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Overview

Have you ever wanted to play an absolutely insane fantasy Warlord battle arena- with Good versus evil, and Lawful versus chaotic, and you literally spawn your army by choosing from a booklet of SIXTY THREE UNITS!?

Not only is each unit you can choose from massively detailed in weaknesses, and attributes, but they usually have 3-4 abilities!

Plus, this game has no-randomness at all. If this giant game sounds like up your alley, strap in for this epic, multi-hour game for 2-6 players.

If you’re looking for something that has this premise but is shorter, check out the Apprentice Rules version of Warbonds here.

Check out the official landing page for Warbonds here!

How to Play

Goal of the game is to kill your enemies, that is either kill their warlord, or their base called a Warcamp by reducing their HP to 0. Or, you can announce protection of neutral Settlements, and if a Settlement hits level 6 while under your control, you win. These Settlements just slowly level up throughout the game and can be slightly sped up by using abilities.

You, the Warlord, will have a bunch of different stats, like health, attacking strength, and special abilities. The troops you deploy also have all this stuff, since your Warlord will run around and eventually recruit other dudes to help them fight. There’s two versions of these Units: Squads and Elites. Both cost money to deploy, and have a gold upkeep every turn. You start with 100 gold, and have some income from war camps, or settlements that are under your protection.

Every unit, Warlord, Squad, or Elite, 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.

Units 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 below. 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.

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 this 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.

Anyways, for this dueling, it keeps going on 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 Warlord left on the map, or 1 fully upgraded Settlement under someone’s protection.

Pros

Warbonds Master Set just has awesome variety in who you’re playing: the TWELVE different Warlords! You can play as a big bruiser Orc called Tangus Unchained, who rewards you for attacking opponents’ war camps! Or a mage, Scarred Rufus the Red, who can perform a Tattoo Ritual, letting each of his surrounding units sacrifice a bit of health for him to get leadership! Or play as an Iron Heart Dwarf, Colette, who can literally de-forest terrain to get a growth token to help level up Settlements! If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can even play as a Conflicted Warlock who can progress into an Evil, or Redeemed form, based off of her actions in game! Warbonds just feels so different in playing each Warlord.

But the Warlord variety isn’t quite what makes Warbonds Warbonds. It’s the catalog of units you can buy, with a staggering amount of variety of SIXTY-THREE units (more on this later)!

There’s a Phalanx, 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 you can control Little Anarchists, who can take control of enemy War Camps, or there’s the Living Dead who can split themselves into 2 separate units on the map. Or you can get craftsmen (Guild of Artificers) who cannot attack, but can literally build roads on the map, and get Loyalty for doing so! Plus, they can heal your Warcamp or Settlements.

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.

But let’s have some fun, and just talk about units that interact with the money mechanic:

1. Mercenaries who you can pay money to turn them Chaotic or Lawful.

2. Crows that make enemies around them require double Upkeep for a round.

3. An elite Bounty Hunter who gives 16 gold every time she kills something

Speaking of elite units, we have to explain the Upgrade system, where Squads can take their entire turn to spend a specific quantity of Loyalty, follow their specific upgrade path, and just become a new Elite Unit. This makes makes spawning squads even MORE nuanced, because now you’re not only thinking about each squad’s use on the battlefield now, but also what they COULD become later down the line.

And this upgrade idea is is super engrained into some squads, like the inexpensive Freed Slaves who are good at attacking Warcamps and Settlements, give you Loyalty from doing so, then spend loyalty to branch into 6 different Elites units! Like, have them become a Vampire who can turn into a bat to move faster and life steals all their damage!

Because units are so nuanced, Warbonds is filled with cool little combos you can do! You can have a Mythical Siren, who can do a morning call to have any ally units deployed right next to her start immediately enabled, and she gets loyalty every time that happens. You can have 2 Living Dead, of which can each split themselves into 2, deploy next to her twice, and then each new Living Dead is immediately enabled to do something. End result: 2 Loyalty on the your Siren, each Living Dead is now doubled while not sacrificing actions, all without spending ANY money if you were to normally pay for new deployments!

Warbonds Master gives SO much decision making in finding the right unit to not only counter your opponents, but work together and combo off of your own units, including your warlord. Like maybe you play defensive by hiring a bunch of slow moving but strong firing plants. Or launch sneak attacks by hiring flying units to fly over terrain to your opponent’s war camp. Or terrorize the countryside by attacking neutral settlements with a bunch of freed slaves to later upgrade them. Or you can… okay you get it, there’s a TON of options, and if you’re looking for some more, check out our Apprentice review here.

There’s another cool trade-off in your army management with settlement control, where you want to watch your army size. See, to go over to settlements, bring up your trumpet, and say, “we are now your lord protectors, pay us money every round!”, you need to have a big enough total army depending on that settlement size— a level 1 wee hamlet only needs 10 or more dudes. This dynamic makes getting elite units a little tricky, because while they’re generally stronger, they are only one dude, so they’re just 1 towards your army size, as opposed to a bunch of units, like a squad of 11 phalanx soldiers.

Positioning is pretty interesting to play around, as having all sorts of different terrain, from mountains to forests to roads really affects how you approach the map. Sometimes you’ll want units to stay on types of terrain, like having undead units stay on a swamp to heal every turn, or having a boulder hurler stay on mountains to get +1 range. Plus, being close to roads is very useful, as its a free move for any of your units, so you can combine it with strong ‘full-turn’ abilities, like boulder hurlers chucking a big rock for 8 damage.

With the 4 different types of movement, from normal, mounted, aquatic, and flying, everyone is positioning carefully around settlements, warlords, and of course war camps. And sometimes you’ll want to move your war camp up close to YOUR action, since it can restore nearby squads’ ammo or health to full, or heal your warlord.

Our last gameplay pro is how Warbonds really handles its ‘no-randomness’ element well because of the amount of decision space with each unit, and the continual entry of new squads. In multiplayer, the fact that some units can move really fast like 7 spaces, and others do area of effect abilities against multiple opponents really change the game state, and leave politics up in the air for you to constantly adapt to. Warbonds doesn’t feel solved because of what new combos players can theory craft in combining units, or doing a backdoor attack with a flying unit… its like pulling all of these trading card game like abilities out of your butt, but then everyone has access to this butt and knew about it the whole time.

To wrap up the pros, replay value is clearly ridiculous with 12 Warlords with all of the different armies you can build with each of them. But also, the gameplay meets the theme well here, with so many fun ingredients to play around with in a fantasy land!

There’s all sorts of ways to build or harvest things to improve settlements, kill things for gold bounties, or walk around on certain terrain for buffs or debuffs. Or there’s the conflict between lawful and chaotic, like how protecting a settlement gives your law units loyalty, or how attacking one makes them lose a loyalty, but if you have chaotic units, they like attacking- they GET a loyalty from pillaging settlements. Oh and if you kill a settlement, you get a ton of gold, how cool is that, maybe you use that money to hire some mercenaries and pay for their Loyalty.

Cons & Nitpicks

We have to start with the rulebook, player aid, and player booklet cons, which were all clunky just like in Warbonds Apprentice, but since Warbonds Master is a bigger, more complicated game, these issues just hit harder. The rulebook is still unclear, player aids too small, and the flipping around of the player booklet could have been fixed with splitting it up into multiple parts.

So now let’s get to the component cons, and we know this is an alpha version, but sheesh, it is clunky as hell. You cannot see what’s going on unless you’re super close to the pieces, made worse how you cannot mark who owns units on the initiative table.

Why not put the art that is on every card ON the actual pieces? And make the game board much bigger.

Where Master version especially gets hurt compared to Apprentice is its huge emphasis on terrain- because the swamp and forest terrain straight up look the same from far away. Or how the numbers and symbols on terrain are super hard to read. Maybe an outline around each terrain would help, or just making their colors way more distinct?

The unit cards aren’t much better- being normal sized cards… with NOT normal sized information. Like, if the cards were bigger you just wouldn’t have to rely on the player booklet as much, making for easier play. Plus, if cards were bigger, they would allow room to show their upgrade paths, of which you can only find in the player booklet, making switching between booklet and card in game annoying.

For gameplay cons, the Warlords are simply not balanced, like Scarred Ruffus with a really weird dueling ability that won’t help in multiplayer duels. Or the Fallen Queen Isis, who is strong on so many levels, with the second highest Warlord in the HP, the capacity to fly, an area of effect attack, AND when any humanoid unit dies around her, she can replace it with an undead unit for half the cost of normal! Half the cost! To round her out, she does 1 Undead damage to everything around her AND herself every turn… but then Undead damage heals her.

We compared this to the highest progressed form of another Warlord, which has less movement, doesn’t have an area of effect attack, less base health, and a heal but that isn’t automatic. This isn’t everything for Warlord balance, but some tweaking will have to be done for especially 1v1 or 3 player games, where you cannot use politics to smooth over imbalances in power.

Then, there’s some cool looking elite units called ‘Highlanders’ which are a complete ripoff, at 84+ gold (almost all of your starting gold), and don’t do that much damage to compensate, at 10 damage. Plus, they can only get Loyalty by killing another Highlander, but then the downside is that if there’s another Highlander, BOTH highlanders have their attack damage halved! What a counterintuitive unit, where to counter an opponent’s poor investment, the game wants you to also make a poor investment, which makes both of your investments worse.

More gameplay cons come in with the Upgrade system, which is broken in giving TOO much value in upgrading. It ends up incentivizing you playing safe and finding a way to farm Loyalty. You can get Loyalty from attacking, but since attacking is risky and requires you to move away from your Warcamp, its usually much safer and efficient to chill for Loyalty.

This gets annoying because with a map of this size, you can’t counterplay someone doing this ‘loyalty’ farm, where sometimes they can spawn a unit, pay for Loyalty at the end of the turn, then maybe their Warlord gives them Loyalty, then they take their turn to go to an elite! This can give a jump of dozens of gold in value by simply spending one Warlord action after deploying a Squad.

What’s more, is that you can ‘recall’ units, which takes them off the map and gives you half to their deploy cost. This is yet another way player can pump money into their economy by recalling upgraded units. To fix this, the map needs to be smaller, or give players bigger incentives to close out the game faster. But the upgrade system and how it meets money and Loyalty probably need to be re-hauled.

Terrain is also too slow to move through, as they end up punishing normal movement intensely, where normal movement is usually a punishment in of itself (3-4 spaces usually for normal movement). This can makes terrain on some maps just feel like straight walls, or no-go zones because of how slow they are to go through. This might be intentional, and leads to some technically thematic design, like having a bunch of mountains clumped in one place, but ends up slowing the game a lot and adding no-go zones for normal movement.

The rest of the terrain movement is fine though, like most terrain penalizing mounted units, which are high in movement value. Or how aquatic units have difficulty going through most terrain, which makes up for them usually being stronger.

Normal movement is a punishment in of itself, so that should get affected at max double value, not three times at much- but then if you make river movement 2 for ground units, that would also make it the same as moving into forest or a mountain? Maybe just normal movement higher in general, and keep river penalty at 3? This has the right idea- the rest of the movement stuff was fine, like penalizing mounted works, since those are high in movement value. Or rewarding aquatic through water, and penalizing them for other terrain makes sense because aquatic units are usually stronger.

The dueling mechanic also needs to be changed, where it has actually gotten hurt from its implementation in Warbonds Apprentice. Those previous pros don’t come around anymore, with the vastly different ways Master set handles units. Elite units being so strong, discourage dueling, because you don’t want to move your Warlord next to an opponent’s army, because the threat of retaliation from an Elite can be easily 8 damage. Or when you engage in a duel, interference from a Chaos Elite unit could be 8 damage.

Then, players don’t have as many units in Warbonds Master, since units have a Gold cost and upkeep. In just hitting a wall with spending at most parts of the game, players will just have less units to interact with the dueling mechanic… that is if you want to even spend their Loyalty, because upgrading Squads just gives great money value.

Dueling just needs to give more of an advantage to the person initiating it, like a guaranteed first strike, or to give more limited Elite interaction in duels. Because right now, you would normally just attack another Warlord normally.

The last big section of cons is the time length, where Warbonds Master can run a LONG LONG time, much beyond 90-480 minutes listed on the box on average. The fiddiliness is inevitable with so many pieces of cards, but we thought of restricting the Gold mechanic to physical dials to reduce using those tiny coins.

As for how mechanics add time, you’re really encouraged to hunker down to find the best synergies of units, basically encouraging Analysis Paralysis. Plus, since money is a thing, you really don’t want to lose units that are worth gold to your nation, as losing one is losing at least 10 gold permanently. So, players are carefully math-ing out how much damage each unit can dish out and take.

The actual win condition of getting your Settlement to Level 6 is 18 growth tokens, which happens super slowly, even with using occasional abilities to get a growth token here or there. This problem is really shown by the ‘Bid for Influence’ event on every three rounds, where players bid Leadership to get growth tokens… ONLY 2 growth tokens. This should give at LEAST 1 level towards your Settlement, if not a little more.