If you know anything about me, or have read any of my articles in the past, you know that I am a musician. No, not that kind of musician, I’m a former band director. I taught high school and college band. Once I became a father, I left the day-today in the classroom teaching and started focusing on my marching band drill design business as well as working for an ed-tech software company. So needless to say, I love music. When I saw an old Dice Masters friend of mine, Kirsten Lunde, post that her first ever board game design coming to Kickstarter, I knew I had to ask for a preview. Then when I found out that is was a music themed game, I nearly fell over with excitement! So let’s get to it, and talk about, Ovation!
Ovation is the first game from Looking Glass Workshop and is designed by the above mentioned Kirsten Lunde, solo design by David Dugby, with art design by Jon Merchant and M.G. Patiño. It plays 1-4 players, is rated for players 10+ years old, and should take between 40-60 minutes to play. A link to the Kickstarter can be found here. The campaign runs through July 20th.
Instead of going through how to play the game specifically, I’m going to give a brief overview with my impression and thoughts about the game.
Overview
Ovation is a card drafting game at its core. You use the cards that you draft to build an engine, which is powered by the action selection element of the game. The engine that you build is not actually used in the main actions that you select, but in the bonus actions that you earn throughout the game. The 4 main actions allow you to draft one of the 4 types of cards – Fortune, Patrons, Chamber Music (small performances) or Concert Music (large performance), or to gain income, which are inspiration (blue-sorrow, red-passion or yellow-joy). Inspiration is the currency of the game, which will be used to draft and purchase the different types of cards. Both Fortune and Patron cards will give you either a bonus action that will attach to one of the 4 main actions, or an end game victory point multiplier that will happen at the end of the game. These end game multiplier cards are Legacy Patrons. The Objective cards, called Maestro Cards, act as the end game trigger. There are 2+ the number of players available, and are earned by the player that reaches the set collection goal listed on the card first. Once there are 2 left, the game ends. Players take turns taking one of the 4 main actions and any additional bonus actions that they are able to take.
Gameplay
The game starts off like any engine builder – fast actions and not a lot of down time between players. Once you start getting a feel for the game, and building your engines, your turns start to get a little longer and the time between turns if filled with mapping out your best strategy based on the given cards available to draft. This is the part of the game the I get excited about – mapping, and then remapping, out every turn. I say re-mapping because in many instances, my opponent wants to draft the same card that I want!
I’ve mentioned the bonus actions that are a result of taking an action a few times, so lets chat about this. When I draft a non-performance card (most Patrons or Fortune) they will end up above my tableau board and above one of my 4 actions. I start the game with 1 bones token, and eighth note, to be specific. I can use that 1 bonus token to take a bonus action on one of the cards linked to the chosen main action, If I have multiple cards above the action, I can play as many as I have tokens, but not any card twice on a turn. How do I get more tokens you ask? Well you Perform! Every time you perform a Chamber or Concert card (draft it and pay its cost in inspiration), you earn another bonus token. These are, I believe, the heart of the game. Finding a great combination of bonus actions that give you inspiration and allow you to take additional main actions, is the crux of the game. Being able to hop around and perform multiple main actions each turn is both fun, exciting, and extremely powerful. I’m a sucker for games that have main and executive/bonus (I’ve played too many Lacerda’s…..) actions, so Ovation felt really smooth and natural to me.
I honestly though that the game would end really quick with only 2 Maestro Cards needing to be earned to trigger the end game, but it didn’t happen as fast as I expected. It took a lot of effort (the right amount I think) to regain enough inspiration after each performance (you spend a lot of inspiration to draft a performance card), and when you’re buying/drafting 5-8 of them a game, there is a really good cadence (pun intended, if you get that pun…. lol) that you develop.
Components
Components, card quality, artwork, and the recessed player boards all look and feel fantastic! Even knowing that this was a prototype copy of the game, it still looked and felt amazing. The art is colorful, fun, and really pops off of the cards. The recessed player board is great and really needed with how often you are sliding your inspiration tokens around the board. The idea to use a piano as the main inspiration tracker was brilliant! Also, every card either has a historical fact about the person or piece of music it is referencing, or a super “punny” joke. My wife Rachel very much approved of the puns!
Impressions and Recommendation
I’ll cut to the chase, I have to send the prototype back to another reviewer tomorrow and I’ve already asked when I can get another copy so that I can keep playing it on my own and play it with all of my other musician friends! The theme is expertly done, the game is super tight, and the barrier to entry is not high at all. I could definitely bring this over to a game night with casual gamers and everyone would have a great time. After a few plays I was really taken by how some actions that I thought I would never use, such as permanently sacrificing a bonus eighth note token to clear any row of cards (Fortune, Patron or either Performance row) in order to refresh the cards, become incredibly powerful at the end of the game when you were maybe looking for a specific type of card. It was also useful to get rid of a card that you knew your opponent needed – but I would of course never do that…… 😉 Oh, and the Legacy Patrons (the end game multiplier cards that both rewards you for specific types of performance cards and punishes you for others!) are just a chefs kiss on top in terms of the risk/reward nature of the game! Theres almost always a net positive with these, so get as many as you can!
It was really obvious the time, care, and love that was put into every aspect of the game. It plays super smooth and definitely leaves you wanting to re-rack to play again at the end! I would highly recommend that you jump over to the Kickstarter page here and consider backing Ovation!
-Stuart
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