HOME is a decent game, with some good and some bad. Me and a friend played it for a few hours and only completed the first Front. For reasons explained below we didn’t want to continue playing BUT it is still a fun game. For anyone coming from D&D or other more crunchy, traditional ttrpgs, I could see this being a nice gateway into the world of more narrative focused games.
First, the not so great. A lot of the reviews and marketing material talk about the dice system as being 'brilliant', 'agile', and 'thrilling'. Brilliant maybe, agile definitely - the system is easy to pick up and your character sheet literally tells you which dice to roll with the 'Preparation' track - but I didn't find it 'thrilling' at all. The influence of Blades in the Dark in the dice system is obvious, but we found that rolls fell a little short of how tense they can feel in Blades and other FitD games.
While HOME uses the same degrees of success system found in FitD games (1-3 Failure - 4/5 Partial Success - 6 Success - 6+6 Critical Success) it removes the feature which gives those games their own 'thrilling rolls' - fictional positioning through 'Position and Effect'. Basically, how much danger are you in (Position) and much can you achieve; how effective are you (Effect). This is influenced by the established fiction and is usually common sense:
"This Kaiju has reinforced armour, so a high-explosive cannon will have more effect than a mecha sword."
"This Pilot has been trapped in depression after the death of her connection in the previous battle, so her Position may be worse against a Kaiju with Psionic Blasts who can take advantage of her emotional state."
Everything ‘envisioned’ within the fiction simply feels like set dressing when it doesn’t also have some impact in the mechanics. It doesn’t matter whether my mecha has a ‘Solar Lance’ or ‘Singularity Missiles’ because I’d be rolling the same dice pool and get the same result either way.
This also applies to the ‘Prep Phase’, where whatever you do will lead to the same result. If you don’t have the upgrades which provide a bonus die then there’s no difference between ‘Studying the Kaiju’ or ‘Building an Outpost’. There’s no bonus to your ‘Effect’ during the battle as a scientist over the radio says,
“Ah-ha, just as we found in our research! A strike at this exact position has a 99.9987% chance to weaken the target according to our data!”
Neither does building a mountainside array of missile batteries give you a safer position by providing covering fire to let you reposition without worrying about Kaiju counterattacks.
By not having this feature of FitD games, every roll felt kinda same-y and the stakes never changed in any meaningful ways. We described the battles happening, and how desperate the fights became, but the mechanics never felt like they reinforced this. The showdown fell into a rhythm of:
roll prep track - whittle down either the Mecha or Kaiju a health a little - 'envisioning the fight' (which got harder over time as it never really felt like the stakes were changing in a meaningful way) - repeat with the same dice pool, slowly decreasing in size.
However, we still had fun. Creating a world, coming up with cultures and our Pilot’s connections was a fun process, as was drawing cities, outposts, tank blockades, Kaiju guts and destroyed mecha on the map. I just wish the mechanics and story could mesh better together than they currently do.
Overall, I recommend anyone interested in telling a bleak story of struggling to defend your home does try it out. The mechanics aren’t bad, they just fell flat for us - maybe because we come from FitD style games.