Masters of the Universe : Battleground - Official How to Play Board Game

will He-Man and Friends be able to stop Skeletor and his evil minions taking over Castle gry skull in two-player battle game the Masters of the Universe Battleground and today we'll be teaching you how to play Masters of the Universe Battle Ground game designed by yek kovich and published by archon studio and hi everyone it's St and Taran here from M University all right let's get through the classroom in Masters of the Universe Battleground two players take on the roles of opposing forces in the Masters of the Universe Universe battling against each other in the land of Eternia through the game players will command their forces in a battle of might a battle of mission and a battle of Capture the Flag aiming to earn the most points over up to four rounds of play whoever can score the decisive number of points will be the winner the full instructions for setup including various Maps can be found in the Battleground book and I will go through these now however for your first game go to the rule book pages 8 and n and follow the simplified setup here each player chooses a faction in the starter set you've got the Masters of the Universe and the evil Warriors players may choose the same faction but your entire fighting force must come from the same faction build your fighting force using any combination of your factions characters and any cards from the weapons and items decks you can do this almost however you want with only a few restrictions firstly you can't have more than one copy of the same equipment in your entire force so these two could not both have battle harnesses the backs of the character cards depict the types of equipment which may be held for example hman could not hold a third trinket or a magical weapon and if a weapon shows this icon then it's considered iconic and may be held only by a character which has that equipment listed on the back of its card to be clear this doesn't mean the character has to start with that equipment it means no other character May determine each of your characters costs by adding up the character value and the values of any equipment they hold you'll find these tables on the back of the Battleground book and do keep an eye on the Masters of the Universe website as these may be up dated over time the total cost of all of your characters may not exceed 100 and the cost of each character is the number of victory points your opponent will get if that character is knocked out in battle roll dice to determine first player this mostly matters only for setup but it does break some ties during the game second player goes through the Battleground book and chooses which map you're going to use place the depicted pieces on the board use the coordinates to help with setup any solid blue pieces are high obstacles this is anything taller than 2 in hashed pieces are low obstacles pieces lower than 2 in some pieces share elements of both this has two hex's of high obstacle and two hex's of low obstacle pink spaces represent a platform above ground with a ladder touching the ground on the yellow space place an objective flag anywhere one is depicted in turn Order each player chooses a deployment Zone represented here by the grade out sections on the map and in turn order go back and forward placing one objective token each until both players have placed two you must Place one in your own deployment Zone one in your opponent's deployment Zone and each must be at least three hex's from an edge and six hex's from another objective through the game you'll be trying to capture the flags which are either in neutral territory or your opponent's deployment zone so placing tactically in setup is important separate the Fate Cards into two decks the blue fate cards and the yellow Glory cards and assemble personal decks of 20 Fates and five glories you can build these from any cards irrespective of their faction icons the sole restriction is you cannot have duplicate cards in your deck each player shuffles their fate deck draws five cards and may do a partial Mulligan discarding any number replacing them and returning the discarded cards to the deck for the glory cards you'll shuffle your deck of five draw three look at them choose two you wish to keep adding them to your hand of five fate cards and then return the remaining three glor cards to the Box you won't use them for the game that means overall you'll start with a secret hand of seven total cards and a fate deck of 15 blue fate cards keep supplies of the dice and various tokens nearby for use finally in turn order players go back and forward placing the models representing their characters into empty spaces of their deployment zones I'll remind once again that for your first game you can cut all the decision- making out and follow all of the starting choices and placements from Pages 8 and N of the rule book you're now ready to play Masters of the Universe Battleground is played in a maximum of four rounds and each round is played in three phases the preparation phase activation phase and cleanup phase the preparation phase is very quick and you'll skip it in the first round but but in subsequent rounds this is where you'll refill your hand from your personal fate deck specifically from the cards remaining in your hand at the end of the previous round you may discard any number of blue fate cards and then you redraw until you have five blue fate cards ignore the glory cards here you're only drawing back up to five blue fate cards second is the activation phase and this is where the bulk of the game takes place and during this phase you'll do the following sequence several times until no players wish to activate characters anymore first simultaneously each player chooses any one fate or Glory card from hand to play face down before flipping both face up you'll compare the initiative values of those cards and whichever has the higher initiative we'll activate a character first for this sequence if initiatives are tied then whoever was the first player during setup will go first but otherwise first player has no impact the player with initiative chooses one character to activate it cannot be a character who has already activated this round and it cannot be the last character that player activated in the previous round unless that player has only one character left suppose here I choose to activate man- at Arms the top half of the the card tells you how many action points that character will have for this activation and how many Mana tokens to give that character action points must be used on this activation while Mana tokens may carry over from activation to activation a character May hold no more than five Mana at any time the lower half will give you one or two other options which apply to this activation on a fate card this is usually the choice between an additional power or an additional manner although in some cases it's a mandatory penalty which applies to a stronger card if the card you played was a glory card then you'll be given the choice between an objective you'll try to complete this activation for points or an extra action point now or during the activation you may play additional fate or Glory cards from your hand onto that character this grants you the bottom half ability for this activation but not the top half you'll need to make sure you make this hand of cards last remember you'll start each round with five blue cards which you'll replenish at the start of each round and two yellow Glory cards which are single use for the game now take your actions with that character once you're done with actions you'll end the activation flip the Fate cards that you played over and play place them over that character the character is no longer ready and the player without initiative now chooses a character to activate in exactly the same way then repeat the sequence players will play new fake cards from hand determine a new initiative order and you'll continue going until all players are out of characters out of cards or have chosen to pass you cannot activate a character unless you have at least one card to spend on its activation this normally means that across you'll activate all of your characters and exhaust all of your blue fate cards but for whatever tactical reason this may not always be the case if you do have any characters who aren't activated they will gain one Mana for free at the end of the round also be aware that there are some Interruption activations that is situations where a character even if already activated will be allowed to have a small Interruption activation during the other players turn we'll see the instances of how this occurs as we go through the actions there are seven different actions in the game Focus move attack which comes in three types melee ranged and spell OverWatch and using an active skill for the first six of these actions the first time you take it on a given activation will cost you1 action point the second time will cost you two action points third three and so on the only exception to this rule is the active skill this is any skill printed on your player card which has a cost in its lower right corner each of these costs the actions and Mana printed and may be used only once per activation a skill with no cost printed next to it is a passive skill this is always in effect and may resolve multiple times per activation the first action is focus to do this simply take a focus token from the supply and place it next to the active character this makes other actions stronger which we'll see shortly a character may have at most one Focus token at a time the second action is move your character will have two movement ranges the basic movement is the lower amount while your character May optionally spend a focus token to move the higher amount for simple movement on flat ground simply move the mini up to that many hex's around the board and relocate any unspent tokens or Buffs so that they're still with that character then after your movement is complete choose the character's new facing Direction This is represented by this small notch on the front of the character's base it must be pointing at one of the six edges of the character's hex and you may choose any Edge it doesn't matter which direction the character moved in you may still face it in any one of the six directions you may never move into or through another character's hex if you move into a hex which is adjacent and at the same elevation as an enemy then you must stop you may still choose whichever facing Direction you wish to characters in adjacent hex's at the same elevation are considered engaged with each other if you are engaged with an opponent and you attempt to move away so that you're no longer engaged then before you actually make that move the enemy has the chance to interrupt you with an attack of opportunity which we'll talk about a little bit later on you may move over an adjacent low terrain hex for three movement points in this case this is the low terrain hex and your destination may be any ground hex adjacent to that so in this case I could spend three movement points to move either here or here you may spend six movement points to move over any High obstacle hex again the destination may be any hex adjacent to the high obstacle so here the six movement points could take me into any of these five hex's that looks like this from above you may spend three movement points to climb either up or down which is a change of elevation your new hex must be a hex at that different elevation which shares a border with your old hex when viewed from above you cannot climb from or to a hex underneath the platform however if you're adjacent to a ladder whether you're below its connected platform or not you may spend two movement points to use the ladder moving to any hex adjacent to the ladder at your new elevation for any change of elevation movement you can enter a space containing another character and whoever owns that character must choose an adjacent hex to be pushed to only if there is no legal place for the existing character to be pushed to is the original movement illegal if you want to move under a platform but your model doesn't fit SW it out for one of these replacement tokens there are some other movement keywords including jump which let you avoid restrictions or extra movement Point costs for moving over characters obstacles or elevation changes teleportation which simply lets you materialize in a different hex and which does not incite attacks of opportunity if you were engaged pushing or pulling which if done over multiple spaces must be done in a straight line and does not allow the victim to change its rotation and switch which allows two characters to change locations with each other again without changing their orientations the next action we'll talk about is attack but before we can get into the Tactical particulars we need to learn about tests since attacks are one of many effects in the game which are resolved by a test a test is in effect a of dice to determine whether you succeed or fail I'm going to take you through how tests work using a range of examples including active skills attack effects and more firstly determine the Test's stat you have five potential test stats strength perception power toughness and mind this here for example is a power test and this one is a perception test take dice equal to your value in the stat of the test on this power test you would take three dice for this perception test you would start with five however you would also apply any modifiers this test for example inherently has a netive -1 modifier therefore this would be a test with four dice in perception instead of five a fate card might give you a dice modifier here for a defense test I'd get plus one die you may be holding an item which gives you a modifier to the stat itself or if you're testing with a weapon the weapon may have a modifier shown here this weapon would be a -1 modifier as compared with this one which is no modifier at all having taken the dice you now determine the scope of the test and the default scope is four this means that when you roll the dice any value which is four or higher will be a success and anything lower is a failure scope may also be modified and importantly when you're modifying scope anything which says to add to your scope or to increase the scope makes the test easier here adding one to the scope means the scope changes from four to three meaning I have more potential numbers I can roll which will count as a success scope cannot be less than two nor more than six most important among these scope modifiers is focus if the character taking a test is focused then that Focus token must be spent to increase the scope of that test by one this is different to using Focus to increase your movement range which is optional so let's suppose that through modifiers we're doing a test of five with a scope of three you would now do your normal role count up your initial successes that's any D which meets or exceeds your scope here it's four next there are two potential phases of rrolling failure dice first is free rolls they're relatively rare but they figure in the special effects on some actions count up all your free rerolls across all different effects and then roll that many dice at once then you have Mana rerolls you may spend any number of Mana from your supply to reroll that many failed dice again you must do all of this at once you can't spend a Mana roll and keep going back and forward until you get the result you want through those rerolls I'm now up to five successes next roll exploding dice for any one of your original dice which rolled as six you now roll one additional die into the pool an exploding value between 1 and four does not count as an extra success exploding d which hit a five or a six count as an extra success this is always a five or six it cannot be changed by scope modifiers these new dice can also explode any sixes rolled on them are rolled again and you keep going until you've not rolled a six in this very lucky scenario here where the original scope was three my total number of successes is nine finally apply the effect of your successes with which is indicated by the star in this card in this case it's jumping up to two hex's per success so this would allow me to jump a total of 18 hex's so now that we understand tests let's go back and look at melee attack a character May launch melee attack against an opponent with whom it is engaged even though they're facing apart they're both considered engaged either could melee attack the other upon launching the attack the attacker first rotates to face the enemy the attacker may use a melee weapon or its fists the attacker does an attack test using strength the defender does a defense test using toughness suppose this was scope four each defense success cancels an attack success compare leftover successes against the table at the bottom of the weapon and apply the highest consequence you qualify for here there were no remaining successes so nothing happened but here with five attack successes against one defense success the net result is four which would qualify for this three success effect of two wounds dealt to the enemy The Defender never damages the attacker even if the net number of successes is negative and for a melee attack without a weapon the only possible effect is is one wound if there is one or more successes the two other types of attack are range and spells and unlike melee you must have a ranged or spell weapon equipped to that character to be allowed to take that type of attack a ranged attack is resolved as a test of the attacker's perception against the defender's toughness as with melee that means that the attacker does a perception test the defender does a tough test and you resolve the effect based on net successes for a spell attack you do an attack test of power against a defense test of Mind ranged attacks only cost the action points while spell attacks cost the action points and some amount of Mana there are also some character active or passive skills which are resolved in a way which is similar to attacks this optic Blast for example is a test of power against mind and it has a range in all of these cases the positions on the map and the positions of obstacles on the map have a bearing on how the tests are resolved and so we'll have a look at that now any ranged or spell effect will have its range listed and range is measured by distance using this ruler rather than by counting hex's to be within range the distance between any corner of your hex and the target hex must be within the stated range of the effect so for this 12in effect this target is within range as is this one however this target would not be within range when you attack over distance before doing the test you must rotate your model to face whichever one of the six adjacent hexers to your model is closest in a straight line to the center point of the targets model for this target I would rotate to face this direction while for this target I have two equally close hex's and may choose either of the two for any range or spell attacks or effects over distance it's important to establish line of sight and cover a Target must be within line of sight to be a valid Target while if a Target is in cover the scope of the attack is reduced by one consider this layout where we have a high obstacle and a low obstacle to establish line of sight you must be able to draw two straight non-intersecting lines from any single corner of the attacker's hex to any two different corners of the target's hex without going through a high obstacle in effect this means only High obstacles block line of sight if I consider this attacker both of these are potential targets within line of sight if I consider this attacker these two Targets are easily within line of sight while this one is blocked behind the wall where it gets tied is around the edges of walls as you can see these two Targets are within line of sight of each other because you can draw two lines between their hexes a line which touches an obstacle is okay it's only a line which goes through an obstacle which is not characters do not block line of sight so this attacker could hit either of these Targets on the other hand a Target can take cover behind any high or low obstacle or another character with the exception of a low obstacle adjacent to the attacker let's suppose we move this character here for the example to determine cover instead of drawing two lines between the corners of the hex's you instead draw one line line between the center points of the hex's so if we draw a line between this attacker and this target it does not go through any obstacles or characters so the target is not in cover but between this attacker and this Defender it goes through the low obstacle and so the target is in cover however for this attacker and this target the target is not in cover because adjacent low obstacles to the attacker do not provide cover think of it as the attacker peeking out from behind the Rocks a similar thing occurs around the edge of this wall drawing the center line we see it passes through this High obstacle hex since this model is adjacent to the obstical hex the hex provides cover for this model but not for this one for this attacker with this target the high obstacle does not provide cover but this character in the way does and the same applies to characters this character provides cover for this one but not for this one when attacked by this one the following changes apply when characters are at different elevations characters who are above and underneath the same platform do not have line of sight for all other pairs of characters you draw the straight lines as usual the only thing which blocks line of sight in this case is a high obstacle adjacent to the character at lower elevation so in this case these two characters have line of sight these two characters do not if this character were here line of sight is now established in the case of cover a character at elevation always has cover from a character on the ground a Target on the ground is only in cover if the center to Center Line Between the attacker and Target goes through a high obstacle which is not adjacent to the platform on which the attacker is standing in this case both of these targets are in cover low obstacles and characters don't help so in this case this target would no longer be in cover while if this wall were here the high obstacle hexers are now adjacent to the platform and no longer provide cover to this target platform ladders neither block line of sight nor provide cover one once again remember that line of sight determines whether a Target is a valid Target or not if the target is in cover it decreases the scope of the attack test a character's facing direction is important because it establishes the frontal Arc and the flank draw a perpendicular center line through the character all hexes which are partially or wholly in front of that line are in the character's frontal Arc everything else is in the flank any attack by an attacker who is in the target's flank has its scope increased by one if you're doing a ranged attack and the target is engaged with one of your teammates then the scope of the range attack is reduced by one this applies only to ranged attacks not to spells and not to melee and finally you cannot launch a range or spell attack if you are engaged with an enemy the same does not apply to ranged skills these are allowed so consider the examples here this is a melee attack from the target's flank and so its scope is increased to three suppose this were a ranged attack against this engaged Target the scope would be decreased to five and this scenario is a spell attack it's from the target's flank so the scope is increased and spell attacks aren't affect by an Engaged Target however the target is still in cover from this low obstacle and so the scope remains at four this attacker is engaged and therefore cannot Target this character with a ranged or spell attack the last of the standard actions is OverWatch and it's a very simple action you simply take an OverWatch token and place it next to the character taking the action without changing its facing Direction you must then then end that character's activation the character remains on OverWatch either until the start of its next activation or until it interrupts an opponent and this is the main reason for going on OverWatch it allows you to interrupt an opponent's character who gets into your range of attack and so we'll talk about interrupt activations now there are two main ways to trigger an interruption either by moving away from a character with whom you were engaged or by moving into the danger range of a character on OverWatch specifically that means ending your movement in a hex which is in the OverWatch characters frontal Arc and within line of sight and within the OverWatch character's range meaning it could move to be engaged with the character in a single movement including a focused move if available or is within range of OverWatch character's weapon here the OverWatch range was eight meaning a move here also wouldn't trigger OverWatch of these four examples this is the only movement which triggers OverWatch pause the active character's activation the interrupting character gets its own activation with a single action point to use this occurs whether the character is ready or not and it does not exhaust that character for the round during this special interrupt activation you are allowed to play fate or Glory cards from your hand to add the lower half effect to this activation you'll just discard the card when you're done instead of putting it on the character during any interrupt turn any movement you take must be towards the character you're interrupting any attacks or skills which Target an enemy must Target the enemy you're interrupting and the scope scope of any test you take is reduced by one in the case of an attack of opportunity Interruption your only allowable action is melee attack using your fists if that's all you have and the scope of the attack is increased by one instead of decreased if you trigger multiple interruptions at once then each will take an interruption activation in the order of the owner choosing some other effects to know about which will help help you in the battle many skills will resolve in targets gaining either Buffs or debuffs Buffs are all yellow with this back and debuffs are green with this back these tokens are stacked next to the character mini in the same way as the other tokens we've seen and a character may have at most one buff and one debuff at a time gaining a new one discards the old one these persist until the of the round the standard Buffs and debuffs have the following paired effects quickness increases your Movement by two while decreases it by two enhancement increases the scope of your attack tests blindness decreases it protection increases the scope of your defense tests knockdown decreases it and regeneration lets you heal one wound when this is removed from your character curse deals you one wound when it is removed some effects areay to place other tokens called marks these must be placed onto empty hexes and like Buffs persist until the end of the round marks have an effect on characters within a certain range and line of sight here the range is two hex's but due to the line of sight restriction impacts only these hexas in this specific case it turns the hex's into difficult terrain this map feature which you don't otherwise find in the set reduces the speed by two of any character who begins in that difficult terrain sometimes there'll be an area or cascading effect for example suppose I played this Fireball and spent two additional Mana to increase its range to three I would first attack a single valid Target at this range of 12 and then resolve all of the secondary attacks as if they were new attacks originating from the primary target other words here I could do my attack test versus defense test against this target a frontal Arc attack with no cover and then my range three secondary attacks would be this frontal Arc attack with no cover this flank attack with cover from a low obstacle while due to the lack of line of sight there is no secondary attack to this target finally while all weapon cards offer you some sort of attack items give you a range of different effects some of these are passive effects which are always in play some of them are active skills like those on your card you'll need to pay some amount of action points or Mana to use them and some are disposable these are one soft effects which you resolve and then flip the card face down there are three ways to score points in Masters of the Universe Battleground the first is to knock out your opponents anytime a character has wounds equal or higher to its Health then that character is knocked out immediately remove its mini from the board that character is out of the game you then score points equal to the total cost of the character just knocked out and that includes the cost of any items which have been spent this case here is a 25o knockout the second way is to complete the two side quests on your glory cards when you play a glory card for a character whether it be as the main initiative card or as an additional card during the activation then as long as you didn't take this extra action point if you meet the objective printed on the card then you keep the card face up for the rest of the game and score the printed points be warned any card that's played lasts only for the activation it was played on so you must achieve this side quest during that activation and you must achieve it after playing the card the man arms couldn't for example use melee to knock out an enemy and only then play the card for the guaranteed points Starter Set Side Quests are worth between 10 and 30 points the Third Way is to claim objective flags and to understand this let's now talk about the cleanup phase the cleanup phase begins once all players have passed or run out of ready characters or cards to activate them you'll now check whether anyone claims any objective tokens you can never claim a token which is in your own deployment Zone only those in the opposing players deployment zone or the neutral area to claim one of your characters must be standing on or adjacent to the objective token and you may not have any opposing players on or adjacent to either the token or you in this case here neither player claims the token while in this case here He-Man claims the token each objective is worth 20 points now clean up the board Buffs debuffs and marks are removed from the board while focus and OverWatch remain now check for an early Victory if there's only one player remaining with characters who aren't knocked out then that player is the winner if through some rare effect all characters are knocked out the game is over and it's a draw if it's rounds 1 2 or three then any character who was not activated in the round gains one free mana and then you'll ReRe all characters for the next round discarding all fate cards which were placed on top of them except for any side quests which you achieved which should be set to the side for final scoring you'll now proceed to the next round finally if four rounds are over add up your scores from Knockouts side quests and objectives if you have at least 20 points points more than your opponent then you are the winner if the difference between the players scores is 19 or fewer then the game is a draw and that's how to play Masters of the Universe Battleground and do check out the link to the project page for the game we'll put that in the description below and thanks so much for watching your like and comments are much appreciated subscribe to see what's coming and let us know what games you've been playing see you next time