After giving Range Wars (see my previous review) a try, I decided that Diskwars must not be that bad. When I plunked down the money for those disks I had seen there was a version of Legend of the Five Rings Diskwars too. I love L5R. I was sucked in through the RPG, got hooked on the CCG, and IMHO is one of the best IPs in the USA and should find a buyer ASAP. (This portion of the review brought to you by the American Acronym Association)
Sadly, I wish I had found another game worthy of the name.
So Everybody Dies Then?
The Diskwars game is set during the tumultuous time period after one of the Seven Great Clans tries to seize the throne of the Empire. Each of the six remaining clans has a corresponding starter army you can buy and this version of Diskwars has starters and boosters, something I wish the Deadlands one had. Most of the disk recycle artwork and characters from Legend of the Five Rings. You'll find Hida Yakamo and Kakita Toshimoko. While I understand where the draw is, I wished they could have come up with new characters and story. This story has been told by the card game and the role-playing game. The world of Rokugan is so rich that there an be plenty of other stories told. Going over well-tread ground is not a good way to get me to get into a new game.
You start the game by setting up the scenario and building armies to a set point. Unlike Range Wars, all your armies are on the table from the get-go. Also, there aren't any specifics for terrain. The scenarios say to use extra stronghold disks as terrain but I was hoping they would actually have terrain disks that affected gameplay like Range Wars did.
Gameplay itself was unremarkable. Each disk has a defensive/offensive rating, some did missle fire, and wizards can attach spells. I've read the rules for the orginal Diskwars and made the first realization that I would not like this product. Rather than rework the rules to fit the elements of L5R, it's basically Diskwars with L5R pictures on the disks. Coming from the L5R end of things, this is not good. In three seperate games, they all ended with both players disks completely wiped out. Everyone seems to die. While this can happen in the card game..it's more rare than here.
Dr. Duel-little
The two elements in the game that really push this into a negative review are missle combat and the iajutsu duel. Missle combat is handled as such: you take the arrows counters, put them on a flat surface, hold them over the target, and tip. Whichever ones land on the target hit and the ones that miss don't. This seems to require a bit of skill from the player. I always seemed to hit more often than my opponent did. I understand that Diskwars is a miniatures-lite game but this seemed a bit unfair. The thing that really got me was that iajutsu duels were run the same way. This is completely not how they are suposed to work. In L5R, an iajustu duel is a duel between two samurai that try to draw and kill each other on the same strike. Both the card game and the RPG do an excellent job of simulating the tense stand-off between the duelists. It's a quick-draw sword duel and they are always fun and require strategy to win. In diskwars, they are a random way to kill more pieces.
The Bottom Line
L5R Diskwars was the game I was afraid Range Wars was going to be. Everything Range Wars did right, this game did wrong. I would recommend any other of the L5R games as a good starting off point before this one. It just doesn't do a good job of recreating everything that is good about the world of Rokugan.
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