SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
you raise up undead legions, summon dragons or angels, recruit humans or wolves and fling them at each other Epic is a card game by Robert Dougherty, the man who gave us Star Realms. There's a blog analysing the game in depth and comparing it to Keyforge.
|
As usual with these games, you are supposed to be a god and you are summoning monsters and armies to do battle with another god. The recent Pantheon expansion actually provides stat cards for various gods and demigods, introducing some asymmetry into the game. Without that expansion, the game plays fine as you raise up undead legions, summon dragons or angels, recruit humans or wolves and fling them at each other until there's just one of you left standing.
The game is Magic: the Gathering on steroids. Instead of earning manna from lands, you can play any number of (weak) 0-cost cards each turn and a single (tough) 1-cost card. Events do their thing then go to your discard pile but champions stay on the table and can attack or unleash other powers every turn. Since creatures have 'summoning sickness' for a full turn after arriving, your opponent will do his best to wipe out your troops before they can act and you will be doing the same.
Several champions have a tribute power that activates when they are first played but some have a loyalty power too, which activates if you can show two other cards of the same alignment (good, evil, sage and wild). This encourages you to curate your hand, rather than just playing everything you can every turn.
Tactics involve setting up lines of blockers who sacrifice themselves to stop the incoming attacks - but Breakthrough damage spills over and Airborne attacks cannot be easily blocked. You can break or banish creatures with various cards, sometimes dramatically clearing the whole table.
I'm a big fan of this game: it has some deep strategies, especially when you dark draft your decks from the core set. This gives you imperfect control over what's in your deck and an imperfect knowledge of what your opponent has in theirs. The world of Epic is charming too, with its dinosaur-filled jungles, time-traveling wizards, plague-spreading necromancers and various political intrigues referenced in the cards.