Hero Realms is for 2-4 players (1-5 with some of the expansions), and plays in anything from 15 minutes for the base game to perhaps a few hours for the full campaign. Hero Realms is the fantasy reskin of Star Realms published by Wise Wizard Games (recently rebranded from White Wizard Games). This game is designed by Robert Dougherty and Darwin Kastle, with artwork by Randy Delven, Vito Gesualdi, and Antonis Papantoniou.
Summary of Game
Hero Realms is a speedy pure deck builder. You start with a very basic deck, and each turn you get coins to try and buy better cards which go into your discard pile to later be shuffled into your new draw deck. You will also get “attack” on your cards, these are used to reduce your opponents to dust as quickly as possible. That is the aim of the game, to try and reduce the health of your opponents to nothing, and be the last player standing.
Initial Thoughts
From the off I liked the idea of this game, it was such a cheap small box and in our old house we had less space to store our games. Inside the box there are just two stacks of cards and some instructions. Luckily we had been taught deck-building already by our friends with Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, and we really felt like we hit the ground running with this game. The instructions are pretty clear, there is a lot to read, considering it is just a folded A3 sheet, but if you have played a deck-builder before, a lot can be skim read.
Gameplay
In true deck builder style, everyone starts with the same weak starter deck which has 10 cards; one dagger (one attack), one shortsword (two attack), one ruby (two coins), and seven gold (one coin each). You use your coins to buy bigger and better cards from the market. The market consists of six available face up cards and a stack of Fire Gems. Fire Gems are worth two coins, but can be sacrificed for extra attack too. The market deck contains 80 cards which are all from one of the four faction colours and are either Action cards or Hero cards. Actions are used and then you put them in your discard pile. Hero cards stick around and can guard you from attack from your opponent. Their ability can be used each turn until they are stunned by an attack from your opponent when they go into your discard pile too.
Creating Synergies that Sing
The four factions all have a different style of play, none better than the others, but you may find one gels better with your play style. The blue Guild faction gets you money, and has some powerful combo abilities helping to get new cards on top of your draw deck to be available quicker. The red Necros faction has a strong attack and helps you to remove cards from your hand or discard pile, this can be useful to thin your deck out and remove weker cards, or to gain sacrifice abilities from cards not in your hand. The yellow Imperial faction is all about drawing cards and healing. The green Wild faction is all about hard hits and getting opponents to discard cards from their hand.
The cards have inherent abilities or actions that you can use, and also synergy additional abilities. If you have got another card of the same faction in play at the same time, you can trigger these abilities. To succeed, you will want to create synergies, which means getting lots of the same colour faction into each hand so they can be even more powerful. Hero Realms is all about building a deck that creates cascades of combo effects to maximise your attack that turn. It is incredibly satisfying to bring your deck from nothing into something that creates killer combotastic moves to snatch the win. This is where Hero Realms sings for me, it allows you the space to create that amazing deck and flex your abilities.
Never Step in the Same River Twice
That title is a quote from “Just Around the River Bend” from Pocahontas, one of the Disney Classics. Deck Builders have amazing replayability because there is no market that is the same as the game before, the decks are never built the same way even if you usually hit up the same factions. Also even if you did have by some mad fluke the same heroes in your deck, no guarantees you’ll pull them in your hand at the same time, and also your opponent will have a different deck. INFINITE REPLAYABILITY. For a game with such a low initial price point too, this makes it the best bang-for-buck I can think of in a board game.
Is it Just Star Realms?
Originally, Hero Realms was a reskin of Star Realms. But just not set in space, and with heroes instead of bases and the capability to play up to four players. However, as the games have been expanded with lots of small and big box expansions, they have really deviated. Hero Realms has a number of small foil pack expansions, some add asymmetric start decks, and others simply add more market cards which is never a bad thing to shake things up a bit. There are also two (currently) available big box expansions, these are part one and two of the campaign for Hero Realms. They are really excellent and shift the game to 1-5 from 2-4 players and also switch it to cooperative play. With the expansions, I feel like the games have really become two totally separate games, and honestly different enough to own both. I got the app version of Star Realms purely because the Hero Realms one isn’t yet out, but I am so glad I did. The games are different enough to enjoy both.
Is the Game Perfection Personified? Surely Not!
Well the elusive perfect game does not exist, so of course I have some negative points to make! Hero Realms has good representation of female characters, but they do suffer a little from over sexualisation. Although Wise Wizard Games have made an extra effort to ensure that the female characters in all the cards are not scantily clad, all the female characters are thin with ample bosom. This I think is a hangover from what the board game industry used to be like, and there have been huge moves to try and rectify this by some publishers. There are more women playing games, and we want to see representation and also once we have that we want this representation to be of strong empowered female true-to-life characters, not fighters in chainmail bikinis (this is not in Hero Realms, just poetic licence for my point).
Multiplayer Experience
So the big difference between this and the two-player specific Star Realms, is that the base game is able to play up to four. The game itself scales well, the four player game is slightly longer than any two-player game I’ve had, but I don’t like player elimination in games unless the game is less than 10 mins long. I feel awkward when choosing whose parade to rain on with my attacks and discard card actions. I just am not that kind of take-that type player. I think I feel the same about Unmatched too, I like duels to the death where there is no choice about who to rain the blows down on! The great thing about Hero Realms though, is that it’s as if they knew that I would feel this way. There are loads of different ways to play at higher player counts. The “Free-For-All” is just like the two player game but scaled up, but there are a few other ways to play when you have 3 or more players. The first is the “Hunter – First Blood” where there are restrictions about who you can attack and whose heroes you can stun. The game ends when the first player is eliminated, and the player to their right is the winner regardless of who did the eliminating.
There are three other variants, Last-Player-Standing, Hydra team play and Emperor which plays 6 players using either a second set or character packs. This adds a huge amount of appeal for the higher player counts for me.
Round Up
Hero Realms is one of my favourite games, I love the speedy duel to the death. The artwork isn’t groundbreaking, and is not the style I usually plump for. But the sleek gameplay more than makes up for this. If you’re yet to try a deck builder or you want a great value game in a small package, then I suggest you give Hero Realms a try!
SaggyScore: 97/100
Likes
● Speedy card game
● Low price point, huge bang-for-buck
● Infinite replayability
● Cheap and accessible expansions
● Lots of different multiplayer options
● Good female representation within the base game and even more so in expansions
Dislikes
● The art is not beautiful, it’s not ugly but it is quite traditional fantasy.
