Gretchinz Board Game First Impressions
Gretchinz involves racing, shooting, and trying to survive the terrain.
Also, “Waaargh!”.
The greenskin’s passion for speed and violence is known throughout the galaxy. It is not uncommon to see (from a reasonably safe distance of course) little crowds of Orks from different klans take any excuse to launch their best Gretchinz into insane races where they pilot buggies which have been slapped together with whatever is at hand. There is no need to point out that firepower and speed are far more important than the safety of the racers when it comes to the design of such contraptions.
Gretchinz Game Play
Each player gets a Klan card, a Buggy, and 3 dice.
The buggies are placed on the table with terrain cards placed in front of them giving them somewhere to move.
Each player takes 5 cards, but the player can only look at the back (terrain) side of the card. They can’t look at the front.
On the count of 3, players roll and reroll dice simultaneously. Dice can be locked into position 1, 2, or 3 on the Klan board. When one player has locked all 3 dice they shout Waaargh.
The player that Yelled Waargh first goes first and activates their dice in the order they’re placed on the board.
Dice Actions
Left/Right – Move diagonally forward Left or Right. If they would move into another buggy instead both players discard a card from their hand.
After moving, put 3 cards in front of the Buggy so they always have a route to go. Then they resolve the symbol of the terrain card they landed on.
Arrow – Move forward one space
-1 Card – Discard a card
Crossed out eye – Draw as many cards as it states, but don’t look at the front of them
Eye – Draw the number of cards shown and but do look at the front of them
Puddle – Remove a flame from the Buggy
Warp – Draw a card from each other player, then discard down to 5
Cards – Draw 2 cards without looking at them
Eye – Pick a player, they look at the hand of cards and say how many are Hit cards. The players can’t lie.
Head – Use the Klan ability. These are different for each Klan.
Dakka – Attack another Buggy or even the Terrain.
Attacking
To attack, players take cards from their hands and play them face-up. These cards are resolved. As the players do not know ALL of the cards in their hand this will give a random effect…
Attacking a Buggy, reveal 2 cards:
If both cards are firing cards, give the target Buggy a flame token and discard the cards.
Should one of the cards be a problem card, the player puts a flame on their own buggy.
If one card is an Explosion card the attacking player discards their hand. The player also gains a flame if the Explosion is played with a Problem card.
Attacking Terrain, reveal 1 card:
If it’s a Fire card, put a crater on top of the terrain. These are useful for slowing opponents down.
For a Problem card, they put a flame on their own Buggy.
If it’s an Explosion, the player discards their hand.
Flames
If a buggy gets its 3rd flame the player ends their turn immediately. They also discard their hand of cards and 2 Flames from their Buggy. If they already took their turn this round, they skip their next turn.
Winning
At the end of a round, if a Buggy is on the 7th row of cards, even with 3 flames, they win.
Theme
The theme is a random race in the Warhammer 40K world.
These Buggies are hacked together with bits which explains all the fire and inability to target correctly. They can’t even fire without blowing themselves up half the time! It’s a fun theme.
Setup & Rulebook
The setup is VERY quick. Hand out some bits, line up Buggies, and lay out a few terrain cards. Nothing difficult there.
The rulebook isn’t great. For so few rules the way the book is laid out doesn’t really appeal to me. It took a long time to work out what was going on. I’m pretty sure some key rules aren’t explained very clearly.
Components & Artwork
The components look nice. The Buggies are cool if a little delicate. They kept falling apart whenever we moved them. Maybe a bit of glue would help? They fit in the box assembled so they could be glued.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
It’s VERY easy to teach once you get the rules yourself. You can’t look at your cards, that’s the hardest part for people to understand. Or at least the easiest rule for people to break by mistake.
The dice symbols make sense in relation to the action they do. It makes that real-time dice-rolling phase easier.
It’s rules-lite and open information so yes, it’s accessible.
Gretchinz Summary
There is a fine balance between making a game seem random for these purposes without making the players feel like they’re out of control. Like the blurb above says, the Buggies are slapped together. You can’t always go where you want and you won’t always hit your target.
So managing to do that yet make you feel in control is difficult. Real-time dice rolling is step one. You know what you want, and you know how to get it, but will you?
The next is blind cards in hand. When firing you have (mostly) NO idea what will happen. Maybe you’ll hurt yourself, maybe you’ll explode, you don’t know. You can draw some cards face up and look at them to give you some idea so there is that.
Game-wise, Titan Race is a similar thing. Moving and attacking with dice in a race. Attacking is more deterministic but it’s not supposed to be as random as Gretchinz. I do like scrambling racing games and it’s making me look forward to Apocolypse Road which should be good.
But I don’t have those games in my possession so I’ll continue blowing myself up in Gretchinz 🙂
Jesta ThaRogue
Note: The copy I played was a review copy generously provided by Devir Games, big thanks to them for this game.
