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 Reviews - Summoner Wars: Cloaks & Jungle Elves |
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by Lee Valentine
Cloaks and Jungle Elves are two Faction Packs for Summoner Wars ("SW"), the card-based tactical wargame by Colby Dauch of Plaid Hat Games. Each of these introduces a new army to the game. Each comes without the dice, map, rules, and tokens required to play the game, so you will have to own one of the original two-deck boxed sets to use these. This review assumes readers have a basic understanding of the Summoner Wars main game. If you need a refresher course, you can refer to my full review.
Gameplay
Components and Packaging Each of these decks is in a small, full-color tuck-box. Unfortunately, I was unable to open the tops of these boxes without tearing them slightly. I was forced to open and close them from the bottom.
Conclusions
For Retailers
Lee's Ratings:
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Cloaks and Jungle Elves Faction Packs for Summoner Wars
The Thief units, for example, force your opponent to
discard a card from his hand onto your Magic pile each time a Thief
lands in his back row (they then jump to another spot on the board next
to one of your walls). Initially I thought this was a fairly modest
ability, but some unsuspecting players may discard all the chaff in
their hands during their Build Magic phases to save up to play one of
their Champions on the following turn. If your opponent's best Champion
is the only card in his hand, a Thief can really change the game. Both
the Scrappers and the Gunners offered up some useful movement-related
abilities. The Champions of the Cloaks come at costs of 4-6, making
for a nice range of tactical options. On the cheaper side, Violet is
capable of making ranged attacks that hit every unit between her and her
target. On the more expensive side, Dagger (possibly named after the
comic book duo Cloak and Dagger) can deliver a devastating five dice
Backstab attack when he gets into proper position. Vlox, the Summoner
of the Cloaks, can copy any power of any active Cloak, making him
tactically versatile. The "Cloak of Shadows" Event is the secret weapon
of the Cloaks; it makes one of your units extremely difficult to damage,
allowing for some daring tactical plays.
The Jungle Elves deck combines
hard-hitting champions with volatile, but extremely fast forces. In my
first game playing the Jungle Elves I managed to get units in position
to attack the enemy Summoner in the first few minutes of the game. I've
never seen this kind of maneuverability out of any other faction in
SW, so this was definitely a change of pace. The Lioneers
featured the "Rider" ability, allowing them to make a special move like
a rook in chess, covering vast open territory on a single turn. Other
than the Lioneers, most of the Jungle Elves units were easy to dispatch,
primarily useful for a quick strike or two before being eliminated.
Among these weaker units, the Lioness units – female counterparts of the
Lioneers – do not count toward your normal allotment of units you can
move, allowing you to deploy many units at the same time. The Jungle
Elves Champions, however, are all fairly expensive (one costs eight
Magic Points to Summon), but each can be devastating. You can put out a
lot of early pressure with this faction, but it lags in the middle of
the game when many of your lesser units have been destroyed and you are
scrambling to generate the hefty sums of magic needed to bring out your
Champions. One of those Champions is an animated tree (a jungle Ent), a
true force to be reckoned with, literally crushing lesser foes just by
walking around. I really found the Event cards available in this deck
to be enjoyable. Some are tactically direct like healing your units and
moving them for free. Other Events are subtler, like swapping two of
your units, or turning off the abilities of enemy units. Overall, this
was a fun deck to play. Some of the early strategy is easy to adapt to,
but when your starting units suffer casualties from every nick and
scratch your opponent can deliver, you will have to be clever to survive
long enough to bring out your Champions.