Apocalypse Now-ish: The Messy, Chaotic Design of Fallen Land

I was chatting with my dad last week, who’s been known to play a few games over the years. He and I have sparred on and off for years over the chessboard. He played a few of the titles I’ve worked on, and at one point went on a serious Civilization bender. So for a member of the Silent Generation, he’s got legit gamer cred.

He even sometimes reads my blog. My recent article focused on solo and cooperative board gaming confused him, though. Though he’s played video games, his board gaming experience has mostly been confined to classic competitive family games – Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, and their ilk. He had trouble understanding the idea of sitting down at a board game with no opponent.

I got a little tongue-tied trying to explain the concept. We didn’t share a good frame of reference. I first pointed out that playing a board game, just like playing a computer game, can be done in the absence of an opponent playing by the same rules as you – an asymmetrical experience, playing against a system rather than opponents.

Even without an automaton to simulate an opponent, some classic family board games have enough of a “system” to make them suitable for a solo experience. In the conversation, I used the example of a very bad but much-loved family game – The Game of Life, a classic Milton Bradley chestnut that my sister forced me to play a hundred times when we were kids.

The Most Stupidest of Games

You know The Game of Life. We’ve all been subjected to it. The goal is to get to the end of a long track on a colorful board, collecting as much material wealth as you can along the way (and overstuffing a plastic car with blue and pink pegs representing way too many kids). 

As a multiplayer experience, Life is a highly random race game, not much deeper than Chutes & Ladders. As a lesson in what life is about, it prioritizes collecting material possessions and cash over anything resembling actual happiness or self-actualization. If Monopoly gets a bit of a pass because it’s an anti-capitalist message disguised as a real estate game, The Game of Life is unforgivable on several fronts – message, mechanics, and lack of meaningful decisions.

The fun of Life (such as it is) isn’t found in beating your opponent – the fun is the stories you tell along the way in a game. This player went to college; this player dropped out. This player hit the lottery; this one had to pay for college for four kids. This player ends up in the dream millionaire’s mansion at the end; this player ends up in the gutter. Opportunities to interact with other players at all are incredibly limited.

Life, to my mind, would be perfectly acceptable as a solo game. You chuck the dice, move your little plastic car along the track, and experience a story. It wouldn’t be a GOOD game – it would get repetitive quickly – but the experience wouldn’t be that different from a game of Life with opponents.

A Sprawl of Cards and Dice

I thought a lot about The Game of Life as I dabbled with Fallen Land (Second Edition) – a heavyweight, card-happy, dice-chucking Ameritrash title I picked up on a Kickstarter whim a couple of years ago. 

I’ve had it out on the table a couple of times, but it never fully engaged me. Still, the user reviews on Board Game Geek, my go-to site for thoroughly evaluating new games, were high – 8.5 when I recently checked. Usually, that’s a great indicator that a game’s worth playing. 

So after my recent binge with Spirit Island came to an end, I hauled out the heavy box, sorted all the cards, and laid the game out for the third time.

Thematically, Fallen Land echoes the old Wasteland series of RPGs. You pick a faction, build a party of five survivors, and venture out into the post-apocalyptic landscape of a shattered America. You collect resources, fight off mutants, and complete missions for a variety of diverse, sketchy, and colorful characters.

During setup, Fallen Land promises a good time. There’s a giant neoprene hex map of the United States after a nuclear war. There are scores of cardboard chits and several enormous decks of cards. There’s a diverse set of evocative post-apocalyptic factions to play and a robust set of scenarios and set-up options.

Collapsing Under the Weight

At its core, Fallen Land is a random narrative race game – just like The Game of Life. You increase your score along two tracks, your town’s health and prestige. In the better of two fairly thin default solo modes, you add several fake opponents to the board that randomly increase their tracks to give you a little competition.

A more meaty solo campaign, structured as a series of scenarios with narrative hooks, fares better and leans into the game’s strengths. It’s easy to get caught up in the varied and well-written events. If you find the experience engaging, it’ll be a long time before you exhaust the content in the box.

Yet as a solo experience, I found the game exhausting and tedious. The turn structure is standard – draw a card, check a bunch of events, collect resources, and perform a few actions. But the level of maintenance, checking, and cross-checking quickly gets overwhelming.

Your five characters (essentially six if your team has a vehicle) each can lug a host of equipment – “spoils” in the game’s terminology. Each of the spoils cards, and the characters themselves, might have a special ability or rule change, written in tiny text, that needs to be applied at the proper phase.

This is all standard narrative solo game mechanical stuff, but it’s just too much. Each turn, you’re scanning a horde of cards, scattered between five characters and your town, making sure you account for every resource adjustment, bonus, or penalty. Each turn, this pure maintenance takes up 90% of your time, while the actual action and associated dice rolls pass by in the blink of an eye.

Fun For Some, But Definitely Not All

Fallen Land is a lot more interesting in its competitive multiplayer mode. Unlike The Game of Life, there are significant and meaningful mechanics for interacting with other players. You can send mercenaries after them; you’ll compete for resources; there’s a clever auction house system that lets you pick over the leftover spoils of other players.

As a solo experience, though, I found Fallen Land too thin on substantive decision-making. There certainly are a lot of choices – who gets this piece of gear, how to best structure my party, what town technology to buy. 

But truly meaningful choices are few and far between. If I compare the game to other narrative experiences I love – the tight Euro-style mechanics of Spirit Island, or the tale of my four western heroes in a Shadows of Brimstone campaign – Fallen Land just doesn’t measure up.

Shadows of Brimstone makes for a useful comparison. It’s similarly sprawling and component-heavy (and requires a lot of miniature painting and assembly to boot!) Yet its story and decisions are more engaging. The combat – though heavy on dice-chucking – requires a fair bit of tactical thought and smart resource usage, and the between-mission upgrading is meaningful. The narrative events are simpler than those in Fallen Land but equally evocative, and the emergent story is better focused on your characters and their experiences.

I understand why Fallen Land has high user ratings. If you immerse yourself in the diverse, well-crafted event content, the game weaves a story, one that’s impressively different every game. From a pure “content for your dollar” perspective, Fallen Land has a lot of value.

Yet, like its post-apocalyptic setting, I found Fallen Land ultimately empty. As a solo experience, it’s dying for a competitive automaton like that found in Scythe, an AI player that makes full use of its mechanics (something the developers are apparently working on for a possible expansion). 

I’m a sucker for strong narratives. I don’t have to “win” a game every time – a good story is enough for me. But for my tastes, in the diverse pantheon of heavyweight Ameritrash solo-friendly board games, there are better options out there. 

Once I saw through the cracks in the design, I couldn’t escape the feeling I’d seen it all before. Fallen Land ends up a narratively evocative but overweight post-apocalyptic Game of Life, with a mountain of event cards and mission counters replacing Milton Bradley’s plastic car full of pegs and stacks of thin paper money.

For many solo board gamers, that will be enough.

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