2023-01-07 - Innovation (2010) [board game]

For every occasion, my wife and I gift board games to each other, so we can play them together. This time made no exception. After browsing BoardGameGeek for a while, I bought her "Innovation", a game where you must create a prehistoric civilization and guide it through the ages using innovations until the information era.

We usually tend stay away from too complex or too strategic games, mostly because it takes too much time and effort to setup, and we end up never playing it. I was also looking for a game that might have a deeper game play the usual kind that we love (Codenames, Chroni, etc.).

And that's why Innovation caught my attention: it's only a cards game. It's a small box, there is no pieces or board to set up for half an hour. And yet the game play seemed rich enough and replayable. And obviously, it works well with 2 persons.

We finally had a night where we were in no rush to try it and take the time to understand the game properly. It took us a while to go through the rules. Not that there are that many, but there are still quite a few things to understand, and a vocabulary to master: "You may meld and splay this card", wut?

No the real good part of the game, is that there are actually very few rules to know from the rulebook, because each innovation card carry it own behavior and specific action or rule. It makes the game not repetitive at all, and it allows you to create very different strategies depending on your current board or what you draw; hence the replayability I was mentioning.

Another thing to mention is that the game is kind of brutal. There are quite a few cards or combinations that can destroy your opponent's strategy, steal their points, break their board, etc. But it also forces you to re-evaluate what your doing, change strategy, etc. along the duration of the game. So it can feel unfair sometimes, but it also make it interesting. It avoids the 7 Wonders feeling where you cruise through the turns on your own board and just count the point at the end.

Anyway, I lost that first game. I made two mistakes that allowed my wife to win. Kudos to her! I hope to have better results next time! Because there will be a next time, we both loved that game.

Oh and since it's a card game, there are already a bunch of extensions out there if we get too used to the base version. I doubt it, however.

Bonus picture