The Waylanders Review

The Waylanders is a competitive board game for 2 to 4 players. The players choose their 5 team members, plan their tactics and fight against their opponents to get the victory.

Waylanders is set in a magical era, when men were connected to nature and to the other races of the world. The exploits and the search for power and treasures became an obsession for the adventurers of that era, who forged alliances and fight enemies to reach places loaded with powers.

Select your 5 adventurers among the 20 available, each of them with different combinations of races, abilities and classes. Each adventurer has strengths and weaknesses in each type of combat (short, medium and long range) and in each type of terrain (forest, plain and mountain). Knock down your opponents, accomplish objectives, control the land… Your strategy will be the one that leads you to victory!

Review:

Overview:

The Waylanders is a competitive battle game set in the universe of the Waylanders (Videogame).  In this Duel or Battle royal board game each player take the control of a team of adventurer who will engage in team fights and try to conquer the land to earn Torqs.  Choose your team wisely and your team leader even more before getting to battle.

Duel Games – turn rhythm

Playing mostly with 2 players, I can say I’ve played quite a few duel games.  Putting the game mechanism aside, there is a feature that has always differentiated them somehow: the action count per turn.  Chess has a one move count per player per turn which is one of the most common manner to play.  Each player plays one action and hands over to its adversary.

Worker placement duel games are just a step further, where each player plays, after the other in a round made of a few turns.

Other games like Crystal Clans and the Waylanders are based on what your adversary used in the previous turn.  Which leads to asymmetry in your turn and through out the game.  You may play one action during the second turn and have the possibility to play 8 after the others.

The Waylanders – as such

The Waylanders is a game in which 2 to 4 player battle a team of 5 adventurers to have them wander the land and fight the other teams.  Each adventurer from the 29 available lead to very different teams.  Moreover each player must choose a team captain.  The team captain grants the team a different power. Leading to a little less than 3 millions possible combinations for your team !

The game takes place on a modular board made of hexagonal regions.  Each region is set up with an outpost.  Taking control over a zone will earn the player a victory point.

Taking another adventurer down is the second big manner to earn victory points.

Fights are based on the terrain that is being attacked and adventurers have a superclass that make them strong on one of the three terrains of the board.  Unfortunately it effectively means that each adventurer of one’s party is only ever useful on one third of the board.

The board tiles have a limited amount of available places for adventurers. Although adventurers may be healed you need to be able to get one of yours on a spot.  Which means that taking control of the board where the corpses of your enemy lay is a core mechanic.  If you are able to take 2 of your adversaries adventurers down and hold there corpses, there is no way your adversaries will recover ever. Which makes it the best way to win.

Material

Although the material of a game is not the most important part, otherwise print and plays wouldn’t ever sell :).  This is were I’m most disappointed in the Waylanders.  The overall quality of the plastic and resin element isn’t up to today’s standard (in my opinion).

Cards and cardboard

The cards art style is well polished with evocative names for each ability, aggressive stances for the warriors and a more defensive stance for the healers.  All information is easily understandable and readable.

Good color and good printing overall.

Miniatures

The miniatures are resin, and are not of the expected quality and are somehow difficult to connect with the cards they represent on the boards because the stances are different, some of the yielded weapons are too.

Dice

Custom dice are always a good thing and the ones provided in Waylanders are of good quality and easy to identify.

Some Last words

The big bumper is the quality of the components for the price paid.  If you love minis and good resin you’d rather buy a Zombicide game for the same price. The snowballing has nothing to envy League of Legends but the Waylanders comes with good ideas and endless possibilities, the team leader mechanism is something that needed to be brought to life correctly. 

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