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Review of Cabals: The Board Game
Blurb from the publisher: 'Cabals: Magic & Battle Cards is the perfect combination of a card game and a board game created by Mika Rosendahl, a M:tG champion. The digital version of Cabals has been available worldwide for years and loved by players and reviewers alike.
The game takes place in an alternative universe based in the 1930s spiced with occultism, witchcraft, mesmerism and secret societies. The box contains everything you need to start playing Cabals with your friends. With a single box you can play games from 2 to 4 people.
In the world of Cabals secret societies are struggling for power employing forbidden arts. Each cabal draws its inspiration from the actual folklore and old fairy tales of its region. The Cabals world currently covers areas of Germany, Russia, Ireland, China, Egypt and beyond, embracing the unique traits of each region's folklore. You get to control powerful wizards, magic users and witches aiming to conquer the opponent’s stronghold or build up magical dominance. Arcane creatures and esoteric individuals help the heroes in their goal. Four separate cabals thrive for superiority.
The Bearclaw Brotherhood, the shamans of the north, unleash the forces of arctic nature and the hatred of the dead. Command over human minds and the realms of the spirits will bring all opposition to its knees. The Bearclaw units can usually survive heavy damage while some of them freeze the game board and try to win by Victory Points.
The Danann Covenant are aristocratic witches about to release the vengeful faerie people of old into the 20th century. Under the ancient burial mounds an inhuman army is biding its time. As some of the faerie folk are fragile strong units are also present. Danann witches are very good at bringing even the weakest units to the top of the food chain.
The Vril Society combines the ancient Hyperborean energies of the underworld with brutal modern technology. Their ruthless huger for power is fuelled by their total readiness for self- sacrifice causing massive damage to opponents.
The participants in the Order of Zahir are men learned in esoteric lore and trained in scientific rigor in quest for eternal life. Will they succeed in the Great Work of Alchemy and attain total mastery over matter? The versatile magic of Zahir can make units disappear and transform creatures to other fiends.
The deck building strategy and deep metagame meets the tactical aspects of the game board. The basic game mechanics are intricate but simple. By controlling special resource locations on the game board you gain resources used to summon creatures and play action cards. To win the game your goal is to move one of your creatures to the opponent's stronghold. To execute this you must manage your resources carefully, manoeuver your units to correct locations and play action cards wisely.
The game board for two player games is usually a 5x5 grid with some special locations. The board itself is assembled from pieces and each board piece is two sided so the amount of possible board layouts is expansive.
In Cabals: The Board Game you can collect the cards you wish to build your deck to outsmart your opponents. There won't be booster packs however as cards will be available through carefully designed expansions that may also contain new board pieces and heroes.
The tokens in this game are made of 2mm punch board covered with 100g/m2 label paper, linen finish and dispersion varnish. The board is made of the same material. The cards are 300g/m2 premium quality cardboard with linen finish, dispersion varnish and black core. All parts are made to last for years!'
What you get: Cabals: The Board Game is currently on kickstarter up to the 15th of June 2015. The game can be purchased during this period for a pledge of USD 40. Purchasing multiple copies drops the price up to almost USD 32. When the kickstarter campaign is over the full game will cost USD 50. That is at least 20% savings already; unfortunately the game will not magically appear tomorrow on your footstep. Weather allowing, it is most plausible and prudent to expect Cabals: The Board Game to be released somewhere around the end of 2015.
In the interest of full disclosure I received a prototype to review with components for two players only. No playtesting was done from my side for three or four players. The final phrasing of the rules is not set in stone, the card lists and their abilities are very like to change, the visuals have already changed between me playtesting this and the start of the kickstarter, while the quality of the components is to exponentially increase. It is pointless to be precise with the game's components. I can indicatively say however that the game will include 4 heros, a 30-card deck per hero, 4 small board pieces, damage, power, defence health and changed tokens, victory points, resource crystals and relics. I wish I was holding a prototype which was way more advanced like in the case of the incredible Trickerion, however this has no bearing on the review.
Gameplay: As the rules stand now the players vie for supremacy on a 21-tile board. Alternate set-up arrangements also exist. The player that either captures his opponent's stronghold or reaches five victory points first wins the game.
To achieve this, each player controls a cabal lead by a Hero. The hero's ability can only be used once per game. On the contrary, the cards that are played during the game (units or spells), can be used in a variety of ways. The units can be used as foot soldiers on the board, some of them having active or passive abilities in addition to their power and health characteristics. When units meet in the same tile combat takes place in a way not dissimilar to other TCGs on the market. Power is compared to health with shields providing cover; damage is then applied. Damage follows a unit until healed. After two or three battles even the toughest units will feel frail enough.
Each player executes the two phases of each turn (the Upkeep Phase and the Main Phase) before play proceeds to the next player.
There are five steps in the Upkeep Phase. During the Draw cards step the player draws a card for each place on the board that he controls which allows him to do so. By Gaining Resources the player receives two resources for his stronghold and one resource for every place on the board that he controls which allows him to do so. During the Victory Point step a player gains a victory point if he controls more relics on the board than his opponent. If he has reached 5 points, he wins the game outright. During the Ready Relics step the relics en route are moved to the reliquary, while on the Ready Units step all exhausted units (the ones turned sideways) are turned back in the upright position.
During the Main Phase on the other hand, a player has a choice between six actions which can be executed in any order and as many times as possible. These are: deploy a unit to the gameboard by paying the relevant cost, move a unit (not diagonally), attack with a unit, use a unit ability, cast a spell, use a hero ability and place (or remove) relics from the board. Everything is pretty much self-explanatory with the exception of the relics. Relics are effectively control markers, allowing a player to control an area without one of his units being constantly present. When removed from the board they have a cooldown time of one round. Placing them on the board should never be done lightly.
The strong points: I admit I was not aware of the electronic version of Cabals: The Board Game which appears to have quite a big following. I understand that the design team is making a very serious effort to make the experience of the boardgame as close as possible to the electronic version, without however sacrificing playability; if things need to change in the boardgame, they will.
Cabals: The Board Game has a definite advantage over its competition in that it already exists in electronic form and is free of charge. One can try the free electronic version for a few days before deciding to invest in the boardgame. More practically however, its success over the last few years means that the game has seen quite some serious playtesting by thousands of people already.
That having been said, Cabals' boardgame iteration is definitely exciting. There are trading card games out there which use a board in a different way, Cabals' mechanic however adds an additional layer of depth. It easy extremely easy to explain and plays fast for the depth that it provides. Careful and planned movement is a prerequisite for your own troops not to bog you down. Relics are a clever little mechanic of control exertion in areas that allow deployment or provide resources. Their use is essential to strong openings and the creation of a sustainable production machinery that will keep on feeding your front line. Equally necessary is the wisdom to remove them from the board for the opponents to not permanently destroy them.
Fighting is of course the heart of the game. The two factions I received felt different and quite balanced, I understand however that quite a few of the cards might have already changed. What makes or breaks a TCG is the quality of its cards and the choices it provides. What I saw appeared to be on the right track.
Theme-wise I enjoyed that the game does not take itself too seriously. Everything and the kitchen sink is thrown in for fights beyond belief amongst Rasputin and Franz Tausend, to name but two of the heroes. This of course presumes that the players pay attention to the backstory, something that I do not take for granted on most TCGs when tactics and the real number crunching starts.
As much as there were no deck building aspects on this playtest (I received 30 cards per cabal and no expansions are available yet), I am pleased with the decision of having a minimum deck limit at 30 cards. When the expansions start rolling out the players will have to take some difficult decisions on how to field their cabals. Even more so because the design team feels very confident about its product and is ready to support it with many expansions in the future. I, for one, would be happy to see the whole project succeed.
It will be pointless to comment on art, components, layout of cards etc, seeing how everything is in the process of being finalised. I believe that the design team will pull this through, based not only on their announcements or the talks we had while writing this review, but also on the progress I see between the prototype I received and the situation as it stands now.
The weak points: Seeing how it utilises a board with two main focal points (the strongholds), the game is plagued by opening sequence issues. Unless something remarkably unpredictable happens in the first three to four turns, the beginning might feel rather scripted without much room for innovation. Different board layouts, the possibility of putting cards faster on the board at the beginning or other mechanical interventions might resolve the issue. On pc games Starcraft solved the problem by putting players closer to the real action by increasing the initial number of workers. Something needs to be done here as well.
Fast as the game is, it doesn't mean that it is not relatively predictable. If you are three spaces away from your opponent's stronghold you know that you probably need three turns to reach that goal (at least with the sort of cards that I had at my disposal during the playtest). Planning and battles gave a WWI feeling of entrenchment which is probably the opposite of what the designers were aiming for. This was exacerbated by the fact that units move horizontally and vertically only, not diagonally, and that only one unit can occupy a space. Having a bigger board and allowing more manoeuvers and exceptions depending on the unit might have created a more dynamic environment, I understand however that this might have distanced the boardgame from its electronic brother. Maybe this will come out in the forthcoming non-collectable expansions?
Expect some fiddliness in the game. You will gain resources only to immediately use them, moving tokens all around in battles, allocating damage, increasing power or defence etc. On an electronic game this is taken care of by the AI in fractions of a second. Here, you will find yourself going through quite a few motions that probably distract from the experience.
In the version I playtesetd the cards were visible only from one player's side. I hope this is taken care of, especially for special abilities. These should be clearly read by both players.
Conclusion: Cabals: The Board Game will be a cool addition to your straightforward player vs player games. It accommodates more than two people, it adds a board in a way that has not been used before and has a cool backstory. You can also try it free on your PC, Mac or mobile first. What more can one ask for?
To find out more about Cabals: The Board Game, its electronic bigger brother and Kyy Games, take a look at http://www.cabalsgame.com/ and http://www.kyygames.com. If you like what you see, the current kickstarter, closing on the 15th of June 2015, can be found right here.
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