CHENNAI: Summoner Wars is a 1v1 duel game where players take on the roles of rival warrior mages trying to eliminate each other. Each summoner has a variety of spells, special abilities and minions at their disposal, ensuring that no two factions ever play alike. If that description sounds familiar, that’s because you could describe Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone or a variety of other games of that ilk; today, however, we’re going to talk about how Summoner Wars still manages to stand out from the crowd.
Like chess, like Magic, like many games, there’s only one victory condition here — eliminate the opposing Summoner. It doesn’t matter how many units they’ve got left if you can take out their leader. Normally, at this point, I’d give you a brief overview of how the game plays and talk about how it feels to play. Instead, I’m going to try something different here — I’m going to talk about one of the times I played this game, and hopefully that’ll shed some light on what this game can be.
Let’s set the stage — I was playing as the Vanguards, who are your typical forces of justice and light, and my opponent was the Fallen Kingdom, who are the undead faction led by a necromancer king. (Most match-ups are less stereotypical than this one, I should point out!) Right from the start, the Fallen Kingdom had me on the ropes. Hordes of undead swarmed my units, and no matter what I tried, they kept forcing me back. I kept taking them out, but the Fallen Kingdom’s ability to resurrect minions from their discard pile meant that the exchange rate was never in my favour.
Soon enough, my summoner was down to two health, and by the end of my opponent’s next turn, I had only two units left on the board — Sera Eldwyn, my summoner, and my last champion, Kalon Lightbringer. To be fair, Kalon had been waging an incredibly successful solitary assault on the forces of darkness over on his flank; but bad decisions coupled with some hapless dice rolls meant that I was one blow away from losing the game.
So I immediately launched Kalon into the fray, trying to get close enough to the necromancer to take him out in a last-ditch attempt; while meanwhile Eldwyn fled, using her magic to heal Kalon while trying to stay out of reach of the pursuing forces. By this point, I had pretty much given up hope of victory but I was trying to land at least one blow before I inevitably lost. The first inkling I had that things weren’t all going my opponent’s way was when she disgustedly commented that she had nothing but Skeletal Archers left to summon — after having had to go up against Reapers and Zombie Warriors all game, this was almost pleasant by comparison.
Each turn came down to the same thing — who does Kalon have to kill and/or block so that Eldwyn could stay out of range of everybody else? It was frenetic and exhausting — for context, most games of Summoner Wars last less than 60 minutes, but we were already touching the two-hour mark by this point. Both of us played out of our skins, but Kalon’s Ghostbusting spree continued and the Fallen Kingdom never managed to land the killing blow they needed.
Finally, the last undead bowman went down, swiftly followed by the necromancer; and victory had been clutched from some way down the oesophagus of defeat. Ultimately, what you want from a game like this is that it tells a memorable story when you’re done. Summoner Wars definitely delivers on this front — the game described above happened over six years ago, but I can still remember so much about it.
It has an incredible amount of replayability thanks to how different each faction feels, and it throws up moments that’ll stick with you game after game. Word on the street is that a new edition is coming our way very soon, which is exciting news; but whether you wait for that or seek out the older version, you can’t go wrong with Summoner Wars.
Arjun Sukumaran (Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)