Warhammer invasion: the card game

today, i got my hands on warhammer invasion, the card game. now, ive played magic and even a bit of the wow card game, which was very simmilar to magic in its basic system, then theres even pokemon and yu-gi-oh amongst others that appear and dissapear from time to time. BUT the warhammer card game is unlike any of these, for one major reason... its made by Fantasy Flight games! WHAT? yeah, you heard me.

Fantasy Flight are a company that produces geeky board games, and are renowned for there love of lots and lots of tokens and over complicated rules, no changes here. but this is a card game, not a board game! there are no boosters, you get 4 decks that come in a box along with spare cards you can if you wish, work into these decks, and a small sub deck that at the start of the game, 10 of these cards get added randomly to your deck.

you have a capital each, so far there are 4, there is Chaos, Greenskins, Empire, and Dwarfs and their respective capitals, each capital is devided into 3 different subsections, the battlefield, the kingdom and quests. for each "power" (power is attack strength of your units(creatures) and other cards also offer power seperately) placed under the quest section allows you to draw an extra card each turn, each power under kingdom gives you more resources, these are used to play the cards, and the battle field is the only place your units can attack the opposing capitals from, you can place units in other areas to defend though.

when you attack, you choose what of the 3 areas you are attacking, and only units placed there can defend this attack, you then get a few moments to use "tactics" cards, which are like abilities, that do what they say on the card, this can be from "target unit cant attack this turn" to "destroy target building" after the attackers have chosen where to attack, and the defenders have been chosen to defend the capital, damage is delt, you MUST deal max damage to each unit before you can choose to damage a capital, if you get 8 damage on a capital, that area is "burnt" and you place a little counter on it.

the over all objective to win is to burn 2 of your opponents areas in his capital.

after spending some considerable time playing the game today, i have decided, that although this does not conform to any other card game ive played, although its made by a board game company, although its confusing at first, it has alot of potential and was quite fun when we had learnt the rules correctly.

each of the 4 races you could choose from were better at one thing or annother, the dwarfs could stick up a good defence, and when they had built up a defence, they could build a fearsome attack force. the empire had lots of cheap units that had abilitys like "pay one resourse and move from one area of the capital to annother" which is good for defence, but they also had some nice abilitys to stunt the opponents growth. Chaos... well they were about mainly strong units, they were quite powerful from the outset, and just brought out bigger and stronger creatures till you could no longer hold them off, but they also had some usefull abilities. finally, greenskins, they were good at taking down opponents "support" cards, which are cards that come into play and have some benifit without being targetable or involved in fights, quite annoying when you want to get rid of one, also the greenskins had a decently strong set of units, that became stronger if they were hurt.

all this has lead me to believe that it was well worth buying and that if they bring out future expansions, i may well go out and buy them, once you get your head around the rules, the game can be quite fun and tactical, for this i shall give it an overall 85 out of 100, its not quite perfect, but with a good expansion or two and better customizeability, this could be a game i will play for years to come. my advice is, if your into card games, and like warhammer, go buy it!