1. Introduction
So, after some back and forth I finally got my copy of Might & Magic Heroes. Since there is only one Review here, I thought I would write another one and here it is.
The first part will be kind of a walkthrough, so if you already know the rules just skip down to "My thoughts". I do hope this will be helpful for players wanting to get a little overview of what they get into (but not motivated enough to read the rules) before their first game. So I will not go into every detail (what are the rules for ) but explain the important parts.
1.1 Unboxing
So when I opened the box my first thought was "oh some stuff here, but not a lot". Boy, was I wrong. There is a real lot of cardboard tokens in this game, at a rough estimate ~350 cardboard, 80 wooden pieces, a lot of small cards, the "board" and capitals. So all in all close to 500 pieces.
The overall quality is nice, the cardboard not to thin and I especially like the wooden capitals.
Also there a few bags in the box, unfortunately not anywhere near enough to sort the game in a decent system. However I do like that there are any bags at all.
1.2 Rulebook
For the most part the rulebook is well written. It is 24 pages long and there a lot of small pictures to clarify its meaning. There a few small things which could have been done better - for example the week cards are explained in the setup, but the actual time when they are to be used is only mentioned in a brief sideline. Also there is no actual turn sequence in the rules (would be pretty short, however that would be where they could have mentioned the week cards). I also would have liked an overview over the different creatures for each faction, since some special abilites affects specific creatures and on first sight its not quite clear which creatures are affected.
1.3 Setup
First time setup, including sorting the tokens etc, took me about an hour. If you have everything sorted and know what to do, I doubt it will take more than 5-10 minutes.
Here is a picture of my 2 player-solo-testgame:
2. 386
Walkthrough
2.1 Components
So in the middle of the table is the actual board. It consists of square tiles, the actual amount depends on the number of players. 9 for 2 player, 12 for 3 and 16 for 4. They are numbered so it is easy to get the right ones.
On the board there are various locations like mines, dragons dens and arenas. All of these are guarded by monster, represented by yellow (easy), purple (medium) and brown tokens (hard).
During the game your heroes will set out from your capital (big wooden marker on the board) and travel across the map to claim sawmills/ore pits/crystal mines, destroy monsters and trying to gather treasure and precious artefacts. In doing so they will also get experience and level up, thus increasing their power.
At first the locations look pretty similiar, but once you play a few turns you will be able to recognize them pretty quick. Also on the backside of the rulebook they are all explained, in addition to the small symbols on the map itself.
The sheets below the board with the wooden tokens on it are the capital sheets of each player. Here you will track your victory points, your gold and resources and muster new armies to bring destruction to your enemies.
It also shows how far you have developed your city, up to lvl IV. If you upgrade your city, you get access to more creatures and more buildings.
The buildings are the 9 tiles below the city. On the front are the requirements for each building, represented by the little house which stands for the level of your capitol. Below are the costs, usually resources and in some cases gold.
As soon as you have constructed a new building, it is flipped over and on the other site there is a picture of the benefits. For example free ressources, the ability to recruit more monsters or a portal, allowing your heroes to use portals on the map from your capitol.
The improvement of your city level is represented by the small wooden token on the left most square. Left and right there are pictures of the different creatures you can build, which is one for each city level.
On the left of the buildings there is the hero currently in the game. Each faction starts with one and a medium army, but has three available which can be recruited as soon as the tavern is built.
The cards left of the capitol are skill cards and are earned by leveling up.
Each hero has also different stats and abilites on his hero cards. These are used mainly for combat and maximum army size (different for different heroes). 349