Designer: Richard Launius
Number of Players: 1-4
Approx. Minutes to Play: 90 minutes
Suggested Ages: 13 & Up
Suggested Retail Price: $84.99
Defenders of the Realm is a cooperative board game that takes roughly 90 minutes to play. In it, you will take part of a band of adventure heroes (our rightly titled Defenders) who are working together to thwart 4 evil Generals who basically want to kill everyone and stomp on the nearby major city. Really bad people here, generally bad dispositions, you’ll want to smite them.
In the game, each turn you will have a set number of actions. The amount of actions you have is your health. Therefore, if you take damage and lose health points, you also lose actions. You can heal by visiting the city of an inn or just by finding an empty relaxing spot on your turn. But during your turn you spend those actions, you draw 2 hero cards, and then Darkness Spreads, which is a set of cards where the bad stuff happens. Rinse and repeat.
Also, talk about a pile of stuff when you open this box! A lot of plastic miniatures, a pretty nice looking board, about everything you could want in what seems to be a pretty solid box. Big monstrous bad guys, gotta love it.
The game is really simple, the most a space will ever have is 3 evil minions and maybe an evil general. You roll dice equal to the color and number of minions and based on the color of the minions you have to roll a certain number. Some minions are tougher than others and a few have some bonuses effects going on. When you fight Generals, everyone can team up together and attack the big bad. Those battles can be pretty fun and once again, really simple. Everything uses common six-sided dice.
One of the things I love is that there are several different characters you could play with. Those characters have different abilities that will affect you through-out the game. It adds some nice flavor to the game and makes your hero really feel useful when played correctly. If the Generals ever make it to the city they will destroy it, if there are ever 6 minions in the city, you lose, and if you run out of these things call corruption stones, you lose.
I’ve left out a few parts, but there are cards that also assist you in moving faster and are what you also use to determine how many dice you will be rolling against a General. The cards can be of limited use, but there are special ones that are quite powerful as well. They also added in quests without making it too quest heavy. It is very well blended in and the quests are good to help you beat bosses or prevent total defeat.
So what did I think? Let’s read on:
Replayability:
out of 5. The bosses are always the same, not a ton of characters to chose from, but expansions will add to this. The general feel of the game make it pretty replayable as you try to win with your friends.Theme:
out of 5. I love this theme! The classic high fantasy adventure, but on a cooperative scale. You feel like you’ve got a lot on the line and with the different abilities it feels very much like a fantasy type of adventure.Price:
out of 5. Here’s the weak point, the price. $84.99 is the MSRP, mainly because Eagle isn’t a huge publisher and they have a limited print run. You can get it discounted and maybe find it for around $60 or so. At that price, it’s no worse than a video game and a tad more reasonable. A lot of fun in this, but at the price, you will definitely want to try it out first.Mechanics/Rules:
out of 5. Very easy to understand and play. The mechanics are streamlined down to the essentials to make this game play fairly quick without too much downtime. They’ve done an awesome job with this one.Components:
out of 5. Overall the components are fantastic! The colored figures and everything is well done. Maybe not quite up to par with Fantasy Flight Games, but it’s getting close. Job well done here.Overall:
out of 5. Very good game, probably not for everybody though. The price is steep for a cooperative, but there will be expansions for it. I really like the feel of it. It’s like what Castle Panic should have been, but wasn’t. Much easier to understand than Shadows Over Camelot and shorter than Battlestar Galactica. The theme sells me on it. A good, but pricey buy if you like the theme!For more information on boardgames like this one, please visit Boardgamegeek.com.
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