In Bellum Magica each player is an evil lord, recruiting creatures and assigning them tasks like exploring for resources or attacking the human kingdom and other players. Each lord tries to expand his kingdom and become the most powerful and rich lord of all times!
2-5 players, ages 10+
15-30 minutes
Designer: Frédéric Guérard
Artist: Sylvain Aublin
Publisher: Blue Orange Games
https://blueorangegames.eu/
Players start the game with a castle, and two goblins assigned to collect food, maps and glyphs or to battle. Each round consist of these following phases:
1- The first player rolls a die and depending on the result, players receive resources next to that number, however players can force the starting player to reroll if they are not happy with the result.
2- The lord who collected the most maps this round brings back a treasure chest from scouting.
3- Then each player is allowed to do one single attack, with your strength in normal and magical swords depending on the dice roll. If you have a thief’s mask you can even steal from your opponents!
4- If a player has 10 chests at the end of this phase, the game ends and players will count the values of their treasures to determine the winner. If not, players are now able to attract a new goblin or dragon to prepare themselves for a new round of treasure hunting.
Bellum Magica is an accessible game that can be played quickly in between, with great looking artwork, and custom resource tokens that surely add to the enjoyment of the game.
I can imagine that the luck factor in the game might not be everybody’s cup of tea, since you’ll always depend on the roll of a dice to determine which resources and attack power you’ll get, and there’s always a possibility that your treasure chests are stolen by other players. But then again, the game doesn’t take a lot of time to play so it didn’t really bother me, and I’m sure this will hit the table often!
Tabletopping 