Base price: $40.
2 / 4 players.
Play time: 25 – 35 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 19 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Zenith was provided by PlayPunk / Flat River Games.

To contrast with this week’s Ancient Realm review, I’m also covering Zenith, a game set in the far far future with robots and weird lizards. You love to see it. Thematic parallels used to be a fun quirk of the site, but with more and more things vying for my time these days, I’ve had to be a bit more strategic about what I review and when so that I can keep getting cool games reviewed for y’all. Does that discernment always work? No, but that’s half the fun. Where will Zenith fall in this? Let’s find out.

In the grim future, there are exactly three races: humans, robots, and Animods. They get along okay. You’ve realized that the best way for things to move forward is, conveniently, if you can gain control of the Senate and unite the planets towards your own personal goals. That’s very nice of you. Your opponent, however, has their own ideas on the subject. Unfortuate. Leverage the power of Zenithium to do research, play cards, and woo factions (and their members) to your side. Will you be able to become the Senate?

Overall: 8.25 / 10

Overall, I think Zenith is a lot of fun! It’s definitely a more complicated game than Captain Flip (PlayPunk’s first title), but I think it builds on the two-player tug-of-war game genre in ways that are interesting and unexpected. For example, it’s got engine-building elements (in that playing cards of a color makes subsequent cards of that color cheaper) but it doesn’t particularly benefit you to know every card, which is really nice. Makes the game a lot more approachable. There are vague trends across the various planet colors and various group types, but they aren’t as pronounced as other games in this genre, either. What you end up with as a result is a game that feels informed by other games like it but deftly avoids their pitfalls. It’s even got a technology tree that’s super easy to use; the cost in Zenithium just gets more expensive each time you need to move up a track, which is also super easy to track. Plus, it feels awesome to activate a track at the fifth level and also activate levels four, three, two, and one. It’s a good idea.

Making the game more flexible and approachable can have its drawbacks, unfortunately. For instance, since the cards are drawn randomly, you can end up with some uninteresting turns if the thing you really need to do or want to do isn’t available for you as an option. There’s a turn action that lets you appeal to one of the major groups in exchange for the Leadership Tile (gives you an extra card or two in your hand), but it doesn’t necessarily feel as exciting as other moves. That said, sometimes cosmic diplomacy takes time and hard work. Tug-of-war games also inherently lend themselves to the occasional no-op turns where you and your opponent undo each other’s moves. Thankfully, all of the cards have primary effects (move the disc of its color one space towards you) and secondary effects which are all different, meaning you can block their first move but unless you have some very specific card sets, their second move can sneak around you. It shows me that Zenith’s designers were aware of these potential flaws and sought to address them in the design, which is pretty cool. It’s still pretty rough if you run out of money, but the game makes it pretty clear that doing that will make the next few turns harder for you.

This is all to say that Zenith does a good job making the case for why it should be your go-to two-player tug-of-war game. It has clear iconography (a rarity!), a fun and dynamic art style, and a bunch of different mechanics that make it difficult for your opponent to block you. Inherently, every turn you’re ceding some ground to each other; you just have to decide what’s the most valuable position to lose, or if it’s worth sacrificing one thing entirely so that you can claim another. Those decisions make the core of Zenith interesting, and as a result, the quality of each game follows. This should not surprise y’all terribly; given how busy I am, it usually means something positive if I play a game 10+ times. It also almost certainly means that the game is on Board Game Arena. In this case, both of your suspicions proved correct (and we’re all better for it). Zenith is definitely for players looking for a bit more control and complexity than Captain Flip, but it works quite well for folks who find the engine-building genre opaque or just like PlayPunk’s approach to art and design. If you find yourself in these camps, you really enjoy head-to-head two-player games, or you just like the idea of space lizards, you’ll likely enjoy Zenith! I’m looking forward to playing it again.

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