Sorry for the lack of update. I've been trying to play my game, FeintWars some so I could give thoughts on mechanics, but things haven't quite worked out to play it.
I didn't get a chance at the game night at the friend's house (though I had a good time), and I got one partial game played at ETX (Evergreen Tabletop Expo, in Tacoma, WA) this weekend. I'm feeling like the game could use some refinement to make the game run smoother, but I'm not sure how to do that. I do really like the core of the game, and I think it has some really fun ideas.
I didn't get a chance at the game night at the friend's house (though I had a good time), and I got one partial game played at ETX (Evergreen Tabletop Expo, in Tacoma, WA) this weekend. I'm feeling like the game could use some refinement to make the game run smoother, but I'm not sure how to do that. I do really like the core of the game, and I think it has some really fun ideas.
At ETX one of the games I got a chance to also play was a dice game called Age of War. It looked very promising. I love push your luck dice games like Zombie Dice. It had a samurai theme. It was designed by legendary designer Reigner Keneiza. And most importantly (to me anyway), it was by Fantasy Flight games. the creators of such games like X-wing (something I spent a good time at the expo playing in a tournament), X-Com and Android: Net-runner among other games.
(Image from the Fantasy Flight website)
The objective of the game is to capture as many castles as you can, represented by cards. This goes so very well with the theme. I've been a long time fan of the samurai epics by Akira Kurasawa like "Seven Samurai", "Yojimbo" and "Ran" to name a few.
The core mechanic of the game is on your turn you choose a place to attack and start rolling dice. Dice have four types of symbols: infantry (the most plentiful, with some sides having up to 3 infantry symbols), cavalry, and Diamyo (king).
If you match a set of dice with a set of symbols you place those dice on the set and keep rolling. You only get one set a time. If you don't get any sets, you loose a die and contenue. If you fill all the slots you capture that castle. You can steal castles from players, but you have to fill an additional Diamyo symbol. This is a great base start for a game, with a bit of a zombie dice type of feel.
The game has problems though.
One is, there felt like very little in terms of choice or strategy. You'd just go after a castle and keep rolling dice over and over. The only real strategy was choice of which slots you fit in the somewhat rare cases you filled more than one at once, since you can only keep one at a time. But even this feels fairly obvious where you want to first get the rare Diamyos, and secondly pairs such as double cavalry, double archers or cavalry and archers.
One is, there felt like very little in terms of choice or strategy. You'd just go after a castle and keep rolling dice over and over. The only real strategy was choice of which slots you fit in the somewhat rare cases you filled more than one at once, since you can only keep one at a time. But even this feels fairly obvious where you want to first get the rare Diamyos, and secondly pairs such as double cavalry, double archers or cavalry and archers.
There's no mechanic for retreat or penalty really for failing an attack, so there's no real push your luck mechanic, which this game really feels like it needs.
Also, the game only ends when every single castle is captured. This is probibly less a problem with more than two players (I only played with two players), but it becomes a slog with many times failing to gain a castle multiple times in a row, since capturing many of the castles is very difficult.
When you capture all of a set of castles in the same providence, you get a bonus and they are "locked" and can't be captured. There was a point where the only way I could win was by winning back a bunch of castles my opponent had before they could captured the last two or three castles in the center, ending the game, which just made the game drag on all the more.
I know there would be a more political element of choosing who to attack with more than two players, which would add more interest. But there's nothing the defending player really gets to do, he just sits back passively. Some sort of opposed action between players attacking and defending would be really neat. As I said, capturing some castles is very hard, made near impossible with that extra Diamyo symbol.
I thought Age of War was a neat start point for a good game, but it just felt like it's missing just one extra element, like bluffing or push your luck needed to make it more interesting and not a game about rolling dice.
At the same weekend I played a game called Tiny Swords which I ended up buying. It's very much a smaller game in many ways to Age of War. It didn't have the pedigree of a designer or publisher. It was very light in theme (you construct swords and fight with theme).It was lighter in mechanics too; you play cards in a rock-paper-scissors style duels with some neat rules added in for a unique twist.
But I ended up enjoying it far more than Age of War. I'll have to do a review soon for that game too.
Has anyone else played Age of War? What are your thoughts in the game? Was there just something we misunderstood about the rules? Let me know in the comments.
