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.
bucklen_uk
Mixed bag here. Prewashed minis are nice, cards and art a bit so so. Iconography a bit confusing (shield doesn’t block melee for example). Not convinced it scales 2 seems the map is too big. However with more the mechanic of a kill for the points means I’m sure you'll see kill stealing - which might be fine or not depending on your tastes. Overall didn’t grab me, too chaotic and luck of the setup, many other skirmish games I'd rather play.
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.
Achire
Great first game, fun skirmish game that plays quickly. A little AP-inducing and the interruption mechanic definitely adds a certain challenge as you need to figure out whether to interrupt and how to interrupt. Plus, as the active player, there is this consistent dread of an interruption slaughtering you.