A game that we play pretty often at home is Star Realms. We have brought it along on vacation and all that. I’ve written about it before. I know that Whitewizard games know card games. I have played a couple of them. But what if they made more than “just” a card game? This is what interested me the most about Sorcerer at first. I read up on it as I usually do. I read about the complaints that the fights take way to long and that makes it overstay it’s welcome. Well… To each their own.
Sorcerer is a game where you start of building your deck. Most deckbuilders make you build your deck from scratch and take a long while to get right. In Sorcerer There are three parts to a deck. And each part has 4 different parts of a whole deck to chose from.
First you chose a Character. In the base game there are four characters which all have special effects and cards.
Second you chose a Lineage. There are four of these as well. This is basically half of the cards in your deck. Here you chose a style of deck. They work in different ways.
And the last one is Domain, basically where you are from. Here you get more creatures and some sorceries that you can cast on your opponents.
When you have chosen of of each of these you have 40 cards in your deck 3 cards that just have effects on them (The top card of the three piles). That is the deckbuilding. Mix your cards well and you are basically ready to play.
Well… There are more steps to it. You get a player board too.
On this player board you get 6 actions per round, you keep your energy, a good cheat sheet and a place to kepp your omen tokens.
The omen tokens lets you reroll dices in the battle phase. Sometimes when you place a minion on one of the battlefields you get an omen token. They are really helpful and lets you reroll your OR your opponents dice.
There are also 4 battlefields where you place your avatar each round and that is where you are allowed to place your minions (you only play with three battlefields in a two player game).
After you have made your 6 actions in a round it is time for the battlephase. The first player will start attacking on the center board and then the opponent will attack and then when they are done there you will battle at the battlefield to the left of the first player.
The battle in itself is where most people think it takes too long… I get that. But for me, that is where the hard choices begin. As the first player you chose which minion you will attack with. You roll as many dice as you have attack on that minion. If you are happy with what you rolled you may not use an omen token. But if you are happy, but your opponent is not, THEY may use omen tokens to reroll your dice. This goes on until both have passed on rerollong dice. OH and as the first player, you get a “First player token”, this one lets you say “Reroll all of your dice” or if you want to reroll all of your dice. That is a gamble… After all the rolling you get to divvy up the damage.
The dice have three different kinds of symbols (besides blanks). One is a skull, which means one damage. Another one is a two skulls, I let you figure that one out. The third one is a pentagram (omen). This is where it gets REALLY interesting for me. When attacking if you have have skulls, the defender decides where the damage goes. The defender may deal damage to all different creatures if they like or all to one, or even to the battlefield. If I do 12 damage to a battlefield I win that battlefield. But if I get the pentagram on the dice I as the attacker gets to chose where the damage goes. And depending on how it looks on that battlefield it really makes a difference. If my opponent has no minions there, the dice counts as a double hit (unless they had minions there this round). I have won a game where my opponent had one single point left on the battlefield and he made me reroll four times but I still got the pentagram and could place it on the battlefield.
So yes, the battles take a long time. But to me that is where it gets really strategic. Even with dice! The fact that you get that many combinations of decks in the base game and the entry level of deckbuilding makes it really worth the money for me.
I got it at a discount yes… But come on.
And the fact that it is GORGEOUS art in the game, does not make it any worse. It is dark, gritty and in many cases straight out yucky.
There are at the moment one expansion of each part of the deck and one expansion of three new battlefields that also adds effects on the battlefields. And I think I will buy them, just to add a little more to the game.
In conclusion I like it. I think there is a lot for the money in the base game but I still want more just to get even more out of it. It’s not a review, I just wanted to talk a little about the game. You may not like the same things as I do. And you know what. That’s fine. If you think the battle phase sounds boring and tedious, it might be that for you. For me that is where I stand up and look at all the cards on the board and in my hand, and really try to wrap my head around the best possible choice. Because the next round is my opponents and that will most likely suck for me…
Play more games!!!
Boardgames and such 