51st State: Master Set

"This isn't even my final form!"

When I saw the new Master Set release of 51st State announced I was pretty excited. It had the distinction of being one of my favorite games in my collection which had been played the least due to its inaccessibility. Originally released in 2010, it caught my eye due to its elegant red, gray, & blue multipurpose cards and was purchased as a birthday gift for me off my Amazon wishlist. I fell in love with the Mad Max style game even as I struggled to understand the poorly translated rule book, complex iconography, & messy structure.

Shortly after that it received a backdoor-2nd Edition in the form of it's "standalone expansion" "New Era" - additional cards, a new faction, all around better components, more intuitive iconography, player interaction, and the same messy hard to teach structure. I appreciated the updates and hunted down a copy of New Era for myself and it got several more plays which were still frustratingly difficult to teach.

I would also hunt down every promo card I could get my hands on, a hard to find copy of "Winter" - an expansion to both 51st State & New Era that I never played despite its good reputation, and Ruins, a small expansion pack that also went unplayed. I loved this game, and acquired every bit of it that I could knowing how darn unlikely it was that it would actually get played. There was always hope. 

Then in 2014 the Polish designer went back to the 51st State well yet again and came back with "Imperial Settlers" - a streamlined version cartoonishly re-implemented as a family game of different competing world cultures and it was good. It got all the attention and praise from across the board game world that the 51st Family in its hardcore niche had never received, and perhaps hadn't really earned due to its flaws.
And you really have to give it to designer Ignacy Trzewiczek, because he doesn't give up on a good idea. He went back again and gave us ANOTHER new edition of 51st State, with better iconography & card design, a rule book that was actually understandable and made it accessible by streamlining its rules similar to Imperial Settlers. And it was good. He even had the cojones to include cards from New Era & Winter as expansions within the box but leaving out Ruins to re-release later as "Scavengers" and still call the big box the Master Set.

And why is it good? It's all in the cards.
Those beautiful red, gray, & blue multipurpose cards representing a filthy, hard-knock post-apocalyptic America and how your faction of survivors chooses to interact with that world. Because every card can be interacted with in 3 ways by spending corresponding red, gray, & blue contact tokens equal to the distance value of the card.

• You can incorporate the card by spending gray token(s) to place it next to your player board in front of you and making it a upstanding member of your [51st] state. This will give you access to its production of goods or special actions or abilities. Cards built into your state can be redeveloped into better cards for V.P., but are also potentially vulnerable to being used or razed by opponents.
• You could also spend blue token(s) to make a deal with the card, so it'll produce one reliable benefit every round that can't be tampered with by opponents
• You can burn it to the ground by spending red token(s) and take the spoils, a one-time benefit listed on the card.

It's an incredibly satisfying foundation for the rest of the game. Each faction uses different resources to produce contact tokens in different amounts, so there is some variety there as well as in the cards you'll draw from the base set and any expansion set you choose to shuffle in. 

The rest of the game is laid out more or less straightforwardly. There's a Draft phase at the beginning of every round to get more cards, followed by a Production phase to get resources from your player board, deals, & production cards in your state. Then in the Action phases you go from player to player, taking one action at a time until you can't do anything anymore - a lot of these actions will be struggling for additional resources and converting those resources to contact tokens or putting points on the board. Victory Points go on the score track as soon as they're generated, and once someone hits 25 V.P. that indicates you are now in the final round. Once everyone has passed the round is over and you discard unspent resources, so as I tell players when I'm teaching the game, you'd better use it or lose it.

It's still not a perfect game. It's fiddly-ness has been drastically reduced but can never be eliminated. Development should have been better explained in the rules and put on the player boards too, as it's such an important part of the game. You might prefer the theme of Imperial Settlers or some of the unique parts of that game to the post-apocalyptic rat race of 51st State. I can also tell you that sometimes when I'm playing the Master Set, I get the impression that it's missing just a tiny bit of the anarchic feel of its predecessors; I can't nail down why but the feeling is there.  

QUICK HITS Theme: Post-Apocalyptic
Gameplay: Tableau building, multi-use cards that make for interesting choices
Components: Unique card art, cool resource bits,
Replayability: Streamlines the original so it's not so hard to teach newbs making it more likely to hit the table.
Rulebook: Solid

Link to 51st State Master Set on BGG...