10 by 10 room

Dreamblade is the new collectible minis game that Wizards of the Coast is releasing at this year’s Gen Con. The game presents tactical battle over a dream-powered landscape, meaning that the figures are drawn from a mishmash of genres and a variety strange and unique forms. (Like a werewolf with freakin’ swords!)


I was introduced to the game from a friend who is writing some Dreamblade strategy articles for Wizards. (Check out his most recent article, “Crazy Uncle Gene”. It gives a good feel for what the play of Dreamblade is like.)

A key aspect of Wizards’ Dreamblade promotion is a tournament structure with big cash prizes laid out in front of the players. This model probably works (since it probably works great for Magic) but also, one that doesn’t appeal to me. I’m enough of a casual gamer that I have no expectation to ever win a prize at any Dreamblade tournament.

However, here’s one stellar piece of promotion on Wizards’ part: an online Flash demo of Dreamblade of the game. Try it out! Demos like this are a fantastic way to teach and promote a new game, and possibly the most painless way of doing so. Most of us learn games through playing with others, and this is simply a computer-faciliated version of that experience, (For another example, there is the excellent online demo of Capes.)

The most essential part: how does it play?
From my experiences, I’d say it does quite well, and this comes from one who is generally a skeptic of the collectible miniatures genre. The game feels less like a traditional wargame, and much more like an abstracted game such as chess. (Chess with blade-wielding monstrosities from the abyss of your mind, but chess nonetheless.) While the focus seems at first to be on using your creatures to damage the opponent, battle is in fact not the most efficient means of scoring points. Instead, control of key territories on the grid generates the majority of a player’s points, and in the balance of the game, the sacrifice of a key creatures matters much less than ensuring that you can occupy your rival’s territory (while denying her access to your own).
The designers have done a good job in compressing the complexity of the game, pushing the complexity outward as good boardgames tend to do. Unlike many wargames, players do not track the health level or movement rate of their creatures on an individual level, but instead treat much more uniformly. A key piece of the game’s tactical depth is the special powers (”Blade abilities”) that certain pieces have, and the ways that they can interact with each other. The way these powers work is constrained however: they are all activated in similar ways, and only in the context of a fight. The complexity is pushed outwards here, toward the individual powers of the creature and the player’s own conception of strategy.
This is a game I’ll be eager to play more of. However, it is still a collectible game, and that is its own caveat. While I’m probably not Wizards’ target market, I am simply not interested in the very large money or time investment required to create competitive sets of creatures. Savvy Magic players have found their own solutions, such as “draft tournaments”, where a group of players collectively buy a set of new cards and create constructed decks on-the-fly, giving the fun of acquiring new cards while keeping the game more focused on a player’s skill rather than purchasing power.

There isn’t clear analogue to this for Dreamblade yet, but I’m sure we can figure one out!