Wouter & Ymke 
Few things work better in board games than the simple idea of toys coming to life and fighting each other. It instantly makes people curious. In Toy Battle, pirate monkeys, skeletons, robots, ducks, unicorns, and toy soldiers all end up fighting over tiny battlefields like kids left the toy box open and things escalated very quickly.
Designed by Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini, Toy Battle is a two-player game about placing troops, controlling areas, blocking your opponent, and trying not to completely ruin your own position in the process. It looks bright and playful at first, but after a few turns it becomes pretty clear the game is a lot more aggressive than the box art suggests.
The maps all have their own little gimmicks and layouts. You’ll fight through volcanic jungles, floating cities, tropical pools, haunted graveyards, and a few other battlefields that look like they belong in different toy sets entirely. Somehow it works. The goal is simple: either capture the enemy headquarters or collect enough medals by controlling regions on the map.
The rules are easy enough to explain in a few minutes, but the game still creates those moments where both players suddenly stop talking and stare at the board because someone just realised their whole position is collapsing. Which, for a game about toy ducks and dinosaurs, is pretty impressive.
👥 2 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designers: Paolo Mori & Alessandro Zucchini
🎨 Artwork: Paul Mafayon
🏢 Publisher: Repos Production (review copy provided by Asmodee Belgium).
Gameplay Overview
At the start of the game, both players get a reserve of troop tiles and a small wooden rack to hold the troops currently available to them. Then you pick one of the maps and place it between the players. The chosen battlefield also decides how many medals are needed to win.
On your turn, you normally do one of two things. Either you draw more troops from your reserve or you place one troop onto the board. That’s basically the whole structure of the game, which is probably why it’s so easy to teach. The interesting part comes from how placement works and how quickly the board state changes once both players start fighting over key spaces.
Each troop has a strength value from 1 to 7, plus one joker troop that ignores strength completely. Some troops also have special abilities. A few let you draw more troops, some remove enemy units, others allow extra placements or ignore certain restrictions. Nothing feels overly complicated, but the abilities are impactful enough that players constantly need to adapt their plans depending on what appears on the rack.
Troops can be placed on empty spaces, on top of your own troops, or on enemy troops if your value is strictly higher. Since units stack on top of each other, only the visible troop controls the space. So sometimes you end up with these ridiculous little towers of plastic warfare where everyone involved probably needs therapy afterwards.
The connection system is really the heart of the game though. Most placements need to stay connected to your headquarters through your own controlled spaces. Empty spaces or enemy troops break those routes completely. That means the game often becomes less about controlling isolated positions and more about maintaining pathways across the board while disrupting your opponent’s routes at the same time.
When you place a troop, its effect happens first. Then, if the space itself has a special effect, that resolves afterwards. Some maps let you recover discarded troops, move enemy units around, draw extra troops, disable abilities, or restrict which troop values can even enter certain spaces. The maps genuinely change how matches develop rather than simply looking visually different.
The regions on the board are also important. If you surround a region completely with your own troops, you gain the medals linked to that area. Those medals stay yours for the rest of the game, even if you lose control later. That creates situations where temporary control can still be valuable, which helps prevent the game from becoming too defensive.
The game ends immediately if someone captures the enemy headquarters or reaches the medal target shown on the map. If nobody can place or draw troops anymore, the player with the most medals wins.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Toy Battle definitely knows what kind of look it wants. Everything is colourful, chunky, oversized, and built around this toy-box theme that feels somewhere between Saturday morning cartoons and complete battlefield chaos.
Inside the box you get 48 troop tiles, 8 battlefields spread across double-sided boards, medal tokens, wooden racks, storage boxes, and a player aid. Nothing feels luxurious, but the production is solid and easy to handle.
The troop tiles are probably the strongest part visually. Every troop looks like a different toy figure from some strange crossover universe. Skeletons fight unicorns. Robots attack pirate monkeys. Tiny ducks somehow become tactical nightmares. It sounds ridiculous, but on the table it gives the game a lot of charm.
The maps are bright and very easy to read during play, which matters more than people sometimes admit. You never really struggle to understand the board state, even once stacks start getting taller. And those stacks do become part of the visual fun. Watching towers of troops slowly pile up across the battlefield makes the game look more chaotic as things get messier. By the end of some matches, the board looked less like a tactical conflict and more like someone angrily cleaned up LEGO with boxing gloves on.
The wooden racks are simple but nice. Seeing your available troops lined up in front of you gives the game a slightly toy-soldier feeling that fits the whole presentation really well. The game also avoids drowning players in icons or tiny text. Most information is clear immediately, which makes the game approachable even for less experienced players or people who don’t play heavier games often.
Our Experience
Our experience with Toy Battle was a bit mixed at first. Not because the game is bad, far from it, but because the cute presentation gave us the wrong expectation entirely. The first game started pretty relaxed. Then about fifteen minutes later we were aggressively blocking each other’s routes and muttering things like “well that ruined everything.” So yes… appearances can be deceiving.
One thing we noticed very quickly is how involved both players stay during the entire game. Even when it wasn’t our turn, we kept leaning over the board checking connections and trying to figure out what disaster was about to happen next. A lot of our matches had that feeling where one move suddenly changed the entire board. Neither of us really relaxed during the other player’s turn because a single placement could completely change the situation.
We also made the mistake early on of treating the strongest troops like automatic solutions. Half the time the smaller troops ended up being more useful simply because they were in the right place at the right moment. Some of our favourite plays came from tiny annoying troops sitting exactly where they shouldn’t be, blocking a route or stealing a region the other player thought was safe.
The maps helped a lot too. Changing battlefields genuinely change how matches play out. One match felt very aggressive from the beginning, while another became this awkward fight over medals where neither player really wanted to overcommit first. A few of the special spaces also created surprisingly funny situations where plans suddenly fell apart because a troop got moved, removed, or disabled at exactly the wrong moment.
What we probably enjoyed most is that matches rarely dragged on. Even games that went badly still made us want another round almost immediately because it always felt like we could approach the next game differently. That also helped with some of the more frustrating moments. And there definitely were a few. Sometimes an opponent has exactly the troop they need at exactly the wrong moment for you, and suddenly your whole plan disappears.
We had a couple of endings where someone just sat there laughing because the situation collapsed so quickly. Still, the game usually stayed entertaining even when things became slightly chaotic. It has that kind of energy where players keep talking during the match instead of silently staring at the board for five minutes.
Usually the conversation sounded something like:
“Please don’t place that there.”
Followed immediately by:
“…of course you placed it there.”
Our Thoughts
Toy Battle is not trying to reinvent two-player strategy games, and I think the game benefits from that. It takes familiar ideas like area control, troop placement, map control, and special abilities, then combines them into something that feels very easy to play without feeling empty.
Within a few turns you already start second-guessing placements and worrying about open routes, even though the rules themselves are pretty straightforward. At first the game almost feels too simple, but after a few plays you start noticing how one badly placed troop can ruin your next two turns. Expanding too quickly can expose important connections, while playing too carefully can leave regions open for the opponent to grab.
What really worked for us is how impossible it is to ignore the other player. Almost every move affects the board in some way. You’re blocking routes, covering troops, stealing regions, threatening headquarters, or trying to force awkward decisions. The game constantly pushes both players into reacting to each other instead of focusing only on their own plans.
The toy theme also ended up working much better than we expected. It could easily have become annoying or overly childish, but the components help make the board easier to read during play. The chunky troop stacks, colourful maps, and ridiculous little armies give the game personality without making it feel messy.
That said, some players will probably bounce off the randomness a bit. Troop draws matter, and some abilities can completely change the board very suddenly. For us that mostly added excitement, but players who prefer highly controlled strategy games may find it frustrating sometimes. The game would rather create sudden reversals than reward the player planning five turns ahead.
We also noticed that certain matches became difficult to recover once one player controlled important routes on the board. The game does include comeback tools, but not every comeback feels realistic depending on the map and troop timing. Some players will probably enjoy that pressure, while others may feel the game occasionally snowballs too hard.
I can see us replaying this regularly, but probably not studying opening strategies for it at 2am. And that’s completely fine. Sometimes you just want a fun two-player game that sets up quickly, creates memorable situations, and actually gets played regularly instead of collecting dust on a shelf.
After playing it, the awards make a lot more sense, especially the As d’Or and the Board Game Arena Best 2-Player Game recognition. The game is easy to get into, plays quickly, and starts creating arguments almost immediately.
In the end, Toy Battle ended up being one of those games we kept pulling back off the shelf without really planning to. Not because it’s trying to be the deepest or most serious strategy game ever made, but because it’s fun, fast, interactive, and very easy to enjoy with the right group. For couples, casual players, families, or hobby gamers looking for a two-player game with a lot of personality, this is a very easy game to recommend.
There’s also a small Medals Track Promo available through some Hobby Next partner stores. It doesn’t change the gameplay itself, but it does make medal tracking a bit cleaner during play.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Asmodee Belgium.
.
