I get why Efka likes the game. There are some really good ideas in here. The card splaying and the card abilities, the wild and the enemy vowel are all good. The idea of the pacing with the lackeys and bosses is not bad, the way you can use the enemy vowel to skip over abilities and manage the antagonists … pretty great. The antagonists abilities are pretty cool and how each is set up gives a different feel while playing against them. Nice! Even the way the cards exhaust and your deck becomes smaller and smaller is good.
BUT…
the execution of it all, the actual game, the physical components do not live up to the great ideas that form what I expected to be the „core loop“ (aka making words). Which makes the package so disappointing to me. I have previously complained about this game on the Recent Games thread and have not really changed my mind.
I have also played the game digitally and while it removes some of the bookkeeping that drives me nuts and also the terrible trackers for HP, energy, hexes and boons, it did not make the game more fun to play.
Playing digitally, and I found that the game remained as tedious and the pacing as slow as on the table—even when my component and book-keeping issues are removed from consideration…
Making each word is fun until you figure out that with the wild and the vowel there is almost always a word to be found. The app actually makes this even easier because it shows you which words are valid as you arrange the cards… and so I rearranged cards until it was a word… because of course I want to win.
And so the game decisions end up being like this:
- check direction of splay (attack/defend)
- check card ability I want to use (1 of 4 normally)
- check card ablities I can trigger through discarding of letters
- do i have the energy, boons, hexes to trigger certain artifacts
- do I want to use the enemy vowel to skip an action
- and finally can I arrange the letters in such a way that I can fulfill all these decisions I already made and it turns out most of the time you can…
I guess if you want a boss battler more than you want a wordgame this might be not a terrible game. Seeing how enthusiastic Efka is about it, I might give it another try. There are some things about it that I do enjoy—mostly the really really great theme and the thematic stuff is really good and well done. The cards and abilities are so good…