Mage Wars - A First Try

 

I spent some time over the weekend reading the Mage Wars rules and getting the spellbooks set up with the suggested starting books for the Wizard and the Beastmaster.  My wife and I were looking for a new game to play after work yesterday and she surprised me by suggesting Mage Wars.  She’s not usually keen on learning whole new rulesets, so I figured this may be a window of opportunity and we pulled out the game.

So a little background about what Mage Wars is – it seems to me to be a combination board game/card game.  You each play a different Mage (there are currently four options: the controlling Wizard, the healing Priestess, the swarming Beast Master, and the attacking Warlock), create a spellbook from all the spells the game comes with (and there are a ton of spells), and then go back and forth casting spells, summoning creatures, and fighting until one mage is defeated.

Sound like Magic?  It sure did to me.

Of course, I always liked Magic.  It just got too expensive to keep up with.  The idea of mages slinging spells, summoning creatures, enchanting the battlefield, etc. appeals to me.  The collectable nature of Magic cards does not.  Mage Wars resolves that nicely by giving me the opportunity to customize my selection of spells and tailor my style of play based on the type of mage I selected.

The rules to the game are actually pretty easy.  Every turn you increase your mana (magic-casting resource) by your current Channel value.  You look through your spellbook and pick out two spells you want to cast, be they creature summons, attack spells, walls, enchantments, etc.

Every creature (including your mage) gets an activation.  You get a wooden token to represent whether a creature has activated.  If it’s starburst side up, the creature can activate.  Once you activate them, flip it to starburst side down.   On your activation, you can either do a full-round action or move and do a quick action (which could be a weaker attack, a quickcast spell if you are a mage, or another move).  Additionally, once per turn your mage can use a quickcast action.  So if you’re about to activate a creature and want to give it a buff, your mage can interrupt with a quickcast of the buff and the creature can move in for the attack.  This wouldn’t take your mage’s activation yet.

When your mage does activate, he behaves like all the other creatures except that he can also cast those spells in your hand.  So he could use a full-round spell (like summoning a creature into his space) or he could move and use a quick spell.  With the free quickcast he gets for the turn, he can get both spells rolling each turn.

The game gets more complex as the individual creatures, spells, and mages come in.  There are a lot of loaded keywords, special cases, and new rules on the cards.  To me it felt more like playing a Warmachine or Malifaux type game where the rule system was fairly standard, but the models themselves brought the complexity.  The spells didn’t have quite as many special rules as those games tend to have on them, but there were a lot more spells being thrown about.

The game feels like it’s going to be much more an investment to play than I expected.  Not in terms of monetary investment – for what you get it’s actually not bad.  But it feels more like a game that you can’t play casually.  If you play it, you play it.  I can see a lot of gaming areas taking the approach of this becoming a game with its own group that plays it pretty consistently.  You create your own spellbook based on the rules, hone it, refine it, and keep going.  In that way it feels like a CCG – you come with your mage and deck and give the game a whirl.  One person might be trying a creature rush while another might take the same mage and play a slow attrition build.  But the game itself does not seem like it could take place in a rotation of other board games to just pull out from time to time.

The other piece that makes it less likely to hit a rotation with my current group of board gamers is that it is only a two-player game.  There are variations where you can play more than two mages at a time, but generally they require the purchase of a second copy of the game so you have enough spells for the other two mages, and so you have enough room to make sure people aren’t walking all over each other.

My wife and I tried a quick game just to understand the rules.  She took the Beast Master and I took the Wizard.  The game started out slowly as we both had to take a good 5-10 minutes reading our spellbook to try to figure out what spells we would want to take.  I imagine that time will shrink once we know what’s available.  But the turns themselves went pretty quick after that.  Move and attack.  Shoot my bow.  Cast my spell.  Okay, we’re done?  Now back to the spellbook for a while.

We called the game early, but we both had a great time and are looking forward to the next match.  There are things we learned from our game that would change how we play next time.  Early on I was building up a strong defense and my wife tried a few weaker creatures and sent them in, but they got chewed up.  I pressed the advance and she figured out how to raise tanglevines on my two advance creatures to bypass them and attack my strong archer.  I fought her off again, and it wasn’t until she was almost out of creatures to cast that she dipped into some of the enhancing spells that the Beast Master’s spellbook provided.  Then, in a single turn, she killed off two of my big creatures, pressed to where my Wizard was, and put me in a spot of bother.

Meanwhile, I spent a lot more time building up defenses for my Wizard than I probably needed.  By the time I was pushing the offense to Laura, I had a high Armor value to reduce wounds coming in, a Defense that could stop one attack a turn, a barrier that would wound anyone coming in, and an enchantment that would bounce an attack back on the attacker once.  If I had been more aggressive early, I could have been teleporting my creatures into Laura’s Beast Master and forcing him back.

Overall, a great match though, and we’re looking forward to the next one.  This game will likely make it out to game nights to see if I can find an opponent for a while.