Bloodstones Review
An old-school approach to high fantasy, using only tiles for area control.
Enter the world of Fal, as you spawn one of 6 armies from your bags of tiles. Spawn you army, use special units, construct/defend villages, and win combats to get the most points! This area control is from 1-6 players, at about 45 minutes a player.
Video published March 19th, 2024
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Combat is drawing 3 tiles from a bag, and replacing 1 from your hand!
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Spawn differing units to capture villages!
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Area control with only tiles
Story
We’re gonna talk about every single player count, although our review will have a bit of a 4P lean, since we played with that the most.
1x 1P (Necromancers 1st mission)
2P (TTS)
1x 3P
4x 4P
1 5-6P
Last thing to know before jumping in, you can currently only get this game if you backed the Gamefound campaign, and there’s only one package which is $100 bucks.
Need to learn how to play? Or want more reasoning for our points? Our review video’s got you!
Component Pros
Nice bags with embroidery
6 silk maps that are allegedly machine washable
Have nice map details to spice up the art
Linen blend booklets feel nice and will likely last longer
Included thin gym bag lets you easily transport game
Art Pros
Core units look relatively similar with slightly different details
Differing ships, castles, citadels, villages for each faction
Accessibility Pros
So easy to setup: Give everyone their 2 bags, then unfold map
Rulebook is generally smooth with nice TLDR areas
Nice player aid on back
Gameplay Pros — Crunchy & Elegant Combat system
Fighting influenced by 3 things:
1. Quantity of units (more better)
2. Actual strength of unit (provide raw fighting power?)
3. Can replace combat tile with 1 from hand
Have to be constantly look at armies’ location, quantity, special abilities
e.g. skirmishers only get value in forests
e.g. castles give 3 value but can’t move
Having more cavalry prevents retreat, so they are more impactful to position
Cavalry only give strength on plains
If can box someone in, they cannot escape after combat so lose all units
Terrain matters for movement
Deserts kill units that end turn there and can’t hold villages
Hills are 3x effort to go through
1 point per unit defeated can massively swing game
Provides discouragement vs. turtling & death balling
Stacking army in 1 place is high risk low reward
Unit movement paid for individually makes moving very nuanced
Ships are bridges between areas, allowing huge movement swings if control seas
Gameplay Pros — RNG Mitigated Combat System
Each combat bag has 8 tiles, pairs of 2-5 (2, 2, 3, 3, etc.)
Increase odds by having more units to draw 4 tiles instead of 3
Thematic and rewards good positioning
Can always replace one of tiles from one with hand
Worst you can get from 3 tiles is 10, which is above expected average value for not replacing
If you’re +2 over opponent, you should win fights
Gameplay Pros — Loose Turn structure enables big turns
Can attack and move as much as you can pay for
Attack someone, see how they retreat, then attack again
Gameplay Pros — Hand management really matters
Tradeoff between playing tile as unit, to move, or to discard for villages
“Reverse” bag building
Playing units on board shrinks bag
Think about what you want drawn for the next regroup phase
Depleting bag faster allows you to score villages faster
Depleting bag slower lets you have final turn but map will likely have less of your stuff
Asymmetry Pros — The 6 Factions
The more “normal ones”
1. Hill Folk
Can go on mountains (no one else can)
Have 2 hill trolls who are worth 2 power and always draws 4 combat tiles no matter what
2. Horse Lords
More cavalry and leader
Have 7 tiles letting you have more firepower
3. Dragon Riders
Have 2 dragons
Dragons fly over terrain and is worth 4 power (crazy strong)
Dragon after attacking dies
More asymmetrical factions time
1. Corsairs
Run away every time attacked next to ships
+1 power to fighting at sea
+1 VP for every fight win
2. Necromancers
Necromancer unit spawns undead
Undead moves for free every round, doesn’t care about terrain/deserts
3. Chaos Horde (craziest one)
No villages or citadel
Spawn ANYWHERE they have units
Capture villages during turn as opposed to beginning
Can capture when opponent is there
Captured villages worth 2x
All factions have slightly different bags/units
e.g. Chaos horde has 20 units that only benefit off of attacking
e.g. Hill folk have 7 castles instead of 5 (and are 1/2 cost)
Progression Pros
Placing more villages to get points eventually means conflict is inevitable
End game you take whatever villages your units are on for free
Late game very tense to anticipate where opponent moves onto you, you snipe their villages
More units you have the more decisionspace increases exponentially
Replayability Pros
6 different factions where you get to choose opening spawn every game
9 tiles in hand to choose from
How close you are to which opponent, water around you, dictates entire game
6 maps
Different terrain/water/shapes
e.g. Sorcerer’s Crucible is a huge island with water surrounding it, ships can move you anywhere if set up
Solo mode has 3 scenario mini-campaign for each faction (18 scenarios)
Setup very straightforward (only tried Necromancer 1st scenario)
Theme meets gameplay well
Factions all make sense
Corsairs hang out by the water and run away
Dragon flies over the map and is great at burning down citadels
Chaos horde is literally chaos
Horses only good on plains, prevent retreat
Skirmishes camping into forest trees is like Robin Hood
Component Cons
Army Bags could’ve been better for constant use
Tassels easily break off
Bags too small where refilling it with tons of tiles at least twice
Cannot shuffle if stick hands in
Combat bag with 8 tiles is ok
Cannot smoothly tell what is going on with army strength
Maps too small
Armies don’t stack well, falls over mid game
Supposed to be flat by looking at campaign page
POTENTIAL FIX: Use War of the Ring army markers if army doesn’t fit in area
Rivers too confusing for being pure decoration
FIX: Remove them, make less prominent, or add bridges
Tiles don’t stand up very well to use to keep hand secret
Can use card holder with varying success (tiles might not fit)
Combat tiles weirdly not double sided
Accidentally flash opponent when taking out of bag
More time consuming to take tiles out of bag
Fight a LOT in this game so friction adds up
FIX: Make double sided, convert player board into player screen
Player aid has issues
Too wordy for units
e.g. dragon ability
Misses crucial combat mechanic about cavalry withdrawal
Some other misc. errors
e.g. corsairs need to specify land combat for stop opponent retreating
Rulebook Cons — Capturing villages?
Doesn’t clarify if you an capture village if opponent has units there
Usually won’t matter, except for Chaos Horde, who always captures with enemies on
We used BGG thread to clarify belief that doesn’t have to be empty
Gameplay Cons — Concerning Faction Balance
Horse lords too strong
Extra leader which is one of best generic units in game
7 tiles provides so much
See more tiles
More resources to win fights more often
With tons of cavalry, can just run down opponents
Dragon Riders’ Dragon unit feels out of place
Dragon’s wild strength goes against game’s mantra of winning fights by careful margins and managing hand/bag better
Dragon drawn early is amazing, if drawn late sucks because it’s all that Dragon Riders have
Drawing it late maybe doesn’t let you spend it in time for your next regroup
Horse Lords & Dragon Riders can both get an early lead and just keep it
Or snowball further with horse lords
These 2 factions allow deathballing and can easily take citadels
Chaos Horde also good at deathballing
Deathballing bad because just becomes bigger stack wins and removes cool positioning
Gameplay Cons — Minor Faction Balance Concerns
Corsair countered by chaos and dragon riders
Chaos have 10 horses to frequently run away
Chaos take villages without a fight
Goes against corsair gameplay of leaving villages open as bait, then swooping in from sea
Dragon prevents any unit from running away, so can wreck Corsairs in crucial fight
Hill folk
Lady of the lake has no good starting areas
“Remains of the Past” only has 1 good starting area
Balance is a big deal because this is a tight war game that is won on the margins. Can use a draft system to draft starting locations and factions.
Player Count Cons — 3 and 4 Player strains the system
Tends to have distinct fronts with armies at borders, and villages behind armies
If someone spawns away from everyone else, villages harder to get to
Leaders don’t punished because is always easier to attack neighbor for VP
Someone will try to death ball into another citadel to cinch game, or take random inconsequential fights
Hard to come back in 3P, since 1 person gets utterly beat down and 3rd party doesn’t have enough VP via villages to win (winner of big fights gets tons of VP)
In 4P, person who got beat on is still out of the game, deciding who else wins the game
Clarification: Kingmaking is always going to exist in area controls on some level, poison is in the dose (last turn is ok)
Kingmaking here is why lots of modern area controls have ways to scale VP up (e.g. Blood Rage, TI4, Rising Sun)
Cannot do traditional area control alliance b/c too incentivized to attack neighbors
5-6 Players issues doesn’t happen because way more borders
Game hinges much more on diplomacy: cannot cover everything
If death ball, leave too much open for 3-4 other players
4P can play with chaos horde, because totally blow game wide open by taking villages like crazy
Time Length Inaccuracies
Gamefound description: “2 Hours”
1-3 players is probably shorter than 2.5 hours
6 Players we played is 4.5 hours
Game state gets way more complicated with more players
Hard to plan ahead with sheer possibilities for movement
End game shoots up length with lots of fights (contest to gobble up villages)
FIX: Just say 45 min/player
Recommender Score: 6/10 Above Average
OH MY GOSH are the tiles on the map is such a janky system for a game where you’re supposed to be carefully analyzing troops, and worry about terrain! Like was this game not tested in person?? I guess maybe it was from seeing the designer diaries photos?
For the gameplay, the more we played Bloodstones, even with all the asymmetry and 6 maps, the more we settled on, yeah this is just an OLDER feeling game, and yeah by reading the designer diaries, this idea came to Wallace in 2010, and the old school vibe rings true everywhere.
The teach is fairly easy for the depth, buuuut the game front loads a TON of information with all the units to learn, with decent asymmetry to boot. And gameplay is really punishing, where winners are hugely rewarded with points, you’re incentivized to beat up losers when they’re down, and point payouts don’t scale up. The fact that you can spawn your citadel ANYWHERE, which gives you agency and replayability, also means you can get your teeth wildly bashed in as a noob. Every choice super matters, and if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s easy to “feed” someone accidentally and give them a ton of points through a pivotal fight.
Heck, this reminds us of Tigris and Euphrates, another old school game that came out in 1997 (27 years ago), where a noob can foolishly wage a bad war and just feed the winner of that a bunch of points of a certain color they needed, and the game is ‘thrown’ for others.
The core of Bloodstones is VERY simple, with nothing to do on your opponents turns, there’s not really anything to incentivize table talk because diplomacy is pretty minimal with asymmetry not being something as nuanced as root, there’s not really any phases or ages, so the responsibility to win is to track well from the get-go. This lends to possibly TONS of analysis paralysis, even from the get go, as you squeeze from your hand… this game is not forgiving like more newer designs.
There’s also people calling this a “Wa-Euro”, or a War Euro, because of how village spawning works, where “oh shouldn’t I just spawn as many as I can to scale up in that way”, but I suspect they feel this way because of how 4P just doesn’t work that well for the combat incentives without the chaos horde in the mix. Also, perfect village placement only gets you 40 points, and to win you will need at least 55+, so yeah you DO need to be winning meaningful fights and so this leans more way more WAR game than euro.
Bloodstones is lifted up from the 5/10 score just because of how much content there is, and if you’re ok with the tiles there can be a lot of tight war gaming value here. Even though the 2 player only gives you access to 4 of the factions, since you can’t play with chaos horde or corsairs, with 6 maps you can still go to town.
Then get a bunch of people together to do an all out brawl at 5-6P, and unleash chaos into the world! If you really want to play at 4, remember, chaos horde is your friend, but man everyone hates them as they burn the world. And then solo has many hours of game.
The fact that solo is such a big selling point nowadays, had us think… what if there wasn’t a solo mode though? What if you took these old school mechanics and had them not in this contemporary content deluge of maps… and just had 1, maybe 2 maps? If 1 or 2 maps were REALLY refined, like like they had more points of interest to fight over, like maybe giving payouts for holding certain areas in a king of the hill aspect, would that not work better for this tight war gaming angle? But yeah we got big content instead and you can experiment how you may in multiplayer.
One Sherlock moment from reading Wallace’s design diaries, he says he wanted to create Bloodstones because he saw a FFG production in 2010 that had tons of components, and I can suspect that from the timing that the game is probably Chaos in the Old World. And so Bloodstones is his alleged anti-FFG, that also has a strong theme and deep gameplay. And by reading the rest, I also suspect that the dragon was a something he REALLY wanted to have, and with theme being a his grounding factor behind the design, and so maybe the game should’ve done more to accommodate its swingyness?
Is Martin Wallace actually achieving what he set out to do in the first place, to have a thematic playground with minimal components where a dragon works?
