Ten Minutes to Learn, All Night to Regret Losing

Bought Summoner Wars because a regular at the after-shift table kept talking it up as the closest thing to Magic without the deck-building bill, and, ok, he wasn’t wrong. Colby Dauch redesigned this from the 2009 original, Plaid Hat put it out in 2021, and it plays two summoners head to head on a grid, each running a faction deck that doubles as your hand, your mana, and your army. I’ve got the Vanguard and Cave Goblins starter, and they play nothing alike, which is the whole point.

It’s fast to get on the table, no board to unfold, just a printed battlefield and a stack of cards, and the game can be learned in about ten minutes flat. That’s rare in my group. Most of what we own eats forty minutes just in setup and rules explanation before anyone touches a piece, and on a night I’ve closed the kitchen at eleven I don’t have that in me. This one I can have on the table and running before the second beer’s open.

The magic pool is the smart part, you discard cards from your hand into a pile and burn them later to summon units, so every card is either something you play now or fuel for later, and that tension never lets up. The boost tokens used to be an awkward add-on tacked onto a few of the old factions, but here they’re built in clean, and the common units that used to die the turn they hit the board finally have some survivability to them. Art’s taken a cartoony, app-spam turn from the original, and I won’t pretend I don’t miss the old look some nights, though it’s never once cost me a game.

Downtime on your opponent’s turn can be a real problem if the person across from you is AP-prone, since there’s not much to do but watch while they’re working it out in their head. I’ve got one friend who’ll sit on a decision for three minutes like he’s deboning a fish. Rest of the table’s fine with it, honestly, and the games run quick enough that even a slow one doesn’t overstay its welcome. Only real knock against it: it’s two players and stays two players, so on nights the whole crew shows up it sits in the box while we play something that seats four. Good for the two-player nights when nobody wants a project.