Steven Duberchin
United States
Schaumburg
Illinois
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Background
So I'm a sucker.
A sucker for Tanga deals.
A sucker for dice games.
A sucker for wizards, spells, and gotcha games.
When Elementalis popped up on the Tanga ad one day on BGG I jumped. Tanga said it shipped with the expansions: Elementalis: Creationists and Elitists, Elementalis: Chaotica and Cultists, and Elementalis: Guardians and Luminaries. I figured, so what if the shipping is almost as much as the game, with three expansions, I'm getting this!
I got the box in the mail 2 hours before my Wed. night game group. I opened the Tanga box, grabbed the shrink wrapped white box inside and ran off to my meet-up group looking forward to playing.
Robert (the designer) is active at this forum, and I'm thankful for that. It is great to see a game supported by its designer actively even years after it is published.
As usual I will not review all the rules to the game, other geeks have done this very well, no reason to rehash. Also they are posted on line for you to read. If you are not familiar with them, please check them out and then return to this review. I'll wait for you to come back and then we can continue.
Thank you to the BGGs that have posted the images I'll use in this review.
Components
Ok.
Honestly, not the greatest.
First off, the box above is only the base game. The rules (more on these later) included in that box are not the latest version. The expansions consisted of some additional player aid cards and the updated rules. These were in a zip lock bag hidden in the Tanga box under a bunch of "popcorn". Now granted if I had not been in such a hurry, I would have seen these, but as it was these were left at home.
The game is played with dice, marker chips and player aid cards.
My package came with some beat up dice. The images were clear, but there was a haze of ink around the sides... almost as if they had been rubbed against each other for a good long time. Play was not affected by this, but they just were not crisp.
The manna marker chips are made from a decent weight cardboard. The images are clear and easy to pick out. The chips are colored making them easy to tell apart. However there are not nearly enough to play with. Robert has said (on this forum) that there is no limit to the manna chips, just a limited number in the box. I've ordered some plastic cubes (for use with another game) and I'll be siphoning some of them off the top and adding them to this game.
The cards have a good stock and some very nice art work on them.
However as player aids, they fall really short on their duty until you are a very advanced player. Also, they are huge... much too big to fit in a deck box. Very nice, and with plenty of room on them...
... but that leaves me to wonder, "Why such a lack of information?"
The other reviews complain about this as well, saying that while the spell names are nice, the game really needed the spells effects called out on the card. I wrote Robert and asked for his ok, then posted just such cards.
Cards with spells descriptions and other useful stuff can be found here:http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/42890
Unless and until you know all of the spells and abilities by heart, I can't see playing with out these. Most of the games I've played without these required passing the rule book around the table ad naseum.
Rules
And about those rules. Yuck. Typos left and right. Lack of defining a turn and a round. Really hard to grasp directions (and I'm no slouch). But these were the rules in the box (not the updated ones in the zip lock bag I left at home). So... if you have the game, don't even bother with that first rule book... read the one in the zip lock bag (if you got it from Tanga).
When I got home and found the other rule book, I was a happy camper. It is written much better. It had pictures, examples, and was much easier to understand. My one gripe is that instead of adding extra pages, they made the rule book taller... now it does not fit in the game box. Agrh.
As we leave the components and rules section I have to state two things. First, BGG has a good list of questions about the rules, and very often Robert (the designer) has stepped in with answers. Chances are that if you have a question there is an answer for it here.
Second, while these two areas are important, they are not all a game is. Yes, I'd expect better from a fully fleshed out and tested game, but even with the poor production there is a gem in this game.
Playability
Once the rules are understood and the spells are under everyone's grasp the game really plays well. As Robert has pointed out, the wizard types are not balanced. Some are much more powerful the others.
[This is meant as a handicap so that experienced players can play with newbies and have a rather level field. Robert - would love to hear your insights on how to rank the wizard types (most crippled to most powerful).]
Basically, all you do is roll dice, compare the results to what you need, allow players to cast spells, and then score.
There is not a ton of AP, the game moves along, and there is a really simple game concept. The "game" comes from the interaction between the players and all the fun extras put on top of the dice rolls.
As the dice are custom six-sided dice there is room for some fun things to happen. It feels better than Bunco, Reiner Knizia's Decathlon, or Yahtzee where I'm just matching patterns of dice. It really feels like I'm randomly gathering spell components and racing the other wizards to the end.
The end game is well defined and scoring is straight forward. I have not run the numbers, mostly because I'm much more happy just playing rather than trying to find the optimal use of my manna. But there is a nagging worry about having to give up victory points (in the form of manna) to cast spells. Some spells seem way to expensive to be used often... Earth's 3 manna spell for example may not often net back as much as was spent. But I suppose that decision is part of playing the game well.
Also, the 3rd die roll seems really risky. So much so, that the only times I saw it played were by people just looking to "see what will happen". Once they did, well, lets just say there were not many 3rd rolls.
Over All Fun Factor
Yep. The game is fun.
Rolling the dice is fun.
Burning your fellow player with a well timed spell is fun.
Flicking manna back and forth is fun.
Choosing wizard types and taking on the role is fun.
Even the luck is fun... most of the time.
It is not like playing Carcassonne where the competition is balanced and there is a bit of luck in tile choosing. There is a LOT of luck in Elementalis and a good deal of TAKE THAT in here too.
The Spells add a lot to the game. The interaction is fun and a different mechanic than what I'm used to in a dice game. (And no, I have not played To Court the King, yet.)
Over all, the group I played with liked it... once they got past figuring out the instructions and the components. I'll bring it back with some updated player aids (the cards mentioned above for sure and I might dream up some other aids). I look forward to playing this again.
Bottom Line
Once you get it, it is fun. Lots of interaction. If you don't take your gaming too seriously and you are out to have fun, this game hits the spot. If complete balance, hard core competition, and production quality are important to you, this may not be the best game for you.
 
(edits for typos)
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Chris Ingersoll
United States
North Carolina
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SteveD. wrote:
This was essentially my thinking (especially that last bit) when I picked up the game via the same deal. 
I've yet to actually play the game, since I've spent the last week and change trying to deal with all of the rules issues that keep cropping up whenever I make an experimental (solo) attempt at doing so. I used an ultra-fine Sharpie to write spell descriptions on the Arcana cards, I've used spare basic lands from Magic to make summary cards for almost all of the types of Mages (I'm not fond of anything related to the Chaotica right now, so I'm basically ignoring them) so I don't have to keep looking up which ones, say, get which benefits from rolling an Ether result.
What keeps tripping me up is the nebulous Spell-casting phase(s); since the Spells are a major part of what makes this game unique as opposed to just being a bizarre Yahtzee variant, you can see how this could be an issue. Maybe it's my experience as a Magic judge and player, but I keep expecting to find more... well, structure than I appear to be finding. Not helping matters is that some of Robert's posts in this forum refer to the current rules while some refer to the older ones, creating conflicting responses. I love the fact that he's here to answer the questions, but I can't help but feel that many of these questions could have been avoided with some more attention to the rule book and/or playtesting. Spells get a brief, one-page index after a single paragraph-ish of rules while we get three or four pages devoted to the (IMO) much more straight-forward scoring system.
I didn't feel comfortable enough with the game to play this with my regular group last night, but maybe by next week I'll have worked things out.
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Justin Fitzgerald
United States
Black Earth
Wisconsin
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As one of the playtesters, I've got to agree with the organization of the rules. I took a shot at it and the first rulebook is basically that rewrite. It was pretty atrocious but better than what was originally out there. I was a little surprised to see it get to market in that condition but as a low-budget game I suppose that's how it goes. It's really too bad because I actually do know people who could have professionally laid it all out and such.
I'm completely taking credit for the addition of the spells though. In all honesty, the game was exactly the same minus spells prior to when I started playtesting. I jotted the spells down, figuring they were relatively balanced and without testing them real thoroughly, figuring that some of the other playtesters would provide feedback. Nada, it went to press with exactly the spells I designed.
Maybe a year later I caught back up with Robert and he sent me out a copy of the game for the help in playtesting. It was kind of funny comparing notes to the Word document that I'd worked up. Spells were word for word what I wrote. It actually freaked me out a bit because I hadn't really tested the spells outside of thinking through how they'd interact with each other.
But after sitting down and playing a game, I was glad to see that the spells were pretty balanced! The rulebook's organization was a mess (it took several reads for me to figure out how to play it even after having done most of the rewrite).
I'm glad to say that the game is fun despite some real mistakes in how it was produced.
The game basically needs a reset, maybe a deluxe edition or something like that.
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Posted Tue May 26, 2009 7:37 pm
