Heroes of Land, Air & Sea

BaBalleflassstar6.5

Good quality compoents. Good rulebook. Too many similar abilities which makes it clunky for no positive gain in gameplay. Combat is too obvious because of combat card resource cost and specific miniature requirements. The game is way too slow to be like Warcraft 3 which it really tries to be. It's fun for a couple of plays, but it's not as good as Clash of Cultures, Forbidden Stars, Exodus, TI4, Lords of Hellas etc. in my opinion. Would be great to see a second edition with a revised combat system and with some more streamlined abilities for each race to make them a lot easier to remember. This is even worse than Kemet where you need to remember the tiles.

EvEvanstar4.6

This is a dudes on the map game that has a really fantastic table presence. It has a look very much molded after the Warcraft video game theme. It largely does the job of games of this genre well, but it suffers on a few counts. The first is, between asymmetric board abilities players unlock, and special abilities on hero cards, it can be very difficult to get a handle on what a player can do without asking them in the moment. This makes surprise attacks tough, and additionally makes for frustration when someone with abilities you weren't aware of attacks you. The game also lays it's regions out in a way that you can't ever have a defensible border. You need to spread out to get the resources you need to advance. Even if you are on an entirely different island, there are enough ways to access areas that your resource gatherers might get punched. To attempt to compensate for this, there are some wonky defense rules or abilities that let you summon all your men from an island into a battle. This is unwelcome wildness in the engine. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment