So here is a review for a card game called War for Edađh. What is it? It is a game of military conflict as its name suggests set in a fantasy world known as Edađh. If you want to learn lots more about the world and the warring factions you should visit the website www.warriorelite.com. The game box and manuals tell you a little about the two forces this box concentrates on but little more than “they fight”. It is a tactical and strategic game including a little bit of resource management and bluffing. It will be a combination of skill in several areas and a little bit of luck that will see you winning or losing the battles. It is a game for two players, though rules for solo play are included as are rules for multi player skirmishes - that will require additional sets of the game to play. The rules allow for several different styles of game to be played from the simplistic “I just wana try this game and see the basics” - which you can probably have read and played some of inside of thirty minutes of opening the box - through to grand battles using pretty much everything you get in the box that I can see easily taking hours to play through when familiar with the game.

What do you get in the box? Well you get a couple of pretty satisfying wads of cards that make up the largest part of the game. These cover everything from resolving conflicts to troops, tactics, terrain, leaders and more. You also get a small stack of thick card score sheets and a handful of plastic tokens in three colours of a suitable size to match the score sheets. You also get two rulebooks – “The Art of the Apprentice” and “The Art of the Warrior”, both are pretty substantial. And a cardboard insert that is only useful for keeping the contents in order in transit.

The box is made of thin card destined to not stand the test of time and usage. It is not the sort of rugged solid box you might be familiar with from other companies that could quite merrily be stacked up and used to reasonably neatly hold an expansion or three, slung in a backpack and bounced around etc. It is attractive and will do a job but won't stand up to prolonged abuse.

The cards are standard playing card size, or at least standard ccg sized - I've already popped mine into clear plastic sleeves for protection. Not that the cards are poor quality, far from it in fact. But part of the mechanic of the game involves flipping cards over and I know it won't take long with my fingers and nails to give them a well worn look. Made worse by my tendency to play games out and about at pubs and other exotic locations that might easily have playing surfaces less well cared for than my own table.

The big idea is you start with The Art of the Apprentice which in the space of a couple of small pages (less than A5) including ample illustrations you end up playing your first simple skirmish that gets you familiar with the core mechanics of the game. You play with that a bit, get comfortable and move on playing more games with more parts of the rules getting introduced in each game giving new players the chance to acclimatise one rule at a time. There are a couple of typos in there and an errata has been issued but not for any major issues. The book is solid - the introducing one element at a time works very well if you give it the chance to - the layout is clean (rather textbook like really which is by no means a bad thing), the writing style is clear and yet still friendly. By the end of The Art of the Apprentice you will be fighting battles with a lot of options at your disposal and capable of having some pretty interesting fracas involving the terrain, army standard bearers, champions and leaders. So after only a couple of the early introductory games you get comfortable with the basics of the game that makes up probably eighty percent of the game, then add maybe another five percent with the extra options by the end of The Art of the Apprentice book.

Then you move onto “The Art of the Warrior” for that last fifteen percent of the game. In this book you'll find out about how to choose your own force composition, explore terrain options and learn several variants of the main game involving battles for tactical terrain advantage before the main conflict, battle where the troops move around different terrain types and can even end up attacking the flanks or rear of the opposite side up to the colossal battles involving several units on both sides and a broad battlefield where you end up playing five smaller games parallel to each other with the potential for troops to migrate up and down the field. Basically book two gives you a big bag of options to play with, without muddying the waters or drastically changing any rules to make it work, allowing players to pick and choose what play style they want. Those who love to wile away a whole evening to one epic battle can do so, those who prefer a “best two out of three” scenario that can be over quick enough to get a couple into the same evening are likewise catered to. The second book however just doesn't feel as well polished as the first one. The writing feels more broken and the appendices were a good idea but create a lot of page flipping and the whole book just comes across as much harder work than the other. It still isn't bad but the kid gloves definitely came off in this one.

Them's the facts as I see them. Now onto more subjective thoughts - my thoughts on the game. I like it...a lot. I played a demo at GenCon UK and it tickled my interest enough to pre-order it and I've played with it a bit since then - though not as much as I'd like. Anyway the deeper I delve, the more I find to like and the more drawn in I get. But because I'm pretty sceptical, I keep expecting to discover something I dislike, or that makes it broken, or less appealing, or anything that might soil my enjoyment. I've not found it yet but I've not given up looking either.

You see for as much as I like War for Edađh (or WfE from here on out) it isn't perfect. It has a whole heap of things I'm not keen on or think could and should have been done better but they are all petty little things. A pet peeve of mine from any type of gaming of fiction is what I call “stupid name syndrome”. I hate it when some designer creates a race called 'dorfidditchinolazaroars' who are short, stocky have prodigious beards and a love of gold and ale. See what I'm getting at? That sort of behaviour annoys me no end. Giving things “fantasy” or “genre” names at the expense of making something original or approachable. I'm more forgiving of it in some cases, if I'm fool enough to tackle a game set in feudal Japan not being able to pronounce anything is pretty much my own fault, should have seen it coming.

WfE has a bit of an issue with this, if you visit the website you'll find more only vaguely pronounceable names with pronunciation guides so you can find out how wrong you are. Had I any flare for languages it might be fascinating, and clearly a great deal of care has been paid to this over time - it is something that has developed. So I feel mean complaining about it but it is a completely original world aimed at gamers who probably don't speak Welsh/Gaelic or any in most cases any foreign language to any worthwhile degree beyond English. Certainly the tatters of French and Spanish I've retained from school did me no favours. In this original world I cannot fathom why a designer would create a tricky pseudo language. The creators however paid attention to what folks were saying about this and have made adjustments since my first contact giving many of the terms shortened forms which are easier to pronounce and remember which I applaud them for. The full names still exist of course I guess much like full traditional Latin names exist for cats and rats – but now it is more of a background element than barrier to entry as I first found it to be. Sure there is still plenty of new lingo to learn, but the same is true in many games. In WfE there might be a bit more than in other games, but there is a lot more world to discover and reward to be had in getting familiar with it.

The website has masses of information. It feels like an atlas to a new world and it is not just thrown together around the game for fluff and fun. It is plain as day this game has been in development for years and over that time this world has also been developed in an organic way (including no doubt the language) and the creators almost certainly have much more in their heads and in scattered notes across notebooks and pc's and emails than they'll likely ever manage to corral into a single tome. I find that comforting. It feels like from the offset the different factions, their troops and the animals they fight with, the land they fight over - it all already exists and fits into the creators' vision of the world. I mean, if all you are interested in is a good tactical game then none of this stuff will ever interest you but I've a fondness for fluff with my games and I got lots of love for tabletop role-playing games and for me knowing there is a fully imagined and realised world that feels consistent, united and focused where nothing feels bolted on or contrived providing the backdrop to this excellent tactical game enhances my experience.

Now it turns out the world has ghosts and demons and haunted houses and zombie like things and wizards and architects and really big things that fly and semi-aquatic guys and girls and firearms - armfuls of other cool things too – very little of which is apparent from this boxed game. So it is worth a look.

The cards are beautiful. The artist has done a great job of giving the races their own style so they can be distinct but the art style is consistent across the whole product. It all hangs together very nicely. The swirling curves, background symbols and often pretty abstract pieces might not be to everyone's tastes though. Even the terrain cards look loved instead of like a necessary evil. The cards and website then create a high art, visually intense expectation. Which is what makes the score cards and rule books feel so sparse. The latter items give function place over form and then give very little consideration to form beyond being tidy. When even the tokens the game comes with are in three colours and have custom icons on both sides, when you've got a book without so much as the occasional frilly chapter footer symbol it seems a bit odd. Certainly it wasn't owing to a lack of art resources. I guess I've been spoiled recently with too many full colour bright and glossy rules books with background textures, spot art and rules figures and diagrams. I mention this only because the contrast between the two is so stark you might easily be forgiven for thinking the articles belonged to different products.

Anyway, sticking with the cards. Specifically the troop cards that represent your force. They are two sided. Both sides have a nice big illustration and a medley of information. This information is importantly different on the two sides of the card. So when you choose which of your valiant soldiers to send forth for an engagement you can only see half the information about them. While being able to see the information on one side of the card and a general awareness that archers will be good at range - and less helpful face to face - will put you in generally good stead for making choices, until you are familiar enough with your troops this does make the “choosing” process feel a bit more like pot luck than it should do. Which can be frustrating. Especially as you are learning the game there are all these other tiny little symbols dotted around the cards that you haven't got to in the rulebook yet and you feel like they are telling you something that might, or should, be important. Also the cards feel not badly arranged but not as well arranged as they should have been - lots of info, small fonts (coloured too), tiny icons, actually quite a bit of space and a high art background creates low contrast and makes reading things difficult. The flip side of the card is even worse as it has some vertically aligned text, over a background image with horizontal text and icons intersecting the vertical text slightly. That sends my eyes nuts trying to figure out what to look at. Sure you get used to it, but that isn't the point. Not when the solution is as simple as giving the text a darker colour and a lighter background to increase contrast - possibly combined with an overall slightly more plain background and a larger font.

I've purposefully said tiny icons more than once because they are. Some are small enough and again generally lacking in contrast with the beautiful, swishy abstract art used - they are occasionally difficult to spot in a well lit room. Never mind whether it is easy to disambiguate one variation of the icon from another. Not that I could suggest better iconography but some of the symbols are kinda cryptic. The cards have a lot of information on them, but it is not as easily accessible as it should be. I believe all these issues are highly addressable, perhaps even without impinging on the art too much. Certainly I'd settle for smaller illustrations if it made the cards easier to read (and by extension the game easier to play). The slightly muddy appearance of foreground and background elements is unfortunate. Now if I am struggling to access all the information on the visible side of my card in good lighting conditions imagine trying to look at what your opponent is fielding and what their abilities might be by trying to pick out that information upside down from across a table, and then throw in less than optimum lighting of the sort you get in most public venues...it ain't pretty. I've spent some serious time here going over this minutiae and all my objections to it but bear in mind not one of these things is a deal breaker. Combined they are an inconvenience. But not one that stops the game from being great fun - just, enough to hold it back from instant and true greatness.

The same is true of the rules in some regards. All the information on the cards means lots of terminology to go with it. I found a handful of the terms and abbreviations less than useful. Like “Blc”. My first thought on seeing that with what is essentially a war game is “block”. But apparently it is “Ballistic”. I can see it, it works just about, but I reckon “Bal” is more accessible. Anyway what I might think of as blocking is properly called “guarding” in WfE and that isn't a bad name choice at all. The act of guarding is determined first by comparing mastery level of troops – that bit I like; a higher calibre of troops might be expected to fend off a lower calibre. But guarding has a second comparison. The defender's “guard value” against the attacker's “guard defence”. Meaning guard defence is actually a measure of your offence capability to overcome defensive abilities. It is a weird kind of double negative meaning that is not at all intuitive. Calling it “guard penetration” for example would to my mind have made the purpose of these values and explaining them more intuitive. Exasperating matters these values are inside of little shield icons that might be greyed out, have an apostrophe or number in them and one is a little crossed shield and the other is just a little shield. So between vague terminology and unclear symbols, guarding is a little minefield waiting to happen and a great example of the sort of little problems that don't make WfE any less of a game but do have an impact. If you are prepared to work through the foibles and get used to the phraseology you will find it all to be rather astute, accurate, sensible and easy to follow.

But I think that is it for my gripes with WfE. It is still an awesome game with masses of potential to be something really very interesting and cool. It's foibles are all the more infuriating to me because I don't think one of them would be hard to remove or at bare minimum significantly improve on.

On now to what I like.

It has a lot of really beautiful, interesting and thorough mechanics. Ideas that feel fresh and innovative are not so easy to come by and WfE has them in spades.

I like that we got given score cards and tokens. Let's be fair - it would not have been unreasonable to ask player to keep track of starting on fifty mastery points and zero damage on scrap paper. All the score cards and tokens do is provide an easy visual way to keep track of whether your army is shaken, whether you can retire troops yet, and whether you've lost by your Mastery Points slipping beneath your damage points. Yet instead of cutting a corner there we have 3 different sets of tokens. Even if the dark purple ones are near indistinguishable from the black ones at a glance. And ten chunky score sheets that have at least a little art on them, if not terribly much. The tokens and score sheets add a little something. I'm glad to have them.

I like the wide array of terrain you get to play on / with which can be pretty important in some of the game variants. Although I'm not so keen on having troop cards moving up and down terrain cards, especially when you need to flip those troop cards over multiple times throughout the game, it is a faff but it is a faff that looks good and makes sense in a logical representation of what is actually happening kind of way.

I like the art style and art in general. Yes sometimes I feel this game has let form rule over function but to make sure everyone is really clear on this point – there is stacks of art and it is all beautiful.

I like the mechanic of troops having an attack value and an attack damage which is compared against the defending troop's defence value and defence damage. If your attack value is higher than their defence value, you deal your attack damage. Otherwise the defender takes their defence damage. Simple, logical and not quite like anything I've seen before. It is very smooth and gives a very good representation of differing skills of troops.

I love conflict resolution. This is the core mechanic of the whole game. Simply you and your opponent have an identical set of cards with numerical values on them as well as several caveats. Such as high value cards cost more to play, but deal more damage. Low value cards are cheaper to play and might actually “convert” to a winning score if played against a very high card. So you end up with this beautiful meta mind bluffing and psychology game between you and your opponent where you are trying to weigh up his tactics, Mastery Points and other factors against your own and trying to out-think your opponent's choice of card. You make your choices privately and lay them down simultaneously – the cards are gathered up again for the next round so everyone always has the exact same pool of resources to work with. And it is this that determines the winner and loser of the round. So you might have vastly inferior troops taking on stronger opponents on better ground, but if you can read your opponent's next move you can still win. This abstraction might seem really weird at first, but it really adds a level to the gameplay that I think is dynamite. It feels kind of poker like to me, especially texas hold 'em where you know to a certain extent what your opponent is using. Anyway, it is gold, try it a few times and I'd be deeply surprised if you disagreed.

I like the army leaders and champions and standards and tactics/stratagems. They add a host of tactical options to the game that relate to the timing of their usage and playing them in cunning ways your opponent perhaps didn't see coming.

I like that troops having different costs and rareness' and levels and that restricts your army building so that even putting together a force list is something of a mini game. Though I do ponder how you might simulate the small elite force in a well defensible position fending off a much larger army and other such scenarios I dare say this sort of thing is a question for the company website that the creators would gladly answer. Even if the answer is simply that these things are planned for future releases. I know for example somewhere on their website “siege” games have been mentioned.

Having just mentioned the brothers Pyne – they are exceptionally pleasant fellows who I've been fortunate enough to meet at a few conventions. They have a deep passion for WfE and many plans for it. At any rate, had they not been nice guys I might never have taken the chance on pre-ordering my copy. As is, I did pre-order and get to feel morally vindicated for having done a nice thing for some nice guys and got myself a nice new toy to boot. Again it might never bother you but for me there is a certain added value in actually liking the folks behind a product.

I like the fact that every single thing I used to enjoy in wargaming is in WfE, and in many cases done better than the wargames I'm familiar with. In fact, since it is so much a wargame, in my opinion, let's look at it in those terms. For £16 you get two beautiful armies - not massive armies but of sufficient size for you to have pretty big battles or have lots of fun picking variant army compositions for smaller battles. All the components needed to play – no need to go find dice or pens or pencils or scrap paper or a tape measure. Setting up the table takes minutes. Storing it all is easy and doesn't require much by way of special protection or measures and it is easy to transport. You also get a mountain of terrain ranging from grass plains to dense forests, murky swamps and assorted grades of hillside. A set of quick-start rules and a full fat edition of the rules too. Now even if you were interested in the seemingly more popular and common these days skirmish style wargames, most of those will still cost you £15-20 for the core rule book, will often require you to get an additional rule book for each faction, may or may not come with dice, templates and tokens, range finders, almost certainly don't come with more than the most cursory of starting forces for one or two forces and almost certainly require you to buy a stack more minis before you can really play the game the way it is meant to be played. One or more token pieces of terrain may be included but other than that you are more or less on your own on that front. I'll admit I quite like painting miniatures and would quite like to revisit my days of hoarding odds and ends that are interesting shapes to make terrain from and if you really enjoy that side of wargaming then you'll need to get your fix elsewhere as that is the one aspect of the hobby WfE doesn't provide - the spectacle if you will. But everything else I loved about wargaming – strategic depth, army building, meta-minding your opponent, manoeuvres on the field of battle, cool art, cool flash fiction. It has got all of that and in generous measure. In short it is all the fun of a wargame with none of the faff.

Really it is to my mind at least the similarity to wargaming that is WfE's greatest strength and weakness. Sure you can play introductory scuffles for fun. But to really get the most out of the game, the big fun, you need to play it in depth. And that requires one or more opponents who are just as into it as you are. With that I can see many, many hours of fun being had exploring the depths and variations of WfE - without it WfE is an at best moderate filler game.

Personally I really hope it takes off, I'm hoping to convert a couple of my local gamer friends so I do have those opponents to spin off and learn with because WfE is chock full of potential for awesomeness.

In a nutshell, War For Edađh is a fantastic strategy card game with the classic, easy to learn but hard to master combination guaranteed to provide hours of fun. It has a lot of depth and massive promise to go further still with planned future releases. It is held back from being an instant classic only by a few niggling issues.