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Review of Assault of the Giants
Players: 3-6
Playing Time: 1-3 hours
Summary of the Components
Assault of the Giants comes with a bit map, lots of cardboard components, a deck of cards, a set of dice, and lots of awesome giant miniatures.
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Quality: You get sturdy cardboard and plastic, plus chunky cards. I wish the cards were linen-textured to give them additional heft, but overall this is all quite good quality. 4+/5.
Beauty: First up, the miniatures are entirely gorgeous. They're very nicely crafted and come in appropriate colors for the various giant races. Do not expect them to be the same scale as your D&D miniatures, as they're a little small for that. Still, they're big enough and awesome enough that I'd definitely use them in my D&D game if there were giants about! The board is also quite nice, with its organic looking terrains. The rest of the components, including the cards and tokens, are attractive but not amazing. There's good art and good graphic design. 4+/5.
Usability: Though it has quite a few special cases, the core rules of Assault of the Giants are pretty simple, and they come across well in the cards. Icons for hits, defenses, and magic are all consistently used, while command cards do a good job of reminding you how they're improved by past cards and how they influence future cards.
My only complaint in Assault of the Giants has to do with the coloring. Though the giant figurines have fairly distinct colors (violet storm giants, mint cloud giants, cyan frost giants, red fire giants, gray stone giants, and tan hill giants), those colors got muddled on the cardboard unit tokens because they appear only on the edges. The cloud giants and stone giants were especially easy to confuse. Those colors also totally disappear for wounded units, which is even more troublesome. Finally, the giants' individual dice were sometimes hard to distinguish. These color problems were never major, but occasionally annoying in play.
Overall, the usability of Assault of the Giants is decently good, with some quirks. 3+/5.
Theming: A lot of effort has been put into making the theming of Assault of the Giants match the Storm King's Thunder arc and D&D in general. Each giant race has a unique feel to it, and various story events feel like they're advancing a plot line. There are also piles of spells straight out of D&D. All of this will make any D&D player smile, and is exactly what you want in a licensed game of this sort. 5/5.
Assault of the Giants is a very good production with awesome theming. Though there are some color issues with the usability, it should only cause minor confusion. As a whole, Assault of the Giants earns a high "4" out of "5" for Style.
Summary of the Gameplay
The object of Assault of the Giants is to gain the most ordning points (victory points) by defeating other giants and meeting a variety of goals.
Setup: Each player plays a specific giant race. He gets a few troops, a leader, and a giant champion set up in his home territory. Each player also gets some resource cards (which can improve spells, give advantages in battles, or other things) and a few of their own event cards.
If playing with less than six, a few neutral giants are set out on the board. Finally, a few global events are put out, which any one can accomplish.
Claiming Events: At the start of his turn, a player can claim one event: either his next personal event card or one of the global event cards. To do so he must meet the event's condition, which is typically to have giants in a certain space on the board. This sounds easy, but to accomplish it a player must get his giants to that space, survive through all the other players' turns, then claim the event card on his next turn.
The events are nicely thematic; the personal events in particular give the game a lot of its color and the different giants their theming.
Playing Command Cards: After optionally claiming an event, the player must play a command card of his choice. These come from a set deck of nine command cards, which are played out over time. The player just picks what he wants from the ones he hasn't played yet. Each card tends to have a base power, but most get better the more cards the player has already played. So, for example, the Recruit card lets you draw two new resource cards, but more if you've played previous cards.
A few cards instead have a base power and then some power that will give you benefits to combat in future rounds. The overall idea is clearly to play your combat enhancers early and your boosted cards late.
The commands vary slightly from race to race, but have the same basic abilities:
- Move. Move your troops and champions.
- Plunder. Draw resource cards.
- Trade. Exchange resource cards.
- Recruit. Bring in new troops and champions.
- Magic. Draw spell cards.
- Attack. Attack an adjacent region.
Each player also has a Rest card; the purpose of it is to retrieve all the cards that the player has already been played, increasing their choices, but decreasing the power of their cards because it clears out combat enhancers and boosts. The Rest card also lets the player heal a giant and move around giantslayers, to be nuances to giants (and maybe kill some and earn some points).
Fighting: Combat is carried out with a set of special dice. The number thrown is based on the strength of the troops. The die faces might generate hits, defenses, or magic. The magic can be turned into hits or misses if a player has already played combat-enhancing cards. A player may also get to play resources or spells to improve their combat ability and may even get to reroll some dice.
At the end, undefended hits wound or kill giants. Killing giants is the main way to earn victory points, so it's pretty important.
Overall, the combat is quick, but exciting.
Ending the Game: After most of the ordning points are gone, players go into a final few rounds of play when they can attack home regions. When all is done, the ordning points earned for claiming events, playing special race cards, and killing opponents are added up, and the player with the most wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Assault of the Giants is the newest of the D&D-themed board games. It's a wargame, but developed in the eurogame direction, which means that it's a little lighter with a little tighter mechanics. The command card deck-management mechanic, where a small hand of cards is played through to generate actions is relatively rare, though in recent years it's been used well by Concordia (2013).
The Game Design
The core mechanic of the command cards and their deck management is a solid one that I've seen used in too few games. It introduces real strategic quandaries about when to take your actions and when to recycle your whole deck so that you can repeat actions. The idea of playing cards that benefit from old cards and that benefit later ones is a great innovation, and something that just makes the mechanic better.
The rest of the mechanics are all solid. The combat is simplistic, but exciting. The trading, which can force exchanges on other players, offers some interesting tactics. The events are a good way to enforce combat and continued forward motion, something that drags too many other wargames.
The game also has strong variability. The different giant races feel quite different, and even when playing the same race again, the magic spells can create a lot of difference (and interesting tactical options).
With that said, the game is ultimately a wargame, following in most of the same paths that you'd expect for that genre. Like many wargames, it runs quite long for its variability of play and it has somewhat limited choices. The deck management introduces some innovation, but it doesn't change the underlying foundation of the game.
I've given Assault of the Giants a high "3" out of "5" for Substance. It's a slightly above-average wargame with some solid and interesting design.
Conclusion
Like beautiful miniatures? Enjoy D&D theming? Want to to see how the Storm King's Thunder plays out as a board game? If so, then Assault of the Giants is the game for you. Not only does it have beautiful production, but it also pushes somewhat out of the mold of classic wargames, thanks to good design and development.
