The sheer table presence of Wyldwood is hard to convey in words. Sitting on the cusp of a skirmish wargame and a tactical board game, the game uses colossal display scale models so big they stretch the definition of the word 'miniature'. I got a hands-on test of the game at Adepticon, and I came away excited. This game could be huge - pun intended.
Flashy minis aren't quite the license to print Kickstarter money that they used to be, and table presence alone won't put Wyldwood into contention for a slot on Wargamer's guide to the best board games, of course. But what little I've tested of the gameplay has me eager to try more.
Wyldwood is a two or four player strategy board game, with each player fielding a team of five fantasy champions with distinctive powers as they battle for survival in a stone-age forest. As well as a default ability printed on their champions' stat cards, players use a customizable deck which contains powerful single-use abilities they'll draw and play throughout the game.
Slaying enemy champions earns victory points, as does collecting woodland spirits called Woodwisps. These woodland spirits can be socketed onto champions' stat cards to power them up during the match, at the risk of handing the victory points to your opponent if they can kill that champ.
I took part in an abbreviated demo game which gave both players fewer champions but more resources to use abilities each turn. In essence we had fast-forwarded a game to turn six, losing a couple of champions on the way.
I commanded the Emberhold Ascended, fanatical humans with fire powers, led by a palanquin-borne king who could reactivate my other units after they had acted. My opponent had the undead treefolk of the Witherwood Legion, who had a mixture of debilitating abilities including a board-denying skeletal hand they could summon onto the board.
The card-powered combat is the reason I'm so high on the game, and so excited to try more: the more I saw of the Emberhold deck, the more I realised the opportunities that were available to me. Cards can be held between rounds, and after a few turns of curating my grip I had what I needed to attempt to assassinate the enemy leader Yewen, a massive but immobile diseased tree spirit.
I pushed my melee oriented Boughrunner up the board towards the enemy commander, and used the card Unseen Watcher to hide him from enemy attacks. Then my King used an innate ability to re-activate the assassin and sling him even further up the field, ready to strike next turn.
I repeated the double-activation trick next round, moving my Ashbolt Marksman just close enough to fire a Coalheart Bolt straight through a blocking enemy champion and into the enemy leader, setting both characters on fire. That was the setup the Boughrunner needed to leap from the shadows and attack with the card "Every Last Drop", which could only be used on a burning target, but allowed me to sink all my remaining energy for the turn into a single, catastrophically powerful attack.
Talking to my unlucky opponent after the game, we agreed that the scenario favored the Emberhold Ascended. The Witherwood Legion had access to a lot of debuffs that would provide incremental advantage over many turns - turns my opponent didn't have - while thanks to the advanced state of the game I had the energy to use my most explosive powers right away.
A mismatched scenario it might have been, but it also revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the two forces, and just how satisfying it was to craft a strategic play from the cards I happened to pull from my deck. That impression might not last when I test the full game of course, so don't take this as an endorsement just yet - but I'm eager to investigate, and to learn how all five of the factions in the full game are different.
So the gameplay is promising, and the miniatures for Wyldwood are too big and too damn cool to ignore. Speaking to designer Brian Pullen at the booth, he said he loved display scale figures, but never got around to painting the ones he owned since miniatures that could actually be used in a game always jumped the queue. That led him to question whether it was actually possible to design a game that used such monstrous minis.
He added that the production partner actually making th eminiatures, Unicool, is able to offer them at a surprisingly affordable price. Whether that makes the game competitive with the other miniature-stuffed board games on Kickstarter remains to be seen.
With gorgeous miniatures, promising gameplay, and the small fact that the team designing it, Tabletop Titans, is also a well-established tabletop YouTube channel, this is a perfect recipe to blow up on Kickstarter when it launches later this year. I'm going to give Wyldwood a full review as soon as possible to help you decide if it's worth jumping on the band wagon when it starts rolling.
Have you been following Wyldwood, or taken part in any of the Tabletop Simulator trials in the game's Discord? Do you have another favorite head-to-head battler board game that we need to try out? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community.