Blood Rage Review - One Of My Favorite Games Of All Time For 5 Years Running

to save you some time I love this game I adore bloodrage and have for a very long time this is just me just catching up on some of the old reviews I should do [Music] this is bloodwitch designed by Eric Lang from common games and it's a game of area control area control drafting across three rounds which you're going to see who has achieved the most Glory at the end of the third round the basic gameplay is like I said already an area control game it's a game which every single round across Three Ages you're going to be drafting cards from these decks of cards you're going to be picking out these cards assign the cards to everyone giving them their hand and then going through the process of drafting Cars one at a time as you pick the various quests you're going to go for you're going to pick the various battle cards you're going to add the various abilities you're going to upgrade as you go through the game the general idea is you're trying to find the right combination of cars that you draft is you go through the drafting phase of every single round before you move on to the actual action phase where you start resolving the actions utilizing your rage that will increase as you go through the game in order to take all the actions that you want that first part the most compelling part is that initial draft this is not going to be a full rules overview general idea of the gameplay but you're going through the initial draft trying to pick the combinations of cards you think will work best for you as you try to go through your objective you're going to look over here and you're gonna say well I really would love to have Brothers in Arms that's going to help my Warriors be worth more strength than again having a plus five to my combat at round one that can be huge and really help me win that battle I need or do I want to start off early on the Loki strategy gaining points when my ships are destroyed which means I don't really mind losing the combat and it can be very helpful there or do you start going for quests because quests can be incredibly impactful as you choose to go for certain quests that will help you go through the game as you try to figure out which objectives you're going to get and which stats you're going to raise and what Glory you're going to get for throughout that process you're going to be going through this trying to pick the combination of cards that you think works for your strategy which monsters are you going to recruit which units or which upgrades which clan abilities all that stuff and every single one of these is important the whole reason why I love bloodrage is because of the fact that every single card that the game offers you is incredibly important in what it allows you to do when you're done drafting you're going to go ahead and enter the actual ability phase we're going to start using and spending your rage in order to move around the board and to invade the various regions and to start the process of actually trying to score points to complete your objectives and to engage in battle since every single battle is going to result with the winner gaining glory for those battles that they engage with you're going to be dealing with a few different stats in the game you're going to have your Rage which is how much rage you start with which you're going to start with six but as you level this up you'll start with more rage across the next rounds of the game you're gonna be access which is the glory you get for winning battles the more axes you have the more points you work at 40 battles starting off at a lowly three points and moving all the way up to eight points of the end of the track and then your horns the number of figures you can have on the board it's gonna be important because you can't add more figures to this board unless you have enough horns to accommodate those figures and so you want to upgrade your horns as you go through the game in order to ensure that you can actually have five six seven figures on the board you're going to be doing that you're gonna be upgrading these stats with two different main methods you're going to win battles when you initiate combat in one of these regions you're going to upgrade your stats and then you yourself you're going to upgrade all three of your stats and additionally whenever you accomplish a quest you have to choose a stat to raise which is going to give you both those increases and stats as well as 10 and 20 additional Glory at the end of the game if you move those markers to those regions over there the actual actions you can take every single round you're going to involve spending rage for the most part some actions are actually free although you can never take an action if your rage is down to zero which is an important way that you're going to try to mess over your teammates and that they're going to mess over you I say teammates when I really just mean the people at the table but you're going to go through the process of spending your age on one of a few different five core actions over here invading marching upgrading questing and pillaging when you do a quest you're going to play a quest down for free again that's one of those actions that cost is your age but you have to have at least one rage to be able to do that once you're down to zero range you can't do that at all so if playing a quest is gonna be one of the actions you can take playing an opera card is an action you can take where you play an upgrade card either to the specific unit it's upgrading or to the general ability structure you're going to go have over there and that's going to equal the cost of the card itself so you can see over here at any given point any single upgrade card is going to have their own individual cost you can see over here if we go through this you can see example the Lord of spheres over here is going to cost you three to upgrade the Eternal dragons will cost you two so you have different upgrade costs over there as far as those you're also going to have the actions to March whenever you march you're going to choose all the units in one region move them anywhere on the board adjacent or non-adjacent for a cost of one rage you have to have that rage but you can go ahead and pop into different regions although you need to be mindful the fact that different spots will have different degrees of available spots to put people in you usually can host anyone there's gonna be sponsors that are actually taken where they've already been Ragnarok over there and they cannot be entered and then past that you're going to have the specific little dots where you're trying to move your region your people across from one region to another from there you have the invade action where when you invade you invade equal to the cost of the unit the strength of the unit is going to be what the invade action is so for example if you're invading with a leader leaders invade for free as part of the ability but a strength one unit will invade for one rage the strength two unit will invade for two rage so the more you're the higher strength your units the more rational costs to get them into combat although whenever you play upgrades for different units including Monsters you get in a free invade action so a little bit of a double dipping over there when you first upgrade units and then from there you're going to have the actual pullage action which is free pillaging is free but you have to go ahead and say I'm announcing a pillage at which point a combat begins players have the opportunity to start entering and joining the combat if they are adjacent if you announce a pillage over here players will one at a time have the opportunity to invade the combat until the spaces are all full and then from there you're going to go ahead and engage the actual strength of the units you're going to add any modifiers you have for any Clan abilities you're going to add all players in the involved in the comment are going to play a single card down and this is what they can use for that combat the winner of the combat will lose their card everyone else will lose their units over two years yourself and then the winner of the con and all the losers will get back their cars so they can play them again so playing that five strength card you don't have to worry about losing it if you do lose it you get it back so there's never that particular fear in combat and that's basically digital you're going to repeat that process across three rounds every single round you're going to have another area on the board destroyed which means more focus and more tension on those core areas you're going to upgrade your stats you're going to add you're going to try to get your stats into the top so you get 10 to 20 Glory you're going to be accomplishing quests you can get a whole bunch of points from over there you're gonna be trying to accomplish and engage in battles as frequently as possible so you can get eight eight eight eight points again and again and again as frequently as possible rinse and repeat until you go through those three ages and see who has achieved the most glory in blood rage I love this game I really do this game has been about my number one game of all time at times I think last year shrunk to the lowly lowly place on my number three game of all time I've adored bloodrays for a very long time and it's one of the most frequent area control games I play and it's because it combines so many of the things I like when I try to tell you what it is I like about blood rage it's going to start with just the Core Concepts mechanics and general things I like in games from drafting I love the mechanic of drafting I love the attention of having a hand of cards in which I want every single card but I can't have a small card I can have one of them and not only that not only can I not have everything I want I have to pass you the other things that I think I can do so much damage with do I want that Clan upgrade that I think will really set me up for the next few rounds but I'm passing you that five cut strength card which means you might be using that against me in the next round of combat do I hope it shows its way back around me as they continue to draft drafting in general is a concept in which you are both trying to choose what you want and trying to choose what you give your opponent and if the more powerful the more intricate the more cool every single card is the better I like drafting game and bloodrage gives you broken heart of the broken card of the broken card so that every single time I draft in blood rage I have that tension of what I want what I hope makes its way back to me and what I'm about to hand to you so that you can win the game and as powers and abilities left right and center from the various characters you actually have for the fact that you are drafting your powers and abilities you are creating your slowly developed asymmetry in the course of the game as you go through it it's just it's so ridiculously satisfying to have cards to have powers to be able to steal a person's last rage if they're crippled in that first round of combat to have them all play their cards and you cancel the entire thing to be able to pursue the Loki strategy where when you die it doesn't really matter if you die because you actually gain more points for dying you're getting points for units of Valhalla you're playing down quests that will reward you for your death there's so many different options and viable ways that you can try to build out your own asymmetry in this game that you can try to give units different things the way you'll have different monsters that engage in the game in different ways dropping the monsters down the board for the way they have their own unique abilities and the way you're going to execute on the combination of your clan abilities your unit abilities monsters that you have in order to try to figure out how you can actually win this game in this area control puzzle and it's area control done right although done right means done right for me I don't like playing simple error control I like area control when you use it as a foundational aspect in which you bundle other things around it and those other things are the powers and abilities the reasons the intricacies the depth of strategy not purely the idea that there's a bunch of dues on a map I don't care about that on its own I care about everything wound into it and bloodrage winds everything into it and it gives you multiple paths to Victory the entire time it does so there's so many different ways you can try to pursue a strategy ways of the combination of of taking a local strategy heavily dying the combination of trying to upgrade your axes so you can start getting eight points per battle just battling and battling and battling getting points of the points feeding directly into the Loki player as they want to die and you want to win but you're outpacing them at eight points per combat the combination of different abilities you'll go for Gap grabbing those extra quests in the last round combining with Odin's Throne so you can score double for each Quest getting 16 points per request and just cascading their points into just a ton of Point bonuses moving your Lloyd to the max over there as you level up your stats and get 20 20 20 getting 60 points over there plus 100 points from your various quests there's so many different Pathways you can pursue as far as what combination of advantages you take in this game it gives you a ton of different ways a ton of different abilities a ton of different monsters and creatures and powers and abilities and it gives you point escalation across the rounds which means you stay involved in the game what I mean by that is the idea that in blood Ridge if you're playing blood rage the amount of points available in round one in the first age are just significantly less than amount of points you can get in the second age and the third age and the relevance of that is it allows you to start building things up but it gives you that opportunity for failure without it punishing you the entire game you can lose horrifically in the first round of the game in the first age and you can have a terrible first round but it doesn't really matter because people are at 12 points a piece in a game that's going to go to 150 points and so there's plenty of room for a few optimal plays to come back in this game that point escalation the sense that they have the math Play Out means you're still involved the entire time even as every move matters it matters more the further you are in the game keeping you invested the entire time all while giving you tons of opportunities to feel clever based on what you draft how you draft where you let other players fight each other where you try to take advantage of the fact that a pill is just failed and now you can walk in taking an easy win over there there's so much going on in this game and it all runs together beautifully as far as what I don't like I tried thinking about this and I really only have one thing I adore this game it's such a good game in terms of what it does and past the complaint that hey once you play this game 40 times it does get a little samey I mean I'm okay with that as a complaint I would say the biggest thing at a certain point for me is that to me when you're playing blood rage drafting monsters in the third round feels less satisfying I love the monsters and blood age I love just stomping down a giant creature and having their ability to take place multiple times but in a game that only lasts three ages having a character come out in the fourth round where they go in the third round there's only three rounds having a drafting a monster in the third age and having them enter the board a single time just doesn't have the same gravitas or impact as other creatures do and so they have these incredibly cool creatures and they're still worth drafting it's just it's less satisfying having a cool and expensive creature pulled and then understanding that you're only going to get one use out of that creature that's the only real complaint I have over here everything else for me is working beautifully but as far as potential things others might not like I do have a few things there and first of all is the Loki strategy bloodrage is controversially known for the Loki strategy the strategy in which a player will try to draft all the cards that reward them for dying the quest they're willing to die in the cars are worth and dying the clan abilities every single thing so they can walk into combat continuously hitting you continuously stealing your rage stealing your points all while happy to lose the entire time because they're getting rewarded for every single death they're getting every single death more and more glory and so you can't fight someone who doesn't want to win and so the lucky strategy is known as the singular most powerful strategy in a game full of completely broken strategies where everything is otherwise equally broken the local strategy is the one that is known for being a bit more broken than the rest it doesn't bother me overly because I do find that going for a partial low-key partial non-local strategy is actually a very solid way where a player doesn't necessarily know when you want to win versus when you're comfortable just stealing their rage I find drafting a Loki card here and there can actually be incredibly impactful in helping your own strategy and making sure to hate drafted looking players an important part of the strategy so the balance around making sure that the local strategy does not persevere just means you have to jump in and ensure that a single player is not getting all the Loki cards you just have to make sure that it happens and it's not a big cost because I find it's a cost that is an opportunity more so than a cost additionally this game is conflict heavy even though it's not punishing I address the fact that in the first two ages of the game you can lose more early game and not have to be quite as punishing but there's still a conflict of a game this is still a game where you're jumping around from emergency region having clashes having people walk around moving them to Valhalla as you try to figure out how you're going to pursue this game and it is ultimately an area control game with people attacking each other with characters dying and with the fact that those units you just spend time energy and effort getting onto the board are now gone and you lost even when you weren't playing the local strategy and you're not trying to lose in the game this is conflict heavy you have to be okay with a conflict game otherwise it's just not the right game for you and then lastly kind of similar the local strategy is lots of cards feel broken if you hop into the forums with bloodrays this is a game where everyone has a question about that one car that appears to be broken that one strategy that feels like someone else is going to win and dominate with a strategy and the problem is because that question comes up about so many different strategies that's usually why it doesn't bother me if everything is broken nothing is really broken as far as final thoughts on blood rage like I said in the beginning I love this game I have loved this game for quite some time now it's been my collection for a very long time I spent the first year of this existence just avoiding it because I didn't need a game full of giant Miniatures it wasn't my genre it wasn't something I pursued at the time and so I kind of just avoided the game and eventually picked it up because I read a blog post somewhere that seems to talk about how good a game it was and so I picked it up and I played it and I have loved it ever since from that very first play through today through the expansions through upgrades through whatever through the fact that there is a second edition of bloodrage coming out in some way shape and form I don't know how but there's been blog posts and Eric Lang and come on and who knows what there's gonna be something coming in some way at some point but I've Loved this game for the entire time too and I've loved every single time that I've played and every time I play it I feel like I want to play it again this is a five out of five for me it's one of the best games in my collection it's a game that almost everyone in our group is happy to table this one the expansions are nice but not necessarily necessary we have the gods of Asgard which are fun I like the gods they're these these nice golden ones are additional touch but the gods are a nice little touch the the mystics are our nice little touch the box of Kickstarter actually with more more monsters and more cars and more things and all these things are nice little touches but honestly the core game of blood rage is what I fell in love with and the core game of blood rage I feel gives you the experience you need you don't need content on everything else it's nice I'm not saying don't get it I'm saying it does add to my experience but the core game of blood rage is plenty in terms of what it does how it does it how balanced it is it just works well it works incredibly well I do find it works best as a four player experience three and five are good four is where it shines for me and two I just haven't played it and so I I Adore this game if you're looking for an area control game that has drafting it has powers and abilities it has multiple paths to Victory and it has just beautiful Miniatures and production quality and everything blood rage absolutely has it a five out of five for me and one a game that I will have in my collection I imagine forever or at least until Second Edition comes along a really really incredible game if you're looking for other game recommendations the other games that I would give slight comparisons to blood rage first of all Kemet is the game my collection that feels most similar to blood rage for me it is a step back I love Kemet but bloodrage to me replace Kemet as far as a Bowers and abilities and area control and combat driven all those things blood ranging camera are both absolutely fantastic Kevin it's still in my top 20 games of all time but bloodrage is my preference from those two but both are solid games and if you're looking for the game that finally surpassed bloodrage as a game that I just find the cleverness manages to outpace the sheer powers and abilities of blood rage in a and it's a fantastic game and the same Trilogy as Kemet but a game that gives you the ability to to feel clever as you engage in area control in a way that gives you the drafting that blood Vision has different games but gives me the drafting that I love gives me the ability to feel clever that I love while dialing it a little bit back on the powers and abilities and dialing it way up on just the degree of clever play being rewarded in inish in any case and until next time I'm Alex Radcliffe from board Gameco I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you found it helpful and as always I hope you have a good one

Channel: BoardGameCo

Views: 23,255

Keywords: review

Id: Q6Vpskgs8q8

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022