Silos Board Game Review

Silos

WBG Score: 8

Player Count: 2-4

You’ll like this if you like: Municipium 

Published by: Bitewing Games

Designed by: Reiner Knizia

This is a free review copy. See our review policy here

By Steve Godfrey

In Silos, we play as aliens who have come to invade the Earth by using the planet's most intelligent species... cows. However, since cows have no political sway, we've decided to settle for using humans instead. I know what you’re thinking. This is another of my hilariously funny but silly intros. Not this time. This is a summary of the intro in the rulebook, so thanks to Bitewing Games for doing the work for me... Not sure what to do with the extra time on my hands now.

How to abduct cows.

Set up by giving everyone their 7 alien figures and then satisfyingly gracing one of those with a cool cowboy hat. Then give each player their set of three personnel cards and shuffle the common deck of 12 cards. Determine a start player and place their discs on the highest space on the town hall track, and place everyone else’s behind it in clockwise order. Place a cow and a random human above each space. Then place a human of the matching color on the 3 spaces around each area. These are called focus groups. Then place the UFO at the news station. In turn order, players will then place a figure on one of the 7 spaces on the board. This will continue until everyone has placed all 7 of their aliens on the board. Now before I go any further, let's talk about influence. Everything in this game relies on you winning influence in the necessary spaces when they activate. Each regular alien is worth 1 influence in a space. Your leader (the one with the funky cowboy hat) is worth 1.5, and your educated aliens (the ones with the even cooler hats) are worth two. If there is ever a tie in a space, then you refer to the town hall track, and whoever is ahead breaks the tie. This is all important info because now I can talk about the last part of the setup. Once everyone has placed, you check the influence in the town hall space, and the person with the most moves their token to the top of the track and then carry on. 

The aim of Silos is to collect 5 societal power emblems (or four if you want a shorter game). You gain an emblem if you collect a set of the four different colored human meeples. These are Professionals, Government Operators, Politicians, and Public Influencers. You can also complete a set using cows, which are a wild resource in this game. 

On your turn, the first thing you may do is use up to two points of movement to move your aliens along the paths to different spaces. You must then play a card. You can play one of your three personal cards, which will then be used for the game. Or you could flip over a card from the common deck. There are 12 cards in this deck but only four different types. 

UFO Advance (5 in the deck) - Move the UFO to the next area clockwise. The player with the most influence takes the cow, and the second most gets the human. 

Marked Specimen (4 in the deck) - Each player draws a human and places it on a matching focus group. If one of these fills up, the player with the most influence wins two of the humans, with the next most winning the third human. 

One Power card (2 in the deck) - Each player activates a space in which they have the most influence (I’ll talk about these in a bit).

All Powers (1 in the deck) - This kicks off all powers on the board. 

Each area activates in number order, and only the player with the most influence triggers that space's ability.

The town hall rearranges the tiebreaker track. The Sheriff's office lets you pick a space and move one player's pieces to the sheriff's office. The University moves all of your pieces to the town hall, and one of your aliens there gets a graduation cap. The shopping mall lets you pull humans from the bag and put them on focus groups until you either decide to stop or one fills up and activates. At the news station you can trade three humans in any combination for an emblem or draw a human from the bag. Winning the church will let you take a human from another player or from a focus group. Finally, the bus station will let you rearrange all of your pieces on the board. 

Once someone has the required amount of emblems, then once the current turn ends, the player with the most will win. 

Mars Attacks! (Not the chocolate bar)

Ok, so full disclosure right from the off. When the opportunity to review this game came up, I may not have done quite as much research into it as I normally do because the premise, the theme, and the look of all the components dazzled me as much as a moth to a flame, and don’t worry, we’ll get to those. I still looked into it to see if it was something I wanted to cover, but it’s safe to say now that I came for the presentation, but I stayed for the gameplay. 

Silos is a deceptively simple game to grasp in terms of rules, but it's the strategy, the jostling for position, and the timing aspect that’s going to be the key to this game making its mark for you. At the start of the game, it’s anyone’s guess as to what’s going to happen, so all you can really do is place where you want and hope for the best. The only thing you can really make a plan for is the cards in front of you. At first, it feels like you’re not really making an informed choice in that initial placement. However, as the cards start to come out, that's when the game starts to get competitive. Even having just card one out of the deck triggers people's brains into gear. All of a sudden, everyone becomes a math whizz as they try to figure out the odds of the next potential card. You start to feel clever because you think you've got it sussed, when in actual fact you've got as much chance of figuring things out as a contestant on Deal or No Deal. What follows is a desperate scrabble as players try to get into what they think are optimal positions to cover as many bases as possible, which is easier said than done. 

Only having two points of movement is like giving players one of those extending dog leads. You give them just enough to get somewhere, just not enough for where they really want to go. It's frustrating but in the best way, and it really goes to prove how clever the game really is. Ideally, you want to be in as many spaces as you can for any eventuality and a bit more freedom of movement. If you do, though, you’ll find yourself spread so thin that chances are you won’t be winning many contests for those spaces. However, bunch up too much, and you’ll find that yes, you’ll probably win where you want to, but moving about once you’ve won could be really limited and puts you on the back foot for those other spaces. It's these tough choices and scope for some clever forward planning that make the game shine brighter than the aliens' abduction beam. 

Even Aliens wasn’t this crowded.

This game seems to become tougher the more players there are on the board. It doesn't sound like a big leap from three to four players, but that’s 7 extra aliens on the board, and it makes winning the space you want all the more difficult, and as such, the competition is fiercer. Luckily, you have more than one path to victory, and it’s this that keeps the game from feeling samey on every play. Each space (except the town hall) will give you a chance to gain humans or cows in a couple of ways, and certain other spaces, like the news station, will give you ways to turn the tide should you find yourself struggling behind. My particular favorite is the sheriff's office, which lets you move other players' pieces from one space to the jail. It's a great way to get the upper hand on a space or just something to do if you want to stop someone else's plan in a petty act of “if I can't have it, no one can.”

To help keep the game fresh, there are alternative location tiles that you can add to the board either all at once, or you can just add the odd few in each game. Each adds its own new twist to the game, and I’d definitely recommend trying them. As I said earlier, the game is easy enough to grasp, and you could potentially throw these in after your first game if you wanted to.

You could hurt someone with that thing!

If you’ve seen any photos of this game, then you’ll know that Bitewing Games have made the ultimate carrot to dangle in our faces and draw us in, and only the strongest of us can resist. You get to put little hats on the aliens!! As I said earlier, I didn’t resist. Everything in this production is top-notch. The alien pieces are these lovely wooden tokens with double-sided prints on them and heads that are just gagging for hats to be put on them. Seriously, I think sometimes the only reason I educate my aliens is so I can put a hat on them. The UFO marker is this chunky, tactile piece that, if dropped from high enough, could do some serious damage to your table or foot. Even the rulebook is made of that really nice textured paper that I’d only previously seen in some of Stonemaier's games. The artwork by Kwanchai Moriya is at its usual beautiful best and captures the quirkiness of the theme perfectly. I love the addition of the spaces to keep the cards around the board. It’s a simple touch, but it shows how important card counting is to the game. 

I thought abduction was going to be fun.

It’s entirely possible to have a bad time with this. If you just aren’t able to win the spaces you want frequently enough, it can easily start to feel like a slog. It’s like when you see those movies where the puppies can’t get milk from their mom because they keep getting kicked away by the others (sorry, cows, milk, you can see where my brain went on this one). Especially if you're only winning humans here and there and not getting anywhere near a set. This is especially frustrating if everyone else seems to be swimming in humans and emblems. There is, of course, a space to help combat that, but that again can be highly fought over, and it could leave a player struggling to catch up if they can’t win that space either. 

I said earlier that there are multiple paths to victory, but if your original plans are closed to you and you need to change track, then it could lead to you being on the back foot for a lot of the game. I think this issue rears its head more at four players since there are so many more aliens on the board and more people chasing those different paths.

SILOS is a fun area control game that sits on the lighter side of the genre. It gives you a good mix of interesting choices and tug-of-war style gameplay. On top of all that, it throws in some great components and fantastic artwork that helps immerse you in this brilliantly quirky theme.

Right, I’m off to try and get myself abducted by aliens and see what all the fuss is about. I hope it's the good ones from E.T. It’d be nice to know if he finally got home.