Base price: $12.
1 player.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Buy directly!
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of At the Helm was provided by Button Shy.
More solo games! I had a pretty good picture-taking week, so I’m hoping to get another seven or so reviews done this week, which is wild. Just been very fortunate, on that front. We’ll see if we can push beyond that before I head out to GAMA. You, reading this, will probably note that this review is coming out after GAMA (if you keep track of industry conferences), but that’s the order of things. Currently trying to get my reviews in order before June, which will be an abysmally busy month. In the meantime, let’s check out some more Button Shy titles! Today’s review is At the Helm! Let’s dive in.
In At the Helm, players take on the role of grizzled sea captains, living a life against the sea’s various trials and tribulations. You’ve got places to go and things to do, though, so you need to use all your equipment if you want to make sure that you get to where you need to be. It’s dangerous, out there, and you’re not nearly as young as you used to be, so you need to manage your health as well if you want to survive. Will this adventure at sea be your last?
Contents
Setup
First off, you’re going to pick three distinct Challenges. There are four cards, so you can pick one side of each card:
The fourth card goes under the middle one, so that the little diamonds point to the 0 or X on the three Challenge Cards. Next, shuffle the eight Market Cards, making two rows of four cards:
Place the Captain Card on your preferred side, with the 7 at the top! This indicates how much health you start with.
Shuffle the Starting Cards! Those will form your initial deck. Draw three, but reduce your health by one for each broken heart icon on the three cards you draw.
You should be all ready to start!
Gameplay
At the Helm is a challenge-based deckbuilder! Over the course of several turns, you’ll try to resolve the three challenges at hand without running out of health! Each turn, you play one or two cards from your hand. When you do, you can resolve the card or just play it without doing anything; your pick. Some cards will have a variety of effects or give you resources; when you get resources, you can split them up as needed.
After your turn ends, you resolve the effects of incomplete challenges. This sometimes knocks out your health or punishes you for certain cards played. Any complete challenges do not activate their effects. Then, refill your hand back up to three cards. Just like at the start of the game, lose one health for each broken heart icon in the top-left corner of each card you draw from the deck. As you take damage, rotate the Captain Card so that the top number is however much health you have left.
If you run out of cards in your deck and need to draw more, take a card from the bottom row of the Market and add it to your discard pile. If there’s a card above it, slide it down to the bottom row of the Market. Then, shuffle your discard pile to form a new deck. If the Market is empty when you need to draw a new card and your deck is empty, you lose.
If you complete all three challenges, you win the game!
Player Count Differences
None, this time! Another Button Shy solo title.
Strategy
- You really need to make sure you have a strategy for getting health back, otherwise you’re sunk. Jokes aside, you’re going to be pretty regularly losing health either due to the cards you draw or negative effects from Challenges, so you should focus on building your health back up every so often so that you don’t get a bad draw, lose 5 health, and lose the game. Though in that case, there’s not really much you can do about that turn in particular.
- Different Challenges have different priorities; I tend to go after the ones that have negative effects. Keep in mind that once you’ve completed a Challenge, its negative effect no longer bothers you. This means that you really can invest some time in going after the most annoying Challenges so that you don’t have to deal with them later. It might be worth doing that over some other Challenge, depending on the state of the game. Just don’t forget to Rescue the Survivors pretty early.
- The Pulley’s ability to double a card’s effect shouldn’t be underestimated. You can combine that in a few pretty useful ways; I used it to get +6 on a Challenge, once, which was pretty incredible. Very much worth the effort. Even a +4 is often worth spending a turn playing your Pulley with another card; you can make a lot of progress that way.
- Remember that you’re on a pretty explicit timer, here, too. If you run out of cards in the Market and you need something, you’re done. This does mean that using a Gold card fundamentally drops a full deck cycle from your game timer, so make sure it’s worth it if you plan to do that. You also can trash cards, occasionally, but same problem. You do all that too much and you’re done.
- Use the Market and Gold Cards to manipulate which cards you discard so that you can set yourself up for combos. You can at least try to take cards that you need to complete Challenges, or you can try to set yourself up to play cards that give you better benefits. Keep in mind that Gold lets you pull a card directly to your hand, so use that when you can if you specifically need one of the cards (or use that to pull a high-health-cost card to your hand so you don’t have to take damage from drawing it).
- Since you have so few cards in your hand and your deck, you should absolutely be card-counting. You really should know what the odds are of drawing the card you need in a given turn, how long until your next reshuffle, things like that. That will help you keep track of what you’ve got coming down the pipeline.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- A Button Shy deckbuilder is a pretty cool concept. It’s a very tight deckbuilder, and the deckbuilding itself is the game’s success / failure timer. I really like how it’s executed; I imagine you could do a lot with this kind of game system.
- I also really like the configurable difficulty and challenge of this one. You really can tweak the difficulty to the bare minimum (4, I think) or crank it to maximum or anywhere in between. I like solo games that allow players the ability to choose how hard they want the experience to be. It gives them an opportunity to grow and an opportunity to set their own pace or pull back according to their needs and desires. Let players have executive control over their gameplay experiences!
- I appreciate that you have multiple grizzled options for sea captain. It’s nice to see.
- I like that you lose health for drawing specific cards; it’s a nice way to add a ticking clock-style mechanic (beyond the Market running out), and it forces players to smartly manage their health. Just another thing you have to track during the game, which adds a nice perpendicular challenge. Yes, you’re managing the Challenges on the board itself, but you can’t overlook what’s happening to your character or you’ll lose another way. You have to keep multiple plates in the air to be successful; I kind of love that.
- Plays pretty quickly. It’s a fairly quick turnaround; you only really can shuffle your deck eight times before you’re out of cards in the Market at most, anyways. Plus, if you’re having a bad game, your game might be even shorter than that! Usually because you lose, unfortunately. But at least it’s fast!
- As always, very portable. I love Button Shy’s entire model! I have so many wallet games at this point and they’re all just kind of on a shelf somewhere. I need to figure out some longer-term shelf storage for them in the future; maybe a drawer or something? I wonder if Button Shy will ever consider a rolodex sort of storage solution.
- The way that the game tracks the completion of the Challenges is pretty brilliant. I really like how the arrows on the Challenge Cards helps track the other Challenges; it’s quick and concise, but very smart. That’s pretty much the Button Shy way, so it’s great.
Mehs
- This goes back to the iconography vs. text debate; the use of icons here makes the game very easy to remember once you’ve gotten used to it, but it might take you a bit of time to remember what card icons mean. As I mention elsewhere, this is probably one of the Button Shy games that took me longer to learn, just between referencing icons, remembering to lose health, tracking how Challenges worked and when their penalties stopped affecting me, things like that. Having icons makes the game easier to remember but harder to learn, in my experience, and that was definitely the case here.
Cons
- It’s not saying much given how short the rules tend to be for these games, but this is definitely one of the denser Button Shy titles; you might end up having to reference the rules a few times during play. To Michael Lee’s credit, it’s a well-written and well-edited rulebook; there’s just a bunch going on here that would benefit from an ability to quickly reference certain things (especially with Challenge Cards and certain other card interactions). That said, I appreciate the icon reference on the back; that already goes a long way.
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by At the Helm! I think deckbuilding has, to some degree, been the semi-serious holy grail of Button Shy titles, since it’s so commonly associated with a lot of cards and Button Shy, as a publisher, tends to … not do that. That said, there have been a lot of deckbuilding games lately where you don’t actually build that large of a deck (Arnak and Moonrakers most immediately come to mind), so there’s something to be said for a small, lean deckbuilder. The theme, here, is also pretty fun, as you take on the challenge of being a grizzled sea captain, one of my absolute favorite types of people. There’s just so much to do, there. The game also has a pretty nice difficulty ramp, as you can mix and match Challenge Cards to find the right level of difficulty for you, which is always appreciated. Threading the gameplay needle is an impressive challenge, especially since this ends up being one of the more complex Button Shy titles I’ve played. There’s a bit more to keep track of. I wouldn’t say At the Helm is, on its face, complex itself; it’s just more so than others. There’s a lot of interesting challenge to it all, and I’d love to see how more cards could change the game (though I imagine it makes the game a bit easier, to some degree, since more cards means it might take the Market longer to run out). If you’re intrigued by a Button Shy deckbuilder or you want a nice solo game with a lot of customizable difficulty options, I’d recommend checking At the Helm out! I’ve solidly enjoyed it.
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