Come Together

The Summer Of Love?

In Come Together, each player will be putting on their own music festival over three days managing the audience, stages, tents, acts and the press to hold the greatest festival board gaming has ever seen.

Rewind not to 1969 but to mid 2022, my wife and I were taking a car journey and talking about the importance of a strong theme in board games. She talked about Woodstock and her love of the 1960s and wondered why nobody had made a board game that really captured the feel of that era so I started to do some research to see if I could find a game that could fill that void in our collection. I was surprised to find Come Together had just been announced and proceeded to pre-order a copy for release. It arrived and looked like something straight out of the Summer of Love but could the game live up to the expectations we placed upon it?

Come Together is a worker placement game with a neat twist, in that you don’t get to immediately claim the card you have placed your worker under but have to wait until that row is activated, with some spots offering an immediate bonus for placement. The actions in the game are themselves relatively simple; placing workers, activating a row of cards or recalling your festival workers from their ‘hippy bus’. The strategy comes from the timing of those actions and sometimes placing workers where you might not want them because you know that row will be activated, granting a bonus depending on the number of occupied spaces in that row.

You begin with a festival board, with an additional asymmetric side for a more advanced game, a number of worker and flower power track advancement tokens based on your player number, some starting cards, camp and single stage. The board has a number of tracks to manage, three associated with managing different types of press and another track with your camps. As you progress along these you will gain bonuses and opportunities to play your starting cards.

The game works by offering a number of cards separated into the different decks you need to provide each aspect of the festival and you take turns in either placing workers or activating rows, enabling any players who have placed their workers underneath to claim the cards. If your row doesn’t get activated before the end of the day, don’t worry you still get those cards but without the associated track advancement bonus underneath.

You then play the cards you have gained into your festival, or add them to your starting cards if you don’t want to or can’t activate them straight away. The cards range from tents to hold new festival goers, the festival goers themselves, new stages and artists or up and comers to play your festival and picking the right ones at the right time is the key to winning.

If You Book Them They Will Come

This may all sound quite overwhelming but once you get going the game flows well, as you try and gain the audiences needed to score the big acts who are delightfully named after a number of different board games (who doesn’t want the Great Western Cowboys, the 4 Wonders or Jay Purr playing their festival!). The acts will score you the majority of your points and over the three days, you will score acts that have audiences at the end of each and the game offers a variable set up for each day to keep it fresh, with bonus cards providing a positive or negative consequence depending on how much newspaper press you have gained for that day.

I’ve tried this game at different player counts and it really holds up well at all of them. For a solo or two player game you use a deck of cards to simulate the placement of a third player to block certain spots and trigger additional activations, it is quick and simple and doesn’t slow the game at all. At higher player counts the game really shines as you tussle for the key spots or hope your row will be activated, with four players being the optimal number we’ve tried.

All You Beautiful Meeples

So what about the components of Come Together? Chillfox Games are a pretty new publisher but they have broadly knocked it out of the park with this one. The art is fantastic and definitely helps to make you feel like you’re building up the perfect 1960s festival, with peace symbols and flowers aplenty. The meeples, used to represent the audience attending the festivals, are fantastic, with different outfits and colours used to show the difference between the audiences available to you. I say that the publisher broadly knocks it out of the park, and here is one of my few niggles with the game in that some of the text on the cards due to the typography used, and numbers on the board can be a little hard to see. It’s not a deal breaker but I found I couldn’t even read some of the names of the band cards and had to double check what points should be awarded a few times.

Woodstock 1969 Or Woodstock 1999?

Come Together is exactly what I wanted it to be, it is a game which doesn’t feel like the theme has been tacked on as an afterthought but one where the designers have really thought about how to distil what would make a great board game recreation of putting together a Woodstock like festival. Although the mechanisms that make up the game are relatively simple, this is actually quite a complicated game to play given the amount of different tracks and cards you need to manage to win.I really enjoyed using the workers to select the cards I wanted but not knowing when I would get them, something that took a little while to get used to but really pays off when it works in your favour. There is a fair amount of replayability to be had here, particularly when you add in the more complex asymmetric starting boards, the range of daily bonus cards and variable set ups for each day meaning you have to adapt your strategy with each play.

The components are beautiful, aside from some typography issues and the meeples in particular would make anyone passing by want to stop and look at what you were playing. Although there is a fair amount of iconography, you will find you can learn most of this after a couple of plays.

Overall, this offers a unique twist on worker placement euro games, it has a fantastic theme and despite looking simple is surprisingly deep and complex to play but worth the entry fee to the festival.