Warlock
I remember Games Workshop's Warlock from decades ago. It was a staple at the Kirklees Military Modelling and Gaming Society, but how well does it stand up today? I dug out my copy to show the rest of the group.
The aim is to be the last remaining wizard and claim the title of Warlock. The 'currency' of the game is magical energy, which is used to cast spells. There are 128 spell cards (with lovely nostalgic artwork) which are used to attack or defend and can have either a magical effect or a physical one. Think of this as casting spells directly or summoning help. A matrix shows which spell counters which, for example the 'Damsel in Distress' can be used to counter the 'Hero', and the 'Saint' can be used to counter most of the monsters. It's left to the players' imaginations exactly how this happens. Physical effects can always be dealt with by summoning something else bigger to fight, or even tooling up the wizard with a magic weapon to sort it out themselves.
If a spell can't be countered the victim is banished to Limbo.
The game is played out over a series of three duel rounds, and the last wizard with any magical power is the winner.
The game, from its components to its slightly fiddly game play, is very much of it's time. The experience was also slightly hampered by me confusing the various house rules we used back in the day with the actual rules as written. Careful re-reading showed me just how far we had departed from the official version.
Warlock in play
Kingdomino
Kingdomino is a kingdom building game where the aim is to have contiguous terrain types with crowns (representing resources) in them. The game has nice chunky tiles and wooden meeples for the kings. There's even a little card castle for each ruler. Scoring multiplies the number of contiguous terrain by the number of crowns in each terrain. There is an elegant method of picking the dominoes, where picking the least value tile one round gives you first choice next round.
My kingdom, bottom right, is mostly lake and wheat fields
It took us about 40 minutes to play through a full game. Sadly my huge lake lacked enough crowns to win me the game, Andy did much better with his mountains.
The winning kingdom
Opinion
Of the two games I preferred Kingdomino. Play was simpler and more streamlined, but there is plenty of tactical choice involved. If I'm grading these games I'd give Warlock a B. It's still fun, but I think game mechanics (and components) have generally improved over the years.
I'll give Kingdominos a solid A, it was much easier to pick up and I had more fun. I should say that it is marketed as a game for younger people than the MEGAforce, which might explain the relative simplicity and shorter gameplay time. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
*EDIT* I should point out that Kingdominos is available from many stockists, including the big South American river. There is a younger audience version called Dragominos, Queendominos, which is both a stand alone game and a supplement to Kingdominos, and also a supplement to either King- or Queen- dominoes called Age of Giants
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