Tabletop war has changed. It’s no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It’s about who can move their pieces of cardboard to the other side of the table first. Welcome to Wartide, a brand new upcoming extendable card game with a story heavy focus. Get your sleeves and shuffle up as we dive into our Wartide review!
Wartide Review – The World and Story
I suppose this section should be called WORLDS, as the story of Wartide sees a multiverse collapsing and borders between worlds becoming more and more unstable as different Realms encroach on each other. You take control of one of three factions and lead your army into the rifts between worlds and fight for control over new territory, to protect your homeland and establish dominance across the multiverse.
Wartide Factions – Empira
A nation of warfare, one that has been fighting bloody battle after bloody battle with only brief pauses of peace between. First with swords and arrows they have evolved to use tanks, rifles and bombs. Think of this faction as one that basically uses weapons from our world’s WWII.
With a key focus on combined arms tactics with support from a versatile infantry, specialised weapon crews and heavy tanks the name of the game is to overwhelm your opponents with an unrelenting force.
Wartide Factions – Null
The people of Null live their entire lives, from birth to death, in service of The Great One. No member of Null is ever truly alone as the voice of their God speaks to them, guides them and evey one of them is expected to live in His tentacley honour. If you like your eldritch beings and anything Lovecraft, this may be the faction for you.
The Null have a focus on putting down many tentacles onto the field as well as priests to, quite literally, shield them with their faith. But this isn’t the only thing they’re good at. If the Great God can’t have His followers make it to victory, he will literally destroy the field to bring the enemy closer to His glory.
Wartide Factions – Kegawa
3 words; Furries. In. Mechs…. Oh you want more? Okay. Kegawa hasn’t had a war in centuries, not since corporations took over the government. War leads to destroyed infrastructure, slowed production and dead wor*ahem* sorry, dead citizens. War was bad for business and bad for profit. War would now be fought in the boardrooms. Still, the population needed some entertainment.
Enter televised mech combat, the next big hit until the multiverse opened up. Now the top mech pilots fight these new invaders, televised of course. Kegawa focuses on throwing mechs into the battle and loading them up with plenty of equipment. Slower moving but tough as nails, this faction is good if you like playing the long game and building up your army.
Wartide Review – How to Play
Wartide is designed as a 1v1 game, each player has a 60 card deck plus a home field for a total of 61 cards. Keep your home field separate and shuffle up, next take the top 8 cards of the deck and without looking at them, place them face down in a 3X3 grid with your home field in the bottom middle section.
Once you’ve done that both players draw their hand of 7 cards and begin. If you’re not a fan of your hand, you can mulligan by setting aside any number of the cards you don’t want and drawing one less, keep going until you’re happy or can’t mulligan anymore.
The most complicated tic-tac-toe.
At the beginning of each turn, you gain a number of resources equal to how much your fields can generate, the best thing is your pooled resources don’t reset between turns so you can keep growing your pool. Next draw your card and start your turn. In your main phase you can play your units, activate abilities and play more fields if you can.
Some things to keep in mind, everything costs resources so be sure to plan accordingly. You can only play units on your back row, the same row as your home field. Finally you can play field cards from your hand anywhere you have a face down card so long as you control an adjacent zone. Once you place the field down, the upside down card is added to your hand.
Next you can move to your unit phase, here you can move any number of units around the board but keep in mind this is your only time to do it. Once you’re happy you may have your units attack any enemy units within range.
At the end of your turn if you have a unit on an enemy field that doesn’t have an enemy unit on it, you can put their face down card in their discard pile and you move the top card of your deck face down in that spot. You win the game by moving up the board until you land a unit on the enemy home field and you control an adjoining space.
One last thing to note during the game but this only really comes up when The Null are involved. Field destruction; in the event a card says to destroy a field, that space no longer exists. Nothing can move over it, shoot over it or be placed on it. In the event that enough of the field is destroyed that a path from one side to the other can’t be traversed the entire board moves up to fill the gaps, this also shortens the field.
Wartide Review – Reading The Cards
It’s important to know exactly what you’re looking at when playing a game. So I’ll tell you exactly what each symbol on the cards mean as we work our way down.
Unit Cards
In the top right is the unit cost, you need these resources to even play the card in the first place. Next the symbols on the left going down are attack damage, attack range, movement and health. One thing to keep in mind is that health doesn’t heal between turns. Your unit takes damage and it’s damaged until you find a way to heal it or it dies. Though some units may have a shield in this position too, which does heal at the end of each turn. Finally at the bottom right is the amount of this particular card you can have in your deck.
Event Cards
These are kind of like spells in your normal trading card game, they can be played in your main step or any time so long as it has the word “React” in its text.
Equipment Cards
These can be attached to a unit once you cast them, but if you want to re-equip them it has an additional cost. These will give a buff to your equipped creature. If the equipped creature dies then the equipment is left on the field and can be re-equipped by a unit walking over it.
Weapon Equipment
These pieces of equipment don’t buff your creatures, instead think of them as additional attacks. If a creature has 5 weapons equipped to it, it can attack with those 5 weapons AND it’s normal attack.
Field Cards
Here is where your resources come from. Your fields will produce different amounts of resources depending if it’s your home field or a secondary field. When building your deck be sure to have plenty so you can pump out enough resources to play your units.
Wartide Review – Playing a Game
This isn’t a game that you can quickly jump into or be done in a few minutes. This is a deck building game where you can have a real slugfest with your opponent. A game can easily go for 40 minutes or potentially longer if a player is deciding to play slow and build up their army. However, that isn’t a bad thing, a slower more strategic game can be fun. A way to test your abilities in deck building and mind games. While you’re playing the game you can admire the great and unique art on each card.
Wartide Review – Conclusion
Wartide is a fun and strategic card game that I can see being played by fans for quite a while. Between the three unique factions with their different play styles, great card art and in depth storyline it brings something new to the card game scene. And it’s not even out yet! That’s right, the game I’ve been telling you about hasn’t even been released yet.
Wartide is currently being funded on Kickstarter and it needs your help. If you are interested in playing this great game that was designed and created right here in Australia then head on over to the Kickstarter and tell them the Qualbert Crew™ sent you.
A big thank you to the Wartide team for sending us home from PAX Aus with some starter decks for our Wartide review. You can find Wartide here on Kickstarter and head on over to their website for a better look at the story and some artist showcases! And for more tabletop goodness, check out our Kitsunedo review and join the Qualbert Discord!
