To Be Continued…

• Designer: Vedran Mocibob
• Publisher: Snovid
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 15-45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Five fellow gamers, The Collector, The Sore loser, The Strategist, The Stickler and Lady Luck, are invited to the game night. Play the role of a Comics creator and follow the adventures, on their way to the favorite hobby activity.  In this game, Players will create their own Comics Chapters, with 9 scenes.  Their cards are part of five parallel story lines (indicated by the story line icons), and their chronological order is indicated by a number (1-15).  The Players’ objective is to create a Chapter with as many as possible scenes from the same story line. Additionally, their Chapter will score better if they will use cards with suitable numbers

To start, give each player a chapter card and sit in counter clockwise order of chapter numbers. Each player also gets an Ad card.  The Deck is constructed by shuffling all the Meanwhile and Story cards together. Players draw a hand of 4 cards (giving them a starting hand of 5 cards including their Ad card).  The Deck is placed on the table and N cards are placed face up on the table in a row – these are called the common piles.

The game will be played in 9 turns, at the end of which the player will have a 3×3 grid of cards in front of them – representing their chapter.

The active player first draws 2 cards, either from the top of the deck or the topmost card of one of the common piles.  If the common pile is emptied, a new card is immediately drawn from the deck to replace it – there should always be a number of face up common piles equal to the player count.  

Then, the player must play a Story or an Ad card from their hand.  If they play a Story card, it must be placed orthogonally adjacent to a previously played card, and must remain within a 3×3 grid.  There are a few more rules though:

• For any particular color (Story) – you can only play a card which is higher than the highest number of that color in any previous chapters.  You also can only play cards in that color (Story) lower than the lowest number on cards already played to following chapters
• Confusingly, if you play a Special Story card, you might be able to ignore these rules
• Additionally, within your own chapter, story cards must be in ascending order by color as if you were reading like a comic.
• If you play a Story card with the switcheroo icon, everyone must hand their cards to the player on their Right

If you play your Ad card, you actually place that card in any other player’s chapter and take the card from that player and then place it in your own Chapter.  This Ad-acquired card must still follow all the placement rules above.

If you do not have a card to play legally (or choose not to play one), you can place any card from your hand face down.

At any point in your turn, as a free play, you can play a Meanwhile card to replace an Ad card in your chapter.  You can also discard a card to move one of your cards one place horizontally or vertically OR use it to exchange the position of any two adjacent cards.  You can always discard three cards from your hand to draw 1 additional card.

Continue this for 9 turns until everyone has a 3×3 grid in front of them. Now it is time to score – the chart is found on the chapter card you were given at the start:

• Timeline points – score points for cards which have numbers in the appointed range for your chapter (Meanwhile cards always count as being in the right range)
• Story points – for each of the five colors, score points for the quantity of each color (Meanwhile cards can be used as any color)
• Ad points – each Ad card is worth 4 points

The player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker

My thoughts on the game

This was one of those games that I really couldn’t figure out how it would play from reading the rules.  When we got it to the table, everyone seemed to get the mechanics, and we were quickly underway.  The scoring rules definitely encourage players to stay in their “own lane” number wise – that is, the first player is incentivized to play very low numbers while the fourth player is incentivized to play very high numbers.

That being said, there is a weird binding advantage to those earlier in turn order.  All players are restricted by the fact that they can’t play a lower numbered card than one seen in an earlier player’s board. Thus, if the first player chooses to play a medium to high number of a color, that really screws up the play for the entire rest of the table (and there’s not much the later players can do to inconvenience the earlier players).    Sure, you could play an Ad card to retrieve said high numbered card, but if this happens late enough in the game, there may be enough other cards played in that color to essentially lock things into place already.

It’s hard to plan too much in the game because there are a LOT of cards that cause you to pass your hand to the next player.  After playing about the first third of the game, I essentially stopped looking at my hand between turns as it was exceedingly likely that my next play would be with different cards, and it just seemed to be better to chat with the other players who were in between turns.  Also, with the spectre of Ad cards disrupting your well-curated collection of cards, the situation is always fluid in To be Continued….

The overall look of the game is cool, and I love the idea that you’re putting together panels in a comic book.  It is definitely an idea which I haven’t seen before – I do wish that the game played a bit smoother though to go with such an original idea.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor