Hallmarks of the Gears of War series for the Xbox 360 are
hordes of Locust enemies, loads of gunfire and big, burly, some might say, American-style, COG Soldiers. All of that is here in Gears of War the Board Game. Marcus Fenix and his cohorts are facing off against the Locust in hopes to eradicate them and save humanity. Each player takes control of one or several COG soldiers to fight off the Locust horde which is controlled by an "AI card deck." It makes for an interesting game mechanic where it is players vs. the game and wins/losses are shared.
Gears of War the Board Game
As one would expect from a complex board game from Fantasy Flight, there are a lot of parts to this game.
32 plastic figures
168 bridge-sized cards
38 mini cards
7 punchboard sheets with 17 map tiles, a line-of-sight ruler and tons of marker tokens
1 mission reference sheet
5 attack dice, 4 Defense dice
2 clear plastic door stands (to hold doors of course!)
Gears of War the Board Game Setup
To start, players agree on a mission, from the seven missions included with the game and choose their characters. The game is co-operative play in that the players win or lose the game together and the Locust horde is AI controlled (more on that later). The goal, as one would expect of COG soldiers, is to eradicate the Locust horde in the mission and seal any spawn points. This isn’t to say that you could make your own missions from the cards as well. It just gives you a nice structure to get into the game and get playing. After that, you might start building your own levels.
The game follows in a sort of dungeon crawl manner. There are map tiles that you link together to forms levels and the number of levels depends on the mission. When you choose the mission it will also choose the Locust units that will appear in it (on the map area mission cards) and once the first level and the units are in place gameplay can begin.
