War groove
Our impressions after two couch-based PvP rounds
my opponent drops a golem, a huge unit that stomps across the field
Iexpected a match of Wargroove to last about 15 minutes when I visited Chucklefish’s offices recently. Turns out it takes more like 30-60 minutes in this turn-based strategy game. I found myself spending far too much time fretting about exactly where to move a unit, whether to buy an archer, or save my money for a stronger knight. Such caution isn’t unwarranted in Wargroove. The deeper you get into a game, the more fraught it is to leave a unit one square further behind enemy lines than you’re comfortable with. You might be putting that knight or spearman in range of a trebuchet, or an archer.
Your goal in Wargroove is to kill the opponent’s commander, or take over their base. Either will trigger a victory. Across the map, there are buildings that act as resource points. The more you control, the more gold you have coming in per turn. Capturing an enemy building requires killing the guard unit inside first. Though each of the game’s factions have different commander units, they otherwise have an identical selection of units, aside from the way they look.
For this game, we’re playing on a desert-y field, with my base on the left, and my opponent’s on the right. We quickly grab half the buildings each, and the fight converges in the central lane.
The one key thing I learned from the last match is that a couple of spearmen placed close together form a good wall in the early game of Wargroove. I didn’t find the basic swordsman units useful for anything other than grabbing buildings in the first few turns, so after that I focus on spearmen instead. After a few tentative turns where I focus on low-level units, my opponent drops a golem, a huge unit that stomps across the field. When it arrives, my spearmen are probably going down.
Since we’ve got the same amount of money coming in per turn, though, I’ve got enough gold for a knight, so that’s what I deploy. They can move five squares at a time, and if an enemy is on that fifth square, you’ll land a critical hit.
Good Knight
This is how I counter the golem—the knight races in and takes it down to about a quarter of its health, forcing my opponent to withdraw it, wasting 1,200 gold. The golem’s demise underlines the idea that everything has a counter in Wargroove. My knight, for example, can’t cross mountain range tiles, nor can it take control of a building—it can only kill the units occupying one. Alternatively, the trebuchet, which costs 900 gold, would’ve been effective against the golem too, but that can’t move and shoot in the same turn. That feels like the type of unit you’d only deploy if you have some units to protect it, then. I buy a trebuchet and wipe out most of the other player’s remaining troops.
Nothing feels overpowered in this build. If anything, some units could be more threatening, particularly the commanders. Of the two I sample, one, Mercia, has a healing power, and another, Valder, has the ability to summon a basic knight unit from the dead, but both abilities take a while to charge up. I ended up leaving them out of the fight because they felt too fragile. This seems to be the area where the most balancing is going on—working out how long it takes for each commander’s ‘Groove’ to charge, and how game-changing that ability will be.
The most exciting thing in Wargroove is experiencing those turning points, where the right set of moves can wipe out every enemy unit on the map in a single turn. The push towards victory is genuinely exciting. I look forward to losing my temper when one of my colleagues demolishes me on their 20th turn.