Tactical Maneuvers, Tiny Epic-style

Full disclosure: I'm a Tiny Epic fan. I own the...

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A friend of mine picked this up not too long ago, but I haven't tried it yet. (Too much Root going on). When I see him again we'll have to remedy this. Looks great!

It's a very cool game, especially if you enjoy stuff like Final Fantasy Tactics or Funkoverse or League of Legends or other "arena"-type games where it's a set of characters bashing away at each other with an overarching goal. I'm used to the amount of game that Gamelyn can stuff into one of their boxes, but this one is king in that respect, I think. The 3D terrain concept is very smart.

My problem with a lot of board games in the genre is that they get too complex for their own good. Anything more than Summoner Wars or Heroscape really ought to be a video game, it feels like. The clever box design and likely simplicity seems like it makes this one a winner.

That distance difference between teams seems like a slightly surprising thing not to catch!

Good review.

I think it may have been a design limitation problem. So, you're working with X amount of space inside the box and then X amount of usable space on the map and you have to figure out how to make all of those squares/rectangles work together and not seem too wonky (The bottom of the main box hangs off the map already.) I don't think it's a crippling flaw, since I've seen people lose from the top spots, including me. But it does always stick out to me when playing from the bottom spots if one of my tough guys (Warrior or Beast) is slow and I realize that I'm just not going to be able to make it to the gray or purple trigger spot as fast as my top-based opponents.

In the capture-the-flag mode, you can arrange the terrain any way you like, so that will obviously change things. Also, the terrain setups on the Wastelands and Winter maps are quite different, but we haven't played enough games on those for me to give a good idea of whether it's still problematic.

Jexik wrote: My problem with a lot of board games in the genre is that they get too complex for their own good. Anything more than Summoner Wars or Heroscape really ought to be a video game, it feels like. The clever box design and likely simplicity seems like it makes this one a winner.

Yep. The overall rules are quite simple and, once you get a hang of the terrain rules (helpfully assisted by a player aid on the back of the rulebook), you'll be off and running. At that point, it's just three actions per round, go. There was a little bit of initial confusion on the part of the general audience because the rules say you can't take multiples of the same action with the same figure, but the way it was phrased was: "List of actions: Movement, Melee attack, Missile attack, Cast a Spell", as if the types of attack were distinct actions. But, no, its Wiz-War rules (attack once per turn), which it clarifies later in the rulebook. It probably would've been better as "List of actions: Move, Attack (melee, ranged, magic.) However, there is one (1) spell in the game that isn't an attack, so you could conceivably cast that spell and make a melee attack with that Mage, which is probably why they left "Spell" as a separate action, but later noted that you can only attack once.

So, a couple gray areas, but overall pretty straightforward.