Tag: Big Box Challenge

FAZA Wins the Big Box Challenge on The Game Crafter

by Ben

So this is some really great news, FAZA won the Big Box Challenge on The Game Crafter!

Faza wins the game crafter's big box challenge

Alex Coulombe, the judge for the competition, played FAZA with his gaming group multiple times. Check out his detailed document outlining what they loved about FAZA.

He described FAZA as “far and away the most polished and engaging, while also offering the most value on repeat playthroughs, especially across 2, 3, and 4 players.” After playing the game multiple times, they “realized there was no ‘sure-fire’ strategy, and the game forced us to adapt and improvise to changing situations.” He went on to say that “FAZA is the best co-op game we’ve ever played.”

If you get further into the document, he continues listing out the many wonderful aspects of playing FAZA:

  1. “Never have I played a game before that is so thoroughly engaging for all players the entire time. While some co-op games achieve this to a certain degree, the level of strategy and planning for an upcoming Faza round in our games had everyone feeling like brilliant tacticians working together.”
  2. “Great balance with the different roles and their abilities. Everyone felt like were able to pick a role that suited their play style, and they had something meaningful to contribute every turn.”
  3. “The game keeps the pressure on continuously– from the word go we basically always felt like we were about to die (or run out of drones), then felt enormous exhilaration and relief when we managed to stave off our demise.”
  4. “Rules are laid out in such a way that made reading through them easy, which is impressive considering there are some fairly complex elements in this game. The rules are exceptionally well-written with clear graphics and worded with a level of precision that immediately answered nearly every question we had.”
  5. “Great synergy between theme and mechanics. I honestly couldn’t tell you which one the designer likely started with.”
  6. “Average playtime for a game became 1 hr 30 min, which felt like the perfect length. We ended every game on a high of wanting to play again and adjust our strategies and roles to see how it might affect our next playthrough.”

 

This news was cross posted to my personal blog as well.

FAZA is a finalist in the Big Box Challenge from The Game Crafter

by Ben

The Big Box Challenge started out with 55 board game submissions, and then the list was whittled down to 20 via a community voting process. Now, the list of games has been further refined to 7, and FAZA is one of them! You can read more about the seven finalists here and also see the scoring sheet provided by the judge Alex Coulombe.


If you start diving into the scoring sheet, you’ll notice that Alex gave FAZA a total score of 42 out of 45. This score is then broken down into three categories: Rules/Mechanics (18 out of 20), Art/Style (15 out of 15), Marketing/Hype (9 out of 10). He then highlights some of the qualities that stood out to him:

“Great cooperative premise and graphics. Like how the play area is laid out, though looks like there’s room for improvement in hierarchy of information. Really glad there’s considerations for ‘if this is your first time playing.’ Rules are super well documented and the examples are helpful. Thrilled to see info for both ‘here’s what to do on your first game’ and ‘here’s how to make the game harder.’ Also nice touch with the considerations made for color blindness.”

 

This news was cross posted to my personal blog as well.