By Chris, VA3CJO

I recently had the opportunity to review a tabletop game with an Amateur Radio theme. Simply named “Propagation,” it’s a card- and dice-based game. It comes with a case that is a storage box for the custom deck, die, and instructions, and also serves as a “dice tower” for the single ten-sided die rolled for each turn.

A bit of background: I’ve been a ham for about two years now, having mostly used 5- or 10-Watt radios with a variety of antennas: end-fed half-wave wires and 1/4-wave verticals in the field, and a dipole or delta loop at home, and some testing of indoor antennas, since I live in an apartment. I’ve been lucky enough to operate several larger stations that have given me a bit of experience with beam antennas and higher power. I mention this because a number of aspects of the game are based on operating using different antennas across bands, and under different solar weather conditions – all of these affecting propagation.

The goal of the game is simple: to gain points by making QSOs. Available stations make QSOs that are represented by 6 cards from the “QSL” deck, face up, representing the DX cluster – the stations on air and available to make QSOs with.

The Setup is fairly simple: each player starts with a stack of antennas, with the entry level “indoor antenna” turned face up, as well as a set of “band” cards, representing bands you’ve “tuned” your antenna system for. You randomly turn one of these up to start – 2-6m, 10-20m, 40-60m, 80-160m. As you progress through the game, there are triggers that give you an opportunity to upgrade your antenna, as well as add more bands. Nothing stops you from making QSOs on bands you aren’t tuned for but you don’t get a bonus. (more on that “bonus” in a bit)

The QSL deck contains not only stations but also “Special” cards which can confer bonuses or penalties (“Transmitted into a dummy load – lose your turn”), affecting your ability to make QSOs.

There is also a “Propagation” deck. A fresh card is turned over each turn and affects conditions, some on specific bands (Sporadic-E, Aurora Alert), some on all bands (Perfect Conditions).

I won’t get into *all* of the game mechanics here but the short summary is: a player targets ONE of the DX stations from the six visible in the cluster and then rolls the die (by dropping it in the hole at the top of the dice tower) and applying any applicable bonuses or penalties.

EXAMPLE: Buenos Aires, Argentina is shown in the cluster, has a band of “10-20m” and a “difficulty” of 5+. This means you’d need to roll a 5+ with the die. However, you have a wire antenna, and the 10-20m band card face up in your “shack”, each conveying a +1 bonus, so you only need a 3+. Rolling the die, you exceed that so you’ve made the QSO – take the card and add it to your shack and turn over another card from the QSL deck to keep the cluster populated with six DX stations. If you turn over a bonus or penalty card, apply that, and turn another card from the QSL deck to ensure the cluster remains at six stations.

Every three successful QSOs, you turn up a RANDOM band card in your band stack, making your station more effective (+1 bonus) on more bands, AND you may also upgrade your antenna by one level. (indoor->wire->tower->beam) When you fail to make a QSO (rolled too low, when factoring bonuses/penalties) your turn ends.

There are short and long variants of the game – short will have you stop when the “band conditions” deck is exhausted. The LONG variant ends when the QSL deck is exhausted and you simply reshuffle the band conditions deck until then.

Final scores are tallied by adding up your successful QSLs, with the more challenging stations (say, “Antarctica” or “the International Space Station”) netting you more points.

So, how would I rate this game? Some context: I’ve been playing “tabletop” games since I was a kid ranging from custom deck card-based like “Mille Bornes” and UNO, to board-based Euro-games like Catan and Pandemic.

My play-through was actually with someone who has NO Amateur Radio experience, other than hearing me talk about it fairly regularly. The mechanics of the game are fairly simple – you’re matching the numbers between the DX station cards in the cluster, plus bonuses, minus penalties, and the die roll. There’s some strategy involved as you pick which DX stations to target, trading off difficulty for higher potential points (“Risk it for a biscuit!”) but overall, the mechanics of play stay simple – there’s only a little strategy involved. Downside: probably not a game you would spend hours playing. Upside: it makes an excellent, quick, “party game” – exactly the type of game you’d pull out to kill some time with a group of hams – maybe over a lunch break during a ham-related class or event, or if you’re having people over for a shack party, between making real on-air QSOs. I’ve got one of these coming up in fact, as several DXpeditions are slated to go live soon (Bouvet, and Sable Island) and I plan to have company over to let them make some QSOs.

Special thanks to Roger VA3EGY of OARC for providing me with a copy of the game in exchange for a review! I like it enough it’ll probably stick around the shack for the foreseeable future.

Propagation game photo gallery