The large square box boasts the excellent art found on the PC game box covers from WarCraft 3: Reign of Chaos and it is very visually appealing on the shelf. It looks like a great Christmas present. The artwork on the playing cards, tokens and the hexagonal map board pieces are also from the computer game and they provide excellent visuals.
And then you see the actual battle units…and before I could say “zug zug” everyone at my table let the profanities fly! Instead of cool miniatures, or even cool cardboard tokens, Fantasy Flight has given us barely recognizable hunks of wood to represent melee units, ranged units and flying units. Yes, the amazing Dwarf hammer tossing Gryphon Riders, wicked Undead Abominations plus all the other incredibly detailed creations from the Blizzard games are now BLOBS OF WOOD! I had to give each new player a few moments to vent before we could begin explaining the rules. What unbelievable crap!
It gets worse. You soon learn that there is NO flavor text describing the races, the units, or the builings. In fact, this game could have easily been called Generic Fantasy Wargame. We were very close to packing it all up and returning it to the store when we first opened the box. The playing cards do NOT have any text on them, instead you have to constantly refer to the back of the rulebook. This tactic was done to save money so the same cards could be used for all language editions, but let’s get real here. I would have happily spent an extra $5 to have the game in my native tongue. I am not asking for Ancient Ebonian, but I think we can expect it in English.
Before you Reiner Knizia worshippers make any farts about Catan or the LOTR game not having English text on cards, let’s remember that those cards have very easy to understand symbols that do not need constant rules reference. That is NOT the case here.
A quick perusal of the flimsy and poorly written rules booklet will soon reveal that there are no Heroes, no Critters and instead of Footman, Knights and Paladins, you will simply have “Human Melee Unit” to describe what you are sending into battle against the “Undead Flying Unit” and “Night Elf Ranged Units”. Thus, the main concept behind WarCraft III is completely absent from this boardgame, but you can smell the WarCraft: Heroes expansion coming and it stinks of greed.
I don’t know about you, but I do not feel like a customer anymore. Instead, I just feel like a sucker to marketing campaigns. Ha ha, you got my money! There are no new RPGs, just core books designed to sell splatbooks and when it says boardgame, they really mean basic set for future $30 expansions. I guess it’s the new economy, but it certainly doesn’t buy any good will…or glowing reviews.
Now most of my gathered grognards and Blizzard devotees were ready to hurl the box. However, we decided to try the actual gameplay and if it completely sucked, we would sell it you on eBay. So we chanted a mantra about how chess pieces don’t look often look like knights, castles and queens and off we went to Azeroth.
First, you must put the game board pieces together to form the map board. There are 13 double sided cardboard pieces which can interlock in many different ways, creating a potentially large variety of battlefields. The rulebook even tells us that these 13 pieces are labed with either Cyan or Magenta color codes (instead of blue and red) which leads me to a buying a fine chianti for the day I eat the liver of whoever taught men such words for colors. These terrain pieces have forests, goldmines and victory point locations, plus mountain obstacles so the map could be quite different each time you play. The game provides a standard map configuration for the two player and four player game, plus three scenarios which we will discuss later.
Gameplay proceeds in turns which comprise of four steps: Move, Harvest, Deploy and Spend. Initiative is randomly determined and all players must complete a step before the next step begins. Thus, we all Move, we all Harvest, we all Deploy and we all Spend in the order of initiative which becomes a surprisingly important strategic issue, especially later in the game.
The actual gameplay mimics the WarCraft games very well. You send out workers to mine gold and chop wood, construct buildings and outposts, build units, upgrade units, build even better units and send them smashing against the enemy. It actually begins to feel like WarCraft after a few turns and you have some battle muscles to flex. By the 4th turn, the group consensus was “hey, this doesn’t utterly suck” and we were willing to play again and try out the other scenarios.
The game has a cool mechanic for depleting resources, because as all fans know that Blizzard absolutely hates the environment and every game must end amid wasteland of tree stumps and collapsed mines. Also, you do not have to destroy your enemy to win. There is an option to win by amassing 15 victory points by controlling strategic points on the board, upgrading units to their maximum level and gaining special victory cards.
Combat is very quick and decisive. You roll under your unit strength to inflict casualties and unit strength increases as you upgrade. Also, some high end units also have a special ability such as Area Attack, Heal, Slow Poison, Bloodlust or Raise Dead. There are a surprisingly good number of tactical options in combats because of the interesting rules on flanking, order of attack and playing cards. And just like in the PC games, combat is fast, brutal and deadly. These skirmishes are very fun and tense. Do dice rolls override tactics? I felt that lucky and unlucky rolls seemed to alter the game more than the usual wargame because expensive units are no more hardy than cheap ones and early depletion of nearby resources can be devastating.
The aforementioned no text playing cards represent tactical options, magic spells and race specific special abilities. Humans can Call to Arms to turn workers into Melee Units for one battle, Dispel Magic, Invisibility to prevent a casualty and Polymorph…but no Blizzard. Yes, the namesake spell of the WarCraft series is missing from this game. All the races appear well balanced and the cards and special abilities give some uniqueness each one. Could the races use some more individuality? Yes, and see above for my rant about the expected expansion set.
A nice addition to this game are the three scenarios included in the rulebook. Since the game board is modular, each scenario is played on its own map and they introduce special rules modifications to make these scenarios quite different that the basic combat game. Fantasy Flight promises to have additional scenarios to download from their website, plus gamers can post their own. I can see this game becoming a convention tournament favorite. I really appreciated the scenario aspect since high replay value is absolutely essential and all too lacking in many games based on popular titles.
The rules say that game length is 60 to 90 minutes, but we were lucky to finish a game in 3 hours. My grognard group is comprised of veteran strategists, chess players and Axis & Allies fanatics and we were surprised that each game took such a tremendously long time. I was quite impressed that once we played a few times, the initial disappointment was overcome by what is a solid and enjoyable boardgame.
Overall, the gameplay is very good and it captures the feel of the WarCraft playing experience. If you like the WarCraft computer games, then you will enjoy the boardgame. If you like fantasy wargames, but do not like real time strategy computer games because of the click-frenzy aspects, then you will enjoy this as well. It would make a great present for a computer gamer who has never played a wargame and I feel that the rules are simple enough, but the strategy complex enough, to appeal to a new players and veteran wargamers. It is well worth the $40 dollar pricetag (even with the dopey woodcuts).
