Tomorrow Board Game How to Play and Review

Tomorrow is an area control, action selection game.

Title: Tomorrow

Year Published: 2013

Designer: Dirk Knemeyer

Publisher: Conquistador Games, Inc.

Players: 2-6

Game Time: ~90 Mins

Set-up Time: >5 Mins

Ages: 12+

Theme: Future Earth

Mechanic: Area Control, Action Selection, Take That, Variable Player Powers

How to win: Gain the most Political Capital.

Game Description

 It is a few years in the future and the nations of the world concur with the opinion of an unprecedented number of leading scientists: a combination of overpopulation, environmental change, and resource depletion has put the human species at imminent and dire risk. Something needs to be done – but what? In the span of a few weeks, top advisers and experts in each major world power conclude that the only way their people – and, indeed, all of humanity – will survive is via dramatic and immediate global de-population. With no one wanting to put their own people at risk, it will take aggressive and even inhumane acts to somehow save the world.

Set-Up

Place the board on the table, and place the colour pawns in each region shown on the board. Place the death marker on the X on the yellow row and shuffle the disease, red, black and yellow cards and put them next to the board.

Randomly take 9 event cards and create the event deck, return the other 3 to the box.

Choose Major Powers but remove India in a 5 player game and the Arab Caliphate in a 4 player game.

Each player takes their superpowers cards and markers and puts the turn order marker near the turn order track.

Give China the cyber card, placing one cyber marker face down secretly on it.

Deal out disease cards to each player based on the number shown on their Super Power card.

Game Play

The game is played over 5 phases.

1 – Event Phase

Reveal the event card and resolve the event that matches the colour on the death track.

2 – Cyberspace Phase

The controller of the cyber card can do one of 3 things…
Decide if they wish to determine turn order (Taking this away from the EU who has this action by default)
Take a strategy card from the deck correlating to where the death marker is on the threat track.
Steal a random unused strategy card from another player.

3 – Action Allocation Phase

Each player secretly selects two action cards and places them face down. I’ll explain the actions in the Round-Up.

4 – Action Resolution Phase

The EU (or cyber card holder) chooses who will go first and put that player’s marker on the 1 spot on the turn order track. That player plays an action card or passes.
Then, the player determining turn order chooses who will go second and they play or pass etc etc
When players have taken their first action, the turn order remains the same for round 2.

5 – Refresh Phase

Refresh cyber markers, action cards and military control markers. Players may choose to remove/add control markers from minor powers they control.

Game End

If after 9 turns players have not reached the target on the death track, all players lose due to the world suffering from overpopulation.
If the tracker ever goes up to the yellow skull, the world overpopulates and all players lose.
When the death track reaches the end, the world is saved!
Score points from the winning card with ties are resolved from top to bottom on the “Winning” card

Tomorrow Round-Up

This is a fun game with a fun theme. Taking the actions in the action phase is tense, knowing you can get them countered or if someone targets you, you’ll lose a fair few points.

If you control India, the Arab Caliphate or China you tend to get targeted a lot due to the mass of the population in your area.

So what are the actions?

Biologicals

Upon revealing a biological card as an action to attack, declare that you are unleashing disease and put a Disease card from your hand face down on top of it.

At this point, players have a chance to counter, if not, the biological attack goes ahead and THEN the disease and target are revealed.

The disease card shows you the ‘Immediate Annihilation’, how far it spreads and its ‘Spread Annihilation… So many diseases kill, spread, kill some more… mostly based on a die roll.

Nukes

Nukes are bad… obviously. They really shouldn’t be used, only as a threat or retaliation for a broken promise.

When you Nuke you don’t claim kills and you do not lower the death marker, instead it is increased by three due to the wasteland created.

You place a nuke marker on the target to signify that it has been nuked and each nuke marker costs the victim three points of political capital and each nuke launched costs the attacker three political capital as well.

Military

You may use your military in one of two ways – Attack or Support
Attack – Allows you to invade a minor power anywhere on the board, uncontrolled or controlled.
Support – Played out-of-turn against another player’s attempt to use a military attack action.

Having military control of regions allows you to draw powerful strategy cards.

Espionage

Block Biological or Terror attacks. You can even block another player’s Espionage if you wish.

Cyber

Attempt to take control of the Cyber card by ‘guessing’ which token they have on the card. If you’re right you get it.

Each pawn represents 70 million people which gives you something to think about when your Biological attack takes out 5 Pawns. But, to win the game you have to get rid of them so as they start to disappear and the Threat track drops the world becomes a better place 🙂

The only downside to the game is that you can get a lot of your stuff countered by espionage and spend a lot of the game doing nothing.

But other than that this is a fun game of simulated mass genocide, negotiation and semi-coop gameplay.

Rating

A good one.

I give it 7/10

Tomorrow Initial Review September 2014

Tomorrow combines mass genocide with nuclear, biological and terrorist attacks.

It’s a game people, get over it.

So yeah the theme in Tomorrow is pretty cool and is based on a fictional future.

Keywords: Board Game & Fictional.

Tomorrow Summary

It’s a good game, with nice mechanics, fun gameplay and a great theme.

I’ll need to play it again though as I had a really bad experience. I had all but one of my Biological attacks blocked and all of my Military attacks immediately overturned so I spent 2 hours achieving nothing. I wasn’t in the lead for 8 of the 9 turns of the game and people who were clearly in the lead were seemingly free to do whatever they wanted.

All I could do for the final turns of the game was launch a Terrorist attack against the player I thought was winning to reduce them to one action, use Espionage to counter Biological attacks and launch my only Nuke to stop anyone from winning at all.

It was the same experience as playing against a blue deck in Magic the Gathering, just boring and frustrating but at least in Magic, you’re the only target.

Jesta ThaRogue