Godtear

Two or three champions a side, each with a little squad of followers, objectives on the board instead of a straight kill-everything brawl, and the whole match is over in five rounds whether anyone’s dead or not. I picked this up mostly for the models, I’ll be honest about that upfront, but the system underneath turned out to be the actual reason it stayed on my shelf.

What surprised me is how much strategic weight this carries for how few rules it has. Every champion’s ability card and every follower’s stat line fits on a card you can read in ten seconds, and yet the synergy between a champion’s kit and their followers is deep enough that I’m still finding combos I hadn’t tried after a dozen plays. The tug-of-war objective scoring is the smartest part of the design, you’re not just racing to grab points, you’re actively fighting to hold and flip them, which keeps both sides engaged even when one champion’s clearly winning their individual duel. It plays fast enough for a weeknight and rewards the kind of tight tactical thinking I want out of a skirmish game without the terrain-building overhead that usually comes with the genre, there’s barely any terrain rules here at all, which some people count as a weakness and I count as time I get back.

The dice are custom and chunkier than standard d6s, which I like a lot, they have real heft in the hand and the faces are big enough to read across the table without leaning in. Where I’ll push back on the glowing reviews: the starter sets only give you two warbands, and the game is genuinely designed around three per side, so the real buy-in is higher than the entry price suggests once you’re actually building out a competitive roster. And at exactly two players going one-versus-one, it can feel a little feast-or-famine, whoever gets the early tempo tends to snowball it, which is less true once you’re running three warbands and the tug-of-war objectives spread the pressure out.

A genuinely well-designed system that the publisher’s own reputation problems have made harder to recommend without a caveat, but the game on the table has earned its spot.