Faceless in a Crowd

Magnets!

It's a cliche, but every now and then, someone actually decides to “do it with magnets.” So it was with the cooperative board game The Faceless.

One kid in a group of friends has gone missing in a strange nightmare world. The rest band together for a rescue, entering this horrific plane of existence to gather items needed to rescue their friend before the evil monster who dwells within finds them and catches them.

So goes the premise of the game. The mechanics surround a hexagonally-shaped board where your playing piece is a compass. Three pieces at the perimeter of the board can be moved by the players, the magnets inside drawing the compass needle in different directions. The monster who moves around the board contains a needle as well. By rotating figures to repel or attract the needle, and by playing cards to move the compass itself in whatever direction the needle points, the players team up to navigate the board and collect objects.

The game is wonderfully evocative. The art is delightfully creepy, from the illustrations on the cards to the two-faced miniatures that circle the board. This story feels like something of a trope, what with Stranger Things and Stephen King's It and everything that came before to inspire those things, but The Faceless serves up the right mix of familiar and original in terms of its art.

Also fun, at least in principle, is the idea of using magnets to indirectly guide a playing piece around the board. It's not fully under your control, but neither is it totally random. It also somehow suits the theme in a non-obvious way, that your fate is in the hands of forces you cannot see, and can only affect at a remove.

But the game itself is not as compelling as the idea of the game, and certainly less compelling than its spooky art. The puzzle is actually quite rote. Presumably, you understand how magnets work, and can reasonably guess how things will interact 90+% of the time. The only question is whether the adjustable difficulty level of the game gives you enough turns to solve the puzzle or not.

I don't think much is gained from this being a cooperative game. It feels like it would be an entertaining enough puzzle for one. Maybe a decent two-player game, at the most. But when you play with more (four players, in my case), there's simply not enough for everyone to do. Characters have specific powers, but they're not broad enough to have more impact than the simple movements of the magnets. There's not much debate about whether the group should do "this" or "that," with one best move pretty clear to everyone every time a new player's turn begins. There's simply not that much to this game, and the rules for higher difficulty levels don't really address giving everyone more to do -- they simply start you out more under the gun.

The theme is compelling, and the look of the game is a fantastic realization of that theme. But the gameplay itself lacks enough to really engage me. I give The Faceless a C+. There are many stronger cooperative options out there.