Review: Infiltration

One of my regular game night buddies one night declared he was tired of all the fantasy board games we were playing and that he wanted to play something sci-fi.  Since that moment, I've been on the lookout for more sci-fi games and haven't found many that won't take an entire day to play through or are only for a few people.  I haven't had the greatest of luck, but one of my other friends found this game and it seemed to satisfy the sci-fi itch at least a little.

Infiltration is essentially a cyberpunk thief movie in a board game format. Players take on the role of thieves trying to break into a high-tech corporation and steal all their precious zettabytes of data.  Like any good thief movie, there is a lot of backstabbing because the person who makes it back out of the corporation in time with the most zettabytes wins the game.  Plot and strategy-wise, it's a lot like Pyramid of Horus, but the gameplay is fairly different.  The "board" is set up as 6 face down first floor rooms, 6 face down second floor rooms, and 1 face down secret room (which you may not be able to enter depending on the first/second floor rooms).  Traveling through the building is linear, you travel through each first room floor in succession and likewise through the second floor or you can backtrack through those same rooms in reverse order.  In each room, you may download any information it has, interface with it to do something special based on the room, or break a tech lock/kill a lab worker for more zettabyte tokens.  After everyone has taken their turn, the first player rolls a d6 to see how much the proximity alerts have gone up.  Once they reach 99, everyone in the building is captured and loses.  Anyone who has already escaped will count their zettabytes to see who has the most.

The higher into the complex you go, the more information there is to download and more powerful the interface abilities, but it also means it will take longer for you to get back out of the building.  You might also get wounded at some point, which means you can only advance or retreat every other turn.  So far in my experience, being wounded essentially knocks you out of the game because you either can't escape the building or your friends take all the goods before you can get to them.

Despite the fact that players choose characters with classifications like The Muscle, The Brains, The Inside Man, etc. there is no difference between the characters at all, which I find odd.  It make sense to me that they each have a special ability they can use once per game or something.  I think I'm going to work with my friends to come up with some for next time.  Aside from that oddity, the game is fun because there is a lot of risk/reward choices and strategy, a lot of direct and indirect player interaction, and games only take between 30-60 minutes.  For the $25 it seems to cost on Amazon, I would recommend this game.