The ABC of magical combat
Arcane Blaster Casters is a game I first played at UKGE back in 2016. When I played it then my spells were not impressive, often doing more damage to me than my opponents. I was therefore keen to play it again and hopefully improve my performance.
In Arcane Blaster Casters you take on the role of a wizard in an arena trying to reduce your opponents to a glop of primordial magical energy. To do this you have a range of spells to hurt, blind, freeze, slow and push your opponents, or heal, shield and teleport yourself. Moving around a claustrophobic arena (particularly if you're playing with the maximum 8 players) you prepare spells from a selection of cards in your hand attempting to blast your opponents while avoiding their return fire.
Somehow all the aggression and picking on each other is so on the surface that none of it feels personal and the game remained fun even for the players in our group who aren't fans of combative games. When someone pushes you through three traps leaving you a frozen, blinded mess in front of the player who's spell is about to be cast, you get it; this is exactly what the game told you it was going to do.
You create spells by combining spell cards, with each one offering up three different modes with which they can be played. Each card contains a start (a), middle (b) and end (c) such that you can end up with a spell called "Whirly Irritating Rain" or a "Vicious Dripping Tempest" with exactly the same cards.
Vicious, Dripping Tempest: 5 move, 3 damage, 2 push, 1 healing with a 2 point teleport and some chaos, lovely!
Depending on where you put each card it'll add different effects to the spell you're casting. Want your spell to have greater range? You'll need to choose a spell piece (or pieces) that give it movement. Want it to drop traps? That means a different choice. The iconography is clear, simple to learn and you'll quickly recognise the effects each spell will produce.
This choice of which cards to use is at the heart of the game and allows you to craft the outcome you want. The game could bog down here, but it does a great job of pressuring these decisions with its initiative system. This also creates conflicting advantage; casting your spell first is great, but also means you'll have to move first next turn letting others react to where you go.
While rushing to complete your spell choices and grab the turn order token that will allow you to cast first, you'll undoubtedly follow my example and set up spells that cause you more harm than your target, or peter out short of their intended victim.
The spell reference cards are excellent, but we did wish they'd clarified that they showed the order in which spell effects were resolved, or that this information stood out a little more in the rule book. It's an important rule that we missed during our first game. The designers have built a wonderfully intuitive and straightforward game and we were eager to get blasting each other as soon as possible, a little more help on the less intuitive rules would improve that experience. Ps. we'd also have teleport resolve first so they can be used more aggressively, as typically its used to run away after firing off a spell.
These Lush Blowing Petals were going to see the yellow wizard travelling for some time...
Traps form a major part of the game, you even start the game with some in play, and at some point, you're going to get shoved through them. This is a part of this that we're a little uncertain of, the game isn't called 'Arcane Trap Masters' after all, but you frequently feel like your best option is shoving your opponents rather than blasting them. Doing so however is also incredibly fun so we are a little conflicted and if you ever manage to pull off a double trap, double burst and fill a 5x5 grid two traps deep (the board is only 9x9), dropping 50 traps with one spell, you're going to feel truly epic!
Adding to the negative side around traps is the fact that some include positive effects and that really takes away from the enjoyment of sending an enemy through them. We saw one situation where a player was shoved through half a dozen traps and came out with more hit points than he started. That, while rare, just doesn't feel right.
On an incidental note the section that details how to resolve multiple traps is is an odd section of the book, not linked to pushes or traps (and no direction to the section in either area). It took us a few games to find it.
When you push someone through lots of traps they stop for each trap, resolve it, then continue any leftover movement. Unless they pick up pushes in which case they hold them until the initial push is complete, then you can choose to send your victim off on another journey through more traps possibly picking up more pushes along the way. This often means that the traps take much longer to resolve than anything else and its them that cause most of the damage and disruption, not your spells. This is not the fast-paced, clean gameplay we were looking for with this game.
Disrupting your opponents can be almost as fun as knocking off a few hit points and a well-timed 'freeze' that prevents your opponent slipping away can be very useful in letting you finish them off next turn. The game utilises condition tokens and these work exceptionally well. Flipping tokens over to extend the effect is simple but really clear and each effect is clever and easily grasped; Slow reduces the length of your spells (two cards instead of three) while Hastened extends them (four cards), Blindness means playing your spells without looking at your cards and Frozen means you can't move.
This just makes such intuitive sense and it's really easy to pick up. I really love the places, and there are several, where the game allows you to play almost without looking at the rules, but it highlights rather harshly where it doesn't quite manage it.
Eventually, a player will fall to the attacks... I say 'eventually' because there seemed to be too much healing for my group's tastes. It's also frequently an accidental benefit on spell cards as the opportunity cost of taking it feels too low. We were expecting the game to be quick and brutal, and not include turns where a player scuttles back into a corner to heal.
Whirly, Irritating Rain; 4 move, 3 push, 1 damage, 2 healing bursting with a little chaos, just what the wizard ordered!
Sorry, I got distracted, as I was saying; eventually, a player will fall to the attacks, but unlike other games, this doesn't remove you from play. You instead turn into the delightfully named 'slug'. When this happens you roll on the slugification table to see what unexpected results your untimely demise may have had and there's even a chance you'll return to the game immediately. We couldn't find clarification on what happened to a player's prepared spell when they became a slug and assumed this was considered part of the hand and discarded.
Slugs are basically immune to damage, traps and effects, but only use a single card to cast spells out of a hand of just two. If you're able to destroy another wizard as a slug though you'll be able to return to play with a fresh chance to win. We loved the randomness generated by the slugification table and having players not completely out of the game was great from a participation point of view. In fact, as they continue to pile pressure on the remaining players they help close out the game quicker. We weren't however comfortable with the 'return to play' mechanics, as they seemed destined to extend games unnecessarily.
Arcane Blaster Casters is charmingly straightforward and lighthearted; just grab your wand and set about reducing your opponents to the mystical goop they came from without a hint of remorse. Overall we loved the game, it plays in a reasonable time frame, does what you expect it to and is great fun along the way. The spell cards naming convention is very clever and there are places where everything is so intuitive that learning to play is easy.
That said the rulebook needs a few tweaks for clarity and we felt the game offered too many chances to heal or return to play and while loving the traps, worried about the time and focus resolving them en mass consumed. It feels as though the designers heard too many complaints that players got eliminated and tried really hard to make wizards survive longer, but for us, it just extended the game time, and we'd much rather have died sooner and played two shorter more aggressive games. I'll be keeping my review copy to play but we came up with a variant that turns this into the faster-paced, more aggressive game we wanted it to be:
Make Teleports resolve first
Remove any healing, shielding, hastening, pushing or 0 damage traps
Remove all but 1 copy of each spell card with any healing on it
Eliminate the slug reform rule for killing another wizard.
If you'd like to hear more about the game, visit Battle Boar Games' facebook page to keep up to date. You'll hear more about the Kickstarter next month as well as see the improvements they're making to the components and artwork.
Note that I was given a free review copy of this game for the purposes of providing a review.
