#svwag

Guards of Atlantis 2 is great, and it's great largely because of things I assumed couldn't be true based on how it is usually described, so I'll refrain from explaining what it's like, and instead try to explain what it is.

Guards of Atlantis 2 is a board game that I bought for €59 + shipping during a crowdfunding campaign. (This is supposedly a discount from its "retail" price of €75, though it is not and apparently never will be available at retail.)

It is a team game: there is a blue team, and an orange team. Each player controls one "hero" card on a hex grid, and you have cards that do things like "move 2" or "attack 4" or "defend 6," or fancier things like "swap places with a friendly unit" or "push an adjacent unit up to 2 spaces."

While the action cards follow a few basic templates, each playable character has a collection of action cards that are distinct enough to give each hero a unique identity, like "good at ranged attacks," or "slow tanky brawler," or "glass cannon."

The teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick. The first time we played a 4-player game, it took us around 2 hours. Our second game added a 5th player to the table and took around 90 minutes. (There's also rule variant that makes the game potentially longer for those who prefer more "epic" struggles.) This is a game that is totally reasonable to bring to a weekday "board game night" and honestly something that wouldn't feel too out of place on the shelf of a store like Target.

Here is the part where I feel like I start providing the sort of information that gave me an incorrect impression about what this game would be:

You can attack enemy heroes, but most of the time you are attacking enemy minions, which provide 2 gold when defeated. At the end of each round (which lasts 5 turns), players get to spend their gold to "level up" and upgrade their abilities. As you level up, it increases the "gold bounty" that the enemy team gets for killing you.

In addition to attacking enemy minions for gold to level up, you are trying to win the "minion battle." If all of the enemy minions in the current wave are eliminated, you execute a "wave push," and the fight moves closer to the enemy base. Fighting closer to the enemy base is harder, but if you push the minion wave all the way to the enemy base, you win. (Your other win condition is killing enough heroes on the enemy team.)

What I have just described sounds very much like a MOBA, and that is very much how Guards of Atlantis II is marketed. That is in fact the entire Unique Selling Point and Core Value Proposition of this product. And in many ways, this "MOBA board game" label is descriptively true. However, it is not MOBA-like in many ways, notably:

The minions do not move or perform actions. They sit on the battlefield, providing passive buffs to friendly heroes (and debuffs to opposing heroes), waiting to be harvested for a 2 gold bounty. There's no "maintenance phase" where you have to figure out what the minions do. This is great: the game is all about the heroes; the minions matter, but the minions are just there to make you stronger.

The default map does not have "lanes." When you play a 2v2 or 3v3 game on the base map, everyone is in one lane in the middle of the board.

Units do not have hit points. Every attack against a minion is lethal. Every attack against a hero is also lethal, unless the defending hero blocks it by discarding a card from their hand that has a defense value that matches the value of the attack. (In a sense, I suppose your hand of remaining cards could be seen as your "health pool.")

Notably, the lack health points means that there is no tracking of health points: there is never a point at which you have to look at an enemy and ask, "how much more damage to kill that thing?" This makes it a breeze to play compared to other hexgrid-based games like Gloomhaven.

Most saliently, I said it above, but I feel obliged to restate it: the teach is short. The actions are simple. The turns are quick and snappy. This is not what I expected when I heard that it was a "MOBA"-style game. This is not a game where you have to spend a bunch of time consulting the rulebook as you play to figure out how things work; you can completely learn the rules in <10 minutes, and then just go in and start doing stuff. You play a card, you do the actions printed on the card, the rules and phrasing are clear and unambiguous.

The other thing that gave me the (false) impression that Guards of Atlantis II was a certain type of game was the nature of the crowdfunding campaign.

I mentioned that I paid €59 for a SKU that is "the base game." The base game contains 7 heroes to choose from. However, you can also buy a €40 "hero pack" that is essentially an expansion that adds 5 heroes with interesting new abilities that are generally higher complexity. This also has the effect of raising the max player count from 3v3 to 5v5, as the back side of the board offers a larger map with multiple lanes.

Did I say that you can buy a €40 hero pack? I meant that you have your choice of up to five different hero packs for €40 each. Or, if you don't want to choose, you can buy all of them, if you are the sort of person who wants to expand the base roster from 7 playable characters to 32. For such people, they helpfully offer an "all-in" tier which gives you the base game for all the hero packs for €249.

That gave a certain impression when I walked into this game: in my mind, it was that sort of Kickstarter game, where you pay $250 for a giant box of nice-looking plastic miniatures that sits on your shelf for years unplayed because nobody you know wants to surmount the massive teaching burden that must accompany a $250 purchase.

But the reviewers at So Very Wrong About Games assured me this was worth the purchase, and so I bought it. And I was delighted to discover that the game that I bought for €59 shipped came in a reasonable-sized box that I can easily carry with me to board game night, and that people are happy to play with me because the teach is short, the actions are simple, and the turns are quick.

It's so easy to just start playing the simple action cards and executing what they tell you to do. Within several turns, everyone was able to begin talking strategy around the table. "He just played his highest defense card. That means we can probably get a hero kill if we go for a double attack." "Hey, can we win this minion push? I can kill these two over here if you get the last one on the other end of the map." "If you can prevent me from dying this round, I promise that I will be able to clear this wave by myself." It's a delight. It's the sort of game where you don't feel like you're playing with and against the ruleset; you're playing with and against your friends.

It's also a game that I feel a bit guilty about recommending, because it's not a game that you can easily obtain, as it was only available during a crowdfunding campaign. I was happy to pay €59 + shipping; I would have been considerably less happy to pay the $150+ that copies are now selling for on ebay.