The worst rulebook ever?

🌹 Black Rose Wars has always been hailed as an amazing game, which led us to blindly back Black Rose Wars: Rebirth—a standalone expansion, or you could say a 1.5 version of the original. 🤔 Like most big crowdfunded games, this one is also hungry for shelf space, so we were really hoping it would live up to the hype. It took some time to finally get it to the table, but after a 2p learning game on Friday we played a 4p game on the weekend, quickly followed by another 2p game with the Avatar automa on Sunday. Well, it seems all those people weren’t wrong, the game is indeed great! 😁

Black Rose Wars is pretty much a euro in ameri-clothing. 😮 You see the amazing detailed miniatures, the mountain of boxes and tons of cards and tokens - but this is no dungeon crawler. There are no frustrating dice rolls or any of the like! You do action-programming with your spell cards that you draft each round, there is “slight” deckbuilding (I say slight because we usually shuffle our discard pile once before the game is over) and majority scoring in multiple areas. It’s awesome! 🙂

Each game is an arena battle between mages. ⚔️ You plan your spell cards in advance, then take turns in clockwise order, performing 1-2 actions at a time, trying to outmaneuver your rivals. You can activate rooms for their effects, summon all kinds of creatures, and damage each other with magic ✨—all while also dealing with event cards and completing quest cards. Ultimately, it’s a race to 30 points, and there are many ways to score. 💪

Now, I have to pause the positivity here for a sec to mention the rulebook and the learning process of the game… 🤢 This is undoubtedly one of the worst rulebooks we’ve ever encountered, and I’ve read many… The structure isn’t necessarily that bad, but when you start playing you realize that they actually forgot to explain the game. Some essential rules are only mentioned on overview cards and the wording on cards is questionable at best. So it’s a lot of forum diving and searching for answers. Even after our 3rd game, we still kept encountering mistakes and unknown cases. So if you are new to BRW, be prepared for that. 😅