Disney Sorcerer’s Arena Hero Analysis – Demona

Armed with rocket launcher and particle blasters, Demona is a terrifying force to be reckoned with, making up for her lower recognisability with power and speed.

Demona is one of my favourite characters from the core set, maybe in the entire game so far. I don’t mean the character itself is one of my favourites, as I had honestly never heard of her until this game came out. I only knew who Goliath, the primary protagonist of the Gargoyles show – was because of the recently released Neca figures. But I owe Demona’s depiction in Sorcerer’s Arena for getting me to watch the show, all because of her fairly simple strategy paired with powerful board controlling moves. Until I saw the keyword on her card, I didn’t even know she was a villian, or at the very least an antihero if we’re going by the cartoon!

As an Ally

Demona isn’t as intrinsically unique as the last hero we examined, Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey, but she can certainly contend with him. Her Skill, which we’ll get to in the relevant sections below, is all that really sets her apart besides an AOE (area of effect) attack with her single copy of ‘Rocket Launcher’. This can take out multiple rivals in a pinch, but also hurts your allies, so utilising it either at the start of the game before the two teams clash in melee range, or once you’ve moved all your heroes back, will be the key to success.

Besides that, you’ll be relying on chipping away at opponents then flitting out of harm’s way again, with your ability to return a movement card to your hand from the discard with ‘Two Steps Ahead’. You can inflict this damage from range with two copies of ‘Particle Blasts’, particularly effective against foes on Victory Spaces, and your ‘Dark Lightning’ card, dealing 3 damage to two rivals and 2 damage to Demona. This card is best utilised as a last resort, or with Ariel in tow to heal you afterwards, negating the drawback.

Demona mainly focuses on movement, so if you find yourself lacking attack strength, fear not; her skill will increase her standard attack to the point it’ll be more powerful than most other character’s Action cards!

Skill

Dangerous Force – If you have played two or more Demona cards this turn, remove all status effects from Demona, then Demona gains 2 Strong.

Now this really is a force to be reckoned with. You’ll likely be playing two cards *every* Demona turn, unless you draw badly, and allies like Mickey, Facilier and Ariel can improve your odds in that department. Demona will likely always have Strong, and as the effect is renewed following removal, in practice she’s shrugging off any negative effects and keeping the buff. It’s also nice that a female character with a slighter build gets to utilise this typically tanky status effect; Sulley and Gaston are the only other heroes who can do so.

However, you’ll be hindered by debuffs like Immobilised and Shrunken, stopping you from playing certain cards and stifling your Skill, so just utilise Demona’s advanced movement to your advantage to stay away from Sulley and Facilier, and you’ll be fine.

Upgrade

Dominique Destine – Whenever you discard your second card on Demon’as turn, gain 2 Victory Points, then flip this card over.

The only other hero with a one-time-use upgrade is Davy Jones, who we’ll cover after analysing all the characters in the core set. Demona’s is… underwhelming. Two victory points isn’t a lot, and the only way to discard cards on her turn is to do so to boost movement or attack. Nine times out of ten you’ll probably rather play those cards to defeat a rival and gain far more victory points than you would from Demona’s Upgrade. As a final, uncounterable ploy to secure victory, perhaps I can see it being useful.

I suppose, true to character, underhandedly snatching victory from the shadows at the last minute – which is the only real use I can figure out for this ability – is typical of the Gargoyle femme fatale.

It feels like her Skill is far more powerful than her Upgrade, and you’d expect the two to be switched, but it really feels like the designers tried that before realising all a Demona player would have to do is sit at the back of the board discarding cards on all of her turns. Luckily, her regular skill makes up for a noticeably underpowered Upgrade.

Demona needs 1 Shell (blue) and 2 Fire (orange) Gears to upgrade. She’s got the shell covered with two cards that bear this Gear, her ‘Saeti Spell’ cards, with a middle of the road “1 damage to each adjacent rival” attack but the promise of an additional movement or action phase, but only her incredibly useful ‘Single Out’ card includes Fire.

As a Rival

How do you catch a queen of the night who can fly around the board at will? Well, as mentioned, if you can beeline for her and inflict a debuff, you’ll put her skill and movement in check when it comes to her turn.

She doesn’t have any cards which return Action cards to her hand, so until she’s expended her ‘Rocket Launcher’ (and you’ll know if she’s returned it to her hand with another rival’s card, as the discard is public information) keep your allies apart from one another. If you must rely on being next to them for healing or buffs, do so first then use your movement to get out of there if you can. Bunch up and you’ll all be caught in the blast!

On the flipside avoiding her movement from cards like ‘Single Out’ can be tricky, as this card puts her next to an unoccupied space beside a single rival; you’ll have to keep at least two of your allies together to protect them from this move, while also trying to contend with the blast radius of ‘Rocket Launcher’. A surefire tell that she’s about to let a rocket fly is if her and her teammates all draw back from your team, taking them out of the friendly-fire zone.

Be wary of victory spaces around Demona, too – you’ll take extra damage from her two copies of ‘Particle Blaster’, and her summoner will likely save these to use as board control.

Conclusion

Demona’s a really fun one, covering her in-universe abilities well with the various tech and weaponry dotted with a few spells, and has the added benefit of not feeling unfair to play. Maybe that’s a me problem, but as a tabletop gamer I can acutely feel when my opponent (often less well-versed in the hobby) isn’t having fun because I appear to have dramatically more powerful abilities than they do.

Demona doesn’t fall prey to this, unlike characters like Gaston and Sulley, which is what makes them my least favourites, but more on them in separate articles. Demona’s deceptively tricky to figure out, and relies a lot on drawing the right cards to enact a specific strategy: attack from range, fly in and out of combat, and control the board from the sidelines. If you draw your ‘Saeti Spell’ without other Demona cards in your hand to utilise the extra phase, they feel like dead weight. Similarly, drawing ‘Two Steps Ahead’ early leaves you with few movement cards worth returning to your hand. And, finally, I recently learned just how much she relies on her ‘Particle Blasts’ when they were, purely by chance, the last two cards in my draw pile, and I was left doing more damage with my standard attack than any of Demona’s cards. Then again, her skill compliments exactly that situation!

Ultimately, if a character I’d never heard of before is now one of my favourites in the game, the designers did something right, and baring this character’s fangs on the battlefield feels as taught as a pair of shadowy wings.

Disney Sorcerer’s Arena Hero Analysis – Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey

Sweeping in with an army of mischievous brooms to aid him, Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey is arguably, weirdly, the most iconic of the characters available in the Core Set for Disney Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances, and you can’t build a Disney house without the mouse.

Mickey feels the most unique of the heroes in the Core Set. This is in no small part owed to his unique status effect: Magic Broom. Whenever a counter is removed from this effect at the start of the turn, his summoner looks at the top two cards of their deck, returning them in any order. They then reveal the top card, and if this is a magic card (bearing the white spiral icon), a counter is added to Magic Broom (negating the removal at the start of your upkeep).

As an Ally

Of course, the other card might not be magic, but may be more desirable to choose than one which will restore Magic Broom; naturally, in terms of teams, Mickey will pair better with more magic-focused characters to ensure you keep drip-feeding Magic Broom all while setting yourself up to draw some of your most desirable cards.

This all means Mickey is also currently the only hero in the game with scry (looking at the top card of your deck) and mill (discarding cards from the top of your deck) abilities, which makes him feel – appropriately, given the name of the game those terms come from – magic.

He’s a little mix of everything – with three copies of ‘Shooting Star’, making up 10% of your draw pile, there’s a good chance he’ll deal three damage from at least range 1, if not range 3 depending on how many counters are on Magic Broom. Keeping that counter high will mean you can make the most effective use of this mouse mage; he’ll be buffing himself throughout the course of the game until he can stack up the Magic Brooms and overwhelm opponents with huge moves like his two ‘Magical Mob’ cards, adding two tokens then dealing as much damage as there are tokens on Magic Broom. With a copy of ‘Quick Recall’, he’ll also be able to return any one of these cards to his hand, meaning he could use them three or even four times in the case of ‘Shooting Star’.

He has a larger health pool of 8, one above other spellcasters like Maleficent and Dr Facilier’s 7, and will likely be left alone as he doesn’t initially seem like much of a threat.

Skill

Magical Means – Discard any magic card from your hand to give Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey 1 Magic Broom.

This can be utilised in a few ways, but isn’t too powerful – as many of his cards rely on three or more Magic Broom tokens to enact their second effect, adding one in a pinch can help if you’ve only played one card which gives him two. However, as a lot of his cards *do* give him two, there’s not much reason to not just… play one of these instead of discarding it. You could of course discard ally’s magic cards on Mickey’s turn, but again many of these are far more useful than having one more token.

Upgrade

Helping Hand – At the end of each phase on Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey’s turn, if two or more Status Counters were placed on Magic Broom during that phase, draw a card.

This is a really powerful one. Mickey focuses heavily around card draw, and this only adds to that. We’ve already seen how many means he has of adding counters, so it shouldn’t be too hard to pull this off ongoing ability on at least one phase of his turn. Just be sure not to mill yourself empty.

This character requires two shells (blue) and two wand (yellow) Gears to upgrade. His two ‘Magical Mob’ copies can give you the wands, but his single team-damaging copy of ‘Spellbinding Whirlpool’ is his only shell.

As a Rival

So, how to counter this onslaught of multiplying mops?

At the moment, removing status effects seems the most sure-fire way to cut off Mickey’s stream of strength. Ariel is the only hero so far with the ability to remove status effects, so use it wisely if you’ve got her on your team against a Mickey player.

Be careful not to let the counter snowball; if Mickey’s getting too powerful and you have no means of removing the status effect through cards, it might be worth making a beeline for him with a heftier hitter, or focusing ranged attacks on his position if you’ve got them. A certain way of removing it is to KO him! He is only worth 4 victory points after all, meaning you’re unlikely to target him as he’s not really worth it. But I’ve lost more than one game to a seven or eight damage attack from Mickey, so the greatest reward comes from moving him back to square one.

Above all, if you see him moving in with a host of counters, his summoner’s likely got a ‘Magical Mob’ in hand, so stay back!

Conclusion

Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey is certainly a difficult character to counter at present, and a very fun one to play. Every game I’ve played with him has seen him hang back from the fray, racking up the Magic Broom tokens and relying on the range of ‘Shooting Star’. I can’t see him straying too close to victory spaces, as you wouldn’t want to risk him being KO’ed and losing a painstakingly built Magic Broom bounty.

The card draw is really fun, with only Maleficent and Ariel (in the core set) being able to do so elswhere.

I suppose his only weaknesses are his reliance on a single status effect (although as we’ve seen there aren’t many ways whatsoever to counter this at present), and his lack of movement. He does have one copy of cards that give him an additional movement or move him up to three spaces, but beyond this it’s the standard value of two all the way, even on his movement cards. But this is a small sacrifice for some truly superlative sorcery.

Big Synergies, Small Package – Waking Shards Review

The name of the game is synergy. Well, it’s not… it’s actually Waking Shards. But what appealed to me, when I decided to back probably my sixth or seventh pocket-sized Kickstarter, was the game’s promise of easy to learn, hard to master experience. These are my favourite types of games; simple on the surface but brimming with hidden strategic depth, or utilising set decks or small numbers of cards but using the relationships between them to create near-endless possible interactions. Think Unmatched, with its unchangeable Hero decks (but where learning their ins and outs is an immensely rewarding puzzle in and of itself) or even the 18-card Circle the Wagons, purely in terms of the utter replayability to be found in so few components. Games which manage to create these synergies, these domino-effects, between very few cards, and still manage to keep the game fresh each and every time despite that, appeal to me completely.

‘Clash of Cards’ – Rules of Play

Out of the box, Waking Shards is a complete enigma – read half the cards in isolation and you’ll wonder how in the world that effect would be beneficial to you. But when you actually find that card in your hand in a specific moment, as if by magic, its situational utility suddenly becomes clear. These instances make the game feel that much more finely-tuned and precisely balanced. We’ll discuss some individual examples in a minute, so let’s start with the main rules.

The aim of Waking Shards is to finish each round with the higher level of power between your units on the field than your opponent’s, from the lowly one-power Scouts to the towering five-power Titan. You’ll also ensnare magical Shards, which have no power level but offer game-changing once-per-round, beginning-of-turn or ongoing passive abilities. To start, each player draws four cards from the shuffled deck, then chooses one to discard (choosing the right option here is a feisty tactical decision in and of itself; it’s entirely possible that you or your opponent may be able to retrieve this card later!). Players take it in turns to place one card until all players’ hands are empty and all their available shards, if any, have been used. The first player to win three rounds in total wins!

‘Mystic Mages’ – Strategic Analysis

These rules can be digested almost instantly; the real learning curve comes in the form of the cards themselves. Like the binding of a spellbook, Waking Shards‘ rules act as the thin but unflinching framework inside which hundreds of possible fusions and combos make up the large majority of the gameplay loop. And, like a spellbook, it’s the myriad conjurations at your disposal which will take the most time to master.

For instance, the relationship between the two starting cards – one randomly assigned to each player – stumped me at the outset. It seemed like Shard of Time (allowing its user to go first each round) was far underpowered compared to the Shard of Zeal’s obvious advantage that its user may play an additional card on their turn. However, in a game with only three-card hands, your actions ending when your hand is empty unless you have more shards in play, this ability becomes both blessing and curse. You’ll only want to play two cards when you can be sure doing so will set off one of the chains of effects woven into the interactions between certain cards. The Shard of Time, meanwhile,

Hopefully, this isolated series of moves (a whole paragraph dedicated to just the cards you start every match with) in a single round should give you some idea of the synergies to be found in Waking Shards. There seems to always be new chain reactions to explore, and with 3,060 possible opening hands of four with the game’s cards, I have a feeling we won’t be uncovering all the combos for quite some time. The fact we’ve ended up with six cards on the field from the opening hand of three should give you some insight into the whacky synergies you can pull off if you cast your spells right.

‘Stunning Sorcery’ – Artwork

We do need to talk art, because Pavel Kunc’s efforts deserve their own section. Immediately, I appreciate the variation in artwork between different types of the same units (like the Scout, Restless Scout, and Frontline Scout). A lesser game would have just given them different names, maybe changed up the colour palette.

The game’s art style overall is like a cross between the Vex from Bungie’s Destiny and the Abyss Watchers of Dark Souls 3, all wrapped in a painterly shell of Slay the Spire-esque oranges and aquamarines. Visible brush strokes (whether painted digitally or traditionally) mean what scant details we are given about the in-game universe are steeped in a sense of mystique and ancient mythology.

For me, as a writer, my enjoyment of a game’s mechanics is often influenced if not entirely dictated by the fluff, the backstory and narratological flavour, that it’s wrapped in. Scythe is an excellent example: given a blander theme or less polished visual style, that game would feel like a bloated slog. In that vein, Waking Shards‘ abstract thematic ties to its concrete gameplay loop are truly what stop such a deceptively complex game from feeling as simple as it initially appears.

‘Cracked Crystals’ – Issues

Honestly, the only real issue is that the novelty wears off quickly. You’ll know what all the cards can do off by heart after just a few play sessions. Even though the game advertises the risk-reward choice between playing Shards to bolster later rounds or playing units to win the current one, in reality you know pretty much which of these routes you’ll take from your opening hand.

There also seems to be no way to truly counter another player’s Shards if you don’t draw the two cards which can dispel others from the field. We’ve spent many games where a player had four shards for a majority of the game, giving them an obvious and ongoing (Shards are not shuffled back into the deck between rounds) advantage, plain and simple. I suppose this opens up another choice to spend a round weakening your opponent’s position instead of trying to win it, and the first-to-four victory conditions (rather than, say, a best of three) seem to encourage this type of play. But this in turn depends on you actually drawing the cards which allow you to do that; if your opponent draws multiple Shards early, the game tends to swing wildly in their favour with no route for the other to halt their advance.

Waking Shards being the joint smallest in my collection with Orchard and Circle the Wagons means, in a dream world, I’d love to see some expansions down the line, offering different settings or units and, most importantly, new and powerful shards to mix and match for truly advanced strategies. If the worst thing I can say about Waking Shards is that it leaves me wanting more of the magic it offers, that should tell you a lot!

Overall: 7/10

The Good:

• Fast-paced action
• Gorgeous artwork
• Branching complexity in a small package

To be Improved:

• Strategies can feel a little repetitive
• Some cards feel overpowered with no counter
• Would greatly benefit from expansions

‘Bloomin’ Lovely’: Orchard (Solitaire) by Mark Tuck Review

After realising that my favourite game in my collection, Circle the Wagons, is also my smallest, when I browse Kickstarter (where I also purchased Circle the Wagons) I’ve been keeping my eye out for similar miniature but deceptively intricate experiences. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon two games in the same scrolling session that I knew I had to back. Coincidentally, their small size also means the creators released the Print-and-Play – or ‘PnP’ – for each, which I hurriedly assembled before I go on holiday tomorrow; these sorts of games are perfect to stuff in a backpack or even a pocket.

One of those games was Orchard. The first solitaire game I’ve reviewed on this site, because I’m not really a fan of them! Sprawlopolis (through the KS campaign of which I acquired Circle the Wagons as an add-on that I ironically preferred a thousand-fold) is just appalling, not even worth considering for this site. It’s impossible by yourself, and as a cooperative game there’s always a better move you could have done on someone else’s turn. The way I feel is that if I’m going to play a game by myself… Why bring out something that takes up table space and will draw people’s eye to how few people I have to play with? I’m far more likely to just stick Pokemon in my 3DS, or Metroid: Fusion in my Gameboy Advance.

Introduction + Rules of Play

But Orchard looked like something that would be just as good with one or ten sharing the same hand of cards, because there are so many options that everyone would be able to come up with a different one. And having played the PnP, I stand by that opinion. It’s surprisingly fun to discuss your options with another person, and my favourite moments with Orchard are when you go to place a card and your partner goes “NO, NOT THERE!”

Orchard is made up of just 18 cards (the same as Circle the Wagons!) but also contains fifteen dice in three colours. You deal nine cards face down and draw the top one, placing it as the start of your orchard, then set the other nine aside – you can conveniently play another round by just picking up this stack. The goal is simple; acquire as many points as possible (with a ‘soft’ upper limit of 50, because you can probably go higher) by overlapping trees of the same colour. That’s all there is to it! The dice are for scorekeeping and get upgraded to 1s with one overlap, 3s with two, and 6s with three; the proper retail version even has custom-printed dice allowing for 10s. You can also use two ‘rotten fruit’ tokens, worth -3 points each, to overlap trees that don’t match. When you’ve used all nine cards, tally your score!

This game is really too small to do a proper review with different sections, so let’s just do it the old-fashioned way!

The Good:

• The theme! I really enjoy the simplicity without it being set in an ugly European castle as so many board games without a narrative seem to be, and the different coloured dice really feel juicy to look at when placed on the fruit trees. The purple is especially pleasant. A nice example of a game’s theme enhancing its components and vice versa.
• The brain-teasing! You need to put a surprising amount of thought into this game. Discussing your options with a partner offers a nice depth as you both compare  However, from the rounds I’ve played I haven’t seen much strategy, as such, beyond planning ahead a little; although with a new card in your hand each time I don’t really see how much that’s needed either.
• The speed! With how quickly you get through the nine cards (as long as you’re not spending an age on each decision, which actually takes some of the fun out of it), it’s almost impossible not to pick up that tantalising second stack of nine cards and play another round. I’ve never played just one game of Orchard.
• The size! Orchard, much like Circle the Wagons, greatly benefits from the fact you can fit it in your pocket. Combined with the speed it means there’s no real reason not to take it with you if you go to a friend’s house, on holiday, to the coffee shop, or really anywhere!

To be Improved:

• It’s very fiddly (and that’s odd for a game with just nine cards in play). The biggest (and really only) issue I have with Orchard for what it is, is how fiddly it is. After playing a few rounds in a row I actually start getting wary of placing a card so that each of the six trees overlaps another that already has a dice on it. This means that you have to pick up six dice, keeping them all in the same order, and making sure you remember what is on each face. God forbid you drop one, or nudge another, because it could mean the difference between beating your high score. This is another reason the game actually works just as well with more than one player; more hands to hold onto dice!
• Some cards are difficult to use. As a small complaint, I’ve found that the number 2 and 18 cards, the only cards with all three colour pairs of trees next to each other, are surprisingly hard to use. Whenever you draw them it’s hard not to groan, as they fit almost nowhere unless you’ve intentionally set the other cards up to facilitate it when you finally draw it. If you draw it early, therefore, it can remain dead weight for a while. Not really a huge problem as your hand size never changes, but worth mentioning.

Conclusion

Orchard is a fun little puzzle and is actually really satisfying to play. It’s certainly not excellent, as the colour-matching means it’s essentially Circle the Wagons for one player with fewer scoring conditions. On the other hand, Orchard is in an advantageous position in that it’s rather unfair to really compare it to anything. Furthermore, having played hardly any other solitaire games besides solitaire itself, I’m actually not able to. So, for a first foray into the genre and a very enjoyable puzzle which takes so little time you can easily play it once a day (as I do) I’d definitely recommend Orchard. It’s hard to find any major problems in something so simple.

Overall: 7/10

They’ve used all the tree and fruit puns in the rulebook.

Some Thoughts On: Disney’s Lorcana

As a tabletop game enthusiast since I bought Zombies!!! from Forbidden Planet in London over a decade ago, I’ve come to realise that many of my decisions in this hobby have been based around who I’m able to play with. When practically my only contact was my abusive ex-partner, I was forced to solely collect two-player affairs, shutting me out of some truly incredible multiplayer epics. During my gap year, living at my parents’ house, I sought less complex titles that I could play with mum, or if I invited a friend round for some drinks and a casual games night. And in my second year of university, while living with three other people who were willing to go head to head, I had a Magic: The Gathering boom (a bubble which has since burst). Which brings me neatly to Lorcana.

I’ve since finished university, and now live with my current girlfriend, her parents, and our housemate. This is my most versatile set-up to date, because it consists of two adults whose exposure to the hobby has (until I came along and broadened their horizons, naturally) until now been limited to chess and Subbuteo; my girlfriend, who will engage in slightly deeper games if the theme takes her fancy; and a new friend who has been playing games all her life. So, although I no longer have to so strictly limit my selections lest a game be unwrapped and then promptly gather dust because no one wants to play it, this is a mix of experience levels into which Lorcana fits almost perfectly, and that’s really the thrust of what I’ll be discussing here.

Part I: ‘The Heffalump in the Room’ – Theming

Let’s start with the first thing that caught my (and many others’) eye about Lorcana: the fact that it’s Disney-related. Immediately, however, I was sceptical. Yeesh, Ravensburger, too? The company whose infantile, chance-based titles – like Monkey Mix-Up – I used to play as a child? Admittedly, this pairing has since birthed Disney’s Villainous, a game which certainly seems well-produced, but one I’ve never been won over by after hearing the general consensus that it isn’t really a game at all and is more akin to multiplayer solitaire (if those terms can even go together). Still, Lorcana did sound like it might engage with more mature gameplay ideas, and I was quietly hopeful.

But, then, I saw Lorcana‘s cards. Seven of the things, in fact, revealed from nowhere like a genie from an inconspicuous lamp during the D23 celebrations; and they changed my feelings from suspicious optimism to outright uncontainable excitement.

As someone who, like I said, has dabbled in MTG over the years but has always felt sort of like they got into the hobby too late, Lorcana looks to be the answer to that issue; being here at the game’s inception is far more appealing than sinking a bunch of money and research into an existing and established property that everyone else is going to have either years more experience with, or none at all. Plus, when it comes to just opening the blind packs, it’s going to be a treat to actually recognise and be surprised by cards depicting characters and artefacts that I enjoy. I’ve heard the argument that Lorcana looks like it’ll land closer to Pokémon than MTG, in terms of people collecting it for the artwork rather than buying it to play it.

Indeed, that artwork is lovingly crafted and as gorgeous as a fairytale princess to behold. But, for starters, I’ll certainly be someone who plays Lorcana as well as collecting it, but the quality of the artwork (all unique, original pieces created specifically, nay, especially, for the game, which is even more indicative of the weight Disney and Ravensburger are lending to their own creation) should only further how much easier it will be to open a pack and go “Oh my god, look, look, I got Tarzan!” instead of “Oh, an Undying Red Wimblepopper, that artwork is kind of cool, no idea if it’s a good card though, let me go home and Google it.” MTG just didn’t bring me the same joy as I think Lorcana will easily capture. It appears likely that it will be a game where my girlfriend and I can actually sit down with a cup of tea and open packs together. A game where we can just pick up a pack or two each during a day out (availability permitting, a dilemma I’ll cover below in the third section of this discussion), and, most importantly, one that she will not just reluctantly dip her toes into to throw her nerdy boyfriend a bone for an evening, but will actively want to pursue herself. I’m excited for Lorcana not only for personal reasons but precisely because of how genuinely excited my partner is (finally!) about a tabletop or card game. But the theme alone isn’t what gives me that impression.

Part II: ‘Inside the Magic’ – Mechanics

While we have little to go off in the way of explicit gameplay rules, the seven cards (all characters, raising the question of whether objects or locations will likewise feature) do give us some tantalising tidbits in the form of flavour text and abilities.

Where the scant mechanics which have been revealed seem to fill a few people with emotions ranging from dismissive disinterest to sneering mirth (both ends of the scale owing to Lorcana‘s immediate similarity to MTG), all they fill me with is more hope; the hope that Lorcana really is going to be an easier-to-teach and more visually appealing (albeit subjectively) version of MTG as I initially dreamed it might be when it was announced and very briefly explained.

Keyforge notwithstanding, my partner finds MTG-style keywords, like ‘Trample’ or ‘Flying’, to be meaningless game-speak. However, she’s been slowly getting her head around them, and I’ve got a feeling her existing knowledge of the characters portrayed will actually aid her ability to interpret the rules. Elsa’s ‘Freeze’ or Maleficent’s ‘Dragon Fire’ abilities are far more self-explanatory when twinned with glorious character artwork than the ‘Vigilance’ of an Alert Heedbonder or a Vampire Nighthawk’s ‘Lifelink’. I know any game is going to have its own lexicon to learn, and many of us are familiar with that of MTG, but Lorcana’s seems to lend itself far more neatly to the link between abilities and cards themselves, particularly for new players.

Another echo of MTG inspiration comes in the process of ‘Exerting’ a card (accompanied by an icon of a card tilting or, in the case of MTG, ‘Tapping’) also hinted at on Elsa’s card. Hey, Adventure Time: Card Wars had ‘Flooping’, so this seems to simply be yet another take on the now-universal action of expending a card’s use. We also see ‘Banish’, which almost definitely parallel’s MTG‘s ‘Destroy’ keyword, or, simply removing a creature from the board.

What’s not yet as clear as the reflection in magic mirror is the no-doubt intricate relationship between health (or defence), power (or attack) – both in the bottom right of a card’s artwork – and mana (or cost) in the top left-hand corner. What we can glean, however, with the aid of Stitch’s ‘upgrade’ card of sorts, allowing you to play it for a lower cost (simply denoted as ‘4*’ instead of six), is that there is a single resource to be spent to play cards. Perhaps it will be something fitting with the game’s Illumineer player-surrogates, like Lums (wait, that’s Rayman) or simply Light. To me, this is the one aspect which seems significantly simplified. While it was a noticeably simpler system than MTG‘s multi-coloured land cards, even Card Wars required you to have a certain combination of the four available land spaces to be able to play cards from certain themed decks. Whether Lorcana will go a similar route to make up for the simple card costs remains to be seen, and this leads neatly onto our final section.

Part III: ‘Villain’s Lair’ – Worries

The simplified nature of the game – and I realise I’ve used that as a positive already – does, of course, worry the seeker of complexity in me. It seems like the creators really are keen to add depth of strategy to this game, and certainly smaller games have done so to great effect. I just hope that rings true, and that they aren’t simply cloning MTG then hand-waving all of Lorcana‘s rules as “depth” simply because they’re borrowed from a more established franchise which has earned the right to call itself deep.

One worry that the game would be not just recycled mechanics but also low-quality reuse of artwork has already been thoroughly put to rest, thank Zeus.

But looming on the horizon like a certain hook-handed pirate’s ship is the threat of the collectible purchase model. Until very recently, I collected Transformers. But it was the snowballing stock availability which first irked me then entirely turned me away, a problem which has already plagued many companies but is now at all-time high (or is that low?). I’m not the first and won’t be the last to point out how Lorcana‘s rich combination of complex crunch and media conglomerate fluff makes it a perfect gateway game. But will the powerful backing of the House of Mouse result in a popularity which shuts off access for all but those who set up bots to monitor online releases, or buy out a brick and mortar store’s entire stock on the first day? The eye-watering prices the exclusive foil variants from D23 are already fetching on eBay seem to confirm the worst, and further embitter a collector like me who shares his hobby with hyena-like scalpers on a regular basis.

Speaking as a Brit, will we even see physical copies of Lorcana on this side of the pond at all? On the other side of the poison apple (I’m trying, okay, there are no famous Disney coins), I fell out of love with Keyforge because my local board game shops stopped stocking it altogether due to lack of sales, and I’d hate to see Lorcana to suffer a similar fate if the artwork appeals to some but the facts it’s a game turns them off. For all the meta commentary on Lorcana‘s gameplay itself, my one true dread is that I will simply not be able to play it at all. That being said, the game releases an entire year from now – I’m wishing upon a star that I’m proved wrong, because I’m truly looking forward to Lorcana.

Unmatched – Hero Analysis: Little Red Riding Hood

With the myriad possible clashes between characters literary, classical, cinematic and non-fictional alike, instead of focusing on box sets themselves I’ve decided from here on in I’ll be examining the individual hero matchups to be found in one my favourite tabletop systems to date: Restoration Games’ Unmatched.

If you need a refresh on this tantalisingly colourful and complex – not to mention nigh-infinitely expandable – skirmish game, I’ve previously reviewed the first set, Unmatched: Battle of Legends Volume 1. Since that first foray way back in 2019, I’ve procured the Robin Hood vs Bigfoot expansion, and been gifted both Jurassic Park: Raptors vs Ingen (still to be played) and Little Red Riding Hood vs Beowulf, the former hero of which will be the subject of this breakdown. First, a little about Red herself.

Little Red Riding Hood (Melee, 14 Health)

Move – 2

I wrote my university dissertation on crunch (in-game mechanics) versus fluff (narrative flair) in gaming, so I have an innate urge to seek areas where these disciplines meet, even where they might not be intentional. For me, I accepted Red’s sluggishness immediately as a reflection of both her small stature and the tentative exploration of the woods from her source fiction. This isn’t to say there aren’t other heroes with 2 movement (including even the mighty Achilles), but there’s no denying that against Move: 3 heroes, even that one space difference feel decidedly plodding. Red, therefore, paired with her melee, is not an area control hero.

However, as soon as I drew my starting hand of five, I was made quickly aware that Red’s bursts of speed lie in her deck itself. The [card name] scheme allows you to move three spaces and gain an action, essentially a free movement which gives the illusion of three actions a turn, but can really only be used to get into combat range rather than out of it, as you cannot, for instance, manoeuvre, attack, then use the scheme, as the additional action is only awarded after the card is played, and at that point you would have already exhausted your two actions for that turn. This almost imperceptible restriction made Red feel surprisingly aggressive, no doubt helped in part by such artwork as her scowling face, a knife clamped between her gritted teeth. But, speaking of her cards…

Ability – Resolve an effect on a card you play if the symbol next to the effect matches the symbol in your basket.

Sitting round the kitchen table, this was initially as daunting as anything. My first (unwarranted) worry was that Red would simply be a bland hero with a complex mechanic slapped on top to give the illusion of depth. I couldn’t have been more wrong. A feature I thought could only possibly limit strategy instead feels the most carefully crafted of all the heroes I’ve played so far, in no small part due to her ‘What have I got in my basket?’ wildcards. With the very solid foundation of being 4-damage attack/defence cards, these have no additional effect but bare all three symbols Red flits between: Knives, Wolf, and Rose. As her ability states, a majority of her cards enact secondary benefits if you (quite literally) play your cards right. Some even allow you to choose between three options, meaning there were times where even with a measly three cards in my hand I found I still had a variety of options.

And Red’s strategy only gets deeper, like the very woods through which she journeys. I’ve always said you learn the most about a particular hero from the opponents you play them against, and that couldn’t ring truer than this round. Against Medusa’s capacity to force discards, you not only have to contend with fewer options, crippling for a hero like Red who specifically relies on having multiple paths to success, but also the dilemma of which symbol will end up on top of your basket, and how this will or won’t benefit the other cards in your hand. While some may see this as a disadvantage, I view it as yet another avenue for Red to use an intended drawback as a welcome boon. It forced me to adapt and utilise her to the absolute best of my ability. I recall exasperatedly turning to my opponent and admitting, “My brain is sweating.” That, however is precisely the feeling I crave in tabletop gaming. The only hero who came close to matching (ha) this skill ceiling in the base set was Sinbad, and is the reason the hero I was least interested in playing rapidly became my favourite in that box.

Sidekick – The Huntsman (Ranged, 9 Health)

I’ll come clean and say that I don’t think, this match at least, that I’m yet proficient with the Huntsman. Utilising his ranged capability against a likewise ranged opponent (more on that in the next section) came with some difficulty, and at present I feel like piloting him correctly is just as complex an affair as getting to grips with Red’s deck, and I (as Mr Big B. Wolf did) underestimated him. Consequently, he was turned to stone about a third of the way into the game.

What few cards he did get to use were very effective, and his card which allows a more powerful attack if he is directly beside his opponent just adds to my opinion that this Hero and Sidekick duo have to be managed especially carefully for success. Overall, he did not immediately seem that special, and considering how much longer Red lasted against a ranged opponent without her protector by her side, the Huntsman seems a little more trouble than he’s worth – more a distant supporter than stalwart defender, which I supposed neatly reflects the his last-minute entrance in the source fiction!

The Match

• Matchup: Little Red Riding Hood vs Medusa
• Board: Sarpedon
• Victor: Medusa
• Time elapsed: 75 minutes (approx.)

Immediately, you might think that, for a game whose box boasts a snappy 20 minutes time-to-play, we must have done something wrong to draw the bloody combat out for more than triple that time. But I assure you, save for some turns where I had to take time to get to grips with the complex synergetic nature of Red’s deck, all turns were made in a timely fashion. It simply reflects the position of Unmatched as a game you can play (not unlike Circle the Wagons) either as snappily or considered as you would like to.

A slight deviation from the safe path in aid of picking some flowers: Roses, to be precise. It feels like a lot of Red’s best cards rely on the Knives symbol, but perhaps this is because you have to be quite aggressive to face Medusa and many knife cards are combative. Those which afford benefits for the Rose symbol, on the other hand, seemed the least useful outside Red’s ‘What Large Hands You Have’ card, a boomerang of sorts for chipping away damage then returning to your hand. The problem with this, however, seems to be that you’re basically reduced to either playing that card next, which your opponent is expecting, or using this as a bluff and playing something else. For such a versatile character, it sort of backs you into a strategic corner. But as for the rest of said strategy…

When it comes to Unmatched, I have always found that you learn the most about a hero by playing against them. So I will describe Red’s playstyle using a word my opponent did: “tricksy”. And indeed, like Alice from the base set, the best word to describe playing as and against Red is “tricksy”. She has many abilities that feel like ‘spells’ which are just plain fun to play, feeling magical.

I have also always liked player-characters or faction and strategies in games which deviate from the fundamentals. Take Keyforge. The fire-giant Brobnar faction relies on straight damage, and the demonic Dis specialise in screwing over your opponent through forced discards. I, however, prefer the more complex scientists of Logos, excelling in a number of hard-to-pull-off but deviously effective strategies like archiving cards: saving them for later in a pile that acts as almost a second hand. This means more to manage and less wiggle room if things go wrong, but that risk-reward has always appealed to me more than a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin offensive or defensive approach.

Red, then, overall does feel like a more polished Alice. She has a more obvious multiple-route strategy for success, and feels truly versatile, whereas Alice’s flexibility resulted in her feeling like she just didn’t excel at anything, and that she only had cheap teleport and heal cards to make up for this. Red’s strategy is woven together far more intricately, like the strands of a basket of tricks.

In fact, the game came down to one 50/50 decision in which I chose wrong (meaning I did not inflict the three bonus damage which would have defeated the gorgon menace) which is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing Medusa beaten in all my time with the game, and is the best evidence of Red’s viability I can provide.

For some final thoughts, the lack of ‘Feint’ cards in Red’s deck felt really appealing. Yes, she has cards which cancel the effects of her opponent’s, but these are scenario-specific and therefore feel earned. I didn’t remember ‘Feint’ (shared by all four heroes in the base set) existed until Medusa whipped out two in as many turns, ruining the combos I’d been painstakingly working up to, and believe me, Red takes careful planning to pull these off. Red’s lack of ‘Feints’ only further solidified an opinion that had been bubbling like a witch’s cauldron since I first played Unmatched: that the ‘Feint’ is a cheap, lazy and unnecessary card. Being the only one shared across different heroes in a game of relatively small 30-card decks, it only muddies strategy and never results in a satisfying move. If this set marks the start of Restoration phasing out ‘Feint’ entirely, colour me relieved, because I believe this will only enrich the heroes – and therefore the game as a whole – going forward.

Tabletop Review 10: Grimslingers (3rd Ed.)

Out of nowhere, I was given this game for Christmas by my girlfriend’s sister, a woman who somehow knows exactly the right present to get everyone around her. My jaw dropped as I opened the wrapping and saw the ‘Grimslingers’ title printed on the side of the box. I’ve wanted this game for literally years, and – seeing as it was the first campaign game I ever really encountered – even based my own tabletop game (currently in the late prototype stage) on it. That should all give you some indication as to my expectations for Grimslingers, and I’m certain that they didn’t help one bit.

In the Forgotten West, a post-apocalyptic world of witchcraft, cowboys and monsters, you play as a titular Grimslinger, a witch imbued with magical powers by the Iron Witch to take down the Witch King. Yes, there’s a lot of witchy business. Travelling through the Valley of Death, you will battle fearsome creatures to build up your spells and inventory, and brave twisters and traps to eventually face the Witch King and destroy him.

The Good:

I went into Grimslingers with the expectations detailed in the introduction. The artwork, which is what everyone talks about first (which should in turn immediately tell you something about the rest of the game) is spellbinding, and I would happily read a whole graphic novel series or watch an Appleseed Alpha-style animated film set in this world. I really hoped the storyline paired with the visuals would make me one of the people who can see through the gameplay and system issues and become immersed enough to enjoy it. Unfortunately, even with the dramatically improved 3rd Edition rulebook, that is far, far easier said than done.

But this isn’t the section for critiques; first, some good stuff. The ideas presented in the game (again, communicated greatly by the artwork) are what I can truly praise the most. My favourite aspect has got to be the levelling up, complete with access to higher hand limits, powerful upgrades and, best of all, signature spells. These are unique attacks and effects that you choose at each set interval, and that you alone can use. Where the basic six element spells (lightning, water, air, fire, earth and ice) are elegantly monochrome, these signature spells are kaleidoscopic in their beauty, and their effects are just as dramatic. From freezing your target or launching incoming damage back at your opponent, to absorbing an attack to heal yourself or even resurrecting yourself after death, these are tantalising to behold, and just make leveling up that much more satisfying, like you’re truly developing your skills.

The Archetype cards, acting almost as RPG-style classes, are a welcome addition, although I’m surprised there’s only six of them. I’d be interested to see if this was an attempt to make sure the Archetypes’ abilities stayed distinct, because there are 24 signature spells and a number of them could very easily be abilities instead. Either way, I often say that when the problem with an aspect is that there isn’t enough of it, that’s more compliment than criticism.

To be Improved:

Let’s start with the way I opened the above section – the components. As with a few games I own, even though what is printed ON the cards is an absolute treat, the quality itself is lacking. Thumbing through the 77-card-thick item deck (far too big to shuffle effectively without splitting it), I find myself constantly groaning as the cards stick together. It’s infuriating, and the near-300 cards included isn’t exactly a small amount to sleeve, and when you do they don’t fit in the damn box insert. This has led to the rather inelegant storage solution of three deck boxes with Grimslingers stickers (designed by Gibson himself) on the back of them. At least it’s more portable split up like this, but that’s all me.

Unlike most, I find the humour throughout (the second thing most people praise) pretty lacking. The grizzly, gruesome flavour should have been leaned into far more heavily, not played down with jokes on every card. Some wisecracks are fine, but when you’re facing a vicious Chupacabra and one of your characters has to impersonate a goat (seriously) it gets a bit tone-deaf. What’s worse is after we slogged through the character descriptions so we could choose which to play as, we fought one monster and were then instructed to read aloud our character descriptions to one another, as the characters regroup around a campfire after their first battle. Had we been told not to read them, we wouldn’t have, but like I already said, choosing a character on picture alone effectively means you have to do all the storytelling legwork yourself.

On the topic of underwhelming cards, the widely-varied character and anima (your plucky, robot companion) cards are purely cosmetic, a rather disappointing and uninspired fact. You can customise them slightly with the health and energy point trackers, printed with different quotes to give them some sort of personality besides a static illustration, but this really doesn’t do the job. I would have appreciated some character-specific upgrades, spells, items, upgrades or bonuses, but no joy. Besides, when the two most popular characters are a cat and a dog rather than any of the human characters (to the point where the expansion focuses solely on them, basically changing the entire premise of the game’s narrative) it says a lot.

When it comes to the enemies these characters will be facing, the ‘Hoarding’ Creature Modifier is completely busted. Even getting to draw six items between you instead of the standard one each is pretty appalling, let alone the TWELVE if you roll a six. You can fast become completely overpowered after even one of these Hoarding creatures is defeated, let alone two, and the rest of the campaign becomes a cakewalk.

And the campaign brings me onto the most problematic aspects of Grimslingers. This is a tabletop game; the problem with that is it should have been anything other than the medium that was chosen. Among other types of tabletop endeavours, a living card game a la Arkham Horror (to simultaneously compliment Grimslingers‘ low price bracket and solve its lack of replayability) or a booklet-driven RPG like D&D (to really embrace the lore and characters) would have been much better fits. Outside of this, even a graphic novel, animated film or series, or indie video game would have done it justice. But a standalone tabletop game with a single expansion – which reportedly creates just as many problems than it fixes – then no more support after that? Not a chance. What’s worse is the upcoming prequel/reboot – which I was actually incredibly excited for as a complete overhaul of the game’s systems – has been revealed to be 90% driven by an app. At this point, its practically a mediocre video game, and that’s deeply saddening to see. I understand a game is an absolutely huge undertaking, but a little more ambition never hurt anybody.

As combat, the thing that makes up the majority of said campaign,  can be so gruelling and repetitive, we’ve had to implement a house rule that if we roll the same encounter twice in a row we get to roll again. There’s only a one in six chance of rolling each, and fighting three Jackalopes in a row is so… Ugh. As a matter of fact, when you draw yet another Discarded Object or Used Bandages card instead of anything useful, or have all the effects of your spells cancelled by your foe’s move, or have to, yet again, look up the difference between ‘discard’ and ‘deactivate’, the overwhelming feeling is defeat; not in a thematic, battling-against-the-odds way, either. And defeat – rather than dazzling and deadly spells – is the feeling playing Grimslingers conjures up.

I desperately wanted to adore Grimslingers. The fact that I keep going back to this review and adding more and more as I think of it is a testament to how much there is to talk about in this little box. But then again, perhaps that’s its fundamental flaw. In reality, it is ultimately pretty hard to rate Grimslingers, as dejectedly considering the potential of what this game could have been actually makes what it is… well, even worse.

Overall: 4/10

[NB: I’d love to give Northern Territory a chance, but the problem is simply that there are plenty of amazing games out there for the same price. It’s not that it’s a lot of money; in fact, I feel like you get a lot of bang for your buck even with the complete lack of replay value – there’s certainly a lot in the box. No, it’s that after all I said in the introduction, you may still be wondering why I never purchased Grimslingers myself, and that’s simply due to hearing elsewhere, in one capacity or another, all of the things I’ve said in this review. Despite its much more solid rating on BoardGameGeek, I’d still be nervous to buy myself an expansion built on such a fragile game system – especially one which was supposed to receive continual support but was abandoned by its creator – but you never know. Watch this space… or I suppose I’ll just have to hope my girlfriend’s sister gets it for me next year!]

Tabletop Review 9: ‘Unmatched – Battle of Legends (Volume 1)’ by Restoration Games

I’m surprised I never played any of the Epic Duels titles that the game system for Unmatched was based on. Star Wars: Epic Duels and the similar Transformers Armada: Battle for Cybertron are based on my two favourite franchises of all time, so the only reason I can think they passed me by must simply have been an age thing. I was only a toddler at the time, so even though I was watching the media the games were based on, the systems themselves would have been far too complex.

But when Mondo revealed their collaboration with Restoration Games to… Well, restore, the Epic Duels name with public domain licenses, my ears pricked up. By this point I knew about the original games, and as a Creative Writing degree student the idea of literary characters facing off against one another (rather than Jedi or giant robots) was considerably tempting. Pair that with Oliver Barret’s gorgeous artwork and the potential for expansions, adding even more famous characters and creatures, I was hooked, and pre-ordered it on the spot.

Introduction: ‘Ethics of Warfare’ – Rules of Play

In Unmatched, you play as one of four characters from legend and literature, fighting to the death with the help of your sidekicks, supporting characters or creatures that buff your fighter.

Part I: ‘Good and Evil’ – Heroes

As the game really lets its four intriguing playable heroes do the heavy lifting, I’m going to analyse them all in depth, looking at their strategies, ease of use, thematic mechanics and overall fun factor. This way, I’ll hopefully indirectly highlight the positives and negatives of the game through discussing its gameplay core.

Alice: Alice, from what I’ve played (two games as, three games against), seems to be the Jill of All Trades. Some card draw, some health regeneration (an underestimated asset), teleporting, a manipulable ‘size’ ability that increases defence or attack a little, and some beefy damage from her sidekick to bring up the rear can all make Alice feel a bit cheap – to play against, at least – as she can do essentially everything the other heroes can do. She is, however, balanced by the fact she can’t do any of it better than them. Her artwork is also some of the prettiest in the game; the pink and blue just pop so nicely.

Favourite aspects – The Jabberwocky card names are lines from the poem. The ‘Eat Me’ and ‘Drink Me’ cards change Alice’s size, which is incredibly thematic.

Issues – The size dimorphism between the tiny blue counter of the Jabberwocky and Alice’s miniature is a bit off; I’m seriously looking into buying a Jabberwocky miniature to make it more realistic. Alice’s ability to teleport to any space with a particular card is a bit overpowered.

King Arthur: Too appalling to talk about here. See ‘Part IV’ for a more in-depth analysis.

Medusa: Statistically the most overpowered hero in the game, although against Bigfoot (more on him in the expansion review) it came down to the wire. She’s a strange hero to try to review because she just doesn’t have that much unique about her. I guess it’s just straight up unblockable damage to reflect foes being affected by her very presence, but only her ability and two cards out of her thirty actually do this, so it doesn’t really feel like it defines her. She has a little bit of card draw to reflect her archery prowess – like drawing arrows from a quiver – which is nicely thematic but sort of steals from Robin Hood’s flavour. Or, I guess he steals from her because he was created afterwards… But he leans into it far more effectively and he’s one of my favourites, so more on that in the expansion review. Medusa’s artwork has some gorgeous pistachio and almost high-vis green, and I love the mythological names of some of her cards.

Favourite aspects – ‘Hounds of Mighty Zeus’ harpy card name. Ability to make opponents discard cards, really feels like you’re slowly poisoning them. However, this can once again be negated by the ‘Feint’ card (see ‘Part III’).

Issues – Her ‘Gaze of Stone’ card seems overpowered in that it can deal 8 damage if you win the combat, but, like Excalibur is essentially useless because your opponent will almost always block it. Winning the combat requires you to beat your opponent with a 2, which is almost impossible. Therefore, it only works if your opponent literally has no cards in their hand, an eventuality which has happened probably twice across all the games of Unmatched we’ve played. More movement-oriented heroes also feel purpose-built to negate Medusa’s ability; I got to use it ONCE against Bigfoot in the whole match, so, once again, her most unique aspects are easily-avoided which makes her feel bland.

Sinbad: Time to talk about some more positives! Sinbad is immediately set apart from the other heroes by his suitably exotic orange and tan artwork, splashed with red and stone-blue. His Voyages ability affects him probably the most intricately of all the heroes. It seems overpowered (although that theme that keeps cropping up; Tom Vasel of ‘Dice Tower’ points out that in Unmatched every opponent you play against feels overpowered) but in reality utilising Sinbad’s ability effectively is really the only way you can win. This makes him the hero with the highest skill barrier to play, and I like that a lot. It makes victory with him feel that little bit more artful, like you’ve perfectly executed a dance routine.

Favourite aspects: I love that Sinbad, when you’re playing with or against him, acts as a ticking time bomb. Once he gets his voyages out he becomes a force to be reckoned with, and heaven forbid he gets his Voyage Home card, allowing him to return all Voyage cards to his hand and – incredibly thematically for a sailor – unleash waves of ever-increasing damage in a matter of turns.

Issues: He has probably the most unnecessary sidekick in the whole game, as he isn’t used for blocking, attacking or… anything, really. You could easily win with Sinbad without the Porter even being included.

But what’s great, is that these are completely subjective opinions. If you play the game yourself, you may love the struggle that comes with King Arthur, thematically reflecting his struggle from poor boy to king. You may hate Alice’s candy-coloured artwork, and prefer Arthur’s grim black and red to signify blood and steel. Whatever you prefer, you’ll have a hero that’s your favourite, and that actually works in the game’s favour; there are four in the box for a reason, after all!

Part II: ‘Field of Battle’ – Settings and Mechanics

Now, let’s talk about the rest of the game’s elements. Apart from the evocative setting (realising that we were going to be fighting on the deck of a ship docked beside a lush forest was a great moment), the boards themselves have very subtle qualities too; when you’re hidden behind the boxes on the deck or in the depths of the forest, you’re only in one zone. When you’re in range of the cannons, or on the edge of the deck where archers from the beach can mark you, you’re overlapping multiple zones. The only issue is that some boards dramatically work in certain heroes favour; Bigfoot thrives in the Yukon woodland, utilising his ability to such great effect that my girlfriend exceeded the hand limit in two turns.

On the other hand, this ceases to be a problem fairly quickly. The unique combinations offer 12 games (6 possible hero pairings on the double-sided board’s two different maps) if you only played unique combos and then put the game away forever. There are some of my favourite games in my collection that I haven’t even played that many times, due to size, complexity or time to play. With Unmatched‘s Robin Hood and Bigfoot expansion, that adds a whopping 9 more hero pairings, and another two maps. This totals a gigantic 60 unique games; (6 hero pairings in the base game plus 9 hero pairings with the addition of the expansion equals 15, times four different maps is 60). This is absolutely incredible, and doesn’t even take into account mirror matches or rematches. I will probably never have time to play all of the combinations available in this game, and that’s only with two of the sets; when you toss in the additional four planned sets (at the time of writing), the possibilities become essentially endless in terms of how many game nights you’ll realistically be able to have. Currently, if I played a different combination once a week it would take me over a year to play them all. Add the other teased sets (at the time of writing), and it would take me… FOURTEEN YEARS to play all the possible hero and map combinations. This is just absolutely insane.

The rulebook, like the artwork, is amazingly polished, organised and displayed; it took me about two seconds to find the right rule during the first few games that required referring back to it, because it was always in a large black box with a bright red heading to draw your eye. Having said that, it took us about ten minutes to learn the game, and then we were ready to go. My girlfriend went from ‘I don’t think I’m going to get this’ to nearly killing my fighter in just three turns.

I’m hoping Restoration really pushes the limit (without power creep, of course) on what the heroes can do that none of the others can; I’m already excited to see how the three raptors are going to work in the Jurassic Park set, where previously the rule is you have one hero and then one or more sidekicks. Some fan suggestions are already maddeningly exciting; a particular favourite of mine has to be the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, with the ability to place walls to block off routes and hem in your opponent. This manipulation of the environment can already be seen trickling in within the Jurassic Park set; this already contains one-way raptor pen tiles that the creator tells us we “won’t want to get stuck in!” and traps set by the In-Gen faction.

The time to play is really appealing, as you can just bust the game out for a quick game over a cup of tea. I love that a game with a box this size manages to offer such a quick experience, often faster even than the wallet-sized Circle the Wagons. This really reflects the ferocity of combat and plays even further into the theme. Some battles are far more involved, of course, but if you play your cards right (literally, as the lack of RNG from dice-rolling is a very welcome decision) you can win in a comparatively small number of turns.

Part III: ‘Collateral Damage’ – Critiques

The miniature quality is a little worse than advertised. There is not a huge amount of facial detailing, and the all-over wash has pooled in many areas, leaving some obscured and some (like Alice’s face in my copy) noticeably blank.

The sidekick counters become easily scratched from simply rubbing against each other or the board with the tiniest big of grit between them; why the designs were printed on both sides when one is face-down at all times is beyond me. It ups production costs for no reason and almost asks for one side (or both, as you don’t know which side has already been played with) to be worn down.

The health dials do not fit together snugly, meaning they spin around at the slightest knock. Only one in my set actually stays where you leave it, and only tentatively at that, which can be awful if you accidentally drop the dial and weren’t paying absolute attention to what value it was on and which you were moving it to.

The ‘Feint’ card is a big problem. Many others have said there really isn’t much else you could do to negate this, which is true, but that doesn’t stop it being incredibly annoying when, as already discussed, it makes the game deteriorate to just comparing numbers, which may as well just be rolling dice. It doesn’t crop up quite enough to be annoying, with only one in every ten cards played being a Feint, but it’s still incredibly frustrating when a move you weren’t even playing with the primary goal of damaging your opponent (as Feint’s defence value is only 1) still doesn’t go off. And when you play a Feint, it feels too cheap, just acting as a straight up ‘nope’ that you don’t have to earn or play at a strategically correct time.

And above all, the imbalance caused by one particular hero in a game where it’s not supposed to matter which fighter you choose is pretty disheartening. I’m still glad Restoration strove for uniqueness rather than balance, as they could have just given multiple heroes the same stats and abilities and then let luck of the draw decide. But it’s time we took a look at the only glaring problem with the game: King Arthur.

Part IV: ‘The Excaliphant in the Room’ – King Arthur

[NB: If you feel like skipping this section, I understand it’s a bit heavy – no, seriously, it’s about as long as the rest of this review put together – although I do feel it offers some interesting discussion on balancing that can be applied to tabletop gaming in general. Just know that I believe Arthur was neither designed nor playtested effectively, and that I consider the base game to come with three heroes, not four. Pretty damning, eh? Don’t worry, it gets better by my final verdict!]

In short, Arthur is a really undesirable choice unless you’re happy knowing that you’re most likely going to lose. It’s at the point where it doesn’t even feel worth TRYING to win in order to challenge yourself. You’d have to be playing against a child in order to secure victory.

Arthur’s only strengths, really, are his health, the highest in the game (although only three higher than Sinbad’s) a little bit of board control with his ranged sidekick (although this is far outshone by Medusa and her three, 3-movement sidekicks who can be resurrected), and the fact that every attack he plays COULD be Excalibur, so you’re more inclined to block all of them as his adversary. However, once Excalibur has been played it’s plain sailing, really, as there’s only one in the deck. Furthermore, as there’s only one copy, when I’m fighting Arthur I know my opponent is going to want to make the most out of that card, so they will probably boost it. So even when they do play Excalibur, they’ll tip me off that that’s what they’re doing, and I’ll KNOW to try and counter it. Basically, it can all be boiled down to the fact that Arthur’s deck has been designed very counter-productively against his hero ability. There is a group of cards shared by the heroes, though they have different artwork for each. One of these is ‘Momentous Shift’, which is a 3-damage card, attacking or defending, and can be used by anybody. Already, it is one of the most solid cards in the game. Not incredible, not terrible, but very solid. But then you add the fact that if you started your turn in a different space, it becomes a 5-value card instead. Now, it’s a great card. So when you’re playing as Arthur and discarding a card to boost another attack – let’s say Excalibur for argument’s sake – why would you choose Momentous Shift if it’s boost value is only 1? We’ve already established that your opponent is probably going to block this attack because they see you boosting it, so a single point of damage isn’t going to make a scrap of different, and you’d be literally throwing away a great card to do so. A waste, in other words.

As an experiment, take Sinbad’s deck. There is ONE card that has a boost value above 1, and it’s just a 2. This is precisely because Sinbad doesn’t really need to boost his movement, so hasn’t been granted the ability to; he moves 2 plus the number of Voyage cards already in his discard pile (there are – the titular – seven voyages of Sinbad in the deck in total). His deck has been adjusted accordingly to fit his fighting style. Now look at Arthur. We’ve already discovered that some of his best cards are only 1-value boosts, and will most likely be blocked anyway. He has a lot of 2-value boosts, sure, but this isn’t that much more than 1, and once again we already know your opponent will most likely block if they see you boosting your attack. No, worst of all, Arthur’s 3-value boost cards are the two copies of ‘Noble Sacrifice’, a card that can be boosted twice (but then your opponent knows exactly which card you’re playing, which is an odd design on its own), and Excalibur itself. You would never throw away Excalibur as a mere boost card, as it is almost the sole reason Arthur’s deck exists; once you’ve played it, you’d better have killed your opponent with it, because then you’re out of amazing cards and your opponent has nothing left to fear. For starters, these cards should have all been 4-value boosts, and the copies of Momentous Shift should have been, too. “But this makes Momentous Shift an even more powerful card,” I hear you cry. Well, yes, but… If faced with the options of boosting an attack for 4, which your opponent can very feasibly and (how many times must I say it) mostly likely WILL be blocking, but you’ll be throwing away a very versatile card that would at minimum be 3 points and at maximum be 5 points of damage if used as an attack… Which are you going to choose? I’d have quite a hard time deciding, and that’s perfect. It becomes a tactical DECISION, instead of a no-brainer as it currently is. Right now, there’s no way you’d use a Momentous Shift to boost another attack as Arthur. You’d be throwing away a potential 5 to use it as a 1 instead. If you were throwing away a 5 to use it as a 4 that could very well be the killing blow if your opponent blocks badly, or even fails to block at all, it would be a much better and more strategic choice, and actually quite a difficult one to make.

I know the win-loss ratios are something the designers may not have been able to foresee, but in actual fact I’m wondering how many playtest sessions they had, because that’s essentially what the general public are now doing in this BoardGameGeek thread, and boy, have they found results. The other fighters are all, paradoxically, incredibly well-balanced, leaving me to wonder if Arthur had… Less playtesting? The linked graph shows that Arthur has lost nearly TRIPLE the number of games that he’s won, far dwarfing the other heroes shortcomings. Regardless, the game is released now, so we can only speculate.

So, how would I improve the once and future king? First off, increase his survivability. Give him 20 hit points instead of 18. It seems like a huge number, but it’s a small tweak, and killing him would only take an extra turn if that. Then, give him an extra copy of Excalibur. I know, I know, but we’ve already established it will most likely be blocked, especially if you boost it, and it has no other bonus effects. It’s a lot of damage, but it’s not an incredible card, and it should be, so the solution (without tweaking the card itself) is to have two of it. Besides, playing against a character like Sinbad who has a lot of card draw almost guarantees they will have a card available to block some if not most of the damage dealt by the sword in the stone; and Bigfoot has two copies of a card identical to Excalibur (sure, without the Lady in the Lake to retrieve them, so we recently played a game where both of them were on the bottom of the deck, but I digress). Then, just as other characters’ boost values have been adjusted accordingly, make Arthur’s Momentous Shift boost values 4, maybe even make the Excaliburs 4, too; you’re still incredibly unlikely to discard an Excalibur as a boost card, and even if you have both copies in your hand at once, this is a very unlikely scenario and you’ll most likely have played one of them as soon as you could, further negating the risk of a massive 10-damage hit. In fact, I’m sure the VERY REASON there is only one copy of Excalibur is to negate this precise situation. But I think, even though these seem like massive changes, Arthur’s win-loss ratio speaks for itself. He is simply too weak, and in a game where the other heroes are balanced perfectly (Medusa is debatable, having won well over twice the number of games she’s lost, but I beat her with Alice the very first time I played the game), there is literally almost no point in playing him, so his very inclusion is negated. The first box set comes with three heroes in my mind, not four.

Conclusion: ‘To the Victor Go the Spoils’

Despite my criticisms, the game still has three more heroes and all the upcoming expansions to look forward to. I’m pretty sure it would be a miracle if I liked all the heroes, and would have made me dangerously fanatical about the game. The rating for this core set is definitely helped by not only the support promised by the ability to expand the game so seamlessly (another plus) but also by the expansion I already own, which, as you’ll see in my review, greatly improves on at least a few of the issues that came up with this box.

Above all – and at the risk of waxing lyrical – Unmatched is simply the game I’ve been searching for for since I started this hobby. The game that recently-reviewed Grimslingers should have been, with its dazzling thematic flare and potential for a continuous narrative, had it not suddenly lost all support from its developer after one expansion. The game that Zombicide could have been, did it not come lumped with its hefty price tag and overflowing mass of Kickstarter-ethos-fuelled miniatures. Unmatched is the game I needed, with a base game that would be a solid 7/10 by itself even WITHOUT the ever-growing repertoire of affordable, optional expansions that only further enhance the and refresh the experience over and over again. Unmatched truly proves it has the potential to be a game that keeps on giving.

Overall: 8/10

Crushing the opposition!

(Table)Top Ten Games: 2019

[DISCLAIMER: This is not a list of the top ten games that came out IN 2019. This is me ranking my collection to create an ever-changing list – to be updated at set intervals – of the games which, regardless of year created, popularity, or hype, I will always be able to whole-heartedly recommend to my readers. Enjoy!]

Over the last few months, I’ve been cooking up something a little different. After seeing lots of board game rankings on both BoardGameGeek and across many of the tabletop reviewers I follow on YouTube, I think it’s about time I did the same with my own collection. So here begins what will most likely be an annual segment (perhaps with some updates around the middle of the year if my collection grows or any standout new games emerge that blow everything else out of the water): the (Table)Top Ten.

Many of these have already been reviewed on this site – in which case a link will be provided – and some of them have even changed rank dramatically after rigorously putting them through their paces, revealing some hidden flaws I may have previously overlooked. This list has taken a while because after roughly narrowing down my collection to the ten best, I made a special effort to ensure all the games were played with a number of different groups, and they’ve been on rotation since around September now. I can now confidently make these judgements on a number of different factors, including but not limited to ease of access, time to play, financial investment, how much of the game is based on chance, and plain old fun. Let’s get started with Number 10.

10. Zombies!!! (2nd Ed. + Zombie Zoo Expansion) by Twilight Creations Inc.

That’s right, a game almost entirely based on luck, with possibly the most amateur flavour-text I’ve yet read in a tabletop game (an honour it has held since the day I bought it back in 2010) has made it to the top ten. The equipment cards are drawn blindly, movement is based on D6 rolls, whether a zombie will eat your brain is based on D6 rolls, the map itself is drawn blindly as you play (and essentially placed randomly for all players except the person doing the placing), the zombie placement is basically random (except, again, for the person whose turn it is). But… It’s still surprisingly fun, and that’s no doubt in part owed to this being my first experience with a ‘proper’ tabletop game. The random map that builds itself up from one tile into a full apocalyptic city by the end of the game is still the best board system I’ve ever seen, and the expansions add – along with some solid new miniatures – a brilliant amount of variety as well as even more broken combos to mess with your friends. The problem of most cards screwing over whoever is winning is far more fun if you’re all drinking, but even without that a two-player game is a blast whenever the dice rolls aren’t hideously against you.

9. King Down by Saar Shai

Review can be found here!

King Down, despite its controversial production which I was thankfully not victim to, fast rose to the number nine spot, even with around 20 games in my collection. The inadequacy of the rulebook and wording is flooring, it really is, but as long as you have someone at the table who’s played it before and can simplify tough sentences and symbols, the game fast reveals itself to be a brilliant, tightly-designed tactical puzzle. The sequence of play is specifically designed so that your options are limited at the start, allowing your pawns to move out of the way and reveal your more powerful pieces, at which point you will now have drawn said units to your hand. It opens up gradually and before players know it their decisions become increasingly difficult puzzles. But beware: you are bound to need some house rules while playing, most likely related to some truly broken spell cards that can ruin the game in one turn. By simply not including these, the game is greatly improved. Whether you’ll even manage to get your hands on a copy is another matter; mine was bought from a charity shop for just £7.

8. Warhammer 40K: Know No Fear by Games Workshop

Some of you may not be aware that large chunks of my days (sometimes weeks) of free time at university last year were mainly populated by one activity: gluing and painting tiny plastic space soldiers. That’s right, from this time last year to around June when the sun came out and I finally went outside, I got bitten by the bug and sunk a not-inconsiderable amount of time and money into the hobby known as miniature wargaming. After purchasing First Strike – a very affordable and truly introductory box set – I was hooked. After countless years in my childhood gazing at the professionally-painted models in the windows of my local toy shop, the towering mechs and writhing space-demons fundamentally shaping my interests as a person, I was finally able to play out that fantasy. And… It’s really fun. The tactics involved, the bolstering of your forces, the whole flavour of the game, is something I’m hard pressed to compare to anything else. The only downside, of course, is colossal, and has already been mentioned. I’ve got three words for you: Time and money.

7. Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire by Games Workshop

Yep, another of these damn things. Thankfully, the Warhammer: Underworlds series is contained to individual boxes rather than pack after pack of individual squads, soldiers and vehicles. Unfortunately, it’s not set in the universe of sci-fi horrors that is Warhammer 40K; rather Age of Sigmar, its fantasy equivalent. I think it’d be at least a space higher on this list if it was space marines instead of stormguard, but I digress. Underworlds is like an ultra-tactical game of chess played with fewer pieces on a hex board. Cards allow you to play victory conditions, equipment and upgrades, or powerful one-time abilities to outwit your opponent. On top of this, placing your fighters so that they can bolster one another through close proximity is incredibly important. Both the ‘time’ and ‘money’ problems from the number 8 spot are heavily mitigated here, but man does its complexity make up for what it lacks in price tag. I haven’t yet played a game of this where we’ve gotten every single rule right, and that can be the difference between win or lose. But with individual games so lightning-paced, it’s hard to really criticise that; you can easily set it up all over again for a nice, gory rematch.

6. Adventure Time: Card Wars by Cryptozoic Entertainment

Review can be found here!

Ooo! Get it? Because… Adventure Time is set in the land of ‘Ooo’. Anyway… I wasn’t as surprised as you may be to find this game so high on my list. From the get-go, the price and complexity are low enough and the theme and fun-factor high enough that this game is a little gem. My partner especially enjoys this one, and that’s a big plus. The fact that – while explaining its qualities to friends – you can compare it to so many other similar games in a positive light is really refreshing. “It’s a lot like Magic: The Gathering but don’t worry; it’s nowhere near as daunting or complex.” “It’s a lot like Keyforge, but without the money-sucking purchase model.” That really sums up the experience I had with it; it’s just more accessible in every way than other games like it. The Finn and Jake starter set is a little unbalanced, although that was actually a blessing in disguise because the more powerful Jake deck meant my girlfriend could actually compete when we were learning the game together. All you need is the additional genderbent starter set with Fionna and Cake and you have a bunch of cards you can build your deck with. My girlfriend and I now have really viable blue plains and cornfield decks that are as balanced as they come, and its satisfying because we made them ourselves. The BIG drawback here, and the reason Card Wars isn’t even higher on my list, is the lack of support. The game is to all intents and purposes completely dead, and its a real, real shame.

5. Deep Sea Adventure by Oink Games

Review can be found here!

Here we get into the big boys: the (Table)Top Five. And ironically, this is by far the smallest big boy of them all. Coming in a box only a little larger in length and width than a standard playing card, there is a massive amount of fun contained here. The push your luck element is something we are STILL yet to master after dozens of playthroughs, resulting in a pleasant puzzle of reading your opponents, but without any of the straight up bluffing, hidden traitor, or deduction mechanics that I so detest. Deep Sea Adventure‘s theme is also incredibly evocative for such a small, simple game. The tiles getting darker as you go deeper into the ocean is genius, and really leaves you gasping for air by the time the game reaches its conclusion and you’re only steps away from the bastion of the submarine, where you can cash in your treasure. This makes it, if anything, just as fun when you’re losing, which makes for an excellent party game.

4. Keyforge by Fantasy Flight Games

Review can be found here!

Remember when I said Adventure Time: Card Wars had a better purchase model than Keyforge? Yeah… That does not necessarily an overall BETTER game make. And Keyforge, once my girlfriend got more and more into tabletop, has become our new Card Wars. But, paradoxically, this just adds points to the latter! Without an entry game like Card Wars, my girlfriend wouldn’t understand half of the stuff that goes on in Keyforge – so credit where credit is due. Now, I could harp on about the sales structure of Keyforge, the blind-bag decks that you can’t alter so if you get a crap one you’re stuck with it and have to spend even more money… But, honestly, if you give my full review a look, you’ll see that your deck isn’t what matters. It’s the one you’re playing against. If you BOTH have a crap deck, it suddenly makes them both… Very good decks? It’s confusing, just like Keyforge‘s ‘Unique Deck Game’ status, and it’s brilliant.

3. Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game (2.0) by Fantasy Flight Games

FFG have done it again, this time setting their S-Foils to attack position and blasting into the (Table)Top Three. I always had Star Wars action figures as a kid. But besides a Slave I that I treasured, the ships were far too big and expensive. LEGO sets are paradoxically even more pricey. So when the appealingly affordable (subject to your completionist tendencies) X-Wing lets you act out any number of the famous dogfights of the sci-fi saga in miniature, and make up near-countless showdowns of your own, it’s hard not to jump for joy. What’s more, the gorgeously-illustrated upgrade and pilot cards ensure that the designated 3-foot square playing area is effortlessly transformed into the spacescape of your choice, complete with all the cheering triumphs and bitter defeats that come with the characters and craft you’ve selected. The flavour is captivating; I often retell the moment I won my first game as Darth Vader against Luke Skywalker, when I threw my hands up to cheer then immediately realised I’d blown up R2-D2 in the process.

2. Unmatched: Battle of Legends (+ Robin Hood vs Bigfoot Expansion) by Mondo and Restoration Games

Review can be found here!

Almost every aspect of Unmatched can be complimented. The artwork? Spellbinding, nothing short of miniature works of art on every card. The speed? I can often finish rounds before I finish my cup of tea (drinking leisurely, of course). The variety? Each and every hero is unique, supported by a thematically brilliant deck and ability that makes them all distinct and a blast to play. The support? Expansions were planned from the game’s announcement, and it only looks to keep on growing. The price? Well, that’s a tougher one. £34.99 for the core set, and £19.99 for each of the two-hero, 60-card expansions (to put it in perspective, my recently-reviewed Grimslingers comes with 280 cards for the same price, and a Magic: The Gathering deckbuilder’s toolkit comes with 285 for five pounds less!). The amount of money for entry can ramp up pretty quickly, but I’m not trying to deter you; we are at the number 2 spot on this list, after all. While the amount you get for your money isn’t too high (4 x 30-card decks in the core set, four miniatures – compare that to the 31 plastic space-soldiers included in Know No Fear – a board and some tokens), you only need take a look at Kickstarter disappointments to discover the amount of ‘stuff’ isn’t everything. And what Unmatched lacks in mountains of ‘bits’, it by far makes up for in sheer enjoyment.

1. Circle the Wagons by Button Shy Studios

Review can be found here!

If you asked me a thousand times, on the spot, to name my favourite game, I would never have thought I’d say Circle the Wagons. But after looking at all the games on my shelf as I compared them to one another, swapping them around on the list and examining them from all angles and aspects… here we are! And honestly, now I see the game in this light, I’m actually not in the least bit shocked. Every time we play I’m consistently surprised that Button Shy managed to produce such a complex, snappy, delightful and infinitely replayable game with just 18 (count ’em) cards. It blows my mind, it really does, and after showing this list to every single person I play tabletop games with, there was not a single one who disagreed with this holding the top spot. What’s even more amazing is that – just going on this list alone – my heart clearly lies in bigger, far more complex and strategic affairs like X-Wing and Underworlds. And that just makes the fact that I’d rather play this, a game which fits in my back pocket, over any of the others, any day, even more impressive.

Conclusion

So there you have it! My (Table)Top Ten games of 2019. This was a really fun process and greatly refined my tabletop collection in my mind, as well as my enjoyment of the hobby on the whole. Now choosing a game to play is harder in some ways, because I know which games we’ll have inherently more ‘fun’ with, but far easier in others; I can now quickly find, using the criteria mentioned in the introduction, which game is best for the situation and the mood both myself and the people I’m playing with are in. Is it a dark and stormy night, requiring an ominous, complex affair of investigators hunting down Lovecraftian horrors? Or is it a sunny afternoon with a few beers (and a lot of table space) in which case we’d really rather build a zombie-infested city and laugh as our hapless opponents attempt to slice, shoot and scrape their way through it? Now I know, and it just makes me even more excited to see what 2020 will bring to try and topple some of the towering (and not so towering) giants on this list.

Some contenders are the expansions for Keyforge and X-Wing, which may bump their parent games up in the rankings, recently-funded Kickstarters Blume (a tile-laying, flower-planting puzzle unlike anything else in my collection) and Orchard (a surprisingly complex-looking tile-laying  solitaire puzzle based on just NINE cards – half that of number one spot Circle the Wagons!), along with many more. I. Can’t. Wait.

Tabletop Review 8 – ‘King Down’ by Saar Shai

I mentioned in my recent review of Darwin’s Choice that, before ever backing a single game, I had heard various whispers of controversies surrounding the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. I put this down to the ravings of die-hard hobbyists on Reddit falsely claiming Kickstarter took attention away from their friendly local gaming stores or ‘FLGSs’; if my ‘friendly’ local store is anything to go by, these stores themselves are the culprit for any lack of sales. But this was all before I found a bizarre shoebox in a nearby charity shop, bearing an emblem, a splatter of blood and the words King Down, that flipped my whole outlook on the matter on its head.

Introduction + Rules of Play

This game is an enigma. Around half of those who backed it never received their copy, if the nearly 3000 comments on the game’s campaign page are anything to go by, yet trying to find out anything about the controversy over the internet turns up nothing save a few one-sentence Reddit posts from the time the game was released. Attempting to play the game myself, I was immediately fascinated and infuriated.

The game plays like a hybrid of chess for 2-4 players with new pieces and moderate deck-builder mechanics. The aim of the game is to be the first player to score 8 Victory Points. You score these by taking enemy pieces and having units in the Capital, the four tiles in the centre of the board that act as a ‘King of The Hill’ sub-objective. You play cards from your hand (either ‘Units’ which allow you to move pieces, or ‘Spells’ which add effects to your units), but must manage a risk-reward system while doing so; you have to discard certain numbers of cards to perform any actions.

[Disclaimer: As soon as I found out about King Down‘s backstory and saw how little coverage it received, it got me excited to write this review where normally I would have shrugged it off as an unknown and unremarkable title. That means this is going to be more of a discussion of the game – where there appears to be none anywhere else – so it’ll be structured a little differently to my normal tabletop reviews.]

Part I: Opening Gambit – Initial Thoughts

The idea of this game is one that appealed to me as soon as I opened the box. Chess, which I was never any good at, given a fresh lick of paint, some fun miniatures and some new mechanics that should be fun and also act as a means of putting players on a level playing field. The artwork on the cards is nothing astonishing for the most part, but it’s a clean visual style and more than a few offer really standout images.

The component quality itself is a little lower than I would like. The main board, miniatures and player boards are all bent in some way. I know I bought a used copy, but everything was still sealed so it seems the owner didn’t play it even once, plus others online have cited this issue. The cards also don’t shuffle nicely and basically get stuck together if you try to draw a new one from your deck. Frequently people I played with growled as they tried to prise some of the cards apart; “I hate these cards!” they snap. Says it all.

The miniatures, too, are not something I would personally complain about. They could certainly be better printed, but – and maybe I’m swayed by the mere £7 I paid for this game – they’re not abysmal, and actually have a surprising amount of detail and charm for the size they are. Units are easily distinguishable from one another with unique sizes and silhouettes, and units with more than one copy even have different poses, plus the kings of each of the four elements (earth, air, fire and ice) are completely different. The problems is there are not enough of any of the four colours to play a whole chess game, despite the back of the board being printed with the standard black and white tiles sans-Capital squares. A Spirit and Shadows expansion, with a black and a white faction containing enough pieces to use them both in the base game or play actual chess, apparently ceased to exist after it was advertised as an additional pledge on the Kickstarter. No one on the internet seems to own one, as Shai never shipped them. Yikes.

Part II: Spell It Out – Issues and Errors

I am in a position in which I’ve never found myself, in that regardless of my feelings towards King Down I cannot give the game a higher rating than the one at the end of this review because of the impenetrable rulebook. Even though a godsend of a rules explanation video cropped up while I was searching, without a rulebook you can’t even play a game. It’s as simple as that. King Down‘s is without a doubt the most grossly unedited, messily-organised, poorly-written, shockingly ugly rule booklet I have ever come across in my entire life. It should serve as an example for absolutely everything you should NOT do if creating your own game. The text is tiny and has practically microscopic sub-sections on top of that, as well as being nearly entirely black so the only emphasis on important terms is caps-lock (although all this does UNIT is mean many sentences have UNIT the word ‘UNIT’ in them UNIT four or five times to the point it loses all meaning).

I can’t even begin to explain the sheer number of errors in the rulebook, so I’ll just outline the ones that affect that game the worst. First off, there is nothing stating whether a unit can either move or take on its turn or if it can do both, or whether or not it can do any of these things more than once. After a single pawn rampaged across the entire board and took three pieces including a king, we decided that we should probably instigate a house rule that pieces act once, as they do in chess. But again, the issue is the rulebook is of no help whatsoever with scenarios like this.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the glossary and index – as well as not being ordered alphabetically – at the end of the rulebook serve as evidence for how poorly worded the Spell cards are, and it’s amazing that the creator didn’t just put the clarifications from the index on the cards themselves and kill two birds with one stone take two pawns with one rook. While I carefully explained the myriad icons and +1, -2, and +2 modifiers on a Spell card, my partner threw her hands up and cried “Then why doesn’t it say what you just said on the damn card?” I opened my mouth to reply, but answer came there none; she was absolutely right. Even the most understandable cards, like Sky Lift, which lets you swap the unit you have in play with any other unit in the game (paying the relevant tolls), are mind-bogglingly worded. In the case of Sky Lift it’s “+1 Swap this unit with another.” As a gamer, I understand it is saying you gain one higher than zero (i.e. plus one) option to swap a unit with another. But for anyone else – and, in all fairness, for me, too – the +1 is meaningless, leaving players understanding the English text but having no idea what the number means. At the risk of running through every single card in the game like this, just know that anywhere it says “+1” could have been replaced with “You may” and completely ironed out this whole issue with only the slightest change. That it would have been so easy to rectify makes it all the more frustrating.

There’s a Knight unit card which, once played, lets you control your other friendly Knight unit without paying the move toll. But as you select units randomly at the start of the game to add some asymmetry, if you get this knight without the other, its ability is rendered useless. We had to house-rule this and many other similar scenarios.

Part III: “King Me” – Positives and Strategy

I don’t know if this will make much sense after everything I’ve just said, but even though these are all objective issues with the game, they act more as a series of near-impassable barriers to entry rather than letting the game down on the whole. Once (nay, if) you actually manage to get past them, there’s a pretty fun game nestled somewhere under all the unreadable garbage.

The new units don’t seem all that unique when they pretty much all move one or two space in any direction. In actual fact, one can take without paying the toll, another can control other friendly units, and another still – the archer – has to take from range, which opens up some deceptively high-level tactics as you must get her into position first. But this is all hidden beneath the baffling card text and symbols, so to the untrained eye these new units appear to be almost identical in ability, meaning many players will avoid using them altogether and cheat themselves out of winning a few points.

The discarding of cards initially completely baffled me. If I only have three cards in my hand to start the game with, and I only draw two at the end of my turn, it must be mathematically impossible to take enemy pieces. The ‘play toll’ is one card, the ‘move toll’ is one card, and the ‘take toll’ is two cards; not even including the unit card I have to put down to even control that piece, that adds up to four cards already, and I only have three! Well, the answer to this is a little more subtle. At the start of the game, your back row of more powerful pieces is almost entirely hemmed in by your pawns. You start with two pawn units in your hand, and another randomly drawn card. This last card will probably be a spell that doesn’t apply yet, or a unit you can’t use yet because it’s blocked in, so you can spend either of these cards to put the pawn into play. But another clever move by the designer is to assign different abilities to all four pawn unit cards in your deck. They will always reduce the cost of moving other units or themselves, take enemy units for free, allow you to draw a card as soon as they’re played, or even be free to play in the first place. This means that even though your options seem limited at the start, this is an artificial lock intentionally placed on the game so that you’re not immediately given a number of choices you cannot perform yet due to the positioning of pieces. That makes getting past this point all the more satisfying.

You always return one card to your hand each turn, discarding the rest, but you have so few at the start that you just recycle the same pawn over and over again, seemingly stuck. However, this almost always results in an incredibly satisfying trickle-down effect where whoever best utilises their pawns on the first few turns will then – instead of playing a pawn unit again as expected – suddenly move their knight and perform a far more complex manoeuvre. We didn’t notice the first time we played, but eventually you do seem to abruptly find enough cards in your hand to make moves like this. This is that same trickle-down effect, brought about because you immediately draw a card not only whenever you take an enemy unit, but also when a friendly unit is taken by another player. Without even realising it’s happening, all players suddenly burst out of the starting gate as one, now boasting combinations of cards that allow them to pull off more and more intricate strategies. This continues until a victor is declared, so that by the final turn you’re moving a bishop into the Capital by leaping it over other pieces because it’s being controlled by your Cog unit, blocking the enemy’s advance with a pawn protected by the Shield spell and sniping the enemy’s king with your archer in one fell swoop. It’s a snowball effect that every player is caught up in, and it’s all down to the limited access you start the game with that gradually opens up right under your (and your opponents’) noses.

Additionally, I enjoy how much the simple positioning of your pieces is (as in chess) actually a tactical decision in and of itself. We were initially relying on scoring Victory Points, where in reality making sure your pieces land out of harm’s way is still essential to success. Naturally, there’s a lower chance your opponent will even be able move their bishop to take your queen, as they must have that unit card in their hand. You’re free to take that risk. But if they do play a bishop on their next turn, and you’ve just sacrificed one of your most powerful pieces, it’s the sort of mistake that can genuinely be the difference between winning and losing the game. We’ll have to play more to properly grasp this side of things, as I feel we’ve only just scratched the surface while we were distracted by the cloying rules. But I think – on top of the cardplay in the above paragraphs – that it adds a depth of strategy to the game which makes every move a carefully-calculated decision.

Conclusion: Checkmate

Overall: 6/10

Here I find myself in a similar situation to the one I did with Odin’s Ravens. Many of the criticisms levelled at King Down‘s quality are somewhat dulled by the fact I picked it up at a price ludicrously lower than its RRP. It’s a tough debate to have on whether the price of a game effects its inherent positive or negative qualities, and I still get a bad taste in my mouth bringing up the money side of things. If I’d paid the full £65 for this game, I’d be launching a petition to sue the creator for fraud, absolutely. But when I lost no more than £7 on the thing, an amount approaching the realms of what many would consider pocket change, even with all my issues I’m still objectively getting much more than I paid for. Realistically, in fact, the game would have to be made of paper and chewing gum for me to consider it not worth the price I paid for it. So how can I in all sincerity give it a lower rating?

It must be said, though, that the fact I am only willing to overlook its flaws because I found it for a far lower price absolutely cannot excuse it when it comes to those who paid in full. Subjectively, I’ve found a game with good quality components which is difficult to learn, near-impossible to teach to amateur players, but actually a lot of fun with the right crowd, and all for an amount of money that wouldn’t upset me for more than a day or two if I literally lost it in the street. Objectively, though, this whole experience has made me a lot more wary of creators on Kickstarter and shown me just how much a few poorly-executed aspects can let a whole game down.