Defenders of the Last Stand Review

Had it come out five or six years ago, Defenders of the Last Stand might have emerged as one of the top post-Pandemic co-op titles. But with its worst-in-class aesthetic and production values as well as an overriding sense that the design is past its sell-by date, it lands in 2016 as a borderline also-ran despite leveraging a dramatically under-represented Mad Max-style post apocalypse setting. To state that it is a redevelopment or refinement of designer Richard Launius’ previous Defenders of the Realm (actually released five or six years ago) is an overstatement – this is essentially a cosmetic reskin with a couple of minor but welcome additions and tweaks.

I use the term “cosmetic” lightly because this is one of the ugliest games in recent memory. Defenders of the Realm was hilariously inept in its visual presentation (Comic Sans everywhere, kitschy Larry Elmore illustrations, DTP-quality layouts) and this new reimagining of that game completely drops the ball on improving its looks. The illustrations are garish, tacky and look like the low end of genre illustration circa 1995. The inconsistent typesetting and graphic design is barely better than many prototypes I’ve seen. Numerous errors, inconsistencies and typos litter the copy. And the miniatures are quite possibly the worst I have ever had the displeasure to encounter in a board game product. They are cheaply made, badly cast, primary colored, and they stink like a toxic Chinese factory. 8th Summit games should be ashamed to offer these for sale in a board game that retails for almost $100.

But a lot of gamers will give it all a pass because the materials are practical and usable, as will many Mad Max or Fallout fans who crave that bona fide post apocalyptic adventure game we’ve never really gotten. The good news is that on the gameplay and setting front, Defenders of the Last Stand mostly delivers all of the customized junk cars, psychopathic punks, radioactive mutants, wasteland eccentrics, hardscrabble survivors, and desolate towns struggling to get by after the bomb. The approach to expressing the setting is a little slapdash and the flavor text writing is atrocious, but it mostly works.

Each player takes on the role of a character that has a couple of special abilities, pretty standard stuff, and has a number of action points to spend each turn. Wounds, when you take them, disable some of your action points and limit your agency until you can rest. You’ll spend these turns to wander the wasteland after setting out from the central Last Stand territory. You might choose to pursue a personal or group mission, check out rumors that could lead to artifacts, or gamble at a casino. Or, you could find yourself striking back against four different factions that all have their eyes set on taking the Last Stand for themselves. Combat is dice-based on the hero side, but the bad guys simply inflict wounds or incur other effects if you end your turn in a space with any.

Just like Defenders of the Realm, this all plays out in a very Pandemic-y fashion with cards randomly placing the four different raider (and monstrosity) types. When more than three are in a territory, there’s an overrun and figures are placed in adjacent territories after marking the space with an Oil and Ammo dump marker. These, of course, were the crystals in DotR. The lose conditions are if one of the faction leaders advances into the Last Stand, if it’s occupied by bad guys, or if all of these Oil and Ammo dumps get placed on the board. The heroes win if they defeat all four of the faction bosses, and the game escalates its pace as each one is defeated.

So the bulk of the game is actually kind of a Dudes on a Map thing with a touch of set collecting because in order to fight these bosses, you’ve got to collect hero cards in the bosses’ respective colors. Each gives you one or two dice to roll against them, and ideally you want to have a mitt full of as many cards of one color as possible. But then there are artifacts, abilities and other cards that might add dice. You can also team up to fight a boss with other players, coordinating a strike and combining your roll with any cards they can supply. A big part of the “fun” of this game is in coordinating these boss takedowns and building up resources to do so. Many rewards for completing missions or other tasks give you cards, and you can also win them in the casinos.

I like the setting-specific additions in general, and almost all will be familiar to anyone who’s ever played a Richard Launius “fives and sixes are a success” skill check-based adventure game like, of course, Arkham Horror. If you end in a space with radiation markers, you have to make a skill check. Fail it, and you actually get something good- a mutation. But you can only have up to five points of mutations or you become a monstrosity. This is pretty much the exact same function as Corruption in Relic, the underappreciated Warhammer 40k version of Talisman. There is an on-board adventure marker keyed to a face-up card, which is something pulled directly from Eldritch Horror, another (better) game that this design resembles to some degree. It’s all pretty unoriginal, but decent fun.

There are some other nice touches, like how one of the faction leaders improves his technology over the course of the game – essentially pressuring players to take him down quickly. The mutant faction has a boss (the worst figure in the game) that flies all over the board and his followers aren’t handled under the normal rules. You have to scout them out, drawing a card to see what the blobby miniature that looks like a cross between a rock, a crocodile and a turd actually represents. Lots of events and artifacts ensure plenty of surprise and interesting decisions throughout the game, and as a whole it feels more dynamic than its predecessor.

For this outing, Mr. Launius worked with Jason Maxwell (Agents of SMERSH) and I appreciate the attempt to make this more of an adventure-focused game than the whack-a-mole that many Pandemic descendants can be. But it also feels like an old fashioned design in a bad way, with lots of kitchen sink card decks, sloppy text, and slippery rules that all feel like relics of the bad old days before designs became more concise and focused. It all feels very 2008, which makes sense given its source material, but it also illustrates how far adventure (and co-op) games have come in just half a decade. It’s ironic, to a degree, that Eldritch Horror in particular bears some similarities- it was essentially a modernized redevelopment of Mr. Launius’ own Arkham Horror concepts so it’s funny to see some traces of it turn up here. I kind of wish it were based on that game and not Defenders of the Realm.

Regardless, I’ve enjoyed Defenders of the Last Stand in spite of itself. At its best, it can muster just enough charm and interest to avoid feeling completely irrelevant and outmoded. But it does require that players (and buyers) overlook a lot of very serious shortcomings, many of which simply should not be present or tolerated in today’s hobby games marketplace. I would not be surprised to see a second edition of the game at some point, presumably in another Kickstarter, and if I were able to gaze into the future to confirm that then I would absolutely recommend that those interested wait to see if 8th Summit can get it together and turn out a professional-quality edition of this game up to industry standard. Given its current cut-rate production, it’s really closer to one of those Italian knock-offs of The Road Warrior like Warriors of the Wasteland than the original article.