RogerBW's Blog

Radlands 29 October 2024

Radlands is a post-apocalyptic two-player duelling game from 2021. It's designed by Daniel Piechnik, who has no other BGG credits.

You will have three camps, each of which provides one or more abilities; if all three are destroyed, you lose the game. In front of these you have two rows which you will fill with defenders. In a standard game, you draw six camps and pick three; some are more powerful than others, but each also lists a number of cards to draw for your initial hand, so powerful camps will leave you with a smaller selection.

The rest of the cards are broadly divided into people and events. People go out in front of your camps; most attacks can only target the card at the front of a row. Events go on a track to the side: most of them have a delay of from one to three turns, and while it's not usually possible to prevent them from happening, an opponent can try to make some preparations.

A turn consists of resolving an event that's got to the front of the queue, advancing any others, resetting to three water (the game's currency), and then taking whatever actions one wants and can afford. Actions are:

  • play a card, spending its water cost. This starts an event on the track, or puts out a defender. Defender abilities can't be used on the turn they're played, very Magic.

  • draw a card, paying two water for the privilege. There's no automatic refilling of hands here.

  • discard a card, paying nothing, and getting whatever effect is in its top left corner.

  • pick up the Water Silo special card: this costs one water and provides one when junked, so it's effectively a way of saving one water to use on a future turn.

  • use a card's ability: this often has a water cost.

Every card has two hit points: when it's damaged, it's turned sideways and no longer gets its special ability. When it's damaged again, it's removed.

The other special card that each player has one of is the Raid; this pseudo-event will damage an enemy camp, but takes three Raid icons (gained from card abilities or discards) to activate and propel it all the way to the top of the event queue. (And while it's there, other Events don't advance past it.)

The gameplay seems straightforward, but there are for my taste too many spiky special cases to remember. The Raid is an event, but unlike other events it doesn't advance automatically. Drawing a card costs 2 water. There are four separate things that can stop a card being Ready, and one of them isn't shown on the table. Damage and destruction effects can't be aimed at protected cards, i.e. those which have another card in front of them, unless they include one of the magic phrases "any", "all" or "one of". The game looks like a lane battler, with your three camps lined up against the opponent's three, but very few effects care about whether someone is in the same row as the card that's producing them.

All this produces an ongoing friction and a continuing need to remind myself of the rules: if I played this game all the time, doubtless I'd overcome that, but for me the experience isn't enjoyable enough to persist with it. My tactics are largely dictated by my initial card draw; getting extra cards takes two-thirds of the resources I can muster in a turn, so I don't do it often. The card art is boldly coloured, which I've seen work very well, but the actual imagery (by a variety of artists) is too often over-busy and unappealing.

And although the rules are strict about the layout of one's play area, making it look like a lane battler, the lane each card is in is very rarely of any importance.

So I can see how this could be a great game for the right players, perhaps a local game group that duelled each other several times in a session and got the rules thoroughly internalised, but as a player with a large game collection it doesn't stand out enough for me to want to make it one of my first-rank, play all the time, games—which is the only way I'd come to enjoy it. This one leaves the collection, I'm afraid; if I want a two-player confrontational game, I already have Carlo Bortolini's lane battler Riftforce also from 2021, also with uninspiring art, but which manages to have fewer special cases and more enjoyable gameplay; and Jon Perry's Air, Land & Sea from 2019, ditto.

(A review copy was provided.)

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  1. Posted by RogerBW at 12:22pm on 29 October 2024

    On reflection during the couple of days between writing and posting this, I think Star Realms also does basically the same thing rather more cleanly.

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