Boardgame review: The Target

Every Tuesday, the local gaming store has boardgame night. Usually, this means a bunch of three and four player games happening at the same time, but sometimes it's fun to get everyone together into one big game. So, we're always on the lookout for good games that accommodate large numbers of players. The Target by Closet Nerd Games looks like it would fill that niche. Anywhere from 4 to 12 take the roles of spies secretly working for either the CIA or the KGB (Or maybe even working for themselves as double agents). Each turn, one player is the "Target", and every player plays a card that targets them. The ultimate goal for each team is for enough intel cards to be played on their HQ to win.

I really wanted to like this game. The theme is perfect for this sort of secret agenda game. A first glance of the rules and contents made me imagine the players trying to work out each others loyalties, tracking the path of intel so they can either help it to its destination or steal it for their own side. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work out that way. I'll be blunt: this not a good game. There's some good ideas in there, but nothing is implemented very well. It all comes out as a jumbled, confusing, awkward mess.



Components: There are a few things to be salvaged from this trainwreck. For example, each deck of cards comes with its own divided box. This is (mostly) a great idea; during play it keeps the decks organized, and when the game is over they store super easily. The agenda cards are also an interesting idea: They have a color bar across the top and bottom of the card, blue for CIA or red for KGB. You hide your card in a little half-envelope, so that if you have to show your loyalty to another player, they only see the exposed bar. The double agents, however, can turn their card so that EITHER a red or blue bar is showing, disguising themselves as one team or the other.

On the other hand, even these good ideas are marred by poor execution. One element of the game is you can only draw from one deck at the start of the game, until you unlock access to the other decks. When you unlock a deck, you get a little cardboard token with a letter on it. Unfortunately, the information that you need to know which deck you're drawing from and which deck you can unlock is really only printed on the sides of the boxes, and not in very large print. In practice, no matter where you are sitting there will some piece of basic game information that you want to know, but won't be able to see from where you are.

As for the neat secrecy envelope idea? It would be a lot more effective if the paper envelope was actually thick enough that the boldly colored card didn't show through. With even reasonably good light, you can easily spot a double agent through the paper.

The Rules: I'm afraid I don't have much nice to say here. The beauty of a game like, say, Werewolf/Mafia or Are You the Traitor, or even Bang! or Shadow Hunters, is that you can easily explain the rules to a large group of players and jump into the game. With The Target, though, even though the rules are only 6 pages long, they're so haphazard and full of special cases that it took a long time to get everything explained. And even then, people still weren't sure clear on a lot of rules well into the game.

The cards themselves are missing basic information. For instance, you can play three blue rookie cards to draw from any decks for one turn. Where does it say this? Not on the card, that's for sure. There are four different kinds of attacks. They all do the same thing, except that bombs work on an HQ and the other 3 don't. Again, the card itself doesn't say anything about this.

Also, there are just obvious holes in the rules. For example, the rule is that everyone plays a card on the target. That's fine, but there are also a lot of game effects that will require some players to show the card they are about to play to other players. Unfortunately, there's no rule for what order things happen in this case. The rulebook has all the hallmarks of a lack of blind testing. Seriously, game designers; take a draft of your rules, have a total stranger read it, and then watch them play a game. If they don't play the way you expect them to, FIX YOUR RULEBOOK. Ahem.

Gameplay: There's not much going for the game here, either, I'm afraid. A small hand of cards means you don't have a lot of choices of what to do. The locked decks mean you don't even have a lot of control over what abilities you have. At the start of the game, you have no information at all about who is on your team, and you'll probably have to play several rounds before you can even start to try to find things out, let alone act on that info. And it's pretty much random which decks you'll get access to. So you can easily end up with access to the attack/defense deck, but with no idea of who you should be attacking or protecting. The only players that had any feeling they were progressing toward their goals were the lucky ones to get access to the intel deck; they just threw as many intel as they could at their HQ when the opportunity came up and hoped for the best. That was a more coherent strategy than anyone else could manage. In the end, no one could really say they had fun.

Final verdict: I can't really recommend this game for anyone. It's far too slow, clumsy, and poorly written to be an enjoyable game. Everything this game tries to be, some other game does better.