CRAB RAGE! review – a board game more exciting to say than play

I want to love CRAB RAGE!. A board game this wacky is usually right up my alley. Sadly, though, reality has come crashing down, like a buff crab doing a sick elbow drop.

CRAB RAGE! is vibrant and unique. Once you clear the surprisingly chunky rulebook, you’re in for a snappy, smooth ride. And I certainly can’t accuse CRAB RAGE! of being boring. This is an area majority game that makes many interesting, thematic decisions.

Unfortunately, I think CRAB RAGE! is more complex than it needs to be. For every clever mechanic, there’s one that gums the wheels. ‘Inelegant’ is the word that comes to mind. At times, CRAB RAGE! has all the elegance of a botched pile driver.

If you couldn’t tell, this is a game of macho wrestling madness. Each of you manages a vibrant team of Crab wrestlers, who are vying for glory across several battlegrounds. If you have the most fans in an area at the end of play, you earn Glory. The player with the most Glory wins. How do you earn fans, you ask? PUNCHING EACH OTHER IN THE FACE.

That’s not all there is to it, though. Just like real-life pro wrestling, spectacle matters. It’s not enough to have the most Muscle. There must be dynamic team-ups, dramatic betrayals, and last-minute twists.

Your team of wrestlers is represented by dice, with each die’s current value representing their physical prowess. The team with the highest total Muscle in an arena at round-end gets to add fan tokens. The more crabs that were battling for that bucket, the more fans you attract.

Each turn, you’ll perform one action from a growing tableau. Actions require you to spend varying amounts of Rage, red cubes that represent your hot-blooded athlete’s mounting adrenaline.

Actions start out simple. You can move a crab from place to place, triggering an on-entry ability on the arena’s billboard. Or, you might decide to ‘Go Clam’, changing your die value to five then charging into a new zone. You might stay put and Smash an opponent, reducing their die’s value equal to the Rage spent. Or you could split up an established a team.

That one takes some more explaining. When a crab moves to a new arena, its manager decides whether it teams up with another team’s crabs. Doing so ups your Muscle, but it halves the fans you might acquire at round-end. Alternatively, you can go solo, which creates more opponents for that arena, but yields higher rewards. I’m a big fan of this mechanic, which replicates the ludicrous team-ups of WWE and its ilk.

From the second round onward, new dramatic flourishes become available. You can shunt crabs into other zones based on their Muscle value, switch Muscle or position with a rival, boost your own Muscle, or simply spam fans in your current space.

CRAB RAGE! presents a vast web of decisions. Will you blow all your Rage on powerful actions in one round, knowing you’ll take fewer actions in the next? Will you accept a tactical loss in one arena to gain Rage instead of fans? Will you spread out to gather end-of-round billboard bonuses, or is it better to hunker down and hoard fans in one spot?

There are so many options, they actually have less impact. With the right action tableau, tactical advantages are easily reversed on the next player’s turn. That on its own isn’t an issue. Rubber-banding is a thrilling part of many games, particularly those that lean more thematic than strategic.

CRAB RAGE!, however, can’t quite decide what it wants to be. It tries to offer precise, tactical gameplay with its many decision points, but their low impact leaves you more frustrated than fulfilled. Plus, the power level of different choices vary drastically.

A prime example is the Special Move. Each crab team has a unique once-per-game ability, a fancy flourish that can turn the tide of battle. They’re all pretty good, but one among them is clearly superior. The Jurassic Thorax team’s special power is Ramprage, which builds two Rage for each of their crabs in a single arena. Because Rage fuels actions, that gives you two or three extra actions in a round, if you time things right. Use this towards game-end, when nobody else has Rage to spend, and you’ve got a serious runaway advantage.

The power isn’t broken enough to guarantee a win, but Jurassic Thorax has a better chance than most. It’s the kind of imbalance that can be laughed off in a thematic board game, but crunch-lovers might find it unfair.

All this leaves a tactical player feeling deflated. Unfortunately, thematic players won’t be too thrilled either. CRAB RAGE! simply isn’t consistent with its ludonarrative.

For me, the biggest sinner is the Hardcore fans mechanic. You’ll collect Hardcore fans through end-of-round billboard bonuses, and they’re used for a bidding mini-game at game-end. Before you total everyone’s fans in an arena, managers have a chance to bid Hardcore fans, adding them to your team’s total as a last-minute substitution. It could swing you the win, but you’ve no idea how much your buddies are bidding, so it’s a gamble.

What does this have to do with wrestling? What aspect of building a career in the ring does this represent? It feels illogical, and it adds very little to the experience.

There are more of these minor rules that add more complexity, but not much else. Style bonuses give you extra fans if you’re the first person to take an action. There’s a dice-rolling mini-game to decide tie-breaks. There’s another mechanic to decide ties at the end. Dice ‘mutate’ with a re-roll if you hoard too much Rage. Billboards have on-entry effects on dice moving to an arena, and they must be rotated between locations every round.

CRAB RAGE! isn’t a difficult game. It is, thanks to these little rules, far fiddlier than it needs to be. Too much time is lost flipping through the rulebook. It’s those moments most of all where hype dies down. The crowd goes from shouts to murmurs. They start to think about a snack break. Too many of these intervals, and you might lose their attention completely.

That clunkiness can be solved by experience, but you need to want a second showing. CRAB RAGE!, for all its intricacies, feels much the same from game to game. A tournament score log in the back of the rulebook encourages you to undertake an epic Royal Rumble of repeat plays, but it’s not varied enough to justify this.

I like CRAB RAGE! well enough. But I wanted to love it. It’s neither heel nor hero in my eyes – just another jobber who’s not flashy enough for a headline match.

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Source: Wargamer