Plot: You are an evil evil god plotting destruction of the Warhammer Fantasy world.
Goal: Two part race, either first to 50 VPs or first to spin their dial to the end game condition.
Mechanics: Be patient this is going to take a while. Nothing is especially hard, but there are a lot of phases in a turn.
Phase 1: Draw an Old World card. This is an event card, and the least threatening person decides how it is set off.
Phase 2: Draw Chaos Cards. These are action cards, played in the varying regions.
Phase 3: Action phase. Summon critters and play action cards. These all have scaled magic costs associated with them. In general you are trying to do two things here, conquer the region (earn victory points) and corrupt the region (get more power and late developing victory points). The more assets you play in a region, the more progress you make towards conquering it. Specific assets will corrupt.
Phase 4: Battle phase. Might be better put as resolution phase.
First, fight battles. Any time two or more opponents are in the same territory a fight occurs. Calculate your offense, roll some dice, determine hits. Combat is Axis and Allies simultaneous, everyone gets to try and hit.
Next add corruption tokens. A level 1 critter, known as a cultist spreads corruption in that reason. Doing this may meet the condition to award you a wheel advancement token, which will increase your power, exactly how much determined in another phase.
Check for Ruination. Getting 12 corruption tokens ruins that territory. It scores VPs now, but can no longer be conquered.
Check for conquering. Score VPs depending on how hard this was to conquer.
Phase 5: Clean up.
Check wheel advancement tokens. If you earned one, your wheel advances 1 spot. In addition, the person that earned the most, advances an additional spot.
Other effects: Sometimes an event places a hero, that hero whacks a critter in his territory. There's other end of turn effects like this.
Which brings us back to D'oh!
Review:
Ryan quizzed me last night, did I like this game. I guess I lied and said yes. The truth is I haven't made up my mind yet. Its got several qualities I like. It's paced well. There are only 6-10 turns, but you are doing several things a turn. It's got good decisions, who to summon where, and who to mess with. But it also has some things going against it. It's hard to learn. I'm not going to say its overly complex, but it is very intricate with all the different phases and things that one needs to do. It takes a long time to play, last night it lasted a hair over 3 hours (including instruction reading). Call it 2 hours once we get in practice. And finally, its got Games Workshop baggage. It seems fairly well balanced (never having played with Khorne...), but I have played too many of their games to think it will remain unbroken.
Anyways, I can't say that I like this game, but I am intrigued and am looking forward to making a better informed decision.
