Designed by Dominik Schonleben and Francesco Grothe, Neon Hope is a solitaire and fully cooperative card game for up to four players. It's set in a somewhat dystopian cyberpunk Berlin and the idea is that, during the course of play, a story will unfold that, like an episode of a TV show, should culminate in a grand finale.
Players have character cards that show their stats and an indicator recording 'endurance', which varies according to the number of players, and affects, inter alia, the number of cards players get to draw into their hands. The game, and unfolding story, is organised into chapters, each with their own plot twists, and the deck for each scenario includes alternative conclusions, depending on the decisions you take during the course of the game. A surveillance dial advances during the course of play, triggering negative effects and acting as a game timer: if you haven't successfully concluded the story before the surveillance dial hits 40 (or 30 if you've upped the difficulty level), the game ends... When you've played all the action cards in your hand, you can refresh your hand up to your endurance but every refresh reduces your endurance and so, like in Gloomhaven (Cephalofair), reduces your refreshed hand size and advances the end of the game.
You'll be moving between different locations as the plot advances and you can take actions to activate and interact with what you find. Of course you can expect to encounter various challenges and tests, each of which shows the number you need to match or exceed with the relevant stat after applying any modifications. Neon Hope is expected to come with custom six-sided dice and it uses an interesting device involving face-down tokens on a 4 x 4 grid that are revealed to modify the outcome of tests. Once revealed, tokens remain face-up, so as the game progresses players can at least narrow the odds of particular favourable or unfavourable tokens coming up on their next test.
Shown here on Board's Eye View is a preview prototype of Neon Hope, so just a demo version of the game for just one or two players. You can expect a lot more in the edition that Hopeful Games are bringing to Kickstarter, and we're excited to see how this intriguing game develops. The KS launch is scheduled for 8 April: click here to check it out.