Brotherhood of Venice board game review

One of my favorite board games of all time is V-Commandos, a WWII co-op game focused on stealth and covert warfare. Now, years later, the team behind this game have taken everything they learned from 1945 and put it to work on something around 1459 instead: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood of Venice.

This is not the first Assassin’s Creed board game, but it’s by far the biggest, something I’ll cover in more detail later in this review. But for now, know that this is a pretty promising fit: not only do creators Triton Noir have a pedigree with sneaking games, but the design team includes former Ubisoft developers among its ranks, one of which worked directly on the fiction of Assassin’s Creed universe.

After a long wait – the game’s Kickstarter has been running since 2018 –Brotherhood of Venice is finally here, and it’s not your average board game adaptation. As I said, the designers have Assassin’s Creed experience, while the current Assassin’s Creed The editorial staff also helped on some of the content that manages to fit into the game’s existing canon in all kinds of interesting ways, making it more of a continuation of the lore than just an adaptation of things we have already played with Ezio.

Brotherhood of Venice comes in a huge box full of maps, scene tiles, and a whole army of minifigures. The game is built around a long storytelling campaign in which players open envelopes to uncover mission objectives, build maps from modular tiles, and then play co-op to sneak / kill guards and complete objectives. . Each mission you play lasts for about an hour, and between them you can retreat to a headquarters – represented physically, like its own map tile with places to store items – where you can rest and restock. It’s a lot of administrative work, but it also keeps an air of secrecy when it comes to missions and campaign items.

The gameplay is very similar to V-Commandos, in that the players start first, taking turns moving and performing actions. You do this in a way that’s essential for teamwork – and it’s one of the most satisfying parts of the game when you can work together to be successful – by spacing out those actions. So, say, if I have four actions this turn, I can take two to get into the same room as a guard, then a friend can jump into the room and kill that guard, then I can skip my two. last stitches hiding my body and pulling it out of the room. Team work! You don’t have to, but when playing with friends it’s definitely the coolest and most satisfying way to get the job done.

Once all the Assassins have moved, it’s the enemy’s turn. Your opponents are controlled by a very basic AI system, where this turn’s event card has a compass direction printed on it, and every guard that can move (many are stuck in place by various jobs / conditions) will go that way, unless the players have been spotted, in which case the guards will move towards them instead.

The key to this whole idea of ​​detection and movement is an alarm state that goes off when you are spotted, which not only attracts the guards, but also affects the reinforcement stage that takes place at the end of each turn. If the alarm is silent you will have fewer baddies to deal with, but if it goes off you will have to deal with a lot more. Ideally, you don’t want to trigger the alarm already, then, but it’s also largely impossible to handle this for an entire mission as whether or not you get spotted is largely determined by the dice rolls, so you have to assume that things will end up going to hell and that you will have to improvise (which is often the time when your teamwork and coordination is the most enjoyable).

I liked this system in V-Commandos– it’s much sleeker than it looks, especially since you can see which direction the enemy will be moving during your turn, allowing you to take that into account – but it’s even better here , maybe because it seems more appropriate. The mix of stealth and open combat, the emphasis on concealing bodies, the need to choose places to come out of the shadows, the constant risk of an alarm being triggered, it all looks exactly like playing. Assassin’s Creed, only now you have wingers and everything is going much slower. As tabletop video game adaptations go, this is one of the biggest.

Especially if you are a big one Assassin’s Creed nerd. Besides playing like an Assassin’s Creed game Brotherhood of Venice feels like one, almost instantly falling into the series’ labyrinthine lore with a story that continues through each mission. There are a lot of characters that fans will be familiar with, including Ezio himself, and the way the story unfolds with your characters progressing and gaining new abilities and items really helps tie together what could have been a whole. of disparate and disjointed missions.

The thing is, by trying so hard to play like the video games on the table, Brotherhood of Venice managed to let some of the franchise bloat and boredom seep in where this medium could have and should have kept things lighter. Basically, I found this game to be too big. It’s literally too big, comes in a comically large box, and when deployed it takes up an awful lot of table space, with Assassin player mats, a game card or two, multiple decks of cards, a few. other large rugs for enemies and a compass, a huge HQ tile with its own cards, piles of envelopes containing the game’s missions …

I have a fairly large dining table, but as you can see below it doesn’t matter for Brotherhood of Venice, which keeps getting bigger, more and more, and bigger. And the photo below is from a night when only two of us were playing!

But it’s also too big in its reach. There are over 20 missions to play as part of the campaign – a lot more if you have all three expansions – and each is about an hour long, or even longer if you’re playing with a full complement of four Assassins and you have to wait for everything. the world strategizes and takes their turn. Do the math on that, then figure out how difficult it can be to get 3-4 people in one room, add the administrative burden of updating all maps, events, and items as part of a current campaign (which can take for all time) and you will see how big an investment it is Brotherhood of Venice.

If this sounds like something you and your friends could handle, then great! Maybe you’ll be away for a weekend / week and you can just turn it on. Maybe you have a playroom or a dedicated space where you can leave it in place and not have to worry about rebuilding everything every time and then putting it away. Maybe you are just one Assassin’s Creed obsessive who doesn’t have much to do over the next few months and thinks everything I just said is fine and acceptable to you in your current situation.

Anyone who ticks these boxes is in a good position to love this game. And in most cases, I do too! But even then, even though I wanted to, I just couldn’t go to the end of this game. I have a video game site to work for 9-5, I play soccer, I have two children, there is a pandemic going on and, perhaps most importantly in this context, I have board game friends who like to play other board games, not the same for months and months. I understand this is my personal situation, but this is my criticism, and I think the scope of this game, combined with the hassle of tidying up and sorting everything properly in the middle of the campaign, is worth keeping this in mind. ‘spirit.

Which is a fucking shame! Because as far as the game itself is concerned, I loved it. I love how smart and snappy it is, and how elegantly the enemy system works, and because I haven’t mentioned it yet, I also really liked how this game is just fun. to rub shoulders with. It’s easy to poke fun at the amount of plastic figurines used in licensed board games these days, but Brotherhood of Venice uses its guards, ladders, chests and [spoilers] to great effect. Almost everything you do in this game is represented by a token or a miniature, which gives the game a great physical sense, while the map tiles and card artwork are rich and vibrant and fit perfectly alongside the sides. of what you’re used to from the video game series.

Unfortunately it was just a little too much for me, which is funny enough when you think about it, considering “being awesome but asking too much of your players” is exactly the same problem that i think video games suffer from. at present. At least here this equation is variable depending on your individual situation, so like I said if you can start a campaign and keep it going, this is a fantastic, albeit slower, version of the campaign. Assassin’s Creed experience.

(If you want to see in detail how the game works, this Dice Tower video is a good place to start!)