Downfall Game

Product Information

The game is currently available in the UK under the name New Downfall, manufactured and marketed by Hasbro. The new version follows the same rules but has a more futuristic design in red and yellow.

On top of contending with the omnipresent radiation, players have to find enough food to feed their survivors, and stone, oil, and metal to fight the radiation, build shelters and units, and research new technologies. Resources can be hard to come by, and it can be difficult to feed all of your people (and it gets progressively harder as the game moves forward) so the game really feels like a struggle for survival in a deadly world, even when you don't take the other players into account. You like games with randomized setup, but don't mind that the randomization can also lead to imbalance. A 3 player game about to begin. Two players are set up and ready while the third (top left) decides how they want to place their starting pieces. I mentioned semi-simultaneous turns because, even though the rulebook says you can do most actions simultaneously, in practice that only works for a few of the actions. Any action that requires a player to move to new tiles or, more importantly, discover hidden tiles can't really be performed unless all players are paying attention because it's important for all players to see what has been discovered as resources are so scarce, and doubly important once players start to expand their territory and bump into the territory of other players.

Thematically this game is an absolute winner. So if you are a fan of post-apocalyptic dread, you don't mind the likelihood that the board won't offer perfect balance to each player, and you like 4X games but don't often have 4+ hours to spend playing them then Downfall just might be your irradiated cup of tea.

The tiles are quite large, and a different mix is used based on player count. Even though each tile is sizable some of them can be split into as many as 3 separate spaces, which can lead to some component crowding. Downfall: Conquest of the Third Reich Preview 4 — Action Rounds Continue, by Bob Heinzmann and John Butterfield

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For your first couple of games it will be impossible to tell where the other player’s discs are on a particular dial. Since both sides are not lined up with one another there is no way to tell where a disc is positioned on the other player’s side of the gameboard. The only way to know where the discs are located is to play the game often enough that you have memorized the differences between the two sides of the gameboard. Even if you have memorized both sides of the gameboard you could still have a hard time remembering all of the locations of the discs. Basically if you don’t play the game frequently enough to memorize the other side of the board, Downfall becomes a guessing game. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it may drive people nuts who want more control over the outcome of the game. The game falls into two halves: before and after the eruption of Vesuvius. Before the eruption, players play cards to place their pieces in buildings. After the first eruption, they can also place as many relatives as the number of pieces already in the building they placed their piece in. When Omen cards are drawn, the player can take any opponent’s piece and throw it into the erupting volcano. In this manner, players try to get as many pieces onto the board as close to the exits from the city as possible. Hour 42 Minute Video Interview from Bonding with Board Games with John Butterfield (Downfall discussion starts at 39:30)