PAX Unplugged First Look: Goblin Cave
It is fascinating to watch industry staples combine to make new and amazing games. With one little twist on Metroidvanias, we got hollow night. The Batman Arkham series gave us strong mechanics for the Spider-Man games. And in the boardgame realm, we now have Goblin Cave - a distillation of team-based mechanics from games like Overwatch or DoTA into a boardgame.
Goblin Cave has a fairly simple premise - human adventurers want relics and goblins don’t want them to get the relics. What follows is a fairly standard game of 2v2 or 4v4 capture the flag. Humans try to capture the treasure and escape and goblins try to stop them. What makes all of this work is the mixture of the maps, abilities, and gameplay timer.
The maps of Goblin Cave provide plenty of opportunities for the goblins to block the adventurers and an equal number of opportunities for the adventurers to trick the goblins and find other openings. In the game I played, one of my goblins had an adventurer with a relic slowed in a long corridor, leaving me sure of my victory. Meanwhile, the second adventurer swooped around the back and stole a second relic - barely escaping as my fighter whittled down her life.
In the vein of MOBAs and hero shooters, each character has unique abilities and playstyles. The human characters tend to have more mobility-based moves while the goblins had more traps and crowd control. I would have liked to see more variation between characters of the same class, as some moments of our game featured perfectly symmetrical violence as our fighters beat on each other with the same moves. While the 8 or so available classes per team help to dilute this problem, it’s sure to come up in too many games.
The timer adds a little bit of time pressure on the adventurers while also creating a nice escalation to the game’s mechanics. If the adventurer’s fail to escape in ten turns, the goblins win. Additionally, at different turn markers, each character unlocks new abilities, including their ultimate abilities. The ability unlocks give the game a natural ramp up where later turns are filled with powerful attacks, dodges, and escapes.
I had a great time with my game of Goblin Cave and cannot wait for the full release. My only concern is with game balance, as the asymmetrical goals don’t align too well with mostly symmetrical abilities. That said, I know the designers are working hard on balance issues and will likely be tweaking things for quite some time.
Check out Goblin Cave’s website https://www.actionfiction.com/games/goblin-cave/ and sign up to be notified of any future kickstarters or preorders.
