Revenant
- Greg White
- 15 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Designed by Allan Kirkeby, with art by Ian O'Toole, Revenant is a competitive worker placement game from Mindclash that's thematically set as a prequel to Mindclash's Voidfall. Although it's a standalone game and no prior knowledge of Voidfall is necessary, familiarity with the earlier game certainly helps as there’s a big crossover of icons and terminology common to both.
Each of the 1–4 players takes on the role of an admiral tasked with escorting the Revenant, the flagship of the Domineum empire, to found new colonies in safety from the invading Voidborn. Players gain influence with the great houses for protecting their fleets and battling the constant Voidborn threat.
The set up is quite involved, but far quicker than Voidfall, and the game looks impressive on the table, especially if you have the deluxe edition with the ship miniatures. The Revenant sits in the central four sectors, surrounded by the various arkships, fighters and dropships of the great houses and the frigates for each player in the outer eight sectors.
The game is played over four rounds, each of which is broken down into several phases. The Action phase sees players place one of their three crew (1 captain, 2 cadets) aboard one of the ships to perform that ship's actions. Each player places their crew in turn until all three crew members have been assigned to ships. Arkships all offer a choice of two different actions; for example, gaining some of the four resource types, gaining or playing operation cards, and attacking the Voidborn. There’s a total of 14 different actions across the seven ships. Boarding a fighter allows you to move between sectors and attack the Voidborn ships. Combat is deterministic, with fighters simply doing 1 base damage which is enough to take out one Voidborn ship. Boarding a dropship allows you to land on one of the planets that are seeded on the board during setup, and the planets also offer a number of actions. The final ship type is your personal frigate which can act as a dropship or fighter and also activates certain frigate abilities from your player board.
After placing a crew member the player gets to take one bonus action from a choice of five on their frigate board. These actions allow you to gain and play cards, remove corruption, promote your captain (giving them more powerful asymmetric abilities when played) and gain resources. Each ship you board grants you influence with the house it belongs to, and climbing the influence tracks is crucial for end-game scoring as your influence score in each house is multiplied by the number of that house's surviving ships.
Throughout the game you will be collecting operation cards. These come in three flavours. Cadet cards can be assigned to one of your crew and each cadet can have up to two of them. These cards grant that cadet additional bonuses when they take their action. Frigate cards are assigned to your frigate board and grant a variety of bonuses when you use your frigate. The final card type are Command cards which offer a single-use effect, often quite powerful when used at the right time. Cards also gain you end-game points.
Corruption is a constant threat. Some actions will gain you corruption which needs to be placed on your frigate board, limiting the available bonus actions and resources you can hold. So you're managing corruption, cards, resources, the Voidborn threat and trying to gain influence but you can see that with only three crew and four rounds you get just 12 turns for the entire game, so your choices are very important. After the action phase your crew are returned to your player board and a new turn order is determined based on your position on the tactic track. Turn order is crucial for snagging the powerful actions early on.
Then the Voidborn fight back: sector by sector the Voidborn attack the house ships: each ship has a certain amount of damage it can take before being removed from the board. Damage is distributed by the player whose frigate is closest to the fight, so tactical positioning of your frigate is important to protect the house ships you may be favouring or destroying those favoured by your opponents... New Voidborn then pour through the rifts and join the battle; if the players haven’t kept their numbers down, the house ships and the Revenant can quickly become overwhelmed. By taking an action on the Revenant itself you can, at the end of the round, initiate a hyperspace jump so that the entire fleet moves to another slightly safer sector of space. The board is reseeded with new planets, rifts and Voidborn...
Revenant has a very interesting dynamic and we’ve seen it played in very different ways. Some plays have seen a very cooperative approach where the Voidborn numbers have been kept low, the Revenant never jumped and the fleet stayed mostly unscathed. Other plays have seen the Voidborn devastate the fleet and the Revenant jump several times...
The game plays well at all player counts, including the excellent solo variant. We highly recommend Revenant if you are a fan of super-tight worker placement games. With the asymmetric frigate boards, double-sided asymmetric crew board and 90 unique cards, no two games will ever be the same...
(Review by Greg White)
