Wildlands
Dash through the ruins to grab the crystals you so desperately desire or focus your efforts on taking out the opposition – but take care, danger may be lurking in the darkness.
30m - 60m
2 - 4 Players
Ages 14+
Dash through the ruins to grab the crystals you so desperately desire or focus your efforts on taking out the opposition – but take care, danger may be lurking in the darkness.
bigmac33070
For our Friday night game extravaganza, Dave, Mike and I played 3 games, 2 of which were new to all of us. First up was Wildlands. Wildlands is a card driven miniature based skirmish style game from Martin Wallace. Not normally Mr. Wallace's style of design, but this one works ohh so well. Your team of 5 characters has to get 5 points first. Points are gotten by collecting your teams gems or by killing an enemy character. What makes this really stand out is that the game is completely card driven. Each team has a very different deck. My team (I won, barely) had a lot of Ranged Attacks and Defense. The card play really is fascinating. Cards can do certain actions for certain characters on your team if that character's icon is on the rows. Or, many of the cards have an action at the bottom that can be done by any character on the team. On top of this, there is also wild cards. These can be used to Draw 2 cards, to move any 1 of your characters, or to Interrupt another players action. Yes, Interrupting is a key strategy in the game. You can Interrupt after the active players finishes one of their actions. The Interrupt can be of any action that you have the cards for. Usually these are Attacks. I was able to Interrupt to do an Area Attack spell in my own square which also did the last point of damage to one of Dave's minis, giving me the game. Fun stuff. Attacks and Defense are all done elegantly. There is Normal and Heavy Melee and Ranged Attacks. These can all be blocked with the correct icon. There is also the previously mentioned Area Effect (1 damage to everyone in your space or an adjacent space). Line of Sight, unlike many miniature games, is wonderfully easy to figure out. The initial draft is also very fun. You get 10 cards, which correspond to 10 spaces (out of 42) on the board. You pick 5 of these for your characters to start on, then pass the other 5 cards to your left. The cards you receive is where you put your gems. So, you can set up some neat ambushes. I really enjoyed Wildlands and see myself keeping this for a while. I think this has cemented the fact that Martin Wallace is my favorite game designer at this point. I also have the Unquiet Dead expansion and can't wait to give that a run through.
andrewroy39
This is between a 7 and 8 for me, but right now I'm leaning 8 because it packs fun, interesting decisions and lots of player interaction in a quick playtime. It isn't a mind blowing heavy game, but the multi use cards provide lots of options and flexibility, the selection of starting spots adds interaction and strategic planning, and the asymmetric factions add depth and planning while not forcing your strategy down a single path. You are always engaged during other people's turns, and you will have to make decisions and sacrifices in what characters you use and how aggressively you attack others. I wish there was an adjustment for board size with fewer players like there is in Tyrants, but even still you know where the gems are and can attack them if you want. Any game that gives you several paths to victory and difficult interactive decisions along the way in a short playtime is a winner for me.
Andy Parsons
My one game of Wildlands was two-player. That really isn't the ideal player count as the game makes no effort to scale down its large board for lower numbers. My characters were mostly free to wander the board and were fortunate in setting up closer to the five crystals needed for the win than my opponent's. I won this skirmish game while making not a single attack. That was dull. With a more crowded board, the game would not be so free of incident. However, there is another reason to believe that Wildlands will remain an unexciting experience. The joy of a game like Summoner Wars is the wide variety of different factions and the very different abilities of each character. Wildlands offers three forms of attack - melee, ranged and a magical blatt. None of them has a very dramatic effect, particularly if the defender has a hand of cards with which to counter them. There just isn't very much you can do by way of variations on those three plus movement and hit points to give each faction a distinctive feel, let alone create drama and surprise. The miniatures are quite nicely sculpted, though it would have helped if they had looked more like the illustrations on their character cards. Production quality is good. In harmony with the game itself, the artwork is generic and bland.