Door 5
What’s behind the next door of the MechanXmas calendar? It’s dueling card games! Well that’s more like a genre than a mechanic... I guess we are just making up stuff up as we go. We didn’t think this hashtag through 😂 Games have too many mechanics, so it’s really hard to do this correctly. Anyways, we wanted to highlight Radlands!
I was hesitating between choosing Pagan: Fate of Roanoke or Radlands. They are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Pagan is a slow, methodical and tense game about trying to find a witch between villagers; meanwhile Radlands is a high-octane bullet-shooting cage match in a race to destroy the camps of the enemy. Both are brilliant! 😁
💥In Radlands you and your rival draft 3 camp cards at the beginning - these all have diverse asymmetric abilities that change up how you approach the match. Your goal is to destroy the camps of your opponents.
On your turn you can either play people cards from your hand to the 3 columns in front of your camps, or event cards into your event queue. You are limited how much you can play of these by water 💧, the currency of the game. You never have enough of it.
You can also scrap 🚮 cards for their icons, discarding them for all kinds off effects.
It’s all quite simple yet there is a lot of variety.
💬 I like how fast paced this game gets as you get to know the cards and their many effects! The hard choices come from the fact that you only draw one card at the beginning of your turn, so you have to think hard when to scrap or play them… drawing extra cards is very expensive. You can also only save up one water.
Sometimes it can feel like you have no chance, if your opponent has a bunch of dudes shooting everything you play. But there is always some way to come back! 💪
We couldn’t resist getting the deluxe version of Radlands at SPIEL. We were happy how small the retail box was, but having the mats for this game is almost a must-have. It’s so nice seeing the spots for the cards. It also comes with plastic cards instead of the normal paper ones, so even if we perish during a nuclear apocalypse, at least these cards will survive… very comforting! 😂
