Debrief: Falcons- the US Air Force Academy Board Game

We debrief Falcons, the U.S. Air Force Academy board game, walking through how it plays, where it shines, and who will love it most. Theme and art carry a brisk time-track system, with competitions and events adding light strategy and table banter.

• time-track movement around the Terrazzo
• academics, training, action cards and how they interact
• competitions with simultaneous reveals and odd second-place wins
• character tokens as hidden points and tie-breaks
• milestone challenges of Recognition, Commitment, Ring Dance, Graduation
• events that reshape later years
• best at three or four players, weaker at two
• art, flavor text and nostalgia as primary draw
• price, Kickstarter path and niche audience
• gift potential for grads and Air Force community

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setup And Disclaimers
• 1:40 Who Made Falcons And Why It Matters
• 2:50 Board Layout And Theme Tour
• 4:00 How Movement And Turns Work
• 6:10 Entering Competitions And Scoring
• 8:20 Events, Character Tokens, And Final Milestones
• 10:20 Table Impressions And Player Count
• 12:00 Price, Kickstarter, And Niche Appeal
• 14:30 Alumni Nostalgia And Expansion Jokes
• 21:20 Final Thoughts And Sign Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. We have a very special episode for you today. Very special, very special debrief. Get ready for a pass and review. Joining me as always. He's fresh off a Viking Minute and back at attention. He's Basic Cadet Clayton Gable. How are you doing, Clay?

SPEAKER_00: 0:34

Uh Basic Cadet Gable reports is ordered. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_02: 0:38

Please joining me and my co-host Clayton. He just threw out a paw and is ready to perfectly deliver Schofield's quote at the knowledge bowl. Basic cadet, Jared Erickson. How are you doing, Jared? Sir, Schofield's quote is as follows.

SPEAKER_01: 0:58

I don't remember that shit.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00

Oh man, that's too bad. Well, today is a special episode because we are debriefing Falcons, the U.S. Air Force Academy board game. This is one that is near and dear to all of our hearts as recent graduates. I will start by saying that the views of this podcast are ours alone and not reflective of the Air Force Academy or the Air Force at large, nor are they the opinions of the Department of Defense. And I don't think that this Falcons board game is related to the Air Force Academy or the Department of Defense at all, although it does have the official trademarked lobe logo of the Air Force Academy right there on the board. So this is a new one from Turning Point Games. Designer is Samuel Brush and Zayd Koch. Those are two West Point grads. What?

SPEAKER_00: 1:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:55

The artist is Johan Anderson, the second. And he is a 2019 grad of the U.S. Air Force Academy. And man, the art really sings in this one. It's really cool. I don't know if they have a whole lot of photos up. Let me see if I can pull some up. But uh today we're talking Falcons U.S. Air Force Academy board game, which is a move around the board type game with a little bit of secret auctioning at the end. What a twist. So uh if you're watching the YouTube video, you'll see uh what we refer to as the Tizo or the Tarrazzo level of the Air Force Academy. You've got the big cadet chapel off to the left-hand side, you've got these big kind of sandstone-looking blocks that go around this big grass area. See a couple of airplanes, the static displays that are there at the Air Force Academy, uh, big Air Force logo in the center, and you have these little cadets that march around the Tarazzo collecting resources and collecting cards to prepare for competitions and your four major milestones that you experience at the Air Force Academy. So, the way that this plays, you shuffle these individual decks. Blue with the book is academics, uh, the kind of reddish, brownish, gray one. Oh, it's it's silver. It's silver. Those are training cards, and then you have the yellow lightning bolt that is uh they call them action cards. They really missed an opportunity to call them athletic cards, but I understand why they did it because the theming of the action cards are not strictly limited to athletics. So on your turn, you're gonna start on the left-hand side of the terrazzo, and you are going to move your cadet clockwise around the tarrazzo on these blocks, and the blocks around the outside have different symbols on them. And on your turn, let me see if I can get a close-up of this. Enhance. Oh, yeah, enhance. Give me in there. All right, that's better. There we go. So you got your little cadets, and up at the top, you have the four different rounds, which represent the four different years at the Air Force Academy. On your turn, you are going to pick up your cadet if you are the one that's closest to the start of the Torato, being this little corner over here by the F-4. Uh, I think that's F-16. Not important. It's plain. It's plain. Semantic. And you can move your cadet as far forward as you want on any given move. You could jump all the way to the end if you want to, but there's disadvantages to that. You jump forward onto these spaces that have these different symbols uh to collect cards that are associated with those symbols, whether it's action cards and training cards, academic cards. Oh, I lost my zoom in. There we go. Uh, and so you can move as far forward as you want, but ideally, you want to hit every single block leading up to the competitions at the end, so that you can have as many cards in your hand before the competitions hit. Uh, the end goal of the game is to score as many, they call it the general order of merit. Oh man. It's the board order of merit. You want to be the highest ranked cadet out of all the cadets that are participating in a three or three or four player game. If you are the last place cadet at the end of the four years, you are disenrolled, which feels really sad and like it has some serious take. Uh but uh you're collecting these cards, you're moving forward. The only rule is every turn you cannot place your cadet into the same Tizo block that you are already in. So you have to move to the next segment, and you'll notice that like a couple of them have four spaces, a couple have three. So in a four-player game, some of these three block uh uh sections of the tarrazzo, you might have to skip over entirely because they're already full. So you gotta kind of seize initiative a little bit, and you might have to jump forward to the cards that you really want. Uh, kind of a cool aspect. I played at two players, that is the worst way to play this game. I would highly recommend three or four. We skipped over like half the tarazzo because there are sections of the tarazzo that are specifically for three or four players. Now you get you get to the competitions at the end, and the competitions kind of look like this, and they have you know the title of the competition, some cool artwork, and then uh some associated rewards that you get for winning that competition. The competition is triggered when the last cadet moves in or past the space. There's like kind of a brackets for the competition. When the last cadet enters that space or moves past it, the competition begins. And those that are inside the brackets for the competition are the only ones that get to participate. So you're you've got all these cards that you are gathering, they have associated values with them. Uh, and then the action cards have different things that kind of break the game a little bit. So action cards will allow you to negate your other the uh the other players' cards, they allow you to draw more cards, they allow you to change your dice rolls, they allow you to do different things. So competition begins. You pick up to three cards in your hand that match the symbol of the competition, whether it's academics or training, or the final competitions are both. So you can play both cards. Some of the cards have a dice on them or a die, and when you play those cards, you roll a die, which has a higher potential, it's one through six. You have a potential for a higher number because most of the other cards only go up to five, and the highest value wins the competition. Now, some of them are not worth winning. You want to actually play second. I don't know why they did this, like the superintendent's pin. If I win the superintendent's pin, I get one general order of merit point. I move my little score marker around the outside of the board, one space. The person that comes in second gets three. And some of these make sense. Like there's one called um like ghost cadet or something, and it's a cadet with like a brown paper bag on his head on his head. And I get that. Like you're trying to fly below the radar. You want to score like less than the highest person. Uh, there's another one called Water Haze, where it's got a person jumping off the 10-meter.

SPEAKER_00: 8:26

Can't say that. Can't say that.

SPEAKER_02: 8:28

Water haze is printed on the card, Clayton.

SPEAKER_00: 8:31

Nope.

SPEAKER_02: 8:32

Oh, no. Wait, hazing is cool.

SPEAKER_00: 8:35

It's cool with hazing. Oh, we're we're back on hazing. Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 8:38

We're back to uh selective training to meet strategic ends. Okay. Uh so on some of them, I get it. You're you're not trying to place first. It's kind of thematics. I think they're just trying to inject a little bit of strategy into it, but you play up to three cards face down, you all reveal simultaneously. The person that gets the highest value wins the first place prize, and then second, and then third. Some of the competitions give you abilities later on. So, like superintendent's pin says discard before a competition. This competition, your opponents have to play their cards face up before you play your cards. So you know what you're kind of getting yourself into and you can kind of uh win a select competition, or maybe you play second strategically if you're trying to get more points. All that to say, you resolve the competition, you keep moving your cadets around until you get to the final competition, which are the four major milestones. These are always the same, the other ones are kind of randomized out of a big stack of them. But the final competitions are recognition, commitment, ring dance, and graduation.

SPEAKER_01: 9:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 9:45

And those have, of course, higher and higher values every year that you're going around the teaso. Okay. Uh graduation, you get eight points if you win, which is kind of cool. Um, and then if you uh if you win those, you keep them in front of you. I will say uh the other aspect is honor or character. They call it character, which are these little kind of uh scales. Yeah, I don't know why they call it character versus honor. I it's not a big thing, but you have a little baggie, a little silk baggie with all these tokens that have the character symbol on them. When you land on a space as a character token or a character symbol, you reach in the baggie and you draw one out and you place it face down and it's secret. Like everyone nobody knows how much character you have. And the player with the most character at the end of the four years uh gets six additional points, and then it helps resolve any ties from for score. Um, then once you finish a year, everybody gets to the end of the tarato. You kind of march them around, you line them up at the beginning of the tarato, and you go again. But this time you will draw these event cards, and the events change the rules of the game for the future rounds, and they stay in effect through your fourth year. Some of them are one of the ones that we had was uh every time you play multiple cards, their values are multiplied instead of uh just added together. And I I don't really know what all of these events look like, but they change things ever so slightly. Another one was like everybody rolls a dice or rolls a die, and they get that many general order of merit points immediately. Um so yeah, you you go around four years, you get three different events. The first year does not have an event. Once you complete the final competition of graduation, the game is over. You tally up all the general order of merit points, you award sixth additional to the cadet with the most character, and whoever has the most general order of merit points at the end is the winner. And that is the U.S. Air Force Academy board game.

SPEAKER_00: 11:54

Wow, is that enticing to either of you? Yes, I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what, it sounds funner than I thought it would. I you know, it has some mechanisms that harken to you know modern board gaming, like that time track traveling, you know, you got patchwork, you got first in flight, things like that that utilize a similar system. I like that system a lot where you can choose to jump ahead, but you're foregoing some things, so uh that's kind of cool. Um, I don't know how fun it actually is, but I definitely am digging the theme. They've got some nice touches in there. I am staring at the guy in his bathrobe. Yeah. And that's really just taking me back to standing on the wall. It's wild.

SPEAKER_01: 12:45

I mean, obviously, we know clay is gonna be the lowest order of order of merit. It's just yeah, it's known to man. Dis enroll now. I mean, uh I the guy tried to leave day one, but now look at him. He has his own podcast with fellow look at him now. I think this this is a classic game that you're gonna really, really enjoy with your uh fellow alumni. But when I bust it out with my ROTC grad uh friends, they're gonna be like, shut the hell up. I don't know if I want to talk to you anymore. But um it still would I still think it'd be fun. Uh still canned sports drinks, are you kidding me?

SPEAKER_00: 13:32

I know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 13:33

There's there's gonna be so many good stories that you're gonna tell. You're gonna the game might only take you what 45 minutes, maybe an hour.

SPEAKER_02: 13:42

Maybe Rachel and I played this in like less than half an hour with two players because we were just like beboping around the Tzo so fast.

SPEAKER_01: 13:49

Um but you yeah, you're gonna you're gonna flip these cards and just be like, oh my gosh, this let me tell you this story, and then you're gonna reminisce the the the best experience you're gonna have is like when the three of us play it and we just like bust up laughing and tell stories and stuff. It's not gonna be necessarily the gameplay itself, which is you know, maybe it's the theme that's gonna really shine through, and it's gonna be a very niche customer base for sure. But I mean it's still got a good mechanic, like you're saying, that you could still, as long as you know you don't pull out your inner Jerry and like me and get the five milli out. Um, maybe I if I withdraw my personality a little bit, you could maybe go easy on the stories and it could appeal to a different kind of uh customer, I guess. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 14:43

Yeah, it's definitely a game of nostalgia and it's made for a very niche audience. I understand that. Uh those that know what the Air Force Academy is and know what they do there, I think they'll get some appreciate appreciation out of it. The mechanics are really simple, the rule book is super short. Um, but the art, man, the art and like the flavor text on all these cards is so good. Like airmanship training shows a cadet jumping out of a plane. The flavor text at the bottom says stand in the door. Uh behind that, I wish this one was showing, but it's just it says dually training. It's got like a freshman in the front leaning rest doing push-ups, and the flavor text says, like, that's not the correct quote. Front leaning rest. Um one of the competitions is like the Astro final, and it shows this cadet that's like sweating and he's like you know, scribbling with his pencil. Um, there's some really cool flavor text in here. One of the competitions, I'm not sure why it's a competition, but it's called like I see athlete. It's got a cadet that's like a football player, and he's like sitting on the grass, like chugging a power aid and you know, sitting with his helmet. It's they're kind of cool. Like they definitely put a lot of academy into this game. Uh the mechanics are really light, and it's not going to be for everyone. I get that. But for those that are academy grads and get an appreciation of what that place is, this game, this game is like a cool gift to give them. Um now let's talk price for a second. This came to Kickstarter. This came to Kickstarter, uh, did not fulfill its Kickstarter goal. Okay, they have this one and they have the West Point game. And the West Point, I'm assuming, is the exact same mechanic, just different art, different flavor text. Probably the the two designers that are uh US military academy graduates probably put a lot more into that one and then had the uh Usafa cadet or the USAFA graduate art. Um it did not reach its Kickstarter goal, but they found a way to publish it anyways, and it went, it's basically only available at Amazon. I don't even know if you can buy it from Turning Point Games, um, but I understand that trophy point. Yeah, trophy point games. Um yeah,$70 for this game. It's it's a lot, it's expensive, and it's gonna be a gift that you get for use of a grads or uh people that have an appreciation for this, but I don't know if there's like a$70 game in this game. They're just not mass-producing it. So uh yeah, there's pluses and minuses. I got it. There was no way that I was not going to get it, it's worth it to me. Uh, but yeah, it is a it's a steep cost for a simple game like this.

SPEAKER_00: 17:19

Do you think there's a world if this was a$30 game that anybody besides an Air Force Academy graduate would buy and play this game?

SPEAKER_02: 17:31

I think people in the Air Force might appreciate it, they might sell more copies. Uh, if you're not an Air Force Academy graduate and you have no frame of mind for what any of this means, you're not gonna get it, and you're gonna pull out the canned sports drink and be like, what the hell is going on here? Uh but yeah, I I don't know. I I don't know how many more units they would have sold if they would have sold it at$30. It's it's kind of a niche thing, it's a niche market, it's a niche customer base that they're aiming for. And I don't think that there's like interesting enough mechanics to move that many more copies outside of those that appreciate the nostalgia of the game.

SPEAKER_00: 18:12

Well, I'm gonna have to get it. I mean, it it just just for these cards alone. I mean, I could I really call myself an Air Force Academy graduate that has a board game podcast and 250 board games. And could I look myself in the mirror at night and not have this game on my shelf? I don't think I can. Probably not. I this is pure nostalgia, like you said, and I don't care if I ever play one full game of it. I want it, yeah, and I will get it.

SPEAKER_02: 18:43

Yeah, now I think the bigger test, the bigger test is Jared, because Jared's an Air Force Academy grad. He lives, breathes, bleeds, Air Force Academy. So, Jared, at$70, will you buy this game? Oh boy.

SPEAKER_01: 19:00

Uh that's you know what? It's gonna have to potentially be after Christmas, after I get some Christmas money. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 19:09

Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_01: 19:10

Uh, but I think I'm sold because even when you just pulled up the player mat and I saw the Teezo, I just instantly, I seriously, the first thought that went into my head was when I was back as a freshman during basic, just running around the Tizo. Uh, and you know, there's some of us who went to the Air Force Academy for five years, uh, maybe not on the Tizo, but it took us a little longer, you know, a little bit longer to go to the Air Force Academy. And uh, I absolutely it just took me back. And uh I yeah, I'm gonna get it. But I might need I might need some Christmas money to to get me over the edge.

SPEAKER_02: 19:54

I can't wait for the uh the prep school expansion. Oh, that is my I mean that's what I'm Jared. You should design that for them. You should design it, and then like every time you draw a card that is, I don't know. If you uh if you draw a card that is like training and it and it's like a certain color or whatever, you have to yell like B squad, and then you get to move like one, yeah, one general order of merit further or something.

SPEAKER_01: 20:21

I mean, when I went to the the naval, the naval academy for when they played navy this year, I wore my Air Force prep shirt, and you know, people throwing up C squad and yeah, it's it's a good expansion. Hit me up, boys. Operation game night. We're on Instagram. You just let us know.

SPEAKER_02: 20:40

We'll be advisors, we're drinking the academic probation expansion where you have to like memorize. That one I could design, yeah. In the corner, it's like the the go-to-jail spot in Monopoly. You have to sit there until you uh can memorize a quote or something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 20:57

You know what? The prep school might be in there in the cards. Did you flip through all the cards?

SPEAKER_02: 21:02

I did not see any prep school. Uh, they do have like not all the cards for academics training and actions are different. They have like, I don't know, maybe 10 of each. Um, but yeah, I did not see any prep school in there.

SPEAKER_01: 21:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 21:17

Well, expansion boys, hit me up. That's right. That's right. I'm ready. All right. Did we do it? We did it. We could talk about this one for a long time. We can share war stories, but we're gonna wrap this one up. This has been Falcons, the U.S. Air Force Academy board game by Trophy Point Games. I have been Base Cadet Smith, he has been Base Cadet Gable, and he has been basic cadet Erickson, and we are out.