3000 Scoundrels Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review 3000 Scoundrels, an old west board game published by Unexpected Games. In 3000 Scoundrels, players are trying to loot the most value out of the safes over the course of the game's three rounds.

At Gen Con 2022 one of my favorite demo games of the convention was getting to try out 3000 Scoundrels. I had loved the first game from Unexpected Games, The Initiative, and the idea of sliding two cards together to make a bunch of unique characters with special powers was pretty exciting.

We only had a chance to play one round but now we’ve had some time to play the full game. So, let’s dive into this cyberpunk-ish version of the Wild Wild West and how it holds up to repeated plays.

In 3000 Scoundrels players compete to steal advanced technology left in the Old West by a futuristic time traveler. Each piece of technology is locked behind a safe and some is more valuable than others.

To get to the goods, players will be given a deck of poker-ish cards: numbered 2-6 as well as a 0 and an ace. Each card can be used to activate a certain action on your player board.

After you perform that action you can hire one of the scoundrels in the saloon, made up from sliding a character under a transparent attribute giving you unique combinations like the Talkative Dog. Scoundrels also have abilities that trigger when you play certain value cards, allowing you to increase the effectiveness of some of your cards.

Some of you may have noticed there is no action for the 0 or the 6. Many of the scoundrels have an ability that triggers based off a 6 which can make it very useful. There 0 however, never does anything. So that’s the big twist: you play your poker cards face down. You can claim to have a 4 card even if you are using your