of everyone's deployments. Although Hacan and I were not an official alliance we worked together and managed to keep a fairly good foothold on the game. Two rounds later another ceasefire came up and we became official allies, with each of holding one stronghold. We tried to convince the Jol-nar to leave the existing alliance and join us, as he controlled two strongholds and if he joined us the final one would be easy to pick off. Jol-nar refused the offer however and decided to carry on with their existing alliance. Hacan and I were within striking distance of a victory, needing to gain two strongholds and maintain control of our existing two. Hacan moved a sizable force into the Palace as Jol-nar challenged me at the spaceport. I moved out of the spaceport into the Navy Base where Jol-nar had a small force, thinking this was a good trade rather than risk loosing all my forces at the spaceport. I made a potentially huge mistake here, forgetting that my ally could now benefit from the traitor cards I held. If I would have left a few units in the spaceport I could hope to win this by traitor as I held Jol-nar's highest strength leader as a traitor. As my ally was facing Sol, of whom I also held their highest active leader as a traitor, there was a good chance I could win both of those battles and give us the four strongholds needed to win.
I did manage to win the Navy base and assisted my ally in defeating Sol with the traitor, again wiping his entire army out. But I lost the spaceport so we were at three strongholds instead of four. Over the remaining turns our two player alliance was ground down, my small casualties staying out of action as I was getting influence starved. It was going to come down to a turn 8 victory. Sol once again held the Palace but Hacan had a huge stack on Power South, so we felt sure that would hold and Hacan would win, giving us an allied victory. Jol-nar moved a single unit into Power South, which confused us but we didn't worry too much about it.. that made it something like 15-1 and prevented the other allies from moving large forces in. Just to be sure he wasn't up to something I moved what I could into the spaceport, thinking if he had some plan to somehow win Power South I would take one back. The final battle phase began, and what we didn't expect was that Jol-nar had held a Graviton Negator for nearly the entire game. This is a card that is played at the beginning of a battle phase on any area where you have at least one unit. It destroys the shield on that area, making it vulnerable to bombardment. The navy fleet was three sectors away and the Sol player confirmed that the next bombardment card was a +5.
In the end there was nothing else to be done. He destroyed the shield, the entire sector would get bombarded on the very last phase of the last round, making that area neutral and giving Sol the win. Their alliance shared a three-way victory.
This raised a few cries, probably as to be expected. Hacan felt that the entire game (which ran about 3 hours) came down to a single card. In essence that is true, but I feel like it was still the play by Jol-nar that really won them the game. He held that potentially powerful card until the very end and then used their alliance's combined abilities to know the fleet's movement in advance, then moved a single unit in as that was all that was needed. To me it was a bitter loss but not a cheap one.. I think they earned it.
I do have to say however that Rex has issues with 5 players, at least as written. I think limiting alliance to two members would help, but then you have the likely scenario where one player is left out against two alliances. I think the reality is that the game should be considered a 4 OR 6 player game and I wouldn't play again with 5. Otherwise however, I LOVE the game. It may replace A Game of Thrones as my choice of strategic diplomacy "big" game. I really felt like I needed at least one more play to really understand what is going on, and having six asymmetrical factions each of which could ally with any one or two others makes for a LOT of possible play combinations.
On the downside, I personally do not like a lot of hidden information in games. Rex pushes that limit for me, with the almost unknown strategy cards and unknown traitor cards. I do think it adds a lot to the game so I'm willing to overlook that. Some players did not like how random the game felt at times, with entire armies getting eliminated because of a traitor card or when a strategy card eliminates a leader, turning the tides of battle. I didn't have a problem with this because that gives the Letnev an area to be good at, and from first hand experience I think they need this as they are shorted in just about every other area.