War Chest

The Game

War Chest is a two-player abstract battle game with a deck-building element. You send soldiers to fight on a hex-based board. You win by controlling 6 bases on the board. 

Each player has four different troop types, and they are all unique. So there are 8 different soldiers in play. The soldiers have different abilities. Generally they don't differ by attack strength, defense strength or health points. Think of all of these as being just 1. So this is like chess. Anyone can one-hit KO anyone else. Let's talk about the deck-building element first. 

At the start of the game, for each of your troop type you have some discs. Some are in play, but some are not yet in circulation. You need to perform a purchase action to bring them into play. Every round, you draw three discs from your bag, and you and your opponent take turns spending a disc to perform an action. The disc you spend determines what you can do. You can't see the discs in your opponent's hand, so you don't know what he can possibly do that round, until he actually performs actions. Most of the time you can see the disc spent when he acts, so you can keep track of how many discs in which colours he has spent. However sometimes the disc spent is hidden, so you may not have full information. 

Actions you can perform include deploying a soldier, moving a soldier, attacking with a soldier, fortifying a soldier, buying a disc, and changing the turn order. Most (but not all) discs belong to a specific troop type, which means you can only use it on that specific soldier. Every cycle that you go through the discs in your bag, you know how many actions one soldier can take. It is limited by the number of discs that soldier has in your bag. This is the deck-building in War Chest. 

The troop types have various unique abilities. For example, light cavalry can move two steps instead of one. The lancer makes a long range attack, but it can only make such long range attacks, which must be in a straight line. They can't do a normal melee attack. The ensign can move other soldiers on the same team. This is a supportive role. When you kill the opponent's soldier, he is not lost permanently. Your opponent can resurrect that soldier by spending the associated disc, redeploying him to a controlled base. 

Bases are scattered around the board. Each player already controls two at the start of the game. You control a base when your soldier occupies it. You can spend a disc to lock a base, allowing you to retain control even if your soldier leaves. However such a base is still vulnerable to your opponent's soldiers. 

The Play

The game looks chess-like, but a big difference is how you must manage your bag of discs and keep track of your opponent's bag too. You don't know exactly the discs in your opponent's hand, and thus you don't know what moves he can make. I was rather sloppy when playing the game, probably because I played in asynchronous online mode. I didn't properly keep track of Han's bag. Not even my own. It is no wonder I fared poorly. I wanted to do something with a specific soldier, but I forgot I had run out of discs for him. My tempo was off. I did not deliberately tune my disc distribution. I probably should have planned more deliberately which discs to buy and even whether to buy at all. If I focus on only getting more discs for one or two soldier types, they might become more nimble because there are more of their discs compared to the others. 

The Thoughts

War Chest is not quite my thing. Partly because I'm not really into chess-like games, and partly because I am sloppy with keeping track of the bags and discs. Because of that, it feels like I am highly restricted in what I can do.