Neuroriders – Messing with the Mind

Memories can be a funny thing. They can be as sharp as a knife or disappear in a fog. But what if you can delve into a person’s consciousness with nanobots? Can you overcome the risks to develop bot technology further? Neuroriders is a 2-4 player game by Miguel Suarez Olivares and published by detestable Games and Draco Studios.

Set Up

Shuffle the floor tiles and place them in a stack. Deal one tile face down to each player. Then flip four additional room tiles face up to form a Room lineup. Place the Starting Room tile in the middle of the table with the corners pointing toward each player. Then place the Memory Counters on their respective tracks on the Memory Board and place it within reach of all players. Also, add a Crystallization Counter near each of the Memory Counters. Finally, give each player three action cards.

Shuffle the Hidden Agenda cards and deal one to each player face down. Keep these hidden until scoring at the end of the game. Then it’s time to play!

Gameplay

On your turn, start by taking one of the four face-up Room tiles. Then, choose to play one of your action cards. You can only play one per turn and each of the three once per game. Then, play a Room tile from your hand (either the one you just drew or the one already in your hand). If it’s the first turn of the game, line your new room up with one of the doorways on the Starting Room. Otherwise, match your Room tile up with another tile already played via a door.

Each Room tile has two indicators in the middle of the tile corresponding to two of the Neurorider meeples. That indicates which meeples will move, if they are within two rooms of the new room you’ve placed. The meeples must take the most direct route to the new tile. But each time they pass through a doorway, check to see if the two connected doorways match. If so, move the Memory Counter that matches the color of the doorway up by one. If you move the meeple of the same color through the doorway, increase the Memory Counter by a second level.

Play proceeds until all four face-up Room tiles are taken. If this is the first round of the game, start by flipping the Starting Room to its Crystallized side. Then, flip each of the touching Room tiles over as well. Finally, if there are any Room tiles with a black background touching a newly flipped Room tile, flip those as well. These rooms are now Crystallized and you cannot move into them for the rest of the game. Then the first player moves the Starting Room to a new location touching at least one un-Crystallized room.

But what happens if a meeple is on one of these Crystallized rooms? Whoever the first player was for that round moves any meeples to the nearest safe Room tile by the most direct route. But they must also move the corresponding Memory Counter by the number of rooms the meeple has to move through to get to safety.

Then, the first player passes the first player token to the next player. Flip four new Room tiles and begin the next round.

The game continues until there are not enough Room tiles to flip out four to start a new round, all the Room tiles are crystallized, or one of the Memory Counter trackers is increased to 20. If that occurs, immediately reduce the Counter to 10. Any players who have not gone yet that round can manipulate another Memory Counter track up or down by one (but cannot trigger another tracker reaching 20 this way).

End Of Game Scoring

Calculate the score for each Memory Counter track by how far the tracker moved up the Counter minus how far the Crystallize counter moved up the track. Then players consult their Hidden Agenda cards and calculate their final scores using the included scorepad. Players also get a bonus point for each unused Action card. Whoever has the most points wins Neuroriders!

Impressions

One of the interesting parts of Neuroriders is that you don’t have your own meeple. Players manipulate all four meeples to increase the Memory Counter tracks they want to have the most points at the end of the game.

We are all used to playing games with a score tracker, but usually you’re only concerned with one score counter moving up the track: yours. Instead, you’re keeping an eye on three. Two of them give you points, one will take away points.

It’s that style of scoring that makes Neuroriders so interesting. And yet, as a family game, it also caused a bit of trouble. Even though you don’t know what the Hidden Agendas are for certain, it becomes pretty obvious which trackers your opponents are trying to increase.

While there is quite the potential for multiple people to have similar positive objectives, it might also be one person’s negative objective. We found in many game plays that this would happen, leaving one player feeling ganged up on. You can mitigate this by one or two parents playing with only one child at a time. The game also bogged down at four players, so we recommend it at only two or three players.

If your family can mitigate the negative possibility of “One vs All”, or if you enjoy competing with hidden objectives, Neuroriders is a fun game with some unique mechanics.

Get Neuroriders directly from Draco Studios, find it on Amazon, or ask for it from your friendly local game store.

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Draco Studios provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of Neuroriders for this review.

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