“Giants have emerged from their strongholds to threaten civilisation as never before. To fight giants, you’re going to have to be giant.”
~Storm King’s Thunder
Based on the story first presented in the Storm King’s Thunder adventure from Dungeons & Dragons, Players will need to command armies of giants as they wage war throughout northwest Faerûn. Order your giants to assault small folk villages and cities to score points and secure resources including food, artefacts, ore, and runes.
In this game, each player controls a race of Giants. You compete for control of the board, complete tasks and win combat for points.
Each race of Giants has its own abilities, stats, minis, starting goals, special abilities etc… They also have their own unique card within their deck. The rest of the cards are the same for each race.
Cards
The cards make up the main part of the gameplay. On your turn, you play a card into your row and do what it says. Most of the cards have a left arrow. This means they trigger additional actions for each card played before it is in the line.
Some have a right arrow which usually has a passive ability that gets stronger as cards are played after it. For example, the ‘Magic’ card below helps with defence in Combat.
The cards themselves let you move and recruit units, draw Magic and Resource cards, start fights etc
Moving around the board is based on movement points and you pay rival Clans resource cards to move through zones they control.
Combat
Combat is done via dice, each clan has their own special die they add to a number of generic dice and attackers roll, then defenders roll with rolls adding to both attack and defence of that clan.
This works out as your standard “attack vs defence” thing.
There is a stack of point tokens and when they run out the game ends, and most points win.
Assault of the Giants Positives
The card play is great. you want to do everything, but you don’t want to do anything too early. It’s almost like you wish you could skip playing a card in turns 1-3 and then play 4 at once to get the bonus from playing them all later. Sadly it doesn’t work that way, but the way it works is very good.
The different race stats, abilities and strengths were very good. I played the weakest race, the Hill Giants, but they’re also the cheapest so I could recruit more during my recruit action. I gained points by collecting food and feeding it to my BFC (Big Fat Chief :))
Looks good on the table with its big minis
Assault of the Giants Negatives
It’s a dudes on the map game, I don’t like them 🙂
As with Scythe, I think my first game was let down by controlling a faction that doesn’t suit my play style. I’m not good at fighting games and in Scythe I played the Black ‘Combat Orientated’ Race and I didn’t like it. I played the Purple ‘Turtle’ Race later and enjoyed the game more. Here I played the weakest race where I couldn’t attack anyone or defend myself at all.
The board is VERY tight, movement and spreading out is hard. Even harder when you can’t kill adjacent enemies to spread into those regions.
Summary
I enjoyed it, but let me have a go with something big and stompy to see if I like it more 🙂