Large Scale Battle in a Small Scale Package: Our Review of 'Cube War'
Some of the largest, table sprawling board games are in the genre of strategy and area-control. Many of these games are lengthy and very involved but the large scale battles and the act of taking over lands and running your opponents off the map make them quite rewarding to play. So what if you could take that strategy and fun and shrink it down to a game that can be played in roughly half an hour in the scale of a deck of cards? Meet Cube War, a strategic, micro-strategy game designed and illustrated by Julius Hsu. Cube War is an area control game built for two players. It features 30 small cubes, 15 in red and 15 in blue, symbolizing the forces of yourself and your opponent. These cubes get placed on a card-sized battlefield consisting of 3 large regions, each divided into 3 smaller areas for a total of 9 areas to compete to control. Aside from this map card, there are 27 other cards that depict individual warriors, each with unique art, abilities, action points, and strength.
In the beginning of the game, each player takes a turn drawing two characters, selecting one to keep, and giving the other character to their opponent. This drafting phase is repeated, alternating between the players until each one has a hand of 10 characters each. The remaining characters are placed back into the box and will not be used in the game.
After this drafting phase, each player conducts their deployment phase placing 3 of their 15 cubes on the map anywhere they want, so long as they do not occupy the same area as their opponent. If you want to keep a particular area more enforced, you can put more than one cube there. If you want to occupy multiple areas, you can spread your cubes out. After you both have determined your placements, the game officially begins.
Each player's turn consists of three main phases: the Reinforcement Phase, the War Phase, and the End Phase. On the Reinforcement Phase, the active player decides whether they would like to discard one of their Battle Cards from their hand in exchange for the action points depicted on the card in the blue text. Cards used in this manner do not get to utilize their abilities. Action points are used to do a couple of different things. You can use them to add a new cube to an area you control or to move one or more of your cubes from your current area to an adjacent area.
The War Phase is only triggered if there are areas in the map where both players have cubes regardless of who has the most cubes in that area. When an area is contested like so, both players will select one Battle Card from their hand to play face down on the table. These are then revealed and the results are determined. Abilities generally take effect first with the active player's resolving and then their opponent. After the ability goes into effect, if applicable and unaffected by said abilities, players will take one of the 8 included D6 Battle Dice for every cube they have in the area being contested and roll them. The roll totals will be tallied up along with the value of their Battle Card's strength depicted on the card in the red text, once again provided that it was not affected by the Abilities of the cards. The larger overall sum wins the battle and the other player's cubes are removed from the map and put back into their pool. If there is a tie, the defender wins. If more than one area was contested this turn, resolve each one before going to the next phase. All cards that were used in the battle are discarded.
The last phase is called the End Phase. This phase seems a bit unnecessary, as it is simply a phase where the active player's turn ends and play begins with the opposing player. Each player takes their full turn until neither player is left with any cards remaining. Scoring then begins.
For every area a player controls, they get 1 point per cube in the area. If the player controls the majority of a region, consisting of 3 similarly color coded areas, the dominate player's cube counts in the region are doubled! Victory goes to the player with the highest overall score.
Cube War is an absolutely fantastic small-scale area control game. It does a great job capturing the strategy and fun of the genre and putting it in a smaller and more quick playing package. The game is small enough to easily transport and play just about anywhere and the card art and uniqueness of each card from the titles to the abilities described are awesome. I am very impressed with the artwork that Julius has done, all of which was done with a Logitech mouse using Inkscape. If you enjoy games of this genre but don't always have the time or the people to dedicate towards playing one, you absolutely must give this game a try! Cube War is running on Kickstarter right now through December 13th, and is priced at a very affordable $19! Check it out here!
Please note, this is a review of a game that is in pre-production meaning some mechanics, appearances, rules, and other components may change. WYLD Gaming was provided this copy for review purposes but was not otherwise compensated in any manner, nor were their words, results, or review scores influenced in any way by anyone outside of the author's own opinions and perspective. If you've enjoyed this review, we encourage you to share it with others to help WYLD Gaming get similar opportunities in the future while also helping the game being reviewed get more attention for their Kickstarter campaign. Thank you!