What is it?:
Deth Wizards is a skirmish miniatures game that can be played solo, cooperatively, and standard skirmish with players duking it out.
The setting:
Deth Wizards is set in the kingdom of Deth, a once typical fantasy world with kings, villagers, paladins, wizards, and the like. And necromancers. You take control of one of these necromancers, cast out for your dark interests, and have now returned to the kingdom of Deth, to cause havoc and have some revenge!
One interesting thing about this setting is how there seems to be something wrong with the land now. In the lore, there’s talk of how the sun doesn’t shine fully or for as long as it used to. And the land is becoming fallow. I imagine it’s because of the return of the necromancers, but who knows?
The system:
To start, you’re going to make a Necromancer. You get to pick a spread of stats, a legacy, and then some powers of your choice. The legacy is how you figure out what “kind” of necromancer you’re playing. Some build up hordes of cheap zombies and skeletons, while others are drawn to the spirit type of undead. There’s only six of these legacies, but you can put a spin on them with the stats and powers.
When it comes to powers, you’re going to have powers that boost your necromancer and those that boost your undead minions, but there’s some that can effect the enemies you’ll be facing. You only get to pick three, after the three everyone, and the ones you might get from your legacy. While you can pick up so more powers and abilities later, it’s really hard to pick just three powers to start off with, especially when you’re just getting started. I’d suggest playing a game or two before setting everything in stone.
The next part of getting ready for the game is picking your minions. Minions have a rating, which will roughly tell you how powerful they are. The higher the rating, the more powerful the minion is. However, that will also depend on your necromancer and your play style. Sure, zombies are low rating and hard to put down, but are slow as hell. This is another thing you should play test before you pick them for sure. Since I tend to play horde style in most games, I know I had to switch myself away from zombies, because of how slow they were, when coupled with the other stuff I wanted to take.
The final part of making your necromancer is selecting a lair for your necromancer. There’s only three of these, and they provide a few abilities, a cap for the amount of undead you can have, and a limit of improvements you can make. You’ll need to leave some undead behind, because your lair can get attacked between games, which you don’t play, you just roll for. And I think that’s kind of lame. I’d rather than it be a thing you play or it doesn’t happen until you reach a certain level of power.
Each mini has a series of stats, the usual ones that you can expect. You’ve got move, Offense, Defense, Resist, and Durability. For the most part, you should be able to puzzle these out and you’ll be rolling d10s equal to the number you have in a stat, with the enemy’s stat being your meet-or-beat on the dice. Resist is the stat you’ll use when you’re trying to effect an enemy model with one of your necromantic powers. Given how you can play against other people, you should think about this as well when picking your minions, if you’re going to being playing that way.
One interesting thing about the game is how your necromancer’s health works. You don’t have any. Instead, you have energy that’s used to power your spells and is how you take damage. Once you run out, you’ll start draining power from the nearest of your minion, continuing until you spread the damage around. I think this is an interesting and unique way of handling this, regaining power isn’t easy. At the start of the turn, you gain 3 energy. That’s the cost of most powers. Your necromancer is going to activate at least twice in a turn, able to move, attack, or cast a power each time, so you’re going to be burning power quickly if you’re going to be running out of it before too long. There’s too other ways to regain power: kill a minion or collect energy from killing enemies. Regaining energy by killing your minions might be a good idea for a minion that’s already badly hurt, but you only gain energy equal to the minion’s rating. That’s 1-4 energy. For the necromancer that’s quote Caligula (Quantity has a quality all its own), you’re boned, getting only 1-2 energy. And to collect energy from a dying enemy, you have to be within 3” of the enemy when it dies. So, you decided to go for a long-range necromancer with a horde of cheap minions, you are screwed for energy. You need to be in the face of the enemy if you want to use more than one power each turn, and if you expect to heal damage. Clearly, the way that the creators what to play the game shines through here.
As I mentioned at the beginning, you can play one of three ways: Solo, co-op, and skirmish. For the most part, solo and co-op are played the same, just with some slight changes for additional people. In this version of the game, you pick a scenario (attack innocent villagers, raiding a castle, and robbing a graveyard, just name a few) and then set it up. As common with Snarling Badger games, the terrain is the same from Reign in Hell, with crags, forests, and pools of water. What makes this version of the game so interesting to me is that they have “AI” enemies. These enemies are the typical “heroes” you’d see in other games; paladins, priests, rangers, and so on. When they get to go, you roll a d10 and see what they’re going to do this turn. This can be absolutely brutal, if you get the worst result at the wrong time. And there’s a lot of enemies you’ll have to face in a game. Unfortunately, the scenarios are mostly “attack this place, face ever increasing enemies, and try to kill everything in five turns.” Which is going to get boring quickly. And requires certain type of terrain (anyone got a “magical college” building laying around?), which is a bit taxing. Also, you either kill everything in five turns or you lose. There’s no minor victories. There’s only succeed, really succeed, or do it again harder and get even more success, or you lose. That’s it. It’s all shades of success or total failure.
And while there is the skirmish version of the game, it’s much more “roll dice to see what we’re fighting over and how we win” which doesn’t feel engaging. I admit that I haven’t read all of the rules about it, as I picked this game up for the co-op or solo play, because that’s what interests me. That said, it’ll be nice to try out, once I finish the campaign in the rest of the book.
After you’ve finished a game, there’s a roll to see if your minion has survived (even if you blew it up, which some necromancers can do), which is pet peeve of mine. After that, you get to choose to raise one new undead. You can either choose to create a new minion from the list at the beginning, or you can raise one of the heroes you defeated. When you try to raise a new minion, you roll a die and hope for the best. Some of the scenarios give you an automatic success on some type of minion or a bonus on the roll. It does it easier to succeed the more you fail. When it comes to raising a hero, you get a hero with the abilities it has, with the rating equal to what it had when it died, but it loses all the AI stuff. I do like how you get a choice of what you want to do, it’s really nice to customize what kind of force you can build. Once you’re done with this, you can spend any experience you were able to earn to get more powers, select some abilities, or save it up. And then you can improve your lair, every other game. The bookkeeping isn’t too much but it seems to be a little too random for me.
Is it worth it?:
Yes, if you have the stuff for it. If you’ve got an evil wizard mini and some undead monsters, go for it. It’ll be a fun change of pace for you. If you’re looking to be evil, there’s a lot of evil stuff to do. It’s less than $20 for a physical and digital copy.
However, the game isn’t a hard, crunchy system. Stuff is really swingy and I bet you could math your way into the best minions to take for every scenario. It’s an indie game, it’s going to be flawed, so you have to be ready for that. It’s more about fun than setting or rules. And that might not be the best for everyone. Plus, it’s not going to be much for replaying after you finish the campaign once or twice, or play the skirmish version a dozen times.
