- Summoner wars best base deck plaid hat games manual#
- Summoner wars best base deck plaid hat games free#
Should you really have summoned that cool unit? Should you have taken that crystal now? It’s rare that you feel truly committed to the tactical choices you make during the game – any flicker of pride sparked from bold decisions is immediately washed out by the floodlights of dread. Decisions feel difficult, strategies feel strained, and satisfaction feels hard to come by. It’s more that this contrast is useful to describe quite how cold and pragmatic this game is. Quinns: Optimise their employee workflow?īut if Crystal Clans was just a game at odds with a theme, we could look past that. You’ve been invited to live in Fraggle Rock, but they’d like you to help them to, well. The ideas and aesthetic sizzle and pop, but underneath the colourful exterior there’s a contest that feels stressful and unkind. Matt: I did too! Crystal Clans is so immediately colourful and clever that to begin with, Quinns and I were puzzled as to why we weren’t having much fun playing it.
Quinns: Ack, is it that time already? I really wanted to like this game. If your opponent gives you enough Initiative, sending a fast-moving, high-attack character sprinting down the field to the enemy castle to deliver a deathblow to her deck feels EXACTLY like scoring a goal in a football match. If a player sends a squad hiking all the way over to their opponent’s side of the board, those cards can “Invade” her castle to slice a wad of cards off of her deck. Oh, and I’ve saved my favourite mechanic for last.
Summoner wars best base deck plaid hat games free#
Sure, you can play cards onto the board, or discard cards from your hand so you can draw different ones, or play cards to help you in fights, but every time your little 27 card deck runs out and you need to shuffle your discard pile to form a new draw deck? Your opponent gets a free crystal. If you pay a whopping 9 initiative to claim a crystal or 11 initiative to summon a killer squad, there’s a sense of handing your opponent all the rope she needs to… not hang you, necessarily, but certainly to tangle your squads up in a lasso.įortunately, this isn’t the only way to get crystals. On your turn you can pay Initiative to take clansfolk from your hand and deploy them onto the board as a squad, you can pay initiative to move them around the board (and optionally fight the other clan’s squads), and if your squads control two of the board’s three “Crystal Zones” you can pay an exorbitant stack of initiative to collect one of the four crystals you need to win the game.īut here’s the twist: You can do any actions you want, one after the other, until you push the sparkly Initiative token onto your opponent’s side of the board, at which point it’s your opponent’s turn to do whatever she wants in whatever order she wishes. Once you’ve each picked a side, the game itself is a race to collect four crystals, a job that will require mastery of the numbered “Initiative track” running down the side of the board (seen above). Plaid Hat has already announced four more clans as imminent expansions, and they’ve stated that in the future they’ll be selling additional cards for each clan to let players customise their decks a little bit.
There are six clans in the base game, from the tiresome psychics of the Water Clan to the teeming hordes of the Skull Clan, but these are just for starters. It works like this: First, two players each pick a clan with its own unique deck and thought-provoking play style. This is like no other box we’ve ever reviewed.
Summoner wars best base deck plaid hat games manual#
This feels like a world for everybody, and the manual doubles-down on that by using the feminine “She” to refer to the player.Įverything in Crystal Clans has a touch of the revolutionary about it, and that extends to the actual game. Quinns: It sure is, Matthew, and so is Crystal Clans! This box is a bat-signal that immediately summoned my childhood fascination with not just “fantasy” but the fantastical.Ĭontained within this game’s deliciously diverse clans are knights that ride bees into battle, necromancers who pursue a romantic Dia de los Muertos aesthetic, time-travelling twins and one massive crocodile. The bracing breeze of GI Joe! The salty spray of the Thundercats. Quinns: To look at the box of Crystal Clans, the new 2 player card game from publisher Plaid Hat, is to hear the soaring soundtrack of Saturday morning cartoons.