For Glory is a two-player deckbuilding gladiatorial combat game from Spielcraft Games. Players represent the owners (lanistas) of rival gladiator training schools (ludi) - much like those portrayed in the Spartacus TV series. During the course of the game you'll be earning and spending money and influence but ultimately you're competing For Glory, just as the title suggests. The game is won by the player whose gladiators score you 6 or more Glory tokens in the arena.
The game is divided into machinations and arena phases. It's through your machinations that you build your deck, adding patrons and recruiting more gladiators. As you'll guess, it's in the arena that the gladiators compete, and their success will depend on the training (cards) with which you've equipped them and the tactic and reaction cards you hold in your hand that may affect the outcome.
Buying cards in the machinations phase follows the conventional deck builder pattern as typified in Star Realms (Wise Wizard): you pay the cost of a card in the market display using the income cards in your hand (and/or coins) and you place cards you buy on top of your discard pile so they'll be available to you on a future turn. The difference here tho' is that you always have available to you a selection of cards in each of the categories (gladiators, patrons and tactics) so you can tailor your strategies for the game. The machinations phase also lets you play cards. Patrons are added to the right of your player board and they give you 'influence'. Gladiators are played to one of the arenas in the centre of the play area, provided you have sufficient influence. Cards to be used as tactics or reactions in arena combat are placed face down in your reserve. However, to get them back into your hand you have to pay 1 coin for each card, and you have to buy all of them... Most cards have special conditional effects so, for example, the patron Vestalis can be exhausted as a reaction in arena combat in order to prevent 1 damage.
Among the stats and other details of gladiator cards is each gladiator's 'blood lust'. This becomes the trigger for moving to the arena phase: the total blood lust of both players' gladiators is totaled and the action phase is triggered when it meets or exceeds the blood lust on the top card of the boast deck. This is an interesting mechanic, not least because the blood lust trigger on boast cards increases each round so delivering a steady game arc. Players redraw a hand of seven cards at the end of each machination turn so both will always have a full hand of cards at the start of the arena phase, and another interesting device in the game is that players can add further gladiators from their hand to the arena as 'late registrations', but at a cost of a 3 coin bribe for each of these gladiators.
Combat itself involves back and forth card activation in initiative (agility) order, with victory and Glory tokens in each arena going to the player with the last gladiator standing. Reaction cards played from your hand can, for example, mitigate damage when your gladiator takes hits. In addition, some tactic cards played from a player's hand can function in the same way as a gladiator attack. Buying back cards from your reserve in the middle of a crucial arena battle can prove to be a 'Hail Mary' game changer!
Gladiator combat is a well-trodden theme: we still periodically break out our copies of Gorus Maximus (Inside Up Games) and Spartacus (Gale Force Nine). Alex Wolf's design for For Glory takes familar deckbuilding mechanics and gives just enough twist to them to give this game novelty and appeal without imposing a heavy rules overhead. Any veteran of other deck builders will be able to pick up For Glory and be up and running in minutes. We like the fact that you always have available to you for purchase a selection of all three categories of card, and we especially appreciate the way the refreshed hand and the option to buy back your reserve add strategy and surprise to the battles. The one aspect we were less sure about was the ongoing arena card rewards. Tho' these provide some neat bonus abilities, they are an additional bonus to the victor on top of the Glory so they function as the very opposite of a catch-up mechanic. Still, ad victorem ire spolias: to the victor go the spoils!
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