Golem Arcana

HBS went away.

Golem Arcana was left to die.

I was waiting to see just how long the game would live. A few years.

I snatched a bunch on great clearance sales, knowing the game would still run on the App as it was an independent program that did not actually need a live server.

I understand why people shy away from these computer/board hybrids. I cannot argue there. 

But man... This is something amazing.

There are two very distinct things going on here. One is a crazy cool world and a very deep game. The other is this weird tech.

So I have to present the review in two distinct bits. The game. The tech. Tech will be in italics.

I assume everyone buys a bunch of dudes and doesn't really just get the starter by itself. In the starter you get 6 guys, maps, cards and the stylus.

The minis are a hard plastic, excellent, excellent sculpts, fabulous design and so-so to good paint jobs. Let's face it, with very few exceptions, prepaints are never all that glorious. They're at the level of the better HeroScape minis and the best Clix minis.

There's great lore involving a war between the dying empire that invented these awesome walking tanks made of precious stones and metal and the upstart rebels who found a way to make them cheaper - from blood and sand. The remaining two factions are essentially Bone and Forest.

The app sets up the tutorials for you after bluetooth connecting to the stylus. (make sure your device is compatible) Yes, the whole map is shown, with your dudes on it. can you play without the minis? Beats me. Maybe, if you're like a party pooper or something. Now, I really don't know what I expected from this stylus, but it does it way better than I thought. It's a weird optical reader, reading this very faint microdot dithering on everything. You tap, and instantaneously, the app responds. It tells you about the dude you tapped, the square on the board or the individual ability you selected, either on the mini base or their corresponding card.

Set up for the tutorials is static. They basically teach you the simple outline of how to play and interact with the app.

In play, the game feels like chess with combos (combinations of powers, not the cheese filled pretzels). Each dude has a point value, held in the app, various powers, and a pilot that does some cool customizing.

In simple games, you have about 3 guys per side. The first tutorial will take a half hour, mostly of you holding up the minis to your face and wondering just how the hell microdot tech works. It's a simple "Kill one of those other guys" scenario.

Next, the game explodes. I mean, it goes from really nifty tech demo to holy cow, there is a really solid game engine here.

Pilots (knights) add modifiers to your guys, customizing them a bit. Your Ancient One basically adds a spell book with a few earth shatteringly powerful ways to break the rules. Your army is suddenly a lot more versatile and a lot more focused at the same time. Abilities are great. Wildly different, and sometimes subtly distinct.

Very. Cool.

Play consists of Action Points. You get some based on size of your crowd (point value). This number is static, so when you have 6 action points spread to 3 guys, they do a lot less individually than 6 points on that lone survivor, who pretty much converts to berserk mode when he's the last dude. But... he gets tired.

All actions, from walking to firing poison needles, have a cooldown. The cost doubles each use, and cools down a tick each turn. So you may have an ability to run 2 squares. It costs 1 action point. Then 2. Then 4. Yeah, you can sprint across the board, but you can't do much else.

And of course, there's tons of terrain modifiers. Don't worry - the app will track the cover bonuses and movement points for everything you do. Tap a guy - it tells you where you can go. Tap terrain - it shows you what bonuses apply.

Essentially, combat is a % roll. Minus the DODGE of the opponent. Then a flat damage amount. Minus the armor of the opponent. All modified by terrain and abilities.

So if you have a 60% chance to do 35 damage and the opponent has 8 dodge and 4 armor, the app shows you have a 52% chance to do 31 damage. This is incredibly simple, but once you have the app doing the math, you start pointing all over the place comparing odds. If you have played the excellent new XCOM video games, it is precisely like that. But now with mini monsters.

With all of the very granular hit points (I had 120, you've done 13 damage and I take 5 per turn from bleeding), it could be a nightmare of record keeping. But it's not. The app does everything and all information is readily available to you.

What takes 40 minutes to play here would easily amount to 90 minutes if you were referring to charts, doing math, moving markers, tracking cooldowns...

There is an excellent minis engine here. It would be a good game without the app, but it would be for truly hardcore minis gamers who will remember the varying cover rules based on terrain vs the size of your golem.

This is now SUPER accessible. You will never forget the rules. You can't. You just need to remember the basic of how to use the stylus.

Yes - the game was hugely expensive. That certainly kept me out of it (Sorry, Andrew, I know you invested hundreds more than I). There were people who won't play an app based game, OK. But I think a majority of the world thought it was a gimmick.

It. Is. Not.

It is an amazing tool to make a heavy and heady game have a weight similar to HeroScape. I have no doubt a 7 year old can play this game. Possibly very well, if they know their abilities and powers. The Fire Ram is a freaking bipedal mortar that rains death on the enemy at absurd ranges if you give him the right pilots and put him on a hill and just leave him. You're spending time fearing that idiot - not calculating.There's a lot more DECIDING what to do than tracking your cooldowns and consulting the rule books.

There's apps for other games. They tend to feel like as much work as the game (I'm looking at you, Sentinels Of The Multiverse - Lord Of Fiddly Bookkeeping). This is a smooth and amazing implementation.I'm not sure if they had a complicated system and decided they needed the tech, or if they had the tech, so added tons of layers of what would be fiddly under other conditions, knowing the app would erase the problems.

This is an excellent game system where you have agonizing choices. The fights are often down to the last 20 hit points (and the big dudes have well over a hundred). It is nerve wracking, and victories feel victorious. There's critical hits, there's damage over time, there's buffs and debuffs, curses and miracles...

This game is really really good. And the tech pushes it into great.

TLDR: Cool mini monsters duke it out with an App to do all the math