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.
artfuldodge2
Jury is still out. Iconography was confusing. Not sure it’s a better game than WizWar, the automatic comparison
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.
bnordeng
Martin Wallace designs a fantasy game of players fighting and racing to collect their gems. Score points by getting your gems and taking out other players' characters. Intriguing even though it isn't the type of game I normally seek out. The 4 factions are unique, there does seem to be a good chunk of randomness and players seem to have a lot of options on how to handle their group. The game fell astonishingly flat for us. A couple players fought every chance they had and exhausted their available cards which allowed other players to more easily take them out. And the untouched player was able to just collect gems with most of them starting in the same area of the board. This feels like the essence of the problem with games like this... it's too easy for one or two players to fall way behind based on their choice or need to spend cards early. This felt like a game that could have been better... either designed better or played better by us - not sure which. Either way, it went really poorly and that means I'll likely never try it again.