Godtear

I bought into Godtear for the miniatures, plain and simple, each warband sculpt is genuinely individual, no repeats, no filler figures, and I still think it’s some of the nicest plastic on my shelf even next to games twice the price. That’s most of why this review isn’t a one star. The rest of it is more complicated.

The objective driven design is actually smart, you’re not just trying to kill the other warband, you’re racing quest cards and positioning around them, which sidesteps the usual skirmish game problem of just grinding models off the table. Low piece count, four heroes and a handful of followers a side, should mean every decision is careful and considered. And sometimes it is.

Then the dice come out and a spiky custom die can undo four turns of careful maneuvering in one swing, and I’ve had games where I did everything right and lost to a bad roll on defense, which is the kind of thing that makes me want to like a game and just can’t quite get there. It’s a crowded lane too, Summoner Wars and Unmatched and Guild Ball are all doing some version of this, and Godtear doesn’t clearly separate itself from that pack for me the way I hoped it would out of the box.

Rulebook doesn’t help. Rules are scattered across sections in an order that doesn’t map to how you’d actually look something up mid game, and the index only gives you page numbers with no topic breakdown, so cross referencing a ruling takes longer than it should for a game this otherwise streamlined.

Two stars, and that’s generous because the sculpts are doing a lot of the lifting. It’s out of production now too, which stings a little, I’ve got warbands I’ll probably never actually get to expand.