Heroes versus villains

CHENNAI: Last Bastion is a cooperative game for 1-4 players who take on the roles of fantasy heroes who must defend the last bastion from a seemingly endless wave of enemies. You could justifiably call this ‘Helm’s Deep: The Board Game’ (it even has a dwarf being tossed on the box, for crying out loud), but how well does it embody this archetypal setting? Mechanically, the game’s incredibly simple — on your turn, you may move and you may perform an action, in whichever order you’d prefer.

You can move your hero one space in any direction on the nine bastion tiles, so you’re never more than two turns away from any other location. As for performing an action, you have two options — you can either activate the bastion tile you’re on or you can fight an enemy. Let’s start with combat. Every turn, new enemies are going to appear and attack specific walls based on what colour they are.

In order to take them out, you need to first be orthogonally adjacent to them and then do enough damage to overcome their resistance. How do you deal with damage? By rolling dice, although you’re not completely beholden to random chance here. Any equipment tokens you’re carrying (or any hero on your space) that match the colour of the enemy can also be used to supplement the dice results, and there are many special powers that allow you to manipulate those results too.

Finally, if you’re in one of the four corners, you can potentially fight both adjacent enemies at the same time; which is tougher to do but can buy you some breathing room. Making the decision harder are the bastion tiles, each of which is compellingly powerful. You can gain equipment tokens, heal any player and give them a free move, target an enemy with a trebuchet and eliminate one of its special abilities, deploy a dwarven trap that’ll instantly kill the next enemy that shows up on that space, cast a spell that weakens one particular enemy type — these are all great options to have, but using any of them means forgoing a chance to fight that turn.

And, unfortunately, the enemy never does likewise. Most enemies will either cause something bad to happen when they arrive, when they’re defeated or (most often) every turn they’re still alive. These can range from the annoying (lose a token) to the painful (lose your character’s special ability) to the avoid-at-all-costs (no equipment tokens may be used in combat, or corrupt a bastion tile and make it unusable). Thankfully, you aren’t without a few tricks up your sleeve either.

Each character has a special ability that can initially sound a bit overpowered — for example, the paladin can activate the tile she’s on and fight, while the falconer can gain any equipment token he likes every single turn — but in practice create a beautiful tapestry of choices. Each and every turn in Last Bastion is a puzzle with wildly disparate cogs, and it’s always a joy clicking them into place and seeing everything work out just so.

If I haven’t given it away already, Last Bastion is a fantastic game. It’s never easy, and you’ll always have to pull an assortment of rabbits out of a variety of hats to stay afloat, but that’s what you want from a cooperative game, and this is one of the best cooperative games around.

Arjun Sukumaran http://goo.gl/uNBWN3
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)