The Components

Spell Wars comes with three decks of cards, eight player mats, a few markers, and some six-sided dice.

Quality: The cards are all printed on medium-weight, glossy cardstock, while the player mats are glossy cardstock as well. The other markers are glossy cardboard. It all looks good quality. 4 out of 5.

Beauty: You're either going to love or hate the artwork on the cards, which reminds me of some of the grotesque early D&D artwork, like that of Erol Otus. Whatever you think, it's good quality, there's a lot of it, and all of the art very cleverly matches up between the three sorts of spell cards (source, quality, and delivery), with the result being that each complete spell looks coherent, which is pretty cool. 5 out of 5.

Usability: The whole game has a Heavy Metal aesthetic to it, and that (unfortunately) carries to the rules, which are hard to read as a result, especially with small-cap white words on bright purple backgrounds. Ugh. That's offset in the rulebook by plentiful examples & pictures.

Fortunately the cards were designed much more with an eye toward usability. The text is usually succinct and the spell glyphs (things like "arcane" and "primal") are very clear and distinct. Good effort has also been made to differentiate the three sorts of spells, both with letters and with outlines around the cards. I would have preferred all of the symbols to be at the top of the card, though, where they'd have been easier to see at a glance. It also would have been nice if the Dead Wizard and Treasure spell decks had actual labels rather than just pictures on the back.

Despite these complaints, the game as a whole is easy to play once you get through the rules. 4 out of 5.

Theming: The background of the game is over-the-top Heavy Metal spell casting. It's carried superbly through the artwork, spell names, and effects. The careful naming of the spell components and connection of the art -- so that everything always works when lined up together -- just improves on all this. D&D and Magic players will likely love the result. 5+ out of 5.

Overall, the components for Spell Wars hover between good and great, but the terrific theming really pushes things over the top, resulting in a Style rating of "5" out of "5".

Summary of the Gameplay

The object of Spell Wars is to be the Last Wizard Standing twice, which means killing all of your opponents during two different battles.

Setup: Each player gets a wizard card and sets his starting hit points to 20. He then gets a handful of cards.

Playing Cards: All players will simultaneously play their spells face-down. A spell can consist of up to three components: up to one source, one quality, and one delivery.

The spell components are all cunningly designed so that they form coherent and fun spell names when they're laid out in this way. Thus you might have "Old Scratch's" (source) "Ritualistic" (quality) "Snakedance" (delivery) or "Thai Foon's" (source) "disco-mirrored" (quality) "vorpal trap".

Wild Magic. A Wild Magic card can be substituted for any component that your spell is missing. When the spell is revealed, the missing component will randomly be inserted from the spell deck.

Glyphs. Each spell also has a glyph shown on it. For example "Thai Foon's" is elemental and "Snakedance" is primal, while "Old Scratch's" and "Ritualistic" are both dark and "Disco-Mirrored" and "Vorpal Trap" are both illusion. These glyphs can improve the performance of spells when they're the same (and can even help out if they're different for certain spells or with certain treasures; the bottom line is that if you pay attention to them, you can do interesting tactical things).

Casting Spells: After everyone has secretly prepared themselves, all the spells will go off one at a time in initiative order. First one-card spells go, then two-card spells, then three-card spells. Within the same card count, whomever has the highest initiative value on a Delivery component goes first.

How fast your spell goes can be very important. I actually got eliminated in the first round my first time out, because I cast a slow spell that would have gone off 5th out of our 5 players. That's probably pretty uncommon, but in later rounds when you and your opponents are all very wounded, you might try to cast a fast spell, hoping to kill them before their spell can go off.

On the downside, giving up spell components for increased speed can result in a much less powerful spell, since each component acts as a single attack (or in a few cases healing for yourself).

Targets. All the spell components clearly define who the target of the spell is (such as the person to your left, or the character with the most hit points). Some components hit a single foe, some multiple. In a few cases, you get to decide the target.

Power Rolls. Some cards have a partially random result, based on a power roll. This is where the matching glyphs come in, because you get to roll 1d6 to 3d6 depending on how many of the component's glyph you possess.

Treasures. Some spells give you treasures. These offer permanent effects that will aid you for the rest of the current battle.

Getting Killed: Each round everyone except one character gets killed. When your character dies, you lose your current spell and in fact toss in all cards -- spells and treasures alike. You then get to draw a Dead Wizard card, and will draw an additional one for every additional round in the current battle. They'll give you bonuses in the next battle.

Not Getting Killed: If you don't get killed, you take a Last Wizard Standing token. Two of them and you win the game. If the game continues, you still lose all your treasures and spell cards before the next battle.

Shorter Games: The game can get a bit long with 5 or 6 players, thus you might want to change the victory conditions. You could just play one battle in 5 or 10 minutes. Alternatively, you could play for a set number of rounds, and if no one has won by that point have a sudden-death battle between the players with a Last Wizard Standing Token.

Relationship to Other Games

As a game involving magicians throwing around spells to kill each other, Spell Wars is most reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering. However, this is largely a thematic relationship as the spell-casting system for Spell Wars is entirely original.

More generally, Spell Wars is a game very much in the hobbyist American school of design, meaning that it fits into the same broad category as Munchkin, Illuminati and many more.

The designer, Rob Heinsoo, was of course the lead developer for D&D 4e. In the card game world, he's the designer of Three-Dragon Ante, an excellent card game with draconic theming.

The Game Design

Spell Wars is at heart a take-that game of womping on your friends with kick-ass spells. As such, it's probably not as strategic as a eurogame, but it does a great job of perfecting its own (American) style of play.

As I already said, the core gameplay of creating spells is quite clever. It's also surprisingly tactical. You can decide to create a matched spell or a spell with a high initiative. You can choose whether to cast a spell with fewer components to go even faster. You can opt to save components for later or use them right away. You can decide whether it's more important to harm your opponents or heal yourself.

There's also some ability to set up clever card combinations, which I suspect was one of the intents of the design. For example, in one of our battles, one player had a spell that did 2 hit points damage and could be used again if it killed the foe and another that let him repeat another spell component's effect. He cast them together, killed an opponent with 2 HPs, did 2 damage to an opponent sitting at 4 HPs, then used the second component to repeat that spell, killing the second opponent, then doing another 2 HP damage to his sole remaining foe! I'm sure there are lots more interesting, fun, and memorable spell component combinations that'll show up in the course of play.

There were three elements in Spell Wars' design that I thought were particularly smart solutions for standard problems in this type of game.

The first is the fact that the spell components indicate who you get to attack. This takes away a lot of problems with teaming up and with leaders getting easily smashed down. It also makes the game feel less personal despite being a fully aggressive take-that game. This is all balanced by the fact that you choose to use specific cards that target the people you want to target, it's just a more limited possibility (and another element of tactical play).

Second, the "Dead Wizard" card draw is a particularly great solution to the problem of player elimination. Because you draw a new card every round that you're dead, we actually had players cheering for the current battle to go longer after they've been eliminated.

Third, unlike many American hobbyist designs, it plays very quickly, especially if you're just counting individual battles.

I want to underline the fact that Spell Wars is an American take-that design. With that said, it's an excellent example of the genre that solves many of the genre's typical problems and is a lot of fun besides. I've given it a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre is an instant classic in the field of American fantasy & science-fiction game design. If you want to see this year's Wiz War, this is it! When you want to create AWESOME spells, BLOW AWAY your opponents, and LAUGH at their demise, this is the game to play.