The Battle of Five Armies Review

The Battle of Five Armies from Ares Games is the younger sibling to War of the Ring. Having never played it, that's about the only comparison I feel comfortable making. Battle of Five Armies has 2 players competing for supremacy of the realm. One player is the free people/dwarves/elves/birds trying to keep control of their cities and defenses. The other is the shadow units and they're trying to mess it all up. Each round consists of some cleanup and maintenance, the shadow player will draw a fate tile and the fate track will advance. They don't want to do this too much because the free people will get more heroes and if it reaches the end, they'll win. Then players will roll their gorgeous dice and take turns carrying out actions. Actions can consist of moving your units around the board, mustering which allows you to add new recruitment tokens or flip tokens on the board to get more units in your armies, character actions, and event cards which can do some extra things depending what they are. Combat is a huge aspect to this game and I'll explain that soon. Each player has their own paths to victory. The free peoples will win if the fate tracker reaches the end, they defeat the shadow units big bad Bolg, or if Beorn is in play and the other player has less than 6 points. The shadow units will win if they have 10 or more points at the end of a round or if they have 10 points and control the Front Gate. Points are awarded based on the different keeps. Some are worth 2 and some are 4.

Alright, combat, let's do this. Combat is largely a dice based system like most war games with some twists to it. For starters, terrain matters. The first thing that is done is checking terrain bonuses. If you're on different ones then different effects come into play. Some units have preferred terrains as well. Players will roll up to 5 dice depending on their armies. If they play a card for one of the units in battle, they'll get a black die in the place of a white one. They will essentially function the same, but a hit will activate a special ability. 5's and 6's count as hits. If you get hit, you're not dead, you'll place a damage counter and the next round of combat begins. Following along? Good. If you have more damage than units, then you start eliminating them. You remove 2 damage counters per unit until you have equal or fewer counters than units. The attacker can decide to withdraw without any real consequences. The defenders can also retreat without casualty if they play a specific card. Otherwise a rout happens and they must remove damage discs until there is only 1 or less. Once combat ends, the shadow will either take their place and score their points or the keep will stay with the free people.

The Good: The overall production quality of the game is very nice. I love that the units have detail to them and are very tactile. The characters especially. The game feels very true to its source material and the world the J.R.R. Tolkien had created. I love that all of the characters have their own abilities that can be activated in order to even the score. Especially since the free people will almost always be outnumbered almost 2:1. Being able to do things to add in more units or take some pot shots can make all the difference. I absolutely loved that the ways to victory were so different.

The Okay: I'm torn here, but I think I'd put combat as just okay. On one hand, I really love the way that it works but there's a lot of rules to it. When you have a bad roll, you're not automatically out of it. Unfortunately, it just feels too finicky for my tastes. Damage counters are a great idea but something as simple as removing a couple can cause a domino effect where you lose 3 or 4 units at once. There's just so much extra thought that needs to be used for it. When it works though, it works. It can be a very tense time and the payoff can be huge.

The Not So Good: The rulebook left a lot to be desired. It's laid out fine but it was just so difficult to follow along with. Typically when I go through a rulebook I feel okay about the game and I'll only need to reference it here and there. Each game that I played, I needed to have the book readily available and a video on standby. It never truly felt like I had that aha moment with it and could feel confident in my gameplay.

Final Thoughts: The Battle of Five Armies is a really solid game, it is. It has some qualities I adore like the overall asymmetry of the players. I'm a sucker for a game where one player has what seems like a never ending army and the other needs to hang on for dear life. That feeling when you can smell victory and seeing it dashed by a huge play or stopping that play is unmatched in board gaming. This universe is perfect for games of this magnitude and scale. I think that if you have an attachment to the source material, Battle of Five Armies is a great starting off point. Personally, I would prefer to play 878 Vikings because it feels more streamlined to me but I absolutely see a place for this on my shelf.

Thanks to Ares Games for providing me with a review copy.