A Glowing Review

 I don't generally do game reviews, but every once in a while I come across a game that interests me in one way or another, and I spend some time thinking about it. Most recently this applies to a game I found on BoardGameArena.com -- 2021's Glow, by Cédrick Chaboussit.

Glow is a "stylish" looking game, with a unique theme, and bold, black and white cover art: 

To be frank, I don't care for the back-and-whiteness of the art. I saw this cover on BGA several times and sort of dismissed it. Then one day I was bored, and decided to check it out.

Very simply, Glow is a card-and-dice drafting game which employs one of my latest favorite mechanisms: Entangled Decisions. You start with a character card, which provides some permanent dice, and has some ability printed on it. Each round you draft a companion card, which has some benefits, is worth some number of points, and has an ability printed on it, and depending on which card you choose, you also get some number (and some type) of dice for the turn. Those dice are basically randomly distributed. So when you draft, you're taking a pairing of a card and some dice, and you need to consider which card you want (based on all it's attributes), as well as how many (and which) dice you want for the turn. 

The dice are colored, and have 5 different resources on them. The resource matching the die color occurs twice on the die, making it more likely to come up. This can be important when choosing your dice, because it relates to the likelihood you'll get what you want or need when you roll.

After the draft, you'll roll all your dice, then get a chance to mitigate them. There are re-roll tokens you can collect, and each one can be spent to re-roll 1 or 2 dice. You can spend 3 re-roll tokens to set a die to any face. the neat thing about re-rolls is that you can "buy" them for victory points in a really elegant way. Some spaces on the score track contain a re-roll icon. If you want a re-roll, you may move your score marker backwards on the track until you encounter one of those icons. the icons are spaced very close together in the early game, when scores are low, but once you start generating points, it'll cost more and more points to buy re-rolls.

Once you're happy with your roll results (or at least, once you can no longer re-roll anything), you get to activate all of your cards. The cool thing to note here is that each die can be used once for each card - not just once total. So you can do well to get cards with overlapping color requirements, for example you might have a character that gives you 3 points and a re-roll for every Air-Water pair you roll, and you might pick up a companion that gives you 3 points per water, and another that gives you 6 points if you roll no Earth icons. In that case, a roll of 2 Air + 2 Water (and no Earth) would generate 18 points and 2 re-rolls! 

Another interesting thing about this part of the game is that you are required to activate all of your cards, and some of them have detrimental effects, from losing points, to killing off the companion.

Finally, after activating all the cards you can, you are able to move your pawn on a board by spending your dice. Path spaces each show one of the die icons, and you advance by using an icon of that type. There's another resource called Footprints that you can get which count as wild for that purpose. There are clearings on the map which require footprints to enter, have some type of reward for entering (like a re-roll token), and show a VP value. Ending your turn on a clearing, you're allowed to move your encampment piece to that clearing, which will now be worth that number of points at game end. Perhaps in a future turn you'll upgrade that bonus by moving to a higher value clearing and setting up camp again.

There are some more details, but that's generally how the game goes, and I've noted some of the aspects of each part of the turn that I find cool and interesting. At first glance, with the black and white art, and a bunch of die rolling, I didn't really think the game would be for me. But after a handful of plays, I can say that I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit! I appreciate a lot of the little design decisions that went into it, and it's actually rather clever. That said, I've found a number of things I'd have done differently, or tried to change if I were developing the game, I'll list them below.

So if you're browsing BGA looking for something to play, and have time for a short (8 turn) game, definitely give Glow a try! 

Here are my current thoughts about how I might change Glow:

• It might be neat (though probably unrealistic) if the dice were d10s with 4 sides matching the die color, 2 sides each matching "adjacent" colors, and 1 side each matching "opposite" colors (like on a Magic color wheel)
• I've always disliked paying a resource to re-roll a die and getting the same result, so maybe that could be disallowed somehow
• For the map, I'd like to see some incentive to visit multiple villages, rather than just get to the 20vp one (or maybe the 15vp one) by the end. Currently setting up camp mid-game just insulates you from failing to reach the big ones. Like maybe a couple of points, or a reroll or something when you set up encampment
• MAYBE have that black die in the game from the beginning, not just if that one bird comes into play (I don't know if I'd actually like that)
• If you're at the bottom of the score track, the last (first?) re-roll icon could maybe just say "set all your dice exactly how you want them"
• The spells from that one card: why are they random? let the player draw N, deal out 1 to each opponent (and discard the extra) or something
• And I wonder about balance on some of the cards, though as a draft game maybe that doesn't matter
• I'm not sure, but it seems like maybe the icons are treated as if, say, clouds are more common than the others... only they're not