Summoner Wars: Master Set

Picked this up wanting something faster than Gloomhaven for a weeknight, and on that front it delivers, ten to twenty minutes and you’re done. You’re pulling cards from a faction deck to summon troops and cast spells, trying to kill the opponent’s summoner while defending your own. Orcs versus Elves was our first matchup and each side genuinely played differently right out of the gate, which is a good sign for a game this size.

The combat resolution is where it loses me a little. Every fight comes down to a single d6 roll, and with only around fifteen rounds total in a typical game, one bad stretch of rolls can put you in a hole you don’t climb out of. Someone summarized this better than I could, calling out the standard deviation on a single die as just too large for a game this short, and once you notice it you can’t unnotice it. There’s no catch-up mechanism to speak of either, winning a fight earns you magic, which lets you field more troops, which lets you win more fights, and a rough early exchange snowballs fast with nothing built into the system to slow it down.

Faction balance is the other real crack. Elves came up specifically as a problem faction in more than one write-up, extra range, extra attack, a teleport-back ability that let them win cleanly against Orcs across repeated tries. My own experience with Goblins versus Dwarves felt lopsided too, Goblins outnumber and out-magic the Dwarves fast if you’re not careful.

Component-wise it’s fine, the card frames and unit art are clean and legible even at a glance, though more than one review mentioned wanting a better playmat for it, which I agree with, the base board feels a little thin for how much table combat happens on it. Good for a fast filler night. I wouldn’t build a whole game night around it the way I would some of the others on this list.