Game overview
A portal has opened from another dimension and all kinds of creatures are pouring out and overrunning Earth. Conventional warfare is no match for this attack so governments from around the world assemble a group of highly skilled individuals - Unusual heroes
Players have to activate their hero’s abilities to defeat opponents while making sure their energy levels are always enough to be able to fight.
In Unusual heroes players become one of six available heroes: Engineer, Assassin, Illusionist, Hunter, Fighter, and Elementalist.
Each of them has different abilities and constraints. This enables players to pick a hero matching their playing style while at the same time having a lot of room to improve their skills.
The heroes will be introduced in another post so let’s now just quickly dive into how to play the game and see all the tools players have at their disposal to save the world.
One final note. The game can be played in versus as well as co-op mode with slight changes to the rules to suit different groups.
Bird’s-eye view
After players select their hero of choice, a number of enemies are revealed along with an event card.
The event card modifies play in a certain way by giving benefits to the players or adding additional constraints. In the bottom left corner is also a certain amount of symbols telling players which enemy skills and additional hero skills are going to be activated. This forces players to think carefully about which cards they will select for a given assault.
Players can use items by activating, triggering, or discarding them. Strategically picking which items to use in a give time can be the difference of defeating a monster or suffering damage.
Assault
The key concept of the game is the assault. An assault represents 3 rounds of play. To start a assault players secretly (in versus mode) or semi-open (in co-op mode) select three ability cards and place them in the three card slots face down.
Going in clockwise order from the player with the round leader token, players reveal one card and pay the required amount of energy. They then execute all of its effects before the next player starts. Cards have to be revealed in order from left to right except for cards which have an instant ability icon in the slot header (currently a lightning bolt). Players have to pay attention to their order in each round as well as the current event being active.
Some slots also have additional energy costs which have to be payed as well to activate an ability.
Once all players have revealed their first card, a new event is drawn, the round leader token is moved to the next player in clockwise order, a new enemy is drawn from the enemy deck and play continues as described above.
After the third round is concluded players start a new assault round by selecting 3 new cards, using items etc.
Once an enemy is defeated the hero dealing the final blow gets the main reward (items or gold) while the remaining players get the group reward (fewer coins or items in case of difficult monsters).
Items and gold can be immediately used.
Every monster awards victory points (VP). The player with the most VP after a certain amount of play is the winner in the case of playing in versus mode. If co-op mode is played players will either rush to earn a collective amount of VP or satisfy a certain winning condition (more on this in another update).
Pick cards, execute abilities, defeat enemies, earn gold and VP and (hopefully) have fun in the process.
I’ll be explaining the individual pieces of the rules in future updates as I move along with writing the rules.
Until then,
Stay healthy