Making Me Sick

There are a lot more board games out there that take 2 to 4 players than those that will work for up to 5. Adding that fifth player can be a tricky thing that doesn't always "just work." Just adding too much down time between turns can be bad enough; sometimes that one extra person can upset the entire balance of the game system.

Viral is a new game that says "2-5 players" on the box, but should have known better and capped it at 4. Each player controls a virus strain that has infected a human host. The board represents six different sections of the body, each with one to three organs, where players battle against each other for control. At the end of each round, your virus must have the highest numbers in a section to score points, but must also be present in all organs in that section to do so.

You have a series of cards that cover your possible moves, and a separate set of cards to target those moves in a particular section of the body. Cards let you reproduce new viruses, migrate them across organs (and through the blood stream to other sections of the body), attack rival viruses, and shield your viruses from attack. The cards you use in one round are excluded from use during the next round, but you can also pick up new cards with new combinations of abilities throughout the game.

I played Viral with 5 players, and I never want to play it again -- not with that number again, at least, though the experience was negative enough to sour me on the game entirely. First, five players is sheer chaos. Each player plays just two cards per round, but each card has multiple actions on it that affect the board state so wildly that planning is essentially impossible. Go early in the turn order, and there's no way for you to account for what will happen after you and before scoring. Go late in the turn order, and there's no way for you to account for everything that's changed since you all simultaneously chose the cards you were playing that turn -- what you wanted to do may now simply be irrelevant.

Setup for 5 players is, quite simply, unbalanced and unfair. There are 12 organs on the board, a number that divides equally for 2, 3, or 4, players. Do you leave two of them empty for the 5-player set-up? Nope, the last two players get them. The player in third position gets squeezed, behind in numbers, and with players causing unpredictable chaos on turn 1 both before and after him.

The game has a bit of a "rich get richer" problem. There's a built-in mechanism that tries to address this: when an organ fills up with too many viruses, the body react and wipes them all out at the end of the turn, which theoretically hurts the players with more board presence more extremely. But there's another mechanism that favors the leaders. At regular intervals on the scoring track are places where, when reached, you get to draft a new ability card for your hand (any of three face up options, or a blind choice from the deck). These are super-powerful compared to the starting cards, so the first player to reach a point plateau and nab one gets more power to turn around and immediately use on the next turn to ascend to still greater heights and earn still more powers. With a limited number of rounds in the game, earning a power early means you get to use yours more often than the late bloomers use theirs, an imbalance with no real counterweight.

There's still more chaos in the game, in the form of a deck of event cards that are shuffled and revealed round by round throughout the game, putting different benefits or penalties on different organs in the body. It's very difficult to instantly get to any particular place you need to go in the body, as movement is rather restricted. It's not like every player can instantly go vie for control of what's important in a given round, or abandon an area that's become dangerous. So essentially, these event cards can randomly give further help to players who don't need it, or further keep trailing players under the thumb of the game's chaos engine.

Even though I somehow managed to finish just one point behind the two players who tied for first (those being the fourth and fifth players that started the game with the extra virus; just saying), I felt completely out of control the entire time, and could point to nothing but dumb luck and opportunity on the final turn of the game that made it that close. That close finish did nothing to salvage the experience as a whole, one I don't care to repeat ever again.

I suppose I might consider giving the game another shot with fewer players some time, but that sort of feels like opting for a left-footed kick to the crotch rather than a right-footed one. I've had a great run of trying decent-to-excellent new board games for some time now, but that ends here with Viral. Solid theme, pretty board... terrible play experience. I give it a D.