Author Topic: WarCraft: The Board Game  (Read 1729 times)

Dragon

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WarCraft: The Board Game
« on: August 28, 2022, 19:22:34 »
WarCraft: The Board Game is surprisingly almost 20 years old. The game was released in 2003 and it was one that I purchased soon after it was released. It has the artwork based on WarCraft III, which was the current video game in the series at the time of release. The board game has a modular board, which was made up of various clusters as small as 2 and as large as 5 hexagon spaces together. The spaces have forests, gold mines, and town buildings pictured on them. The game could be played with 2-4 players, with different maps that could be setup based on scenarios in the book, or whatever else the players came up with. Players collect resources, build up their towns and armies, upgrading them as they go, and head into battle hoping to capture their opponents town or get enough Victory Points from upgrades and important locations on the board. The game can end by getting 15 victory points in the standard game, which requires maxing out your upgrades on your combat units and/or getting "Experience Point" cards from battles, some of which have Victory Points on them.

I had played WarCraft: The Board Game with my son, Isaac, years ago, but after one play he wasn't interested in trying again for a while because it took nearly 4 hours. Normally the game play is about about 60 to 90 minutes. I had played it against some other people also, and although I enjoyed how the game worked, I wasn't able to get it out a lot. I did print off some helper sheets years ago. I also got extra dice that matched the colors of each army in the game, red, blue, purple, and green, which I think was a nice addition to the game because the game originally came with just 4 small white dice - they just totally felt like they were meant to be replaced.

Before Isaac went off to college, we were talking about some of the games he was interested in playing that he hadn't in a while and WarCraft was one that he mentioned. Last night, after he came home for a weekend visit, he agreed to play and we went to battle with the Orcs vs. the Undead. Fortunately I had a little time to re-read some of the rules while he was out with his mom, and we had about a 15 minute overview of how the game work once he sat down to play. Early in the game, he had pushed his Workers out to a forest space that was near the center of the board and I immediately played a "Fast" card and moved my Melee units out to the space to destroy them. We had a close battle soon after that, in which I used Devour to take out one of this Melee units at the start and I got lucky when he was hit, played a couple "Curse" cards, and failed to save himself from getting killed. We both had Outposts near the center of the board by that time and soon after that I went after his and destroyed it. Isaac lost more undefended Workers and more units in some other battles as I continued to Upgrade my units, build up my Town, and continue marching my troops toward his base. I captured his Town about 75 minutes after we started playing, which seemed like a reasonable timeframe for our first time playing the game in many years, but most importantly, Isaac enjoyed the game even though he lost. He said that he knows where he made his mistakes and definitely wants to play it again. 

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