Any time I get my hands on a new Paolo Mori game I get excited, so I was thrilled when Osprey Games offered me a copy of Battalion: War of the Ancients to take a look at. It’s a game which masquerades as a wargame, has all the theme and trappings of a war game, but plays more like an asymmetric duelling card game. It sets out to do something very particular, and it does it brilliantly. Battalion is great fun, if not without a rough edge or two.

They say stay in your lane, boy

The first thing you’ll notice is there’s no board. A board game review site reviewing a game without a board?! The very idea… The lack of board is one of its biggest strengths, as the game is modular and only takes up as much space as you want it to. As long as you’ve got enough space to have three sectors (five in a four-player game), you’re good.

All you’ve got to worry about is a small player board, a few cards, some dice, and a whole lot of tiles. The tiles are a funny shape, they remind me of those tickets you used to get from the deli counter in a supermarket, but wider. Younger readers, ask your parents. Each tile represents something in your chosen empire’s army. A tile is known as a rank, and when you jigsaw them together – which, by the way, is way more satisfying a thing to do than it should be – they become a unit. Units fight against the opponent’s units, lining up in the aforementioned sectors.

If you’re at all familiar with MOBA games like DOTA or LoL, the concept of lanes won’t be alien to you. Using a two-player game of Battalion as an example, you have central, left and right lanes to deploy your units, and choosing which to deploy where is a huge part of the game. Not just because of the tactical nuance of the match-ups you want to make, but also because if you start a round uncontested in the central sector, you instantly win.

Instant win conditions – there’s something you don’t see in your games every day. Let me tell you, it really adds to the already spicy levels of nonsense going on in this game. Nonsense in the very best sense of the word too. How many other games in your collection let you utter phrases like “Okay, I’m sending in my elephants over here on the right”? See, wonderful nonsense in a world of beige farming and plastic zombies.

Bumping heads

Combat is pleasingly clean and easy in Battalion. No consulting of tables or calculating odds as per a more hardcore war game. Instead, you roll three D8 dice. 8s are guaranteed hits, then you assign any other dice to units to at least match the value printed on their tile for long- or close-range damage. You can grab extra dice to swing the odds in your favour by certain attributes of some ranks, discarding tactics cards, or managing to overlap (i.e. flank) an opposing enemy.

I love the combat system. A game like Battalion is aimed at drawing in more casual players, and if Paolo & Francesco had used something more convoluted it just wouldn’t have worked as well as it does. Being able to point at a tile and tell a new player “You need to roll at least that number to hit me” is a real boon. The trick comes in choosing which units you use, and when. You see, issuing orders – such as assaulting the enemy – comes at a cost. You have a stock of command tokens which you need to add to units to do stuff. If you don’t have enough, you can’t do the thing. When you’re in that situation you can Rally which brings them back to your board and flips Disorder command tokens back to their Order side.

Why would you have tokens on their Disorder side? Well, when you take hits you can offset some of the damage by flipping an available command token to the Disorder side and placing it on the damaged unit. This is where some of the most interesting decision-making comes in the game. Tokens are in short supply. If they’re marking Disorder on a unit, you can’t spend them to give orders. So what’s best – lose ranks in battle and save the tokens to make your own attacks, or save the rank from death at the expense of being able to do less? Battalion has you making these kinds of decisions constantly, which is great in a game which might only last half an hour.

The tactics cards I mentioned before are another great addition. You start each game with a slim deck of them and they offer all kinds of bonuses when you play them in battle. When you Rally though, you’re forced to draw another tactics card into your hand. This would be no big deal in most games, but in Battalion it’s the opposite. If you’re forced to draw a card and you don’t have any left, it’s another instant game-over situation. When you consider shorter setups only give you six cards to start with, you start to get a grasp of how vital they are.

Collateral damage

As much as I really enjoy Battalion, there are a couple of things which niggle me. First of all, are the Traits. Rank tiles have traits printed on them. Keywords which have different effects at different stages of the game. When I first played the game I was a little disheartened when I saw all the different verbs & adjectives printed on the right-hand side of the tiles. I remember learning Too Many Bones (review here) for the first time and just drowning in keywords. Having to refer back to the rulebook or a player aid every single time you want to plan a turn is horrible.

In fairness to Battalion, the traits aren’t as bad as the mental overhead of the keywords in Chip Theory’s games. There are only 14 different traits listed in the rulebook, but what annoys me about them is that very few of them are obvious just by reading the word. The number of times I found myself re-reading the descriptions for Discipline or Steadfast is ridiculous. I’m sure if you played it frequently it might not be quite as big an issue, but it still bothered me.

That all pales beside the issue I have with the command tokens though. They look cool, and they’re screen-printed on both sides. But for some reason though, and I really can’t fathom it, both sides look similar. Really similar. Look at the example below. Bear in mind that this is much more zoomed-in than your view over a table. The top token is on the Disorder side, while the one below is on the Order side. Picture this but with loads of tokens on loads of neighbouring ranks.

It makes it difficult – for me at least – to tell which command tokens I’ll get back when I Rally. Remember, when rallying you get tokens on the Order side back to spend, while those on the Disorder side get flipped instead. I just don’t understand why one side didn’t have a big cross on it, or even just left blank. It might sound like me being picky for the sake of it, but Battalion is almost entirely driven by the command tokens at your disposal, so an at-a-glance read of the game state is really important, and is unfortunately made more cumbersome because of the way they’re printed.

Final thoughts

Despite my pet peeve with the command token printing, I really like Battalion. I lead a busy life and have to squeeze a lot of different games into my free time, so I haven’t played this as much as someone who loves lighter war games might. I really like it though. The four ancient empires in the box (Roman Republic, Carthage, Han, Greco-Batrian) have some similarities in the units they let you command, but where they’re asymmetric the differences are stark and varied.

Playing casually to learn means you’ll probably turn to the preset scenarios in the rulebook which define the units, numbers of cards and tokens, and guide you gently into the system. Don’t get fooled into thinking this is the ‘lite’ way to play just because it’s using presets. Playing with them is fantastic. If you feel the need to mix things up, however, you can play mustered battles. This is more akin to drafting with pre-built decks in a card duelling game, and is great because you can agree between you the size and length of the game before you start.

I’m still not sure how the design for the command tokens ever got through playtesting, and while it’s not enough to make me not recommend the game, I can easily see people using Sharpies to mark one side to make it more obvious. Is Battalion for everyone? No, I don’t think so. Some people will bounce hard off the theme. While a lot of people are happy to play pretty much anything, ancient warring empires doesn’t do it for everyone, and this isn’t the game to change that. The same is true of hardcore wargames. Battalion won’t satisfy the hex-and-counter or 4X yearnings of those people. But for anyone looking for a quick, very clever, satisfying lane battler with tons of space for strategy and tactics, Battalion: War of the Ancients is superb.

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Battalion: War of the Ancients (2024)

Design: Paolo Mori, Francesco Sirocchi
Publisher: Osprey Games
Art: Roland Macdonald
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 20-60 mins

The post Battalion: War Of The Ancients Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Poleis station

‘Polis’ means city in greek, and there are lots of these poleis on the map of Greece where the game takes place. It’s a war game, but not one with a ton of cardboard chits, or worrying about attack and defence values. In fact, it looks and feels more like a Euro game. Lots of pushing wooden cubes, resource tracks, and trading – it’s a bit of a Euro-war hybrid. It tells the story of the struggle between Athens and Sparta over the course of nearly 80 years. Athens with its naval presence, and Sparta with its growing army of Hoplites.

Flood a province with enough Hoplites and you can lay siege to any Polis. There’s nothing complicated when it comes to sieges, it’s just a case of rolling a D4 and hoping the result is at most the number of cubes you’ve got there. There is another, sneakier way to claim a Polis, and that’s by sending your Proxenos along. Bribe opponents with silver along the way, then throw more money at the population of the city, and you can incite a civil war. The upshot is the Polis falls under your control, and means you can demand tribune in the future, to collect resources.

One of the things I really like about Polis is how some of the areas behave differently to others. Take Korinthos for example. It sits in the middle of the map, but uniquely has access to the seas on the East and West. It makes for a really handy cut-through, and controlling it feels like a really powerful position. A couple of the Poleis are in neutral territory, and the only way to control and demand tribute is by using your Proxenoi. Touches like this lend a little bit of something to think about, to a game which has a fixed, rigid setup.

Prestige

As Polis is a war game of sorts, you’d expect to battle with your opponent, and you’d be right to expect it. When any region contains many cubes of both colours, there’s a battle, and battles in Polis are pretty cool. Each side takes turns attacking and defending, and the combat is handled with a deck of battle cards. It works nicely, and maintains that layer of abstraction between controlling map and the nitty-gritty of war. It’s a game of control, not combat. The victor in a battle, and anyone who takes a Polis by any means, can expect precious Prestige points in reward.

Prestige is at the core of Polis, as so many of the potential actions you can take are fuelled by it. If you want to move galleys or Hoplites, lay siege, or collect tribune from the masses, it all all costs prestige. Prestige is in short supply, and it creates a game of careful planning. If you’re used to games which throw resources at you like confetti at a wedding, you’re in for a shock. Balancing the few things you own is tricky, and it results in a very unforgiving game.

You can trade the things you have for precious silver and wheat, but access to the foreign markets where trade happens is controlled by whoever controls the seas. This is where building and moving Galleys comes into play, and it adds a really clever, really interesting mechanism into the mix. It’s a real challenge when you’re trying to build your own army and navy, while simultaneously tracking what the other player is doing, and also trying to make sure you end the round with enough wheat and silver. Ending a round with wheat is the only way to feed your people, and to allow the population to grow. More population means more people to train up into soldiers and sailors.

Familiarity breeds contempt?

It’s not unusual for a war game to have a strict, static setup routine. A place for everything, and everything in its place – that sort of thing. Most modern Euro games are the opposite, with a large amount of variance in setup, and often asymmetric playstyles. It could be quite jarring to a Euro gamer coming to Polis to adapt to the rigidity in the game. The only variety in the way the game plays out is by way of a couple of things. Namely, the event cards (of which you’ll see three over the course of a game), and the projects available to build and add to relevant Poleis.

These changes are only very small, however, and it’s not as if the projects change anything about how the game plays. Each player has the same eleven actions available to them for the entireity of the game. There’ll be some people reading this now who have started shaking their heads, assuming it leads to boring games where the first few moves are always the same. And while it’s true that some of the early game is led by the situation you start in, what seems like a weakness is actually a part of the game’s greatest strength.

Balance.

Fran Diaz has created a game with almost perfect balance. I’m sure that having a second edition certainly helps, but there’s no denying how finely tuned Polis’ engine is. Both factions are identical, other than their starting positions on the map, and that one has silver to start, while the other has wheat. It’s a game of strategy, control, action and reaction.

Final thoughts

Polis, in its second edition, is the result of taking a diamond in the rough and cutting it to shape. The polish is evident throughout, most noticeably in the 8-fold, double-layer main board. I’ve played plenty of games with those tantalising sockets for cubes on player boards, but on the main board itself?! Opulent madness.

Now, as much as I think Polis is a brilliant piece of game design, I’m going to do that reviewer cop-out thing and use the dreaded line “But it’s not for everybody.” In my first game, I played along with the rulebook to learn. I got to the end-of-round part only to realise that I had no wheat to feed or grow my population. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had no prestige, which is an instant loss. Polis is unforgiving. There are no stabilisers, and the only way you’ll learn to play is to ride the bike and fall off a few times.

Polis rewards repeated play. It’s best in the collection of someone who has a regular opponent for two-player games, someone who likes to butt heads on the same field of battle time and again. The actions are elegant, the rules are simple, and they very quickly disappear into the background, leaving the game centre stage. The player aids are more than enough to ensure you’ll leave the rulebook in the box. If you want something with more chaos sewn into its area-control finery, have a look at something like Scythe. If you favour asymmetry and historical battles, then a COIN game like Gandhi or All Bridges Burning is a better option. As an easy-to-learn deep, two-player conflict though, Polis is hard to beat.

Review copy kindly provided by Kosmos Games UK. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

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Polis (2020)

Designer: Fran Diaz
Publisher: Devir
Art: Enrique Corominas
Players: 2
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Polis Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If the phrase ‘war game’ conjures up images of acres of beige and green hexes, with tiny tank tiles on them, you’re not alone. It’s an image the scene has a hard time shaking. What Leder Games and designer Cole Wehrle have done with Root though, is to boil-down the mechanisms and the scale of the conflict game, and dress it up in costumes straight out of a cartoon, leaving us with a sweet, potent concentrate. We’re looking at the Ribena of war games here.

Kyle Ferrin’s artwork is absolutely gorgeous throughout. Just like one of my other favourite board game artists, The Mico, you can spot his work a mile off. His style is so unique, so full of charm, and brings so much colour and life to a genre of game traditionally dominated with small drawings of vehicles and murky green and brown landscapes.

If you go down to the woods today

The aim of Root is to rule the woods. Four different animal factions are vying for the title, and between them the cats, birds, rabbits and raccoon (just the one) use their unique abilities to try to claim the 30 VPs needed to win. Each turn is split into three phases – Birdsong, Daylight, and Evening – and each faction has different actions available to them in each phase. Cardplay is central to the game, and you’ll use your cards to gather support, craft items, and aid you during the inevitable fights.

On first glance, the woodland board of Root looks confusing. The first time you see it you’re likely to see a few blue birds in one corner, a lone white raccoon somewhere on the board, and orange cats swarming into just about every clearing. If you’re coming to Root accustomed to the balanced way just about every other board game starts, it can seem daunting. Leder Games recognise this though, and there’s an absolutely brilliant touch in the box.

The Walking Through Root booklet plonks four players into the middle of a game in progress. All four factions are represented, and each player has a preset hand of cards. Players pass the booklet around in turn, doing what it tells them to, and reading out-loud an explanation of why they’re doing it. After a couple of turns each the scenario ends, and everyone around the table has a far better understanding of what’s going on, how it’s happening, and why. It’s a really clever interactive tutorial, and I love it.

Fly-wheels and ping-pong balls

Like the Vast games before it, Root is very asymmetrical. I can’t stress that enough; there are no two factions in Root that play anything like one another. The Marquise de Cat needs to spread her reach, building and harvesting the forest’s resources for her war machine. The Eyrie Dynasty forms an ever-increasing government to build roosts, but risks collapse from poor planning. The Woodland Alliance try to gain sympathy for their cause, slowly gaining momentum. And then we have the Vagabond, acting as claws-for-hire, completing tasks for, and jumping in to aid, the other factions in combat, before disappearing again.

Some factions slowly chip away at the VPs, pinging one or two, here and there with each turn. Others take time to wind up to speed, like a fly-wheel, scoring big later in the game.. Even if it looks like one person is taking an unassailable lead in the early game, the clever balance means that games tend to end up closer than you expect after the first few rounds. The feeling of a race to score the deciding points is so tense, and so much fun.

It means that learning to play Root is no easy task. Once you’ve learned how to play as one of the factions, you’ve got to start again when you try a new one. Sure, you’ll have an idea how they work from your previous games, but you still need to find out how to get that engine running smoothly. For this reason, Root is a game best played with a regular group. A seasoned player versus a newbie is always going to result in the latter being trampled into the mud. You’ll end up holding their hand through their turns, and making sharp intakes of breath as they make a poor move. Frustrating for you, and potentially annoying for the new player.

If you’re looking to add a new player to your Root games, I recommend they pick up the excellent digital version of the game. They can learn the game and practice against the AI before they ever sit down at a table with you. Trust me when I say it’ll make the experience much more fun for everyone involved.

A ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?

If you’ve never played Root, and you’ve made it this far in the review, you’d be forgiven if the biggest concern on your mind is about balance. Asymmetry is a tricky thing to create balance in, but Leder Games have a lot of experience in it, with the two Vast games that came before. Between the physical and digital versions of Root, I’ve racked up a lot of games now, and it doesn’t seem to matter how good you get with one faction, someone will always come up with a way to trip you up. If you’re playing with less than four players, some combinations of factions just don’t really work well, but the rule book explains this and suggests which to use.

I shudder to think how many games must have been played during the playtesting of Root. It paid dividends though, because the balance is brilliant. Because the factions are so different, learning to play one is like learning to play a new game, and it helps keep Root feeling fresh. It’s a great way of evening things up if you find one player is too dominant with a faction they’ve used a hundred times. Just get them to play as a different one.

What if you do grow bored of the same factions, or get tired of the same map? Luckily for you, Root has plenty of ways to spice things up if the lustre is starting to fade.

Expansions

The Riverfolk Expansion (2018)

The Riverfolk Expansion adds in two new factions to play: The Riverfolk (otters) and The Lizard Cult (um, lizards). It also throws in another Vagabond, some co-op scenarios, and the first example of an automa / bot to play against on your own. There are some new variants to play for when you’re playing as the Vagabond, but maybe the nicest thing this expansion does is to change the player count. It takes Root from 2-4 players up to 1-6, which is great if your regular group is more than four.

I really like the two new factions, they both feel like a breath of fresh air. The otters are my favourites to play as. It gets really interesting as players are paying you for services with their warriors, which you can then spend to perform your actions. It’s a proper little brain burn, deciding what to do, and when.

The Clockwork Expansion (2020)

The Clockwork expansion doesn’t offer any new factions, but it goes one better than The Riverfolk Expansion and its bot player. In fact, it goes three better, giving you bot versions of all of the base factions to play against.

Obviously, this is fantastic news if you play a lot of games solo. Rather than playing a two-player game against an automa opponent, you can play a complete four-player game against three bots. There’s a little overhead in doing this, as you need to run through the list of priorities for each rival faction on each part of their turns, but with the new player boards included in the box, they’re not too cumbersome to run. I’ve certainly played with more complicated bot opponents in other games.

The other really nice thing it does is to allow a couple of human players to team up and take on two bots. In this game mode you race to score 30 VPs each before any bot does the same. Co-op play is surprisingly rewarding in a game designed around direct conflict between players. The Clockwork Expansion is a really good investment if you want to practice building your strategies, but don’t have enough people to play with every time.

The Underworld Expansion (2020)

Two new factions, and two new maps in this one. The Underworld Expansion adds in The Underground Duchy (moles), and the Corvid Conspiracy (crows, not germs). The moles are great fun to play with. Being able to tunnel all over the map and just spring up, makes them feel like dangerous opponents. The way they use their sway to influence the game is really nice too. I like the crows too, with their plots. You even get to plant bombs and wipe out all resistance in a clearing. Once again though, as powerful as that sounds, the balance is really good.

Maybe the star of this box, however, is the new game board. There’s now a lake and a mountain map, each with their own unique features. The lake adds a… well… it’s a lake. This puts a huge divide in the middle of the map, but the addition of a Ferry means that any player using it can move to any lake-adjacent spot on the board. With movement being the key to strategy in Root, it adds a really interesting new dimension. The mountain map adds a new mechanism, with blocked tunnels. Players can spend cards to clear tunnels, opening up new ways to move around the board. There’s also a new Keep piece added to a clearing, and the faction controlling the keep gains a VP at the end of their turn. It gives the game a real King of the Hill feel.

Final thoughts

There are some people who never manage to get on with Root. Something about the game just turns them off completely. I’m not one of them, I absolutely love Root. I spend so much of my time playing non-conflict Euro games, that the change of pace, and styling of Root is a welcome change. There is so much variety afforded by the different factions and the deck of cards you draw from, and with the expansions (there’s another due to land soon), there are a ton of ways to keep the game fresh, if you get addicted to it.

While the balance in the game is there (check the errata on BGG for each game too, some may have rules tweaks from your printing), the biggest problem comes with the player skill imbalance that I mentioned further up the review. It’s very hard to break into an established Root group if you’ve never played before. Buying the digital version really does help, but if you’re bringing a newbie to the table, be prepared for a baby steps game or two.

When it comes to the expansions, I recommend The Underground Expansion first, then Riverfolk. Only get the Clockwork Expansion if you intend to play solo, or with low player counts, but want all factions on the map.

If you’re after the woodland feel and the cute animal characters, but don’t want the conflict, look instead at Everdell. But if you fancy something with a bit more bite, or you’re on the fence when it comes to whether you’d enjoy a war game or not, get Root. The game design is genius, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

Image credits: ¹ Ross @ More Games Please

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I bought Root and the Clockwork Expansion with my own pennies. The Riverfolk Expansion and The Underground Expansion were kindly provided by Leder Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Root (2018)

Designer: Cole Wehrle
Publisher: Leder Games
Art: Kyle Ferrin
Players: 2-4 (1-6 with expansion)
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Root Review (+ expansions) appeared first on Punchboard.

The Tu’x Rebellion is a competitive, yet co-operative game, set in a fantasy world. It combines Euro-like resource management, and outright war-gaming, in a grand scale campaign.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been talking to the game’s creator – Matt Hanna of Maniple Games – and we met online to play the game on Tabletop Simulator. Those who know me, know that I’m an out-and-out Euro game fan. I’ve never been into war games, but I’ve often looked at offerings from publishers like GMT with curiosity. Root is my biggest exposure to the genre. Knowing me, I fear that if I started down that rabbit hole, I’d slip a long, long way down it. So let’s call me war-game-curious. The reason for this preamble is because my views and opinions are as a Euro gamer, so bear that in mind.

Taking the bait

The first thing that made me more than a little bit curious about The Tu’x Rebellion is the resource management and tableau-building. I love tableau-building, it’s one of my favourite aspects of a good game, so it hooked me straight in. The continual improvement and snowballing of resources and abilities is right there in this game too, and it feels good to turn cards the right way up (buildings not built yet are turned upside-down) and know that in the following rounds you’ve got more goodies heading your way. But what to do with all this wood, stone, metal and money?

Yeah, you guessed it – you make stuff! Except instead of making statues, fisheries, or farming supplies, like I’m used to, you’re raising an army. Armies, as you’ve probably guessed, are used in the battles which make up the core of The Tu’x Rebellion. When a battle happens, that’s when the really interesting stuff happens, and it makes up the lion’s share of the playtime when the game’s on the table.

Battle lines

Whoever instigates the battle can invite other players to the battle, and each can bring their own units to face off against the various beasts and enemies. This really reminds me of Cosmic Encounter, the classic space game of making alliances then stabbing your friend in the back to win. Right at the top of the review I mentioned that The Tu’x Rebellion is simultaneously a co-operative and competitive game, and that’s where this comes into play. Winning battles earns you Favor points, and Favor points are what you need to win the game. But, if between all of you, you lose two battles, it’s game over. You lose, losers.

So now you’re asking yourself the question – who do you invite to battle? That guy sitting opposite you has really strong regiments, but lots of Favor. Bringing him in will certainly help win the battle, but push him closer to victory. Then again, maybe you bring him in under the guise of getting help, but secretly hoping his units get sufficiently weakened to make him less powerful. Alternatively you could be talking to the others around the table, explaining that this guy is running away with it, and that maybe you should all work together to share the Favor and reel him in. And you’re definitely trustworthy and won’t double-cross them, right? Right??

This is where the beauty of The Tu’x Rebellion lies. Not in the clever use of cards for units – which makes setup and tear-down quick, and also makes it easy to see attack and defence stats on the table – but in the meta. This game is all about the discussions around the table, it’s about appearing to work together, working towards the same goal, all the while plotting your own dark machinations.

Campaign trail

The Tu’x Rebellion is a long game, and it’s a game which really needs a regular group of people to get the most out of it. Unless you’ve got a full day to play, you’ll be playing an hour or two, then ‘saving’ and putting it away for another day, like any other big campaign game. I mean, it’s not a campaign game per sé, it feels more like something like Twilight Imperium. Unlike Twilight Imperium however, the co-operative aspect of the game means if one person loses, you all lose, so no-one is sat around like a lemon, with nothing to do.

Matt’s created a really nice card organiser system, which means you can pick up everything you need from the box and have it in front of you and ready to play in minutes. This is not your dad’s wargame, it doesn’t have hundreds of chits to sort and place, or a big board to populate. In fact, there’s no board at all. The game is made up of a plethora of cards and some pads of sheets. The centre of the table is where you create the screen, body and flanks of your armies. Once they’re in place it reminds me of American Football (I’m a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan), with two lines ready to crash into one another while the ranged and flanking units get ready to do their things.

One of the things I particularly like is that Tu’x isn’t too hardcore with its rules when it comes to battle. There’s no battlefield measurements, no fog of war, no line of sight. The rules about who can attack who are really simple, and it keeps play ticking along quickly. Battles still take a while to resolve, and a lot of consideration, but it’s quicker than it otherwise would have been.

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed my time with The Tu’x Rebellion. I get nervous when I read-up about games, and start counting mechanisms which leave me wondering how they’ll integrate. A wargame that also throws in resource management and tableau-building could have fallen flat on its face, leaving it more like The Homer than a magical Liger. I’m really happy to say that this game is the latter. The Draw and Build phases really feel like a traditional Euro, and the battles feel something like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, but with buckets of strategy thrown over them.

War-gamers might read the above and consider it sacrilegious, the way I’ve dumbed-down the war aspects, but as I said right at the top, I come at this as a dyed-in-the-wool Euro gamer. When you bear that in mind, remember that I really enjoyed The Tu’x Rebellion. Even without all of the final art, and with that clunky TTS interface making it feel like trying to play a board game with a crane machine, I can tell that this has the potential to be a very good game.

I can’t talk about its longevity or balance, because I simply haven’t played it enough yet. There certainly seems to be longevity baked-in with the various factions available, and their unique units and play styles. I’ve talked to Matt and watched his videos, and it’s very obvious that a lot of time and effort has been put into the game, so I’d be extremely surprised if the game suffers from any imbalance. If you’re looking for a simple, play-in-an-hour game, this isn’t it. But if you’re looking for something more towards the epic end of the scale, with multiple plays with a group of regular friends, I could see this finding a spot in your collection.

The Tu’x Rebellion will go live on Kickstarter in the coming months. For more information please visit their Facebook page or head over to their Discord server and say hi.

The Tu’x Rebellion (2021)

Designer: Matt Hanna
Publisher: Maniple Games
Art: Various
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 600-1000 minutes (120-180 minute sessions)

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