Falling

In Falling, the somewhat idiosyncratic theme is that in a fantasy world somewhere a colossal tower is falling, but falling slowly enough that we – the players – are able to launch our flying machines and explore its various enchanted floors, building devices to harvest what lies within.

The board shows the tower itself, broken into numerous floors that – literally – will fall down it. These floors are made of smaller boards, placed over the top. To be completely honest, when you begin playing the magical theme does evaporate somewhat, so we’ll focus on how it all works mechanically here, which is relatively straightforward – or at least more so than appearances suggest. There are only four actions to take in the game: on a given turn you choose one of them. The first action is ascending. Your flying machine begins the game at the bottom of the tower, so you can pay Gas to fly upwards, one or more floors – as long as you have gas to pay for each elevation – and placing your machine beside the new floor on arrival: when you do so, you can choose any open spot there and take the reward: these might be points, or more gas, or coins, or one of the other resources (brick, ore, crystals) that help you build devices.

Building a device is the second action: you’ll have a player board in front of you with all your devices on it. Simply pay the required cost as shown and place the device in the building on any available spot: the caveat here is it must be in the same storey your flying machine occupies. Most of the game is spent either ascending or building: the other two actions are more limited. One – Negotiate – is simply placing a crystal or skill token (you’ll begin with one skill token, and there are ways to get more) in one of the four negotation spaces and taking the rewards: again, more of the resources in general. The final action is passing. If you can’t (or don’t want to) take any more actions in a given round, you pass and move your turn-order token to the ‘pass track’. The order players pass in determines turn order for the next round, but it’s not an otherwise redundant action: every time you would have gotten another turn in the current round, your turn marker moves along this little track, showering you with more rewards: Falling is a game where you get a lot of stuff!

Once all players have passed the current round ends. Everyone gains some income based on the devices they’ve built, and then the bottom two floors of the tower ‘fall off’ the board, making room for two new ones at the top. If there were any devices on the lost floors they return to the player boards (for more rewards) and all the flying machines return to the bottom of the tower ready for the next round.

That’s pretty much it except to add that at the start of each round players also get a bit of extra income and a Guild Card which – as a free action – they can place a Skill token on to do whatever it says there. Some allow you generate more resources (eg turn two money into three brick) and some will give you more end-of-round income. Point-scoring is interesting: every time your score marker passes a multiple of ten you also gain a reward! After the fourth round’s income phase, there’s some final scoring based on devices still surviving in the tower – more is better! – and then the player with the most points is the winner.