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.
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