Game Review: Octego

By W. Eric Martin
August 2, 2008

Publisher: Willow Tree Games
Designer: Joe Davis
Players: 2
Ages: 7+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $25
Links:

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Three

Anyone who’s ever walked within a hundred yards of an abstract strategy game will instantly peg Octego for a member of the genre. In case the Octego name – blocky and regular and conceptual – weren’t enough on its own, the box bears not one, but two of the oh-so-familiar slogans that populate the Venn diagram intersection of mainstream games and themeless no-luck strategy games, those two being:

• “A Strategy Game That’s as Easy as Checkers and as challenging as Chess!”

• “Octego can be learned in just a few minutes, but you’ll have years of fun trying to master it!”

So It Really Is Like...

Enough about expectations, though – let’s get into how the game actually works: Each player in Octego has 18 pieces: six that move one space, six that move two, four that move three, and two precious Octego pieces that serve the role of kings: lumbering and weak, yet key to your victory. Every piece other than Octego pieces can capture any other piece, and to win you need to either capture the opponent’s Octegos or move one of your own Octegos to the opponent’s back line.

True to the marketing promise, Octego will remind you of chess and checkers because familiar elements like board control, piece swapping and fork threats are all present. Pieces can move forward or backward, so tokens that move three spaces (henceforth, a 3-token) are threats to a huge number of spaces since they can circle back to strike a piece on an adjacent space, assuming the path is clear, in addition to lashing out across a huge swath of the board.

As in chess, you face the risk of being devastated if a piece infiltrates your backfield; I hopped a 2-token down the front line of one opponent, for example, destroying multiple 1-tokens and he had no counter-strike to shoo away the attacker. Ideally you can set up an interlocking web of pieces that will protect each other and keep the opponent wary of engaging in tit-for-tat.

Epileptic Test Kit

One tricky element to the game is that the board is effectively two playing surfaces. Think of the red and black spaces on a checkerboard; if a piece starts on red, it would (most likely) stay on red for the rest of the game. Thus, fights for control over the center of the game board get played out twice, once for each set of interlocking spaces. Note that pieces can shift from one playing grid to the other along the outer edges of the board, with the piece sliding from one grid to another to serve as reinforcements or avoid being killed. Octego pieces cannot teleport to safety, however, and must be protected the old fashioned way, with lots of muscle and barriers.

While the idea of separate-but-equal playing surfaces is a good one, the graphic design of the game spoils the effect. The game board is so busy – gold-bordered black spaces clash with silver-rimmed purple ones, with the whole thing topped by harsh waves of highlighting – that spaces blur together rather than being easily distinguished. Perhaps this effect is what the designer intended, but I find it neither attractive nor usable.

Two Ways to Win?

After only three plays, I have a hard time judging how deep the strategy in Octego might be. The game does have tricky elements, such as the realization that your 2-tokens can swap from one grid to another only on one side of the game board and not the other. (They start an odd number of moves from one edge, and moving two spaces will keep them an odd distance away.) Did you waste moves finding this out? Too bad – maybe you’ll do better next game.

Navigating the danger spots around for an opponent’s 3-tokens takes some thought, too, although if you can set up supported attacks, the opponent will typically flee the area since the 3-tokens provide the most variable and powerful offense.

Although the rules mention two winning conditions, players rarely move their Octego pieces unless an opponent is threatening to bring down the hammer. After all, why try to move them across the board when that merely exposes them to greater risks and gives the opponent more indirect control over what actions you might take? As such, Octego has something in common with Kris Burm’s PÜNCT, which also has two unevenly used game-winning conditions. As with PÜNCT, this secondary winning condition isn’t a flaw so much as an oddity, something that will come into play just enough to make opponents aware that a game could slip away unexpectedly

Don’t be misled by the comparison to Kris Burm’s creations – Octego doesn’t excite me the way that Burm’s titles do, possibly because the Octego board starts from a fixed position rather than an empty or random board that primes the strategy juices from the first turn on. One opponent and I played Burm’s TZAAR three times in a row, for example, whereas our playing of Octego on the same day was one and done. Octego works and provides a thoughtful challenge, but I don’t feel like exploring the game in depth – and without that excitement in the potential player, the game becomes little more than yet another abtract strategy game on a shelf filled with better offerings.

Want to give Octego a trial run of your own? Then head to BGN’s Games for the Animals page to see whether this game is still available!

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