Did you grow up watching Yu-Gi-Oh, just waiting for your chance to duel Seto Kaiba? Then a game like Battle of Souls might pique your interest. Battle of Souls takes a pinch of that nostalgia and brings it to reality in its own card game. Now the only question left to answer is, is it successful? Let’s jump right in!

What Is It?

Battle of Souls is a Yu-Gi-Oh-esque card game where players command an army to fight an opponent and work to gain enough soul points to become King (or Queen) of the realm.

Who Is It For?

The game itself states a recommendation of ages 7+ to play. I would say that if you have “gamer” children – ones who play a fair amount of games with you, and learn quickly – then that is accurate. Otherwise, I’d say it’s mostly for adults and seasoned gamers in general, because it has a little bit of a learning curve what with needing to earn kill counters on your warriors in order to sacrifice and upgrade them to better types of warriors…. it might be a little much for younger/unfamiliar audiences.

Quality of Components

I can’t say too much here because I don’t have a finalized copy of the game. My card text is difficult to read, my rules are a separate print out with some errors, and my card box is too tight. Their previous Kickstarter shows a cleaner card layout, which is so nice and much more legible. Mostly, for me, quality is TBD and I can’t know anything for sure until a final product is released.

PROS

  • I like the theme/concept. I think that it plays very similarly to what I always thought of Yu-Gi-Oh and I was definitely attracted to that.
  • I like the feeling it gives you while playing. It really has that tense battle ambiance to it where you feel like while you’re playing that your soul is at stake here! It’s definitely a plus.

CONS

  • Rules are a little confusing/convoluted. It just feels like you can get stuck in endless cycles of not having anything to play since there doesn’t seem to be a discard rule. Additionally, as I mentioned, I have a simple print-out of the updated rules, and I think the, what seems to be, simplified version of the rules leaves out some bigger picture items.
  • Individual cards aren’t explained well, which makes battling difficult in my opinion. This could very well change with the updated cards.
  • While playing it felt like it could always go one of two ways – once someone got a significant lead they kept it and soon annihilated the other player with no real hope on their part of making a comeback, or it is an endless tug-of-war of losing and gaining similar amounts of soul points until someone finally concedes. More cards which award or take away soul points directly might help to streamline that.
  • Finally, and this may be specific to my play, but I was given 2 Samurai decks to play with an pitting identical decks against each other did not seem to work at all. It just seemed to not balance correctly. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be playable with similar/same decks, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it regardless.

Difficulty

I would probably rate this a 3.5/5 based on my experience. While I found turn and phase order easy to go through, I thought it was hard to follow the ranking rules, mostly because it was hard to keep warriors on the field for very long since the decks were very evenly matched. The rules were just a little confusing to get around as well, which didn’t help our particular playthroughs.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really liked where this game was going because it had a cool concept behind it and I really enjoy battling card games. However, I felt that the version I played with had a few too many hiccups to make it the purely enjoyable game I think it could be. Personally I feel with  few more tweaks it could be a real contender for an awesome game. I hope to see more on it in the future!

Happy Gaming~

Additional Information:
Publisher – No Limit Games
Website

*I was provided a prototype copy of this game to do this preview*
*All components shown are subject to change*

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