Lockdown Board Game First Impressions
In Lockdown players will try and save their family members in any way they can.
Be it eating rotting meat, or sending other humans out to their death!
A semi-cooperative game that takes you into a horrific world overwhelmed by Monsters which you know nothing about … besides their veracious appetite for your skinny little human bodies.
Lockdown Game Overview
Quick Rules Summary
Players each control a family divided over 6 different locations. One player will control the security cameras and will secretly know which locations the monsters will attack next.
Players will then secretly choose a location to move a family member to, monsters will spawn and if monsters outnumber humans at a location the players vote on who dies there.
Throughout all of this, players will be making deals while backstabbing and lying the whole time.
How do you win?
When 5 survivors are left, the players add up their value and the player with the highest value wins.
Main Mechanisms
Negotiation and voting are key. When you’re voting on who will die you need to have something to offer in return for the vote not going your way.
USP
This is a reimplementation of City of Horror and Mall of Horror so it does not have a unique selling point. However, it’s pretty quick and the components are nice for a game of this kind.
Theme
“Lockdown” is a word you want to avoid in 2022, we have had enough of that 2 years ago.
But being trapped by monsters and having to sacrifice those noisy monster-attracting children is a difficult choice.
Setup
Tiles out, tokens out. Job done.
Components & Artwork
The thick location tiles and the chunky people tokens are really nice. The art is not for me but does the job. The families are full of people of all colours and physical abilities.
Ease of Teaching
It is easy to teach with several steps per round and very little actual hidden information. The only issue is if players have cards in hand they don’t understand. If these are cards that can be used to screw someone over they don’t want to reveal they have it.
Similar Games
The people I played with called this an easier version of Dead of Winter which itself is a story-enhanced version of City of the Dead. There are a lot of similar-style games.
Lockdown Review
Positives
Very nice components.
A diverse cast of characters of all ages, races and abilities.
Simple gameplay that allows the focus to be on the table talk.
A short playtime that can be done in an hour depending on how much table talk there is.
Negatives
It relies on players playing in the right spirit, not king-making etc and in my experience you won’t get 6 players that can do that.
The components drive up the price to more than I would want to pay for this game.
Summary
A fun game to play if played correctly.
Jesta ThaRogue
