Wroth against an Automa!

💠 Wroth is an area-control game, so you might be surprised to learn that it has a solo mode and you can play it co-operatively with more players. 😮 After explaining the core of Wroth in our previous post, this time I wanted to talk a bit about this co-op mode.

You will be facing off against an automated opponent 🤖, and the variability is similarly huge here as in competitive games, as every faction has 3 “scenario” cards with different settings for the automa. So you can go up against the 7 playable factions with 3 scenarios each; That’s 21 variations! 😁

Scenario cards show you any changes in setup or default rules, and most importantly it shows how you can win. Some scenarios are a simple victory point race (like the competitive game), but there are more involved ones too. Gameplay itself is fairly smooth - 🧐 you draft action dice as normal, but the last die goes to the automa. They always act after the players, but as many times in a row as there are players. So they kind of act in bursts. You can control what die is left for them at first, but they also do random rerolls. There is an 8-sided die too (called Chaos die 🎲), that triggers special effects of the automa every round.

Deciding what the automa targets is mostly straightforward, but you constantly have to calculate “Threat” ⚠️ values to determine their attention. Sometimes it works a bit odd as it overfocuses on certain areas for no reason. The arcs of automa games were also a bit strange so far for us: 👉 At the beginning it does so many things and overwhelmes us with troops and rushes forward on the points track, then the in the second half of the game it kind of runs out of steam as it has no more troops to send out, and many dice actions are just skipped for it. It seems absolutely unwinnable at first, then by the end the difficulty dips. Maybe it’s just some of the scenarios though.

💬While I think the co-op doesn’t work perfectly, it’s still an enjoyable way of playing - especially if you prefer co-op over confrontation. All in all I think it’s great that this mode is included, even though we might favor competitive Wroth games in the future.