Year: 2021 | Players: 1-4 | Min: 30+ | Ages: 8+
This spoiler-free The Initiative review was made after playing through the campaign once. All games were either played by two players or three players.
What is The Initiative?
The Initiative is a cooperative deduction campaign game in which you play as code-breaking teenagers in the mid-90s who find a mysterious board game.
The Initiative was designed by Corey Konieczka and is published by Unexpected Games.
Rules Overview
In The Initiative, you play as a group of friends who find a board game called The Key that’s all about cracking different types of codes. The story of the teenagers unfolds in a comic book, while the game they’re playing takes place on the game board. During each chapter/mission, you’ll work together to uncover clues to give you a better shot at solving the puzzle.
Each Mission card will tell you how to set up the board by placing face-down clue tokens in different rooms. The back of the Mission card stays hidden in the mission console and you’ll reveal the information as you play through the game.
On your turn, you’ll perform one or two actions by using your character’s unique action or playing Resource cards from your hand onto one of the four available action cards. The three main action cards are used for moving, revealing clues in other rooms, and gathering clues from the room you’re in. The catch is that you can only play a Resource card if its value is higher than the last one placed on that action card. The fourth action, Regroup, allows you to clear cards off one of the other actions to make it easier to do that action on future turns.
Communication in the game is limited. You can discuss what you want to do, but you can’t reveal specific details about your cards.
Whenever a clue token reveals a glyph that matches a glyph on the Mission card, you flip the corresponding window(s) on the mission console. The more windows you flip, the easier it is to solve the puzzle.
Not all clue tokens are helpful, though. There are traps that can have immediate negative effects and some that stay on the board, affecting players who end their turns in those rooms.
Time is also against you. After you go through the Resource card deck the first time, you shuffle in Time cards that have one or two clock symbols on them. If there are ever three of those clock symbols showing in the discard pile, the game immediately ends in a loss.
To beat a mission, your team must solve whatever is on the Mission card. At any time during the game, the team can decide to try to answer the question written on the Mission card. You’ll lose if you get the answer wrong. You’ll move forward in the campaign regardless of whether you win or lose.
As you move through the campaign, you’ll unlock Secret cards. Those cards can have codes on them that you need to crack or they can help you during future missions.
That is an overview of the core rules for The Initiative. More rules are added as you play through the campaign.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- The highlight of The Initiative is the code-breaking puzzle game. There are different types of puzzles to solve and, besides the first mission, they were all pretty challenging for us. Some are straightforward Hangman-esque puzzles, but others make you work quite a bit harder to find the answer. We enjoyed trying to solve all of them.
- Finding the glyphs you need is genuinely exciting, especially when you’re running out of time. There were a lot of situations where we were missing one or two key letters and were able to find them in crunch time. Those were some “Wahoo!” moments.
- I like this theme a lot. It’s a game within a game set in the 90s and the story plays out in a comic book. That’s a cool combo of things.
- The Time cards do the job of adding extra tension to the game. You feel pretty safe the first time going through the deck, but you definitely feel the pressure after you shuffle those Time cards in.
- There are some pretty cool surprises along the way. I’m not going to spoil anything, but I will say that designer Corey Konieczka came up with some awesome ways to keep things exciting and fresh throughout the campaign.
- I like how easy The Initiative is to get into. It’s a very clean design, which made it easy for me to teach people on the fly.
- There’s a lot of game in this box. You get about seven hours out of the 14-mission campaign, and there are a lot of one-off missions to play after that.
- It’s easy to drop in and drop out of the campaign. Multiple people joined and left my campaign and it only took a couple minutes to catch them up on the story and the secrets we had found.
Cons
- The core actions of moving and flipping tiles started to feel samey to me after five or six games. More is added to the game as you play through the campaign, but for the most part you’re still doing those same two things.
- I can’t say I love the look of this game. The character and comic artwork is nice, but the boards, Resource cards, and tiles are pretty bland.
- The Mission cards don’t slip in and out of the console very easily.
- You can’t replay any of the missions since you’ll know all the answers. That’s not a major issue for me, but it could be frustrating for people who want to replay the campaign with multiple groups.
Final Thoughts
The Initiative is a bunch of different board game genres blended together, but for me, it most closely resembles cooperative escape room games my group has played. The core card gameplay was just okay, but the puzzles are what made me excited to keep playing through the campaign. Plus, the unique theme and well-crafted comic book story made it an enjoyable experience for everyone I played with.
This game also reconfirmed that I am very bad at code-cracking puzzle games. I still have a great time playing them, though!
I don’t know how well The Initiative will work as a family board game since some of the puzzles are pretty tough, but I think most co-op fans will get a kick out of it. I highly recommend it if your group loves puzzle games.
- Update: The Initiative was added to the Best Puzzle Board Games list!
The Initiative Links
BGG | Amazon | Miniature Market
Thanks for taking the time to read our The Initiative review!
Be sure to look at our Best Cooperative Board and Card Games list and the other board game rankings.
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