The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged is a powerful skirmish board game

Breaking the board game The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged For the first time, players may be surprised at how small the playing area is. Netflix animated series The dragon prince is an epic fantasy that spans entire kingdoms and countries, so its 10-square-inch game maps may seem restricted at first glance, especially when you realize that they are not used together, and that a complete game is intended for be played on a board.

But once you get into the game, that compressed play area becomes key. Battlecharged is a tactical skirmish minigame, and positioning and movement are crucial to making many of the character mechanics work. Those little simple setup boards, with their various obstacles, help make matches exciting, and once the characters start to battle each other, they don’t really need room to maneuver, but luck, careful planning, and teamwork. Video gamers familiar with turn-based tactical games like the Banner Saga series can get a comforting sense of familiarity here.

Players control characters from the Dragon prince series – displaced crown princes Callum and Ezran, their warrior aunt Amaya and their elf ally Rayla, their arch nemesis High Mage Viren and their two grown children, Claudia and Soren, and the elf Sunfire Janai. Each character has an elaborately detailed miniature and a character card detailing their starting health and energy points, as well as their movement, range, and attack values.

Players determine which characters will be in play, place those characters on the board, and then attack each other. A character that runs out of health is knocked out until the controlling player’s next turn, and the first player or team to accumulate three tokens for knocking out the opposing characters wins the game. Simple and straightforward, to the point where the average game can only last about 30 minutes.

The first complication comes from the game settings. Battlecharged It is considered to work for two to six players, but is optimized for two, with each player controlling two characters, or four players, with everyone taking one character and the players divided into two teams. The five- and six-player variants put six characters on the field, which may seem fun, fast-paced, and chaotic, but it also means that games can pass quickly before some players feel like they’ve had a chance to shine. The five-player variant can also feel a bit lopsided, with two players taking on three and a member of the two-person team controlling an additional character. Some characters synergize better than others, so while individual characters are well balanced, not all teams feel completely the same.

The second complication comes from the characters’ playing decks. Each character has a 16-card deck with special abilities that they can perform for stronger maneuvers, defenses, and attacks, or the opportunity to benefit from events that happen on the board, even things that don’t directly affect them. Some cards can only be used on a player’s turn, while others are reactions to other players. One of the strengths of the game is a simple and clear design: terms such as “react” and “technique” are universal in the cards that, otherwise, are highly variable, which makes it easy to choose any character and see from immediately which cards can be used in which phase of the game. . There are only a few relevant symbols to learn to understand card powers, so this is an easy game to learn and play, with virtually no setup time and few explanations.

Battlecharged only offers the most basic flavor text to introduce the game to players. Dragon prince Newbies won’t learn anything meaningful about political machinations, moral dilemmas, and gradual growth of character. Avatar, the last airbender writer Aaron Ehasz and Unexplored Game Director Justin Richmond prepared the seven-season plan for his series. At the other end of the spectrum, enthusiastic fans of the show might be frustrated by the game’s complete lack of narrative, offering no justification for these characters to ignore all of their past alliances and affections, in favor of unconsciously beating each other. on the battlefield.

But players who are at least partially familiar with the show will have an instant advantage in understanding how each character’s mechanics differ from those of the others and what the basic strategies should be. You can also see some humor in the fluidity with which the tactical design emerges from the personalities of the characters. For example, the young and daring swordsman Soren has moves called Taunt and Show off, which allow him to attract attackers or gain energy if he has more health than whoever is fighting. Soren is a worldly fighter with no arcane powers, so he has a low starting energy score compared to many of the wizards and elves in the game, and his powers are mostly quite small and cost little energy. But as a character designed to protect his allies, he recharges extremely quickly, gaining energy whenever he or any adjacent ally is attacked.

He makes a stark contrast to his powerful father Viren, whose magical techniques deal devastating damage, but have high energy costs. Appropriately for Viren’s parasitic magic style on the show, Viren also has a hard time charging quickly, because he has to consume his own health to gain energy. These kinds of details, which give each character a strikingly different playstyle appropriate to their role on the show, give Battlecharged much of its flavor.

The most exciting games occur when the styles of the characters conflict; For example, Rayla is a fast and mobile elf who wants to attack with her knives, then exit combat and recharge if a turn ends with no adjacent enemies. Janai is a heavier hitter with some terrifying buffing moves, but she prefers to stay still and hit hard, and she gains energy if she takes a turn without moving. None of the elves have a ranged attack, so players controlling either character will often have to make tough decisions: sacrifice energy stacking to hit, or potentially take damage from ranged characters as they power up? ?

All characters have similar offsets, which are not deep enough to make Battlecharged It seems complicated, but it guarantees that players will always feel that they are making meaningful decisions that affect the game. For example, the empathetic young prince Ezran recovers energy if he passes a round without attacking, and has supportive moves like Encourage and Call For Peace, which allow him to contribute significantly even if he isn’t doing damage. On the other hand, you can bring into play persistent cards, your pet, the luminous toad Bait, your young dragon friend Zym, and the adult dragon Pyrrah, which can significantly increase your attacks, making it tempting to get your metaphorical hands dirty.

Character decks are small, shake quickly, and get familiar quickly. If this game is successful enough to warrant future expansions, more cards and tactical options for each character would be a higher priority than adding more characters. But with that said, radically different characters offer many different combinations and team interactions, and just the difference between introducing one character or two offers a lot of variability. This is the rare board game not expressly designed for two players that doesn’t feel anemic for one-on-one play.

In fact, depending on the personal style of the players, they may prefer the control of managing two characters in a smaller game to running one character on a team. In a six-person game, players have a lot more to coordinate with each other, and unless they leave the table to debate tactics (and slow down the game), discussing their plans will let the opposing team know what they are. until. It can be more satisfying for one player to run two characters, especially since anyone with multiple characters mixes both character decks into a single pile. Any of the characters on a team can use many cards, giving a single player more options and tactical flexibility, and more possibilities for a unified strategy.

Those little combat maps – six of them in total – also have a surprising amount of variety. Each introduces different barriers to movement, line of sight, or both, allowing players to find defensible locations or escape the fray long enough to recover. They are appropriately varied depending on the environment: tactics that work in the forest, with only rocks and trees scattered along the way, will not blow up in an abandoned keep, where walls and stairs are a bigger problem. Optional advanced rules for zone of control and line of sight offer even more tactical options for players trying to block or defend.

Battlecharged It is considered accessible to players ages 10 and up, and the rules are simple and consistent enough across all characters for younger players to have a lot of fun with it. The team structure can also allow younger players to join forces with older ones, or allow newer players to learn strategies on the fly from more experienced teammates. But the game’s variability and wide range of character combinations make it a fast and solid choice for more sophisticated players, whether they care or not. The dragon prince, or they are invested in their next fourth season.

Battlecharged it is not a massive and innovative experience that is about to replace Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team in the world of tactical skirmish games, but it’s a respectable introduction to the genre. And given how fast The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged plays, and the ease with which a group can add or remove players from one game to another, is ideal for the beginning or end of a board game day where people enter at random times. Those little game boards open up a big world, with many possibilities.

The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged is now available at friendly local game shops and online. The game was reviewed with a final commercial copy of the game provided by Brotherwise Games.

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