Gaming Recap - Black Rose Wars

 Gaming Recap - Black Rose Wars

I headed over to one of our FLGS here in St Louis (Miniature Market) last Thursday night to play some Black Rose Wars. I knew basically nothing about this game other than it involved cards and players were mages. It was one of those instances in which Chad wanted to get a game going, suggested a couple of titles, and someone else made the final choice. I was all too happy to follow someone else's lead on this because I didn't know any of the titles Chad suggested!

Therefore, I was fairly well surprised when I showed up at MinMart and found two tables worth of set-up! Well, sort of. It really is a much bigger game than I anticipated because it's not *just* cards, though it is mostly a card game. There are player boards, then a game board, the multitudinous decks of cards, and then the minis. But I'll also say that the components are nice. The player boards have the recessed track for cubes, the art fits well with the theme, and the minis are really excellent. I'm pretty sure I don't need another game to paint, but if I did, I could do worse than Black Rose Wars.

Ultimately, I ended up enjoying this game. We played with 4, and I think the maximum number of players is 5. I definitely wouldn't play with 2 players. There are a lot of bells and whistles (I don't say this in a derogatory way!), but ultimately this basically plays like Adrenaline. Each mage gets points for killing other mages, who respawn instantly after death. More damage equals more points, a kill earns you a trophy, and killing the same player again and again earns you dimension returns on points, incentivizing you to kill players you haven't killed before. Again, just like Adrenaline. I like it and would happily play it a bunch more times! But I'm unlikely to buy it anytime soon because I already own Adrenaline.

Also, as a heads-up, there's quite a lot of stuff in this game. If you sort of keep your head down and don't need to know EVERYTHING about the game, then it runs fairly smoothly. So just be conscious of who you invite to the table. Otherwise, y'all will be sitting with nothing to do while one player considers every possible avenue they could take on every single turn, and instead of enjoying the game (which really does feature a decently slick design, aside from quite a big setup and tear down; plan on playing this more than once in a sitting or plan on it being the only game you play that evening), you'll find yourself just hoping it'll be over soon. And that's not really fair to this game.

I chose to go with the big bearded guy because he looked cool. Honestly didn't give it any additional thought because I was ready to get started and get my ass handed to me as I figured out the game. I decided to start with a deck of Necromancy cards because I generally love Necromancy in games. There are a ton of different schools of magic, each featured in its own deck. Each round, players will draw up to 4 new spell cards from these various schools of magic, choosing two to keep and add to their deck. This is where that analysis paralysis can kick in, so I had already decided to buy hard into Necromancy and then sprinkle in choices from maybe 2-3 other decks. I started with Cartomancy just because I was curious as to how that would be implemented in the game. Plus, my very basic understanding of Necromancy was that I'd be raising constructs and sapping victory points off of other players or siphoning their health to use as my own. Either way, I thought Cartomancy might provide a bit of a Control element to my spell book. I was disappointed by the first cards I drew into, but kept it in the rotation anyway because I liked what I thought they were trying to do with the spells.

I got off to a bit of a slow start during my own turn for the first round or two because I was getting a handle on the game and wasn't quite locked into playing it like Adrenaline just yet. So I was taking hits and not dealing them. But I really lucked into summoning 3 constructs in my first turn (servitor minions that can act, do damage, and activate after all the mages have gone; 3 is the maximum a player can have at any given time), and those 3 hauled off and hurt some people when their phase rolled around. So they really singlehandedly kept me from falling too far behind in the first couple of rounds.

Again: really cool minis.

At some point, though, between scoring a couple of damage/kills through my Constructs, I really started to get ahead in the spell power track (I think that's what it's called? It's basically the victory point track, though there are other sources of victory points involved, like quests and such... I'll elaborate at the end why I'm a little foggy on this), and hit a point wherein I thought I could just sprint to the end. I kept picking up Necromancy cards and had a brief flirtation with Void cards just because I didn't know what they did. It looked like the summoning of demons from what I drew, so I quickly moved on because I already had summoning on lock. I figured I needed a little diversification that would earn me a couple more points to end the game and secure a win. I ended up going for blunt and started drawing from the Destruction deck alongside Necromancy at the end of the game.

At this point, though, MinMart was closing and we did not want to overstay our welcome. So we decided this would be the last turn. However, it was in this turn that I was going to end the game anyway, as I could easily increase my track score by 2, getting me to 30 before anyone else. That's how I spent my last turn. Then we called the end of the game because cleanup was going to take more than a minute, even without putting everything back in its proper spot. There are just so many components! So I think I won, but I'm honestly not sure. We had briefly discussed scoring in the beginning of the game while Chad was teaching it, but I forgot all of the different things that contribute to endgame scoring. We didn't really have time to tally it all up at the end, so we're pretty sure I won, but we don't know for certain.

I'd like to come back to this soon. I think it's a fun game and while there's a decent amount of depth to it that offers replayability, it's not a hard game to pick up, persay, so long as players aren't trying to analyze every single option available to them. So, again, I do think the group with whom you choose to play is more likely to dictate how much you will enjoy the game than with most other games. The game has a ton of spell book options, and as Chad pointed out, it might be better to just not play with all of them. Such a choice would cut down on setup, breakdown, and playtime. But overall, it seems like a solid game, I'm glad I played it, and I'm looking forward to playing it again.