Last Spell Review - Quick Take with Tom Vasel

0:07 The last spell from Nestor Mangone and Alessandro Piracci and Tabula Games. Now, Tabula Games makes games that are well, often hybrid style games. They often look like they're this big Ameritrash style game and then they have Euro mechanisms and they do some interesting things. This one is based on a video game which I have not played so I can't talk about that and I don't know if I played it right because the rulebook is awful. But what this game is is sort of you have all these bad guys who are coming towards you and you are moving and upgrading and building defenses and using powers and moving around and fighting off these enemies. Sounds very exciting. It's a tower defense game essentially. But it is a slow tower defense game. It's just really slow, very thoughtful and so much effort going in and then when you play the game you're like, "Wow, these guys come in and I run over here and I do this."

0:58 Compared to other games like Project Elite where speed and fast this feels like a mismatch and that's the problem with this game is I'm not sure who is it for. Is it for people who love these Euro style games with tons of optimization and you're doing all this optimization? Those people will like that part of it while everyone else who doesn't like that are going to hate it and then there's random die rolls to see if you hit the people or not which is going to drive the optimization people crazy while the people who like to just roll dice and have fun with it are going to go nuts with how how kind of slow that is. There's just so much randomness in it and it doesn't help that the rulebook is vague and unclear and the whole thing just moves so slowly. It's really quite boring, unfortunately.

1:43 I really wanted to like this game. I was excited but wow, I was like, "Is it over yet? Is it over yet?" Cuz it's just kind of going, "Oh, these bad guys are coming in and there are so many of these tower defense games out there and they're usually snappy, quick, keep things moving. This is the very opposite of that and so therefore I can't really recommend it. Great pieces, cool look and maybe it is like the video game, I wouldn't know, but not a board game I want to play. A five out of 10.