I have saw again A lots of board games adaptations video games on This site, and for good reason: it’s the most intimate intersection of our board game and video game coverage. In almost every case, the key consideration has been how the board game feels compared to the original. What kind of concessions were made, how does it differ, does it match the video game in terms of mood, if not exact mechanics.

Frostpunk is different. It’s a massive board game that seeks, in almost every meaningful way, not to fit the video game to the table, but to bring it big, warts and all. It’s an ambitious undertaking if nothing else, but I’m also not sure if it’s worth all the effort.

And it’s an effort. When I first went to play the game I had at least 30 minutes to set it up when I started having sweats. I had spent half an hour painstakingly punching cards, reading the manual, and placing chips on the table and it looked like I had barely started. Did I do something wrong ? Was I just a very slow guy? After reading this Dicebreaker story titled “I spent an hour not setting up a board game and it made me question everything“It turns out not, luckily I’m fine, it’s the game that’s slow.

Frostpunk is one of the most complex board games I’ve ever played, let alone put together (and that’s not just me talking, it has a 4.32/5 “weight” rating on BoardGameGeek, which is very high). There’s a seemingly endless array of tokens, several decks of cards that look alike but aren’t, and loads of different rules that bend and swing for each player. The most infuriating thing is that there are eight tables that you must follow.

Eight. Boards. That’s too many boards.

If you’re wondering why the board game version of a (relatively) simple city-builder must be so complicated, it’s because this edition of the game, for some reason, didn’t want to vaguely recreate the spirit of playing Frostpunk. He wants to recreate the whole thing, replacing table components with mouse clicks. Almost everything you can do in the video game, from politics to resource gathering to city-building quest expeditions, is here, and it works pretty much the same as it does on PC.

This is, in many ways, a staggering achievement. Once you’ve (eventually) mastered the game’s vast array of components, maps, and rules, it truly feels like playing Frostpunk, the nagging pressures and responsibilities of the digital wasteland seamlessly transplanted into the physical world. . Indeed, some of those pressures are even better here, as Frostpunk is a cooperative game, which means that you can be 2 to 4 of you (there is also a single player mode, but I didn’t play it) taking on different jobs in the city, working together while discussing every decision. If you thought social and political stuff was cool in video gaming, it’s great here since you’re basically acting out a lot of those debates in the flesh.

Yet in other ways it all seems a bit pointless? The board game cuts so close to the fabric of the video game that you sometimes wonder why you bother at all, since the video game does it all for you, without the arduous setup time or the constant consulting of the rules. Sure, it’s a more solitary experience, but there’s a time when that trade-off can be worth it, and for a lot of people, myself included, that time can come when you’re hours into a single game and you’re not even close to finishing it.

Photo: Luke Plunkett | Kotaku

At least some of this setup is worth it. The game comes with a huge plastic recreation of The Generator, which not only looks amazing in the middle of the table, but also has real gameplay use, as players have to drop coal into it almost every turn while they play, an act that rivals the robotic mining of Deep Rock Galactic as one of the most satisfying physical actions in recent board game history.

And, in a very rare case for these reviews, I want to salute the game’s documentation. For some reason, most board game rules in 2023 still suck, but Frostpunk, despite the complexity and scale of the game, never let us down.

There’s a very specific type of person for this game. Someone who loves Frostpunk but feels lonely while playing, or someone who’s never played video games but is intrigued by density and politics offered here. Sadly I was neither of those people, I found its setup time and length too long, but as I said I can at least appreciate the effort of exhaustive design that has been devoted to the approach taken here, if nothing else.

Things haven’t been going well for Xbox lately. Microsoft faces strong resistance in its bid to acquire Activision Blizzard. He hardly released any big exclusive blockbusters last year. And he just cut over 10,000 jobs last week, including many senior developers at the Halo Infinite 343 Industries studio. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer tried to stay optimistic and damage-limiting on each of these and more in a new interview with IGN.

“Every year is critical,” he said. “I don’t find this year more or less critical. I feel good in our momentum. Obviously we’re going through some adjustments right now which are painful, but I think it’s necessary, but it’s really to set us and the teams up for long-term success.

This week has captured both the peril and the promise Xbox faces right now. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a decrease in net income of 12% for the last fiscal quarter compared to the previous year. Xbox gaming hardware and software have fallen by similar percentages, and Microsoft hasn’t said anything about how many new subscribers its Game Pass service has gained since hitting the 25 million mark exactly one year ago. year.

Then, on Wednesday, Microsoft provided a sleek, streamlined preview of its upcoming games in a Developer Direct livestream copied directly from Nintendo’s playbook. Forza Motorsport has apparently been quietly delayed to the second half of the year, but looked like a beautiful and impressive showpiece of racing sim. Arkane’s Sandbox co-op vampire shooter Redfall has had a May 2 release date. Real-time strategy spin-off Minecraft Legends will arrive in April. And to top it off, Tango Gameworks, creator of The Evil Within, has lost the shadow Hi-Fi Rush on Game Pass, a colorful left-field rhythm-action game that has already become the undisputed top gaming hit of 2023.

Screenshot: Tango Gameworks / Bethesda

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“2022 was too light on games,” Spencer confessed in his IGN interview. 2023 shouldn’t be thanks to Redfall and Starfield, Bethesda’s much-anticipated answer to the question, “What if Skyrim but space?” But both of those games were technically supposed to come out last year. Meanwhile, Hi-Fi Rush, like Obsidian’s Pentiment before that, is shaping up to be a critically acclaimed Game Pass release that might still be too small to move the needle on Xbox’s biggest fortunes.

Spencer remained vague when asked about the success of these games or their impact on Game Pass, whose growth would have stalled on console. “I think creative diversity grows for us when we have different ways for people to pay for the games they’re playing, and the subscription certainly helps there,” he said.

Hi-Fi Rush, Redfall, Starfield and a new The Elder Scrolls Online expansion coming out in June are also all from Bethesdawhich Microsoft finished acquiring in 2021. Microsoft’s former first-party game studios have been relatively silent in recent years while working on their next big projects, or, in the case of 343 Industries, have recently been hit by a number surprising layoffs. .

Following the news of the cuts last week, rumors and speculation began circulating that 343 Industries – which launched a well-received Halo Infinite single-player campaign in 2021 but struggled with seasonal updates of the multiplayer component in the months that followed – was benched. The released studio a brief statement over the weekend saying that Halo was here to stay and would continue to develop it.

Image: Bethesda/Microsoft

Spencer doubled down on that in his interview with IGN, but offered little information about the reasoning behind the layoffs or his plans for the future of the franchise. “What we’re doing now is we want to make sure the leadership team is set up with the flexibility to come up with the plan they need to build,” he said. “And Halo will remain critically important to what Xbox does, and 343 is critically important to the success of Halo.”

Where Halo Infinite has been touted before 10-year plan fits into this, however, remains unclear. “They have other things, some rumored, some announced, that they will be working on,” Spencer said. And on the future of the series as a whole, he simply said, “I expect that we will continue to support and grow Halo for as long as Xbox is a platform for people to play. ” It’s hard to imagine Nintendo talking about Mario with a similar lack of conviction.

Microsoft’s ongoing difficulties with some of its internal projects may be part of the reason it’s so focused on seeking help outside of the company. Currently, that means trying to acquire Activision Blizzard for $69 billion and fighting an antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission in the process. Microsoft originally promised that the deal to get Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush would be done before the end of summer 2023. That deadline is fast approaching, even as the company continues to offer compromises, as would have given Sony the option to continue paying for Activision’s games on its rival Game Pass subscription service, PS Plus.

Spencer told IGN that he remains optimistic about closing the deal, even though he claims to know nothing about the logistics of doing so when he started a year ago. “Given that a year ago, for me, I knew nothing about the process of making an acquisition like this,” he said. “The fact that I have more insight, more knowledge about what it means to work with the various regulators, I’m more confident now than I was a year ago, just based on the information I have. and discussions we had.