Empires of Arcana

Bias: I am not a wargame fan.

Cheap paper components. I spent the majority of the last game we played super-gluing the layers of the tokens back together.

The goblin mechanic is a creative way to make the players work together for the first part of the game before turning on each other, but the rest of the game falls flat for me.

My regular miniatures partner and I(both of us in our 40s, he is a lawyer) played this game last week with my ten year old son.

While a simple beer and pretzels game rules wise, it still has wonderful nuances. Most importantly, this game is FUN!. My friend and I are looking forward to playing it again, and plan on taking it with us to Historicon next month to play at night.

My son wants to play again, he bugs me every night. He takes the box out and shows everyone the goblins on the back, and explains about his dragons, how much they cost, and how he went in and cleaned out a goblin warren. It was a blast.

The goblin rules especially are ingenious. Creating a viable system generated opponent that the players MUST band together to fight makes the game so much better.

A wonderful game. Easy rules, good decision making, but most of all just plain fun.

Great game, but let down a bit by some production issues with the counters (ie, they're hand-cut) and a goofy-but-harmless typo on the mapboard (altar, alter, what's the diff?). Lots of fun, and scales well between 3 and 6 players. The NPC goblins can be surprisingly hard to contain, much less exterminate.

Excellent solo playabity. Artwork is fantastic. Gameplay is tense due to the expansion of the goblins. Managing building army units vs. upgrade/adding towns/castles/wizard towers is very important to gameplay and adds a dimension of having to make tough decisions each turn.