If you’ve been around board games for a while, you’ll know that there are a few themes that pop up regularly. You might be sick of games about Cthulhu, or building railroads, or zombies, or farming.
But have you ever played a game that’s about building railroads and farms AND fighting Cthulhu and zombies?! AuZtralia is Martin Wallace’s answer to that question, and it’s a weird, delightful Frankenstein’s monster that’s more than the sum of its parts.
The setting of AuZtralia is (you guessed it) Australia, centuries after Cthulhu and the Old Ones invaded and destroyed most of the planet. After fighting off the Old Ones and settling the “new” continent of Australia, it turns out that all is not well in the Outback – the Old Ones had secretly set up operations and are spreading across the continent, snuffing out the people who’ve settled there. It’s your job to fight off the monsters and keep building out the infrastructure to help humanity survive.
AuZtralia can be played competitively or cooperatively, though honestly there’s not a huge amount of difference between the two. Either way, you’re trying to survive to the end of a time track and score more victory points than Cthulhu and company by building farms, killing monsters, and gathering resources. The game-controlled Old Ones start out with monsters scattered around the board but with their specific type and strength unrevealed until players actively explore and fight them, and score points at the end of the game by destroying farms and having monsters still on the map at the end of the game.
The latter scoring mechanic is especially challenging because you can’t just avoid combat and hope the monsters will go away – besides moving around the board and actively attacking players, all monsters left at the end of the game count against you and the other players, with unrevealed monsters counting double! The game very cleverly forces you to seek out and fight monsters even when you’d rather not.
Players have a lot of different actions they can take each turn, like building new railroads or farms; buying military units; gathering resources such as coal, iron, phosphate, and gold, which you’ll need to perform actions; recruiting helpful Personality cards that can add one-time, permanent, or situational bonuses; or starting a combat.
The brilliance of this system comes in the time cost of each action. Rather than having traditional player turns, each action costs a certain amount of time. When you take the action, you place a cube on it and move your player marker that many spaces on the time track. The game also has its own time marker, so depending on which action you take, you, an opponent/ally, or the game itself could end up getting several turns in a row. This makes every decision feel extremely important and tense.
To further ratchet up the tension, taking the same action again will require you to spend gold, which is a pretty rare resource. One of the actions you can take is to clear all cubes off your action board so you’re back to a “clean slate,” but spending time to do this feels like a painful and inefficient necessity. Timing your cube retrieval correctly is critical to success.
One other extremely unique aspect of this game is the combat. Whenever you enter combat, you get to decide which units to take with you. However, the more units you take, and the stronger they are, the more time they cost you. Besides the time cost of fighting, you also have to be careful about which units to risk and when to keep fighting or retreat, since losing units and having to pay to build new ones later is very costly in both time and gold.
Rather than rolling dice, combat is resolved by flipping enemy cards that show which unit types can damage that enemy and which of your units lose health or sanity. You’ll go into combat with 3 sanity tokens, so in addition to taking damage from enemies, you can lose the combat if you run out of tokens and flee in panic. You keep flipping cards until either you kill the enemy, they destroy all your units, or you decide to run away and keep any undamaged units. Combat is very much “push your luck” and deciding when to stick or run away is wonderfully agonizing.
Combat ends up being exciting every single time, because you only have a general idea of how well particular units will do against particular enemies. There’s a grid in the rulebook that presents the “effectiveness” of each unit type by enemy as Poor, Average, Good, or N/A (can’t damage that enemy at all). One of my only real knocks on the game is that this guide seems extremely loose and inconsistent – I’ve had combats where I pulled 10 or more cards in a row that did nothing to an enemy they were rated Average or Good against. Take these ratings with a big grain of salt. In general, though, it’s a very unique, exciting, and simple way to play out combats.
The game continues with each player and the game taking actions until either everyone crosses a time threshold or one player’s home port is destroyed, at which point you’ll total up points for how many farms you have left, the victory point values of enemies you’ve killed, any phosphate you’ve gathered (a different kind of resource that is worth immediate gold and end-game victory points), and any bonus points from Personalities you’ve recruited. The game gets points for monsters remaining on the board (both revealed and unrevealed) and farms they’ve destroyed during the game.
So far I’ve only played the game fully cooperatively, in which case all players have to have scored higher than the game for the players to win. The competitive game functions similarly, but whoever has the highest score is the winner, assuming they scored more than the game.
The competitive mode is an interesting balance, because there’s no direct conflict between the players – you might rush to grab resources first, or try to kill a monster to get the victory points before your opponent does. You could even conceivably try to “bait” monsters into attacking their farms instead of yours, but at the end of the day everyone will need to work together to kill monsters so the Old Ones don’t get out of control and end up defeating everyone.
As a huge fan of the Cthulhu mythos, the setting and theme of this game really appeals to me. Although other themes probably could have been applied just as easily, it finds ways to integrate the Cthulhu Mythos in the way certain monsters behave or the sanity mechanic of combat that make sense and add to the immersion. The Personalities you can recruit also add some nice strategic flexibility, and although some players may suffer from analysis paralysis on which actions to take and when, the game moves along quickly and doesn’t get bogged down in complexity and details.
This is a game I’ve played many times with Andy, and it perfectly combines his love of crunchy Euros with my love of co-op Cthulhu-fighting games. If you’re looking for a game that blends theme and mechanics in fun and interesting ways, and gives you the option of playing fully or semi-cooperatively (or even solo), I’d highly recommend checking out AuZtralia.
Presentation
+ Fully illustrated, with thematic art throughout
+ Nice component quality
+/- The board does a good job of communicating information but isn’t the most attractive to look at
Getting it Played
+/- Setup and initial spawning can be time-consuming the first few times, but leads to a unique setup each time
+ Pretty easy to teach, though new players may be overwhelmed with action choices and the flow of combat
+ Moves at a quick pace, and managing the enemy is straightforward
+ Plays semi- or fully cooperative, solo, or with a 1 v Many option using an expansion
Gameplay & Fun Factor
+ Combat is very fun and tense, with a satisfying push your luck factor
+/- Some people may find combat to be too random and luck-based, even with the effectiveness guide provided by the game
+ Actions always feel important and impactful
+/- Resources can be hard to come by, and some players may feel they don’t get a fair shake on them based on the randomized setup. This can be mitigated by the Import/Export action, though.
+ Although the core gameplay loop is always the same, the mix of setup, monsters, and Personalities means each game plays out differently. There’s also an alternate map setup on the back of the board, as well as expansions I didn’t get into in this review
Allie 
Andy 