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Dart Wars is a peculiar war game designed by Pascal Reymond and distributed in the United States by Asmodee Editions.
Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 1-3 hours
The Components
Dart Wars is a wargame played with magnetic darts:
The Board: A high-quality magnetized vinyl board of the world. Each continent is broken up into two or four territories, and there are various islands as well. There's also a small bullseye to the south. It's attractive and colorful.
The Darts: 6 plastic darts with magnetic tips which are thrown at the board. Now these darts are both the heart of the game and somewhat troubling. First, I should admit that I've never played with magnetic darts before. I'm used to real darts with sharp points and cork boards. In comparison the magnetic darts in this package fail badly. Unless you throw them straight on, they have a tendency to "walk" down the map. After a full game I was getting better at preventing this, but I had to throw them a lot harder than normal darts, and I still found them pretty frustrating, as did the other three players.
Maybe if you've got a lot of experience playing with magnetic darts, you won't have any problem with these, but for me the difference between metal darts and real darts was the difference between a so-so game and what could have been a great game.
Troop Magnets: A set of 75 small magnets in the 5 player colors which symbolize troops on the board. They're highly magnetic and won't move unless you hit them straight on with a dart.
Overall, the components are great quality and my only concern is the ease of use of the magnetic darts, but that is enough to limit the game to an average "3" out of "5" for Style due to their importance. If you've used magnetic darts before and you feel particularly comfortable with them, you can probably raise up that score to "4" or "5" for your personal use.
The Gameplay
Dart Wars is a simple wargame where you try and wipe out your opponents.
Setup: Players each throw a dart, taking the land that they hit as their starting space. They then place three troops on that homeland.
Throwing Darts: Now, on his turn, a player will throw three darts at the board, which will determine his actions that turn.
Moving. If a dart lands on a territory adjacent to a space where the player has troops and not occupied by any enemies, he may move one troop into the space. If this is a space that has never been visited before by anyone, he immediately gains one new troop. A troop can keep moving with additional dart throws if it didn't cause a new troop creation.
This territory may be land or sea; in addition there's a special type of light blue sea which lets a player move from the land on one side to the land on the other side as if they were adjacent (provided that the player lands a dart in the far land territory, of course).
Fighting. If a dart lands on a territory adjacent to a space where teh player has troops and occuped by enemies, he must move one troop into the space.
Fighting Battles: After a player's three actions, combat now occurs in any territories that were hit by darts where there are enemy troops. (This could be a space that the player newly moved troops into or where he already had troops.) This combat is determined by throwing darts at the bullseye.
Each player throws a dart, and the winner is the player closer to center of the bullseye. He converts one of his opponent's troops to one of his own.
Taking Out an Opponent: You can take out an opponent by taking over his homeland. He then becomes your client, fighting alongside you (unless someone else takes over his homeland).
Winning the Game: When your are down to just one opponent, you can eliminate them by taking over their homeland or by destroying all of their troops away from their homeland.
Relationships to Other Game
Dart Wars is truly a combination of darts--that you must throw accurately for various purposes--and a war game--specifically a very simple war game like Risk. It does a good job of playing up its use of darts by using them not just to determine winners, but also where you can take actions.
The Game Design
Overall, Dart Wars feels like it should be a great game because it offers up a totally different way to play darts that still rewards accuracy. It even throws in a bit of risk-reward, as you can choose to throw for big, easy to hit targets or small, hard to hit targets when you're playing. This all would work great ... if the darts were easier to throw.
On the downside, the war game element of Dart Wars is very simplistic. The decision to keep losing players in the game was good, but the end game is set up in such a way that it could (literally) go on forever. A final assault on an opponent's homeland just doesn't work if it's too small to hit, and meanwhile he can be building troops everywhere else on the board. We finally gave up after 30 minutes of back and forth on the final players' homelands.
Nonetheless, I've let the game eke in a "3" out of "5" for Substance. It's pretty average for a family game, but with increased skill with the dart throwing you might come to like it quite a bit.
Conclusion
Dart Wars is a highly original game where you throw darts to move armies that's ultimately hindered by the magnetic darts which you use. If this were a traditional dart game played with a cork board and real darts I would have thought it was great.
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