Defenders of The Realm

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Price: $59.94 $54.42   

Product Feature

• Great strategy game for 1-4 players
• Takes about 90 minutes to play
• Tons of top quality components

Product Description

FDD101253N Defenders of the Realm Board Game by Fred Distribution

Our Liege is in desperate hour! From what grievous cause have these accursed races arisen? Orcs, Dragons, Demons and the Dead make haste towards Monarch City. The King and Countryside of Monarch City is in need of valiant Heroes!

Will you answer the Kings call?

In the ancient Citadel of Monarch City, the King calls to arms the finest Heroes to defend against a Darkness that engulfs the land. You and your allies must embark on a journey to defend the countryside, repair the tainted lands, and defeat the four creature factions before one of them enters the City. And they approach from all sides! Fast populating Orcs! Fierce Dragons! Undead that bring Terror! And Demons! All tainting the land in their wake. There are several paths to defeat, but only one path to victory, and only the most valiant Hero will be named Kings Champion.

Defenders of the Realm is a cooperative fantasy board game in which 1-4 players take a role as one of the Kings Champions (Choose from Cleric, Dwarf, Eagle Rider, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer and Wizard). You, as one of the Kings Heroes make use of strategy, special abilities, cooperation, card play and a little luck in Defense of the Realm for a unique experience every adventure. But be forewarned! There is never time to rest. As each Enemy General is struck down in battle, the remaining dark forces only grow more difficult to vanquish and their march to Monarch City gets faster with each Hero victory!

Defenders of The Realm Review

I was looking for a new game to play with my son, and after a lot of research, I ordered Defenders of the Realm. I'm glad I did.

Quick summary: Cooperative play for 1-4 players. Scales REASONABLY well to the number of players. Highly variably (read random) from game to game. Good odds you'll lose, but the game is fun in the playing (no, honest, it is!). Materials are adequate but a little on the cheap side. Overall, a lot of fun if you dig the theme.

DotR is set in a generic-feeling fantasy kingdom. The board is divided up into a few dozen regions with names like "Raven Forest", "Orc Valley", and "Ghost Marsh". Dotted lines connect regions showing the allowed paths of movement. The central region is "Monarch City" where the players all begin. In each of the four corners is an enemy general (orc, dragon, demon, and undead). The players' shared objective is to destroy the four generals before any of several failure conditions occurs. Each player chooses a character from the provided set of stock fantasy heroes (paladin, dwarf, wizard, etc). Each character has unique advantages which provides a nice degree of customization to personal play style. A deck of cards controls the enemies, and at least one card is drawn each turn. These cards cause minions of evil to pop up around the board and may cause a general to advance along a fixed path toward Monarch City. The players lose if a general reaches the center, too many minions overrun the board, or one of a few other conditions crops up. Other decks provide the tools for the players to attempt to win or offer extracurricular quests that can be completed to gain advantages.

Gameplay is straightforward. The character is allowed a certain number of actions on the player's turn. These can be spent moving around the board, beating down the random minions or their side effects, attempting extracurricular quests, and gathering resources to fight the generals. When all the actions are used up, a bad guy card is drawn to see how much worse things get. Since a bad guy card is drawn after each player's turn, more players means a faster tempo of advancement for the evil. This is, of course, offset by the extra players to try and keep the lid on things. It is vital that the players cooperate to keep the minion tide under control and make joint attacks on the generals; if they can't work together, victory is almost certainly impossible. Victory is a team victory as well. There are some optional rules for designating the king's champion if you have to have an individual winner, but most people I know ignore them. The essence of play is balancing the short term threats and options while pursuing the ultimate goal of beating the generals.

A note about randomness. The bad guy deck is purely random (barring a few powers that can let you reject cards, etc), so it's impossible to predict enemy behavior. A bad series of draws can be lethal as one quarter of the board erupts into a minion storm or a single general sprints to the finish line. It's entirely possible to lose on turn four. In general, though, it seems to be fairly well balanced. Combat against minions and generals involves rolling dice as does completing the extracurricular quests. This adds a degree of uncertainty which thwarts long-term planning. It can be frustrating to get a series of bad rolls so you spend your entire turn throwing yourself repeatedly at what SHOULD have been an easy fight. This may frustrate some players, but it can also be a good thing. Since you can't plan more than a couple of turns in advance, the game stays fairly fluid and fast moving. You don't get twenty minute pauses while someone works out their next fifteen moves to five decimal places.

The materials are of mixed quality. Each of the characters has a unique plastic figure with some decent detail, but they're a drab grey. The four generals are pretty good looking, but all the minions are carbon copies (the only difference between an orc, a demon, and a dragonkin is the color of the cowled figure). The regions on the board each have a nicely painted picture, but those individuals pictures are scattered across a featureless surface. The font of some of the cards can be tricky to read. Some of the generals don't like to stand up on their own. In particular, the orc general tends to invade the kingdom on his back because I get sick of fidgeting with his base and trying to get him to stand up.

Bottom line, I like this game a lot. My eight year old son and I play it frequently. It's got a good balance for two or three players which is nice when no one's around to play with us. The randomness of the enemies and the wide variety of characters makes for good replayability. There are at least four ways to lose which makes for interesting variation. Each failure condition can be resisted if the players tune their activities, so the game involves a lot of turn-by-turn rebalancing. We've won probably 30% of our games, but almost all of them has been fun. I like the purely cooperative aspect of the play; there simply isn't an individual competition (if you ignore the king's champion silliness). It's got a lot of tactics to a small amount of strategy, but that can be a good thing. Playtime tends to be around ninety minutes once everyone's familiar with the rules.

One last note... DotR has a lot of mechanics in common with Pandemic. DotR is larger in scope and more "personal", but the overall feel is very similar. If you love or hate the gameplay of one, that feeling will probably apply to the other. The themes are totally different, of course, and that can make a lot of difference depending on your players' interests.

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