Tabletop Tuesday: “Emergence” by Liminal Games

This game is on Kickstarter for just seven more days and I didn’t want any of my wonderful readers to miss it.

The robot apocalypse waits for no one after all. The robot apocalypse has been a theme of science-fiction since the day of Isaac Asimov and we’ve seen the idea of that robo-revolution take shape in a variety of films, TV shows, video games, and so many other genres – from books to comics and onward.

Liminal Games seeks to add their name to the hat with “Emergence”, a game that mixes the paranoia of “The Resistance” with the resource collection of games like “Catan”. At the start of the game, a couple of players are selected at random to be the human survivors of a war that pushed humanity to extinction working to hide their true identities from Skynet. Everyone else gets to play Arnold and help rebuild their robotic dystopia.

Next, everyone chooses one of the preset colors representing resources (in the form of data, both raw and compiled) that you’ll use to undermine your enemies and achieve victory. At the start of every round, players declare their augmentations (blue for a mechanical alignment and green for biological). These are used each round to determine what tiles you can gather resources from, where you can move, and even who you can interact with on your turn. This turns what would normally be a simple act of moving around the board and gathering resources into highly strategic slugfest for the post-apocalyptic ages. In “Emergence” every move you make could have repercussions that reach across the board.

The game is made for 3-6 players and involves, as you might imagine, a ton of teamwork and deception. Ideally, the game should last anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, but that’s barring things that happen in every board game – setup and rules squabbles mostly. Players will move around a Catan-like board and use resources they collect for their team to earn points.

The game looks fun and amazing as well and props have to be given to Jordan Roberts and the art design team for creating a look that feels futuristic and dystopian. All of the images are simple to read and understand, so much so that I imagine a new player picking the game up for the first time would be able to easily decipher what they’re supposed to do.

“Emergence” is on Kickstarter for just seven more days, so if you’re at all interested in it, be sure to check it out. Kudos to Liminal for creating such a unique game.

Until next time, nerd crew, game on!