In the world of The Others an apocalypse is imminent as members of the Hell Club have summoned the 7 Deadly Sins upon us. But fret not my friends as the paranormal fighting organisation Federal Authority for the Interdiction of Transdimensional Horrors, or ‘F.A.I.T.H’ – because let’s be honest no one has time to say all that… are here to save the day!
The Others is a one vs many miniatures game where one player takes on the role of a Sin and up to 4 others assume command of the F.A.I.T.H team. The ‘heroes’ must cooperate to complete their mission and stop the Sins from spreading across the city.
On the side of the F.A.I.T.H you have the choice from 7 characters each having a specific class that will offer different specialties, Leaders are good at helping the team, Bruisers are proficient in melee attacks. Snipers…. snipe, and Fixers help with resolving crises. Each hero also has their own stats and perks that will aid you in your bid for victory.
The box comes with two of the seven sins, Pride and Sloth both of which have fantastically detailed minis and awesome, imposing looking larger avatars for each Sin – I’d expect nothing else from Cool Mini or Not. I absolutely love the theme for the game, although it is a little disappointing to know that even though the game is based around the 7 deadly sins you only get 2 in the box, which means you’ll have to fork out a fair bit of money for the rest should you want them. As I said I like the theme for the game, it’s something a little different, it’s not your typical good vs evil scenario, it’s more evil vs antiheroes.
Corruption is the main driving force in The Others, it is a way for F.A.I.T.H players to gain access to powerful abilities and a way for the Sins player to try and consume them and wipe them from the board. The Sins player also has access to an Abomination, a Controller, the Hell Club and Acolytes, all of which can be summoned to the board in various ways to help in the fight towards total corruption – each unit has their own special abilities that can be used.
Corruption can either forced upon a player through combat or from corruption checks in zones. Or a player can voluntarily take corruption in order to gain the benefits shown on their tracker (extra dice rolls etc…). But if a player reaches the maximum (7) corruption and has to take more, they will instead be wounded. Wounds are placed over the bonuses on the corruption tracker meaning the player will no longer gain that benefit.
The game features three different mission types, Terror – which focuses more on combat and is recommended as a good place to start for newer players as they’re generally a little more straight forward.
Corruption – these stories focus on the heroes’ struggles of facing corruption and trying to rid the city of it.
Finally Redemption stories, which focus on saving the city from various different crises and missions.
Each story then has a few different maps for you to choose from.
These variations on game types and maps not only give you a nice amount of replayability, but they also change the gameplay or the focus of the gameplay a fair bit.
As you might expect with a game from Cool Mini or Not there are quite a lot of pieces involved meaning there is a fair amount of setup to do in order to get going, although it’s not as much as something like Dead of Winter – which I still feel is probably the longest game set up I have. For the most part everything fits back nicely in the box without needing too many extra bags or sleeves, although you’ll probably want a few for the cards and tokens, but personally I think it’s one of the better ones for box storage.
When you get around to playing you’ll notice that turns are carried out in a slightly different way. Each F.A.I.T.H player has two Turn actions and each turn allows you to either ‘move and take an action’ or ’take and action and then move’.
The actions you can perform are either start a fight or revolve a crisis which is essentially removing harmful tokens – like nests, fires and corruption, from the board. There is also the option for players to take a city action offered by a district space that they occupy, these can be performed at any time and amount to bonuses like healing wounds, taking an upgrade card, or calling in an orbital strike – yup you can call airstrikes to kill enemies.
As for the Sins player, they don’t have a specific turn per se; they instead have reaction tokens which can be used after any other player has taken a turn. These allow the Sins player to move monsters or start fights.
All combat in the game is resolved using dice and you build your pool depending on who is fighting and how many dice their cards say they can add, with various modifiers taking place based on things like sharing space with another player. Rolls are done simultaneously and the outcomes are then determined with defence rolls countering attacks, counter corruption countering, you guessed it, corruption, any remaining attacks will then add wounds to all units involved in the fight.
A round ends once all the players have either taken their turns or don’t wish to take any more. You will then resolve your end of round task from the story board, summon more monsters and the Sins player can draw extra sins cards if they’re able to. Then reset your tokens a duke it out again!
The mechanic for allowing the Sins player to basically take a turn whenever they choose is a really interesting one and one that I quite like as the F.A.I.T.H could be working towards something only for the Sin player to step in and put a stop to the plans. It basically makes for some very nice moments for a Sins player to ruin someone’s plans.
Whilst I do like the one vs many game type, if the Sins player takes their actions early on it can lead to a lot of waiting for the round end before you can get involved again, but generally it’s not too bad.
I found The Others to be a good experience and the variety on offer keeps things fresh from game to game. My only one real negative is that with the game rocking in at £90+ I felt like maybe there should be an extra Sin or two in the base game as adding the other five is going to bump up the price significantly. £90 isn’t a small amount of money and I feel like that might put some people off.
However, if you’re looking for a good one vs many game then I would very much recommend The Others with it’s great theme, fun gameplay, interesting take on the turn mechanics and the incredible mini’s.
You can find your nearest copy here.
-Will
