![]() ![]() At the start of every turn, the Fast swaps places with its egg. That’s right: anywhere, provided the space is empty. Ranked as one of the game’s tough-to-handle wizards, the Fast is allowed to plop down its egg anywhere on the board. I think he might be omitted from the final game for reasons unknown to anyone but the corporate suits at GMT.Īs for me, I was the Fast, an extraterrestrial toad with an egg. Someone else was a centaur Sharpshooter, known for her ranged attacks, hoof kick, and being nicknamed “DeviantArt.” The third player was a skeleton troubadour who liked to die on purpose in order to spread around his own tombstones. Our host picked the Windzard, a fast-flying dickhead with a penchant for rotating people clockwise around the map with his wind gusts. Our recent play consisted of four players, each of whom was completely different from the others except for the shared capacity to walk from one hex to another. There’s the Sand Witch, who spreads dunes across the map to hamper rival movement and assist her own, a spoiled Princess entitled to everyone else’s item cards - oh, and she’s haunted by a killer shadow - and a Bear and a Pig. Much like the wildly varied races of Cosmic Encounter, every wizard proves dramatically different from his, her, or its peers. Not into complicated territory, but rather into the realm of holy smokes you can do WHAT? ![]() ![]() Couldn’t be any simpler.īut that’s when Mystery Wizard takes a hard left. It only seems easy, in part because turns consist of two actions taken in any sequence of your choosing. Don’t expect this to be as easy as in real life, where mysteries follow us endlessly and with misplaced trust. Your ultimate goal is to return two mysteries to your home space. The map itself is a grid of hexes, peppered with special zones - a desert, a marsh, the usual - and magical sites, like temples that refresh your spells and a central tower where the mysteries are hidden. In other words, it’s a great fit for a board game. It’s a turbulent relationship, soon giving way to bitterness, nagging, and escalating attempts to poison each other’s food with Drano. To approximate it, picture the wacky antics of Wiz-War entering into an ill-conceived marriage with the racial perks of Cosmic Encounter. The result is that playing Worldbreakers is like exploring a hobby from adolescence for the first time.What is Mystery Wizard? Like any complex system - a city, a termite mound, a systemic racism - it cannot be easily summed up. It’s intuitive to teach, riffs on a few familiar chords, and crosses vivid new horizons. Amir has refined that august parentage into far more approachable offspring. On the other side of the coin, Worldbreakers is appealing for much the same reason. If anything, its slight differences from Magic - say, in the way attacks are resolved - are a sticking point for no other reason than because they’re so minor that they never wholly escape their daddy’s shadow. Teaching it is as easy as confirming that your pupil also constructed decks in middle school. There’s nary a novel bone in the game’s body. From one perspective, it’s the bastard child of Magic: The Gathering and Android: Netrunner, right down to the compulsive inclusion of a colon in its title. Those of us who lived through the collectible card game boom of the 1990s approach our CCG derivatives with due suspicion.Ĭonsider Worldbreakers: Advent of the Khanate, Elli Emir’s take on the genre.
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