GamesReviews written by Matt Thrower
This is a mad game. I'm not aware of any other title that screws without your head quite so much in terms of feeding drips of information to individual players and making everyone excruciatingly paranoid. Every decision you make is a horrible combination of mechanical strategy (no dice, remember) and hidden information: the tension is palpable. Indeed if anything the game is almost too tense. The legendary manner in which the game connects to the source material hardly needs further discussion and is well deserved. However the near-requirement for 5-6 players for a satisfying session is a shame.
There's more to this than meets the eye. Whilst there's a big crapshoot element with the dice, you roll enough of them to even out and there's a surprising amount of tactical choice under the bonnet although it takes several plays for this to come out. I also love the variety on offer - two different boards, orc and human troops and a whole grab bag of fantasy monsters including dinosaurs! Not massively happy with production quality (board is too cluttered, art poor) or rules (a number of clarifications needed) but still a good choice for a medium length two-player game.
There's more to this than meets the eye. Whilst there's a big crapshoot element with the dice, you roll enough of them to even out and there's a surprising amount of tactical choice under the bonnet although it takes several plays for this to come out. I also love the variety on offer - two different boards, orc and human troops and a whole grab bag of fantasy monsters including dinosaurs! Not massively happy with production quality (board is too cluttered, art poor) or rules (a number of clarifications needed) but still a good choice for a medium length two-player game.
Basically an old fashioned hex and counter wargame buried under a ton of fantasy chrome. The gameplay is mediocre - a lot of it comes down to guessing which stacks are hiding dangerous units but the fantasy theme is evoked brilliantly. I have an immense nostalgic soft spot for this game because it's one of the introductions I had to the hobby.
Final verdict time. This is yet another low-interaction optimization/efficiency game. It's novel, short and manages to squeeze an awful lot of game play out of some very simple rules which makes it either ideal filler for efficiency gamers, or an efficiency game for the rest of us. But it's still the same old maximise-the-efficiency-engine sort of game that's become so tediously familiar over the last few years. It'd probably be worth another point of rating played with 4 - there is a *bit* more interaction and the extra downtime gives you space in which to shuffle properly! Theme is wafer thin. After ten plays or so, I just feel ... meh.
Utterly compelling. Shame about the play time. I've become convinced that PBEM offers other advantages than just solving the time problem - you can't be overseen chatting to your enemies enemy and it actually feels morel like a game of 1900's diplomatic communication when you can't see the people you're playing against.
Fun-filled dungeon romping with plenty of excitement, and I love the fact that individual adventures are short enough to make campaign play feasible. But ... but ... it sits on an awkward line between being both relatively light and excessively procedural.