Fallen Land: A Post Apocalyptic Review

So I backed the Kickstarter for Fallen Land: A Post-Apocalyptic Board Game and it arrived last week. The components are good quality and seem to be well made. The Kickstarter arrived with the first expansion, A Journey Into Darkness which expands the card count by about 20%.

The expansion also adds rules for a 6th player and for solo play.  The game covers a nuked-out version of the United States. There are three types of terrain, Plains, Mountains, and City/Rad. Each type has its own deck of encounters. The decks scale in difficulty from Plains being the easiest to City/Rad being the most difficult.

The game setup involves selecting one of ten factions, getting some starting characters and gear, and placing some missions randomly on the map.

The characters form your party which goes out and interacts with the landscape, finishing missions, claiming resources and attacking other players.

One deck not yet mentioned is the Action deck. This gives you a number of actions you can perform to modify die rolls or to penalize another player or boost your own party or even hire a mercenary group. In solo play, the Action cards that are multiplayer only are conveniently marked with a red dot. You can remove these prior to playing, or like I did, just redraw when you get one of them.

Gameplay proceeds in a number of actions, including drawing new Action cards, selling extra gear, buying gear, and moving around the map. Each party has four weeks of actions they may do. Some actions take more than one week, like completing a mission. If this would put them over the four-week mark, they gain a deficit counter for the next month and correspondingly fewer actions.

The object of the game is to get to either 20 prestige or 80 town health. Most actions you can do gain one or the other, or both.

I’ve only played one solo game at this point, so I am sure there are a lot of nuances that I am missing, however, I give this game a solid 4.5/5.