After fighting to defend their land, mercenaries now look to prove their worth. Whether you’re fighting for control, breaking through barriers, or just trying to completely crush your opponents, you’ll need to strategize and play to your team’s strengths in order to succeed. Use covered spots and elevation to your advantage, and be aggressive while also being tactical. Think you’re ready to fight? Then let the battle begin!

What Is It?

Grid Movement – Players will move their characters around the board to accomplish their objectives and attack other players

Asymmetric Characters – Each player has a team of 2 or 4 characters each with unique stats and a deck of cards with unique actions/bonuses

Hand Management – All character cards from a player’s team get shuffled into 1 deck and players have to manage their limited hand to play the best cards to do various actions (movement, attack, defend, character abilities, et cetera)

Variable Set-Up – Boards are double sided and can be oriented any way so the map’s a bit different every game. Also, you can play a game where all players try to control the center of the board, or where players each have a unique objective to achieve

Expandable – Players can get additional character packs to have more choice when building their teams

Who Is It For?

  • 2 to 4 Players – I think the game is best at 2 players; 3 and 4 is a little too busy for me
  • Ages 13 & Up / Mid-Weight Gamers – Fair bit of up front rules, especially with learning the different terrain types, attack ranges, and character cards. Definitely beneficial to have some experience with gaming in general
  • Players who enjoy tactical / strategic games and enjoy navigating a battlefield
  • Fans of Granblue fantasy, hand management, and/or plenty of variability

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Cute art on the cards; foiling is really nicely done on the cards that have them (from expansion character packs); elevated terrain is a nice touch; nice table presence
  • Components – Acrylic standees are lovely – I love the rubbery bases for them too so that putting bases on and off wears on the acrylic less; all the cardboard pieces are nice too
  • Variety – Good variability in board set-up, characters (if you have more than a starter set) and objectives
  • Game flow is pretty smooth / quick
  • I like that the command card allows you to activate one of your characters twice in a round
    • Likewise, the ability to chain actions can be super useful to make a big move in a “double turn” to maybe complete an objective or take out an opposing character

CONS

  • Components – Acrylic standees aren’t double sided, so it is hard to tell which character is which when they aren’t facing you
    • Some of them are also gigantic and don’t really fit within a single square on the board. It is often players are knocking things around when just trying to move a character
  • Defeat – When characters are defeated, they do not come back, which makes their cards less useful, and can set back a player quite a bit
  • I wish there were reference cards – simple reminders maybe for terrain rules, attack types/reach, and maybe when to gain defense tokens
  • I wish the starter sets were combined so that one starter set came with enough characters for a 4v4 game, since you can’t play the objective module without that many

Final Thoughts

If you enjoy tactical skirmish games and appreciate a nice variety in characters, you’ll want to check this out! There’s a lot of room for strategy and whether you change a lot of very little game to game (between the map, characters, and objectives) you can always try different approaches to win.

I definitely like the 4 character teams better than only 2, and the varied objectives are much more interesting than the starter control game of wanting more characters on the center tile. But, that can still be an okay intro game if you just want to try out come characters, or get to know the game flow.

My biggest pet peeve in the game is the character elimination. I’ve played other, similar skirmish games in the past which all give points for defeating an enemy, but characters always come back in those, just resetting to the starting line. It just doesn’t feel good to permanently lose a character, and it just seems to set to set the player back a lot. Navigating that element was definitely tricky for me, but if you’re more strategic, maybe you’ll have a better time with it.

It’s important to bring a balanced team so you can play a little defensively, while also working toward your end goal consistently. Overall, a lot going on, but a pretty neat play.

Additional Information:
Designers – Josh Derksen; Dylan Birtolo
MSRP – $39.95 (starter set); $5.99 (per expansion pack – single character)
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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