Summoner Wars

Two decks, two summoners, one battlefield laid out on a shared grid, and the whole thing plays like chess got mugged by a card game. You’re placing units from your hand onto the map, moving and attacking, and trying to land damage on the opposing summoner while keeping yours alive. I’ve had games decided by whether my Mountain Vargath could punch through a wall of cheap sand goblin chaff before my hand ran dry.

The faction identity is where this earns its keep. Every side plays like a genuinely different game, not just a different color, the sand goblins want to flood the board with cheap high-number units and don’t care much if half of them die getting there, while other factions play a slower attrition game where you’re protecting a couple of expensive pieces. I like factions with a real personality more than I like factions that are just numbers moved around, and Summoner Wars leans hard into that, to the point where I keep a running mental list of which faction’s whole gimmick I still haven’t fully cracked.

Here’s the honest complaint, and it’s one I see echoed by people who’ve put way more games into this than me: dice decide too much at the margins. You can build the exact right combo, set up the perfect attack, and then watch it evaporate because the roll went the wrong way, and that’s a real tension in a game this tactical, the puzzle-solving satisfaction fighting against the fact that a bad roll can shit on the whole plan. I’ve made peace with it mostly, but I understand the players who haven’t. The remastered edition cleaned up a lot of the first edition’s rough spots, health totals feel less paper thin, turns don’t collapse into summon-move-die in one round anymore, and the faction resets genuinely help. What hasn’t improved is the box. I own the master set, which is fine, but the standalone faction packs still ship in boxes that don’t stack or organize worth a damn, and for a game built around collecting a rotating cast of factions that’s a real miss nobody’s fixed across two editions.

Quick to teach, quicker to play, and there’s a good chance my rating creeps up the more factions I actually own.