Skytear: Starter Box – Season One

Skytear

Skytear is a board game take on a MOBA game (Massive Online Battle Arena). It uses miniatures to represent heroes and minions, action selection and cards to play out the game. A standard game plays out with one player or team taking charge of four heroes and taking cards for each of those heroes. For advanced players there is a deck construction option.

Heroes are aligned to one of four gods, they have names but are helpfully are also represented by colours. Blue, red, yellow and green! Each god has a different worship action that their heroes can utilise. Red heroes can ‘mark’ their opponents for bonuses. This might remove the line of sight rule or allow your hero to teleport next to a marked enemy. Yellow heroes can project holograms of themselves, blue shapeshift, and green place and remove totems to gain buffs.

It all works incredibly well and in a balanced fashion. Heroes can use cards of their god and one other god that they have sympathy with! Cards cost mana to pay and the amount of mana you have for each hero is equal to the round of play you are on.

You will play a maximum of 5 rounds or until one team has destroyed the nexus (base) of the other team. Players take turns activating heroes, with each choosing up to three different actions. After heroes have finished activating the minions will move. This is the most abstracted out part of the game as you don’t directly move the minions, rather at the end of the round you total up control of the various points on the board and any minions left will move up.

This works rather well, as you have more than enough to focus on with the heroes, so the automatic movement of the minions actually keeps things at a good level decision wise, without muddying the waters. If you like skirmish or mini games, or just want to dip your toe in the water, Skytear is an amazing place to start.

Player count: 2-4
Time: 45 minutes
Age rating: 13+