Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Being the sucker for card games that I am and still feeling vaguely enticed by the prospect of being able to build decks once again, I grabbed Warhammer: Invasion over the Chinese New Year from Toybox. While I was there, I also bought the Skavenblight Threat as it was the only one of the battle packs left. Apparently these things have been selling quite well even in Malaysia. As someone who was heavily into Magic: The Gathering during the old glory days, I’ve been very curious about Fantasy Flight’s LCG format and wondered if it would truly be able to solve the problem of CCGs being huge money sinks while successfully retaining the core mechanic of customizing decks. This would therefore be my chance to find out for myself if it works as advertised.

As everyone knows by now, this is a card game that is supposed to simulate battles between the different races of Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy world. The basic Core Set comes with four decks for the Empire (humans), Dwarves, Chaos and Orcs. A companion set is supposed to be released later this year to add decks for the High Elves and the Dark Elves, but the Core Set already includes a handful of cards for each faction plus twenty four neutral cards that can be used to customize a deck. What surprised me was that the set also includes twenty cards used only to support a variant drafting format but aren’t actually included in playing decks. In addition, the box contains a large number of tokens to help keep track of resources and damage as well as a Capital Board for each faction. The boards aren’t strictly necessary but they do look nice and help to keep the playing area organized.

Each of the four included decks are composed of forty cards and in a two-player game using only the Core Set, the rulebook suggests having each player take one of these decks, shuffle the neutral cards and randomly deal ten of them to each player. Alternatively, there are rules for drafting a deck for each player using the drafting cards to make it almost like a separate mini-game. Unfortunately, there are no rules for multiplayer though I note that the text on the cards carefully make allowance for that possibility. For example, instead of saying “the opponent”, the cards specifically state either “target opponent” or “each opponent”, leading me to think that perhaps rules for multiplayer might be released at some point in the future.

The basic rules are easy to learn but leaves open the door to many interesting decisions. There are four phases each turn and a player goes through all of them before the turn passes to the opponent. During the Kingdom phase, the player collects as many resource tokens as he has power icons in that zone. Since the capital board already starts with three icons, each player generally gets a minimum of three resources a turn. These are refreshed each turn, so you can’t save resources from one turn to the next. Then comes the Quest phase and the player draws cards equal to the number of icons in that zone, with a minimum of one as marked on the capital board. Next comes the Capital phase where the player gets to put units and support cards into play. This is where things get interesting for someone who knows only Magic: The Gathering.

This is because in Warhammer: Invasion, units and support cards can be played to any one of three zones. So if you want to get more resources every turn, you play units and support cards into the Kingdom zone. If you want to draw more cards, you play cards into the Quest zone. The third zone is the Battlefield zone and only units in this zone may launch an attack on the enemy capital. This occurs during the last phase of the turn, the Battlefield phase, in which the player needs to declare which enemy zone to attack and with which units. Each zone starts with 8 Hit Points and once a zone has accumulated enough damage, it is considered Burned. The first player to have two of his three zones burned loses the game. The other losing condition is when your deck runs out of cards.

Combat is very different from Magic: The Gathering as well. Only the units actually present at the zone under attack can be declared as defenders and all combat involves the entire group as opposed to a series of one on one fights. Each side adds up the total number of power icons its units involved have and inflicts it as damage tokens on enemy units. Because your opponent chooses where his damage goes, you can expect low defense units to die first, so don’t expect high defense units to be able to shield weaker ones. The attacker can distribute damage tokens onto the enemy capital only after he has assigned enough tokens to kill all defending units. This damage is permanent, which means that tough units can be slowly whittled down over the course of multiple attacks.

Combine these rules with a decent variety of cards and nicely differentiated factions and you get a game that plays very well right out of the box. What’s especially impressive is that this is a card game with actual gameplay. The ability to play cards to any one of the three zones and the corresponding control that you get over your resource generation and card drawing power ensures that you always have interesting decisions to make. This contrasts with the often justified criticism against Magic: The Gathering that it’s game almost purely about deckbuilding as the gameplay during a match is so straightforward that the deck basically plays itself. The four decks all play very differently and lend themselves to different strategies, so even without delving into the deckbuilding aspect, I’d say the Core Set is well worth its cost as a standalone game.

At the same time, even though I can see how building many different decks can be viable once enough cards are available, I haven’t come away with the impression that the LCG format is really much better than the old CCG format in this respect. Some cards in the Core Set for example come in only one copy, so if you really wanted to make a deck with three of these cards, the maximum number allowed in the rules, you’d have to buy three copies of the Core Set. I’m also not happy with the way that Fantasy Flight is trying to make each of the battle packs contain a little bit of everything for everyone.

Calling the first pack the Skavenblight Threat seems like a bit of a misnomer once you realize that there is a grand total of four skaven cards in the forty card pack, which makes them completely useless as skaven cards look like they’ve been designed to work only with each other. It would have been more customer friendly if each pack had a specific theme and only included cards that fit this theme. They’d have to publish the list of cards well in advance so that only people who specifically want to build a skaven deck for example would buy it, but folks would then know exactly what to buy and what not to buy. As it stands, even if you’re only interested in building, say, an Empire deck, you’d still have to buy all of the packs because the Empire cards are spread across all of the different packs. Changing the pack format to include three copies of every card doesn’t really help with this but it’s obviously a great way for Fantasy Flight to make more money.

Finally, for all the thought and attention that obviously  went into the game’s design, I wish they’d paid more attention to the history of Magic: The Gathering and the problems the designers of the older game had to resolve over the years. Many phrases and words seem poorly chosen or inconsistently applied. For example, the first time I read the phrase, “after your turn begins” I knew they were asking for trouble. Sure enough the FAQ has since ruled that this phrase should be replaced by “at the beginning of your turn” wherever it appears just as Magic phrases it. The FAQ has even made at least one extremely important rule clarification that completely contradicts the rulebook and drastically changes the way combat works. If anyone doubts that players have a lot of doubts over how the different card effects interact  with each other, just go take a look at all of the threads on BGG about rules questions. Even now, I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between terminology like “dealing damage”, “taking damage” and “moving damage” and whether or how damage cancellation effects work in each of these cases.

Still these are problems that I’m sure will get resolved eventually, even if they have to hire a rules lawyer from someone in the fan community to do it. In the meantime, Warhammer: Invasion is still an excellent two-player and I think I’ll be getting the Companion Set to add a couple of new decks when it’s released. I’m not really in a position to get into deckbuilding at the moment, so I have no idea how the metagame will evolve. I do note that currently Orcs are widely considered the strongest faction and based on what little I’ve played for now, I’m inclined to agree. I do hope that official rules for variants involving more than two players will eventually be released and I’d also appreciate it if the drafting rules were modified over time to include additional cards from the battle packs. That would help casual players who don’t buy everything but would like some extra variety to spice things up from time to time.

All this means that while the LCG format isn’t quite the clean break from the CCG format that I’d hoped it would be, overall Warhammer: Invasion is a still very good game that I’d easily recommend to anyone interested in the Warhammer Fantasy theme and looking for a good two-player game with decent replayability. Plus the art, which I understand is taken directly from the sourcebooks for the miniatures game, is fantastic and the borderless card design makes them a joy to just look at. It’s already gained more attention than the actual Warhammer CCG,  WarCry. Hopefully, it’ll end up sticking around longer.