Payload
In Payload, from Liquid Bird, the 1–5 players are competing companies engaged in a space race to build and successfully launch rockets, completing contracts for getting the payloads into space (for example, to launch satellite equipment). The game is designed by Ashutosh Kumar and Arjit Ray.
Victory points in Payload are earned by fulfilling contracts and you have to tender for contracts against other players. The game uses an ingenious system for bidding whereby the players each take a card that gives a value to various code words. You bid by calling out the code word on your card for the amount you want for taking on the contract; others do the same but because the same code words have a different value on every card, no-one is sure how much other players have bid. The contract goes to the player who submitted the lowest tender.
Payload is a tableau building game where players are drafting cards to make up the four sections of their rocket, enhancing their rocket's performance by hiring various engineers. There's some dice rolling involved to determine whether or not your rocket gets off the ground safely, and the choices you make - including the engineers you recruit, help you to mitigate the risk of failure. At the heart of this game then players each face a choice of whether to press for a construction optimised with matching components (ie: those of the same colour) and with engineering support or whether instead to just take a chance on a cobbled together rocket and hope for a favourable dice roll.
The colour coding also extends to the payload contracts; launch risk is reduced for each rocket part that matches the colour indicated on the contract card. The contracts specify the minimum attributes that your rocket will need to have in order to be able to attempt a launch.
There are operations cards that pay you to use them and we've found in our plays at Board's Eye View that this serves to incentivise 'take that' actions. If I know you will benefit from having a blue nose cone, I might deliberately take the Reload operations action to dismiss that card from the market display - especially if, in doing so, I get paid bonus cash for my trouble. Without the cash incentive I probably wouldn't spend one of my actions in this way.
There's a lot going on in Payload because players have quite a wide choice over the cards to draft. The order you follow is important; engineers reduce the cost, for example, of upgrades so you probably won't want to take an upgrade operations action until you have engineers in place... Position in the grid also affects the cost so you need to take that into account too in making your drafting choices. That said, this game isn't rocket science - that's just the theme - once you grok the mechanics you will find the gameplay is smooth and straightforward and you should be able to play in under an hour.
The main gripe from our plays at Board's Eye View is that the game uses our least favourite system for keeping track of money: overlapping cards, similar to those used to track 'authority' in the early editions of Star Realms (Wise Wizard). These are fiddly to use and it's all too easy for an accidental jog of the table to screw up players' tracking. Wise Wizard have moved over to using dials for tracking, and we'd have preferred to have seen dials in this game; they'd also be a better fit with the theme. Alternatively, if you dislike overlapping card tracking as much as we do, you could easily substitute coins or paper money from another game.
Payload is due to launch on Kickstarter on 20 October. Click here to be in on the countdown...
