Channel WON is the semi-cooperative card game of reporting news stories. Resort to anything to report everything! Channel WON News has decided to put their reporters to the test in a one-day, all-out showdown to see who is the best reporter to land the job of prime time news anchor! Your goal is to travel the city, gather resources, and help report the best news stories of the day.
Channel WON is played over three rounds, Morning, Evening, and Nightly news. In each round, players work together to add location visits and sources to each lead in the day’s line-ups in order to report stories revealed to them by the station head Myra Porters. Are you ready to build up your rating while discrediting your opponents? Will you be the newest anchor for Channel WON? From the creators of CULTivate.
Xcptionl –
Let me start by saying, “I love the packaging of this game!” I really love the texture, the colors, and the style. I just think they are great and feel like quality. Now the game, you gotta have the right group of people to play this game and you have to study the instructions to grasp what you need to do. We love board games and this one was different and fun to play. It is a creative idea for a game. I think it’s great.
Peter M –
This is an interesting game. It’s not the greatest game I’ve played, but it’s entertaining. Good for the person who has every game. I’m not a fan of co-op games, but this one has a competitive portion as well.I’m not sure it’s worth the $30+. Maybe a $20 game for me, but others may feel different.
theresa –
I played this with a couple of my teen kids as a three person game. It’s easy to learn and we had fun, but some parts felt like they need some finessing. As we continue playing, we may also make up some of our own rules to help the game a little.The game is played in three rounds that are each split into two phases: phase one is only drawing cards, and phase two is only playing cards (with exception of using a particular Inside Scoop Card). The goal is score points by contributing to and closing stories; open stories don’t count toward points. Each of the potential (open) stories takes place at a specific location, and location cards must be played first before any source cards are added. Then, source cards can be added matching the category (Sports, Entertainment, Business, Crime, Political, or Fluff) until one of the players chooses to use their turn to close a story. Closed stories can continue to gain or lose points, but new contributors cannot be added, and only the official contributors score. Also, each player can only contribute to three stories, which is sometimes a challenge depending which cards are in your hand. The Inside Scoop cards do all kinds of interesting things, and don’t need to necessarily be played in the same order. We basically ignored them our first round as we were learning how to play, but found the Inside Scoop cards to be game changing once we embraced them.There is also a co-operative aspect to the game as open stories and stories without a positive point value at the end of the round cause the news station to lose a star; and once the stars are gone, the game is over. So everyone has a vested interest in keeping up the station’s star rating, and we did communicate with each other throughout the game regarding that purpose.Some of the issues we had were:1. Location cards have limited use, yet are significant to starting a story. The more we played, the less we wanted to draw the Location cards because they feel like a deadweight if they are unable to be played, whereas the Source cards are versatile, and the Inside Scoop cards really boost the score (or sabotage others). We want to find a creative solution for using those Location cards beyond their primary purpose (e.g. maybe they can be swapped with any face-up card on a turn).2. You can only pass once per round, yet sometimes someone would be out of usable cards. We chose to pass anyway, because the only other option seemed to be ending the round early.3. We were unclear whether a story must have both a location and at least one source to be closed, or if it could be closed prematurely as a strategy, or to avoid losing stars if no one had the right source cards.4. We needed a longer score track. We out grew it on our first game, and expect to get better as we continue playing.The artwork and theme are really fun. The kids initially were disappointed that their favorite colors didn’t match up with characters of their genders, but at the end of our first game we realized that we wished we had picked the characters based on their special abilities rather than by who we most identified with, as those abilities can also make a big difference in gameplay. Overall, we enjoyed this game, but not as much as other games we play regularly.
Eric Taylor-Wise –
This is a very interesting game. It’s a bit of a learning curve, for me anyway, but for younger people who play a lot of the newer games it shouldn’t be much of an issue.The instructions are a little confusing, but after a few play throughs, you’ll get the hang of it. Some other reviewers have posted more in depth about game play, so I won’t here.The quality of the game components is excellent!
jlt0518 –
What a fun and creative game!! We play a lot of board games in this family, and this one will definitely be staying in the rotation! Shut the TV off and play….unless you want to put Anchor Man on in the background which is fitting and what we typically do lol! My only gripe is that there’s a bit of complexity at first so more of a learning curve than some, and it was difficult for my advanced 10yr old to figure out at first especially, but even the 14yr old and 16yr old struggled. But once they got the hang of it, it’s been a blast. Still 5 stars in my view!
Hannah –
There is for sure a learning curve at first, but once you get the hang of it, it is super fun! It is interesting, and I think the box is really awesome to have among my collection because it is really cool artwork. As someone who has collected a good amount of games, I would recommend adding this one to your game nights!
Sa2 –
Daughter 10, and I felt like Clark Kent and Lois Lane going around looking for stories to report on and trying to do the right thing. You work together to keep the channel from going under, but also work against each other. Lots of components are provided, and the stories to report on can be downright silly at times. Played over three rounds You an work together to take up on leads and keep your channel’s news strong by completing stories and their objectives and making sure that you don’t go under as a whole.Game is easy to learn, casual and makes a great evening of play.The box is very sturdy and the insert is top notch keeping everything intact.Wooden pieces are a nice welcome and are painted really well to a high standard.Makes a great gift, but can also be played casually with friends in an evening.