by rseater
I don’t like writing negative reviews, and when I dislike a game I tend to propose a fix rather than writing a bad review. But I do want the BGG forums to present a balanced set of reviews, and I really didn’t enjoy Hornet.
Summary
The components of this game are great, and the modular scoreboard (using a cardboard punch-out board) is very clever. The art is silly, but fine. However, I found the gameplay to be very poor. Hornet fails to address a fundamental challenge of designing an area control game, which simply must be addressed for such a game to work. In fact, the other mechanics in the game make it worse. Namely, the best strategy is to never compete and to hope nobody decides to compete with you (in which case you both lose).
Very Short Rules Summary
I will not summarize the rules in detail here, as that has been done in other reviews. Suffice to say, you add influence to regions. When that region is reached on the turn track, the player with the most influence there scores it. Other players get a small consolation prize. Influence is placed via simultaneous action selection. For each action, you can choose nice (always works) and aggressive (works better, but backfires if enough other people picked the same type of action).
Background: The Area Control Challenge
One of the fundamental challenges of area control games is how to deal with competitions. That is, it’s important to competing over a region doesn’t just mean that both competing players lose. You end up in situations where nobody wants to fight, because you just drain resources (even if you win the fight). At best, the game devolves into solitaire play (Because players avoid competition). More often, you cannot avoid competition, and you randomly end up stuck in fights. At its worse, this become kingmaking, where player #3 has to choose to fight either #1 or #2, thereby handing the other player the game.
There are a range of solutions to this challenge, which have been employed in other games:
In games like Web of Power/China, first place gets the most points, but second place often gets points more efficiently. Furthermore, regions that are fought over generally become more valuable for everyone.
In games like Beowulf: The Legend, first place gets first pick, but the rewards are differentiated so the second place player may still get what he/she wants.
In games like El Grande, there are multiple scorings of each region, so a second place player can leverage his/her influence later. There is also a very fluid board state, so leading during one scoring round doesn’t mean that the player has definitively controlled the region.
In games like Midgard, you draft cards that let you place influence, and thus you have a lot of information about (and control over) who is going to be able to out-compete you in a given region.
In games like Tradewinds, when one region is fought over, nearby regions become more valuable, so you can mitigate your risk by clumping your investments appropriately, and even benefit off of a fight that you start with someone else. (I think a similar dynamic is present in Dominant Species, but I haven’t played that one.)
The Problem with Hornet
Hornet does not employ any of these dynamics and, in fact, exacerbates the problem through simultaneous role selection and further explicit punishments for players who end up competing. The aggressive roles backfire if several people pick them and then impose a penalty on you. This dynamic further punishes players who are competing, and further rewards players who are not. Plus, in order to complete, you not only have to add your own influence to a region, but you often have to spend time & resources removing others’ influence (to make space for yours). So, in order to compete, you are both spending more than someone who is not competing, and you are taking on the risk of losing it entirely.
In the last 3 player game I played, the scores were pretty reflective of this:
1st place: person who avoiding fighting altogether
2nd place: person who fought and won regions through careful play
3rd place: person who fought and lost through bad luckThe game plays better with more than 3, since it will be impossible to avoid competition. However, the basic dynamic is the same – avoid other players, hope they choose to avoid you, and sometimes find yourself kingmaking when you have no choice but to compete.
Conclusion
This game may be fun for kids, who are still learning about the dynamic of ‘let other people fight’. It certainly plays quickly, has art that appeals to kids, and has an element of luck that makes it amenable to casual play. However, as an adult hobby gamers who has played some of the other great area control games, I found that it had nothing new offer and was a step back from its predecessors. I recommend instead playing one of the other games I mentioned above.