First Impressions: Relic Balde

 Look at me doing something other than complaining!

Yes indeed, I got together with my good friend Troy to try out a game I've been super interested in for a while now: Relic Blade. All the models here are Troy's, so admire his paint work if you so choose.

Relic Blade comes to us from the mind of one Sean Sutter and his company Metal King Studios. It's a 28mm fantasy skimish game in the truest sense of the term, and it simply slaps.

This game is basically everything I want in a miniatures game these days. It's easy to learn, there's plenty of tactical options, the rules aren't a muddled nightmare, it understands basic 21st century game design and has a stupid amount of charm. It's so clearly a labor of love for Mr. Sutter, and because of that the game oozes with character and love like few others I've seen.

Anyway, Troy and I did a normal 100 point game. When building a warband you pick which faction you'll be playing: Advocate or Advesary. Yeah, there are only two factions in the game. But don't let that fool you, each one has sub factions, sort of. Really they're just themed boxes you can buy to get you on your way towards playing, as anything from each faction can run together. Thus it's entirely possible to have a warband with a dragonman cleric, a wood elf archer, a gnome riding a magic carpet and a Persain themed goblin. Yes, those are all real things in this game.

Characters have their stats: action dice, movement value and armor. They also have a series of actions they can do, which tell you how many dice you need to do said action along with target number, damage modifier and any special rules. All of this plus more is brilliantly conveyed via the stat cards which feature the game's beautiful, almost comic-book styled, art from Mr. Sutter.

Sheer beauty.

When a character activates they get a number of action dice (in the example above the Cleric of Justice gets four) to do what they want to do. Moving, attacking, special abilites and objective actions all require the use of AD. This is a brilliantly simple system that doesn't get bogged down in pointless complexity for the sake of complexity. There's no bullshit for the sake of artificial depth, just solid and fluid mechanics.

The forces move towards the objective.

The game, rightly, uses alternating activations, so player involvment is constant and you can try to react in something more akin to real time. And since the average game will feature somewhere between four and six models a side things go by at a good clip. Relic Blade is also played on a 2x2 table, so it doesn't take up a ton of space or take long for the carnage to begin. This also leads to games not lasting all damn day, so being able to squeeze in several games in two hours is a real possibility here.

Once models engage in combat with each other they can start using attack actions. These will show how many AD they take to preform, and the faces shown on the dice on the card are the target number. If you manage to roll the exact faces shown you get a critical hit. Crits come in three flavors based on number of dice being rolled: one, two of three. Each increases the damage potential. Characters can use a focus action to add an extra die to an attempt, which is the only way to reach three dice since nothing has an inherent attack that rolls three dice.

The Battle Pigs swarm the objective, and promptly forget it exists.

If you hit you roll a d6 and add the attack's damage value to the roll. Now, if you score a two die crit you get +1d6 to the damage roll, and if you manage a three die crit you get +2d6 on the damage roll. So it's entirely possible to roll three dice for damage, adding it all together plus the damage stat of the attack. The defender also rolls a d6 (or 2d6 if they used an action of gain a dodge token) and add their armor to the result. Whatever the difference is is how much damage is done to the defender. The game can be brutally savage, and it's not uncommon to see guys getting one shotted. My Thief and Cleric of Justice got dropped in a single attack from a very angry swine.

The scrum that quickly ensued.

I really like this level of brutality, it reminds me of Dark Age which was probably one of the most punishing miniatures games I ever experienced because even your super high cost awesome dude coule get dropped in one shot from a scrub with a bit of broken pipe. It rewards smart gameplay, and I love that.

Another thing I really appreciate in Relic Blade is how many abilities require die rolls. It gives a real sense of characters actually having to concentrate and try to do stuff. There are some innate abilities that don't need die rolls, but the ones with the bigger impact do. For example, my Wild Elf Druid could turn into a bear. Yeah, she could just turn into a giant fuck off bear and start mauling people. This still required her to try to do it, and the first time I attempted it I failed and burned two my her four AD that turn which put her in a tough spot when the pigs came gunning for her. But when it does succeed there's a real sense of joy, but maybe that's just because she became a fucking bear with which to initiate the aforementioned maulings.

Hibernation time is over!

Relic Blade also features a campaign system, but we didn't play with any of that so I can't really say how well it works. Troy assures me it works quite well, and with the short length of games he says a group can, given a day, play an entire campaign in five to six hours.

There are also rules for wild creatures based on the type of terrain you're playing on, allowing fey spirits, giant lizard monsters and skeletal pricks to show up and start attacking both warbands. On top of that there are optional rules for playing on grid maps, which I think is brilliant if you, like me, want to play at home but don't have terrain. It gives you choices, and that's always greatly appreciated.

The models are also beautiful. They have a nice old school charm to them, and the parts counts are kept to sane levels (that's a post for the future, trust me) with many being single piece. And if you don't like the official models, for whatever insane reason, you can just buy PDFs of the various stat cards and use whatever models you want. So, if you already have a good sized collection of fantasy stuff that could easily slot into the roles of some of these characters and you don't want to add more models to your horde then you can still play without needing to buy more minis.

Now, I always like to bang on about how no game is perfect, every game has it's flaws. I got to tell you, though, that Relic Blade is damn near perfect.

The flaws it does have, in my opinion, are that the critical rules can be a bit wonky to understand at first, especially for three die crits. They aren't terrible, but the first few read throughs I found myself going "wait, what?" a few more times than expected. It works in practice, but it is just a little weird. 

By also only having two factions it can sometimes feel like warbands are a bit of a hodge podge, and it would maybe be nice if there was some sort of bonus for running thematic warbands to encourage a sense of uniformity. Not a deal breaker, and the flexibility is great, but if you're the tpye of person who needs stuff to feel unified then the small selectiion for some of the subfactions may leave you wanting.

My last "complaint" is that some of the upgrades feel either crazy situational, or really limited. For example, my Cleric of Justice had a piece of equipment that gave him extra armor if he was critically wounded (the little box on the damage track with the shattered bone), but he got dropped in a single blow so that simply ended up never applying and being a total waste of points. I'm sure in cases where your cleric character doesn't get bitch slapped with a halberd it can be useful, but it does feel a bit too easy to circumvent. And other cards just don't seem vesatile. That same card can only be used by clerics if I recall, and as far as I can tell that is the only cleric model in the whole game so far. Another example is the Wild Elf Geomancer from the Wilderkin box set. The box comes with a handful of cards that can be used by wizards, but they require a rock spires, and only the Geomancer can summon rock spires thus far so the cards might as well just say "Geomancer Only" on them.

But, these are also incredibly minor and petty nitpicks that in no way detract from the overall awesomeness of the game. And with the range ever expanding (and a new Kickstarter project on the way to help with that) my complaints about the cards may be undone. Hell, I'm only nitpicking because I feel like it's my job to do so. 

This game is still the closest to perfection I've ever seen in all my many years of gaming and reviewing. It does just about everything right, from the rules to the atmosphere to the art style. It's a stellar game dripping with charm and clearly maxed out its charisma, and it is simply pure. The amount of passion Mr. Sutter has for his game, his world, is totally invigorating and a breath of fresh air in an industry where the big dogs all feel like the same thing with a slightly different hoodie on. 

This is why I got into gaming, games like this are why I got in so deep and why I eventually became a journalist. It's people like Sean Sutter, with that heart and soul, that give me hope for this niche little hobby. It's games like this that remind me why I try to spread their gospel across the land. Because they're good, and they deserve all the attention because the person making them cares.

So yeah, I suspect there will be more Relic Blade in my future, so you may well see some unboxings of various models here. Until then, I encourage you to be not afriad when wading into the waters of miniatures gaming: expand your horizions and check out more of the games my small studios. Be like bear...

BEAR FEARS NOTHING!