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Overview & How to Play

This is Warbonds: Battle for Vitoria, Apprentice Rules! Whew, that’s a mouthful, we’re just gonna refer to this as Warbonds Apprentice from now on. For Warbonds Master Set, click here.

For the Warbonds website, check here!

The premise is that you are a unique Warlord, trying to rule the land of Vitoria by eliminating other Warlords or their bases called Warcamps. Or you can upgrade your war camp to level 3 to win the game. Warlords have different stats, like health, their attacking stats, and special abilities.

You know what else has all that stuff? The troops you can spawn! So Warbonds isn’t just your Warlord running around, its them also recruiting other dudes to also help them fight, called Squads. These Squads are also filled with very similar stuff to the Warlords, just weaker: like their army size which is like health, attacking stats, and their abilities are a little less.

Every unit, warlord or squad, will have an initiative: which basically shows how fast they go. Every round, every unit will get to have a turn, as we go from left to right on an initiative table. On their turns they can:

1. Move (using their movement number)

2. Do an action (attack, use an ability, deploy another unit, etc.)

That’s it! Getting more squads is through the “deploy” action, where if they are next to “wild” terrain on the board, they can take this action to pick any squad in the booklet, and just smacking it down to add it and its initiative tracker to the game. Players can spawn anything EXCEPT for units that violate their player alignments: good warlord players can only spawn good or neutral units, and evil warlord players can only hang out with evil or neutral.

Squads have a token that’s really important called Loyalty, which is important so they don’t suddenly leave you one day for another Warlord. This is also useful in duels which we’ll cover in a bit. Chaos units gain Loyalty by seeing their warlord attacking while they watch close by, whereas Law units get Loyalty from attacking things while their warlord watches- they like to be watched instead. There are also Warlord’s leadership tokens, which they gain in their own ways, and can use to pay for their special abilities.

Eventually, every single unit will get a turn, then each player’s war camp will go, where those are usually used it to spawn units. Then you do some end of round steps, like triggering that specific round’s event.

Oh, we didn’t explain how to level up your Warcamp yet, that’s a win condition! If you get that to level 3, you win, and to do that, you want to get growth tokens, which you get 3 of by eliminating other players from the game. 3 tokens equals your war camp leveling up once. The other main way to get it is to bid leadership tokens at the end of certain turns when the “Influence the Public” event comes up.

One last thing: dueling, where if your warlord is right next to another Warlord, it’s an action to CHALLENGE the other to a duel. Then, the rest of the game freezes, and you use a dueling sheet, where Warlords just play out rounds of attacking each other once, and squads nearby the duel on the map can spend 1 Loyalty to literally run into the duel and do an attack or block an attack! Use up Loyalty, make duel unfair.

The duel continues until one player chooses to surrender that fight, probably saving their life, but making all of their nearby Chaos and Law squads usually lose Loyalty… cause they just saw their Warlord be a freaking pansy.

That’s the barebones of the game! Every unit gets a turn, you do end of turn stuff, then rinse and repeat until there is 1 survivor on the map, or 1 fully upgraded Warcamp.

Pros

Right off the bat there are 5 included Warlords which are incredibly distinct, leading to different battle strategies. Maybe you’ll play a straightforward bruiser called Tangus Unchained, who rewards you from attacking an opponent’s Warcamp, or rewards you for starting duels! Or you can play as an anti-undead mage, Anna Xandra Soul Judiciary, who is incredible at fighting undead, gets Leadership whenever one dies around her, and no undead can even spawn around her! If you like combos, play as a dark mage, Scarred Ruffus the Red, who can perform Tattoo Rituals to let his surrounding units sacrifice health to give him Leadership.

These 5 Warlords all feel distinct, giving you a personality and play style for each game, and remember, their alignment affects your unit spawn! But the biggest draw of this game is the squad deploying, where there are 18 units to choose from in player guide (like a menu) every time you deploy. Each unit is so nuanced that they are like mini-games in of themselves!

We got the Phalanx (see photo), who is humanoid and armored, with above average squad size at 11. He moves slow at initiative 8, but has 2 types of attacks: a spear that does well against Mounted units, and a javelin that also does well against mounted and has a range of 2! What’s the big specialty here? Well if you stack a bunch of Phalanx next to each other, they get the formation bonus, letting each phalanx unit get an extra swing when attacking!

Or Boulder Hurlers who like to throw rocks as a ranged attack, but also can TOSS ALLIES, repositioning that ally, and getting them BOTH loyalty!

Those are fairly simple ones, like there’s Little Anarchists who can take control of enemy War Camps, or the Living Dead who can split themselves into 2 separate units on the map.

Also, we need to explain that every unit, including your Warlord, has elemental weaknesses, resistances, and immunities! Most units have at least 1 thing they’re influenced by a bit differently. When we add that onto the attributes of good or evil, or lawful or chaotic, or all the other attributes here, and there is SO much nuance behind spawning each unit. Like, thank Vitoria each unit has a tool tip next to it, and there’s recommended unit spawns for each warlords, or else players could get really lost on what to do.

Because units are so nuanced, Warbonds is filled with cool little combos you can do! Here’s a quick one: remember Scarred Rufus the Red who can let allies do undead damage to themselves? You can have the masochistic Pain Bringers, who WANT to take damage, do a little bit to themselves. One damage is nothing, letting them use their ‘Pain Seeker’ passive to gain 1 Loyalty.. Then remember that Scarred Rufus gets leadership from this!

Warbonds Apprentice is has a nice Rock Paper Scissors dynamic with soft unit counters, but that’s just the beginning of the puzzle because you still want to figure out what units play off your own warlord or other units well. Like certain undead units are good to have their abilities used one each other. Or maybe you have bunch of phalanxes next to each other to build an impassable wall that gives each phalanx attacking bonuses. You have information on everything, so its up to you to get creative with the player booklet and where and when to spawn each unit.

With that being said, positioning is really well handled and nuanced! See you can eventually play with some terrain: scattered across Vitoria are roads that give you an additional movement. For roads, one free movement is a LOT in this game, where you can combine that with ‘full-turn’ abilities to still move while doing really strong actions. Or I could prioritize securing the wild terrain early to deploy MORE units, because that’s the only place you can spawn units outside of using your war camp’s turn.

To position, there’s 4 different types of movement to do- so there’s normal, mounted, aquatic, and flying! So not only is that another thing to look out for when spawning units, but makes you play around terrain carefully- like aquatic units move painfully slow, whereas flying units can just fly over any terrain, and even enemy units.

You’ll want to space very well to abuse attacks range as much as possible. Remember, Law units get loyalty when attacking next to your warlord. Or whenever your Warlord attacks at all, Chaos units around him get loyalty. Oh, and then we haven’t talked much about the war camp yet- which is a cool hub that can restore nearby squads’ ammo or health to full, or heal your Warlord. But yeah defend that, lest it die, you lose the game.

But we have to go back to you, the Warlords! Let’s talk about them dueling each other, the duels! These do a really good job of forcing interesting game states with how to manage Loyalty on units near your Warlords, and just overall feels like it completes the no-randomness gameplay well.

We say that dueling completes the game because not only does it give another outlet to attack other warlords, but it also really rewards stacking Loyalty on units and spacing them close to your warlord. There can even be a bit of a chicken game going on in multiplayer, as 2 isolated players eye each other on how much they’re willing to spend from either loyalty or leadership to protect their warlord from damage. Do they forfeit the duel at the end of each round of dueling, or keep going?

And if you couldn’t tell already, this game has great replayability- mostly from how many different strategies you can employ as you deploy different troops from 18 types with 5 different Warlords. Like, the amount of openings this game has is unlimited, as you get to choose where to put your war camp after your first couple of games. There’s pre-built maps for beginners, but the game encourages you to eventually build your own… so sky’s the limit.

Speaking of different terrain, Warbonds Apprentice really has all the high fantasy bells and whistles here in gameplay. There’s a story as your horde or alliance gets bigger and interacts with everything else in game. Because abilities are so specific with really fleshed out units, there’s good room for your imagination to soar.

Like imagine 11 boulder hurlers say “me go rock”, picking up 8 crows, and chucking them into the sky 2 spaces!

There’s undead healing, elemental resistances, and warlords inspiring your troops to later possibly give their life as a body shield for the warlord like a freaking sidekick to a main hero… that’s all here!

Cons & Nitpicks

For cons, we have to note that this is an Alpha version of Warbonds Apprentice, so it’s possible these will all be fixed! But man this game’s rulebook is rough, where its out of order, and does not explain the “deploy” action well, which forced us to use the How to Play videos on the Warbonds website. Plus, the Player Aid cards are tiny.

The Player Guide is extremely comprehensive, with a proper intro, win condition, end of round event explanation, symbol explanation area, and even a table to list all the units! This is fine, the problem is when that is combined with the pages of 18 units, and the 5 Warlords, causing tons of flipping mid-game to reference abilities. Flip forward, flip backward, rinse and repeat throughout the game. If this booklet was split into 3 parts, that would really help.

Moving on to components, Warbonds Apprentice is really hard to visually keep track of all times. The text on every single unit ridiculously tiny, with the in-game art gone from them. Why not put the art on the tiles, and make the tiles bigger?

All the tiles in general need to be simplified and possibly color-coded, because right now, you have to get right up to their medicine bottle like text to read it. The same goes for the unit cards, which are normal sized cards holding non-normal sized information.

There’s more on this component disfunction probably addressed better through video form, so as we get to Gameplay Cons, Scarred Ruffus has a really odd dueling ability that would kill him as soon as he leaves a close duel, making it quite weak in multiplayer games.

But the main Gameplay con to focus is on is that actual unit deployment system. To understand this, we need to jump ahead to the BIGGER Warbonds, Warbonds Master Set, of which Warbonds Apprentice lifted 18 of the units from. But then Apprentice didn’t take all of the mechanics of Master! The game starts to get a little wonky when certain units that had the mechanics of gold, and upgrading themselves, removed from the game.

Now, making and upkeeping units is completely free. Well, if units are free, and you can’t really do super early victories due to war camps being away from each other, the beginning of games can just look like a bunch of unit spawn until you hit close to 6 units.

Like, think about killing an opponent’s unit, and then only for them to respawn it pretty shortly thereafter for no cost, no matter how strong units are! It just makes attacking other units not feel that impactful. This especially hurts the 1v1, where attacking your only enemy’s units can get easily replaced. Every single spawn being free doesn’t rule out ever spawning some weaker units, because everything is so nuanced here, but you’re definitely going to spawn some squads more than others. The way to solve this and still keep units free is to have a maximum amount of unit spawn per game, say like you could only spawn 10 to 12 units EVER in a game.

Some niche units also can kind of feel like risky dead-ends, like the Domesticated Corvus, that is a blazing fast, disruptive unit that had anti-supply abilities, making them good to prevent others from activating some abilities, but these crows don’t attack well. In Warbonds Master, you could upgrade this into something else once you got your utility out of it, but in the apprentice version, no upgrade exists. Not saying that you wouldn’t ever spawn this Corvus now, but its just not that flexible to use and can be a bit unforgiving if it ends up taking the wrong slot in your army cap of 6.

The rest of the cons include extreme fiddliness of handling all the components, especially when deploying units. Or how we have some nitpicks on multiple rules that are thematic, but really easy to forget, like how squads that lose any health do -1 attack when performing attacks.

To keep this brief, the last con to focus on is the time length, where Warbonds Apprentice runs LONG, especially on first games with the large amount of upfront unit information. Plus there’s player elimination, so if you’re knocked out early, you might be sitting out for 1-2 hours in multiplayer.

Speaking of multiplayer, our final con is that the 3 and 5 player count don’t work too smoothly for Warbonds Apprentice, especially 3 player with the lack of politics. Warbonds is really victim to the Mexican standoff of 2 players attacking each other while the other guy sits in the corner unscathed. A streamlined 1v1, or 4 players is the way to go here.

Final Thoughts

Warbonds is actually a pretty cool idea, and an ambitious one at that. It’s kind of like a bunch of games in one. Super positional no randomness Chess play with a grid map and differing units. But units that are so different and thematic that they feel like out of a trading card game. Like, stacking up loyalty and leadership definitely feels akin to counters on cards in Magic the Gathering. But then the game kind of feels like a fantasy militaristic spin on Sid Meier’s Civilization with a base to protect and an army to optimize. Oh, but then with units having different attacks, with area of effect spells, elemental vulnerabilities, and flying versus non-flying traits, the game is like a tactical RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics, without the randomness.

Wow, this is a LOT of ideas, but does it make for a good board game? Well, the visuals and component handling say no, but the biggest hurdle for a massive game like this is still learning it. The core of the game is knowing the ins and outs of units, and that still takes time with this ‘junior’ version of Warbonds. That makes this system still something that is out of reach for most board gamers.

Like, picture learning Magic the Gathering, that has a bunch of different units. But those don’t always have abilities, and when they do, they’re almost NEVER as complex as any unit in Warbonds. Plus, you don’t have to choose between a bunch to play, you have a hand of cards.

The beauty of Warbonds is that once you know everything, the no-randomness, complicated unit nature really never feels like the game is playing you. You have a swath of squads to pick from, politic when necessary, and carefully sync up current unit abilities’ and initiatives.

A digital version of Warbonds would be fantastic, but we can’t argue that not all turns are fiddly, and there is a multiplayer magic across the table of seeing who attacks who.

We’re basically saying that Warbonds is a good, bold, if not slightly flawed idea for a table. It currently requires a lot from you to get the Apprentice version going and to keep track of gameplay. Warbonds Apprentice actually would have been a 5/10, but the fact is that the Master version exists, with a more concrete handling of units, knocks down Apprentice’s unique draw. But then Master’s system is CRAZY at 60+ units, more mechanics, and so maybe Apprentice is something you want to keep your eye on.