Summoner Wars 2nd Edition Review
Grid positioning meets mage dueler play, but will the dice rolling be a dealbreaker?
Grab a faction deck and defeat your opponent’s summoner, in an hour! You can discard card for magic, roll dice to kill your opponent’s units, and abuse asymmetry uniques. With deckbuilding possibility, Summoner Wars is only for 2 players, and currently #5 on customizable on BGG.
Video published April 22nd, 2024
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Position around the 2 summoners on board.
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Grab 1 of 6 factions, and go!
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Spawn units, or discard from hand for magic.
Story
For the past couple years, I’ve been getting nonstop comments on summoner wars, so I finally decided to buy it!
Plays
Over 20 hours between physical and digital with the official website. 4 Games IRL.
Need to learn how to play? Or want more reasoning for our points? Our review video’s got you!
Component Pros
Cards feel durable
8 custom engraved dice
Double sided health tokens prove very useful in practice
Usually dealing 1-3 damage
Diverse art for 6 factions
In total 72 pieces of art
Easy to start pros
Rulebook is mostly pretty good
Plenty of diagrams, explains game in clear way
Back half is a glossary
Very fast setup
To start: take out board, follow included setup for summoner, and get 2 piles of tokens out
Nice player aid to explain every turn’s phases
Gameplay Pros — Interesting positioning play
All framed around killing opponent’s summoner, while protecting yours, while getting most out of your own summoner’s stats/abilities
e.g. Sneeks who can swap with 0 cost units during attack phase
e.g. Svara who moves gates after she moves (so save more movement for her)
Easy to create choke points and protect certain cards
Worry about blocking your own units
Melee vs. ranged units to worry about
Many cards that work off adjacencies
e.g. Clinger that can’t move, but can latch onto other units to piggyback off their movement
e.g. Pile On (event), who gives certain units next to each other more attack
e.g. Citadel Knights to taunt adjacent units only to attack them
e.g. Nadina (champion) who gets stronger for every structure within 2 spaces
Losing a unit during battle gives opponent magic, so minimize needless deaths
Gates offer own positioning nuance
Can spawn next to summoner to reward its movement or protect it
Can open up new fronts on will
Counterplay against gates to clog up their summoning spots
Only 4 of them, so once all dead can’t spawn anymore
Gameplay Pro — Discarding for Magic System
Intuitive way to pace yourself accordingly (only 30 cards in deck)
Be careful discarding 1x (champions)
Keeps you own your feet as you can discard more/less cards after dice rolls go a certain way
Sometimes just discard to see more cards
Mass discard is high risk possibility to have “all-in” on pushes but risk decking out too fast
Ties well cards in hand vs. positioning vs. magic
Gameplay Pros — Progression
Champions change game a lot when dropped
Abilities & just having more health
e.g. Eater 9 HP, rolls 5 melee dice, but needs to kill something every turn
e.g. Gwalark who gives units around him “flight” to fly over cards
Deck outs do happen of being mana poor, drawing little to 0 cards every turn
Gameplay Pros — Asymmetry of 6 decks!
No repeat cards between decks (besides standard gates)
4 unique events
Clear style and strategy with special summoner
1. Vanguards: Magic & Hand Advantage
1. Paladin draws you cards, archer discards cards to boost 1 attack
2. More magic buffs one of their champions
3. Sera (summoner) gets any citadel card from discard
2. Breakers: Sneaky mystical with only ranged common units’
1. Tacullu (summoner) when kills something, goes over to your side
2. Set up “Deceiver” wall to push opponents in and out of to do 1 guaranteed damage
3. Savannah Elves: All about boosting (bonus tokens)
1. “Lioness” can get more health after attacking
2. Rhino can move more than 2 spaces, then trample others to do damage
3. Chant of Entangling event gives 2 units each other’s bonuses
4. Abua Shi (Summoner) has 5 attack, and gives free boosts
4. Cave Goblins: Low cost swarm
1. Many free units, including 2 champions
2. 0 cost units have drawbacks, but can get buffed via events (e.g. Pile On to do +1 damage for adjacencies)
3. Sneeks (summoner) can swap with 0 cost units for killing blows
5. Polar Dwarves: Structure (gate) manipulation
1. Have 9 gates instead of other’s 4
2. Svara (summoner) moves structures on her move
3. Ice ram opponent by crashing structures into them
4. Having gates moving up allows for more aggressive placements
6. Undead: About destroying your own units
1. Ret Talus (summoner) injures himself to bring back something from grave
2. Cultist to damage things around him when he dies (can give “Hellforged Weapon” that has risk of harming himself but buffs attack)
3. Undead Archer teleports to any space when something dies
4. “Sacrificial Pyre” heals summoner for everything that died this round
Replayability Pros
6 super diverse factions, opening hands will be different
Can at least play each deck 2x against every other deck
Won’t be able to use every unique champion each game (3 different ones in each deck)
Possibility for deckbuilding with buying further sets
Thanks to YT comment section for clarifying that Master Set cannot deckbuild
True to Time - 40-60 minutes
Don’t have quick surrenders because can come back through card draws for new flanking
Dice rolls allow for many new stories
Players will deck out after a while
Longest game we’ve played is 90 minutes
Gameplay Meets Theme Very well
Ranged is harder to hit
Factions feel very true to their art/style
Rulebook Cons — Missing some clarifications
“Instead of moving this unit, boost it” needs to be specified
Does “Additional attack” stack? (Yes)
Should have breakdown of each of 6 factions
Some decks not straightforward (e.g. Polar Dwarves & Undead)
Need to understand what is worth discarding and positioning asap
Should include card count of each deck to avoid confusion
Only Polar Dwarves deck shown
Component Cons
Missing player aid to explain each champion for each deck
Often unsure about discarding a champion to set up for next champion, even after 1-3 plays of deck
Won’t be an issue if you deckbuild
Funky card layout causes weird eye-darting on board
Magic is next to health, instead of attacking next to health
Every single card (besides gates) has exact same layout, little distinction
Champions vs. commons easy to mess up
Give summoners/champions their own borders for more importance
Cards have tiny unbolded text that is hard to read on board
Huge lack of symbols throughout, or misusage of current symbols (magic, health)
Should make text bigger on other cards
No included organization
Recommend getting 6-8 plastic bags
Gameplay Cons — Poor elements of Randomness for 2024
Getting 1 magic by killing something, which is based off dice rolling
Killing something is double whammy of up a unit AND free magic
Crucial opening turns of being up a turn on board, or tied
Having extra units on turn usually means get to do another attack
If highly expected to kill something, and don’t, now down a magic, and that unit does something (swingy if that’s a champion)
No included mulligan for drawing 4 different types of cards
Only way to get more cards is to discard, so can find yourself losing strong cards early game
Not getting a common 1st turn means you’re behind on tempo (want to use 3 moves/attacks on turn if possible)
Worse case scenario is opening 5 events
“More-card draw” system possible to see more cards from deck, then put extra back into deck?
Gameplay Cons — Undead Suck
Grave recursion not good when you have subpar units
Archer has too little health for its attack/ability
Swordsman that gets +1 attack buff loses 2 tokens every turn
No other card loses boosts
Undead carrier gets another one from grave, but not that good of a unit
Don’t have a way to secure ground well or have advantaged movement
Strongest champion is insanely expensive by having high mana cost AND blowing up one of your units, cannot spawn normally
Ret-Talus (summoner) also has worst summoner attack at 2 (could have been at least +1)
Naturally hide him away, but then grave recursion units are out of position
Cool combos are very event dependent to be drawn in the right sequence, not even that strong
e.g. purge a cultist that is near opponent’s units, so it blows up and you do 3 dmg to things around. (Use 2 cards to hopefully kill 2 cards)
Hopefully kills something to +1 sword guy (loses bonus end turn)
Recommend starting the game with Vanguards (straightforward, higher health to be less punishing)
Then play Savannah Elves, who are possibly strongest in box
Gameplay Cons — Nothing to do on lengthy opponent turns
Many phases in each turn to be done in order, invite downtime
Can just leave turn when turn ends, 0 interaction
Cannot really plan ahead even though see next hand, because turn is so reliant on opponent movement/dice rolls
Makes SW an amazing asynchronous game (use the official client)
Compare to TCGs where every time you do something, opponent has a window to react
Or War games where you trade off doing smaller turns
Recommender Score: 7/10 Good
Despite so much hype I see, I can’t call it this box great, although Summoner Wars has a LOT of charm going for it. Sure, there’s some visual and balance concerns here, but that’s not the true culprit, rather the randomness handling in 2024 is.
It was about after my 3rd game where I couldn’t stop thinking how much getting reasonable results on dice rolling lets you actually resolve most of the cool plays, and combined with card draw with 4 different types of cards, yeah that’s a heck of a lot of weird variance. But on the other hand, it’s all of these permutations that make Summoner Wars also an incredibly replayable game, allowing easily dozens of hours in this master set, even more if you deck build.
Summoner Wars is this accessible fantasy playground that invites so many stories, and these moments despite our concerns are what I see groups coming back for more. Maybe one game you boost a rhino and it runs down the entire board to kill their summoner. Or you just enjoy piling on their strong knights with goblins. Or creating an unstoppable way of gates with the Polar Dwarves, and ramming your way forward. Or stealing their CHAMPION they invested so much magic into with Tacullu.
The dice rolling also can work to create these massive upsets- say Tacullu never gets to kill something to mind control because she rolls bad, well you’re down a champion ability that is inherently very swingy. Or your summoner is completely surrounded, on their last legs, but they just don’t -quite- kill you with too many misses. Then you summon your last common from your hand in a gate your opponent forgot about, and you roll the dice- who will win!?
With this mindset of creating fantasy stories within an hour, you probably won’t care about the randomness concerns. Or you might say, well hey it IS a tactical game where, where card draw, opponent rolls, my rolls, are all part of the tactical-ness, and planning too deeply ahead isn’t the idea of the game anyways. Even with positioning nuance and deck manipulation, you should be injecting some ameritrash expectations in gameplay- look at all the lightning symbols that can lead to all sorts of outcomes, and that’s fine with the right mindset. Though newer ways of handling this might be to give you re-rolls, or save rolls- just more mitigation.
Let’s talk about deckbuilding- again I haven’t done it, but the champion limitations are really telling on how tactical this experience is supposed to be- you can only have 1 copy of each champion. In a trading card game, this would be WILD to not have multiple copies of the same card to increase your probability of drawing them.
But that’s not Summoner Wars! It’s not trying to compete with TCG carefully constructed deck construction, rather just wants you to enjoy the sheer tactical questions it poses while still getting rewarded for dozens of repeat plays. Even with randomness concerns, if you deck build, I would say the better player usually wins best 3/5 games.
Even without deckbuilding, there’s definitely room for strategy with saving cards in your hand, or anticipating your final draws, or counter-laying your opponent faction’s positioning intentions perfectly. But there’s so much variance in outcome that those expecting that feeling constantly should beware.
Summoner Wars has so much asymmetrical and positioning charm that it isn’t yet completely obsolete in 2024, 15 years after 1st edition. At its best, its perpetual tactical thrill that can make you feel REALLY clever with positioning with strategic possibility that isn’t always fully realized in every turn, but fun to ponder over. Our concerns like potentially awful hands, having empty turns from missing all your dice rolls, or imbalance, might not even matter at ALL to your enjoyment, but why not play with a free mulligan eh?
And no, it’s not like Chess. Sure, I can see the comparisons- your summoner is kind of like your king and queen combined, and controlling the middle is important with general positioning ideas, but that’s where the similarities mostly end. You dice roll for every combat that is only melee or ranged, you’re constantly summoning new dudes through portals to get a bigger army… Summoner Wars is a tactical game that is in its own fantasy dueler category.
Heck, Legacy’s Allure, which is a solid replacement for Summoner Wars is more chess-like, its an actual war game where you have perfect knowledge of everything- it is actually a rather quite serious game, unlike Summoner Wars.
