Roaring to victory

🐾 Tug of Roar is also part of the Twisted Realms series (currently live on Kickstarter by Inside Up Games) which we already talked about last week. It caught our attention because it is - surprise, surprise - a tug of war dueling game, and we usually tend to enjoy those. 🤩 Players lead either the 🦌 Elkyr or the 🐺 Lycaran faction in a struggle to control the 5 regions of the battleground - which is a beautiful playmat. The concept might be familiar: playing cards to different regions while trying to have the bigger sums at the end to win a majority of regions - but there are some new ideas infused into the mix. 😉

The game goes through 3 phases: Enlist, Deploy and Skirmish. 👇

You start out only with 10 captain cards valued 0 to 9. In the 🧾 Enlist phase, you’ll use some of them to bid for drafting order - You’ll reveal 2x3 card sets randomly and whoever won the bid can choose which set to take and which goes to the opponent. This goes on until both players have 12 cards in their deck.

Then, the 🥾 Deployment phase begins: You play your cards one by one to the 5 regions of the map. A region can only have 2 cards per side, so you will both play 10 cards. Here comes a bluffing element, as you can optionally play up to 3 cards face down to surprise the opponent. Some cards might move the Roar track token, bringing fear tokens into play for an additional edge over the opposition. 😈

When all cards are played, it is time for the showdown in the ⚔️ Skirmish phase. You evaluate regions one by one, but remember those captain cards I mentioned? 

First you’ll play your remaining captains to fight for +2 strength bonuses. You then reveal cards and compare strength, and additionally if you have a matching Class pair in a region you activate their special ability. (Matching the theme of the other games, recruits you drafted are all named after RPG classes.) If you have a 1-2 strength advantage you win a flag, if 3+ then you win two flags. So just leaving regions alone because you think you are losing there isn’t necessarily wise. At the very end you check to see who won more flags - and that’s it! The whole game takes about 30-40 minutes! 😉