From: DG Associates

Price:

- MSRP $25.00 (Starter)

- $35.00 (Deluxe Starter with PC HOMM IV)

- $  3.50 (Booster Packs)

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A note:  The Armchair Empire received less than 20% of the initial release set (a starter box and a dozen or so boosters) for review.  As with all collectible games, a player's experience is going to vary based on the cards available to him or her.  This review is based on our experience with the cards and tiles we had available.  Having more cards available could improve the game greatly or it could reveal weaknesses in the game that were not apparent to the reviewer with the given set of cards.

The Spin:  “Adventure is Reborn...”

The Story:  In the Heroes of Might and Magic IV Collectible Card and Tile Game (HOMM) players take on the role of a hero or heroes traveling around the land recruiting creatures, invading towns, securing resources, and engaging other heroes in combat.  The game is based on the hugely successful PC game and attempts to capture the strategy and feel of the series.  For those unfamiliar with the game, the Deluxe Starter Set includes the complete PC/CD-Rom game.

The Play:  HOMM is a collectible card game, so players begin by assembling personal decks with which to confront their opponents.  These decks consist of numerous elements familiar to players of the PC game—creatures, heroes, towns, mines and other locations, artifacts, spells and skills.  The huge number of each type of card in the initial set should mean a number of different deck building strategies will be possible.

After building their decks, players begin the game by assembling a map from an assortment of oddly shaped tiles made up of small hexes.  These tiles include hexes representing towns, creature dwellings, and locations.  The tiles include an amazing variety of different terrains which affect the speed which an army can travel across them.

Basic gameplay involves moving around the board, discovering different towns, creature dwellings and locations and claiming them.  Towns allow heroes to muster a variety of forces.  Creature dwellings allow for the recruitment of specific creatures, and locations

provide resources necessary to recruit higher level creatures or cast certain spells.  The unique aspect of HOMM is that the specifics of each town, creature dwelling, and location are determined by the cards played by the player who first discovers/conquers them and their defense is determined by the other players in the game.

For instance, if I invade a creature dwelling, I first must fight the guards—who are placed there by one of my opponents from their own deck.  After defeating the guards, I play cards from my hand to show what creatures can be recruited there.  Then, I can recruit creatures of that type from my hand/reserve pile from that point on at that location. 

The same scenario applies to the discovery of towns and other 

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locations and the game basically boils down to trying to make your opponents pay a higher price for building up armies and resources than you have to pay. 

The combat in the PC game is a lot like the combat in the old Avalon Hill classic Titan.  When two armies meet on the overland map, the game closes in on the action to allow for tactical maneuvering like the Battle Boards in Titan.  HOMM the CC&TG doesn't have the separate terrain boards, but, instead uses a a two-rank system to determine which troops can attack where.  Basically, there are two possible positions for creatures in combat—the Ranged position for troops with ranged weapons and the Melee position for those without ranged weapons.  Melee troops can only attack from the Melee row and can only attack creatures in the opponent's Melee row.  Combat is handled through dice rolls.

The game is won by the last man standing.  As soon as only one player has any towns or army stacks, the game ends.

My Take:

First, let me say I'm a huge fan of the Heroes of Might and Magic series (though I was disappointed with HOMM IV), so that might have colored this review somewhat.  HOMM:CC&TG certainly captures the feel of the PC game.  An effort has clearly been made to reflect as much of the PC gameplay as possible.  This is both a blessing and a curse, but, overall, it makes for a game that is certainly going to appeal to a segment of the gaming community and to most people who enjoy the PC games.

On the positive side, the whole building armies, advancing towns, promoting creatures, learning spells, defeating opponents aspects of the game are compelling.  I love the RPG aspect of starting with a low-level hero and advancing him or her to become a powerful sorcerer who controls legions of amazing mythological creatures. 

The way the guarding of locations is handled is brilliant, one of the coolest mechanisms I've seen in a game in the past few years.  I also like the mechanism for purchasing creatures and upgrades (cards in hand are used as money) because if you draw a card that won't help you at that point in the game, you can use it as cash.

Combat works well, but I would have loved to have seen a Battle Board like feature that better reflected the way combat works in the PC game and gave the battles more tactical depth.

There are bigger problems, however.  First, the standard victory conditions simply make for too long of a game (two hours for 2 players, over three hours for three players)s.  There is nothing in the basic game driving players into conflict.  In a multi-player game especially, the first players to get involved in conflict usually fall behind the players that continue to explore and muster, so most games involved a lot of multi-player solitaire (lessened somewhat by the “flipping for guard” mechanic) as players mustered and prepared for conflict, then round after round of combat as players whittled away at each other.  The game desperately needs some kind of timing mechanism to keep things moving. 

Luckily, the rulebook discusses upcoming scenarios that will be released on the game's website.  I'm looking forward to these.  We only had one ship in our initial set of cards, so we actually built a scenario around that fact in one game.  We placed the ship on a coastline at start up, placed a stack of creatures to guard the ship, and placed an artifact on an island.  The goal of the game was to be the first player to conquer the creatures guarding the ship, take the ship to the island, recover the artifact and return it to one of his or her towns.  The game was an absolute blast and ran about an hour shorter than our typical game using the Last Man Standing victory conditions.

Another issue I had was with the quality of the map boards.  The hexes are tiny and require the player to use counters that are then linked to stacks of cards.  This works fine and I wouldn't expect to have a map board that I could move full-sized playing cards around.  It would have been nice to have larger hexes, tokens and map pieces though because in a multi-player game is isn't always easy to see exactly what an opponent has in their repertoire.  Additionally, our map boards were warped and very difficult to counter-bend due to their odd shape.  This made for an uneven and easy to disturb map which, in turn, made for some frustrating moments.

My final complaint is a personal one that won't necessarily apply to anyone else.  HOMM has over 700 cards in the initial release, which means variety of deck design shouldn't be a problem.  Still, I can't help but wish that the game wasn't collectible.  I know that the CCG model can be profitable, but I just can't bring myself to buy boosters and starters that might well contain nothing of use to me.  I hope the game does well, but if it doesn't, I hope DG Associates would consider releasing the game as a stand-alone in the way Fantasy Flight did with Vortex (Maelstrom) and U.S. Games did with the Wyvern CCG (Dragon Hunt). 

The above might make the review sound more negative than it really is.  HOMM IV is a pretty good game that would likely be even better if I had more cards.  It is an old school, dice-heavy, combat game and there are certainly people out there who are going to find this to be great experience.  Anyone who goes into the game knowing what type of game it is will likely not be disappointed.

- Danny Webb

(September 21, 2005)