Tonight I got to play four games of Warhammer: Invasion, the "Limited Card Game" set in the Warhammer Universe. This is like a collectable card game (in that you have deck building) but you buy non-random sets of cards. This is just a quick review, mechanics and general thoughts. I happen to like CCGs (particularly Shadowfist and Legend of the Five Rings), and I'm reasonably fond of the Warhammer world (Blood Bowl in particular, but I've played other games in the world).

Mechanics

Each player has a deck of 50-100 cards, and starts with a stronghold which shows their alignment (chaos, orcs, dwarves or empire to start with, elves and dark elves coming soon, I hear).

A typical card will have a resource cost expressed as a number and 0 or more symbols (like "4 Empire Empire"). You have to pay the number, then you have to pay one for each symbol you don't have. Each stronghold provides a symbol (so, an "Empire" player has one) and some other cards also provide symbols. So an Orc Leader may be "4 Orc Orc Orc Orc." So he costs 8 resources, but if you have a bunch of orcs in play (and the stronghold), you only pay 4.

Each unit has zero or more axe symbols (usually 1). This is how much damage they do. Units take one or more hits before they die, but damage accumulates.

Cards are played into one of three areas, "Quest", "Kingdom" and "Battlefield." The Battlefield is important because only units in your battlefield can go out and attack. At the end of your turn, you send units from your battlefield to attack an enemies area ... either Quest, Kingdom or Battlefield. Only units in that area can defend. You don't match up attacker versus defender, each side just totals their axes and assigns damage to other units. The attacker can also assign damage to the defender's stronghold.

Eight points of damage sets the area "on fire", and you lose when two of your areas are burning.

Apart from defending, units in the Quest and Kingdom serve another purpose ... for each axe in your Kingdom you get one resource a turn (and you always produce three, from your stronghold's intrinsic ability). Resources, you'll remember, pay for cards. Cards in your Quest area let you draw one extra card (beyond the one you get every turn). Play a few cards in your Quest area, and you can easily draw 4+ cards a turn. But if you run out of cards you lose, so it's a double edged sword.

In addition to characters, there are support cards (which just provide some benefits), cards that attach to other cards, tactics cards (which are 'instants' in magic lingo). Finally, one clever idea is that you can play one card a turn face down in an area as a development. Each development increases the amount of damage that part of the city can absorb, and many other cards give a bonus for developments.

The development idea works well, in that you can choose any card, and several times each game I'd develop only to change my mind about which card to use.

Like any CCG, Invasion has chrome and many cards break the rules. You don't "Tap" to attack (like Magic), but cards can become corrupt, which makes them unable to attack or defend. Damage can be reduced and redirected. There are also Quest cards, which require a unit to sit on them for several turns and then can trigger a powerful effect (usually after 4 turns).

Game Play

I've only played without deckbuilding, but the game play had several possibilities. I won one game quickly without increasing my starting resources or card drawing. I played a character that would do 3 damage (if there were two developments in the battlefield) and a development on turn one. Next turn, I played another development and another copy of the same character, and attacked for 6 points. Next turn I attacked for 8 points, burning an area, and finished a turn or two later.

One game I lost after early exchanges when I just couldn't match my opponents 9 resources a turn, which paid for a huge attacker I couldn't match.

I won one game by drawing 5 cards a turn. My opponent stopped attacking, but I managed to barely burn my second area the turn before I ran out of cards.

Each game after the first took roughly 30 minutes (except for that quick win). Warhammer:Invasion isn't the deepest CCG, but given the limited card set it seemed fine. Examining the cards I think there are a few reasonable strategies for deckbuilding ...

However, to build an interesting deck you'll probably want to buy a second copy. (Or have everyone buy one copy and trade). There are rules for drafting (and special cards used only in drafting), but we didn't try that.

Gut Feel

Warhammer:Invasion is a well done "LCG", but its still constrained by the format. $40 is enough to get you in, but to build a really interesting deck you'll probably want 2 or 3 boxes. Compared to a CCG, that's still cheap (I'd drop $200 on a Shadowfist expansion if it ever showed up....) You can have up to 5 (3? Unsure, see below) copies of a card in a deck, but each game only has 1 or 3 copies. Most criminal (in my mind), there are only 24 'neutral' cards (1-3 copies of each), but you'll probably want some for your Orc Deck, some for your Empire Deck, etc etc (assuming you wanted to build a few decks for your friends to play with, and not just one great deck for tournament play).

For me, I'd rather just go whole hog with a CCG I loved. I can resist the temptation to get involved in a new game. It's fun, but not that addicting, and while there is some ability to come back from a poor start, I suspect that games will be decided by speed and steamrolling more often than not in games like the ones we played where you just take a base deck and shuffle in a few random neutral cards.

So overall a nice diversion, but I'm not tempted to buy.