It has some great ideas, the “quest” deck is really cool, being able to pick your way through the quests in a style similar to the fighting fantasy books is really good fun. The pieces are great, the Pip-boy dashboards are really pretty and tactile – slotting your S.P.E.C.I.A.L tokens in, moving your health/rad markers around and slotting conditions in is much more fun than it should be. The minis are awesome, the whole game is impeccably presented.

However.

The game is really quite bad. The quest deck is an awesome mechanic, but there is nothing stopping other players from completing *your* quests. I could find a person in Diamond City who asks me to go look for their lost sibling (this is a random example) and a player on the other side of the board could complete it on their next turn. Sometimes by having previous knowledge, but just as often by chance. How are they supposed to know about this? The game justifies it as “word of mouth”, but it just creates a poor game experience. It’s really disappointing having gone to do all the work for someone else to snatch it away from you. If the game was co-op it would make more sense, but it’s not.

The win condition is appallingly random. You can win simply by drawing the right card at the right time. This has happened a couple of times when I’ve played and it really just makes the whole effort of playing feel like a waste of time. Similarly, when you trigger the “end” event, it doesn’t feel exciting. Often it’s easy to tell if any of the players are actually going to manage to achieve a win by that point and the “countdown” just feels like an inevitable bore. We often just quickly ran through our turns verbally and could calculate the result very accurately.

Combat is ok, but it’s not very exciting. Again, it’s easy to predict. If I manage to kill that Deathclaw I *know* it will kill me in the process. So I avoid the Deathclaw. Boring. Again, predictable. There’s no heroic efforts here, no shot in the dark, no last ditch attempts. Honestly they might as well not even have bothered with the dice.

The game gives you a sense of freedom, but your best choice is often obvious and so the game essentially leads you through it. Player choice is an illusion.

All of these points really push players away from feeling truly immersed in the game, the world. The game essentially breaks the 4th wall by continually reminding you that you’re playing a game and not exploring the wasteland.

The game plays best solo, at least you know your quests are yours and it feels a bit more immersive because of this.

I’ve kept my copy in the hopes that expansions or erratas might be coming and that will fix it. There *is* a good game in here, somewhere, but this isn’t it. This feels like a beta test. For the moment, me and my group have planned to house-rule a few things in order to fix some of the issues we have, namely not being able to complete another player’s quest unless agreed upon (essentially bartering for information). We’ve not tried this yet as we simply do not have the drive to ever pull this out the box again.

FYI. There is a a game called Salt Lands, published by Antler Games. Salt Lands is the game this should have been.