Downfall Game

Product Information

Downfall: Conquest of the Third Reich Preview 3 — The Soviet Offensive Continues, by Bob Heinzmann and John Butterfield Downfall is a two-player game for players aged 7 and older, first marketed by the Milton Bradley Company in 1970. Thematically this game is an absolute winner. So if you are a fan of post-apocalyptic dread, you don't mind the likelihood that the board won't offer perfect balance to each player, and you like 4X games but don't often have 4+ hours to spend playing them then Downfall just might be your irradiated cup of tea.

You like games with randomized setup, but don't mind that the randomization can also lead to imbalance. The game falls into two halves: before and after the eruption of Vesuvius. Before the eruption, players play cards to place their pieces in buildings. After the first eruption, they can also place as many relatives as the number of pieces already in the building they placed their piece in. When Omen cards are drawn, the player can take any opponent’s piece and throw it into the erupting volcano. In this manner, players try to get as many pieces onto the board as close to the exits from the city as possible. The tiles are quite large, and a different mix is used based on player count. Even though each tile is sizable some of them can be split into as many as 3 separate spaces, which can lead to some component crowding. The game is currently available in the UK under the name New Downfall, manufactured and marketed by Hasbro. The new version follows the same rules but has a more futuristic design in red and yellow.

Review Summary

The copy of Downfall used for this review was provided by Tasty Minstrel Games . Where's the score? Hour 42 Minute Video Interview from Bonding with Board Games with John Butterfield (Downfall discussion starts at 39:30) A closer look at the setup of the Yellow player in one game. Each player starts with 5 survivors, a bunker, and 3 gathered food. Each player then chooses a mix of 4 outposts and airships.

I mentioned semi-simultaneous turns because, even though the rulebook says you can do most actions simultaneously, in practice that only works for a few of the actions. Any action that requires a player to move to new tiles or, more importantly, discover hidden tiles can't really be performed unless all players are paying attention because it's important for all players to see what has been discovered as resources are so scarce, and doubly important once players start to expand their territory and bump into the territory of other players.

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The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. For your first couple of games it will be impossible to tell where the other player’s discs are on a particular dial. Since both sides are not lined up with one another there is no way to tell where a disc is positioned on the other player’s side of the gameboard. The only way to know where the discs are located is to play the game often enough that you have memorized the differences between the two sides of the gameboard. Even if you have memorized both sides of the gameboard you could still have a hard time remembering all of the locations of the discs. Basically if you don’t play the game frequently enough to memorize the other side of the board, Downfall becomes a guessing game. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it may drive people nuts who want more control over the outcome of the game. I really don’t think anyone will want to play the game frequently enough to memorize the other side of the gameboard and I don’t know why you would want to. If you have memorized the other side of the gameboard, I don’t think the game would be that fun anymore. Most of the fun comes from not exactly knowing what is happening on the other side of the gameboard. It is somewhat exciting to turn a wheel not knowing whether you will end up dropping one of your opponent’s discs helping them out. It is also interesting watching the other player/team’s turn to see if they are going to help you out. The game's box art is parodied on the cover of Expert Knob Twiddlers, an album by Mike & Rich ( Mike Paradinas& Richard D. James).