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.
brantshep36
Easy to learn rules with some good depth. Only played 2P so far, but looking forward to adding in a 3rd or 4th. Eyeing expansions.
BobbyReichle
A good pvp that feels like Martin Wallace's response to Wiz-War. Defeating your opponents is one of only two ways to get points, the other being collecting shards. That's where the comparisons end. Spawning your players and drafting those spawn points is a fun early decision, and planning when to interrupt is also a fun decision, if a bit hard to track. Things being hard to track is unfortunately a big part of the wildlands experience, as the pieces all have too-similar silhouettes and their corresponding cards do not have matching poses. Additionally, the action rows with character symbols is hard to parse. Some of these graphics issues seem to have been sorted out by Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter. Those problems didn't prevent me from having fun, but my playing partner had major issues with those problems.