The game is good. By good, I mean GOOD, on that level that my wife wants to regularly play and paint minis. She's a non-gamer (or at least a gamer that's not very good at games) and it was easy enough for her to follow, understand, and even get kind of good at, yet it can be tactically challenging for both sides depending on the players' skill levels involved.
I guess I'll start with the bad stuff... the rules are missing a few clarifications or examples, but easy enough to "common sense" your way through until Sodapop gets an official FAQ up.(which should be soon, because people were complaining about a lack of assembly instructions and they were on Cmon yesterday
) I honestly haven't played the game enough to have things like that regularly come up though. Aside from that, I could see the game getting stale after a bit in that way that all stand alone boardgames do since your only given so many options with the pieces you have, but we've already seen some concept sketches on beastsofwar.com for things that haven't been released yet that should be coming down the pipe soon to keep the game fresh.
A simple run-down of rules is this...
- game uses 3 types of custom dice. ranging form little hits, to lots of hits on die faces. Attacker rolls attack dice, defender rolls armor dice, if attacker's hits exceed defender's hits the defender takes wounds equal to the difference.
- all the dice have either a heart, a potion, or a heart+potion face on them. if these are rolled and you still manage to score a wound on the monster, the hero gets health , a potion, or both. Consul player counts these as blank faces.
- Consul player can spawn 4 points of minions from every spawner every tun. He can only activate 4 points of minions total every turn, where as all the heroes go every turn. (otherwise heroes get massively outnumbered quick)
- the game uses an "adventure tracker" board, which mostly just counts wounds inflicted by both sides and awards treasure to heroes and mini-bosses/bosses to the consul player to keep the game moving and stop one side form just building up to take advantage of the other.
- potions are a resource for effects other than just healing.
Throw that all on top of about 8 or 9 types of special attacks detailed either on the hero/minion's card or in the rulebook if it's an AOE, and you pretty much have the whole game.Most AOEs have a shape that they effect on the board which is the only reason I bring it up.
