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.
adamw
I was really wanting to get this one, expecting a skirmish game with some really clean rules. But alas, it isn't that clean for me. The setup is a bit fiddly. And the production has some strange qualities. The artwork on the cards doesn't match what the card can do. The icons are a little strange. And the race aspect to gather gems while works fine in concept, it has the frustration of too similar in color for the color-blind. Another thing is the characters are face down to start the game which I find just odd and maybe unnecessary for the cost of frustration in remember which is which. Lovely miniatures!
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.
Banne
Skirmish, arena type secret deployment game. 5 heroes per faction race against 5 points to win by collecting shards and killing (or killstealing) other heroes. Fast to learn, fast to play and lots of fun. Card based combat, similar to Dungeon Mayhem.