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Overview & How to Play

Skytear’s goal is to destroy the enemy’s Nexus.

That sounds EXACTLY like a MOBA you’d play on a computer, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. Yet Skytear starts immediately diverging by also letting you achieve one of 3 randomly selected win condition cards, like killing enemy Heroes a certain way, or successfully sieging certain lanes. You do those instead of killing a Nexus, you win the game.

Players pick 4 heroes, then take turns performing 3 actions. They can move around the board, attack enemy Heroes and Minions, support their lanes with cards in their hand, or use their unique abilities, called Worship actions. Heroes can be ranged or melee, and have differing attack strengths, unique starting health, and many have Armor that protects against attacks. After a Hero takes their turn, they exhaust, and then the opponent uses a Hero, then you use a Hero, so on and so forth until all of the Heroes exhaust and the round ends. You keep playing up to 5 rounds until someone wins, or the game ends in a tie.

We can’t forget about the lanes though! Unlike in a MOBA where there’s 3 lanes, there’s only 2 lanes in Skytear. Each of the lanes here will have Towers, Minions, and then this thing called a Control Marker. Players will try to stack lanes with their own Minions, Heroes, and cards to push that control marker forward to kill other Minions, and damage their opponents’ structures, including their Nexus if you push in deep enough.

The center part of the map, the cloudy area, is called the ‘Dome’. Minions don’t go here, and heroes can fight over this to get dominance. If a player successfully dominates this, they get the temporary favor of the ‘Outsider’, a huge creature with its own abilities and attacking patterns.

Skytear is really a card-driven game, so players are going to have multiple cards in their hand they can use every round. There’s Mana costs on the top left corner, which means that you gotta play cards from a Hero that provides that same type of Mana. So on your turn, you play a card, and that uses that much Mana from that hero. Your Mana for each Hero starts at one for the first round, and goes up by one as the rounds progress. But then, you also got cards in your hand that are reaction cards, which you use Mana to play in response to any effect, yours or your opponent’s. 

After all the heroes go, you calculate dominance to push the control marker and damage turrets if they’re close enough, spawn more minions, draw more cards, and move the round marker up. Just fight until you destroy your enemy’s Nexus or fulfill one of the 3 victory cards. 

Pros

Skytear boasts an immediate fantasy look off the bat, with the different factions of Heroes, detailed terrain that includes bushes to hide in, and card art being very vivid. Minion minis are incredibly sturdy to move around on the board.

The base game of Skytear we’re taking a look at has 8 Heroes, each with their own stats, abilities, and 8 recommended cards that make up their deck. In this deck will be an Ultimate card that screams flavor, like a cool Blades of Lightning. Each of these Heroes also belong to one of the 4 factions, denoting specific Mana they can use, and giving a special Worship action.

Time to actually explain this crucial Worshipping. A Worship Action is a key type of ability only that faction can use, where maybe the red Kuromo faction can mark enemy Heroes for other Heroes to press the attack with. Or the green Taulot faction likes to create Pillars on the board that their Heroes can manipulate and get buffs off of.

Each card also has multiple uses that ties into the gameplay well. Aside from using something for its normal ability, you can use it for a Lead action, injecting its Mana cost into a region to win a control marker. Also, when attacking anything, there’s no dice used, instead, you flip over the top card of your deck to see the attack modifier, so you need to be mindful of your opponent’s discard to determine their capabilities.

On your turn, you’re first going to agonize over which of your available Heroes to use, then sequencing 3 of 5 actions while constantly gauging your hand. Remember, there’s multiple victory conditions, and you need to see which one is the most feasible throughout the game. You have 4 Heroes, and there’s 3 areas, so position carefully. Heroes in general are almost always 3 spaces away form attacking something, making combat so available if you want to get feisty.

Don’t forget your hand either! Should you play a card from hand, or use it for leading to boost a region? Or maybe you just lead from the top of the deck and hope you get something good!

Cons & Nitpicks

The rulebook is quite lacking though. Specifically, how come Nexus health is only mentioned 16 pages in, when its a key victory condition of the game? There’s sequencing issues in general there.

Now this is also an introductory box of about $70, with plenty of included win condition cards, but be warned that the deckbuilding that is a big part of Skytear is not possible in this base box. So, the intro box just weirdly dumps you with tokens that you can’t use until you buy more of the game.

Initial games are also extremely long. The website’s claim of 30-60 minutes is true once you get the game down, but on a first game, plan for at least 2 hours. This is because you don’t fully understand this multi-layered game yet, with different locations and abilities everywhere, and your Heroes and decks aren’t optimized very well.

Final Thoughts

When zooming out, it’s actually good that Skytear doesn’t quite feel like a MOBA. Would you want to manually manage hordes of Minions of 3 lanes, or experience points/items/4 abilities for multiple Heroes? Probably not. The streamlined nature of Skytear works well, with Mana progression being a simple increase every round, and there’s only one active ability for each Hero.

Ultimately, Skytear takes so many ideas from different trading card games, whether it be getting mana every round like in Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering’s abundance of counterspells and Mana colors, and Vanguard's ‘top-of-deck-flipping’ for attacks.

Deckbuilding pushes the replayability through the roof if you decide to invest in the system, and isn’t that pricey considering the quality of components and the multi-layered aspect of each card.