I haven’t talked about a new deckbuilder all year. As I’ve previously written, I think that’s because the genre has peaked. So I was happy to get my Kickstarted copy of Don’t Turn Your Back (2015), by Eric B. Vogel, because it gives me a chance to return to a topic that has often filled this blog in recent years.

I talked with Eric about the game in February, but now that it’s out I can talk more about my own experience with the game — about how it expands the field and where it has troubles. I should note that Eric is a friend of mine, and I playtested the game several times in 2014, so take what I write with the appropriate amount of salt!

The Game

Don’t Turn Your Back is a deckbuilding/worker-placement game. You buy cards and filter cards like you’d expect, making the best deck that you can. However, the game’s use of those cards is unusual. Instead of just playing them and taking their effects, you instead place cards on specific areas of a game board, each of which has limited spaces. Doing so produces specific results:

• Cards played to The City Slumbering are used to buy new cards.
• Cards played to District 13 are used to win a majority-control battle for rewards as determined by the current law.
• Cards played to The High School are used to win a majority-control battle for victory points, and might stick around for a few turns.
• Cards played to the Bizarre Bazaar allow the usage of special effects on the cards.
• Cards played to the Wax Kingdom are permanently filtered out of your deck, and also compete in an end-game majority-control battle that determines how many victory-points each player earns for cards in their deck.

There’s also a limit on which cards can be played where: each card says which location(s) it can can legally be played to.

After eight rounds of play, players sum up their points, gained from the High School, District 13, certain card plays, and Wax-Kingdom-determined endgame value; the player with the most points wins.

The Good

How does Don’t Turn Your Back innovate the deckbuilding field? It starts out with some large-scale mash-ups with other types of eurogames.

Deck Building + Worker Placement. Copycat (2012) was the first major game to combine these two mechanics, and it did so in a pretty obvious way. The deckbuilding and worker placement aspects of that game were parallels. Each one could give you some of the same advantages (money, victory points), they were just different approaches to the same problem. As I said in my article on Copycat, deckbuilding was used as a mechanic that was one element of the game’s engine.

Don’t Turn Your Back takes a very different tack. Instead of combining the two mechanics in parallel, it instead connects them serially. Deckbuilding creates the deck of cards, which is then used for the worker placement. In other words, the cards are the workers, each of which is played to certain locations on the board. Therefore, it’s really a workerbuilding game! (There’s an innovation for the worker placement field too: the effect that a card has is based on a combination of the worker placement space and the worker-card itself.) 

This worker placement methodology is quite innovative on its own, but also introduces one other big advantage: it’s the first of several ways in which Don’t Turn Your Back is very interactive: you’re competing with other players for these limited worker spaces. This is something that’s badly needed in the deckbuilding field.

Deck Building + Majority Control. Don’t Turn Your Back also touches upon another major mechanic: majority control. Each of the cards has a (Pain) value, and that value is used to win majority-control contests in the District 13, High School, and Wax Kingdom areas. This sort of battle is a somewhat obvious result of having valued cards, and it’s another thing that increases player interactivity … so it’s surprising that it hasn’t been seen more in the deckbuilding field.

The majority control mechanics of Don’t Turn Your Back also introduce risk and reward to the game; players must decide when it’s worthwhile to play cards to the majority-control areas, and when it’s likely to be a waste of time and effort. This risk is amped up by the limited (and random) card draws, by the limited play spaces, and by the fact that cards are played one at a time. The result is a set of very tense decisions that often reward he who risks.

Interestingly, the cards most focused on majority control appear in the start decks — which includes several cards with Pain values and no other powers. This is a nice way of easing players into the game (and their decks), before they start dealing with the more complex cards that they might purchase later. Of course classic deckbuilders like Dominion (2008) and Ascension (2010)s do the same thing with their very simplistic start hands. The difference is that Don’t Turn Your Back still has complex cards in the starting decks: they have different values and can be played to different places. They’re just don’t contain special powers.

The worker-placement and majority-control aspects of Don’t Turn Your Back are the big picture ideas that make it unlike anything else in the deckbuilding field. However, the game also innovates some of the smaller details of deckbuilding play.

Slightly Unusual Card Purchase. Each player has their own personal purchase deck, which offers several random cards that can be purchased at any time. The result is a combination of very purposeful choice (players can build the exact deck they want, because they have access to every card) with chaotic randomization (players can’t build the exact deck they want, because the right cards might not come up at the right time). I’m not convinced that I like the purchasing method better than the survival-of-the-fittest fights for deck evolution that come from buying out of a central pool, but it’s certainly a valid alternative.

Existing games like Ascension that use random purchases often have a problem with cards blocking up the purchase area because either they can’t be bought or they aren’t. Don’t Turn Your Back overcomes that with a starting card called the Harvester that cycles the random purchasable cards every time it’s played.

Attacks & Defenses: More Risk, More Interactivity. Each personalized deck includes several Attack cards and several Defense cards — each of which only take its effect if it’s actively played to the Bizarre Bazaar. These cards tend to expand upon two themes already discussed: risk and interactivity.

The risk comes through the purchase of cards: a player must decide whether to spend valuable resources purchasing Defense cards, or to hope that the losses taken from Attacks occur at a low enough level.

The interactivity comes through the play of cards: players are affected by attacks from other players and must choose whether to defend against them by spending the time to play your Defense cards.

Built-In Card Filter. One of my favorite deckbuilding twists in Don’t Turn Your back is how it deals with filtering. It’s not just a standard part of the game (a player filters a card out of his deck whenever he plays to the Wax Kingdom); it’s an encouraged part of the game (a player must filter to earn points at the end of the game). Too many deckbuilding games make filtering too minor of an element … when it should be 50% of the deckbuilding play! Don’t Turn Your Back changes that ratio.

And finally, Don’t Turn Your Back is very nicely produced:

Beautiful Theming & Artwork. Don’t Turn Your Back is based on a roleplaying game called Don’t Rest Your Head (2006). I’m just vaguely familiar with the RPG, which details some sort of terrifying dreamland, but I love how that theme has been applied to this game. The artwork is moody and freaky and frankly scary. In a genre where too many deckbuilders edge toward somewhat abstract cards, Don’t Turn Your Back forces players to pay attention to what cards they’ve got, and the result is a even-better game.

The Bad

What holds Don’t Turn Your Back back?

A Bit Fiddly. Each player has two decks of cards, two discards, and six face-up cards available for purchase. As a result of this proliferation of different cards, it’s very easy to discard cards to the wrong place or to draw from the wrong place (and I’ve seen it happen in more than one game). Even taking cards back from the board at the end of a round is a bit fiddly. Players have to not only dance around each as they reclaim cards, but they also have to remember to “wax” cards in the Wax Kingdom and to leave the right number of cards on the table in the High School. (I’ve seen cards incorrectly cleared from the High School in more than one game too.)

Fairly Static. Every game, every player starts the game with the same cards, and they have the same small set of cards available for purchase. Though decks develop differently depending on what a player purchases, there’s a lot less variety in Don’t Turn Your Back than is common in a deckbuilding game. This wouldn’t be worth mentioning in a classic eurogame, but deckbuilders have different expectations.

The Other

Are these good or bad? I dunno, but they’re worth noting. 

Very Baroque. The gameplay of Don’t Turn Your Back involves lots of special rules. Not only does each area of the board work differently, but they also have different rules for how they score points and for how players get cards back. I find the Wax Kingdom’s endgame scoring to be the most baroque, because it has a different formula for each of the four players that earns points there.

Should this have been polished more, or does it just increase the variability and charm of the game? That’s often the question in a baroque game.

Very Tactical. To a large extent it’s true in every deckbuilder game that what you can do is defined by the cards you draw. However, it feels even more notable in Don’t Turn Your Back because the cards define where you can play. No City Slumbering cards? You’re not buying anything new! No District 13 cards? You’re not competing for the newest law!

Of course this tactical focus also suggests that players can really mold their decks to excel at what they want to be good at.

Conclusion

Don’t Turn Your Back is a very innovative game that really changes the ideas of what a deckbuilder can be and what it can do.You could say that it uses deckbuilding as a mechanic (like many later generation deckbuilding games), but even moreso, it uses deckbuilding as an organic part of a larger game system — an output for other mechanical inputs.The result may not necessarily scratch the pure deckbuilding itch, but it’s nonetheless currently my third favorite deckbuilder (after Ascension and Dominion).

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