Lords of Heaven Gameplay Impressions | Phalanx | Crusades Wargame Boardgame | Solo | Review

0:00 hi everybody I'm Zilla Blitz and welcome today I'm going to offer up some Impressions on Lords Of Heaven by fallinks now this is a game where you control it's a two to four-player game where you control various factions vying for control of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas in the first two historical Crusades now a couple of caveats here one I wouldn't call this a review because I haven't been able to play it for quite that length of time that I would feel comfortable saying this is a review but I have experienced the game four player four player solo and two player solo so I'd like to share some thoughts and observations on gameplay as I've gone through that now one big caveat here too this is a prototype of the game and I've been as I've been watching the crowdfunding unfold I can see there's been some new mechanics added things like a naval element with harbors and things uh there's a third crusade that's being folded as I think as optional gaml looks like leaders have been added to the game and those things really aren't in the Prototype that I've been able to experience and so while I think I've been able to experience the core game game play things will change likely between now and the time the final version ships so just something to keep in mind another reason why I feel a little bit um not quite comfortable and saying this is a review of the game because I think the final version will have some tweaks and adjustments to to the components and then the gameplay as well uh but I would like to offer up thoughts on four-player two-player and then the soliter element of game this surprised me quite a bit so I want to talk a little bit about that and so let's Jump Right In and get started with the four player experience so four

1:32 player Lords Of Heaven this is The Game's I think shining sweet spot I absolutely love this game as four player there are and I'll talk about some of the reasons first there's just a fantastic sense of History I'm a big fan of Crusader Kings 3 on the PC game and this kind of brings this element of the Crusades of that part of the game to life I love the artwork and the color and the color palette of the game and it just kind of brings you into the area we've got Christians factions Muslim factions we got Byzantine Empire got the Crusaders the the caliphate we've got the seljuks and it's just just sucks you into the history and the cards bring this whole thing to life so just this historical context within which this game sits is really special to me and I really like that the work they've done with that there I also really like the pace of the four-player game uh in a couple of ways and I'll talk about both of them first up this is a short game and I'm going to talk more about that momentarily but not only is it a short game it it picks up the pace really fast some games take a while before you kind of feel like things heat up but literally you're like two turns into this game and it's smoldering hot you feel like you're right into it and you've got a critical battle coming up the acceleration of this game is so good because you're going to be two three turns in and you're like okay you are going at it against another faction some battle in a key place and it just keeps up its po pace and its momentum it picks up up fast and it's got good momentum but the other thing I like about it is I

3:03 mentioned it's a short game and that's that's probably not fair because you're probably thinking oh it's like a 20-minute game 30 minute game no four player game is probably hour and a half two hours once you get used to the systems and things like that so it's not what I would call a short game but it is what I would call a single sitting game and this skin it's kind of got a feel of war game crunchy Euro blend with a really nice historical context to it and these types of games where you can sit down learn the game and play in a single sitting um I I think are just such great games and especially a four-player game where you can do that it's got just a nice sweet spot of length where I think this is going to be a game where you could bring a couple of new players in teach them the mechanics of the game and you can play through a whole game in one evening and I'm finding more and more I grow to appreciate these games with that sweet spot of length that's going to be about two hours so you know you're going to just start it's going to heat up fast you're going to be going at it and then you're going to realize wow you know it's not going to be that long of a game it feels like when you first look at things it could be like a game that takes four hours but it doesn't it's great momentum great pickup and it just keeps moving along and it doesn't overstay it's welcome so I love that element of the gameplay about it and the gameplay itself I think is really good I love the different levers you can play using the cards well I mean there's a lot of different things you're trying to use well to achieve your particular particular goals you've got citadels fortresses youve got mosques or church you've got your military troops

4:34 different types of military troops you've got political presence military presence card play and using those cards really well can make a huge difference if you can get a card where you can kind of trigger a double action which you if you play them well you can do that and that can just swing the whole thing in your favor and then your opponent swings back you've got alliances so you've got this kind of political back and forth where you're negotiating with the people you're playing with trying to get them to do things you're making Bargains and Deals it's just a really really good outstanding four player experience and I am really excited to see what the final version would look like if it's this finely tuned and this finely dialed in right now and I think one of the elements that stands out with this is why is it so is that it's got kind of I wouldn't say claustrophobic but there's not enough space to do everything you want to do and you don't have enough resources to do everything you want to do and you don't have enough actions to do everything you wanted to and those three elements bringing themselves together onto the gaml means that every decision you feel like you're make is a cool fun decision and you feel like it's important so it's I love games that throw meaningful decisions at you and literally again like the third turn and you're thinking wow this is a big decision you know I have I I should make a good decision here and you've got a lot of different ways to solve problems a lot of different ways to disguise your actions it's just a really fun game so if that's the four-player experience now I want to talk a little bit about the two-player experience because well I think the four-player experience is

6:06 absolutely Majestic I think the two-player experience um needs some needs some refinement um I I found the two-player experience good but I don't find the two-player experiences riveting yet as the four-player experiences and and I wish I had played the third player three-player experience I think the three player experience probably was somewhere between the two of them here um but there's a few reasons why that I think the two-player experience needs a little bit more refinement and again I also go back to the caveat that I think these things will be refined as the kickstarter goes on as the the crowdfunding goes on excuse me I suspect that the two-player experience will be refined before it hits its final version um but there's a few elements in the the two-player because I mentioned in the four-player game how there's not enough space and there's not enough stuff to do the one things you want to do and not enough decisions and some of that balance between space and your resources really kind of I think Wiggles and loosens up a little bit in that two-player experience um for example you have 10 presence markers that you can use as each faction um you can either be um you can play them as political presence or military support and when you've got nine locations and four players you've got 40 of those tokens on the board and it's it's everything is important and you're going to get kicked out of spaces and you're going to have this balance between milit AR and political presence but when you have 20 tokens with two players scattered out over nine locations which happens in the

7:37 back half of the Crusade um it doesn't have that same kind of claustrophobic feel and it seems to be the advantage to play those for political presence and you kind of have a lot of room to work with likewise in the four-player game you have nine locations and there can only be 12 citadels that are there are 12 citadels that are in play so there's not enough room for three citadels they they just can't fit on to the board so there's this sense of urgency for grabbing the spots for the citadels and the mosques and churches as well but in the two-player game you've got six of those and you've got nine locations so you've always got a space to put one down and it just didn't feel to me like the two-player game is as tightly wound as the four player experience is yet and I think that again that yet is a caveat I don't want to render just like I wouldn't say this as a review I don't want to render final judgment on the two-player experience because I suspect there are more refinements to the two-player experience to come but as it stands right now four-player experience absolutely riveting two-player experience I think is a good game so we've talked about four player and we've talked about two-player I want to talk a little bit about the soliter experience because um I haven't heard a lot said about it yet and uh I know there's a lot of viewers on the channel that like to play war games and Euro games uh soliter so I want to talk a little bit about that because did spend quite a bit of time playing at soliter as well and so um couple thoughts first up there is no bot there is no official um you know mechanical bot that's going to play one side while you play the other side so by

9:08 playing this soliter basically what you're doing is you're switching sides and you're trying to play each side to the best of your ability it's also important to note that the official marketing the game is two to four player and falling isn't making any claims that this is a soliter game as a matter of fact there are two places in the game where as I was looking at the rules and as you start to play the game you realize okay this is going to be a little bit tricky soliter first up is how do you handle alliances and then the second is how do you handle combat and sieges basically battles and sieges and I'll talk about both of those in turn but as I started out I thought I wasn't really going to enjoy the soliter experience because of those two reasons well how am I going to be able to handle that uh and it doesn't seem like it's really going to work that well but with just a couple of adjustments I actually grew to really really like the four-player solitire experience it's actually quite good and I enjoy it a lot and again this is you know you're playing one faction then you play the next faction you play the next faction and then the next faction so if you're not a gamer who does that you won't like this but if that's the type of game you like and that's the type of solitary experience you enjoy you might find this one quite a bit better than you would anticipate by looking at the official marketing materials and kind of thinking about how the game might play but it takes a little bit of an explanation so I'm going to take about five minutes now I just want to kind of talk through it because there a few things I had to do to kind of get the solitary experience to work for me and another caveat you know I've played it a couple times now Sal here I think I can refine on this as

10:40 I go forward to make it even better but so let's talk about the two problematic areas and why they're problematic and then some of the solutions that I put in place to deal with each of those in the solitary experience and to get it work to a way that I felt was really satisfying first up one of the problems is in the four player game you have you can have allly alliances and these are trans they're fast they're shifting and you can betray your opponents and you just quite don't know how they're going to go and it's a really fun part of the four player multiplayer experience but in soliter the question is well how do you handle the allies and you could say well okay the Ally can make the decision to the best of their ability um but I felt like it was easier for me to just put down kind of a guideline for alliances and my guideline was this and and basically what happens in a battle is or a Siege is um if there are you know more than two factions in an area the attacker can ask one of the other neutral parties that isn't getting attacked say would you like to Ally with me and join this battle and as an ally if you're on The Winning Side you get two victory points that's quite a bit in a game that the victory points are going to be around 20 for the winner you again it's a 12 to 16 overall turn experience so being an ally on a winning battle could be really helpful for you so the way I handled it was rather than kind of trying to make decisions based on what that player would think about and things like that I just said um you have to Ally you can only Ally with your religious partner unless it's to your clear advantage to do

12:12 otherwise and what that means is this there are two Muslim factions in the game and there are two Christian factions in the game so if you had you know a Christian faction attacking a Muslim faction the Christian faction can ask the other Christian faction to Ally with it this faction can either say no or say yes but it can't say yes to the Muslim faction as an ally unless it's to its clear advantage to do so and by that would be like you know it's close to the end of the game and you can see that your Christian Ally for example is going to win the game if it wins this battle and yet if you if it lose the battle and you could win the battle it's going to put you in a better position to win the game so I just played it like that and it actually worked really really well it was a smooth easy decision to make and it just streamlined those alliance's play and made it works smoothly in the game so that took care of alliances let's talk a little bit about battles because this was a little bit more of the trickier part but I've kind of fallen into a system that I really like for handling the battles and the sieges too now why are the battles and sieges problematic well there are a number of elements in battles and sieges that are hidden and you don't know what's going to happen until everybody shows what they did and then you resolve the battle result and there are a number of places where this goes first up um you play a card in battle that remains hidden until the kind of the revealing time and those cards can have a variety of strengths and effects on them and some of them can be quite powerful so when you can see both cards it's a little bit problematic

13:43 because generally in the the multiplayer game you can't see the card your opponent's going to be playing the second place is you can commit Faith markers to a battle and you don't know how many Faith markers your opponent's committing to a battle either and those add strength to your forces lastly you don't know how many forces your opponent's committing to the battle and you don't know the strength of the forces that are going to be committed to the battle so a big part of the multiplayer combat experience is that kind of it's almost like a poker like bluffing where you can say I'm going to attack here but maybe you're not going to attack there because you're saving your resources for a battle that's going to happen in the next turn or in the next stage of the Second Crusade part of thing so faking out your opponent and either not committing resources or committing them the right places and things like that can be really helpful towards getting you to victory and the reason is as well is because Faith markers are expended no matter what happens in the battle so you commit them to a battle you lose them second up you have to pay gold to get your troops back from a battle so it costs you gold basically to deploy your troops into battle so if you can fake out your opponent and get them to commit a lot of faith resources and commit a lot of troops but you don't they've expended a lot of resources on a battle they win by way too much so basic basically you're trying to just win a lot of battles so this bluffing and commitment of resources is a big part of the multiplayer experience and how do you handle that in Solitaire so there's one thing I would I found that I don't do that helped and there are two things that I found that I did that helped make

15:14 it really flow well in soliter first up was in the uh soliter experience I don't calc calculate to Great depth the resources available to each side so you can kind of pre-calculate the battle and say okay get this and they get this they're going to have like 13 points I can have like 12 points maximum I know this side can win so I don't do any of that detailed math before you jump into the battle and I just paint the thing that I did instead was paint with a broad stroke so I just said okay this force is going to commit all their resources this Curr Force it's should be an easy battle they're going to commit half their resources and just do it that way and just really simple and then commit the resources don't pre-calculate and then just see what happens and that worked really well and then the thing that I started adding on to make it work even better was I started thinking okay what could the defender or attacker conceivably do here I could say okay the attacker could conceivably Bluff here and commit almost nothing or they could commit say like all of their forces that would make sense one of those two things and then they would just roll a die to determine what they did a one two or three and they Bluff a four five or six and they committed everything likewise I'd make that same decision for the defender say okay the defender might commit half their resources or they might commit all of their resources because they might have a chance to win so on a one two or three they commit half on a four five or six they commit all I just did that and it worked really really well it just it the whole thing flowed smoothly and I'm like this is a really fun experience and once I did that it handled those two elements of

16:45 that are problematic in soliter play the alliances and the the commitment and the bluffing that's involved with combat and it just made it flow really really well and I get to a point where the four player soliter experience was really really fun for me so I wanted to share that because I know a lot of soliter viewers on the channel and they might be looking at and saying well I don't think it's going to play very well soliter your mileage may vary right as always your mileage may vary you do have to make some modifications to handle those things but I found I was able to make modifications uh to the game and it worked really really well so I liked it a lot as a soliter experience and I was not expecting that there we have it thoughts on gameplay for Lords Of Heaven the last thing I want to say um is I I do think the rule book um needs some refinement and I do think it's going to get some refinement again this is a prototype but there were a few things that I felt like could have been clarified a little better could have been added to certain places they seem to be off in a couple places but that's pretty common for Prototype rules and I think that they will be refined as it goes forward so those gaps and those omissions and things like that I think will be will be tightened up and I expect the rule set will be good it's not a bad rule set by any means just there there number of places where like well it doesn't really tell you there quite what to do so I expect those will evolve as the game has evolved in into its final state from its you know 80 to 90% state right now into its final State as it goes through its production and things and there you have it thoughts and Impressions on gameplay and time spent with Lords Of Heaven by fallinks again this four player experience is spectacular I really like the soliter four player much better than I did than

18:15 I thought I was going to um two- player I think needs refinement but I expect it we'll get there um big thumbs up for me I think this is a good one if you like historical crunchy Euro war game type Blends that you can play in a single sitting I think this is something you might want to look at and there's a lot of videos out there so you can see a lot of other stuff too so you know do your research and things like that and make your decision but I I I really have enjoyed my time with this one I think this is going to be a great addition to the historical gaming genre when it kind of reaches production at the end of its its crowdfunding stages and things like that if you want to see some gameplay video that I've put up I'll put a link up here to the first gameplay episode that you can take a look at and that's a two-part Series where it plays that two-player game all the way way to completion thanks for watching everybody I hope you have a great day