The story in this one is excellent. We've been marooned on a frozen planet thanks to a likely sabotage. Much of the crew is dead. The few survivors are scattered across the frozen wastes, split up into tribes that do not trust one another.
All we have are a trio of drones and some cobbled together blueprints. The mission? Get our people (pods) underground before the sun goes down.
Appreciating Cryo's Art
On top of a good story and great gameplay, pretty much every aspect of this game is a wonder to look at. It starts with the box:
Nice, right?
All the little pieces, the board, the cards: all well designed and fun. Even the resource counters got some love. Here's Blue's board:
Sparkly purple cube FTW!
Cryo's gameplay
This is a worker placement game at its core. You take turns sending your drones out to landing pads, which represents them doing things/gathering resources. Each game, random landing pads are broken (depending on player count).
So long as you have one drone out on the map, you are allowed to do a 'pullback,' and retrieve all your drones. As they come back to your board, they can activate a machine—if you have it set up.
If you commit a pullback, you must take an incident token. There are only 20 or so of these things, and they act as one of two game timers. When someone takes the SUNDOWN token, the world freezes, ending the game.
Some things that drones can do:
- 🔹 Gather/manage resources. There are five of these to juggle: Crystals, Organics, Tech, Nanites, and Energy.
- 🚁 Rescue pods and transport. For the cost of Organics, sweep up your lil cylinders and get them ready to travel underground! Later, spend Energy to move them to the warm safety of the caverns.
- 🤖 Activate machines. Upon pullback, generate extra resources or actions by landing on the right pad on your board.
- 🔎 Start a scouting mission. Unveil deeper parts of the cavern, so your pods have more cozy options.
- 🃏 Initiate a card action. There are cards, and they are a big part of the game! They cost tech to draw and play.
The multifunctional cards
You start with a few cards, and spend a whole lot of time fretting about getting and playing more. Cards have four uses, so choosing the right thing at the right time matters!
- ⬆️ Top of card: Upgrades. A permanent buff for the rest of the game. Worth 1 point, and you can have up to 3 different upgrades.
- 💯 Left side of card: End game points. Secretly stow up to 3 private end game point conditions.
- 🚚 Middle & bottom of card: Vehicle. This is how you get your pods underground. Play a card as a vehicle, put pods on it (there's a seat limit), then get a Drone to trigger the action needed to send yer crew 'home.' Vehicles are one-time use.
- ♻️ Scrap option. Each card has a scrap reward (upper left area). Toss it out and immediately get that resource. This can be clutch! Especially if you draw cards you don't want.
Strategy and scoring
There's a lot to consider in this one, despite having a fairly restrained decision space (at least compared to other worker placement games).
Do you work on building up awesome personal machines, so by end game you have a crazy resource engine? Could work, but then others can rush the endgame by doing rapid pullbacks.
Do you work on spamming cards, to build up your upgrades and end game points?
There's a place on the board to put pods to work on the surface, so that you get a free resource every pullback. Maybe you hammer on that instead of machines?
You can focus on the main aim: rescue pods and get them down below. But this is time and resource intensive... might be best to wait until there are more cavern options and get it done in a few turns vs. many.
Here's a near end of game picture:
Top right of board: the incident tokens are almost gone. Only a few more pullbacks are left!
Blue and Red have done a decent job of getting pods into the cavern network. Yellow still has quite a few left on the surface. Pods = 2 points when they're underground, and 1 point if they're on your personal board (recused, but not yet fully safe).
The cavern spots also have majority bonuses. Blue's looking to win some of those right now.
Near the middle right you can see a bunch of pods in the 'working zone.' Unless you have the right end game card, those folks will die on game end unless you get 'em out!
❄️ In the end, Red took this one by a small margin. They managed to grab a max of three end game point cards, and that carried them through. They had fewer pod points, but those cards are powerful. ❄️
Obligatory SUSD review video below! The video should start at 25:00, but if not, that's where the Cryo part is.
