Board Game Deconstruction

The goal of Patrol Lost is to make it from a start tile, through a potentially large map and waves of enemies, to an escape tile.  Only 1 of 5 pawns of the person playing the "good guy" has to make it and survive to the end of the map and survive the turn, to end the game and secure a win for the "good guy."  For the "bad guy" to win the game he must spawn enemies out of sight, and work to ambush or find a way to defeat all of the "good guy's" pawns.

This game is a combat based race/strategy game and very loose in terms of it's rules, setting, and theme.  I'd call it a race because the "good guy" must progress through a dungeon before the "bad guy" can cut him off and kill his pawns.

Patrol Lost is played on printed hex tiles with map routes drawn on them.  The player playing the "good guy" picks 5 pawns, we used my Dungeons and Dragons minis, and the player playing the "bad guys" uses counters, I used various dice.  He has access to a large pool of enemies that is non depleting.  You also need about three d6's but 6 is optimal.  The "bad guys" mobs are all the same stat wise where some of the "good guys" pawns give bonuses to combat depending on their relative hex to each other.

The operative actions of the game for "good guys" are Moving, and declaring Combat.  The operative actions for the bad guys are placing a random tile for open line of sight, discarding tiles lost from line of sight, placing enemies from your pool of enemies, moving enemies, and declaring Combat. The

Resultant actions for good guys are clearing enemies out of the way, progressing through map, and making the map bigger via movement.

Resultant actions for "bad guys" are increasing difficulty, changing the randomly generated map, eliminating tiles so the end goal gets closer, blocking off routes, and eliminating the "good guys" pawns effectively moving closer to the goal of winning the game.

The way the developer controlled space in Patrol Lost was interesting.  The space was able to form and transform changing the environment as the game progresses.  The available play space changes depending on line of sight of the person playing the "good guys".  If one of the "good guy's" pawns loses line of sight of an area, the tiles in that area are discarded and no longer able to be played.  Conversely, if the good player moves to a new hex and new sight lines are created, new paths are open.


Chance has a huge role in the game.  While pieces are moved with some sort of strategy or skill, (or sometimes zerged), chance dictates all combat.  The combat is kind of clunky and weird, but it works.  Players must roll D6's against each other and it's highroll wins, but the results of the combat can be confusing initially.  Positioning also usually buffs the rolls and can sometimes hinder them depending on the "good guy's" pawn class if you play with classes, we did not.