Relic Wars First Look & Overview | Fantasy Tactical Combat Board Game | Flying Pig Games

0:00 Hi everybody, I'm Sil Blitz and welcome. Today we're going to do an overview of Relic Wars, the upcoming game from Flying Pig Games and designed by Denver, Get it? Walker. This is a two to four player game where each player takes on the role of one character. It's got kind of a Hunger Games gladiator type fantasy tactical combat feel to it. Now, this game is coming to crowdfunding in about 2 weeks as I'm making this video right now at the end of April, early May 2025. There is a link to the crowdfunding campaign down below in the video description if you want to check it out and follow the campaign. With that being said, let's jump right in and get started. So, I've got Relic Wars set up for the most part for a four-player game. I haven't punched the counters, but everything else is ready to go here before we jump in and take a look at the components and talk a little bit about gameplay. Let's do a quick overview.

0:46 First up, this is a two to four player tactical fantasy combat game playable in 30 to 90 minutes. And I would guess that 30 to 30 minutes is more if you have two players. 90 minutes is going to be more if you have four players. It's going to the more players is going to lengthen out the game. And there is no time limit. So the game is played until you meet either one of the two victory conditions. The first victory condition is that one character has three chalicees on them and you're going to be collecting items as you're exploring the map or until you are the or until you're the last character left. So either you wipe everybody else out or you get the three chalicees. either one of those two ways is the victory condition. So you can sense it's got kind of this battle royale Hunger Games type of feel to gameplay. Also in in terms of unit scale, each player represents a single character and we can see the four miniatures off to the sides of the the tilebased map in the middle and that's uh your player represents that individual being. Let's talk a little bit about some of the mechanics in general terms. First up, there is melee combat. It is dice based. So, you're going to be rolling dice, and we can see a a kind of a set of dice in front of us. We'll take a closer look at those later. You'll be rolling dice for hits, and you'll be rolling dice to mitigate hits. Each character is going to be finding things like swords, bows, and shields, and using those to hit other characters and defeat other characters or defend themselves against it. It's a a relatively simple, straightforward combat system, but you have to find the weapons. So, you don't start with weapons. As you're exploring the map,

2:17 you're going to be finding different weapons and adding them to your inventory, and those are the things that you're going to be using in combat. So, again, that kind of sense of a little bit of a tingle of Hunger Games type stuff where you come in empty-handed and you've got to find stuff as you explore the map to be able to survive and defeat the other players. There's also magic in the game. So, as you're exploring the map, you might find spells, and those spells could be either air, water, or fire. And they each do slightly different things. So, combined with the melee combat, we've got a a basic magic system, too. It's also important to know that each of the four characters are unique. So, they have some unique characteristics that are going to make them play a little bit differently, or as in other words, asymmetrically. There's visibility and line of sight involved. It's a very basic visibility and line of sight system. So, especially that it comes into play if you're, you know, shooting bows at long range with arrows, you've got to be able to see the character that you're shooting at. and different terrain types can get in the way. There's also shifting conditions.

3:14 We can see here this divine intervention deck. At the end of each player turn, you're going to flip one of these cards over. They can change the game positively or negatively for everybody. They can impact some characters. They can impact your character. They can impact one other character. So, there's kind of this shifting uncertainty that permeates the combat system. Connected to the magic system, there are also portals. So certain tiles on the map could end up having portals on them and that will allow you to transport to a different place on the map. And speaking of the map, it's tile based as we can see. And it's very much kind of a fog of war system. So as you enter this, you don't know what's going on, but as you move into a tile, you're going to be flipping it over and uncovering both an item there and the terrain that's there. And now let's jump in and take a closer look at all the components. A big caveat before we do that, though. This is very much a prototypy prototype. So, the the miniatures that we're going to look at are locally printed here, but the final version are going to be much higher quality, injected molded, much more durable. Um, the tiles, the counters, the box, the manual, everything's going to be different in the final final version in terms of quality of components. Imagine the artwork will stay roughly the same, but this is definitely a prototypey prototype. And so, keep that in mind as we're looking over things, especially in terms of final game quality. Let's take a look at the documentation real quick. Uh this again is a very much draft, right? So this is just a draft rule set. So both in terms I think of the writing and the layout and what it looks like. And of course this will be in color cuz I just printed this out in black and white. The

4:44 reason I did want to show it though is to talk a little bit about the complexity. Altogether this is about a 15-page word document in its current form. Pretty big spacing and layout. I read through the rules in about a half an hour over lunchtime the other day. Very clear. There's a couple of places I had little minor questions, but again, I think, you know, both the rules in terms of writing and layout are going to be uh you they'll be vastly different by the time they get to the final version. My main point though is that this is I think a very accessible game. If I were to give this a complexity rating, I would say a 2 and 1/2 out of 10 on a wargaming scale. I think it's a, you know, a game that you do not want to let the complexity scare you off. It's going to be fairly easy to pick up and fairly easy to teach. Also, in the realm of documentation, we have some player aid cards. There are four of these. They are identical, two-sided. One side has spell information on them and one side has the turn and movement and then attacking information on them. And we can see here we have information, the key information for fire, earth, and the second spell type is earth, not air. I I misstated earlier in the video. And then water.

5:43 And so this is going to be handy because this there are some nuances to the spells. There's some nuances to the characters and some nuances to attacking movement um and the turn order that you're going to want to know. So this be a handy little player aid to have for each player as you play the game. This is probably a good time to talk a little bit about the sequence of play. Players start the game off the map and then there's a little sequence of play to get players onto the map and start the kind of moving around through the tilebased environment. But basically after you get the characters on, each player goes in turn and during your turn you perform two one of two actions. You can move, you can attack, or you can kind of pick an item up. And so it's a very simple uh turn-based sequence of play. At the end of your two actions, you pick up a divine intervention card and then do what it says on that card and then play goes on to the next player. Let's take a look now at the counter set and then the felt bag that comes with the game.

6:32 Again, these are prototype quality, so this will be different in the final version. In particular, the counters are going to be a much higher quality in the final version than they are in this prototype version. But, um, what we're looking at here, these are the Relic War tokens for the most part. And what's going to happen as you play the game is you're going to take a certain number of these tokens, put them in the bag, and then as you go to a different tile when you move into that, when you kind of reveal that tile, you flip it over and you pull a token out of the bag and put it on the tile, and that's what you've found there. So, it's kind of again that hidden exploration fog of war. You don't really know the terrain until you designate to move into it. And then you don't know what's going to be there until you kind of move into it. Again, kind of as I think of this, I think of like the Hunger Wars aspect where you're constantly looking for tools to survive, looking for different things that you got to find. So, you're going to be really building your character's capacity through exploration of the tile set as you're playing the game. And so, there's about 30 or so of these that'll be in each in the bag as you go through.

7:29 We can see here we've got some of the spells. Here's the earth spells, fire spells, water spells. These are portals that you might draw out. Here's the swords you could draw out. We've got arrows. These are the chalicees. If you get three of these, you can win. Um, down here we've got these are the shields you could pull out. So, a variety of stuff that you could get and I could see each game playing out quite a bit differently depending upon which of these elements your character gets as they're starting to develop the game. You know, if you develop a defensive character, offensive character, spell-based character, that's going to depend on what you pull and what you explore and what you find. So, playing with what you're dealt is probably a big part of doing well in the game. Next up, let's take a look at the player cards and then the miniatures that go with each character. Again, there are four unique characters in the game. There is a also, I think, going to be with the Kickstarter, uh, an expansion that you can buy that adds another set of characters for play in the game using the same roughly the same rules. So, this is Sanctifra what we're looking at.

8:26 We've got an image of the character here. This is the miniature. And again, these miniatures are going to be uh different in the final version. uh they're going to be produced uh in a different manner and and be uh more durable. Uh these are again prototype characters that we're looking at now, but you can get a rough sense of what the artwork is going to be like. Now, um what we can see on this player card right here is that um this is the hit points for the character up top. So, as you do damage to other players, their hit points are going to go down. When they get down to zero, they're knocked out and knocked out of the game. There are some ways you can prevent that as that happens, too. Movement is six for sanctifies do have some unique movements. Then we have a special ability which is uh Sanctifrax for example can attack diagonally. Most characters can only can't attack diagonally but she can. And then the way the weapons work down here is that for example if uh she finds a sword the first time she finds a sword it goes in the weapon slot and that's going to add power to her attack. As she finds a second sword icon relic token. It doesn't represent a second sword. It represents an enhancement and an upgrade to that first sword, which makes your sword attack much more powerful. So then you're going to go to, you know, you'd have a sword. You could have as many as three sword icons, which would give you a much bigger and more powerful die roll when you attack with a sword. Likewise, shields don't represent three shields down here. They represent an upgrade to your shield system which is going to give you better defensive capacity because not having it's like having a level three shield instead of a level one shield if you get all the way over here. And then there's a space here for

9:57 inventory for items other items as you find them like spells and things like that as you go through the game. As we look at Saitari Lionheart, we can see he has a different set of abilities here. So his special ability is a retaliatory retaliatory attack which allows him to attack back against a character when attacked. His hit points are less than Sanctifra. His movement is a four, which is a little bit slower than Sanctifra as well. So again, subtle differences in how each character is going to play out. Lacrimosa has a basic attack that's different than the standard attack a character uses. U six hit points, movement is four, a special ability, they can use city tiles as portals. So uh quite a bit of mobility for this character. Lastly, our last character is the Veil Walker. This is kind of represents I think a thieving class with a movement of five but a special ability here is a pickpocket which is an action veil walker may steal an item of her choice from another player. This can only be done once per turn a range of one. So if you're adjacent to someone they can basically pickpocket an item from somebody else's character which could really lead to some I think some very interesting gameplay dynamics with this character. Throwing a bit of chaos into Relic Wars are the divine intervention cards. There are about 30 of these in the game. And again, at the end of each player turn, players going to pick one of these and execute what it says. There's a good range of stuff here. Here's four I've kind of picked out. Heal is beneficial. All players in forests heal two hit points. So again, a little bit of randomness. If you're in a forest, you're going to get lucky.

11:22 You're going to get healed a couple points here. St. Michael's sword is one that allows you to attack other players with infinite range. Flames of hell means that the space you're in and anything orthogonally adjacent to you is going to get attacked. Torrential downpour reduces players actions to one action instead of two. Here's a look at four more. Uh traveling archaeologist means all the chalicees that are revealed on the map are thrown back into the bag and removed from play until you pull them out again. So that changes the dynam dynamic of the game. Uh, anybody who doesn't have a shield gets attacked here with a basic attack. And then, uh, here's Rivify. This is a card you can keep that allows you to come back to life if you get knocked out. So, if you go down to zero hit points, you can play this card to stay in the game. And then pious is all players who uh have they have to take one of their items and they drop it as a sacrifice to the gods. So, these cards, I think, are going to be they're going to introd introduce a random element to the game for sure. And dealing with these effectively and astutely is probably going to be a big part of doing well in the game. Again, kind of getting to that idea. You don't know what you're going to find as you go into the tilebased map. And you don't know what's going to happen, too. So, I think things could shift one way or another depending upon what you find, what you're looking for, and then how some of these cards can play out. Let's explore the set of dice that comes with the game. So, it's a pretty big set of dice. Uh the easiest one to understand, this is for directional die, north, west, east, and east, and south that you roll to determine what side of the the map that your c the tilebased map that

12:54 your character comes in on at the beginning of the game. But all of the other dice connect to combat. These are basic attack dice. Most of the attacks involve you rolling one of these. So the little hit marks here determine how many hits you do on a character. one, one hit, two hits, uh, one, zero, and then potentially three here for these. Then, if you're attacking with a weapon, so for say for example, you have one sword in your sword slot, that would be a level one sword. So, you're going to roll a six-sided die in addition to your attack die. So, if you rolled this and you had a sword, you think you would do four hits instead of two because you're enhancing the power with the sword. Likewise, there also bows in the game. So, if you had a bow and were attacking with this, you would do four hits as well. And then if you have a second sword, for example, in your second sword slot, that that represents an upgrade to the sword, not two weapons. So, instead of rolling the six-sided die, you would roll the eight-sided die, which is more powerful, and it does more damage with the sword. So, we can see additional hits here. Lastly, if you have three swords or three bows in your slot there, you would be rolling this uh 12-sided 10-sided die in addition to the basic attack die, which creates a pretty potent attack. Here we can notice that one of the sides has an automatic KO to it, which could potentially end the game if the character doesn't have a way to get out of that situation. Then for these attack dice, we also mentioned there are shields in the game. So, if you have a level one shield, you're going to roll this die to add to your defense. uh level two shield would give

14:25 you the eight-sided die, which is more powerful. And then a level three shield. You roll a 10-sided die, which is even more powerful than that. And lastly, there's also this red defensive die. So, if you're in a city and you roll a city, when you're rolling on your defense, if you get attacked, this is going to mitigate one hit as well. So, these four dice mitigate your damage. And these are your attack dice. And it's all a very kind of simple, straightforward dice rolling damage and damage mitigation system that's going to integrate with the terrain, the weapons, the enhancement that you've got, and the spells that you're using. So, pretty slick system. I think it's going to play fast and play pretty quick and pretty straightforward. And now, let's take a look at our tile-based combat system. So, there is no paper map or a mounted map that comes with Relic Wars. What comes with Relic Wars are these tiles. And for a four-player game, you build a 6x6 grid. And for a three uh two or three player game, you're going to reduce it by one and build a 5x5 grid.

15:16 And there are some extras here. Some of the divine intervention cards will allow for a swapping out. Like I think there's one that's an earthquake card that's going to pull out some of these and replace them with different terrain representing the earthquake, destroying the type of terrain that's there. And basically what happens as a character kind of is going to be moving into a different spoon, you're going to flip over the tile to see what's there and then exploring the map and uncovering the map. And as you go into a new unknown tile, you're going to be pulling one of the relic tokens out to see what's there. So, you're going to be getting potentially terrain information and an item that you can be adding to your inventory if you want to use an action to pick it up. And we have a good variety of terrain types here. Of course, we're getting the all identical ones here. Here we have our our town or this looks like uh monastery. I I'm not familiar yet with all of the different terrain types here, but there's a good variety in here. We got some lakes, some of course we're getting all the similar ones. This one allows you to may roll an attack roll. Here we have lake type of terrain. There's forests in here as well. A good number of clear ones. So again, the map is going to play out very differently each time you play the game.

16:20 And each one of these zones, different categories of terrain types have different ways they impede or help or benefit attack and defense. They can block line of sight. So it's going to create quite a different landscape, I think, each time as you play. So there we have a general overview of relics. I think the only thing we haven't talked about really is solitire. This is, you know, it's listed as a two to four player game, and I feel like that's very much a fair evaluation of the game. There's nothing in here that would prevent you to uh play the game soliter, so there's not really hidden information. You know, as you reveal a tile on the map, other players are going to know what that tile is. They're going to know what's on it. They're going to know where you are. So, I think you could play two-handed solitaer very well. I'd be curious at some point in the future to see if people might be designing solo bots for some of the characters which could create some for some interesting soliter options for the game. But as of the moment, I don't see those in the production path going forward. So, what would I give this as a soliter rating? I would say probably a very five out of 10. I don't see anything really that's going to hinder hinder you from playing this solitaer.

17:21 But I get a sense kind of like the betrayals and the teamwork and the working together in that, you know, three and probably particularly the four player game is really where this game is going to shine as you learn other players tendencies and how to play, making alliances with players to team up against somebody else that's doing really well, kind of getting betrayed. I think that human element in there is what's really going to bring this game to life in particular probably as you get into the the higher player counts. So while a five out of 10, I think you could play this game solitire. I think the game again, you know, it is designed for that two, three, four player experience and I think that human element is really going to add a lot to the gameplay. I am going to make uh one more video about this game. I'll put a link to it as soon as it's ready. And a reminder, this is coming up on Kickstarter in the early part of May. I'll put a link to the Kickstarter campaign down below in the description if you want to check it out. Thanks for watching everybody. Have a great day.