This is a sponsored review.

QUICK DISCLAIMER

This review of Skytear Horde was part of our 24 hour challenge to make a board game review in an entire day, including learning the game, playing it, and making the video. As such, we have only played this game 3 times, and our analysis isn’t as deep as usual. We played it once competitive (with the expansion), and twice cooperative (as 2 players playing as 1 team, then 2 players each playing their own deck)

How to Play

Goal of the game is to have your castle of 20 health survive, and to fully defeat a boss called an “Outsider”. To get to kill the outsider, you’ll have to first destroy 1 horde portal, which will get you another portal… then that portal summons the outsider. Once you’ve killed the last form of said Outsider ya win the game.

To do that, you’ll fight over lanes, where you and the bad guy creatures duke it out. Classical trading card game stats with cards: attack and a health value. If any card in a lane is unopposed, it’ll do damage to the enemy structure- portal or castle. If opposed, things kill each other- one usually dying.

Rounds look like this: first you’ll get mana to play things. Then monsters will spawn from the portal based off of its corresponding number, and sometimes monsters will do something when immediately played as well. Then its your turn, you can play cards from hand paying the mana cost, move cards around, and even use your castle ability once per round by exhausting it (exhaust just means it can’t use its ability again this round). You can do as much as many of these actions as you can pay for.

Then, its time for Treachery: the horde deck flips over a card- this is a treachery card that could give attack to something, or trigger some other special ability.

Finally, everything attacks- things fight from left to right. Many things probably die here, and then you just go to the next number of portal… next round time!

Wait, we didn’t say how to draw- how do you draw cards then? Well whenever any monster dies, you draw a card.

One last thing: Minions, these are 4 side monsters that chill around the battlefield and don’t do anything normally… but when they get health, they actually start attacking! If not opposed during the battle phase, they’ll do something called pillage, which remove cards from the top of your deck equal to their health. So yeah needless to say when you deck out completely, you lose the game.

To stop these minions, you can engage one in your leftmost lanes with an ally card. When minions lose all health, they go back to chilling around the battlefield, they’re treated as dead but can always get more health through an ability.

Pros

Skytear Horde just looks great- and disclaimer here, we do have some deluxe components of the playmat and acrylic tokens, which will run an additional $40 extra combined.

But anyways, this game looks fantastic, with there being a great slot on our mat for each card or deck of cards, a clear space to put mana, and component quality feels great with an included insert.

And I know Skytear Horde is cheating on the art department a little, since Skytear exists, but the art checks out hard. Cards pop really well with bright colors, whether it be good or bad guys, the boss outsiders, or even castles. Some cards will even be ‘borderless’ for more showing of art.

Symbology is also excellent to save time, like lightning bolts for cards you can play outsider of your turn, and attack/health symbols make perfect sense.

Learning is also pretty good- there’s a bunch of clear steps to get you playing, telling you which cards to setup on your first game, explaining key concepts, then going through each phase in order so you can smoothly run through the motions yourself. And there’s some nice player aids! Back to the rules later though.

Now for gameplay pros: And first we gotta say that this game does a pretty good job of depicting this whole castle defense thing. Monster cards spawn round upon round blasting out of a portal, you put up some defenses to get in the way of monsters attacking you, and there’s even towers to usually tap them every round to use their ability!

There’s some nice uncertainty within rounds, because the treachery that the horde flips before attacking can do a teensy little adjustment in adding damage or a surprise ability to slightly bother your plans. Granted these aren’t anything unfair feeling, but the additional +1 attack on a right or leftmost creature, or suddenly spawning a skeleton can keep you on your feet. And you have some response to this with some spells, anything with a lightning bolt on it can be played in response, so usually you want to wait and react to the treachery flips!

What really makes this Horde game came together is the card abilities, which are the meat of this game- and with 3 unique decks for the alliance AND 3 decks for the horde, there’s so much to unpack here.

There’s the common MTG-esq abilities of things having “Trample” over defenses to have leftover damage affect a structure, or doing something when they die, or armor to prevent attacks, or even as simple as doing something when played! There’s a couple of new tricks with the “Guerrilla” to damage minions without actually attacking them, which is incredibly fitting to not constantly have to block minions. Or having the ability called “Heroic:, that boosts your attack when you take damage but are still alive… but it can be pretty tricky to justify taking a little damage because you also want to block high attack monsters from attacking your castle?

And remember your castle has an ability: it can routinely draw a card by paying mana- or it’ll let you heal stuff every turn!

Bad guys are filled with dirty tricks too: some starting milling you after damaging your castle, or causing them to ALL get trample (the old forgotten)! It’s really in the undead deck to spawn a bunch of skeletons everywhere and keep buffing them!

It gets scarier with THE OUTSIDERS, the big bad monsters- the DEATH DEALER can destroy a bunch of monsters, then summon a skeleton AND another card for each card destroyed this way! Or the beast lord has THREE forms, which can initially bounce your allies back to hand (form 2), then eventually make all of the monsters gain trample for a giant huge attack (form 3)!

We gotta praise the asymmetry, because you got 3 decks, all with 40 cards in this game, with 3 colors, and they all feel completely different. Oh there’s also 2 heroes per deck!

The straightforward blue deck is more about playing big monsters, and doing ‘preventing of damage’ The “Clan of the Wildcat” can bounce itself to prevent a monster from attacking. Wind Riders are my favorite, which they let you REBUILD your deck from your discard, granting you some more deck which is like more health in this game, and it prevents a minion from pillaging this turn! One main hero, “Corjof” can utterly negate a monster’s ability! The other, “Gulbjarn” can attack multiple monsters at once.

The Red deck heats up, with big damage dealing spells, and lots of weapons to equip their dudes to fight! Stack well, because “Mage Crafters” do damage to the portal for each attachment played… and then this ninja can later on just disappear off the battlefield, taking the attachments back with him to your hand. My favorite play with these guys is to play the “Bushido of the Rose” (2 attack), then play Katana of the dusk on him (provides +2 attack). The Bushido attacks for 4 damage because of the katana, then takes 1 damage… then attacks again for 6 (HIs “Heroic” buff goes off)! This is 10 damage against the portal, that will pretty much take out any portal in the game.

The green deck is about token counters and boosts when things die. A Bush Dryad can move any amount of damage or health boosts onto her when played… and whenever Bush Dryad’s neighbor dies, you “mutaform” 2, meaning 2 more +1 tokens! They have an INSANE behemoth to play as a 25 mana.. .but gets less expensive for each card in your discard. Speaking of discard, Cotlic gets +1 attack for each tribesmen in your discard… one game we had him be +6, so he was a 10 attack guy!

Pros Cont.

We need to praise the Minion mechanic now too, because by them putting pressure on your deck, in addition to the monsters threatening your castle, usually puts some good pressure on you and prevents the game from ever dragging. You’re usually thinking, should I engage the 4 minions now who slowly discard off the top of my deck… or should I engage the scary monsters who damage my castle more, have some harmful passive abilities, but are also harder to kill?

There’s also some Horde cards that will buff the minions, not only giving them health (which is also their attack value), but also abilities, lending for some interesting minion counterplay. Like, some cards will make the minions pillage for double the amount off your deck- we had a single minion mill 8 cards once! Or others will just be harder to engage, like one will cause you to discard a card to do so.

Killing minions are also a great way to farm cards, since you draw cards whenever they die. Between the minions, monsters on board, the portal, or even preparing for an upcoming outsider boss, you’re worried about something.

There’s also an option to play this game 2v1, with 2 guys playing as TWO alliance decks versus the horde, and this has a lot of nice teamwork moments. You’re moving cards around one another in the lanes, playing attachments or buff tokens on one another, and definitely the common occurrence of who should draw a card, or get a mana. To bring up the hero Tlakali for the green deck, her redirecting damage to a teammate’s card can lead to some good spreading of damage.

Then for replayability, its fantastic! The 3 alliance decks being 40 cards, with plenty of cards being discarded off of the top each game means your hands are always gonna be different, and you can even mulligan at the beginning of games. Then of course you have the 3 horde decks, of which you’re also not gonna see all of every game. You can strategize around rushing to the last portal as early as possible to not deal with the portal 2’s minion spawns… but then you’ll have less mana every round?

There’s a HUGE boon where you can deck build, combining colors together, as long as you follow the castle restrictions. The idea is to pick a castle you like, then deck build around it, and then just see how you fare against undead, predators, or renegade baddies, whichever you feel. Maybe see how many achievements you can get, like there’s some for swapping monsters or minions roles, or playing the game with a 30 card deck, but without any deckbuilding limitations.

There’s another replayability highlight in swapping out portals for difficulty. There’s 1 for every difficulty and player count for the first 2 portals, so for example 2 player, they have difficulty easy medium or hardfor these first 2. And the versus version of the portal is different!

And we can’t forget about competitive, which is pretty darn good. Here, the horde is played by a human, and the game structure is the same, with the Horde having a lot of tricks up their sleeve!

Like, they have mana, and can actually spend it to play cards facedown. Or to rig their deck for a treachery flip- its really easy to get the perfect treachery off this, getting nice abilities, or even just mind gaming. They can also challenge an ally card to prevent it from every running away- oh that’s how you link up the perfect treachery play! So don’t let the Horde only dropping 1 or 2 cards for this round fool you- they can do so much… like they can keep rearranging monsters like you’re playing 3 card monte up in here… follow the epic monster… follow it? You also have to be mindful of playing any card that boosts the alliance mana.

Cons

The rulebook is actually pretty irritating at times for how well presented it looks. Minions are a huge source of confusion, because even though they are monsters, its not intuitive to think of them as such. So remember, you draw a card every time you kill them. BUT they’re actually not in play when they don’t have health. Maybe if they were referred to as minion monsters that would be clearer.

Or another one, where it’s a little confusing on how the outsider pile works, because you fill it up with only 1 card at the beginning of the game, not all of the outsider cards, but you could easily accidentally spawn BOTH outsider cards in when the game asks you to spawn ALL cards from the discard deck.

Oh and then the rulebook says the minion cards have green backs, which actually tripped me up SO hard on my first play… I thought I went crazy trying to find it…

These are ALL cleared up in the official FAQ, so nice that this exists, but a bit of a pain to search up during gameplay.

Then we have some text annoyances that would normally be a nitpick, but these added up quite a bit throughout the review, like typos, small text, and the versus symbol on portals being way too small.