The Apocalypse never felt so good

The cover art was the first thing that drew me towards Phoenix New Horizon. Of course a picture alone isn’t a great addition to a board game collection, so I was delighted to find that there is more to this game than meets the eye.

This is a mid-weight euro for 1-4 players with a post-apocalyptic theme - somewhat reminiscent of Revive, as humanity leaves their shelters to repopulate Earth by building Regenerators. These are a kind of technological breakthrough that allows the creation of habitats for people on the otherwise uninhabitable surface. Players each lead a faction of these re-emerging humans, trying to make a name for themselves in the new pages of history.

Worker placement with a twist

Worker placement is the central element of this game, but with an innovative take. There is a separate action board where players get to take actions, and this board is divided into 4 tiers. The higher tiers have better or stronger actions. On your turn you can either do a task with a worker on its current tier, or promote it to a higher tier (in exchange for some Fuel).

Tiers are divided into separate areas, so when promoting you have to follow a chosen path. This limits your available action choices, so the decision of which route to take when promoting adds an interesting layer to the strategy. Seeing these links between the tiers is a bit difficult at first, as the board is quite cluttered, but it gets easier as the first turns go by. Actions are also randomly dealt to slots of the board at setup, so you will have some variability. Used actions are blocked until the end of the round, after which workers return to the rest-area of their respective tiers. Another important detail is how after a tier 4 action your worker resets to tier 1 and remains active, so it can be reused again that round - and next time you can potentially climb up on a different path.

Actions

There are a bunch of actions you can take but the 2 that are the most essential are placing out Regenerators and Buildings onto the game board:

Build a Regenerator: you can place out a Regenerator if you can pay for it, and if your energy level is high enough for the piece you are choosing. (Energy level goes up every time you build a Regenerator.) Wherever you build it, you get the depicted bonus. Regenerators are very important, as they allow the placement of Buildings on the board. If there is a tape token between the regions of two of your Regenerators, you also get a reward, and if you are the first to do this the reward is better.

Construct a Building: this works very similarly to placing Regenerators, but instead of getting a bonus from the game board, you get the bonus next to where you take the building from. You can only build next to Regenerators (it could even belong to an opponent, but they get to activate their bonus again if you do). Wherever you place the building determines its type (civil, military, lab), which is important for multiple reasons.

There are of course a lot more things to do, but listing them would be like reading the rulebook. Just to mention a few things, you can draw mission cards, get technology tiles with all sorts of effects, move your insignias which act as multipliers for your buildings, or move up on the different tracks.

There are actually 3 tracks in the game, all of them with some cool nuances:
- The aforementioned energy track restricts what pieces you can choose to place. It also unlocks new settler meeples you can use and determines your Fuel income together with the development track.
- The development track has 2 tokens that you can choose to move upwards, choosing what bonuses you want.
- Finally there is the population track, where you can go up on branching paths with your settlers activating bonuses, then ultimately claiming end game goals. As you play you will unlock additional settlers that can also start on this track, so you can gather even more bonuses. There are more uses to settlers though, as there other places where you can claim spots for end-game objectives.

I’ll use this chapter to mention that interestingly there is only 1 resource type in the game: Fuel. It doesn’t feel dull however, as there are countless ways to collect some, and it always feels like you don’t have enough as you need it for literally everything.

Game structure

On your turn you can either do an action or promote a worker, or alternatively pass for the rest of the round. When everyone passes you do some cleanup steps and get income, then you repeat this for 3 more full rounds, after which you count up points to see who wins.

As you only have 3 workers and there are 4 rounds in the game, that translates to around 12 worker placements (actually more, because doing a tier 4 action resets the worker to tier 1 and it can be used again). 12 actions might sound too few, but thankfully the game gifts you with some extra actions every now and then as you go up tracks or place out pieces to the board. Additionally there are the Mission cards which I haven’t mentioned yet, that make your turns more eventful.

Mission cards

Before or after you take an action you have the opportunity to complete 1 mission card from your hand. Cards give you bonus actions or resources but you can only play them if you fulfill their requirements. These are always about having specific building types, at specific regenerators and/or in specific regions of the map. Having a steady supply of cards and playing them often gives you a lot of momentum. Other than giving you much needed actions, cards do a great job of supplying you with short term goals to work towards - while you maximize your end-game scoring by working towards the goals of intercoms, technology tiles and insignias.

2-player games

We mainly play games at 2p, so it is very important to us for games to work well at this player count. Phoenix New Horizon scales well to accommodate 1-4 players. The board has two sides, one for 1-2 players, but if you play with 3 players you also get some "hazard tape" tokens to disable a region. The action board also scales with players and there are some tokens to block certain spaces. Of course with less players you still might have less potential blocking with workers and less options on the map. Racing for intercoms, public objectives and technology tiles is perhaps also less critical. Otherwise I didn't feel like we were missing out on much at all when playing with 2.

Aesthetics and components

I want to go out of my way to mention the aesthetics of this game. Although art is subjective, I have to say that it is absolutely amazing, even small stuff like the art on the card backs or the little scribbles on the game board. The cardboard components have cool custom shapes like floppy discs, intercoms or cartridges, and everything has this grimy weathered look that adds a lot to the post-apocalyptic vibes. Then there are the awesome screen printed meeples. Let the pictures speak for themselves. Safe to say Jorge Tabanera Redondo did a great job.

Closing thoughts

With the clever worker placement, mission cards and bonuses from the game board and tracks, there is a lot keeping you engaged. There is a reasonable amount of player interaction both on the action board and on the game board, so careful maneuvering and doing things at the right time is important. Setup is also quite variable thanks to the end-game scoring intercom tiles, public objectives, technology tiles, bonuses on the map and on the population track, and even the actions on the action board are randomly assigned.
In summary, this is a euro with really combo-filled gameplay that is just satisfying to play. So I’d suggest giving Phoenix New Horizon a go whenever you get the chance!