It's a mix of Starcraft, Twilight Imperium, Runebound and a dash of Race For The Galaxy with a nice combat resolution system without dice. Players are aiming to own 6 'dragon runes', achieved through controlling areas (the hexes), through rewards for quests, or through turning in various kinds of tokens (e.g. 8 influence for 1 rune). So you're recruiting units, moving them around to take over areas, building up your strength to keep control of the areas etc etc. In addition, there's a secondary system where each player controls heroes that can move around the board attempting hidden quests for bonus rewards with dueling between the heroes etc.
Rounds consist of 4 seasons, with players basically choosing one action per season after a mix of random events & seasonal events occur. After 4 seasons, it's a new year. One key seasonal event is that at the start of Winter, the unit limit per hex is greatly reduced (from 8 down to 3 or 4 depending on your situation) keeping players from 'turtling' too much - you need to spread out your forces to keep them on the board.
There are three resource types - food, trees, iron - and there's a nice dial system where as you gain control of resources, your options for recruitment & extra cards/influence increase. Each player's dials are different depending on their character, for example my Undead allowed me to cheaply generate waves of skeleton archers from my cheap to grab trees.
What made it stand out for me is the diceless combat system & the order system. Each piece has a symbol at its base - triangle, circle, square, hex - and each player's units have a rank based on their type. To resolve combat against a player (or neutral), you effectively "line up" your units based on their rank, then go down line by line drawing 'fate cards' for each unit in the row that have 4 quadrants (one for each base type) & an effect for each quadrant - "magic", "damage", "route" or "nothing". You resolve the cards for that row, the defender does the same, doing damage where needed. Move to the next row & repeat. It sounds complicated, it's really easy to get the hang of. It's fun, it's fast, it's neat. I likes.
Now, the order system is a mix of Warrior Kings & Race for the galaxy. Each player has a set of identical order cards ranked 1 to 8. At the start of each season, players choose one secretly which are revealed simultaneously. The player with the lowest ranked card goes first. Unlike RftG, you only execute your card's powers. If your card is the highest ranked card you've played, there's a secondary bonus you can choose to execute (e.g. move again, gain bonus tokens etc). This encourages a natural sequence to the 4 seasons - move, recruit more units, build/develop - to maximise secondary benefits (which are very useful) but to get ahead, I suspect you'll need to jump the sequence sometimes. Really easy to pick up.
There's a whole bunch more to this game that we really didn't get to grips with - the whole hero/quest system, duels, titles, training heroes, strongholds, developments to your strongholds, etc etc. Typical FFG big box game. It'll take a few plays to really grasp. We ran out of time as none of us had played it before so the setup & learning took far longer than it should. Hopefully, I'll get to play a 'real' game of it again soon.
0 comments:
Post a Comment