Capture-the-flag or tug of war games are perfect for two-player titles, since they create an automatic level of interaction between the players and can turn a game tense very quickly, as one player approaches the last flag or token they need to win and the other has to drop everything to play defense. Battle Line, Riftforce, and the new King of Tokyo Duel are built entirely around the capture-the-flag mechanic, while 7 Wonders and Watergate include it as one part of larger games where it’s just one way to win.
Zenith comes from the designers of last year’s Castle Combo, a great small-box game that played larger than its size, and asks players to fight over control of five planets at the center of the table, with tracks of three spaces on either side. To win the game, you must capture the same planet three times, capture four different planets, or capture five planets in any combination. You move the planets by playing cards either directly below one of those planets or to the technology tracks to try to build up your tech for bigger moves later in the game. It’s extremely tense and mostly well-balanced, with some risk that the initial card draws can skew too much in one direction.
The cards come in the same five colors as the planets, and each card has an action, a cost, and one of the three technology track symbols. You can play a card directly to its matching planet by paying the cost, subtracting one for each card you have already played to that planet’s side of your board. When you play a card in this way you move that planet one space closer to you, and then take the action shown on the card, sometimes paying an additional cost in coins or Zenithium, or by discarding cards you’ve already played, with actions that allow you to move planets, discard your opponent’s cards, gain resources, take the Leader token, draw more cards, and lots of other things alone or in combination. The first player to claim each planet gets a one-time bonus, randomly chosen for each game. There’s also the ‘diplomat’ action, which gets you the Leader token and one small additional benefit—one Zenithium, three coins, or drawing two cards. The Leader token expands your hand limit and activates additional powers on certain cards.
Playing either to the board or to the diplomat spaces are short-term moves that benefit you immediately, while the technology tracks build up over time to allow your future moves there to become more powerful. There are three tracks, and they vary significantly from game to game, with multiple printed boards to use and variable tokens you’ll place there each game. It costs Zenithium to play to the tech tracks, increasing in cost with each space you move up, but when your tokens on all three tracks all reach the first, second, or third levels, you get a bonus move of the planet of your choice as well. Whenever you move a token up any tech track, you get all of the bonuses you’ve hit on that track so far—the one on the space you just reached plus all of those below it. Tech tracks are nothing new, but the way Zenith incorporates it into the game and makes it the way to pursue a low-and-slow strategy, allowing a player to increase the power of later moves, separates this game from most games in this genre.
Zenith boils down to a lot of hand management, especially since the default hand size is only four cards (going to five if you have the leader token on its silver side, and six if you flip it to its gold side), and the balance between two fundamental strategies—the blitzkrieg approach of trying to grab a couple of planets quickly with cards, putting your opponent on the defensive immediately, against the technology approach, which can be very hard to stop once a player reaches the higher levels of any of the tracks. It also requires some basic resource management between the regular coins and Zenithium, and depending on how the cards and tech tracks go, those can be scarce in some games and annoyingly plentiful in others.
There’s some randomness in the card draws, but over the course of the game there are plenty of opportunities to draw and cycle through enough cards to balance that out … except for the initial draws, where each player can flush their hand once for free but otherwise are stuck with what they get. It’s not a flaw, as that’s just part of any game that revolves around hand management, but I’ve also played this enough times that I’ve run into games I’ve won or lost because of what each player got at the start. Some cards are just more powerful than others, especially in certain combinations, and if you begin the game with them and know what you’re doing you can control the game from the outset.
I find Zenith incredibly addictive to play—it’s so tense as you pull the tokens towards you and watch your opponent tug them back, and there’s huge satisfaction in setting up a big move over a couple of turns that you think turns the tide of the game in your direction. (Sometimes you’re even right.) The mechanics are easy to understand, while over multiple plays, you get more of a sense of how to use cards and/or the tech tracks together to make your moves more potent. It’s a fantastic addition to your two-player collection.
Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.
