I recently received my copy of CoLab by Portal Dragon. This was only about 13 months after it was supposed to be delivered. By Kickstarter standards, this is good performance - if you disregard Garphill Games, which has a very good record of delivering when promised, even a little early. CoLab has a solo version, so I went about trying it out. Here are my thoughts after that playthrough.
First, I’ll say that CoLab is a bad name. This is a purely competitive game. There is no collaboration or cooperation. There are labs. But these labs more closely resemble those of Doctor Frankenstein than the Centers for Disease Control. “Mad Scientist Clash” would have both been a more thematic and a more memorable name.
For that is what this game is all about. Mad scientists wander around town to different laboratories building potions, equipment, and monsters. All aiming to prove who is the best, or maddest, scientist by generating the most victory points.
The basic gameplay is collect resources. Use those resources to build cards and put them in your tableau. These cards give the player VP or special powers. So far, so Everdell.
CoLab is not a worker placement game like Everdell, though. At least, not much of one. Players place their dice-carrying minions in towers built between the six laboratories. Each tower has three worker placement slots. There can be some competition for these slots, particularly at higher player counts, but it does not drive gameplay.
Placing or removing a minion allows the player to take one of two actions associated with the tower. These actions are either collect a resource, collect a card, or turn a die in the player’s pool to a preferred side.
It is these dice that are the focus of the game. Each turn, the player moves their scientist to a new lab. I guess Mad Scientists have low attention spans. At that lab, the scientist can collect resources/cards associated with the lab or build a card. Each lab is associated with one of the three colors of cards - red, blue, or green. At the beginning of the game, the scientist can only build cards of the color associated with the lab. Later on, lab expansions can make it so any color can be built.
Hold on, I’m getting to the dice. There are six types of resource, two of each color. Building a card requires a certain number of select resources. A player can collect tokens that can represent either resource of the token’s color. There are also totally wild tokens. But the tokens are minor contributors. Most of the resources used to build cards come from dice. The side of a die can have a single or double resource, or a single or double wild of a particular color. Players have a pool of dice in front of them. They can spend the resources represented by those dice by discarding the appropriate dice. They can also spend resources represented by the dice held by the minions in the towers adjacent to their scientist’s lab. These dice do not get discarded. The player can use the dice held by ANY minion, not just their own.
That’s basically it. Collect dice, spend dice for cards, put cards in tableau. Game ends when someone completes their 4x4 tableau.
The solo game is slightly different. The solo player plays exactly the same as in the multiplayer game, except they are aiming for 12 cards in their tableau, not 16. This is a point in favor of the game. Too many solo modes use abbreviated versions of the multiplayer gameplay. The “evil” mad scientist (or mad scientists) played by the AI has two goals. The first is to rush the end of the game to prevent the player from meeting their 12 card and selected VP goal. The second is to reduce the worker placement slots available to the player by destroying them.
How are the components? Overall, I’d give the components a B+. Some are poor. Some are much too high quality for a relatively lightweight game.
I’ll give the insert a B. Is the insert necessary? No, but then few are. Is it well designed? So-so. The slots for the scientist and minion minis fit them pretty well and protect them from damage. There are places for many of the game components. For other components, there are just big pits to drop in bagged components. (Portal Dragon did include the bags.) Some of the components are difficult to remove from the insert, particularly the cards, if using the add-on card sleeves. The slot for the cards is just big enough for them, not for a finger to get in to pull them out.
The cards themselves are the lowest quality component. The finish is poor. The edges are sharp. These are cards that definitely need sleeving.
In contrast, the board is over-engineered. The labs and towers fit together like a jigsaw. They are double-layered to hide the jigsaw tabs. It has a non-slip backing. While the idea of securing the pieces of the board together with jigsaw connections is a good one, the double-layering and non-slip backing are not necessary. They use more material, increasing the cost of the game. I would bet that the backing makes the board non-recyclable.
The minion and scientist minis are well-made and detailed. I did have one minion whose die holder was a little too small to fit a die in comfortably. It was nice to see that the scientists represented multiple genders and multiple races. My only problem with them is that they are huge. Each one stands 3 inches high. They could easily have been a third that size - saving materials, reducing box size, lowering cost - without sacrificing anything in gameplay or game attractiveness.
The dice are fine. Their quality is reasonable. There seems to be plenty of them. They are about as small as you could make them and still have them be useful. Their only problem is that some of their iconography does not match the iconography used in the rulebook to explain the iconography. Not a big problem, but confusing for a minute or two.
The wild tokens for specific colors are chunky and wood. Incongruously, the wild tokens which can be any color and resource are cardboard. They should probably have all been cardboard. In my playthrough, these tokens were not a major factor. Like some of the other components, the use of wood was a design decision that increased the materials used, the size of the box, and the cost of the game, without materially improving gameplay, the durability of the game, or the look of the game.
The pieces that are cardboard are pretty good. Except for the gameboard itself, they are of an appropriate thickness to be decently sturdy. They punched out with no problems. There were no printing errors that I found.
The rulebook is mostly fine, but it needed another pass through before printing it. As I mentioned above, some of the icons in the rulebook do not match the supposedly identical icons on the dice. There were some sentences which made no sense what-so-ever. The insert’s component organizer pictured in the rulebook was not actually the one delivered. It was close enough, but the artwork should have been updated to match. There were a couple of places in the rulebook where it said to set up the board or some part of the game according to the artwork. The icons on the board needed to, for example, distinguish one lab from another are fairly small. Good enough for the board. But the picture of the board in the rulebook was not high enough resolution to differentiate those icons easily.
The setup rules were all over the place - board setup rules, first time play board setup rules, player setup rules, two player setup rules, solo setup rules, normal setup rules, first time play setup rules (separate from first time board setup), express setup rules. The setup itself is not difficult. Only figuring out the rulebook.
The description of the rules themselves is adequate. They are not hard to understand. The description is not set up for quick reference after the initial readthrough, though. Sometimes the rules are presented in long paragraphs. If a player is looking for a particular rule, it could easily be missed in that format. Reference would be easier with shorter paragraphs or lists. The game does include player reference cards that do include many of the key rules.
The game has some issues but not fatal ones. They can easily be overlooked if the game is fun or challenging. Is it either?
The solo game has three difficulty levels in the rulebook. The difficulty level defines starting resources - number of dice and number of cards in hand - and the win criteria. For all three levels, winning requires 12 cards in the player’s tableau. Easy requires 30 VP, medium 45 VP, hard 60 VP. I suppose that difficulty can also be modified by the number of opponent mad scientists used. If that axis was discussed much in the rulebook, I missed it. For my first playthrough, I chose one opponent and easy level.
At first, I thought I was well on the way to losing. Minions were going on a rampage, rapidly destroying worker placement slots. The mad scientist was quickly advancing his evil plans. I was collecting a lot of resources but not building very many cards.
Then I realized I was not taking advantage of the resting turn. This is a rule I did not explain above. Instead of collecting resources and building cards, a player can rest. This allows the player to reroll all of their discarded dice and add them to their pool. In the solo game, it also allows the player to repair a destroyed worker placement slot.
I was used to games like Condordia, where you put off resting until you are forced to do so. In CoLab you are only forced to do so when you have to place a minion and do not have a die for it to carry. I had been collecting dice at a fairly rapid rate, so I always had a couple in my pool to put in a minion. I did not have enough to use to build cards. Those dice were sitting in my tray of discarded dice.
About halfway through the game, I realized I needed to recycle those dice back into my pool more often. At that point, I had well over a dozen dice doing nothing. From that point, my progress took off. After a rest turn, I had enough dice to make it easy to build a card every turn for two or three turns. Rest again. Start the cycle over.
In the end, I met my criteria, but it was a close thing. I built my 12th card on my last turn. Getting enough VP was easier. Setting up an efficient tableau was not a challenge. I ended up with 47 VP, much more than the required 30. More than would have been required at medium difficulty.
So, is CoLab worth buying? Once bought, is it worth keeping?
I would say it is not worth the $80 MSRP identified in the Kickstarter project. It’s pushing it at the $60 that it actually cost me. This is a fairly simple game. I think that the Boardgamegeek complexity rating of 3.00 is much too high, when Wingspan is 2.46 and Everdell is 2.82. Even Wyrmspan is only at 2.64. All of these are more challenging resource collection/tableau building games.
I’m not saying that it is a simple game to criticize it. There is certainly room for this type of game in the spectrum of hobby games. There will be families and groups who enjoy CoLab. The gameplay is not interesting enough for it to be a go-to game for those groups. Just one to pull out for a change of pace. Given that target audience, $80, and even $60, is too much. Even in these days of inflated game prices, I don’t see many being satisfied with CoLab if they spent more than $40. This is why I carped so much on design decisions that made the game more expensive.
Should this game have been Kickstarted? If it is the only way that the game would have gotten made in the first place, of course. Is it hampered by the belief that games only succeed on Kickstarter with over-the-top components? Yes. Some games have to be Kickstarted because they are so expensive that they would never get retailers to buy enough copies to be viable. People who are willing to Kickstart a game for $120 (or $150, or $300) usually either have plenty of disposable income or think that the game will be a lifestyle game, at least for a little while. Those buyers expect top quality components.
Then there are the games for which these components are extraneous. Philosophia: Floating World, any Garphill game, and CoLab are good examples. The Garphill games show that gamers will buy a good game, even if it is not blinged out. Philosophia: Floating World’s Kickstarter price was almost $90. Its retail price is $100, although it is available for $90. For a game that is rated 7.0 on Boardgamegeek. That is, it is an adequate game at best. Compare that to the miniature-heavy Zombicide, 2nd edition, $103 and an 8.0 on BGG.
The point is that component upgrades that might or might not help a game sell on Kickstarter might price it out of its target retail market. CoLab is a $40 game. If Portal Dragon can create a version that can be sold at that price point, they might have a successful game.
But I did buy it. Should I keep it? I am not interested in trying to beat it solo on hard mode. After I figured out when to rest, the game became boring. The selection of cards to build was not an interesting choice. By that point, resources were not very limited, so deciding where to send minions and my scientist was also not very interesting. It was just a race to see how fast I could get done with the game.
I will keep it around for at least a little while. I run sessions teaching games to those new to hobby board games. I’ll roll it out for one of those. If people like it, maybe I’ll keep it. Maybe I’ll sell it to one of them. Overall, I won’t refuse to play the game. I just won’t be very enthusiastic about it.
Den of the Red Wolf 