Barrage is all about controlling the flow of the water to produce Power.
Dam, it’s big!
In the dystopic 1930s, the industrial revolution pushed the exploitation of fossil-based resources to the limit, and now the only thing powerful enough to quench the thirst for power of the massive machines and of the unstoppable engineering progress is the unlimited hydroelectric energy provided by the rivers.
Barrage Game Play
This is a brief overview, far from comprehensive, just sayin’ 🙂
The game is played over 5 rounds where you build Dams, Conduits and Power Stations to generate Hydro-Electric Power. A round is played over 5 phases so here is a brief overview of each of those.
Income: You gain income in various forms from unlocked icons on your player board which could also include adding Water. This water will later flow down the board.
These income paces are made vacant by building things which I’ll get to later.
Additional Water is also added depending on the round.
Actions: This is a worker placement game and this is the worker placement phase. Each player has 12 workers and there is a TONNE of spaces to put them. Spaces require a different number of workers depending on what you need to do.
Building
There are several things to build including those Dams (Or increasing the height of an existing Dam) or a Conduit or Powerstation mentioned earlier.
The building action also requires that you have enough little wooden Excavators and Cement Mixers as well as a tile-matching the building you want to build available to you.
These are placed in a wheel on your player board and you only get those resources/tiles back once you spin the wheel all the way back around.
The cost to build increases the higher up the land you build them too. The board is divided into sections, Mountains at the top, then Hills in the middle and finally Plains at the bottom.
Other Actions: A list of what some of the other more important actions do…
- Buy contracts for bonus scoring if accomplished
- Rotate your building wheel
- Add Water to the board
Producing Energy
For this action, you place workers that will adjust the number of power produced by +2 down to -2. The +2/+1 bonuses require more workers and are quite often taken early in a turn, forcing you to take 0/-1/-2 at times.
You choose a conduit next to a Dam that is holding water. You then push the water up the connected pipe to a connected Power Station and the water continues to flow down.
The Conduit will have a value, each water you push through will be worth that much and you adjust your power track accordingly.
Water Flow: Water flows down from its point at the top of the board, following the route down river stopping at dams. If there is more water than the Dam can handle the excess flows over and down to the next Dam, eventually you run out of the water to flow or it flows off the board and out of the game.
End of Round: Players now get a bonus for the amount of energy they produced. This is followed by a cleanup phase which most importantly resets the track that shows the number of energy players made in that round.
After 5 rounds the player with the most points wins.
Theme
It checks out.
I did end up reading about the benefits of pushing water uphill as a renewable energy source after playing the game.
Setup
I mean, it takes up ALOT of space and there is some preparation to be done.
If the owner of the game knows what they’re doing it’ll still take quite a while. It’s one of those games where everyone needs to get involved shuffling and placing tiles.
Components & Artwork
Obviously very nice. I know the wheels have had some criticism but if you push them right they’re not too bad.
We played with different water pieces and the ones that come with the game are tiny little shiny things. I didn’t like the look of them.
The art is decent too.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
Erm… it’s quite heavy. If you’re familiar with worker placement games you’ll be fine. Just make sure you fully understand how to generate power and all will be well.
It is far from accessible though. While it’s all open information it will be massively overwhelming and ‘what to do next’ isn’t always obvious.
Barrage Summary
So, more evidence that I just don’t find worker placement games all that good. I’m not saying I didn’t like this game, I just didn’t feel the same as I do with other styles of Euro game. Partially because of this and the theme and art style I just thought we might as well be playing Power Grid 🙂
But the game itself is decent. You have a lot to do and you can’t do it all because you don’t have the resource to do so. This is where controlling that wheel to get your stuff back is key.
Also, each player has a player power which will change the game a lot. Mine was that if I generated less than 4 power it counted as 4. This made me setup quick, cheap low-value stations for quick hits early on. It wasn’t much good late game though.
But, while it’s decent it just gets buried under the LONG list of Euros I would rather play.
Jesta ThaRogue