Yesterday, I played a three-player game of HeroCard Orc Wars. If you’ve read my review, you’ll note that I assess it strictly as a two-player game; this is because I didn’t own the expansion packs at the time of the review, and I still don’t. When I played with my friends Tad and Chris yesterday, Chris played as the orcs, Tad played the Paladin, and I played as the Ranger, using the Ninja deck from Rise of the Shogun. I still plan on posting a second part to my review, assessing it as a multiplayer game with the decks that it’s meant to be played with, but I thought I’d post some preliminary thoughts based off of the game I played yesterday. In no particular order:

• As a multiplayer game, Orc Wars is something of a mixed bag. I enjoyed it, and I think there’s a lot of potential fun there, but my problem is with the player elimination mechanic. As a rule, I’m not generally a big fan of player elimination in multiplayer games. In a two-player game, it’s fine; once a player is eliminated, the game ends. Yesterday, though, Tad was eliminated twenty minutes or so into the game, and had to watch me and Chris play what had effectively become a two-player game for another thirty or forty minutes. How is that fun for Tad? I’ve always thought that, regardless of whether you win or lose, a good game should be fun for every player as much as possible. The other issue with the player elimination mechanic is that, once a player is eliminated, the orcs are at a huge advantage. Once Tad was eliminated, Chris and I were effectively playing a two-player game; however, he was able to reinforce his armies based on the number of elves at the start of the game, and he got a bonus draw whenever I drew cards based on the same thing. This puts the remaining elves at a pretty severe disadvantage, and it almost makes it feel like you’re just trying to delay defeat as long as possible, rather than trying to really win. Of course, this may vary based on scenario. To combat these problems, I’d like to try Orc Wars with a modified multiplayer system, one that eliminates the player elimination aspect of the game. Some possibilities:
  • A mechanic similar to the one used in Descent: Journeys in the Dark could be used. Instead of each elf having a wound track that results in elimination when it’s filled, perhaps the elves have a collective pool of tokens equal to their total wounds. Each time an elf suffers a successful attack, they discard a wound counter; when they have no more left, the game ends and the orcs win.

  • Perhaps an elf whose wound track is full could suffer a sort of ‘disabled’ condition. Upon receiving his final wound, that elf skips his next action phase, but then plays as normal afterward. Any time the elf takes another wound, he suffers the same effect, skipping his action phase. The elf might also suffer some constant debilitating effect, like the value of any attack sequence he plays being one or two points lower for as long as his wound track is full. When all elves have full wound tracks, the orcs win.
• The more elves there are, the more it is to the elves’ advantage to accomplish their objectives quickly. Tad and I spent a couple of rounds trying to kill off a squad of orcs, but because Chris could reinforce his armies more effectively in a three-player game than in a two-player game, the orcs were reappearing almost as quickly as we could kill them. By the time the game had ended, Chris had four full squads of orcs on the board; that’s twenty orcs against my lone elf! We were playing The Relics, and if we had been trying to get the treasures on the board a little more quickly, we might have stood more of a chance.
• If you don’t own the expansions for this game but you do own other HeroCard games, the ones from Rise of the Shogun make good thematic approximations of the Ranger and Sorceress. Thematically, the Ninja is a pretty good match for the Ranger, and either the Prince or the Miko would work well for the Sorceress. For me, playing as the Ninja helped to minimize the thematic disconnect that I would have felt had I played, say, the Cosmic Cult from Galaxy or the Cryptomancer from Cyberspace.

In all, I feel like Orc Wars is really optimized for two players as it is, though I think I need a few more multiplayer play-throughs to truly get a good sense of the game. The game scales well on the orc side, allowing the orc to still be a viable player, but the player elimination aspect has some problems.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 7:09 pm and is filed under House Rules, Links, Musings, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.