Review: World of Smog On Her Majesty’s Service

World of Smog: On Her Majesty’s Service is the latest release from Cool Mini or Not. Like pretty much all their other games, including the fantastic Dogs of War, this is one darn pretty game. The miniatures are fantastic as one would expect from a company with mini in their name. The board itself is equally well designed, with interesting rotating components that form the games central mechanic. There’s a deep puzzle here somewhere, one that definitely requires a lot of thought and foresight to solve. Yet, despite it’s glossiness the game is riddled with poor aesthetic choices and superfluous mechanics. Overall is World of Smog: On Her Majesty’s Service a fine example of style over substance? Is it really actually…any fun?

World of Smog: On Her Majesty’s Service (or OHMS from now on), falls into the weird board game category of abstract strategy. I’ve always found the term abstract a bit odd when it comes to board gaming seeing as every game you play involves some sort of abstraction. You’re not actually building a farm in Agricola and you’re not actually a betting on real camels in Camel Up. Anyway, I digress.

Abstract strategy normally refers to games with very little theme and very little reliance on luck. They usually involve complicated positioning puzzles or maybe creating pretty patterns. A few examples including the ridiculously ancient Go, and the slightly more recent Hive. At it’s core OHMS is a clever and interesting puzzle, moving your playing pieces around a continually shifting board trying to predict what your opponents are going to do next. On top of this you have the addition of other mechanics not often found in the abstract genre. Buying, selling, bidding and other mechanics all piled on top of a tough abstract movement puzzle. To complete the picture, the game is riddled with theme and lore set in the pre-existing World of Smog universe which combines the mystical with a steampunk Victorian London. Reading this paragraph back it makes OHMS sound pretty interesting and it’s not that surprising that it surpassed its Kickstarter goal, raking in over £100k in funding.

In OHMS each player controls a gentlemen, sent into the world of Faërie to obtain magical artefacts and ether not available in the real world. (As an aside, despite one of the playing pieces being female every player is referred to as controlling a “gentleman” in the rules. This may be a minor or even inconsequential point to many players but it did annoy one of the people who played with me whilst reviewing the game. It’s one of the many poor design choices in OHMS that will become more apparent later on in the review). The board, represents the shadow market, a constantly shifting maze like bazaar controlled by the enigmatic Shadow Master. The board, and its associated mechanic, is perhaps the highlight of OHMS. Like most tabletop games, and in fact all quadrilaterals, the board in OHMS has four sides. When sitting down to play each player orients themselves so they are facing the board from one of its four sides and each reads the board in a different way. The board itself is made up of locations, eight in the middle that sell the different types of ether, and four around the edge of the board that sell the magical artefacts that Queen Victoria requires.

Each location is a disc that can be rotated by the players. When viewing a location the player can only purchase or sell the ether that is shown at the bottom of the disc in relation to their position at the table. For example, in the image below if that was my view of the board I would only be able to buy or sell the red ether, Blood, on that disc and would either cost me or provide me four coins. Whenever, you buy or sell on a tile you cover that spot, temporarily blocking it, and then rotate the disc 90 degrees. Herein lies the games abstract movement puzzle. Each turn, you can normally only do three actions and to plan ahead you also need to account for how the board may shift whilst you wait for your turn. You want to sell on your spot and then move to the next tile and buy an artefact, but before you can do that another player has rotated the tile you are on and ruined your whole plan.

The aim of the game is for each player to purchase one of each of the four artefacts and a unique combination of the four ethers. This unique combination is kept secret from each of the other players and determined by a card at the start of the game. It becomes a game about efficiency, understanding what you can best achieve with your limited supply of actions and cash. You can use those actions to do pretty much anything, buy, sell, move, turns a location wheel or remove the hourglass tokens that have blocked recently used spaces. Knowing which set of actions will be most efficient is tough and, at times a pretty interesting puzzle. Once you’ve got your secret set of four ethers the game then becomes a rush to escape the Shadow Market, and again each player has a unique space where they leave the board kept secret from all other players.

On top of the three actions you get each round there are a couple of other things you can do that further complicate the game. First of all there are the special action cards that mess up the rules and allow you to do unpredictable and wacky stuff. These cards are obtained by using an action to move any location disc on that board, a feat that can only be performed when your gentleman is on the games central space. As many cards can be played per turn as you want as long as you have the required ether listed on the card. For example, cards that provide extra money or extra actions might only require one ether to use whereas cards that allow you to steal ether and artefacts from players require a lot more resources. These ethers are never spent you just need to have them to hand to be able to play the card.

I do have a few concerns over the balance of these cards. The ability to steal artefacts off other players is very powerful, seeing as these are the only items that all players need to win. Combine this with the fact that you can play as many cards as you want per turn and you can get some ridiculous moves. A player can gain extra actions and coin, move to the centre of the board, get a new card and immediately play it to steal stuff from other players. This is the sort of thing that, as the other player, is incredibly hard to prepare for or mitigate against. The game does however, contain the most ridiculous card I’ve ever seen in board gaming. Now remember how, I mentioned above that your position relative to the board is very important? Well by simply playing a card you can pick up the entire board and rotate it by 90 degrees. Suddenly everything has shifted and the entire way you read every single location on the board is different!

The games final extra little complication is the Shadow Master, the enigmatic ruler of the Shadow Market. At any point during your turn you can bid some of your precious money to control this mysterious figure for future rounds. If you succeed then you get some tasty, tasty benefits. You become first player, you get to take four actions per turn instead of three but most importantly you get to control the Shadow Master’s powerful agents. During any game of OHMS four agents will surround the board and, at any one time, two of them prowl the board effecting the locations they occupy. The controller of the shadow master is in charge of where and how they move and, considering how powerful these effects can be, this player can almost attack the other opponents. A few agents provide beneficial effects but the majority simply mess with players, stealing money or actions from any gentleman they share a space with.

This is all nicely balanced out by the fact that, even when you control the Shadow Master you still have to pay him every round. Whereas every other player gets their income of one coin every round your coin goes directly to the Shadow Master. This does two things – firstly it can really effect you economically and secondly it makes it very, very hard for other players to outbid you and snag the shadow master away from you. Once you’ve got him you are often lumped with him for a while whilst slowly getting poorer and poorer.

This brings me nicely to the many design flaws that unfortunately plague this game. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very, very pretty game. However, being attractive does not necessarily mean a game is well designed. Take the aforementioned agents for example. The game comes with six beautiful miniatures for these agents, and at any time two of them are in play on the board. Their powers are written on cards containing an illustration of each agent. The problem is, due to the art style of the game, it is often difficult to know which agent goes with which card. Many of the agents are wearing top hats and ultimately, they all look quite similar. The figures are quite clearly coloured but the cards themselves are mostly grey with a very slight hint of the figures colour. Basically, from our point of view it just wasn’t that clear.

In fact this whole game seems to have a serious problem with colour coding. Colour coding is used in practically every board game out there. It lets you know which playing piece is yours, what resources you have or what type of card is in your hand. It’s an almost universal constant in board gaming used to clearly and quickly convey information. In OHMS the game’s obsession with theme and the drab, greys and browns that make up the majority of the games colour palette results in a lack of clarity. Moreover, one of the games resources, Titanium, is represented by three different colours over the course of the game which is frankly very confusing. This is shown in the picture below. The colour on the location, the colour on the resource maker and the colour on the edge of the board are all meant to represent the same thing. It’s very annoying.

Another design choice that irked me slightly are the components used for the hourglass tokens. These tokens temporarily block spaces on the board whenever you buy or sell an ether. These are then removed using player actions slowing your turns down. Annoyingly these tokens are made of small translucent stones that make it very hard to read what’s underneath them. The information underneath is by no means secret so the game often boils down to players picking up and looking underneath every single token on the board to figure out what to do. It’s irritating, it’s tedious, and with different component choices it could have been avoided. Also remember this is a game where one of the cards allows you to pick up the whole board and rotate it by 90 degrees. How you’re meant to do this without scattering all the miniatures and hourglass tokens is beyond me.

All of these design flaws could be ignored if OHMS was good fun but, ultimately, I just can’t get very excited about this game. It’s very pretty and deep, deep down there’s an interesting mechanic at work but overall it’s just not very….fun. Each turn basically boils down to a few rather simple actions. Move here. Buy something. Sell something. Move again. In most board game I play the game eventually escalates to some sort of climax. Whether that involves building an economic engine, or a great hand of cards the game goes somewhere. In OHMS this just doesn’t seem to be the case. Your first turn is pretty much exactly the same as your last. Sure, the secret information adds a bit to the game but there’s not actually anything you can do about it. You can’t block an opponent if you don’t know what ethers they need or where they need to go to leave the shadow market. It also means the end of the game is incredibly anticlimactic. Suddenly one player moves to a spot on the board and announces that they can leave and they’ve won. The game then just ends. The action cards and the Shadow Master add a few interesting things to the game but overall it’s too little too late.

OHMS is a great example of style over substance. The game, is gorgeous with great miniatures and a great board. The central mechanic is interesting and something I’ve never really seen before. Yet that’s pretty much it. It’s almost like the designers created this gorgeous board and then went, “okay we’re done now let’s get this project on Kickstarter ASAP”. Games need to be more than just pretty components. They need to have substance and the mechanics need to actually go somewhere for them to be worth playing. OHMS has none of those things. I’m sure there are some people out there who will love the puzzle that makes up this game’s core and will have a decent enough time with this game but, I’m definitely not one of those people.

Tags: Abstract Strategy, Board Game, Cool Mini or Not, World of Smog On Her Majesty's Service, Yohan Lemonnier