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Player count: 1 player
Play time: 30-45 minutes
Designers: Scott Almes
Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
You are Taylor Minde, a rookie pilot of the Force’s Outer Rim. After a crucial battle you are stranded far, far away from home. You are lost, your fleet is nowhere to be found and you are low on resources. You must jump through warp gate after warp gate hoping to make your way home. But with each jump you get further away from home and deeper in to enemy territory. So deep that you stumble across the enemies Mothership. Do you have what it takes to fight and out-manoeuvre the hordes of enemy ships and take down the Mothership? Welcome to Warps Edge!
Warps Edge is a solo only game bag building game from designer Scott Almes and published by Renegade Game Studios. Players are drawing tokens from a bag which are used to defeat a deck of enemy ships. The ultimate aim is to take down the Mothership. Tokens drawn from the bag can be lasers or manoeuvre tokens.
These can be used to stun or defeat your enemies. Upon defeating an enemy you may gain new tokens. These are added to your bag for future pulls, or a bonus ability such as drawing additional tokens. There are special P.O.W.E.R. ability tokens which can be used for their effects and energy tokens which can be used to but additional tokens for your bag.
Any enemies that are not defeated or stunned attack your ship and cause you damage. Once you have run out of tokens in your bag, the warp ends and all defeated enemies in the discard pile are shuffled together and added to the top of the enemy deck. All tokens are added back into the bag and the round begins again.
The game comes with different Motherships to defeat and different space ships for you to play. Each Mothership has a set of rules or abilities to be followed and a different set up of the three different levels of enemies. Each player ship comes with different P.O.W.E.R. special ability tokens.
Going it Alone
Flying through space, alone, in your trusty ship. Seems fitting for a solo game right? But does the drawing of tokens from a bag and the revealing of cards from a deck offer tension and suspense? Does it make you feel good when you pull off a cool combo? Well, read on to find out more.
Warps Edge offers an interesting sense of escalation. You start off with some basic tokens in your bag and the easiest enemies to deal with. As you draw tokens and defeat the enemies lined up in front of you, you get to more than likely, increase the strength of your token pool. These new tokens will assist you in future rounds and future warps for when the tougher enemies come out. I like the sense of power increase that this provides, it feels like you are getting stronger as the game progresses.
Warps Edge- Let's Do The Time Warp
At the end of the warp in Warps Edge, you shuffle all the defeated enemies and add them on to the top of the deck, very reminiscent of games like Pandemic. You know what enemies are going to come up next, but not the order. There is a tension and dread of drawing the stronger enemies knowing that they will come up and you have to defeat them at some point.
The game is very much a puzzle. Working out which enemies you can defeat to increase your token pool or gain ability is interesting and fun. The Motherships play differently and may change how or when you can attack them. Efficiency and optimisation is the key to success. The rewards that you receive also depend on how you defeat the enemy ships (lasers vs. manoeuvres) so this needs to be taken in to account when trying to figure out how best to allocate your tokens.
There is a ton of gameplay in the box. You have various Motherships, various player ships and each player ship comes with a different set of P.O.W.E.R. ability tokens to be purchased. In addition, you get a dealt two skill cards at the start of the game and get to pick one. This offers some additional variability in your starting set up. The deck of skill cards is a decent size and it will be some games before you get through them all.
For me, Warp's Edge hits the spot when it comes to quick playing solo games. It is easy enough to set up. It plays very smoothly and gives me some interesting choices to make, all in and around 30 minutes. Also, it has the replayability and variability that I love in my games and no two games feel the same.
