Final Act Review

Critical Hits: Fun action, chunky bits, good for kids, off the beaten path.
Critical Misses: An awful lot like Tank Battle, chintzy production, repetitive.

Tyto Games' rather unfortunately titled Final Act is coming off a modest Kickstarter and it is a tank game designed by a bona fide Israeli Defense Force tank commander with apparently no interest in replicating the gameplay concepts and mechanics of today's most popular games. It looks like a tread head wargame, but it's really kind of a programmed movement abstract with really funky, chunky wooden pieces that can't quite overcome the remainder of the package's amateurish production values. I sort of took a chance on this one solely to check out this unusual looking game- expectations were low, but I'm glad to report that Final Act is a pretty cool title that I think will play well with kids as well as more serious gamers looking for a fun, easy to play two player "war-ish" game.

Design-wise, Final Act isn't really very original despite it looking and feeling like one of those out-of-nowhere outsider designs. It has much more in common with the classic Milton Bradley Tank Battle game from 1975 (reissued as Mission Command: Land over a decade ago) than it does with Panzer Leader. In fact, this game plays like a simplified version of Tank Battle- which was already quite simple. Tank Battle's lineage goes back to Battleship, but the big innovation was that the materiel you are shooting at moves and it's not about guessing static locations, it's about anticipating where your targets will move on the next turn. But Final Act pares some of the more detailed pieces away and arrives at a simpler, more direct game.

Each turn you secretly select the direction your tanks will move. They only move one grid space and they can move to the three squares in front or in back or stop. They can turn, but the catch is that they turn like tanks would so that means you can only change facing while moving diagonally and the facing change is limited. Oddly, the turrets on these tanks are only point forward. After all the movement is dialed up (on these pretty impressive command consoles), players then place one shell corresponding to each tank within a fire radius that extends in a diamond shape from the front of the tank, six squares at its furthest and widest axes. Then the consoles are revealed, and the plotted moves go down. If you moved into a square where your opponent placed a shell, you either take a damage marker or destroy the tank if it had taken damage previously.

That's pretty much it, and the goal of the game is to get just one tank across the board to the opponent's defense line. Terrain complicates matters, and there are wooden berm markers, swamps (in the "open desert plains"?), and minefields that are set up at the outset to block line of sight, create defensive positions, and restrict movement. And to be honest, the early going in the game seems to play out fairly predictably despite the variable setup, with both sides trundling forward and making some perfunctory potshots.

But about halfway through it gets pretty compelling- and brutal. Tanks begin peeling off searching for openings in the flanks. You might have a tank sitting up on a berm to take advantage of the extra square of range it allows. You might find yourself trying to outwit your opponent, looking for an unpredictable jaunt or sidestep to avoid getting shot. Or you may have to wheel one or more tanks around to interdict an enemy that has broken your line and is heading for victory.

Once you get accustomed to the not-very-intuitive line of sight rules, come to terms with the fact that the turrets on all of these tanks do not do what they are supposed to, and rationalize those desert swamps there is definitely a decent design here. I can't stop thinking about Tank Battle while I'm playing it so I don't feel it's particularly unique, but with that said there really isn't a current game on the market quite like this. It's a two player only thing, and it plays in about the 60 minutes as advertised on the box.

This is also a good game for kids, and I think a child as young as 7 or 8 can easily grasp it with some chaperoning over the line of sight rules. My son really liked it, there is a tactile pleasure in putting out the big wooden shell markers and watching your opponent drive right into it. But it may be more satisfying to thread the needle with your tank through to the one space surrounding it that didn't get shelled for the turn. Kids are also going to enjoy the big, goofy wooden tanks- they are cute, but grumpy adults like me should be able to discern how chintzy and bland the pieces and product design are.

Overall, a neat game- the kind of thing you play once with a partner and think "huh, maybe let's do that one again". It's fairly engaging and easy to get into, but repeated plays also seem to push toward similar results. I've played a couple of games that wound up with the same arc of not much happening to total destruction to one or two tanks on both sides basically trying to win a race to the line. I've seen the tiebreaker- where if both players get a tank to the other side simultaneously, it's the NEXT tank that wins- more often than not. I believe experienced players will see similar results simply based on the strategies that seem to work in this game.

Overall, not bad but not exemplary. With that said, at least it's not another worker placement game or dungeoncrawl. And that does count for something.