En Garde! There's More Here Than Met TheEye
Written: Sep 14 '05 (Updated Oct 02 '05)
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Pros: Easy for even the youngest gamers to learn, well-constructed, surprising strategic depth.
Cons: A theme only a five-year-old boy could love.
The Bottom Line: A surprisingly interesting game of strategy with a kid-friendly, if cringe-inducing, theme. Perfect for the young Yi-Gi-Oh or Pokemon fan.
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| theeye's Full Review: Duel Masters: Battle of the Creatures |
I did not expect to be writing this review.
When my husband picked up the DuelMasters: Battle of the Creatures board game for five bucks at our local going-out-of-business KB Toys (apparently, we'll be getting yet another unneeded bank in the neighorhood to replace the last remaining toy store), I must admit that I looked askance at him.
We'd been looking for interesting strategy games to keep the interest of our five-year-old budding gamer and had been focusing on adult games with relatively simple rules and minimal reading required. The sort of games that he could learn and enjoy, that would be appropriately challenging and that we, as his frequent partners in play, would find less soul-destroying than, say, Chutes and Ladders. A board game that appeared to me, at first glance, to be a cheap tie-in to a lousy television show based on yet another Pokemon-Yu-Gi-Oh-Magic-the-Gathering clone did not seem promising at all.
It's five bucks, he said. How much of a mistake can it possibly be? (I was ominously reminded of the apocryphal tailor who lost money on every suit, but made it up in volume.) Fine, said I. But you will play it with him; I want nothing to do with it.
With that settled, we brought the game home and I headed off to do a little web-surfing, while Daddy did game duty. I was only half-listening to their talk of summoning creatures and collecting chips and engaging in battles, convinced that DuelMasters was one game I'd not be learning. But the boys seemed to be having a fine old time.
The Best Laid Plans
Later, at dinner, my husband commented that the game was actually quite playable and well-designed, though it clearly would be much more interesting with more than two players. My son immediately concurred and, with his most earnest and winsome look, assured me that, if I wanted to play after all, I could be any color I wanted. Well, except for blue, he hastily added. Blue, of course, is The Kid's favorite color.
I caved. (Hey, I defy you to stand firm against The Winsome Look.)
As we set up the game, my husband reminded me that, while the official manufacturer is Milton Bradley (Hasbro), DuelMasters is actually a Wizards of the Coast property. If there is one thing that Wizards (the makers of Magic: The Gathering among other collectible card games) is renowned for, it is game design. They are not the sort to slap a cartoon theme on a board, toss in some plastic avatars, a pair of dice and a poorly-thought-out instruction booklet and call it a game.
And, in fact, if you can bring yourself to overlook the Apocalyptic Battle of the Way Cool Monsters thematic overlay, this DuelMasters board game turns out to be, rather surprisingly, a well-designed game of luck and strategy easily mastered by a young child and unexpectedly tolerable for an adult.
The Basics
The game requires no reading whatsoever and only basic counting skills. But there are real strategic decisions to be made at every turn and, for all the dice throwing that goes on, there is more skill required here than you might think at first glance. (Consider backgammon, for example, a game in which every move depends on the throw of a pair of dice -- and which is, nevertheless, very much a game of skill. Duel Masters isn't quite as sophisticated a game, but it's a lot closer than you might imagine.)
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's start by taking a look at the game equipment. For what I initially thought of as yet another slapdash television tie-in, this game is manufactured to surprisingly high standards. The elongated rectangular board (it folds in quarters to fit in the box) is lushly illustrated with super-saturated colors and intense artwork that will draw lots of oohs and ahhhs from any five-year-old boy. (Or a forty-something boy, for that matter. Ahem.)
The dice included are high quality, factory-stamped custom dice: no peel-and-stick labels as you'll find on so many kids' games these days. And they're generous with the dice. The game includes a single twelve-sided die (D-12, for you D&D aficionados) and no fewer than fourteen identical six-sided, custom 'battle dice' stamped with special colored symbols, even though at most seven need to be thrown at a time. With fourteen dice, all required dice throws in the game can be performed without any passing of dice back and forth, which is a nice touch.
The game pieces come in five different colors (red, yellow, blue, green and grey), corresponding to the five colored areas on the board. Each player is assigned a color and controls seven numbered 'creature pawns', consisting of cardboard squares, mounted on correspondingly colored plastic bases. The creature pawns feature illustrations of fearsome monsters, who are, thankfully, entirely irrelevant to the gameplay, though they will, of course, be profoundly meaningful to your five year old boy (and possibly to his Daddy). If you are interested in a detailed description of the monsters and their names, I regret to inform you that you are reading the wrong review.
All of the creature pawns are made of heavy-duty, thick cardboard and the plastic bases seem quite durable as well. In another surprising touch of generosity, the manufacturer provides fourteen pawns of each color: each number is represented twice, with different creature illustrations. The extra pieces are pure lagniappe, but they serve as nice insurance against losing a piece and allow kids to pick their favorite creatures to play with.
In addition to the various dice and creature pawns, the game comes supplied with a set of twenty-five small plastic disks ('power tokens'), five of each color. The tokens are ridged to stack nicely and, again, are of somewhat better quality than I've come to expect in many children's board games.
The Board
The game board, when stripped of its elaborate fantasy elements, consists of a doughnut-shaped play area, divided into five colored zones, all filled with an interconnected network of play positions; the connecting lines indicate the permissible moves. The power tokens are placed in unicolored piles on the five innermost positions and each player places his first three creatures on the indicated positions just behind the power token space. The higher numbered creatures begin the game out of play and must be 'summoned' by their player (Magic: the Gathering players will note the familiar terminology).
Play begins, of course, with the youngest player and proceeds around the table. At his turn, a player may choose one of two actions: (a) he may move any one of his creatures, or (b) he may summon a new creature to the board.
Moving a Creature and Dueling with Battle Dice
Creatures move along the lines connecting the board positions and may move as many positions as their ordinal number; thus, the creature labeled number one may move only to an adjacent position, while the creature labeled number three may make as many as three jumps in a single move. Moving through a position occupied by an opponent's position is forbidden, but a move may end at such a position, in which case the two creatures duel to the death.
When two creatures duel, their controllers each roll a set of battle dice equal in number to the respective creatures' ordinal numbers. Each roll is scored by counting the number of symbols of the player's color rolled; in addition to the five colors, the dice feature a 'wild card' dragon symbol on the sixth side which counts as a hit. Ties are rerolled as many times as necessary and the loser's creature dies and is permanently removed from the game. The advantage a higher-numbered creature has in dueling a lower-numbered creature affords a nice opportunity to discuss the concept of probability with kids.
Summoning a Creature
If a player chooses to summon a creature, he must roll the twelve-sided die: if the number rolled is greater than or equal to the creature's number, the creature is successfully summoned and may be placed on any unoccupied position in his home area, other than the power token position. If the attempt to summon fails, the player forfeits his turn. Creatures must be summoned in order: the number five creature may not be summoned until after the number four creature has been successfully summoned onto the board.
The Goal: Collecting Power Tokens
The object of the game is to be the first player to collect all five colors of power tokens. All it takes to collect a token is to have a creature visit the token position -- and survive the turn. Collecting one's own token is easy and is often accomplished on the first turn of the game. Collecting the other colors usually involves meeting and dueling opposing creatures who will tend to be positioned in the most inconvenient of places. The lower numbered creatures tend to die early on, but shrewd players will summon larger creatures and set at least one to guarding the home turf against invaders.
While the mechanics of play are actually quite simple once you understand the rules, the strategic considerations are surprisingly rich, requiring a careful balancing of offensive and defensive moves. An optimal strategy is far from obvious, particularly in a multiplayer game, and the gameplay has enough depth to keep an adult gamer's interest.
My husband was, of course, correct: the game is significantly more interesting when several players compete and the board is more crowded. When I play this game with my son, I often assign each of us two colors to make things a bit more challenging. If you do this, you'll want to be sure that you assign colors in an alternating pattern, so as not to give either player a positional advantage. (Fortunately, blue and green -- the 'boy' colors -- and red and yellow -- the 'girl' colors -- are appropriately arranged on the board, so my son is satisfied with the assignments.)
The Down Side
For a game I was sure I would despise, DuelMasters has given me surprisingly few complaints in the end. But there are a couple of areas that could use some improvement.
The battle dice are of high quality, as I noted above, but I sometimes find the colors of the symbols a bit difficult to distinguish at a glance. It would also be nice if the box contained some way to organize the many separate pieces which always end up in a jumbled pile.
On a less trivial note, I suspect that the game would be improved by slightly decreasing the probability of success of a creature summoning. The entry cost seems to be a bit too low, though I admit that some more exploration of the strategic possibilities of the game might lead me to revise that view. In any event, when playing with young children, it is probably best to avoid over-frustrating them: as you might imagine, getting A Really Big Monster out there relatively fast is very popular with the kiddies.
All in all, I must plead guilty to having misjudged this game by its cover. Under all the commercial hype and the pandering to young boys' pseudo-violent fantasies, is a well-designed and genuinely engaging game of strategy that the whole family can enjoy.
Mea culpa, boys.
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Additional resources and information:
The manufacturer's overblown product description can be read here: https://www.areyougame.com/Interact/item.asp?itemno=HB42031
Other games my son (and his folks) recommend: King's Table, Fluxx, Kill Dr. Lucky, Rush Hour, Jr., Roadside Rescue, Aquarius, Four Children's Card Games
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 5
Type of Toy: Board Game
Age Range of Child: Whole Family
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Epinions.com ID:
theeye
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Location: New York, NY (it's a hell of a town!)
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 165 members
About Me:
Company president, math geek, first time mom at 39, epinion addict. Sleep? Not lately.
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