EuroFront II Question

I have wanted this game for a loonngg time and finally have a copy. How long should a full game of EuroFront II take? It would be a group of experience war gamers that have played a lot of games and understand block games, but have not yet played EuroFront II.

What is realistic to expect? I want to try and play this with my gaming group, but I am afraid the time required is going to be too drastic. If that is the case, this game may have to visit my "Gaming Closet of No Return!" and wait about 10 - 15 years until some of my younger boys are old enough to take part in this game with me.

Review: Wizard Kings by Columbia Games

So aside from my gaming group, that meets 1 or 2 times a month, most of my gaming is done with my 13 year old son, Brandon. So I decided to start a series of reviews on games we play, from that point of view... the point of view of a Father and Son taking part in gaming sessions.

I am more of a hard war gamer, playing the more complex and lenghty games, games with other adults that take a full day or more. Mostly World War II type, I have a ton of fun. My son likes the WW2 theme as well, but finding a game that he can play that he enjoys is the problem, the main downfall being the legth of time between turns in the game, the excessive downtime is a killer for a teen age boy.

So I recently came across Wizard Kings, and got the entire first series and 16 of the new expansions, plus all available maps. We tried to game out a few times and liked it, and have recently begun a campaign game which has been going well.

I am not going to get into a review on the game mechanics, and how the games works step by step, there are plenty of reviews here on that, instead I'll get into the game review from our point of view on the game itself and game play.

The game itself is wonderfully done, at first I thought the blocks were huge (compared to other block games I have, such as GMT's Europe Engulfed), but after spending a little time with the blocks, sorting them by army, organizing the forces, etc., they actually are not bad to play with, and very nicely done, easy to understand, decent artwork (nicer artwork on the new second series stuff).

The maps were beautifully done, and there are so many to choose from and combine, that the game could be played dozens if not hundreds of time with the maps never getting 'old' or causing problems with developing common strategies.

My son quickly found an attraction to the forces of evil, he loves Orcs and Undead armies, so we quickly divided the armies up into "his" (bad) and "mine" (good)...

We decided rather than both looking at what each army had to offer, it might be more fun to reveal it as we went along, the whole "fog of war" thing, which is a main point of this game, prevents the opponent from seeing what pieces he is fighting before the fight happens... This worked out nicely, especially since neither one of us was familiar with each other's armies at the start... as games went on we both got a feel for what each other had, with some surprises still to pop up many games after the first (either from blocks not used previously, or the chaos units that are added in from time to time).

We initially played with older 1.5 and 1.6 rules, but quickly changed up to the newest 2.0 rule set with some minor changes and house rules to carry over some things we didn't like... for example, having a stacking limit of only 4 didn't allow for the larger 'epic' feel we both like, so we agreed that each side could have one unit of blocks lead by a wizard exceed the 4 limit, and increased it to 6. So it was kind of neat seeing one large force gather and work it's way across the board. This then lead to the house rule of the limited turns in combat (I think it is supposed to be 3 or 4?), but we banished that because we could never finish a fight in the time limit, especially if storming a city that was reinforced or if our largest army was involved.

With all the house rules aside though, I'd say we played the game by the rules about 95% as close to 2.0 as possible, with those, and a couple of other, minor adjustments.

For anyone not playing with the 2.0 rules, I urge you to try it out. Being able to transport gold from city to city, or city to front line, has certainly made the game much more strategic and more fun overall, than when we first started playing. Also the addition of magical items, weapons, artifacts and new units/troops (including Clerics that heal and heros) also has been more exciting.

The game play has gone very well, I am very surprised at how fast the game moves and also how quickly the turns go, there was no long periods of waiting, and in the few times we did have to wait around, there was very little time to get bored, as you were constantly looking at your army and trying to decide what the next move was, or what new units to purchase and what current units to improve, etc.

As an experience war gamer, I was quite pleased with how Wizard Kings played and the level of strategy. I found myself only "going easy" on my son a few times when we first started, now I find he has caught onto the rules and has developed some tricks, etc. I no longer find myself holding back on him, which also tells me the games rules are easy enough for him to fully pickup in a short time.

On time he had a massive force moving in on one of my high production cities, and I sent in units to reinforce to hold the city, at the same time he had some small units working their way down another part of the map at less important cities. It was only after he had distracted me long enough that I realized the large army was a decoy, he used our house rule of 'over the stacking limit in one army' to send a decoy army filled with strength 1 foot soldiers and an expendable wizard... the decoy worked as I had diverted many of my forces to meet and defend against this huge army of crap... meanwhile on the other size of the board, some highly powerful chaos units had unleased an attack on several smaller cities, one of which I lost... Imagine my surprise when my main forces basically held off against the lowest possible level guys in the game, and a Dragon attacked a city that was for the most part unguarded (two low level guys).

This clearly illustrates the 'fog of war' element of the game, and how it can work to someone's advantage. 

As for how I rate this game... the overall game itself is decent, the maps are good and made of high quality paper with nice graphics, the blocks are not bad, I did notice some variations on the colors, nothing major and nothing that could 'flag' a unit or 'mark' it as something you would recognize at a later date... the game itself is great too. It is not something I would pull out in my standard gaming group, but it is something that I can have a lot of fun with playing it with my son. He loves the game, and while thought it is not his favorite (cough cough runebound cough cough), it is surely one of the top 10 games that gets played at my house now. 

I have recently ordered "Victory: The Blocks of War" from Columbia Games, which seems similar to this in a more WW2 type setting, so that will probably be another game that will soon see a lot of table time.

As for Wizard Kings, our campaign is well under way (using the rules posted here in the file section), only time will tell who will win, but currently my son's Forces of Evil are ahead slightly in the campaign (I think he now leads by 2 points), so there is time for my Forces of Good to pull off a victory.  I will write a session report on the whole campaign as time goes on and we get closer to finishing the first part.

My rating on a scale of 1 - 10 is going to be: 8.5

Mainly for the playability that I have with it here at home with my son, if it was a game for my gaming group only, I think it would have gotten a much lower rating - not a 'bad' game, but not for my group of gamers.

Wizard Kings campign rules question

My son and I have been having a blast and decided we'd like to do an ongoing campaign type of setup, I found and downloaded the campaign rules that were here in the file section byt Jason Little and they look pretty good!

I wanted to see if anyone here who has played using these rules has any suggestions or info they can give me knowing that I am going to be using these rules to game by.

I am also open to read other campaign rules if there are any available.

Wizard Kings rule variations all over... (update)

 am glad to hear some different views, that is the main reason I wanted to post to begin with.

Initative Roll - It is working out great that the winner of the roll gets to choose who is going to go first.

No Retreat - We were looking at it from the opposite view of you, the person who moves first (gets initative) has the advantage for the turn, so we were looking at it as if they were more prepaired to react, etc. Therefor letting them retreat if they wanted.

3 Rounds of Combat / Stacking Limit: I did forget to mention, but we dont use the 3 rounds of combat rule, it makes an attack seem too difficult, and with a retreat option you can always back out later in the fight if you want to... Since we have a house rule that lets one force go over the normal stacking limit of 4 to a limit of 6, we have found times that two huge armies are meeting on the battlefield, combat sometimes hasn't even gotten half done by the 3rd round.

Wizard Kings rule variations all over...

So my son and I have been playing for a couple of weeks now and really enjoy the game, we have been doing the 1.5 and 1.6 and 2.0 rules. Talk about conflicts. haha.

We have found some things we like and some things we dislike, so we have come up with some house rules that have been working out pretty well.

First is the Initative, rolling 2d6 with the high roller going first sometimes is NOT an advantage, sometimes I dont want to go first, so we changed it roll 2D6 and the high roller gets to choose who goes first that turn.

No Retreat on the first round of combat - We thought this made some units not as good as they could be, like some elves, so we decided that whomever won initative on that turn could elect to retreat on the first round (not who won the roll, but who went first), if you did not win initative you could not retreat on the first round, it made the initative roll also a bit more dramatic since the winner could choose who gets the initative. If you win the initative roll and choose the other player, then you also forfit your ability to retreat in the first round of combat.

Stacking Limit - We played with the limit of 6 (plus wizard) and the board seemed very cluttered in some spots, so we tried the 4 limit and it played much better (I have read many complaints about 4 not being enough, but I think it might be players who were used to the 6), in any case, although the game did go smoother, we did notice some combat that seemed like it would have been better with larger armies. So we decided to stick with the stacking limit of 4, but allow 1 group on each side to go up to 6 (plus wizard), this represented the main army or largest force that your side has to offer, we also decided that a wizard has to be in command of that group for the stacking limit to go over 4... If the wizard was killed or left for some reason, the group would have to split, etc. We are thinking of maybe trying out something like for a 100 point game you get to go over the stacking limit of 4 once, and for each additional 50 points you play you can also go over 1 more time, so a 200 point game would allow you 3 groups that can break the stacking limit of 4, etc...

There was one other thing that we had made a house rule on, but I can't recall it right now and I dont have the game handy to look, so I may edit this message at a later date with more info.

I would love to hear everyones opinions on these house rules and let me know if you have a better way or a house rule that is similar and any good/bad thoughts about it.