Review: War Chest (AEG)

The stage is set for chivalrous battle. You, your forces, your keen strategy, and a bit of luck will decide the outcome.

In War Chest from Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), two or four leaders deploy their brave knights, bold warrior priests, sharp-eyed archers, and more to the field of honor in hope of vanquishing their foe and taking control of vital positions to declare victory. It’s a storyline that most gamers know, love, and played multiple times in the past, but AEG wraps the concept in a clever design that makes you think and strategize in entirely new ways.

Spoiler: This game has WOW! written all over it. (And for those of you keeping score at home, that’s the enthusiastic wow, not a reference to the computer game of the same initials.)

Here are the top five bits of battlefield intelligence you need to know about War Chest.

Asymmetrical, But Balanced

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Players in War Chest command an army made up of four types of units drawn from a pool of 16 unique options. Players begin the game by deciding how to pick their forces (more about that in a moment). This setup creates asymmetrical armies, rather than identical ones like chess.

Kudos to the design team on balancing the units so carefully. In our test games, we found some combinations that naturally work together (Archer and Scout comes to mind), but nothing we could call “broken.” Likewise, combinations that looked strange at first blush often revealed surprising strengths during play.

Drafted, Historical, or Random

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A deck of unit cards provides the details you need to know about each unit. The game offers several ways for players to use the deck for selecting their playing pieces. This flexibility made replays delightful.

For the introductory game, the rules suggest a pre-set mix of units. From there, you can try one of the setups inspired by famous battles (the Battle of Bannockburn was especially fun for us), use a drafting option (lay out eight random cards and take turns choosing one), go all-out random by shuffling the cards and dealing them out.

Grab Your Bag of Chips

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Units are represented by sturdy poker-like chips with the unit’s icon on one side and generic art on the back. The pieces feel good in your hand and make a satisfying sound when you snap them onto the board during play.

You begin the game by placing two chips of each unit into your playing bag, along with a non-unit chip called the Royal Coin, which can only be played face-down. On your turn, you mix the chips in the bag and secretly draw three of them to use.

Both Units and Action Tokens

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Your unit chips act as both playable forces and action tokens, giving you four opportunities to do things each turn.

You can play a chip face-up to deploy it onto one of the locations you control or, if you already have one of those units on the board, stack the chip on top of it to make it stronger. You can also discard the chip face-up to take an action with a matching unit, such as attack, move, use a special ability (called a “tactic”), or control a location.

Chips can be discarded face-down to take the first player marker or to add another unit coin to your forces.

Managing Your Bag

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The dual use of the chips combined with randomly drawing them from the bag each round creates some very interesting (and challenging) strategic decisions in the game. Carefully managing the number of chips in your bag becomes an important part of playing, as does paying attention to which chips your opponent recruits and plays.

You also need to consider the outcomes of battles. Chips lost in an attack are truly lost. They don’t go into your discard; instead, they leave the game completely. Every unit chip you lose affects your ability to do things with the remaining units of that type, adding another layer of intrigue and strategy to the game.

The Verdict

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With simplified fighting units, a very flexible army creation system, and a delicious balance between luck and skill, War Chest deceptively looks like a light filler game. But just a few turns into the game, you begin to feel the power under the design as the number of lost chips grows and your options start to narrow.

The asymmetrical army building gives players huge replay value. Since the included box insert has some empty spaces — and the box itself has room for another full insert or two — we anticipate expansions coming in the future.

War Chest brings a very fresh approach to the classic war game concept. If you like a head-to-head style of game, then find a worthy opponent and put this on your table.