In a round of battle, each player selects one of his or her Mastery Cards in secret. These cards are numbered with a Combat Value between one and twelve and some have special functions such as increasing value against certain other numbers (a “5” is worth “17” against the opponent’s “12) or providing the opportunity to guard against attacks initiated with certain numbers. Cards are revealed, and the player with the highest adjusted Combat Value has the initiative.

The catch is that the use of these cards incurs a cost in Mastery Points—kind of a measure of momentum and stamina—with the higher value cards deducting more from this total. So it’s possible to go all-out with high level cards and risk losing the entire battle by running out of steam or you can play cautious and strike when you have an advantage. The winning player selects a front-ranked troop card to attack and the defender selects the lucky recipient of the attack. The combat boils down essential to comparing numerical ratings (Attack to Defense) and arriving at a damage value. If the total damage of an attack is ten or more, the defending unit is automatically eliminated and could contribute to a total rout of the army at the end of a duration, which occurs when every unit has attacked or defended. Damage is tracked on the same chart as Mastery, and if your damage marker ever goes over your Mastery marker, you’re dead. There are other ways to lose, but in short you really want to pick your fights wisely and keep your soldiers alive.

It’s a fascinating system, with a tremendous amount of potential for detail built in, but I do think it feels almost overdone. There’s a few too many steps involved (like when you reduce your Mastery Level by what’s on your card and then increase it by another value on your troop card) and I think the way that defense works is way too complex. There’s a sort of parrying mechanism but it’s bogged down in confusing terminology (what the hell is “guard defense” anyway?) and again, a step or two too many. Once you figure in modifiers for Battle Masters, Standards, Stratagem cards, terrain advantages, range, and other bells and whistles, it can turn into a numbers soup that takes you right out of the fantastic world that the game is trying to describe. The system definitely works and provides some really tense and exciting gameplay once you sort of work it all out, but it feels like an editorial eye could have trimmed out a few steps or compounded existing processes into something more streamlined.

I was really surprised at how well Warrior Elite managed to achieve its goal of creating an interesting combat system that was without dice or randomness at all. I was very skeptical because I think randomness provides drama, chance, risk, and surprise and I was afraid that the game would boil down into a “my number versus your number” thing. And with the most basic rules set, it kind of does exactly that and it almost feels like you’re doing very little. In a couple of test games using the simplest rules set, I’ve had opponents tell me that it felt like they weren’t really doing anything other than picking cards. I think that’s a valid complaint, and if your intent is to play WAR FOR EDADH as a 20 minute filler (which is entirely possible), I’d say that it may not be the best choice. As you increase the options though, the game really opens up and the range of gameplay becomes extremely impressive. What’s more, the game becomes more and more interesting and challenging, and the tension between players can be electric. It becomes more about reading your opponent’s style, planning a few turns in advance, and studied reaction. It is definitely the kind of game where different players will play with different strategies and with the potential to build custom armies the potential for interesting matchups and situations is virtually limitless. It’s even possible to build specific scenarios with particular units or limitations for asymmetrical games.

That’s a very brief and woefully incomplete summary of how the core gameplay mechanic works in WAR FOR EDADH, but to fully describe it with any comprehensiveness would mean simply providing the reader with a bullet point list of rules. Suffice to say, the conflict resolution system is really unusual although the number comparison concept is hardly novel. It’s that the game incorporates a lot of smaller factors- such as units that do better in melee than they do when charging or firing missiles, or how guarding is a function of what initiative cards you play- that offers the player a lot of opportunities to make critical tactical decisions. Standards, Battle Masters, Combat Masters, and Stratagem cards come into play at higher levels of the game and the potential to hold advantageous ground, do extra damage, modify stats, or take advantage of other abilities increases the range of choices at the player’s command. Even at the “Apprentice” level, there’s a lot to consider.

And that’s something I think is kind of a stumbling block for WAR FOR EDADH- there is a lot to take in, and a lot of what is there is painfully dense, opaque, unintuitive, or a combination of the three. Troop cards are printed on both sides with a dazzling array of numbers, arcane icons, and cryptic acronyms that may or may not even matter depending on which rules you are using. The game’s internal terminology is sort of outside the usual hobby game grammar in places (that “guard defense” thing again) and certain concepts aren’t really as clear as they should be, like how you have to sort of “nominate” a Stratagem card for use in the next round by moving your Combat Master forward. And as much as I really like the muted, idiosyncratic art style it’s hard to look at a card and know right away what it does or how you should use it. There is a certain opaqueness to the game that is only compounded by the fact that when spread out on the table, a lot of the cards look very, very similar. There’s a definite and very steep learning curve once you venture beyond the basic rules and the game’s presentation doesn’t make it any easier to take it all in.

But WAR FOR EDADH is kind of rough like that and if you really want to enjoy the game you’ve got to be willing to put up with some of its quirks- like the tiny icons that are almost indecipherable for about the first ten games or the nightmarish layout of the rulebook. The game has a slightly ragged, unpolished feel despite tight mechanics and fascinating gameplay. I actually think that the scrappiness is an asset rather than a negative trait, although I’m likely in the minority in the hobby gaming world. I’m more than happy to squint a little harder to see the custom fonts and to have to kind of figure out the visual clues that separate an Angueth from a Hzuoo-Daa if it means that what I’m seeing is all EDADH, all the time.

Too many small and DIY publishers fall back on simple art and boring public domain fonts (Arial and Comic Sans, I’m looking at you) in an appeal to “practicality” or “usability”, but when a game is really trying to convey a sense of time, place, and narrative it’s worth putting up with a little inconvenience and some internet bitching to create a total aesthetic package. I’m glad that Warrior Elite stuck to their guns and put out the game that they wanted, that looks like how they wanted, and plays like how they wanted. That’s something they should be proud of, and it is something that forward-thinking gamers who care about the future of game design should support.